13
The day I was to go hunting again never came that year or the next, for that December the war came and Father surrendered his shotguns to the Japanese. They also got all of the riding horses, save one—the old skinny nag that was Old David’s. The delta where our prey was safe became the sanctuary of brave and angry men.
The war changed the delta and Rosales but hardly altered us. Father and our relatives, we retained our leisurely manners, our luxuries, and the primeval quirks of our nature. Only Tio Doro, I am now sure, was profoundly affected by the war, and I am glad he had survived it. Of all my uncles, it was only he who devoted the best years of his life to politics. There has always been some distaste in our family for any activity that was political, but Tio Doro was simply made of a different fiber. He took to its swagger and blather not for personal honor, but because he found in politics an outlet for his nationalistic passions.
He had no delusions or misgivings, however, in his last days when the ideas that once propelled him to great wrath seemed finally jaded. Maybe he was consoled somewhat by the thought that in his time he had lived fully and well.
After the war, when the Philippines was granted independence, I was sure he would be the main speaker in his town during the program that marked that momentous hour. The honor would have been his by right, because he was Balungao’s first citizen and all his life independence was his one consuming obsession.
I had expected him to say so many things, and those who knew how fiery he had been would have been surprised at the change. Not that he had forsaken his old beliefs for new, pragmatic ones; he simply had outgrown them, I suppose, just as I had outgrown my short pants.
If it were not for his daughter, Cousin Emma, I would not have gone often to Tio Doro’s place. Not that his big, blue house was far from Rosales—it was only five kilometers away. He was awesome, and moreover, he seldom talked with me, maybe because he felt I was not ready for his ideas. I had heard Tio Doro deliver speeches in public, and I recall vividly his Rizal Day speech many years ago. At that time I had enough of a grasp of English. Tio Doro had always occupied a prominent niche in his town, and he was the program’s principal speaker.
It was highly fashionable then to speak in English, although only a few understood it, and Tio Doro spoke in that language for the benefit of the high school students and town officials who occupied the first rows of rattan chairs. A platform had been set up on empty gasoline drums, bordered with split coconut fronds and draped with the national tricolor. Everywhere around the stage, people were sprawled on the grass, on the amorseco weeds, on caretelas and bull carts, and on the floats decked with tobacco sheaves and girls in native costumes.
He wore one of those ill-fitting, collarless drill suits that was the uniform of bureaucrats. His stiffly starched pants almost shackled the ankles, but they heightened his patriarchal dignity. When he strode to the stage, there was a discernible clapping from the front seats. After clearing his throat, Tio Doro cast a solemn glance at the newly painted Rizal monument, whose base was covered with amarillo wreaths, and then he broke into a resonant voice that became more vigorous as he progressed.
He spoke of death, declared that dying could not be more glorious than when one gives up his life for the native land. He said this with such intensity that it made me wonder if he remembered it on his deathbed. He relived the days when, at the age of thirteen, he was already with the revolutionary forces. And on he meandered, no longer elaborating on dying but attacking Occidentals, the despicable manner in which they had exploited Filipinos for centuries. He dissected the Monroe Doctrine and its distorted implications, the hypocrisy of the Americans in exercising it, their much touted entry into World War I to make the world safe for their democracy. His voice rose as he lambasted whites for their rapacity and deliberate blindness to the Filipinos’ right to self-government. He gesticulated and swore to high heaven and evoked the wrath of the gods, because on earth nobody would act as Tio Doro wanted.
He finally concluded: “God forbid that I will ever have ties with foreigners who ravaged this beautiful Philippines!”
As if precipitately timed with the end of his speech, the brass band played the hymn “My Country,” and the notes hammered at the already excited audience. The ensuing ovation was ringing and long.
As I said, Tio Doro seldom spoke to me, and when he did, he was aloof and dull. On one visit, however, we finally had a chat. I was browsing in his library, and Cousin Emma was banging on the piano. I had picked out the Noli from his Rizaliana and was giving it a cursory look when he emerged from his room, propped himself comfortably on a sofa, and asked what I would want to be when I grew up.
There was a note of concern in his throaty voice. For a moment I did not know what to say. I was but a sophomore in high school. I finally blurted out that I had not yet given the matter much thought, but Father had insisted on my becoming a doctor. Tio Doro remarked that I might be a writer someday, because I was always reading. But being a doctor, I told him, impressed me more. Whereupon, he tried to dissuade me from becoming one, arguing that there were too many doctors who had M.D.’s only as honorary suffixes to their names. And that was when, for the first time, Tio Doro talked with me as though I were grown-up.
