Toto sat back; he knew the answers to such cliché questions—they had been hashed and rehashed in the seminars of the Brotherhood—and he spewed them right out. I knew them, too, but did not believe them.
“Our people do not understand such nationalism, even if it were true. It is more important, Toto,” he said paternally, “that you know how the people think if you want to win them. And slogans will not do it. Do you know what this means if you cannot win the people?”
Toto was getting peeved and was no longer stammering; he began to talk in a shrill, excited squeak.
“The people do not make change, or revolution. They are conservative and they do not know how to think of the future. Look at the people here, in the Barrio. They will go anywhere, wherever they are led.”
Ka Lucio shook his head. “You will learn otherwise, and when you do, it will be too late. The young are discovering politics, they are thrilled by it, they want to do something with it. And it is all very good—oh, if we only had you thirty years ago. What we could have done then!”
“But you did not have us. And you made mistakes,” Toto said.
“Yes, and that is why we lost. But we did not fail. No, by God, we did not fail. We made one step … so that you could make the next. I hope you will make it three.”
Toto sat back, his anger assuaged.
“I hope,” Ka Lucio was continuing, “that you will not waste yourselves. I sometimes ask myself, what have I done with my life? It is all behind me now. And what have I to show? Twelve years in prison. No, those were not wasted years. I was able to think a lot, the mistakes we made. And more than ever, I got to know what freedom really means. Do you know what freedom is, Pepe? Again, this is not a philosophical question.”
“Free speech,” I said, “free elections, free assembly, free worship.”
Ka Lucio shook his head. He placed his right hand over his breast. “It is here, Pepe,” he said. “This is where it lives. And once it is dead here, no slogan, no demonstration, no ideology, no revolution can ever bring it back to life. And to the people, it is not free speech. It is clothing, food, shelter, medicine for the children when they are ill. Education … not a degree from UP or Ateneo; just the simple kind that will enable them to get jobs.”
We left Ka Lucio reluctantly, Father Jess would be back, and we had to serve him dinner. We knew we would be back, if only so that I could ask how it was during the Japanese Occupation, how they fought, how it was that the Huks were defeated. Ka Lucio had opened a treasure house for me, and I coveted it.
Toto bothered me with his vaulting enthusiasms. He was much brighter than I in history; certainly, he had read a lot of Marx and Marcuse and could cite passages from Sartre and Fanon. I could only recite a few lines from Jarrell, Plath, and Thomas and relate the travel books and novels I had read. Still, I did some reading, too, not just the pamphlets Professor Hortenso prepared or had us distribute, but the esoterica at the library where I often stayed when I had time. Even if my political reading had not increased much, my conclusions were firm. There was something awry about the enthusiasms not just of Toto but of Professor Hortenso, who had a better education than all of us. We should have had more sessions with men like Ka Lucio to learn tactics, organization, and most of all, those irrevocable lessons of their failure.
“What is there to learn except consciousness?” Toto asked. “This is the most important thing. With the new consciousness, our minds are opened and we see the truth at last.”
“That is a lot of messianic shit,” I said.
We were in our favorite siopao corner and we had finished our noodles. It was one of those white-washed cubicles with waiters and waitresses in starched white. You lined up at a counter for noodles, siopao, and soft drinks, and then took your tray to a white Formica-topped table often soggy with the remnants of the last occupant’s meal; for some reason the noodles always tasted a bit soapy, and they were dry and hard no matter how long they had been immersed in hot soup. But never mind; I was not one to complain, especially since Toto was paying.
“The Huks failed,” Toto said, “because they did not have the support of the masses. They were fish caught without a sea.”
“That is too glib an answer,” I said, “although I will not question it. The important thing is that we should not forget it.”
“We are another generation,” he said stoutly.
“Yes,” I said, “but we do not look back. We are a people with history but we have no sense of the past. And look at our heroes now. The movie stars who cannot act, the politicians who are crooks. We are a people without memory. Why do we rename our streets after politicians who have not done anything for the Filipinos? Why do we allow the Japanese to build monuments for their dead on our land—land they had ravaged?”
