I wrote a short poem entitled “Tear Stains” three years ago as an attempt to immortalize a nameless young man who lost his life in the 80’s war of ideologies because, it seemed to me, we no longer talk about him these days. The guitar that he bequeathed to my older brother when he was still alive has long become an organic matter in the manner that he himself was reunited with the soil. The wife he left behind has long remarried, moved away and faded out of our lives. The second of the two sons he gave her also passed away at eight and the older one, now grown-up and married, we seldom see. A cassette record of the songs he sang that my mother kept in her bureau has long lost its voice to the digital age. The visits that we paid his grave have also dwindled through the years until one day the flowers just stopped coming. Memory and time are tricky nemesis, after all.
But there are days of the year, hours of the day when a certain slant of the sun in the horizon throw certain colors through the curtains and windows and send familiar and haunting shadows on the floor that disturb the dust of the past. Then, suddenly you find yourself reaching out for that part in your memory that would not let go. Like a woman who allowed her hair to grow longer for years, in those first few days after the stylist cut it short she finds herself instinctively reaching for the strands below her shoulders even if they are no longer there. One also finds himself reaching out to someone who has long vanished but whose face cannot be completely forgotten like the young man to whom I wrote the poem.
This nameless young man was my mother’s youngest brother, aged 28 when he died in 1981, a father of two little boys and a defender of freedom…or what we were taught to believe as freedom…and his was one of the saddest stories that can ever be told.
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1981. The Philippines, under President Ferdinand Marcos, was still in a state of Martial Law. People took to the streets to protest the repressive Marcos government. In Manila and other major cities in the country, students, intellectuals, religious, vigilant citizens locked arms against the raging fire truck hoses aimed to disperse every public assembly and flush the ideals of freedom and what moral fiber has remained of the Filipino society down the “street manholes.” Those were unforgettable desperate times and while others find a world of freedom in the confining space of the streets, there were those who looked somewhere else and found solace in the seeds sown by Marx in Russia and coaxed to life by the Bolshevists and the armies of Mao. A great number of this group also took their discontentment and grievances to the streets. Others rang their advocacy in the academic pulpits. The rest, inspired by what Gandhi’s freedom fight achieved in India, took the mountains step-by-step, planned to seize the periphery so that, surrounded, the center where the power of the present order emanates, would lay on its knee and be conquered easily.
Talks about charismatic and persuasive young men and women who went house to house in remote villages drawing trees with socialist roots and equality fruits broke out. Not long after, bands of “people’s soldiers” (as they called themselves) roamed both the familiar and unfamiliar mountain paths all throughout the country recruiting new members, getting new allies with the ideology that promises equality among rich and poor through the abolition of the oppressive instruments of the state (more aptly, instruments of capitalism). Each day, more and more farmers took up arms to champion this new cause for when you work all your strength all day in the fields that you do not own and still you owe your landlord your last drop of blood, isn’t equality a red-flaming sun that beckons at the edge of the horizon?
The military bristled and girded itself for the advancing enemy, the commandos who, among other aspects, could outdo them in roaming and maneuvering the forest without combat boots and food for days. To defeat the enemy of the state, the enemy of democracy, was the ultimate goal after all even when the Marcos government was far from being democratic, it was the time of the Cold War and smaller countries were pawns to the bipolar global politico-economic arrangement. Second, isn’t war, at whichever frontier and whatever scale, a business for the ones in power? Third, isn’t equality and abolition of private ownership a horrible concept for the rich? Fourth, there are many good soldiers who really believe that democracy, and the freedom it guarantees, is way better than communism. My uncle, the young man I talked about, was one of them.
As the military and the rebel armies took their fights to the mountains and the remote villages, as more and more civilians suspected of conniving with either of the party were taken in the middle of the night never to return, the air was rife with menace, the grasses shook with fear.
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He was fascinated with the military since he was young. He was a military reserve officer in high school. He was good in maneuvers and military tactics as my sister and older brother who were officers that same year would attest. Their battalion commandant in school nurtured this fascination until when, after his studies and marriage, an opportunity to train as army presented itself before him. He went to the training camp and stayed there for months. Got himself a crew cut, the legendary rigid and snappy stance of a disciplined soldier, and slowly weaned himself away from what they call at camp as the “civilian mentality” or translated in ordinary language, running for your own life leaving your buddy behind when in trouble.
Then the real trouble started. In Monte Rico, a remote barangay situated in the mountainous part of the town of Baybay, Leyte, old drinking buddies and neighbors of his father-in-law started giving him the sharp side-long glances and talked about killing someone within his earshot. One night, while he was vacationing with his wife and children at his father-in-law’s, an old friend came and asked to take him to a harana in the next village. Sensing the change in his friend’s demeanor he declined to go. In the front yard where his father-in-law hung newly stripped abaca fibers to dry, the old friend took out a long, sharp bolo and sliced the air shouting “I feel like I could kill someone tonight!” With fury, he chopped all the abaca fibers he could get his hands into until everything lay on a heap before his feet.