“It is just too bad,” he mused, gazing at the unlighted Aladdin lamp above us. “We don’t have a language that is known throughout the world. Even if we could have a national language someday, it would still be better if our writers wrote in English. Then they will have a wider following. However, if you will ever write, use a pen name. If you use your own, you might be mistaken for a Latin or even an Italian. Now, if you wrote under such a name like Lawag or Waywaya, no one would doubt your being Malayan.”
Though I did not quite know his motives then except for what I gleaned from his impassioned speeches and from textbooks about Bonifacio and Del Pilar, I said I understood.
Tio Doro was an elementary school principal and was among the first batch of graduates of the Philippine Normal School. After his wife passed away, he gave up teaching and focused more attention on his estate, which, after all, was the main source of his income. He plunged into active politics immediately after he quit his teaching job, and that was even before I was born. Several times he ran for the presidency of his town, but every time he lost. His political enemies had a tough time dislodging him from the political platform, though. He was that kind of a man—he could be stopped but not knocked out. And when he finally retired from the political arena because of physical disability, never again were elections in his town thrillingly anticipated. Under the tattered banner of the Democrata-Nacional he waged his fight, and when this party irrevocably split over the Hare-Hawes-Cutting Law, he sided eventually with the Democratas.
He should not have suffered defeat as often as he did. It was not because he squandered on campaigns, filling the insatiable stomachs of voters, for his wife’s and his own resources were quite formidable. There was nothing questionable, either, in the way the ballots were counted, for the time when birds and bees could vote was yet to come. It was just that he had a horde of implacable enemies.
In his town the Chinese up to this day carry considerable influence. Tio Doro did not have a single Chinese friend then, and he derided Father for being on affable terms with Chan Hai. He attacked Mon Luk, the rice merchant in his town, whenever he could and at his political meetings accused him of controlling the retail trade. Tio Doro never failed to point out how many people owed money to the Chinese middlemen.
Tio Doro would not have won in the 1934 elections if the Nacionalistas had not split and backed two other candidates for the presidency. As town executive at last, he effected no radical changes during his term. Many had thought he would forcibly padlock all the Chinese stores or do something equally drastic, but he did not. On the routinary side of his term, he sliced a narrow graveled road behind the cockpit and named it after himself, as was the practice of almost all town presidents. He built a new wing for the elementary school building, planted rows of ornamental bougainvillea in the town plaza, erected a water tank, and dug drainage ditches on the sides of the streets.
Anyone would have asserted that Tio Doro truly loved himself, but no one could deny him his charity when in 1934 he gave half of his rice harvest to the poor, as the great storm of that year ravaged the crops. At the close of his term, the Commonwealth was inaugurated. He expressed his usual skepticism about the new arrangement, but he did not run for reelection. Not that he was tired of politics. I used to see him limp often. Now his legs were paralyzed, and that ultimately meant he could not campaign anymore. This did not mean, however, that he left politics completely. His heavy hand was still felt as he welded the Democratas in his district as the last phalanx of the opposition. Though none of his weakling protégés got elevated past the municipal council, he scrupulously supported them to such an extent that he became a local power broker.
Being a true Democrata, Tio Doro would not support President Manuel Quezon, but when Quezon made his now oft-quoted “Better a government run like hell by the Filipinos than a government run like heaven by the Americans,” Tio Doro tersely commented: “Tama!”
After high school, Cousin Emma continued her piano studies at the state university conservatory. Tio Doro might have at times been smothered with loneliness in his big house, and the wheelchair to which he was tied might have depressed him no end. Emma was not around to play his nostalgic kundimans, the nonpopularity of which he lamented. “These songs,” he said, “express the soul of our people.”
I seldom went to see him, but on those occasions that I did, he spoke to me of the conflict between Japan and China as if I were now grown-up. But clearly the flare-ups loomed nearer, darker. Mussolini had attached Ethiopia to his empire. In Spain the civil war raged. Then Germany invaded the Balkans. Developments came quickly: Japan joined the Axis, and he predicted that, with Japan now on one side and America on the other, Filipinos would soon be involved more precariously than ever in the whirlpool of the White Man’s destiny.
