SHOES OF THE TRAVELER

By Mauro Gia Samonte

BOOK FIVE

 A TALE OF TWO DESTINIES

CHAPTER I

THE DAWNING  of the Age of Aquarius begun in the latter half of the sixties in the United States was getting caught on by the Philippine youth at the advent of the seventies.. Girls in early teens had learned to let go of their petticoats in exchange for pedal pushers in which they walked with boys in a unisex drive for social relevance. Attires didn’t matter anymore in distinguishing between the sexes as it became a fad for young people to sit on sidewalks, school grounds and public parks discussing imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism. Jose Maria Sison had initially tackled these issues in a mimeographed, bookbound manuscript that carried the title “Struggle for National Democracy”. These were the same issues that already in 1966 a guy named Clemente was discussing to Maurito quite discreetly. Clemente was taking up political science at the Lyceum, close to MIT in Intramuros.  In his own drive for relevance, Maurito just found himself in the company of Clemente and a few aspiring intellectuals who in sessions at Fort Santiago would show off their exposure to high thoughts: “What now, Aristotle or St. Augustine?” “Machiavelli,” Maurito would have retorted, but Clemente whispered to him “Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought”, at which Maurito stared. Clemente offered to take him to Jose Maria Sison whom he said was forming the Kabataang Makabayan. But with that offer was the last Maurito saw of Clemente.

            In 1969, when Maurito moved to Top Magazine as much for better pay as for  more leeway in editorial prerogatives, he joined the fad in the media of publicizing Kumander Dante, chieftain of the just organized New People’s Army, counterpoised against the “fascist” Armed Forces of the Philippines as well as against the “revisionist Lava-Taruc Gang”. In his state of consciousness at the time, these euphemisms did not strike him as carrying deep ideological and political implications. For instance, he did not find reason to ask why the NPA was formed at that precise time? Why need another red army when those composing it were the same elements that had composed the Hukbalahap, the guerilla army organized to resist Japanese invasion of the country in World War II. Maurito didn’t feel like asking, too, why the Communist Party of the Philippines was organized as a re-establishment of the old merger party, Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP)-Partido Sosyalista ng Pilipinas  (PSP), parties that bore the brunt of struggle for the Filipino proletariat and peasantry, from the period of American invasion, all throughout the period of Japanese occupation, and all the way to the fifties when the Huks came close to toppling the Philippine Republic.

All that mattered to Maurito was that in the offing were the answers he had been trying to discover for the many inequities he witnessed in society. At the Top post, Maurito got the prerogative to say what he wanted in whatever field, including politics. In one issue, he devoted his whole column to paying plaudits to Kumander Dante, whom he, like everybody else, didn’t know from Adam. Conjectures were even rife that Dante was a non-person but an acronym: D for (Jose W.) Diokno; A, (Benigno) Aquino; N, Neptali (Gonzales); T,(Lorenzo) Tanada; and E, Eva (Estrada Kalaw), most hardened oppositors to then President Ferdinand E. Marcos.

Reporting for work shortly after the publication of that particular issue of Top Magazine, Maurito found a lady seated at his desk, waiting. She must be in her early twenties, pretty and charming enough for the naughty magazine publisher, Cil Evangelista, to insinuate possible romantic  relations between her and Maurito. Cil, wearing that characteristic mischief in his smile, introduced the lady as Julie Delima. The girl was visibly upset, and even as Maurito was only just beginning to strike up a conversation to know what she came for, she rose, said goodbye, and went just like that. After the 1986 EDSA revolt, that name “Julie Delima” again figured in Ka Mao’s consciousness, the name of the wife of Jose Maria Sison, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) chairman ordered released from incarceration together with NPA chief Bernabe Buyscayno, aka Kumander Dante.

Ka Mao could only deduce that those events taking place far off in time from one another, were pieces of a puzzle that would baffle him at each recollection but which with the unfolding of the identity of Julie Delima would finally fall into place: that as early as the late sixties, efforts were already afoot to recruit him into the revolutionary movement that would gain momentum beginning the first quarter of 1970.

Had Clemente or, later, Julie, not been too timid about revealing to him their intentions those times around, they would not have had a hard time convincing him. It is basic to Marx that social consciousness grows out of social being, and Maurito, who was born poor, was raised poor, got education the hard way of the poor, was surely ripe for gulping into the mainstream of struggle by those taking up the side of the poor in the brewing storm of class conflict.

But, as Ka Mao had set in his own criteria for the development of a story,  that was the way events in his life took place, that was the way his story would have to go.

As the theme from “A Man and A Woman” goes:

“And so we go another season

We close our eyes and find a reason

For we are joined by destiny

And love is stronger far than we”

            Thus, romancing with the revolutionary storm could not yet take off. For one thing, the Aquarian age had only dawned and had not quite shone to bring forth social upheavals. There was no storm yet to romance with.

            At hand was the first destiny he had to go by.

            Nearing thirty, he was still single, and with the increased income from his writing, he began to enjoy little luxuries that made life, or so he thought, worth living up. He could afford drinking now in the beer joints of Ermita which, compared to the cubicles of Fifth Avenue cabarets, were ”class”. And the girls were far more sophisticated, whose charm and allure you could feast on, damn to your heart’s content, in any of the motels that abounded in the area. And with no talk about price at that.

