Francisco Jose - The Samsons - Two Novels

Friends were apprehensive. I had been harassed by the Marcos gangsters, but the harassment was nothing compared to what had happened to the others who opposed him, those who were tortured and killed by his thugs. Now, they were specific: Colonel Abadilla, the dreaded hatchetman of the dictator, would get me.

But I knew Marcos was deliberate. In 1965, during the presidential campaign, the Macapagal government banned a movie on Marcos’s life and it drew much attention instead.

At the onset of martial law in 1972, he threw Senators Jose W. Diokno and Ninoy Aquino into prison. After two years, however, he released Diokno but kept Ninoy Aquino in jail. I asked Jose Diokno why he was released. Diokno explained: he was not in a position to really harm Marcos. He could range the world, making speeches condemning Marcos, but the dictator would still remain in power because Diokno did not have the political machine and the following to overthrow him. Ninoy did. Furthermore, Diokno did not aspire to the presidency. Why, then, should he languish in jail?

If Marcos stopped me, he would only draw attention to the book. It must be remembered that he censored newspapers and movies, but he did not censor the stage. I also knew that he believed Filipinos by and large did not read novels.

Years afterward, Alex, my son, who is an executive chef in California, told me that the apricot is the best brain food ever, which perhaps explains why Mass sold so well, even in Holland, where it came out in two editions. Since then, Mass has become my most translated novel and the one most commented on. A young Dutch teacher came to Manila only because he had read Mass . The novel, he said, evoked a vivid sense of place; he asked to see the setting, so I took him to Forbes Park, Manila’s ritziest district, then to the massive slum of Tondo, and finally to a sleazy massage parlor in Quezon City.

Another reaction was from a myopic academic who prided himself on being Tondo-born. He dismissed Mass as inaccurate, saying that I did not know Tondo. How could I explain that I had known Tondo since before World War II, when I used to visit relatives there? Besides, I had also lived in a poor section in Manila, near Antipolo street in Santa Cruz.

In the late sixties, a nongovernment cooperative, SAKAP, was conceived in my bookshop by Fr. Francis Senden, Angelita Ganzon, Ramon Echevarria, former Justice Jose Feria, Jose Apostol, Tony Enchausti, and several other middle-class do-gooders. SAKAP was to work in the slums and train out-of-school youths for jobs. I elected to work in Barrio Magsaysay in Tondo where I made acquaintances through an American Peace Corps volunteer, Walter Turner. I set up a bindery shop in the slum, enlisting jobless out-of-school young people there as apprentice bookbinders. I got obsolescent equipment from printer friends, like the late Alberto Benipayo, then visited the university and college libraries soliciting bookbinding jobs. I supervised the bindery, working with the Barrio Magsaysay youth and getting to know their families. I even got the services through UNESCO of an Italian binder who worked for a while in the project. At the height of its operation it employed some twenty youths. When I had time, I showed them the sights, from my van. In Makati, at a supermarket, they found the goods there cheaper than in the stores in the Barrio. They were all so awed by the magnificence of the Manila Hotel when I took them there for merienda . Why was I doing so much for them? some wondered. Was I going to run for city councillor or for Congressman of the district? If I wanted votes, why did I scold them severely on occasion? Unfortunately, I soon found out that I was giving too much time to the project and neglecting my writing and my little bookshop. I started to withdraw and slowly the project fell apart. They couldn’t manage it themselves — the accounting, the quality control, the collections. I asked the experts what had happened, why such a good project, backed up by the best of intentions, did not succeed. It was explained to me simply. Not only did those I left behind have no real training in management — the members of the cooperative, for that was what I intended it to be — they had no real stake, no money in it, to demand their scrutiny and loyalty. It was a stern lesson I will never forget. But with writers, no experience is ever wasted. It is all stored in the mind to be retrieved afterward. That is how I used my intimate Barrio Magsaysay slum background in Mass .

Some six years ago, on the occasion of the publication of a collection of my short fiction in Paris, my wife and I visited my old haunt, this time with the help of Philippe Cardenal and a generous grant from the French government. We stayed at the posh Hotel Madison across the boulevard from the church of Saint-Germaindes-Prés. With my translator, Amina Said, and her editor-husband, Ghislain Ripault, my Criterion publisher, Genevieve Perrin, and Quai d’Orsay guide Domnica Melone, we dined in fine watering holes. I revisited my old hotel, the public market below it, and was warmed with nostalgia for that June in 1976 when I wrote Mass and subsisted on bread and apricots. I worried that whatever I wrote would not equal Mass in its passionate intensity, not having a single bite of that precious fruit on this trip.

I had meant the title Mass to represent the Catholic mass, and the masa , as in EDSA in 1986. The offertory, the sacrifice — it’s all there, and so is the masa that should usher our salvation. But, as we can see in the top officials, we had elected our damnation.

Come to think of it, on occasion I miss Marcos; he was there, the epitome of greed and moral depravity. It was so easy to mark him as the enemy who gave us — who despised him — a cause, a reason for being and unity. And listen now to the shameless arrogance of his widow and children. How could we welcome them back?

One thing is sure: Marcos defined with unerring clarity the shattered Filipino intellectual community. He clearly demarcated the line between those who pandered to him, served him, and oppressed their fellow writers, and those who remained steadfast in their integrity. Today, many of those who toadied to him are back in power, befouling media and gloating at having returned like worms that have surfaced from the woodwork. No one among them has come out to say contritely, “mea culpa, maxima mea culpa”—no, they swagger instead like untarnished paragons. This is what ails us all — we do not ostracize them, we do not punish them; we anoint these vermin instead.

How I envy some of my characters, Tia Nena and Ka Lucio in Mass , whom I re-created from Rizal’s Sisa and Cabesang Tales , the young and old who acted with great fortitude and courage, who did not compromise as I have done. So here I am on the fringes and yet very much a part of this rotten structure I want to destroy, chained as I am to it by comfort and human frailty.

In writing my novels, I had dreamed of giving my countrymen memory, an iron sense of our heroic past that would exalt and ennoble us so that even in our poverty we could somehow hold our heads high, remembering that greatest of all Filipino writers — Rizal — who was my inspiration.

Forty years ago, in that village in the Basque country where I wrote the first novel in the Rosales saga, memory and my conscience compelled me to accept revolution; with it I also chose the pen as the instrument to help bring justice to my unhappy country.

Every so often, I bring writer friends and some of my students to that barrio where I was born. I show them the creek where as a boy I had swum, the fields where I had helped in the harvest, and my few surviving childhood friends — how shriveled and defeated they look. Through the years, I have seen my barrio become a rural slum. And so, looking around me, at the debris of our youthful dreams, the old man that I have become knows now the futility of words.