Notes on the writing of the Rosales Saga
Science and Technology are now the universal mantras for progress and, of course, it is difficult to argue against the success of countries like the United States and Japan, and now the emergent China — they have attained such power and prosperity because they excel in science and technology.
We who believe that the humanities—particularly literature — have much to contribute to progress, too, are a muffled minority and it is precisely because humanists are hardly listened to, that seminars such as this are important particularly for those who will expound on our gospel in the classroom.
But even writer teachers — no matter how committed to their vocation — are bound to tire, grow old. We wallow in clichés, in archaic formulae which must be constantly renewed, ingested, if we are to be useful in a fast changing world.
We need to remind ourselves — those of us who are engaged in this lonely craft of teaching and writing — that repetition may be boring, but necessary. And so we must repeat again and yet again to ourselves and to those who matter the importance of literature: that literature teaches us ethics which is now in great demand in a demoralized world. Literature anchors us in history, too, binds us together with our common past, and hopefully inspires us to build — as I would like to dream always — a society suffused with justice.
Since we write from our inconsequential lives, memory is our most important asset. Perhaps, I started “writing” the Rosales Saga when I was a child, not even in grade school; my grandfather took me to the fields beyond our village and when we stopped, he pointed to the expanse of ripening grain and said all that land was cleared from the forest by him and his brothers. But that land, after all that hard work and suffering, was stolen by the Spanish mestizos. He then said that I must go to school so I will not be oppressed the way he was.
Like most peasants in those days — the closing decades of the 19th century, he was illiterate. I had turned to the ancient face and to this day, I remember him crying silently, the tears rolling down those withered cheeks. Years afterwards when I was surrounded by decrepit lives and the sorry shapes of poor neighborhoods, I understood what my grandfather meant.
Then there was my teacher, Miss Soledad Oriel who gave me Rizal’s novels when I was in Grade Five — 10 years old — the Noli and the Fili as translated by Charles Derbyshire — they were the first novels in English which I read. In that portion of the Noli where Sisa’s two sons Crispin and Basilio were wrongly accused of stealing by a Spanish friar, I was so moved, I wept. I was influenced by Rizal’s novels — not just the novels but by his life; they gave me the basic idea for the saga. More than this, Rizal created such vivid characters like Sisa who I recreated as my Tia Nena in the third and last novels in the saga, My Brother, My Executioner, and Mass.
We know that the Fili is the sequel to the Noli; that the conclusions of both novels are not quite precise and clear-cut which leave the reader a lot of leeway in his interpreting what the author really wanted his reader to conclude. Bitin, we call this in Tagalog; the reader is left hanging and even guessing. If Rizal was often implicit, I am often explicit.
I started writing the saga almost immediately after World War II. Earlier in 1938 when I was a sophomore at the Far Eastern University High School, I began writing short stories, mostly the O.Henry type with surprise endings that were arrived at after a careful weaving of the plots. All were rejected by the Free Press, the Graphic and the Sunday Tribune Magazine. During the Occupation, I also wrote verse although there was no publication to which I could send these.
Then, in 1946 in Santo Tomas, I started sending fiction to the magazines and my first story was published by Salvador P. Lopez in the monthly Philippine American Magazine of Benjamin Salvoza. I got 50 pesos — this at a time when a salary of a clerk was 80 pesos a month.
The saga is also influenced by my reading during the Liberation of the Salinas novels of John Steinbeck. And William Faulkner’s literary geography, Yoknapathawpa County, became the rural Rosales which expanded into an urban setting.
Though interlinked, each novel in the saga is independent of the others and each can be read complete in itself. Each is written, too, in a manner different from the others. It is difficult to trace the sequence as in a linear continuum. I wrote most of the chapters of The Pretenders, Tree and My Brother, My Executioner as short stories so I could sell them immediately. I was very poor, a self-supporting student after the Liberation in 1945. I had spent all my savings from my brief stint in the American military. I was a stevedore at the piers but the foreman seeing how emaciated and puny I was, assigned me instead to the office. That job lasted a few months; soon after, I became a staff writer of the Philippines Commonweal which later on became the Sentinel, the Catholic weekly.
