The muse of our history

Mute with grief at the death of essayist and historian par excellence Carmen Guerrero Nakpil, I was able to retrieve an essay I wrote about her book, Legends & Adventures.

In an essay of the same title, Nobel Prize winner for Literature Derek Walcott said that the writers of the Caribbean had to forge literature from the ruins that was their colonial history. Only through this would their texts be called muses – lodestar and light for readers across the ages. Legends & Adventures  by Carmen Guerrero Nakpil was written in the same vein.

This is the second part in her much-awaited trilogy of memoirs. The first – Myself, Elsewhere – which I thoroughly enjoyed, shot up on the bestsellers’ list of National Bookstore and was lionized by reviewers and critics. It also won the National Book Award for the Essay from the Manila Critics Circle, of which I am voting member. Legends and Adventures has an Andy Warhol-like series of the young war widow – seven photos with the colors of the rainbow, to correspond to the seven incarnations she has had since that awful war that killed her young husband and decimated their resources.

It begins this way. “In the same, arcane castellano we’d spoken at home in old Ermita before the war, and in her gentlest tone, my mother delivered the latest communiqué from Pappy: “Your father wants me to tell you that you have been drinking too much and coming home much too late.” The 23-year-old Carmen Guerrero did not faint and shrink in the shadows after the war, the way many of the war widows did, sinking in the swamp of their sadness over their fates.

Mustering her trademark bravery and wit, she worked as a proofreader in a newspaper, wearing nondescript clothes, then became a reporter and columnist who read the galleys, ate in cheap joints, and went home only after the paper had been put to bed. So in the sexist, macho newsrooms sailed Carmen Guerrero of the illustrious Ermita clan. She covered the police beat and interviewed criminals and joined raids on vice dens.

Later, she was offered a job at the Philippines Herald. One day she was assigned to do a series on “the ten neediest cases” identified by the Social Welfare Department – leper parents nursing their children in squalor, bloodstained TB patients, infants with swollen heads that battered her “into speechlessness and near-tears at every interview. Nothing in my experience, not even the horrors of war, prepared me for this. . . “

Our writer surmised that her brilliant editor, Joe Lansang, must have assigned her to do this, “to fill serious gaps in my education, for I began to develop distaste for luxuries, extravagant partying and the mindless self-indulgence of the other half of the Manila community. My reports turned into Chekhovian stories of the stark ironies in society and a social scheme that tolerated such misery among its weakest members. . . .”

After that she began writing her now-famous essays on history for The Philippines Quarterly, one of which, “The Filipino Woman,” was plagiarized by an American writer wholesale. She sued him and, as Tita Chitang said, he had the good sense to die before the hearing on the case started. The essay caused such a firestorm because, based on pre-Hispanic eyewitness reports, she wrote that, in essence, that the Filipino women were “pagan, pleasure-loving hedonists.”

Carmen Guerrero Nakpil is a cosmopolitan and Westernized woman who could make any racist Westerner wither with shame because, “you needed to become Westernized to resent colonialism.” Once, on a British Council gathering, she ordered sherry as an aperitif for lunch and a Fleet Street type sniffed at her: “Oh, and where did you learn to drink sherry?”

Thus provoked, she replied sweetly: “You forget that the Philippines was Spanish for 400 years, and that your ‘sherry’ is really Spanish for ‘jerez,’ only you mispronounced it. We drink sherry in Manila as a matter of course.’”

Why did she work for the Marcoses as director of the Technology and Resource Center? Simple. It was in exchange for the freedom of her daughter Gemma and her husband Tonypet, then allied with the Left. “At first I saw myself as one of those ancient Greek scholars serving the new Roman dispensation of pelf and power. I eschewed servility and often spoke out of turn, at which Imelda would pause and reprimand me half in jest, ‘There you go again,’ she would say in Tagalog, ‘You’ve always been tagilid.’ It meant contrary, wrong-headed.” Sometimes, Mrs. Marcos would call her ‘pahamak (troublemaker),’ after the journalist she introduced wrote scathingly of the Marcoses.

But despite her closeness to the Marcoses, she was one of the few who never made money. “I still live on the same piece of land my father gave me, in the house built by my husband, who owns a Benz and pays for my groceries, and I buy clothes from the New Yorker or Slim’s whom I’ve patronized for decades. In my first government post at the National Historical Commission, I donated my salary to the government; in my second, at the Technology Resource Center, it was bolstered by representation expenses which were duly accounted for with receipts. On the side, I worked at my weekly history columns which were syndicated by government-run newspapers for a small paycheck.”

She flew economy, roomed with fellow officers at low-end hotels, and had no logging concessions or other high-paying government directorship. Neither did she get a pile of diamonds or a Swiss bank account. The day of Ninoy Aquino’s funeral there were one million people on the streets. Imelda called people up, but the rest of the world had abandoned her: only Tita Chitang came.

“I asked her whether she and the President had watched Ninoy’s funeral on TV, and she said, yes, they’d done so, together, in his bedroom. And that they’d been crushed, struck dumb by the enormity of what they were seeing on the video screen. She added that they had felt overwhelmingly humiliated because they had little inkling of the public mood, and that Marcos had said, ‘So, after all these years, all our efforts, our trying and striving, it has come to this?”

And then the trademark Carmen Guerrero Nakpil moment comes: “I was aghast. Had their isolation misled them so completely that they never even suspected people hated them with such unnerving passion? They simply could not plumb the depths of the people’s rage, could not accept the evidence of their wrath. How was it, I asked myself, that they did not know?”

This book is a ringside view of Philippine history in the last 50 years with intimate close-ups of, as they say, its major movers and shakers. Carmen Guerrero Nakpil did not only write of history. She had become the muse of our history.

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