Hitler must have slightly piqued Tio Doro’s interest, for he bought a copy of Mein Kampf. He never trusted foreigners, and now he justified the racism of the totalitarians as long as national progress was their goal. When the Atlantic Charter was promulgated, Tio Doro was inclined to be sarcastic about it. It is a very interesting scrap of paper, he averred, but the Americans and the British have common imperialistic designs, as history had proved in Cuba and India. Do you think they will come to the succor of the colonials without considering their private interests first?
War engulfed the Philippines shortly afterward. The Japanese landed on the beaches of my province, and Tio Doro’s town, like ours, was one of the first to be occupied. Father saw no reason for us to leave the province. We were not molested, and we had enough to eat. But the transportation was slow and difficult, and I rarely visited Tio Doro and Emma, although Father did see him frequently.
Cousin Emma wrote to me occasionally. In her letters she could not say much because the mails were censored. For Tio Doro, however, his writing days were over; the dread paralysis had crept to his hands.
Then Emma’s letters ceased. The country was liberated, and we weathered a few scary nights. When the fighting was over, Emma wrote in one long letter everything of importance that had happened. She told of how her father had been humiliated by the Japanese. His frailty had proved to be no shield. He had been asked to serve as town mayor, a figurehead, but he had flatly refused. Yet, before the war, he had appreciated the Japanese love of country and emperor that amounted to fanaticism, and he believed in the validity of the Japanese catchword: Asia for the Asiatics, the Philippines for the Filipinos. Then, inconsistently, he secretly gave most of his harvest to the guerrillas rather than sell it to the Japanese rice agency, the BIBA. Cousin Emma recounted some gory episodes, among which was how the only son of Mon Luk in their town was executed for underground activities, and how the rice mill of the Chinese had been razed to the ground, transforming the Chinese merchant into a pauper. To all these incidents Tio Doro had been an eyewitness. At one time he was a prisoner, too.
But for all that happened, Tio Doro’s absorption in politics had not waned. Although the war had added to his worries, he still managed to dabble in politics. His health was deteriorating, and his resistance was petering away. He was sick most of the time from complications of his paralysis so that the doctor’s visits became more frequent. He was never really physically strong; even when his legs had not yet succumbed, his frame was meager and he was susceptible to colds, so that when he made his nighttime speeches he was always wrapped up. Emma asked if I would like to see the old invalid before he passed away.
I arrived on an Army truck transformed into a bus. The Balungao municipal building was a gaunt remnant of a once imposing edifice, and beyond it, Tio Doro’s blue house still stood above the rubble of the other residences, which had not been as fortunate. At my right loomed the chimney of Mon Luk’s rice mill, a monolith pointing to a sodden sky as a reminder of a once-flourishing business, over which Tio Doro would have pleasantly chuckled years ago if by some occult and terrible power it suddenly collapsed.
I passed through the stirring May streets, felt the cool whiff of the rainy season through the thick afternoon heat, recalled how every house once stood, how edges of gumamela had not yet sprung up in the yard of the demolished schoolhouse, which was now alive with American GI’s. The acacia trees that lined the main road were bigger—they had been but puny saplings once. The asphalted road, which they lined, was rutted and scarred by the tracks of tanks and bulldozers. A couple of makeshift bars were filled with soldiers in olive uniforms, laughing boisterously and singing “You’ll Never Know.”
As I neared the blue house—its paint peeling off, its fence shabby and crooked—jazz welled up from within. I pushed the heavy iron gate that squeaked open with a metallic tinkle from the bronze bell above it. Up the graveled path I hurried, and from the direction of the back-door stairs, Cousin Emma came beaming.
I hurried up the polished stairs, on each side of which stood little statues of discus throwers. Cousin Emma took me to the spacious drawing room and told me that the old man’s days were numbered.
We went to the room where Tio Doro was confined. He was propped up in a wheelchair near the wide-open window. The afternoon sun streamed in. His cheeks were sallow, the crop of distinguished white hair sparse. He was apparently resigned, as would be the earth to the whims of the elements. But now in the room were two middle-aged American officers and Tio Doro’s former archenemy, Mon Luk, who, I later learned, had just borrowed a little capital from him to start business anew.
I held his soft, nerveless hand and kissed it, and almost forgot to answer when he inquired how Father was.
At that time when no explanations were possible, I was hurtling back to those blurred yesteryears, to that conspicuous Rizal Day program long ago, when as the main speaker he discoursed despicably on all foreigners, when on his election platform he damned all Chinese. And now, in the privacy of his home—in his own room—were these strangers laughing with him as if they were his long-lost brothers.