Half a lifetime ago

Half a lifetime ago, I was working as an editor in the Secretariat of the Batasang Pam–bansa. I edited the plenary sessions, correcting the unforgettable grammar and idioms of the assemblymen. One of them rose one day and said, “Mr. Speaker, I want to declare (blank) Air Lines a persona non grata, because their planes always collapse.”

A day later I went to him, with transcripts in hand, and told him that an airplane cannot be declared a PNG, and that planes crash but never collapse. Mr. Assemblyman rose to his full height of five feet, looked up at me (I am 5’ 11”) and barked: “And which school did you come from? The nerves to correct my English.”

When I told him where I studied, he smiled, showing teeth stained with nicotine. Then, he mumbled that next time, I could just correct his startling ways with the English language, since I already had his “approbation” to do so.

I was slaving there when President Marcos declared on Ted Koppel’s Nightline that he would call for a snap election. The fragmented Opposition (they are always fragmented, then and now) cobbled together a presidential and vice-presidential team. The green of Doy Laurel gave way to the yellow of Cory Aquino, whose words then — and more so, now, — still ring in my ears.

“Courage,” she said, before blessing the body of her dead husband in the casket, clad in her widow’s weeds, the day of her arrival from Boston, “courage is as contagious as cowardice.”

Short and sharp those words, like bullets exploding in the air. And now, this brave woman was running for President. Speaker of the Batasan Nicanor Yniguez was a gentleman of the old school. He gave us our 13th-month pay that December of 1985. Then he followed that up with a 14th-month pay, and, why, even a 15th-month pay. He did not say he was giving us that largesse to vote for Marcos. He just said that the Batasan had some savings (it did) and these savings could be better used if given away to the employees.

My 13th-month pay went to a new set of contact lenses, which in those days cost an arm and a leg. My 14th-month pay went to my mother. And my 15th-month pay I brought to the Cory Aquino for President Headquarters in front of Santo Domingo Church on Quezon Avenue, and gave it to them as a donation.

The Batasan then was a cool place to be. Stickers of Cory and Doy would mushroom in the bathrooms, to be scraped away the next day. And then they would be there again, only to be scraped again. The young employees were blithely campaigning for Cory and Doy. I attended all the rallies, giving away campaign leaflets to jeepney drivers and sidewalk vendors. Their stickers I pasted in our gate in our house in Antipolo; their banners I hung in the branches of the star-apple trees in front of our house, incurring the ire of my father — the military officer — who was a red, white, and blue fan of Marcos, the hero of the Second World War and a bright lawyer.

We voted, we watched the counting, we guarded the vote. The Batasan where I worked proclaimed Marcos, to our great and utter embarrassment, such that I applied for work in the so-called mosquito press then, only to be told there were no openings. We continued attending the massive rallies of Cory Aquino, where you counted people not in the hundreds of thousands, but in the millions. Cory then, alive, and Cory now, dead, always crunched numbers.

And then Feb. 23 happened. I had just watched a movie in Remar Theater in Cubao and was eating donuts in the basement when I heard on the transistor radio the voices of Juan Ponce Enrile and Fidel V. Ramos, crackling in the dry air, saying they had withdrawn their support from the Dark One. The Coke nearly spilled out of my nose. I rushed home, only to find my father already watching TV and telling us never, never to go out. “There might be trouble,” he said, “you will be safer at home.”

Of course we did not. My two sisters and I went to EDSA, on the pretext of buying books at National Book Store in Cubao. We saw an old woman waving a big Philippine flag on the corner of P. Tuazon and 20th Avenue in Cubao. People cheered and sang and danced on the whole length of EDSA. Cars were barricaded in front of what is now the POEA. A Mass was going on, while vendors plied their trade. It was like a fiesta. When we went home, my father remarked tartly how hot it must be in the bookstore, since our skin turned brown from buying books in a cool store. We just kept silent.

When Marcos was speaking on TV and he was cut off in mid-sentence, I knew his end had come. The baritone voice that echoed, and sometimes still echoes in my ears, was gone. A few days later, he flew away, with his family and their loot, in the dead of night.

And Cory became president in February of 1986. A month later, I had two letters in my hand, telling me I had been accepted into two M.A. programs of Creative Writing in American universities, on scholarships. In the afterglow of People Power, it was an easy decision to make. I stayed in the Philippines, took my graduate studies in Literature at the Ateneo, and taught. 

Three years later I was taking my second Master’s, this time in publishing studies at the University of Stirling on a British Council grant. I took publishing studies because Marcos had destroyed the country’s publishing industry, and I wanted to help the Ateneo’s then-fledgling Office of Research and Publication produce textbooks and literary titles for the next generation of readers. In December of 1989, I was about to go to sleep when Ricardo, my Brazilian flat mate, knocked on my window. I opened it, and the cold wintry air stole into my room. “There is a war,” he said in his Portuguese-accented English, “there is a war going on in your country.”

“Shut up, Ricardo,” I said, “the last coup d’etat was in 1987.”

But he said there was a new one. So I turned on my Walkman radio, and there it was, in the clipped, terse English of the BBC journalist in Manila, reporting on the latest coup d’etat led by Colonel Gringo Honasan. A day later, I was on the train bound for London. I was going to the US embassy in Grosvenor Square, to get a visa for my holiday visit to my sister in the US.

Outside the train, winter had turned the landscape into the color of bone. I listened again to the BBC, where the same journalist reported that he was somewhere in the Atrium in Makati, and gunfire was exploding all around him. I could hear the staccato of the machine guns, and saw the rectangle of Atrium rise in my mind. For the first time, I thought of the possibility of living in exile. But a few days later, the rebels lost after the American jet fighters flew over them, spraying a ricochet of bullets as warning shots.

Three months later, in February of 1990, I had two letters in my hand, telling me that I had been accepted into two Ph.D. programs in Creative Writing in American universities, on scholarships. I agonized for days on what to do. My sister living in New Jersey was telling me to accept the offer. She was so lonely there and wanted me to join her, and added I could write more books if I stayed in the USA. I had just been to the US for the Christmas holidays and surely, she added, you must have enjoyed your stay here?

But did I really want to be a writer in exile? That romantic notion of making it in the publishing houses of New York, reviewed by the New York Times, and read by Americans? Or did I want to return to take care of my two parents going into their 60s, pick up a promising career in writing in the Philippines, and publish books that would be sold at the local bookstores?

I did return, taught for 22 years at the Ateneo, and published eight books of poetry and prose. And last week, when Cory Aquino died and she was shown on TV in an earlier interview saying, “I am honored to be a Filipino, to be like all of you,” I finally knew that I made the right decision to come home. Half a lifetime ago.

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