            For the girls just loved his company. His training in insurance and encyclopedia selling had honed him up on speech which with touches of hyperbole proved effective in making friends with bar hostesses. Just making friends, like sharing them a shot of Tequila or two, in-between dancing the cha-cha or rock-n-roll in trim tight-fit, high-waist flesh-colored gabardine pants, purple cowl-collared cotton shirt with fat red horizontal stripes and worn tuck-in, to go with unbuttoned coat of carmine red and, yes, his ubiquitous Swatch in purple, too. When, in their state of intoxication the girls got tired from dancing, they would sit and drop snoring on his groins. What happened after that would be just one more piece of forgettable history.

ERMITA in the late sixties – that is, in the memory of Ka Mao – was a pleasure hub for all kinds of people, be they rich foreign tourists, top business entrepreneurs, government bureaucrats, middle level executives, all sorts of sales agents and brokers,  down to underworld kingpins, street bullies, including proletarians and social scums who would even get  reserved spots in drinking stalls set up in dingy alleys, unattended lots and ruins of  buildings, and  in less conspicuous sections of sidewalks. In these latter categories, for want of appropriate space, whenever a man and a woman felt like ejaculating, they would just seek a dark nook and did it there either on their seats or on their feet.   .

            To the world, when you talk about Manila, you talk about Ermita. Ramon Jacinto sings about Manila, he sings about Ermita. Peque Gallaga films Manila by night, he films Ermita’s nightlife.

             Big world business is transacted in the dining halls of Ermita five-star hotels where international guests enjoy world class accommodations. Foreign exchange is in abundance, as evidenced by money changing shops that in some sections dot the streets literally every inch of the way. Plush restaurants cater to as many tastes as there are foreign embassies in the area, notably the American and Japanese embassies.

            But while there were establishments in Ermita engaging in one kind of legitimate business or another, one outstanding feature of the district is its thriving flesh trade. The entire stretch of Mabini and M.H. del Pilar teemed with clubs and beer joints many of which had girls, mostly adolescents, clad in skimpy bikini gyrating to rock music, caged in glass so that the male passersby did not have to come inside to take a look and make a pick.

            The real classy women, all beauteous and alluring and many of whom priding in this and that college master’s degree, do business inside luxuriously furnished rooms of exclusive clubs, the business consisting of giving you the honor and pleasure from an honest-to-goodness dinner date and while at it engaging you in intellectual conversation about anything that interests you. Though normally the conversation goes with hard liquor, the policy is always – no touch.  If you haven’t got fifty grand for that kind of service, forget about it.

            Why pay fifty thousand pesos for just being dined with and talked to?

            Maurito wouldn’t pay five hundred for that service.  Not that he was in league with that legendary Manila mayor who, as one anecdote went at the time, was said to have wanted to date a lovely New York prostitute who priced her services five thousand dollars, which, the spendthrift that he was, he rejected, bargaining for five hundred, which the American sloth turned down, of course, and so nothing came out of the night, and the following morning while walking down a New York street, the mayor again met the lovely bitch who at seeing his wife beside him smirked, saying, “That’s what you get for five hundred dollars.” In his job, Maurito got to sit with lovely, highly educated  girls gratis et amore – with touch, too, even, at times.

             Now, back to the college master’s degree holder lovelies, surprisingly there were takers of the high price of talking.

            What’s fifty thousand anyway for congressmen and senators? They have pork barrels  from which to draw funds a lot more than that. Or for local government executives and military generals who regularly received protection money from jueteng operators and dope syndicates.

            Meantime on the sidewalks and in dark alleys, girls not yet into their teens flaunt their nascent scents to foreign pedophiles.

            Maurito had not stopped grieving at sight of those young prostitutes – prostitutes, because those little darlings, as if in a show of supreme irony, knew exactly what they were doing.  It was in their system, a way of life, just the way Maurito took it now, one of those things, part and parcel of a decaying society –  something he just had to stomach, because, from the way he saw it, irremediable.

            It was inevitable that Maurito became a habitué of Ermita. Notoriously known as the “red light district”, the area also abounded in art studios, shops and galleries, where artists held exhibits for their work. He was living what, because of sheer overuse by writers of the phrase, had become a cliché: search for meaning and identity.

            It was a paradox, Maurito would deeply ponder the phenomenon: art and prostitution in a single venue. How can something beautiful like art exist side by side with something ugly like prostitution?

            In his later studies of dialectics, from its conception by philosophers of the Aristotlean age, down to its refinement almost to perfection by Hegel, then to its materialistic modification by  Marx and Engels, and finally to its social application by Lenin, Ka Mao would learn that this is just what life is. In his book On Contradiction, Mao Zedong has a succinct way of explaining the principle: “identity of opposites,” meaning two opposing aspects coming together to form the entity of a thing, the identity  being that each aspect is the condition for the existence of the other. Stated, therefore, in the case of Ermita, art is the condition for the existence of prostitution just as prostitution is the condition for the existence of art. And judging from the numerous hacks and pseudo artists who had converted the district into their haven, what Aristotle and his descendants down to the current century had preached as a world outlook in the ideal, had become a grim reality.

SO NOW Maurito found himself immersing in the contradiction of Ermita. He seriously believed he had got art in him and he needed company to let it flower. Moreover, the artists of Ermita had the penchant for spending hours engaging in intellectual discussions, about aesthetics, philosophy and political thoughts, which Maurito found helpful in crystallizing and systematizing his own ideas.