“I will not forget, I will always remember,” Toto said.
I went back to Ka Lucio. “The Huks lost because they were betrayed.”
“That was in their time,” Toto said stubbornly. “This is 1970; it will not happen again.”
“You are dreaming,” I said. “You are blind to everything around you. Listen, our history is a history of failed revolutions. Always, in the end, someone was bought or someone turned traitor. We are a nation of traitors; we delight in seeing the downfall of others, even friends. We betray for money, for revenge, for envy, but most of the time out of sheer cussedness. So here you are in this organization. You will see me and the others claw our way to the top, over the bodies of our friends. We have the wrong memories. We remember the slightest injury to our pride, our so-called self-respect. We etch these in our hearts and wait patiently for the day when we can stick the knife in the back. But let someone do us a good deed, and we forget it easily. We are also a nation of ingrates.”
He was looking at me, eyes unblinking.
“It was this way before,” I said evenly. “Why should it change? Why shouldn’t history be a continuity? Diego Silang, Apolinario dela Cruz, Andres Bonifacio, Antonio Luna, Gregorio del Pilar—they were all betrayed. But the worst betrayal is when we betray ourselves for a few pesos. And sometimes we don’t even know it. We are shocked into discovering that we did it, bit by bit, until we had gone over the brink into the cesspool. We can atone for it with knowledge. But how about those who don’t realize it or refuse to do so?”
“I will not betray anyone, and I will not betray myself,” Toto said, his lips quivering. He was beginning to stammer. “All through our history men died for what they believed in. They were not traitors. You named only a few; the brave are more than a handful.”
“But where are they now?” I asked. “It is so easy to have people go another way. The student leaders—they can be bought. If not, all you have to do is please them, their sense of manhood, their being Ilocanos, or Batangueños.”
“That is not true, that is not true!” Toto’s voice pitched.
“The revolution against Spain—the Filipinos were bought at Biak Na Bato. The same with the war against the Americans. And the Japanese. Look around you now. Who are the victors? So then, why should the young be different?”
“Because you are different and I am different!” Toto cried. I could see people turn to our table; he was quickly aware of this, and his voice dropped. I stood up, held his arm, and we walked out; they went back to their noodles and siopao, wondering perhaps what it was that made two friends quarrel then stop as quickly as they had started.
Out in Recto, in the sweaty crowd and coagulating heat of afternoon, I tried to tell Toto how necessary it was to retain a certain cynicism, a little distance from those passions that possessed us, but he would not listen. He believed, and you cannot tell someone who believed the sky was dark when to him it was the purest blue. Looking back, I know I could have saved him. But I was being drawn, like the moth, into the flame that had been ignited within us.
Walking home at dusk, taking the small side streets clogged with people and garbage, I would peer at the dimmed insides of houses, the battered furnit
ure of battered living rooms, and wonder about the kind of life these people lived, how far the reality was from the dream. Somehow, with the darkness, the hard lines of faces disappear, the dirt is hidden, and even the filth in corners no longer appears as detestable as it would in the daylight. But darkness or light, I could see them more clearly, their riddle that is the present and their past that should be destroyed if need be, but forgotten it must be. I see them as I see myself.
Walking home at dusk, I sort out my thoughts, try to understand how it had been, how instinctively I had drifted with the seasons. Who was it who said the bamboo survives the storm because it bends? That is what I know: to say the right things, the correct things that signify my acquiescence, my adulation, so that the wind will not break me. The storm leaves, but I stand—I stand without triumph for I have done what must be done in order to live. Is life really worth all this bending?
There are many others who will not bow, who will question belief, this course, and it is they who believe, too, that the crow will be white some day, that the skies will open up and from there, blessings will pour. They may wait forever, but forever is not time. For them, time has lost its menace. Only tomorrow matters.
