He was the harbinger of light, hope and goodwill; always smiling, always so easy to provoke to laughter. He was kindhearted and thought nothing about tipping waiters with P100 bills when P100 could buy a “massage” in Manila’s massage parlors where he often entertained his friends after a gourmet meal. He always remembered favors done for him and repaid them double or triple. Unlike the Japanese, he did not return gifts in kind and of the same price as a matter of ritual — he gave them sometimes on a whim. He gifted his women with cars, the particularly faithful with houses. And the men who did his bidding were rewarded with lifetime jobs. He forgave the wrongs and those who slighted him but only if they were venial as defined by the Church. A von vivant, an entrepreneur — that was what he was called; he understood the euphemisms, reveled in them for he had acquired sophistication, complexity. He truly deserved the nickname “Sunny Johnny,” and this was how he was known to most.
But black was his favorite color — not the white that is associated with light and gaiety. All his trousers and shirts were black, all his footwear, which he particularly cared for; the furniture in his house was black, the linens, the towels as well. And why not? The Chinese did not consider black to be the emblem of grief or sadness. His favorite singers were all black: Ella Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Ramsey when she was singing in Manila theaters. He never missed her, following her even into middle age.
His cars were all black and so was his yacht which was actually a de-commissioned patrol boat he had bought in Hong Kong, refitting its engine and living quarters to be as luxurious as they could be made at the Whampoa docks.
He had seen so much of the high life as well as its dark underside, and through it all, he seldom bothered with high and ghostly matters like questioning the finality of death, or his relationship with God, although at times, in those boring parties that he tried to avoid, such subjects did come up and he would veer the conversation elsewhere. They understood, for they knew he was a sensualist, concerned with the visceral, the here and now; although on occasion, to please a guest, he could be capable of musing on the meaning of life which he considered his most precious possession. He did not care at all — within his deepest being — for the lives of those he had killed with such impunity.
Life was valuable, it was not to be wasted or given up easily: all those heroes his father, the Senator, often extolled in his speeches, the sacrifices such great men made for this country and people — he shared no such vaulting sentiment. How foolish of them to believe so much in this unalterable logic of love!
And yet, now, he was going to give up this dearest of possessions to redeem himself with this act for there was no other way he could escape his damnation. No other way.
He wrote on ordinary bond paper in his own distinctive hand, in black ink — the b’s, the o’s and the a’s bloated like toads. It started with archaic legalese: “I, Juan dela Cruz III, 60 years of age, of sound body, mind, and free will — will and my life this day, June 12, 2005, an act for which no one could be blamed.”
He then proceeded, in the same precise hand that was almost effeminate, to state the reason for his action, the deeply personal sense of guilt but made no specific mention of his crimes. He asked forgiveness from those he had wronged, knowingly or otherwise, and in this farewell note which also appeared like a last will (though his had been executed years previous), he even specified how his corpse should be dressed, in his black linen suit as usual, with his favorite black, hand-woven tie from Japan which looked like it was abel Iloko. And most of all, he specified that his feet should be exposed without socks or shoes. Those who would gaze at him in his coffin in the wake would surely wonder why.
He closed the one-page farewell with one last plea — “God, forgive me.” — at least, in his mind, this final renunciation of all that nastiness in him, and perhaps, just perhaps, the final act would be his redemption.
He signed his name slowly and as though to assure the authenticity of the testament, he affixed his left and right thumb marks above his signature. This was one document, however, which he did not notarize. He had thought about it and there was not a wisp of doubt in his mind that in the process, he wouldn’t change his mind.
Before he slashed his left wrist with his old Batangas fan knife, he had considered going in agony to atone for all that he had done. He had considered the traditional Japanese way, sepuku but that would have been too messy and the picture of himself all bloodied that way, his guts spilled out, did not particularly appeal to his image of a neat and well-ordered corpse. His ceiling for pain was also very low — he always avoided those instances when he could cut himself or suffer any physical damage. But this manner with which he elected to end it all would afford him the ultimate experience, to feel, to be conscious all the way to the very last when that perpetual nigh would fall. No disorderly end for him; he let his bleeding hand rest on a wide-mouthed plastic waste basket, assured that it was steady enough to hold all that red living stream that leaked from him.
