Friends, what they are for

Again, three friends passed away recently within weeks of each other’s demise. Their passing, I am sure, means so much not just to me but to others whose lives they have touched. The first is Khuswant Singh, the Indian novelist known for his saucy novels like Delhi and his classic Train to Pakistan about the tragedy, which the India-Pakistan partition was. I met him in the early Sixties in Manila when I set up the first Asian PEN Conference. He attended it and after that, we would meet again and yet again in conferences and on those few occasions that I visited Delhi.

Once, we were together on a flight to Honolulu and when we were at the immigration counter, he said, “Watch this, Frankie.”

He was taken out of the line and was detained for an hour. When he was finally released, he told me it was that damn list which the Americans kept for over 50 years, the suspected communists who were in the International Brigade that fought with the Republicans in Spain’s civil war. Khuswant was a fastidious scholar; his voluminous study of the Sikhs (he was one) demonstrated that scholarship. As a journalist, his thousands of readers were enraged and enraptured by his satiric spoofs of India’s politics and politicians, and the many sacred cows — literal and otherwise  —  of Indian society. He had such iron self-confidence, he also deprecated himself.  He was lustily in love with life, with women, and, of course, with India.

Grant Goodman’s passing was relayed to me by the playwright, Paul Stephen Lim, who was his lifelong companion. His contribution to the study of our history is immense. Grant had many friends and students from the Philippines for he had visited the country often and studied the Japanese presence here even before World War II when they developed abaca plantations in Davao. Like Paul, he had retired from the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

I met him in the lobby of the Janpath Hotel Delhi in the late ‘50s. We were both waiting for our flight to Tel Aviv. I was then following the Bhoodan land reform movement initiated by Vinoba Bhave; it had attracted attention in Asia. I was going to Tel Aviv to stay briefly in a kibbutz outside the city.

Grant, together with Edward Seidensticker, studied Japanese during the war so he could be an interpreter in the army. I recreated him as Grant Goodchild  —  one of the informants in my novel Vibora, about Artemio Ricarte. I had expected him to visit Manila on or before his 90th birthday next July.

Fr. John Schumacher, the historian, was buried at the Jesuit cemetery in Novaliches the other week. I met him in the Sixties when I started my publishing house. I published his dissertation, The Propaganda Movement, and other articles in my journal, Solidarity. I told him then that he was going to be in the Philippines for life and since his major academic interest was Philippine history, he may just as well become a Filipino citizen. So one morning in the Seventies, bright and early, he came to the bookshop beaming and told me he had just gotten his citizenship. We celebrated it with coffee and ensaymada at the nearby Za’s Café.

As a writer, I am often confounded by questions on history, which, with my limited knowledge, I cannot answer. He was an excellent source of historical data. Once, I wanted to find out if Filipinos were using pencils at the turn of the 19th century. The encyclopedias didn’t have that information. He called me up happily one afternoon to say that a 19th-century document he was studying had notations in pencil.

In one of my conversations with him, he was worried about how little interest Filipinos have in our own history and so few students are enrolled now at the Ateneo where he taught the subject but in all the universities in the country. So many aspects of our past have yet to be recorded so our memory can be strengthened — and with it, a powerful sense of nation without which we cannot develop.

I have often wondered about friendships between men, between opposite sexes, what makes them last.

At a recent meeting at the Ortigas library in Mandaluyong, the eminent historian Glenn May talked about the late Ateneo professor Frank Lynch and his SIR (smooth interpersonal relationship) as the core value among Filipinos in their relationship with one another. Of course, there is always an element of truth in this observation, but if we analyze human relationships, almost always they are based on power. Except, of course, in the relationships of friends.

At one writer’s meeting, I said that the late Nick Joaquin was very loyal to his friends; he defended them whenever they were criticized. I noted, however, that some of his friends were not all that loyal to him.

Loyalty  —  that is the true measure of friendship.

Every so often, I eavesdrop on the conversation of people in restaurants, in public places. At one such instance, at a restaurant in Makati, my wife and I overheard an earnest young man at the next table telling his date that he was very careful about his choice of friends — that he made sure he could get something from them.

I bring to mind two friends from way back from whom I got nothing but the warmth of their friendship. In college one wanted very much to be a poet. He could memorize soliloquies from Shakespeare, and of course, he memorized Mi Ultimo Adios in Spanish for he spoke the language.  Benny — that was his name — was a bit of an eccentric though; he always carried in his hip pocket a wad of clippings of his poetry. Being poor, he often went around in rubber slippers. I knew he was often hungry so every time he visited, I saw to it that he had a good meal.

The other friend was Chinese; he had fallen into desperate times. We often talked about literature and Chinese culture; and once, I spotted him at the Escolta, unkempt and apparently hungry. Again, we had a long talk on the sidewalk, unmindful of the people who often paused to stare at us, and continued the conversation in McDonald’s.

