Francisco Jose - The Samsons - Two Novels

A word about that peasant war. After the American liberation in 1945, the landlords who had fled during the Occupation returned to their haciendas with the blessings of the Americans and the government. The landlords demonized the peasant Huk movement as Communist and began maltreating their tenants as before — the same tenants who had joined the guerrillas fighting the Japanese. Stegner was, of course, correct: there was hardly any literature written on that period. The most moving was not fiction; it was a memoir written by the American Communist William J. Pomeroy, who had joined the Huks. It was this internecine conflict that forms the core of My Brother, My Executioner . Don Vicente, the landlord, who appears but briefly in Tree , dominates this novel. Finally, I did The Pretenders , which ends bleakly in the suicide of the protagonist, Antonio Samson. I intended the novel to end the saga on this note of despair.

Someone asked why. Was death the only solution to our moral conundrum? I intended Samson’s demise, however, to be not just a physical death, but also a metaphor: in a revolution, the rotten structure has to be destroyed before reconstruction takes place.

Then in 1972 Marcos declared martial law and some of my contemporaries became his eager acolytes. It was then, too, that so many young people opposed Marcos and took up arms against the dictator and his minions. A glimmer of hope. I started to rethink the suicide of Tony Samson.

There was one young man, Emmanuel Lacaba, to whom I dedicated the latest edition of Mass . Eman used to come to my bookshop and we had several quiet talks. He was an excellent poet, like his older brother, Jose, and I published some of his poetry in my journal, Solidarity . He was very serious and I did not realize how passionately he felt about the rot afflicting our country. He disappeared, and months later I learned that as a cadre of the revolutionary movement, he had died in Mindanao.

Eman’s death was tragic, but an even greater tragedy that has escaped most of us is the death of hundreds of our soldiers, fighting for the same cause — Filipinas. Like the cadres of the revolutionary movement, these soldiers come from the lower classes and are in the army for the simple lack of better alternatives. When can we ever resolve this horrible contradiction and promise a better future for all our young?

I was somehow heartened by the sacrifice Eman and the youth of his generation made. I also realized that they were sorely divided. The more radical fell under the influence of Communism. Although I believe in the necessity of a revolution, its righteousness and perhaps inevitability, I had hoped for a nationalist uprising, not Maoist-inspired. There is so much, after all, in our revolutionary tradition and in the writings of our own heroes of the ambrosial ideas to sustain the young.

I am not and cannot be self-righteous in my assessment of the intellectual subservience under Marcos. Many had refused to sign the appeal that I drafted in 1974, pleading with Marcos to release the writers in prison. Some of those who refused to sign were simply frightened; like most writers, they did not have an economic or social base. They depended on their government jobs and could easily be dismissed by the dictator. I understood this only too well — but what about those who had money? I recalled Virginia Woolf, who said, “Only those with independent means can have independent views.” I did not persist with those who refused to sign the appeal.

I couldn’t leave after Marcos declared martial law. I received many invitations to go abroad for conferences, writers meetings, and cultural festivals, but the military did not permit me.

After four years of not being allowed to travel, I finally concocted a plan. Having been interested in agrarian reform, I had supported Marcos’s land reform program, particularly the first two years of it, when he outlawed tenancy in the rice and corn lands. No president had ever done this. Not even Magsaysay with his vaulting popularity could push such legislation through a landlord-dominated Congress.

An American friend, Robert Tilman, who was a college dean in North Carolina, came to Manila, and I asked him to invite me to a nonexistent conference on agrarian reform in the United States. I was to speak on the Marcos land reform decree, which I wholeheartedly supported. I showed the letter to the press secretary, Francisco Tatad, who endorsed it to the Department of Foreign Affairs. I had known the acting secretary of foreign affairs, Manuel Collantes. It was at his office where I found out why I couldn’t leave. A former colleague in journalism, who was then executive secretary, had put me on the black list. I listened to their conversation when Secretary Collantes said he was taking me off the black list on his responsibility.

With my passport back, I went to Paris to attend a cultural conference, after which I decided to stay on for a month to write. I have done my best writing away from the tension and hassle in Manila — in Japan particularly, as noted, where I have enough distance from Manila but am near enough to rush back if necessary. To do the fifth novel in the saga was a compulsion I couldn’t ignore, to pay homage to the courageous young people, like Eman Lacaba, who defied Marcos. Antonio Samson had an illegitimate son, Pepe, in The Pretenders . I made Pepe the redeemer in Mass , the concluding novel in the saga.

Nena Saguil, the painter who had lived most of her years in Paris, found me lodging at the Rue de Echaude, a hundred meters from the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés on the Left Bank — seven dollars a day — no one would believe it: a tiny, spartan room, without bath, but with a washbowl, a small writing table, and a cot. Close by was the café Deux Maggots, which writers like Hemingway frequented; Jean-Paul Sartre also lived in the area.

I had little money from my small publishing cum bookshop business, which had suffered during the martial law regime.

A public market was below on the sidewalk. For the whole month of June, I subsisted on bread and apricots, which were in season, till my stomach was sour.

I had never worked as frenziedly as I did then. Mass is the only novel I wrote from the beginning to the end in a month of creative spurt. I had to transfer three times from the rooms I occupied: I was disturbing the neighbors. The concierge was very understanding and finally found a corner room on the top floor so that even if I was typing the whole night with my old portable, I would not bother anyone.

When tired, I walked to the Boulevard Saint-Germain-des-Prés, idled on the sidewalk benches, and watched the girls in midsummer shorts. Sometimes I crossed the Seine to the Notre Dame cathedral and looked at the tourists.

Returning to Manila, I polished the novel in four or five drafts, after which I went to New Day. Publisher Gloria Rodriguez, who had included me on her list earlier, read the manuscript and was enthralled by it but flatly told me she couldn’t use it: Marcos was mentioned in the novel by name, and she feared the consequences if it came out under her imprint.

I went next to Eggie Apostol, a college classmate and comadre . She was putting out Mr. & Ms. , a weekly magazine that, even then, was already courageously critical of Marcos. She, too, demurred. There being no publisher, and penniless as I was, I had Mass mimeographed and distributed to a few friends as a kind of samizdat.

Somehow, my Dutch publisher, Sjef Theunis, heard about the manuscript and asked to see it. I sent it immediately, and it turned out to be one of those flukes: it first appeared in Dutch. I asked Sjef if he might advance my royalty so I could publish it in the Philippines. With that money, I immediately put it out under my Solidaridad imprint.