In death, his face retained its finely sculpted features, the wide brow, the aquiline nose, the thin lips. In the end, it would seem to Juan dela Cruz that all of life was a dream — this, to paraphrase the Spanish poet, Calderon dela Barca who his father had quoted, “Toda la vida es sueno, y los suenos, suenos son.”
The dela Cruz family is Spanish mestizo, like some of the upper class families in this country that, after all, was ruled by the Spaniards for more than 300 years. Spanish was spoken in the dela Cruz house. Even the maids learned the colonial language — noble and beautiful, said the patriarch.
Indeed, Juan dela Cruz or Sunshine Johnny had many pleasant dreams, joyous — unlike the last, which was a nightmare, not a dream that summed up his life. If the end could be the beginning, this story should be written in bile — as dark as the secrets in men’s minds, never to be fathomed even by the most imaginative story teller.
When Sunny Johnny had not yet legally assumed dela Cruz as his family name, he was Juan Bacnang, Bacnang being the family name of his mother. He was 15 going on 16; he learned from his friend, classmate and neighbor, Mariano — nicknamed Anno — that the stores in Dagupan were bigger, better than those in the provincial capital, San Fernando. It is there where he planned to buy his first leather pair.
The first Sunday in January; in another week, classes would resume at the San Jacinto National High School and on the next Sunday, the Junior and Senior Prom. They would be Juan’s best shoes and for these he had saved more than 150 pesos, hard earned for almost a year from the charcoal and firewood that he got from the forest above their barrio Napilatan. He must invest it wisely.
He got to Dagupan an hour away and immediately sought the shop that Anno had identified — a large department store in Dagupan’s Jovellanos Street. The people of Dagupan were no longer Ilokanos but he could understand a bit of their language and they understood Ilokano, too.
He was always self-conscious when buying shoes or any kind of footwear, for then, he had to show his feet and they always elicited attention for his feet were unusually short but wide, and those infernal toes! He was not ashamed of his being a bastard, about which his classmates teased him. He had not bothered too much about who his father was; when he was about six or seven, he had asked his old grandparents who his father was and they had told him what they knew, what their daughter had revealed to them when her belly started to grow, but they were farmers, yoked to this village, this tiny plot of rice land — how could they possibly relate themselves and this handsome mestizo boy to the richest, most powerful family in the province if not in the entire Ilokos region?
It was supreme irony, of course, that their name was Bacnang for in the language of the north, Bacnang meant someone affluent — a misnomer for no one among the Bacnangs in Barrio Nalipatan was well off. In fact, the grandfather Bacnang had always been a tenant and his only daughter who finished grade seven never got beyond that; she would have married another farmer but after the birth of her only son, she remained single to help in the small farm at the foot of the Cordillera.
Crudely put, there was no love at all in the manner by which he was created for he was the result of a rape. His mother was just 14. During the Japanese Occupation many crimes were committed, not only by the Japanese but by the Filipinos themselves — rape was certainly the least of them. Juan dela Cruz is such a common name, a synonym for the Filipino everyman like Joe Smith in America. His family name is common, too. It is understood that in the old days, the offspring of the Spanish friars were often baptized de Dios or dela Cruz signifying their “holy” origin — God or the Cross.
Juan was born in January 1945 on that day that American battleships bombarded their landing beaches in Lingayen. His mother’s moans of pain were drowned out by the thunder of those big guns; their house was not along the coast; it was on a brow of a low hill far out overlooking the sea and a stretch of the gulf and from that vantage point, on that clear and faultless morning, the hundreds of ships seemed to fill that blue green expanse — so unlike the time when the Japanese ships came, just a few of them. Now those big guns shook the earth every time plumes of smoke belched out from their snouts.