Tomorrow then, and my first and biggest demonstration. I was quickly impressed with how an organization, working with a few dedicated members—whatever their purposes—could set up a singular machine for almost anything, to amass crowds of varying allegiances and murky origins, even the young people of the Barrio whose politics is simplified by slogans. We had planned well in the National Directorate. This demonstration was to be our show of strength; we had now aligned ourselves with other student groups—or rather they had joined us, for it was the Brotherhood that had the most chapters, the most radical slogans, articulate orators, best writers.
The delegation from our university was surprisingly large. But they came not because our cause was just but because it meant crowds, excitement, and, most of all, a good excuse not to be in class. It was perilously close to final examinations, but the dean of students granted us permission to assemble, and all classes that afternoon and evening were canceled.
We had fashioned red banners from bolts of cheap cotton and hired two dozen jeepneys, all equipped with sound systems, and these were now on the prowl, gusty with our slogans, urging on the students who had amassed in the side streets, Brotherhood activists marshaling the ranks.
Some had started to sing the Brotherhood songs in Tagalog, the “Internationale” and as Ka Lucio had said, they were as stirring as the Huk songs his comrades sang in their time.
The streets were now empty of traffic, and we had the asphalt to ourselves. Who would stand in the way of thousands of young people united for the first time? We were laughing, pleased at how we had brought ourselves together with so little money and a lot of rhetoric.
Toto was not a marshal; he did not have the build or the voice, and his eyes were bad. He was with me, and his face was aglow with the happiness that communion brought. He even had his arm on my shoulder though he was no taller than I, and it was in this manner that we marched most of the way to Plaza Miranda.
Ah, Plaza Miranda—the throbbing, malodorous heart of Manila! It is here where they all meet, the scavenging politician and his wordbound listener, the government official and his gross hypocrisies, the penitent and his worldly vows. The blooming banners, the shabby buildings loomed around us. It was four, humid and hot, and the crowd was so thick we could barely move. Not all were students—many were the poor with their plastic bags for the market, clerks with cheap vinyl portfolios, vendors in rubber slippers. The Brotherhood had arranged to have a mobile platform—actually a brokerage truck with the sidings removed—backed to the fence of the Quiapo church, and on it were our guest speaker, the aging Senator Reyes, known for his radical nationalist views, as well as orators of the Brotherhood.
All around the plaza were policemen and Metrocom troopers, armed and sullen, but they did not interrupt the meeting. We stationed marshals everywhere who knew what to do. At given signals, they led the chanting: I-bag-sak. Marcos—Tuta. I-bag-sak!
The marshals also led the clapping at significant pauses of the speakers. I was both fascinated and bothered. How easy it was to channel the energies, the raucous voice of the mob—for that was what we had become, how mindless, how meaningless the clichés, and how foreseeable the response.
Most of us were in blue denims and dark T-shirts, and we knew by experience then that rubber shoes gave us more speed, more comfort on the asphalt and that was where we left many of them the following morning where they were stepped upon and shucked off, together with the placards that had been ripped, the canisters of tear gas, the shards of broken bottles, and, yes, our blood—smudges of dark red on black, our signature that would describe how high we had vaulted and how we had been dashed back to earth.
Looking back, I knew then what unity meant, the sense of power it evoked from each of us as we saw our solid, swollen phalanx moving, singing, surging. But how long could such unity last? How many of us really believed in what we were doing? Well enough, deeply enough to have our blood spilled on the asphalt?
I am sure that many joined the demonstration as one would attend a fiesta—because that was what everyone was doing, because it gave a way to express resentments that could not be vented otherwise, and because being in a demonstration gave a ranking above the lethargy of the mass that was inert even in its anger. Time would tell who among us would soon react to the tragedy that hovered over us. We were no longer playing games.
But what I did not foresee was a demonstration gone wild. The last speaker had ended his piece to the usual applause. Although it was not in our plans, the demonstrators had started to move. Malacañang! Malacañang! was the new and electric chant.