            As the guys vented their energy on dissertations, Maurito stayed on the sidelines, just listening. That’s how he always was, a no show-off in matters of the intellect, one who did not have the knack for bravura in debates. He did have occasions to engage in some grandstanding as a declaimer in the elementary grades, but always that was a show, not a way of life. So in those moments with Ermita artists, writers and pseudo intellectuals, he was contented just listening.

             As Ka Loren would say, “Less talk, less mistake.” So conversely, the more you listen, the more you learn. Ka Mao did come to realize this when he was finally deep into the national democratic movement. In a DG, the political officer advised: “Give first place to the other fellow’s idea.” That, by way of illustrating proletarian selflessness, the apex of quality expected of cadres of the Communist Party of the Philippines.

            Maurito’s regular hangout was the working area of Aro, an ink artist who created his  figures by impressing them as dots on a white cardboard – actually antedating what today is known as pixels of digital images. With that technique, Aro did his numerous contributions to what was in vogue among artists calling themselves relevant, the propaganda against American imperialism.

            Aro hardly spoke. You read his mind through the images that painstakingly took form as dots accumulated on the cardboard, impressed there with a pen point moved by his hand with the precision of a woodpecker’s bill puncturing a tree trunk. It would take 24 hours on the average for Aro to fill the whole cardboard with what initially would look like nothing but dots. What’s that? Maurito would ask. And as though priding in his work not being understood by a simpleton, Aro wouldn’t say a word. At any rate, there was something in his work, some kind of a tri-dimensional nature such that as you belabor your eyes in trying to make something out of the dots, there appears the image of the imperialist eagle here, the American flag there, or Uncle Sam made like Satan on the next cardboard.

            Aro had hair that curled in waves down to his shoulders like Che Guevarra, had moustache like Che Guevarra, and had a face which with its white, Caucasian features was as handsome as Che Guevarra. For all you know, he thought maybe he was Che Guevarra.

            At the same time, those features are those of Christ also, as depicted in art caricatures and in images worshipped by the Catholic church. So for all you know, too, Aro thought maybe he was Christ, too. This last speculation inspired an idea in Maurito. He thought of a theme: “My Christ is not the coward who carried a cross to Calvary but Christ the Comrade who fired away an Armalite from Sierra Madre.”

            Using the Nikon FT that had become his most prized possession, Maurito did a pictorial of Aro in the nude backdropped by the rocks forming the seawall of the reclaimed area of Manila Bay and amidst the squatters’ shanties which at the time was far off from being sold out by Popoy to Amari.

            So Maurito was there that morning firing away with his Nikon when all  of a sudden a very maddened fisherman came charging with his wooden paddle and paddled away at Aro’s hump.

            “Ouch!” cried Aro as Maurito and the pictorial crew beat it quick.

            “Sonnovabitch! We’ve got women here,” growled the fisherman and then swang the paddle again.

            The implement swished past the very tip of Aro’s own implement as he backed away. Aro turned and dashed away. It was a good thing he rushed forward for if he did it backward, the fisherman’s next swing could have crushed the glory of Aro’s manhood. For the paddle landed hard smack on his butt.

            “Ouch!” Aro cried painfully.

            That was the first ever word Maurito heard from Aro. And that gave Maurito an addition to his theme: “My Christ is not the Christ who in bearing the sins of humanity ever cried out ‘Ouch!’”

CHAPTER II

Maurito had by then joined the Makabayan Publishing Corporation, owned by the Araneta family of the Araneta Colieum fame. And his placement in the company sort of widened his circle of friends and acquaintances in the journalistic field. The company was publishing Weekly Nation, considered at par in terms of nationwide exposure to Philippine Free Press and Weekly Graphic, the two other leading magazines at the time. It also published Tagumpay, a weekly  magazine in the vernacular, and Movie Confidential, a monthly magazine which enjoyed influence and respect in the film industry and in entertainment. It was as editorial assistant in the last-named magazine Maurito was hired in the company.

             That was a demotion to be sure, but Movie Confidential was the country’s leading movie magazine. Not only did it pay a lot higher than did his two previous employments but also gave him a higher degree of prestige, which the show business industry looked up to.

            With Danny Holmsen, he was constantly tugging at his coattails, ever just his waiting boy. With Top Magazine he proved himself capable of standing on his own feet in matters of editing a magazine. With the Movie Confidential, he was at the top of show business journalism

            Maurito found himself aspiring now  to be in league with Franklin Cabaluna and Douglas Quijano, the cream of the crop of movie writers along with Ethelwolda Ramos and Ernie Evora Sioco of Weekly Graphic.

            Into 1970, Andy Salao, the Editor of Movie Confidential, had a falling out with the Makabayan Publishing Corporation and resigned. It was Andy who had worked out Maurito’s employment in the company and Maurito sympathized with him in that incident. But Andy himself advised Maurito to stay on in his job even as he was leaving.

            How nice of Andy, said Maurito to himself as he watched Andy pack his things up. He remembered that night he visited him at the MCU Hospital, his arms and face bandaged, his legs in plaster cast. Andy had had a car accident together with his wife. Maurito had learned about it and was the first from the movie world to visit him. They had not been that close before, but Andy must have valued that visit so much that right after recuperating from his injuries, he recommended Maurito for the Editorial Assistant post.