As was the custom, those born during that period were named “Warlito” depending on the gender, or “MacArthur” after the general who had returned.
But his mother was not going to be foolish. Although she never got to high school, she was bright, industrious and level-headed. She decided to call him after his father, Juan, for she was absolutely certain who the father was. She was a virgin when Juan dela Cruz, guerrilla leader, and now Senator of the Republic, raped her.
As in most rural communities, the midwife is often endowed with other “powers”; some were considered as faith healers, soothsayers, clairvoyants. Baket May-yang who delivered Juan Bacnang was in her 60s and in the 40 years that she had performed, not one mother or baby had died under her ministration.
She drew the thing slowly out of the womb; its body still shiny with the rancid juices with which it was cocooned. The baby’s eyes were closed — they would soon open. Some come out squealing and crying loudly, but almost immediately, this newborn did respond to the light and the air of the outside world, not with crying but with a giggling laugh — the old midwife could not mistake it — that rollicking laughter which seemed almost adult. Yes, the baby was laughing as if its being ushered into this life was a big, grand joke. But on whom? She was amazed, stunned. She laid the baby on the small tin basin and then examined its features with a midwife’s careful eye. The body was normal, the arms, the legs, the face. She examined the hands — curled as yet, like all baby hands. And then the genitals — they were all very normal in shape and size. Then the feet, and that was when she was surprised again — the toes — nothing like them had ever been seen by her. Nothing in the last four decades that she had been delivering babies. There was one baby with six fingers on one hand, and a couple had harelip. Nothing like this. Nothing like this, on both feet. Then it came back, the kind of dim memory that was passed on to her from way, way back, from the old midwife who taught her this chore. It couldn’t be — poor woman, and her child, the omen that he brought! She shook her head, refusing as she did to believe what she had heard in the past, what could happen. It must not happen…
The big toes and the long toes next to them were joined by a thick ligament, very much like what forms the web in the feet of ducks. The nails were much thicker and harder and were conjoined, too. It was impossible for the child to wear those rubber sandals for his feet would look awkward with them and the sandals would merely emphasize the unnatural look of his feet. Because his feet were wide and short, his shoes had to be one or two sizes bigger, which made Juan just as self-conscious, even when he wore shoes. But with them, those strange feet hidden from view, everyone took to Juan easily, comfortably, for there was in the boy, even when he was very young, a pleasing demeanor, a charm that decreed him likable. No, “adorable” is the precise word to describe him.
He was so attractive that, when he went to the men’s shoe department, two salesgirls went to him immediately, all smiles, eager to serve him. In the glass case were the more expensive shoes.
“What is your size, sir?” one asked. She had big bright eyes, fair like him; in her blue uniform, she looked like a college student.
“I don’t know,” Juan Bacnang admitted.
The girl looked at his battered rubber shoes. “Size nine, I think,” she said.
He pointed to a black shiny pair with rubber heels. While the girl went to the stock room, the other girl, short and plump and just as good looking, attended to him with small talk.
When the other girl returned with his shoe size, he sat on the stool and proceeded to untie the laces of his rubber shoes. This was the moment that he feared most — when that ugly foot would be exposed. The two girls stared at it — an excruciating eternity, but though they saw the deformity, they did not comment on it, for which Juan Bacnang was most grateful.
“Your foot smells,” the fair-skinned girl finally said in jest.
It was true, of course and Juan Bacnang knew it: that when his feet were freed from whatever footwear he had, they exuded an animal odor, something similar to that of a goat.
“I know,” Juan admitted with a laugh.
She found a pair of black Ambassador shoes. “Made in Marikina,” she said, “and expensive.” It was 120 pesos for the pair. A bit large for his age and height, but it couldn’t be helped.
“You have to wear socks,” the girl suggested. She was solicitous. His smile, his disposition always attracted women of all ages, including his middle-aged teachers.
He would wear them for the first time at the prom.