That Barbra Streisand song about people needing people  —  it resonates all through time. I remember very well when the foreign service officer Manuel Collantes was in the freezer during the Macapagal presidency in the Sixties. I never asked him the reason. President Macapagal did not fire him so almost every day, he was by himself at the Manila Overseas Press Club on Roxas Boulevard seemingly forlorn and abandoned. I often sat with him, and listened to his stories about diplomats and diplomacy. When Marcos declared martial law in 1972, he became foreign secretary.

I was not allowed to travel for four years since the beginning of the dictatorship. In the fourth year, after vain efforts to get my passport back, I decided to approach him. He literally bawled me out when I told him my problem. He said, “You know I am here, you should have approached me four years ago!” And that was how I got my passport back, and also learned from him it was an old friend — a brother almost — who put me on the black list!

When she was in Malacañang, I wanted very much to tell then President Gloria Arroyo my story about her father because it is very instructive of how nasty we Filipinos can be. In 1965, newly elected President Marcos organized the summit that brought leaders allied with the United States to Manila. The purpose was to show support to President Johnson in the Vietnam war effort. Imelda organized the usual lavish barrio fiesta for the visiting heads of state. I was then writing for the Economist and I attended it. I noticed at once President Macapagal — he was there by himself, an ex-president without power ignored by everyone. All were crowding around President Johnson, Marcos, Imelda and the visiting heads of state. I spent almost the whole evening with him, keeping him company. He must have remembered, for afterwards, particularly during the martial law years, he would come to the bookshop and talk about the good old days.

Those repressive years were truly instructive. People found who their true friends were. As one who was very powerful in journalism told me after his paper was closed, “Now, I know who my friends are.”

When I finally got my passport, off I went to the United States primarily to look for a job. In Washington, the first person I got in touch with was Raul Manglapus, another old friend. When I couldn’t afford one, I knew him well enough to borrow his topcoat when I went abroad for conferences. He was very glad to see me. He said I was one of the very few friends who had enough courage to see him. He said many personal friends went to Washington but they did not even call. He understood — they were all afraid that he might jeopardize their comfy positions in the Philippines when they returned for Marcos was monitoring all his opponents in the United States.

During those martial law years, I kept away from some of my old friends who were ensconced in high positions. It was not self-righteousness or a presumed high moral ground that made me do this. I worried that if I met them, I would criticize them. I did not want to do this; I wanted to keep their friendships.

What then is the true measure of friendship?

Shortly after President Quirino was defeated in the polls by Ramon Magsaysay in the 1955 elections, he retired to his house in Novaliches. I visited him there. Mr. Ma Mon Luk, who started that mami chain that bears his name, was there, too. He brought with him a basket of lychees and his traditional siopao.

President Quirino took me aside and said, “Here I recognize my true friends. I am no longer in power, but this man continues to visit me.”

I think that in the East, more than in the West, there is more human bonding. Family ties are closer, maybe because Asian societies are more agrarian than industrial. Agrarian families are tighter, more compact, because the economy demands this closeness, while in highly industrialized societies, human relationships particularly those of the family, are often splintered.

As a consequence, so many westerners develop deep relationships, with their pets, sometimes deeper than with human beings.

This closeness to animals also exits in agrarian societies. An Indian friend — he was Hindu, of course — told me he did not eat beef because of religious sanctions and because he grew up with cows and he regarded them almost like human beings to love and live with.

It is so true, dogs can be more loyal than humans. And they are grateful. Not just dogs — cats, too. And the best story of such gratefulness is epitomized by Androcles who was fed to the lions in ancient Rome. The big cat did not kill Androcles — it was the same cat wounded in the foot by a huge thorn which Androcles had removed!

Can such bonding among individuals be extended to nations? I bring to mind what Theodore Roosevelt said, that America had no permanent friends — it has only permanent interests.

Filipinos have yet to understand this important injunction.

Our truest friends reveal themselves when they or we are in need. We are bonded by loyalty, by gratitude, by loneliness and misery as well.

Martial law is still within living memory to so many of us but in our harried daily life, we have become inured or have forgotten our bitter memories of it. We do not realize what that nefarious regime had done, not just to us individually, but to us as a people, a nation.

The massive political upheaval that Marcos inflicted in this country — martial law — sundered so many harmonious relationships particularly those of the family, the shattered friendships that were never restored again. In those years of impunity, thousands were killed, imprisoned and tortured. These victims — most of them never got their rightful share of justice.

Where each man thinks only of himself or of his family, the institutions of freedom are weakened, if not destroyed. This results in the diminution or even the death of ethical standards and this erosion of morality — we can see so much evidence of it now, not just in the Napoles list, but in the daily murders, in the palpable corruption of the highest officials. All these — they are the end result of martial law. From this moral swamp wherein we are bogged, we cannot rise.

Where then may a person find that true friend he can lean on? He can trust with his life?

Where else but in his own self, when he becomes his own best friend, but only if that man is true to himself, for then, he cannot be false to any man.