            “Once I find another publisher, I’ll put out my own magazine. I’ll take you in,” Andy assured Maurito before leaving.

            Andy’s niceness, wasn’t that what the insurance unit manager had advised Maurito about long ago? “Never mind if you do not make a sale with your prospect. No matter what happens build goodwill.” Surely, nothing but pure goodwill brought him to the attention of Andy and placed him in the Makabayan management higher-up.

            Maurito did not get the editorship of the Movie Confidential as things would ordinarily turn out. It was given to Danny Villanueva, the Editor of the Entertainment Section of the Weekly Nation. Maurito, the human being that he was, felt bad at this and was on the way to resigning, too. But Celso Carunungan, publisher of the company’s magazines for the Araneta family, had the magnanimity of spirit to understand Maurito’s show of trantrums and, like Andy, advised him to stay on. Not long after, the Daily Sun, a tabloid, entered the publication scene, pirating Danny Villanueva for the editorship.

            Thus was Maurito finally got promoted to the post of Editor of Movie Confidential – and of the Entertainment Section of Weekly Nation, too.

            Suddenly the entire entertainment world and glamor society appeared to gravitate around him. Quite a few stars and movie producers vied with one another in wanting to host for him a party for the promotion. It was tempting all right, but Maurito valued self-respect so much that he would never compromise it for a flitting moment of superficial honoring by a world known for utter thanklessness. Where before he had to virtually gate-crash into big-time movie affairs, now he had to be wooed for his presence in those events. By being not beholden to any star or movie outfit, he gained ascendancy over them.

            Maurito thought he got the fullest measure of it that afternoon he proceeded to the office from the Manila Bay pictorial with Aro. He had gestated a theme on Jesus Christ on the way and was excited to put it in writing, for inclusion in Movie Confidential’s next issue.

            A man had arrived at the editorial office long before lunch and had had to bear with more than three hours of waiting to see him for a purpose. The man was a lean fellow with slightly curly hair combed well backward to fully bare his wide forehead, his thin-rimmed spectacles slightly sliding off his nosebridge, revealing chinky eyes that lit up as soon as Maurito walked in through the door.

            Maurito could not have possibly missed those features, the Malayan-looking pseudo-intellectual who used to twit him for his writing which he said only served to enrich the paper industry.

            “Jimmy!” exclaimed Maurito as he hurried to shake hands with the visitor.

            “Good morning… err… afternoon. I’ve been waiting for you since ten.”

            “Oh… Sorry about that. You could have just come back later.”

            “I didn’t want to miss you today. I need your help.”

            “Anytime.”

            “I’m handling the PR of Nepomuceno Productions. “

            Maurito got what Jimmy had come for. And he remembered his oath that time he was struggling to polish on his writing in the travel agency office: “Just you wait, wise guy Jimmy. Just you wait…”

            Now, indeed, Jimmy had waited. And Maurito smiled triumphant.

            Maurito himself interviewed Luis Nepomuceno and gave him a nice splurge on the pages of the Weekly Nation. The question is asked then: Why give something nice for something bad done to him? In the spirit of the Christian returning with bread the stoning given him? For Maurito it smacks of the beauty of dialectics. By granting Jimmy’s wish for a coverage of Nepomuceno, he cast him to the height of humiliation. More than vengeance, it was an act of ascendancy.

             Maurito had long begun asking if it was not the case that by humbling himself, Christ had come to lord it over humanity.

CHAPTER III

THE NEXT TIME Maurito came to visit Aro’s pad, he was no longer there. A lady who had just arrived and was heading to the upper floor informed Maurito that Aro had moved to another place; he could no longer afford the rent of the pad in the building which was rather high. It turned out Aro’s work had all the time been subsidized by the owner of the Aristocrat Restaurant who was some sort of a patroness of art. According to the arrangement, Aro would enjoy the subsidy while he was still at work with his pieces but once the art works were done, the art patroness would have them exhibited at the restaurant for sale to art lovers, and from the sales proceeds she would get reimbursed for her earlier subsidy of the works.

            All that, Maurito learned from the lady, who went on and on with her story even as her husband proceeded to their third floor quarters followed by her daughter who secretly exchanged soft, sweet gazes with Maurito as she stepped up.

            That arrangement with Aristocrat worked well both ways for the patroness and the artist.

            For the patroness, it served to add to the prestige of the restaurant, which the way it was already enjoyed a regular wide clientele from not just Manila but from the suburbs which at the time meant the yet less-developed areas like Quezon City, Pasig, Caloocan, Pasay, Mandaluyong and Paranaque.  Danny Holmsen himself, with Maurito and the rest of his regular entourage in tow, would go to the place after work just to have a bowl of that delectable dinuguan, beef cubes cooked in its blood, taken with rice cake called puto, which is the most popular among the dishes served by the restaurant, a popularity matched only by its other signature dish, chicken barbecue served with fried rice and taken with an exotic appetizer called atchara, a concoction of shredded papaya, carrot, ginger and bell pepper preserved in vinegar mixed with just the right amount of sugar. From those two dishes alone, Aristocrat was said to be earning a windfall and you could see it from the way the eatery had been expanding over the years and was counting.