Miss Paz Latorena, my Santo Tomas literature teacher, told me to take the exam for the college paper, the Varsitarian. I passed, got a small salary and a scholarship which I asked from the Secretary General of Santo Tomas, Fr. Florencio Munos; Fr. Francisco Villacorta who succeeded Father Munoz continued my scholarship. I was writing the stories in the Varsitarian office and often stayed there late after school.
Poon, the first novel in the time chronology — 1872 to 1972 — is the last that I wrote in the early ’80s but its first chapter was written together with the chapters of Tree, The Pretenders and My Brother in the ’50s. The first chapter, The Cripple, was published in the Sunday Times Magazine in the ’50s. By then, I had already plotted the full structure of the saga.
I realized that early that I had to do a lot of reading on our history and so many felicitous events came my way. I was invited to dinner by the Lavas who were then living in Diliman. The honoree was Cesar Majul who had just returned from Cornell with a newly minted Ph.D. When I told him I was from Rosales, he said Mabini had tarried in my hometown for a rest cure when he was fleeing from the Americans. By my limited reading, I knew how upright Mabini was, how he unselfishly served the poor and the new Republic. Mabini must be in the saga.
In recreating Mabini, I committed a horrible blunder by giving currency to the rumor that his being a cripple was attributable to syphilis. I thought that by doing this, I would humanize him — a mistake that should be a lesson to all attempting to work with historical material. When his bones were exhumed in the ’80s, it was found that he had had polio. I confronted Cesar Majul and Teddy Agoncillo — our two venerable historians who had passed on to me the story; both excoriated me for using unconfirmed rumors. As Ambeth Ocampo, the much younger historian explained, the enemies of Mabini concocted the lie to neutralize his tremendous influence in the Malolos Republic.
After, the Noli and the Fili, Miss Oriel gave me My Antonia by Willa Cather then Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes.
The narrator in My Antonia is a boy who befriends a family of European settlers in Nebraska, among them a girl named Antonia. This haunting novel impressed me. When I wrote Tree, the second in the saga, I also made the narrator a boy among peasants and their families. I selected a rich boy to tell the story from his point of view. The novel is an improvement of Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus. In the Steinbeck story, as the bus stalls in a town, the story of the town unfolds. No central theme unites the characters. In Tree, the town and the balete tree which dominates its plaza are integral to the lives of the characters. The continuity is not just in the town. The landlord who helps the Ilokano settlers in Poon — a revolutionary and friend of Mabini — is now a grandfather of the narrator.
I recall how eagerly I followed Don Quixote’s misadventures — reading the novel even under the street light beyond our house when we did not have kerosene for our lamp. Cervantes taught me the technique of the narrative and to append to it whatever else I wanted. A writer who ignores the power of the narrative misses his most important function — to tell a story.
Sometime in the Seventies, Kunio Yoshihara, a Japanese friend who is a Southeast Asian specialist, came to the Philippines. He had read Tree and without telling me, he visited Rosales, stayed with the town mayor, then returned to Manila and told me there is no balete tree in Rosales.
Of course, there is no such tree in my hometown. I put it there as one overarching symbol which most of us can understand. For so long, our writers enamored with their Western education have missed it and other native objects — Ficus Benjamina Linn — the strangler tree. It starts as a sapling surrounded by vines which grow around the young tree — the vines strangle it then grow and become the trunk of the tree itself.
The rural setting of the saga is not fictional but I gave it several imagined attributes — the Colorum peasant revolt in nearby Tayug in 1931, for instance. I transferred it to Rosales but did not actually describe it as it happened — it is merely inferred in the reminiscence of the characters.