Unbeknownst to his neighbor, my uncle quietly slipped at the back of the house and fled all his way from the mountains to the next town where his mother and all of his siblings lived, often bumping into tree boles, tripping over brambles, not using the frequented path where he thought others lay waiting for him. Unbeknownst to my uncle too, he topped the rebels’ purging list—the purging list was a list of names of people affiliated and/or loyal to the military who are target for execution under the “new judicial system of the mountains”. A lot of people that my parents knew were on that list.
My uncle stayed at my grandma’s house for two weeks. Then, his sentiments summoned him to his destiny—he missed his kids and wanted to go back to his father-in-law’s to get them, never mind if his wife wouldn’t want to come. Everyone in the family was against the idea. “No, you know too well that they wouldn’t let you live once you go back there,” my aunt, the one closest to him, protested with tears. “Do you want to personally feed yourself to those dragons?” my mom waxed metaphor in her crisp, clipped and compact manner. “I would die if something happens to you,” my Lola pleaded. “Listen to your older siblings. We could not afford to risk anyone’s life in this family. There are many options for you to be reunited with your family without you going there,” my dad, the voice of reason and calmness. “We will ask someone to get your family down here,” his older brother suggested.
But, as my mom’s cousin said, a stubborn nature is beyond anyone’s capacity to reason. My uncle, convinced that whatever negative sentiment his old friends had towards him has dissipated by then, smuggled himself back to the mountain and his older siblings could do nothing but give in to the irrational impulse borne out of love and family attachment, and perhaps the belief in the natural goodness of his old friends, that drove my uncle to forget about safety and his military training. Well, he did not totally forget about it. He did not stay there for long. The next morning, he packed a few clothes in a backpack, hoisted his son on his shoulders and set out for home…where his siblings and mother are, where one could still walk down the street at night without worrying too much about someone lurking in the darkness. Although, that time, in our place, the curtain of peace and security was also starting to come down.
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I was five years old. I did not have classes in the morning. In the Americanized child development center I attended, classes are in the afternoons. So, I spent my time in our shop listening to the jokes that the carpenters in my father’s employ threw at each other amidst the noise of planers, sand papers rubbing against wood surfaces, hammers driving nails and all the commotions of people in a busy furniture manufacturing shop. I was shoveling saw dust on my little truck (yes, truck). My dad stood beside me giving instructions. It was a lazy morning; while the sun was bright there was not a stir amongst the trees. Probably nature’s foreboding.
Then, at about 10:00 A.M., Domie, a young man who was a friend of my mother’s family and worked in their farm and who, later, would become a part of our family, came running towards the shop. Panting and pale, he pulled my father aside and said, “Noy, I have a sad news to tell you: Anastacio died. He was murdered while on his way here.” Anastacio was my uncle. “Ah, hell, don’t give me that kind of joke!” No. He was not joking. He recounted to my dad everything that happened, everything that they knew happened. My dad went silent. I stopped playing with the saw dust and stared from my dad to Domie and back. I listened to what Domie had to tell. “Noy, I do not know how to break the news to your in-laws. Please help me out.” That morning, my dad fetched my mom from the courtroom and the two of them delivered the news of my uncle’s tragic death to wailing sisters, angry but helpless brothers and, worse, a mother with a crumbling grip of her emotional faculties.
The things Domie told my dad were beyond what a child of five could imagine. When I heard them loud, clear and unembellished, everything around me faded. The saw dusts I scooped in my hands slipped through my fingers like shifting sands. I looked across the street where our house loomed amongst my mom’s flower collections but the only thing I could make out was the image of a man with a deep stab on his left armpit, bullet wounds on his chest and a bleeding mouth where once there was a tongue, soaked in the river from waist down, his upper body sprawled on the grassy river bank. A kilometer down the winding river, my two-year old cousin was walking down, dazed and lost. He saw how his father was killed. When a farmer first found him he asked my cousin, “Where is your father?” “There, sleeping,” pointing his lips upstream and that’s how they found him.
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When police investigators, people who first came to the crime scene and family members pieced their different opinions of my uncle’s death together, it seemed to come out that he was ambushed by his alleged killers half a kilometer away from his father-in-law’s house. He was brought down the river and probably, put under interrogation. Maybe there were things they wanted to know. What these things were, we did not know for he brought with him the account of what happened to his death. If his murderers were really the rebels that most people suspected, they must have wanted to extricate from him whatever military-related information they wanted to get. Knowing him, maybe he refused to say anything and little by little they tortured him. (But what did he know? What can a poor soldier of a mean rank know about military plans, conspiracies and sabotages?) The police said the stab wound on the left armpit was older than the cut in his tongue. Did they poke his body with knives, laugh at him, jeer at him, shout at him just to weaken his defenses so that, pained and bleeding and morally defeated, he would ultimately give in? And not getting anything from him they proceeded to carve his tongue? Was the knife sharp or blunt? These days, when I think of it I wish in my deepest heart that it was a sharp knife they were using so that there was not much sensation of pain but just the numb feeling left by a lost part…and perhaps the salty taste of blood. What did they say: “Open your mouth and let your tongue out or else we will shoot your son?” Did they make him dance, run and give him the shots?