            For the artist, it gave him the imprimatur of high-breed Ermita art, simply stated, high price of his work. So that though the earlier subsidy for his work would be deducted from the sales in the exhibit for reimbursement to the patroness, what would remain would be comfortable enough for the artist to work on his own thereafter.

            For Aro, whose works didn’t sell, he got no proceeds for working with on his own, nor would he again get support from the art patroness. So he had to move to a cheaper place, which the lady who told Maurito all this story didn’t know, and so could not say where Maurito could trace Aro any further, bnt since Maurito was there, he could proceed to her upper floor quarters and join the family for dinner.

            The lady was an entrepreneur who owned the “Steak House” that occupied the front section of the second floor of the building. “Steak House” was a misnomer. The establishment didn’t serve steak; it served beer, brandy, whisky, gin, and other such hard liquor. It was not for dining but for smooching and groping by mostly Japanese customers with hostesses called hospitality girls, the ancestors of today’s GROs, for guest relations officers. If the Japanese wanted some higher degree of hospitality, he could repair with the girl to one of the nearby motels.

            There were no Japanese yet as the lady showed Maurito up the steps. The hostesses were either seated at the windows, looking out into the street for signs of any customer approaching, or asleep at a table on a chair with legs propped up on another, or seated in a similar position at another table reading a comics book, or dancing to the boogie tune coming from a record player, or getting this and that treatment at the beauty parlor walled in glass in one section of the second floor toward the back.

            “This is my parlor,” the lady said, indicating the place where two girls in tight mini skirts that bulged with excess flesh were heading to from the steak house.

            “Find me a bar fine tonight, Mommy,” one girl said to the lady. “My boyfriend needs money for his tuition.”

            Maurito knew that term. Whenever a man wanted to take out a hostess for a date, he must pay that fine to the cashier at the bar,  sort of a permit fee; that, on top of whatever amount the hostess and the customer had agreed upon.

            “Japanese don’t want them fat. You slim down.”

            “Tell those bow-legged ones. Fat or thin, it’s the same mouth size up and down.” And the girl wiggled out her tongue at Maurito as she and her companion stepped into the parlor.

            Maurito didn’t mind it. He fixed his stare at another section, similarly walled in glass but with closed door over which was the sign “Lydia’s Photography.” The lady went on up the stairs toward the third floor, pushing on Maurito’s back to make him step ahead.

            “That’s my studio. It’s my name there, Lydia. Not operating anymore. Found out my photographer cheating. He took pictures with my camera, processed them in my dark room, but pocketed all the money. I see you are a photographer.”

            Maurito had his ubiquitous Nikon FT slung on his shoulder..

            “I take many of the pictures I use in my magazine. I love photography.”

            “Oh, yes, the wife of Aro told me you are editor of… what’s that?”

            “Movie Confidential.”

            “Ah, confidential. The secrets of movie stars. Hey, is it true about Vilma in the toilet of Channel 5?”

            “I wasn’t there.”

            “They say Dovie has gonorrhea that’s why Macoy got it. So Rosemarie must have gotten it also.”

            This lady must have been reading Franklin Cabaluna, said Maurito to himself.

            They reached the third floor living quarters. To the street side was a room, its door closed. To the back was a kitchen where the male companion of the lady was heating food  on an electric stove; a couple of dishes had already been set on the small dining table in a section adjoining the stairwell. Between the kitchen and the room  was a space furnished with upholstered sala set and a hodge-podge of decorative trimmings that –  like the interior plants in Chinese pots that immediately greeted your eyes at the stairs landing and the twin divider between the sala and the kitchen/dining area carrying Japanese characters and figures on black, glossy field, and the beads of seashells strung on cotton strings and hung in that corner where the sala adjoined the room, and swayed at touch of air blown by the electric fan standing beside one chair of the sala set – didn’t indicate a taste for interior design.

            The lady called to the man in the kitchen as she and Maurito stepped into the sala.

            “Timmy, this is…What’s your name again?”

            “Mauro Gia Samonte.”

            “Mauro. He is the editor of what magazine is that?”

            “Movie Confidential.”

            “Yes, Movie Confidential. You know, that magazine that publishes stories about Vilma Santos, Dovie Beams, Rosemarie Sonora, Carmen Soriano, President Marcos…”

             “How are you, Mauro,” said the man, cutting the lady short.

            “Fine, thank you.”

            “He is your Mang Timmy, my better half.”

            “How do you do, Mang Timmy?”

            “Okay…”

            “Mauro is having dinner with us.”

            “Sit awhile,” said the man, pouring a preparation of soy sauce and lemon juice into the pan he was frying pork in.

            The man cooked nice, said Maurito to himself as he subtly breathed in the aroma from the kitchen.

            “Surely you can find space in your magazine for fashion models?” said the lady.

            “Why not?”

            There was a sudden glint in the lady’s eyes. She gently pushed Maurito to the sofa.

            “Sit down;” said the lady, then turned for the room. “Let me have a minute.”

            “I didn’t get your name.”

            “It’s written in the studio sign. Lydia. Call me Aling Lydia.”

