Francisco Jose - The Samsons - Two Novels

The first thing I did was bring Roger and the officers of the Barrio chapter to Panciteria Asia where we had pancit canton , fried chicken, chop suey, and all the beer they could drink.

We also bought cartulina , †ink and paint at a Chinese wholesale store in Divisoria. A sign painter in the Barrio, Ka Enteng, who painted the prow of the fishing bancas † that plied the bay, did the posters. The slogans prepared at the convention were clichés, of course. Ibagsak ang Imperialismo, Yankee Go Home, Close the US Bases … etc. I never felt strongly about them, but Toto did, and he even improved on them, adding words like Now!

They were all lined up for everyone to see, and Ka Lucio saw them when he returned from that small export-import office in the Escolta where he clerked.

Toto and I were viewing our handiwork with satisfaction, but Ka Lucio just glanced at them, then shook his head.

“They will not do, Ka Lucio?” I asked.

“You want advice?”

Toto said eagerly, “Yes, you know so many things.”

“Come and visit me in an hour,” he said.

Ka Lucio lived in a two-room house with two nieces whom he managed to send to college. An assortment of relatives, province-mates, and old friends were constant visitors. He tried to help them find jobs or, at the very least, offer them a roof and a meal while they were in the city. He managed to look like someone’s city uncle, well-bred and wise to the ways of the rich. A soft lilt to his voice camouflaged an iron will and a hardness of spirit that enabled him to endure not just years in the forest but more than a decade in army jails. Here, in the Barrio, he had not only been emasculated; here, too, was the final ignominy — to be poor and be with the poor, while many of the guerrillas of the war he had fought had become wealthy and gross and inhabited the perfumed enclaves of Makati. There is no adulation for a failed revolutionary, only a sympathy akin to pity or even contempt, not so much because he has failed but because he has lived so long.

Like most of the two-story houses in the Barrio, his was badly constructed. The living room had a cracked cement floor and a couple of sagging rattan sofas; beyond was the dingy kitchen, with its rusty kerosene stove. A transistor radio, a black-and-white TV, and a case full of books, mostly on politics, occupied a corner.

He bade us sit down while one of his nieces, who studied in the mornings, opened two bottles of Coke. They were not cold and the cookies, exposed to the air for some time, were limp.

“So, you are going to be revolutionaries,” he said, a grin lighting up his face.

Neither Toto nor I replied; he sounded very patronizing.

“It is not easy,” he added quickly. “But if you have set your mind to it then give it everything you have, but more than anything, give it intelligence — something I did not give. I was more passion than reason. I know otherwise now.”

“What do you think of the posters, Ka Lucio?” I asked impatiently.

He stood up. Ka Lucio was tall for a Filipino. His thin lips gave him an ascetic look but his eyes, always wrinkled in laughter or a smile, put us at ease. He had surrendered, but that had not helped; he was jailed just the same and had served out his sentence without parole or lenient treatment. He walked to the shelf of books. “You are welcome to these,” he said. “My library, or what is left of it.”

“What is wrong with the posters, Ka Lucio?” Toto asked.

“You are engaged in propaganda,” he said. “It is just as important as being out there, in the forest. No, I see nothing wrong with the posters — they are well made. Too well made, as a matter of fact. But will they be believed? To whom are you addressing yourselves?”

“They will be believed,” Toto said, “because they speak the truth.”

Ka Lucio shook his head. Though he was sixty-five, there was not a single gray hair on his head, and he did not wear glasses. Everything about him belied years with the Huks, the guerrilla war against the Japanese. He had lost his wife after the war in an ambush and had not remarried. Now, in his eyes, this certitude. “What is truth?” he asked. “This is not a philosophical question. It is a matter of perception. What is the truth that you know about the American bases, Toto?”

“Instruments of American imperialism, the enslavement of the Filipino people,” Toto said quickly, almost by rote.

“They provide jobs for more than twenty thousand Filipinos,” Ka Lucio said. “They bring millions of dollars to this country. Can you do the same, you and your revolution?”

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.