We were marching again, intoxicated by our numbers, uncaring about the traffic jam we had created all around Quiapo. As the lead marchers reached Recto, an explosion rocked our rear. A massive surge forward separated the head of the demonstrators from the rest, but the marshals were very skillful. Makibaka! Huwag Matakot.§ They chanted, and we repeated the chant: Makibaka! Huwag Matakot!
It was past seven, and the neon lights along Recto were glittering, but all the shops were closed. The merchants, the people were afraid. Perhaps it was best that they should be; now they saw what massive power the young could muster if they were organized, if they were led as the Brotherhood now led them.
It did not take us long; in another thirty minutes, while we marched and formed a broader column, we reached the corner of Legarda. The repository of history, power—Malacañang—was ahead of us, across the bridge and up the broad tree-lined street. I did not know what we would do; perhaps the marshals knew. Torches of bamboo filled with kerosene materialized; they lighted up young faces, sweaty and happy; girls in jeans and rubber shoes. It was a euphoric binge, and we were living and enjoying every moment of it.
Toto had not left my side since the start of the march, and often he would turn to me and smile and when the chanting came, it was his squeaky voice that was loudest. We paused. Word was passed down to us that the police and the Metrocom had a barricade on the small bridge that spanned the foul-smelling estero between Legarda and Mendiola.
Toto and I broke from our ranks and went forward to find out what could be done, and the marshals shouted the slogans again, I-bag-sak! I-bag-sak!
We had gotten quickly to the front, where the marshals were waving their red banners. Across the barricades was a line of Metrocom troopers, their rifles at the ready, and with them were Manila policemen, truncheons in their hands. From our ranks, the shouts volleyed: Sugod—sugod!‖ And the formation surged forward. We were lifted as if by a giant wave, and it was then, in the semi-darkness, that the shots rang out, the volleys louder and different from the sounds of our exploding Molotovs. Around us were more explosions. Through the acrid haze, the Metrocom moved forward. For us, it was now each man for himself. Bullets whined above our heads, and a
s I started to run, Toto ahead of me staggered, then fell. As he slumped forward, his voice came clear: “Pepe, I’m hit!” God knows I wanted to go to him lying there, waiting for the oncoming flood of Metrocom and police, but by then I had jumped into the shallow ditch that led to the creek, and though I was standing and seeing everything and was conscious of the turmoil around me, I could not move. My knees, my feet had become rooted to the earth and no longer did I have control over them.
They came and pummeled everyone they could reach; then they regrouped and rushed at us again. I was now flat on my stomach. So this was what violence was, the red violence in which Toto and the Brotherhood believed, the violence that would usher an effulgent dawn, liberation, and all the boundless goodies of the earth. Around me, the thunder of explosives, tear gas, acrid smoke, the rushing and scuffling of feet. I cowered, I hugged the ground, I must live. When the phalanx of the demonstration was finally disbanded with tear gas, I clambered to the street and looked for Toto. He was sprawled there together with the others who had been shot; some were squatting and moaning, but Toto did not move; his left side was wet with blood and only the slight twitching of his arms told me he was still alive.
I cried for help and a Metrocom trooper came; ambulances had arrived, their sirens screaming, and we loaded Toto into one of them. I wanted to go with them, but there was no room. No jeeps were on Recto and Legarda; I had to run to the boulevard and hail the first taxi I saw; I had thought the wounded would be taken to the hospital in Avenida, which was nearest, but the ambulances were not in sight.
I boarded another taxi and rushed to Taft; they were at the hospital there, and the lobby was filled with students, policemen, and Metrocom, and everyone was tense and full of recriminations. Where are they? Is Toto alive? No one seemed to know, and they would not let any of us into the emergency rooms. Reporters were all over the place, too, asking questions, but I was too dazed, too sick with worry to talk to anyone until I realized that it was they who could get the information I wanted.
The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) Page 44
