Messages from apparitions

In this ultra-sophisticated, high-tech, information-driven world of ours, we are often told that things are never that simple, that there is an innate complexity in how things are organized, or resolved. Even in human relationships, what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s acceptable and what isn’t, are often difficult to discern in that maze of moral ambiguity which always confronts us when we sort out ethical issues.

I suppose this merely reflects reality. Think of any problem: In politics, for example, the puzzle of whether Gloria should go, or whether she’s the best we’ve got at the moment, can occupy skilled debaters for hours, and you still wouldn’t reach an agreement on anything.

In religious matters, I’ve known extremely articulate people who’ve nearly come to blows when discussing, say, the government’s population policy. At the end of a rather exhausting encounter, they wind up convincing nobody. The contending sides often dig deeper into the trenches of points of view with which they began in the first place.

In business, all you have to do is sit through kilometric discourses on, for example, the blessings or the curse of globalization. If you don’t come out of those sessions with a severe headache, you have my undying admiration, because I do.

But all this, we’re told, is what democracy, the free marketplace of ideas, is all about. I have stopped disputing this notion. I’ve resigned myself to the reality that in this new millennium, ambiguity and uncertainty, like blinding change, are facts of life.

I suppose it’s this yearning for more reassuring times, when black was black and white was white, when good always triumphed over evil, when the path to personal and national salvation was crystal clear, that makes us appreciate novels like Cesar S. Tiangco’s Message of the Apparition.

You’ve probably never heard of Cesar Tiangco. Neither did I, until my law school classmate and fraternity brother, Press Secretary and Presidential Spokesman Toting Bunye, told me about him.

It turns out that Mr. Tiangco was the founding principal of the Muntinlupa National High School in 1945, and served in that capacity for over 30 years. Grateful graduates like Toting call him an "imposing figure," an "extraordinary individual" who was "most respected and admired" by all those whose lives he touched. Mr. Tiangco passed away last year at the ripe old age of 91.

Many of us remember particularly influential teachers like Mr. Tiangco. These are uncommonly dedicated men and women who have foresworn all prospect of professional prominence and financial gain, and spent entire lives educating young men and women. They could indisputably carve out lucrative and highly visible careers for themselves. But many prefer to toil in relative obscurity, totally happy in the thought they are, precisely, in the one place that they are meant to be.

I and many Ateneans remember our first year high school teacher, Mr. Onofre Pagsanghan, who today, at or about 80, still teaches high school freshmen. He remains an enduring and beloved presence in all our lives. Alumni and alumnae of other schools will, I am sure, have their own icons, teachers who opened our eyes to the wonders, not only of literature or other subjects, but of the vast world in which we live.

One thing which strikes us about these great educators is that they always had a clear view of what was good and what was true. Even if our later lives persuaded us to consider more complicated factors, in the end things are really fundamentally simple. You know what you want to be, and what you don’t want to be. You know what’s good in you and in other people, beyond the advertising and public relations. You know that despite the cacophony, the right thing to do always beckons to you, but makes clear that, ultimately, you choose your own path…and live with it.

The reason I’m saying all this is that Mr. Tiangco’s novel essentially does not quibble with itself on moral issues. He’s a great storyteller, even if, candidly, his prose does not flow as smoothly or elegantly as my favorite Filipino author in English, the National Artist Frankie Sionil-Jose.

But I’m nitpicking. There is absolutely nothing wrong, in my view, with Mr. Tiangco’s style or syntax. It’s simply that I really think he deserves to be ranked with the best of our writers and, in that august company, the standards are extremely high.

But as I said, Mr. Tiangco’s greatest skill is as a storyteller. The characters he sketches in his comparatively slim volume are all familiar: the morally conflicted parish priest, those ladies of the local Catholic Women’s Organization, the corrupt Mayor, the crusading owner of a local tabloid, the crooked and slimy local cop, the overqualified mail carrier, the crippled boy who begs in the churchyard, the 5-6 operator, the jueteng collector, the "crazy" rape victim, the men and women who fall prey to life’s vicissitudes and, despite themselves, make the wrong moral choices.

The lives of these and other actors remind us that, indeed, there are people like that around. But they, and we, are all capable of change. Most of us change deliberately by choice, others because of what God wills for them.

I will not spoil your experience of the book by telling you how it ends. You should read it and draw your own conclusions. The "message" suggested in the novel’s title may, I think, be different for each reader. For me it was a message, first of hope – that whatever trials (or favors) life deals us, no matter how encrusted and atrophied we might have become, we can still change for the better.

It was also the message of faith, that when things get too difficult to comprehend, we ought to turn to faith, in almost childlike submission. In doing so, we might see that faith is where the answers were all the time. Some may find the denouement of this story too simplistic, almost a deus ex machina. I did not. I found it logical and, in this day and age, far too rare.

I’d like to think that the novel of Principal Tiangco reflects what he truly believed in life. His novel was dedicated to his late wife Amanda, his "devoutly religious and faithful companion" and "God’s gift" to him for "more than fifty happy though trying years." This work, it seems to me, represents his own perception of the "message" which his deeply-held faith conveyed to him.

Would that all of us had lives so sure of purpose and so firm of conviction that Principal Cesar S. Tiangco was blessed with.