Rosales can be any Philippine town, lethargic in its ways, Christian with a pagan and superstitious core, small town politicians beholden to national warlords, rhythms punctuated by the seasons, the planting and harvesting, the fiesta. All these color the saga, particularly so in Tree.
From this small town, the narrative moves to the city, to the slums, the perfumed enclaves, the university belt and even a sliver of its dark underside. Young and old, the desperate, the dejected and the perennially hopeful move untrammeled in this geography that is also in constant flux.
My Brother, My Executioner, the third novel in the saga, is considered by some as the most dramatic of the five novels. Two brothers, Luis and Victor, represent protagonists in the Huk rebellion in the early ’50s; Luis — the illegitimate son of the Spanish landlord Don Vicente Asperri in Tree, and Luis’ half brother, the peasant leader Victor.
Don Vicente who looms over the novel Tree but rarely appears, is now a very powerful presence in this novel, an anxious father who sees his mestizo son with the peasant woman Nena, mature as a poet and his only heir. Nena who is the reincarnated image of Sisa in Rizal’s Noli also loses her sanity in this novel, disappears then reappears as Tia Nena in Mass and finally, in the play Balikbayan.
The setting of My Brother includes Rosales in the vortex of that revolt and Manila where Luis, the heir, lives in comfort and intellectual exile. He marries his cousin Trining at the urging of his father, after a disastrous affair with his publisher’s daughter, Ester.
The brilliant young playwright, Rody Vera who transformed Tree, Mass and The Pretenders into plays, is now working on My Brother. As a musical, it will be ready for staging early next year.
The Pretenders, the fourth novel — like Tree and My Brother when finally completed — was serialized in the early Fifties in the Weekly Womens Magazine edited by the late Telly Albert Zulueta. The Pretenders is the first in the Saga to appear in book form. When Rody Vera started transforming it into a play, I re-read it after almost 40 years since I had looked at it.
Its patent maturity surprised me. Remember, I wrote it in my twenties. I then realized that my generation was matured early by World War II — its dehumanizing ordeals, flight, hunger and death. I make his observation as an oblique comment on much of the writing of our younger people today. So much facility, innovation characterize their prose but, alas, there isn’t much probity or depth in it.
Mass, the concluding novel, was a momentous after thought. I intended to write just four novels with The Pretenders as the conclusion — bleak, uncertain but purposive with its symbolic call to revolution in the suicide of Antonio Samson. His death is not just physical but an allegorical rendering of the need for self discovery and destruction of the rotten foundation of society and replacing it with an invigorating vision limned by justice.
Then, in 1972 Marcos declared martial law. So many young people responded to that challenge as did the youth in 1896. I had to record that brave response; I knew some of them, shared their hope although I was not going to act as courageously as they.
Martial law was not kind to me. Aside from being periodically harassed, I was not allowed to travel. After four years of trying without success, I thought it time to pull strings and use my old contacts in government — the friends who joined Marcos, Secretary of Information Francisco Kit Tatad and Foreign Affairs Secretary Manuel Collantes. They returned my passport after an old friend had placed my name on the black list. I was going to attend a cultural conference in Paris. I decided to stay on for a month to write. Nena Saguil, the Filipina artist who lived in Paris, found cheap room for me in the Left Bank — seven dollars a day with continental breakfast.
On the plane to Paris, I thought of the illegitimate son of Antonio Samson in The Pretenders — Pepe — he became the antihero in Mass. It is the only novel I wrote from beginning to end in a month of concentrated work and creative spurt. Never had I labored so hard as I did in Paris that summer of 1976. Sometimes, I typed for two to three days straight till my hands were numb. No rest except a nap or a snack of bread and apricots — they were in season and very cheap.
Back in Manila, I cleaned up the first draft for about three months then showed it to New Day publisher, Gloria Rodriguez. She liked it but couldn’t use it. Marcos was mentioned in it by name. I then showed it to Eggie Apostol, my comadre and publisher of the Inquirer. She turned it down, too, for the same reason. I mimeographed it then distributed it to friends. To a, man, they said it was too dangerous, that the Marcos thugs would get me.
