Now once again we were in Leyte-Samar, on a mission to make some cinematic sense of even more distant and certainly not accidental deaths. I was with film director Gil Portes and production manager Peping Almojuela to visit Balangiga on the coast of Eastern Samar, facing Leyte Gulf. It’s one of those places, like Gettysburg and Verdun, made forever famous by the carnage of war.
More than 100 years ago, on Sept. 28, 1901, 74 American soldiers died in Balangiga at the hands of several hundred Filipino rebels, who lost 50 of their own number on the spot; when the Americans took their revenge, cutting a swath of fire and destruction across the island, many thousands more Filipinos died. Samar was turned – in the words and by the orders of Gen. Jacob Smith – into a "howling wilderness."
The few people – Filipinos and Americans alike – who know anything about the Filipino-American War have taken to calling that event the "Balangiga Massacre," perhaps unwittingly assuming the American view. Today, the people of Balangiga themselves prefer to call it the "Balangiga Encounter," which they re-enact every Sept. 28.
This was the challenge and the burden Gil and I had taken on: transforming the Balangiga Encounter into a movie. It’s been done before – Joey Gosienfiao directed Sunugin ang Samar a long while back – but we wanted to do a more factual, semi-documentary version keen to the temper and the rhetoric of these Balikatan times and to the clamor for the return of the three Balangiga church bells carted home by the Yanks as trophies of war and now on display in Wyoming and Korea.
But first we had to see Balangiga itself, to get a feel for the locale and for its residents and their albeit modern cares. Balangiga is about a two-hour drive from Tacloban, and we hired a fellow named Tony and his Nissan van to take us there.
On the way, Tony briefed us on the realities of Leyteño politics circa 2002. He had refused to vote a junior Romualdez into Congress, he said, because "he used rubbing alcohol when he shook our hands"; still, he would vote for Imelda Marcos anytime, anywhere, and was certain she would win hands-down. We talked about safer subjects, like food. "There are no restaurants in Balangiga," he told us helpfully.
As it turned out, there were two or three carinderias, and one lodging house whose last visitors, according to the guestbook, had come a month before. The town itself was as typically Filipino as towns can get: a plaza by the national highway with the church and the municipal hall taking the measure of each other across the lawn, and the elementary school and camposanto within spitting distance. The river led to the sea, and the beach was fringed by slender coconut trees. The church looked freshly painted in creamy yellow; a new belfry had been built in anticipation of the return of the three bells in time for the 1998 Centennial, but they never came.
We made immediately for St. Anthony’s Lodging House, which doubled as a snack bar and videoke lounge on busier days. Its proprietor, councilor Tony Baldenor, was up on business in the mountains when we arrived, so we had to cajole the girl he had left in charge to give us rooms, of which there were, unsurprisingly, plenty. Each room cost P75 a night, and could sleep three people in a bunk and a folding bed; we decided to splurge, and gave ourselves a room each.
Since meals could be had at the hostel only upon request, we took pedicabs to the public market to find a spot for a late brunch. It was Saturday, market day, and the mercado was livelier than usual, but the more special vegetables – carrots and such – were waiting for buyers and wilting in the heat. "They come from Manila and Davao via Tacloban," the vendor said of her idle greens. We settled into a carinderia and decided to have a can of corned beef and some salted eggs served up with instant coffee and the pinkish, flavorful rice.
"Do you have any crabs here?" we asked, hopeful of gorging on our favorite marine animal. "Only by prior arrangement," the manang said. "Someone has to bring them in, and they’re expensive, at P100 a kilo." The town lives off fishing and copra – and pedicabs, dozens of which seemed to be zipping about, riderless. "My boundary’s P40 a day," said our pedicab driver Arnold. We paid him and his partner P100 each for the 45-minute pedicab tour they gave us of the place. "Is Manila very different?" my driver asked me as he pedaled back to town from the camposanto. "Yes," I said, "very different."
Balangiga a century after its trademark event has a population of around 11,000, and it seems quiet, even mildly prosperous, with dust rising constantly from all the concreting being done to its streets. Most of the houses are old, with thatch roofs and walls of blistered, unpainted wood. There is no moviehouse, although we espied a VCR in Brgy. 6 screening Yamashita, presumably for paying customers. Our driver Tony warned us that the NPA came out on the road leading to Balangiga after dusk, and I suppose we might have run into some cadres in disguise at the public market; I saw one uniformed policeman there, and he seemed to be enough.
There were two funeral parlors, one on either side of the poblacion. Everyone in Balangiga was alive when we visited; no wakes were being held.
While looking and waiting for our interviewees, we parked ourselves in a store that sold cold soft drinks – a relief, because there had been a day-long brownout and generators were few and far between. I saw a poster on the wall and considered, for a moment, ordering what was advertised: "Vino Viagro 25 empty bottles free T-shirt 9.50." The ad was illustrated with the picture of an indubitably virile man squiring an appreciative maiden. I went for the Coke, unhappy to let so much promised potency go to waste.
At local historian and businessman Voltaire Canillas’s house, we reviewed the careful records he kept of the Encounter, while a game of American football played on the TV in the background.
I remembered to buy a bath towel from the dry-goods store across the street; for P75, you got a fresh pillowcase and a bedsheet doubling as a blanket at the lodging house, but not much more. When darkness fell, the power returned and the electric fans came on, but we moved around in an orange murk. I checked the lights and found that all of them were 10-watt bulbs, just enough to make sure that you found your way to the communal toilet and bath. Once on the throne, performing the inevitable, I squinted my eyes and read the management’s hand-lettered admonition: "Sit like a princess, not like a frog."
I slept peacefully and soundly, woken up only by an early-morning chill. I had imagined we might be visited by ghosts with names like Connell and Bumpus and Abanador and Abayan, but nothing of the sort happened. When Gil got up at 6 the next morning to go to church, there was a horde of pedicab drivers waiting at the gate, squabbling among themselves over the privilege of carting our soft, overfed bodies around Balangiga.
We had contracted Tony to pick us up at 5 p.m. for the ride back to Tacloban, but he came early at 3 – to make sure, he said, not to be caught on the road at nightfall – and so we left as soon as we could, which is what those 74 Americans should really have done in 1901.
Leynes’s work has been described as "super-realist" and "magic realist," and you’ll understand why when you view his paintings, which infuse the genre of what’s been called "local color" with a distinct vitality and certainly with the kind of application and care that you just don’t see too much of these days. If you’ve been spoiled by modern art and think that painting is easy, study Leynes and think again.
From doing sketches of American GI’s after the war for P5 per portrait, Leynes moved on to assisting Vicente Manansala on the latter’s murals and to making a name for himself as a painter and as an advertising man, spending many of his years at J. Walter Thompson. He left JWT in 1980 and went full-time into painting. His second one-man show at the Philippine Plaza in 1984 was sold out.
On Feb. 22, at 6 p.m., we get the chance to encounter Nestor G. Leynes and his lifetime’s work in an 80th birthday restrospective exhibit, opening at the RCBC Plaza on Ayala Avenue in Makati. See you there!