            Maurito didn’t get to say any more word as Aling Lydia  opened the door and by that opened up for his eyes bare legs of a girl in sleep shorts, lying in bed with the upper half of her body hidden. Aling Lydia  kept the door ajar when she proceeded inside the room and went out of view into a corner. Maurito had some feast with his eyes on those young legs, now spread flat on the bed, now crossed, now spread-eagled, now propped up on the feet spread wide, now frontward to Maurito as she lay on her side, now backward to Maurito as she changed side positions.

            Amused, if aroused, Maurito asked himself, Is this a show? Those legs looked okay, though not quite. The girl needed to fill in more flesh on the calves and on the thighs. But what’s noticeable about those limbs was the hair that even from the distance, where Maurito sat, he could see the nice pattern it formed on the fair, smooth skin running from above the ankle up to the thigh and still further up into the sleep shorts where it must be gathering in some nice spongy lump where the thighs joined up.

            What is it about hair such that the mere sight of it on a girl’s skin threw him into instant fantasy, or something, at any rate a sensation that caused his own body hairs to stand to their ends?

            A half decade later, Ka Mao would realize that maybe Pilar Pilapil understood the phenomenon early on. The former beauty queen, Miss Universe Candidate and eventually top movie actress was shooting “Ang Madugong Daigdig ni Salvacion” in Tulay Buhangin, Quezon and day after day on the job, she didn’t feel like taking any caution about hair from in-between her thighs liberally protruding through the hems of her bikini panty. Neither did she bother shaving the hair in her armpits.  In contrast, much farther down time, Rossana Roces had it all shaven off  at the joint of her thighs when she reported for the first day shooting of “Machete II.”

            With Pilar, Maurito would feel something nice, very much like the sensation he felt now as he, with understandable discomfiture, stole stares at those legs of whoever was that lying in bed in the room Aling Lydia had disappeared into. With Rossana, however, he felt like throwing up when she, doing ala Sharon Stone in “Fatal Attraction”,  spread-eagled her thighs to show to Ka Mao her crownless glory. “Oh, no,” said  Ka Mao, like weeping; he thought he saw the inside of a scallop gasping for moisture where it  had been left to  dry in the sand. “I don’t like it that way. Let grow there hair.”

            It would take that long for the aesthetics of hair to crystallize in Maurito. For the time being, it was enough that he traced with his eyes the pattern of those sparsely-spaced tiny strands of black streaming  on immaculate flesh. What thoughts the pattern of hair evoked!  Flow of water in a brook, white cogon flowers swaying with the wind, in the green of the meadow and blue of the sky, homing birds against the setting sun, flames exploding in the bonfire in that boy scout jamboree once upon a time, then suddenly the stream of notes from a thousand violins rasping the night.

            Maurito’s poetic musings abruptly stopped at the appearance of Aling Lydia, rushing back to join him at the sala. She had gotten several photo albums and sitting close to Maurito, she began opening up to him the pages containing beautifully taken photographs of a young teener, posing in various stylish attires in fashion shows and in various pictorial sessions in different settings.

            An incorrigible beauty lover, Maurito immediately turned jelly at sight of the girl even just in her photographs. Lovely, lovely, lovely, he almost sang to himself. Hair cropped short, forming a beautiful bob that framed what appeared to be the face of Audrey Hepburn, complete with that wide, winsome smile, her eyes glinting with girlish youthful exuberance but already hinting at a juvenile yearning for womanly pleasure. She wore that precise tease in her eyes when she fixed a flitting gaze at him as she walked up the stairs a while ago.

            Aling Lydia didn’t realize it, but her presentation of the photographs served to complete the physical exhibition Maurito’s eyes continued to be treated to by the girl in bed in the room whose door Aling Lydia had not bothered to close back.  

            “This is my daughter, Lala,” said Aling Lydia. “She is a fashion model for Nick Libramonte. You know, Nick Libramonte. He has a shop in Blumentritt…”

            “How old is she?”

            “Oh, Nick Libramonte? Thirty perhaps…”

            “No, your daughter.”

            “A, Lala,” said Aling Lydia, laughing as she slapped Maurito on the shoulder. “She is fourteen.”

            Maurito gaped somewhat. “She looks sixteen or seventeen.”

            “You saw her arriving with us. She’s a big girl.”

            “Okay. How tall is she?”

            “How tall? Er…” Aling Lydia groped for the answer. “She must be… Let me see…”

            The girl in the room leapt off the bed, having overheard the question, and making like doing a fashion walk, she sashayed to the sala, the book she had been reading staying in her hand.

            “Five seven,” she said, gazing at Maurito with that very subtle girlish flirt in her eyes.

            “My… I’m only five four,” said Maurito, glancing her over from head to toe and back up to the half-exposed midriff between the sleep shorts and the blouse of the outfit. He was finding some hard time not betraying his sensual affectation by the girl.

            Mang Timmy had finished setting supper at the dining table.

            “Hey, you people. Continue your talk here,” he said as he took a seat and began eating.

            The three join Mang Timmy at the dining table. Maurito sat at the chair pulled for him by Aling Lydia at the head of the table. She took the seat next to Maurito at the side and beside her sat Lala.

            Aling Lydia served food into Maurito’s plate.

            “Here, taste your Mang Timmy’s steak. This is the kind that we serve in the steak house.”

            Mang Timmy offered to Maurito the stuff he had specially prepared in a saucer.

            “I made mashed potato in case you want to take it with the steak.”