Somehow, my publisher in Holland, Sjef Theunis, heard about it. He immediately put it out in Dutch. It sold very well in Holland. With my royalties I then published it in Manila. I gambled. Even if Marcos read it or heard about it, he wouldn’t bother because he knew Filipinos do not read novels. My thinking was confirmed and so I am here today able to tell you these stories.
Wisps of the saga appear in Viajero which my French translator, the brilliant metaphysical poet Amina Said, considers my very best. Viajero recounts our history through the eyes and the imagination of a deracinated scholar, Salvador de la Riza. Salvador returns to the Philippines from San Francisco and meets with Pepe Samson and Father Jess. Pepe Samson, now a revolutionary, takes him to the Caraballo range to a “liberated territory” and shows the returning Filipino scholar the grim reality of revolution.
The saga ends with my play Balikbayan. The first act is in a bookshop where the characters in Mass meet after 20 years. Pepe Samson is the central figure; among his activist colleagues in the Sixties and the Seventies, only he has kept the faith.
The second act, Dong-Ao, is the Ilokano ritual of the living wailing over the dead, in this case, Pepe Samsom who is betrayed.
The play was translated into Tagalog by Rody Vera and the second act, Dong-Ao was staged at the Cultural Center of the Philippines directed by the genius, Chris Millado.
The whole saga and the play were presented last Dec. 3 at the Tagbilaran Cultural Center by the magnificent Bohol impresario Lutgardo Labad. The play, translated in Cebunano, was preceded by a reading of the synopsis of the five novels then the first act was read; the second act, Dong-Ao was staged.
The director, PETA’s Melvin Lee, was assisted by Lordely Garrate Trinidad of California. Like Chris Millado’s CCP presentation, the Tagbilaran staging was moving. This comment is self-serving but I really saw that evening in Tagbilaran so many teary faces.
More than 10 years ago, my son Eugenio who lives in San Francisco drove me to Sacramento in California to see Miss Oriel, now the widow Mrs. Bill Soriano and retired. She was past 90 but her mind was still lucid. She told my son how often she had to report me to the principal for being absent. My mother would then be informed; I was playing truant again. She had kept some of my grade school themes to show to her students when she started teaching in college.
I had kept some of those early attempts too — a collection of verse I wrote when I was in my teens. Jette, my daughter who is also my editor, chanced upon it and said I was truly mushy. I am terribly embarrassed when I read these first strivings and those that were published immediately after the World War II. They’re so bad, I could cry.
As I stated in the beginning of this presentation, the ego propels the creative effort. Narcissm, however, has its limits. The happy celebration of the self eventually negates the outward reach of art; the writer then transcends himself to attain the fulfillment which lies beyond his narrow compass.
In writing the saga, I also tried to portray the Filipino condition honestly and as best as I can so that we will be able to recognize the truest image of ourselves. We will then be able to fashion for ourselves an alternative reality, a redeeming vision emergent from our unblemished understanding of why we are.
In writing the saga, I tried to restore our faded memory which custom and the vagaries of life often render us insensate or forgetful of this past — even the recent past, for as long as these dire events — no matter how traumatic to us as a people, don’t impact on us as individuals.
I have tried to show a nobler image of what we truly are; our history has abundantly informed us of our iron revolutionary tradition, our forbearance, our heroism.
I am ready to be accused of falsifying this history, of hieratic myth making and literary sorcery. What excuse or reason can I give other than what any artist will claim — that this saga is my homage, my humble tribute to my unhappy country.
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(This piece was delivered by the author, upon the invitation of UST professor Ferdinand Lopez, as the opening address during a conference organized by the Faculty of Arts and Letters, the Literary Society, and the college paper of the University of the Santo Tomas, The Varsitarian. The conference, attended by writers and teachers, and which focused on the teaching of Philippine literature in our schools, was held in honor of the writer Paz Latorena.)