Rumors had it that when the gun shots ensued in the air and echoed through the village, his wife who was still left in the house shouted, “It must be Anastacio!” If this was true, did she know beforehand what will happen to her husband? Were she and her father party to her husband’s death? My family asked themselves these questions but the weight of grief had its toll on them they were too tired to press her for anything she might have known about the incident. Besides, she was grieving too.
There were two things that stood out in my memory that afternoon when my uncle’s cadaver were brought to our place. First, my little cousin was so pale, hungry and still in shock. Dressed in my most favorite Voltes 5 shirt, my dad held him in his lap. Second, my Lola crying, pacing our living room, running towards the gate wailing, vowing to kill her son’s murderers while my older sister and my older cousins restrained her. I did not go to class that afternoon. So much had happened to my family in the span of six hours. Then our world changed.
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My uncle’s killers were never apprehended. Who knew who they were? There were suspects, but they were only that, suspects. No one arrested them for no policeman half his courage would ever go to the mountains to do it without digging his own grave too. My big family left our place for my Lola’s province after my uncle’s burial except my mother and her brave family. We could not leave, my mother has established her career in our place, my dad has a booming business, the children are all in school, and it’s not easy to wrap all the years of existence in a piece of blanket and be off. We had our friends there, our house, our garden, and my parents had their civic duties. My grandparents’ farm went unattended for years. My mother did not bother about it.
Time has changed too. A military officer and his escorts were ambushed by rebels in the neighboring town. He had just been promoted a week before that. No one in that party was spared; the radioman was killed even before he could call for reinforcement. Their bodies were brought in our town’s municipal building. My mom saw it. One by one, the people in the purge list were picked up at night by armed men never to return. Finally, our father contemplated moving us out. Curfews were implemented. By 9:00 PM, the streets were clear and all the lights in the houses were off. The military came and stationed themselves in our place. Some nights we listened to the roar of the tanque de Guerra on patrol; some days the whole place shook in the explosion of cannons as the armies shelled the mountains with heavy artilleries. Helicopters peppered the mountains with bullets if not ferrying wounded soldiers from the battle field to the military hospital in the city.
We had the drill. My mother taught us. In case of red alerts, we have to crawl our way to the underground where we are safer. We became quite adept at it. One time when our parents were on travel and gun shots reverberated through the night while we were eating supper, all of us ducked under the table and crawled our way to safety.
The military was able to round up truckloads and truckloads of evacuees and relocated them temporarily at the old municipal building. Old men and women, kids my age and babies were cramped on the concrete floor every night. Some rebel soldiers, trapped, surrendered too and sought amnesty from the government. And by this same process he came into our lives: Fredo, the man who sliced the air and chopped the abaca fibers one night when my uncle refused to go harana with him. Indeed, he was among the band of rebels who tortured my uncle. With the cloak of amnesty around him, he was untouchable. Because he knew too much, he became the military’s guide, asset, during operations. He was a speaker too in the military’s anti-communism campaigns. He became particularly close to a military major who was a relative of my father’s and by that connection he started coming to our house until he became a regular visitor often sharing with our meals.
Those first few days of visits to our house must have been a big blow to my mom. As he sat with us during breakfast or lunch talking with my father about anything under the sun my mother did not say anything. This was the man who killed her brother; the instrument of his misfortune; the cause of their worst nightmare. What could you possibly say to him? Then, the day came when my mom finally exchanged a few words with him. Did we poison his food to get even with him; to avenge a death that happened a decade ago? No. My parents are way beyond that. As the three of them sat through countless dinners, my parents never ever touched a topic that would lead to a discussion of my uncle’s death and make Fredo uncomfortable. Besides, what satisfaction can you get from killing your brother’s murderer when you have already moved on and the wounds have already healed? And the truth was we never really have to lift an accusing finger at him. Three years after his surrender, he hanged himself for reasons unknown. There’s probably too much burden there.
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During his rare visits, I could not help but wonder what if my cousin is subjected to hypnosis and is sent back through the vortex of time on that day he stood by the river and watched what was done to his father. What stories are there lying hidden within the deepest and darkest recesses of his memory? How much of the stories that we believed we knew are still hidden from us? But no, what’s the use of rousing the ghosts of the past? Probably some things are better left unknown. My cousin is in the military himself and, by the looks of him, doesn’t seem to be suffering from worst nightmares. Let the old pains be put to rest.
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We read her novel “The House of the Spirits” (La casa de los espiritos), a story of generations of Trueba family in post-colonial Chile. (The novel was later adapted into a movie starring Glenn Close, Meryl Streep, Winona Ryder, Jeremy Irons and Antonio Banderas.) Then, there’s City of the Beasts (La ciudad de las bestias) which was her first young adult novel. But before that, there’s Of Love and Shadows (De amor y de sombra), a tale of two people who are willing to risk their lives for truth and justice. There’s also Portrait in Sepia (one of my mom’s favorites). These are just a few of her novels.