            “Thank you,” said Maurito as he scooped with his spoon a piece of the mashed potato.  “I’ll take some. Though I’m always partial to rice even with steak. With any viand for that matter.”

            All the while, Maurito stole glances at Lala, who returned them with same stolen, flitting gazes that betrayed her own sensual affectation by him.

            As Maurito caught Aling Lydia noticing the gazes between him and Lala, he made good at it by speaking to her.

            “You go to school?”

            “Laco.”

            “La Concordia,” butted in Aling Lydia.

            “Yes, Laco. What year?”

            “Second year,” said Aling Lydia, beating Lala to the answer.

            “You talk to Mommy,” said Lala.

            Turning to Aling Lydia, Maurito said,  “You’re in second year?”

            Aling Lydia, just at that moment feeding food into her mouth, gawked.

            “No, Lala, stupid,” she hardly put the words out through her mouth.

           

             Mang Timmy laughed. The rest laughed with him.

            “You got sense of humor,” Aling Lydia said, continuing to have difficulty with her words.

            “Mommy, don’t talk when you’re mouth is full,” admonished Lala.

            That triggered a recollection in Maurito which made him laugh heartily.

            “What’s funny?” asked Lala.

            “There were these newly weds on a honeymoon. That night the bride’s mother tiptoed to the honeymoon suite to eavesdrop on what bliss the couple could be having. But it was all quiet and the mother thought of calling, “Darling  daughter, are you okay?” No answer came. At breakfast, the mother asked why no answer came when she called the night before. And the daughter said, “Didn’t you say, Mom…?”

            Mang Timmy picked it up from there, “Don’t talk when your mouth is full.”

            The two men got a good laugh.

            “Mom, what’s funny?” asked Lala.

            Aling Lydia ignored the question. She rather chided Mang Timmy, “Stop it, will you?”

            She turned to Maurito, “How much will it take to have my daughter featured in your magazine?”

            Maurito was taken aback at the question. He stared at Aling Lydia, like asking, “Are you daring me?”

            Aling Lydia repeated the question, “How much?”

            Maurito shifted his eyes to Lala. She felt strange at the sudden gentle seriousness with which he gazed at her.

            “Don’t be shy. Say it. How much?” insisted Aling Lydia.  

            “For love,” Maurito said abruptly, without taking her eyes off Lala.

            There was a pleasant twinkle in Lala’s eyes. She loved those words. They made her feel warm, a warmth she had not felt before.

            Aling Lydia could just stare, tongue-tied.

CHAPTER IV

LAGUNA DE BAY opened up a pretty panorama in Maurito’s  eyes as he leaned on the side of the motorized outrigger cutting across the fabled lake. It was a clear day and the sky was a lovely field of endless blue where abounded cottons of white that were the clouds. To the east lay the mighty Sierra Madre mountain range which despite outcries of deforestation caused by illegal logging continued to bask in the green of its foliage. What barren brown patches of earth there were appeared just little dots from where Maurito was viewing the scenes around. The much bigger dots were the several islets in the lake peopled by farmers and fisherfolks whom he could see busily working the fields with their plows and carabaos, those in the water throwing fishing lines from aboard their tiny canoes, and those by the shores casting nets. A few enterprising fishermen were beginning to set up fishing pens – this last livelihood idea to be seized upon by big capitalists decades afterward in their shameless conversion of the lake into their private fishpond.

            For the moment, that social concern was far-fetched in Maurito’s mind. Occupying his thoughts were recollections of episodes in Noli Me Tangere depicting the romance of Dr. Jose Rizal and his cousin Leonora Rivera in this same lake. Maurito just felt himself getting romantic touches which he wondered if Leonora Rivera had not herself done to Rizal.

            Beside Maurito was Lala, making like engaging him in an innocent talk about the scenery but increasingly pressing close so as to make the liaison pleasantly physical. Her hand was groping the top of the boat siding on which Maurito’s groin was pressing. And the bobbing of the boat caused a tossing of his torso to and fro such that his groin in effect rubbed gently on Lala’s hand. What exquisite sensation the two were getting, only they knew, conveyed by the way they gazed at each other with glassy eyes.

            Aling Lydia was among the other boat passengers reclined in folding chairs; Mang Timmy was asleep beside her. Though she was awake, she busied herself accounting for her finances: checking receipts and money lists, counting cash in her bag. She glanced at the two. They did appear to be enjoying the sights.

            Lala was acting pretty well, excitedly pointing with her left hand the biggest one among the lake islets.

            “Look, there’s Talim Island.”

            But Maurito was moaning, cussing to himself, “Dammit… dammit…”

            Lala’s hand was groping harder on the boat siding accordingly as the vessel swayed from side to side, making like keeping her balance in the boat motion. In effect, the hand pressed harder and harder on Maurito’s groin.

            “That’s where we’re going. The family’s got a farm there.”

            And then at a particularly strong swaying of the boat, Maurito pressed his front hard on the boat siding and kept it pressed there.

            “Dammit!” he grunted, but keeping his voice low for only Lala to hear.

            Lala looked to Maurito, who gave her a gaze that conveyed a feeling all at once blissful, satisfied and relaxing.

            She gently giggled. She removed her hand from under the pressing by Maurito’s groins and with her ubiquituous handkerchief blotted the wetness on the back of it..

            Maurito stole a glance at his front. A wet spot was very visible on that section of his pants a little below his groins. Taking care not to make his next move obvious, he slowly pulled out his shirt, untucking it from his pants so as to cover its front.

            Lala neatly folded her handkerchief.

            “Throw it away. I’ll buy you a new one,” Maurito whispered to her.

            “No,” Lala said with a look of protest. “I’m keeping it.”

            “Keep it… why?”

            She let out that dainty, girlish smile of hers, then said, “Souvenir.”

            Initially after that mischief, Maurito swelled with a guilt feeling. No matter how he looked at it, he took advantage of a young adolescent girl’s innocent search for the meanings sought by her flesh. The predicament Maurito found himself in with Lala was precisely the same predicament the hero in his short story “Forests of the Heart” had toward his adolescent cousin. But while the short story hero had regained balance of mind and held back on his lusty intentions toward the girl of his desire,  in this case of Maurito and Lala, he completely gave in to his lust. Had he defiled her then? The anquish crossed his mind even as his muscles quivered in those last jerks of ejaculation.

            But now… How sweet of Lala to have said that word. People don’t keep bad things for souvenirs, Maurito felt himself assured. What he did must be good for her to want to keep it forever. And her smile assured him as well that she liked it, too. What transpired, then, was a mutual giving and taking resulting in mutual bliss. No need to feel guilty about that.

            On the contrary, it encouraged Maurito to persevere in his pursuit of Lala.

            In a pictorial session conducted beside an idyllic brook that flowed down trees-covered slope on Talim Island, Maurito appeared exceedingly inspired, endlessly whispering “You’re beautiful… beautiful…” each time he came close to position her for a pose. Each time he drew his mouth so close to hers he could almost gobble her up in a kiss. And she could have just let him but that Aling Lydia and other girls in waiting were around observing.

           

            After the photo sessions, Lala relaxed with her mom on a bench in the yard of their lakeside house. They talked about things while observing folks bathing naked in the water near the shore. On the horizon, the sun was setting. And then they stirred as an old man suddenly stood up to scrub his body, revealing the full glory, or what remained of it anyhow, of his manhood.

            Lala turned to Maurito who was busy doing something behind her.  She gestured him to the naked ancient bather.

            “Oh…,” said Maurito with a slight gasp.

            “On this island,” said Aling Lydia, “people have grown accustomed to taking a bath in the lake in the nude.”

            “I can see that…” said Maurito, pointing toward another elderly, a woman, rising from the water, revealing her stark nakedness.

            Aling Lydia looked toward the woman in the lake. Maurito seized the opportunity to drop what he had been working on into Lala’s laps. It was a piece of guava, all right. But the secret way Maurito gave it to Lala made her realize he wanted to hide it from Aling Lydia. So Lala grabbed the green fruit and kept it in her hand.

            At bedtime, Lala took the guava out of her panty and read the nail-carved inscription on its rind : “Mau loves Lala.” Surely she had read it already, but now that she was alone in bed ready to sleep, she thought it nice to read those words again.

            She kissed the fruit, saying, “Love you, too. Make me sleep and make my dreams wet.”

            She giggled, put the guava back into her panty, pressed it tight there by hugging a pillow, clipping it with his thighs,  and then closed her eyes to sleep.

CHAPTER V

AT FOURTEEN, Lala was in that age where any young girl experiences strange things about her body. Her breasts would seem to tighten around her chest while her groins contracted so hard she had to keep her thighs apart or it seemed they would be welded to each other for good. During the day when her body moved continuously in the the course of his usual acivities in school, she managed to contain the discomfiture caused by the unabated tautening of her breasts and groins. But at nights when she was alone in bed, nothing would distract her mind any longer from the pestering sensation, she had begun succumbing to the temptation of rubbing her hands on her genitals and gripping her breasts. What she did that for, she didn’t know when she began doing it.

            She started getting the idea of what was it all about when a twentyish boy neighbor began setting lusty eyes on her. He secretly sent her letters, which she kept, not necessarily putting much value on them nor understanding completely what the boy was putting in her mind.

            That afternoon while waiting for her fetch at the gate of La Concordia College on Herran Street in Paco, the boy siddled up to her and handed her a thin small pamphlet. Innocently she opened the pamphlet while the boy began stealthily groping her hip. It was a crudely printed bedtime story with some illustrations of couples copulating. In her innocence, Lala just leafed through the pages of the pamphlet, giving the boy the impression that she was liking it. And so he got bolder in his groping on Lala. She didn’t know how to repel his touches. If she made a noise, that would be very embarrassing. Emboldened even more, the boy groped slowly down from her groin to in-between her thighs. Of course, his hands were on top of her skirt, but he was digging his finger deep and was pressing on her very front. That got Lala finally annoyed. She brushed his hand aside.

            Just then, Lala’s car fetch arrived. And she hurried to get inside, taking the back seat. The boy just trailed the car with a mocking smile. He felt confident that he was going to subdue Lala sooner or later.

            Aboard the car, Lala was smarting to herself. The nerve of that guy feeling my… Why would boys love feeling a girl’s front. What’s so nice about it. She felt her thighs, making her hand press deep into her front. She began feeling a hot sensation creeping over her groin. That triggered recollection of that moment aboard the boat to Talim Island, Maurito’s front rubbing on Lala’s hand as he bobbed frontward, backward, sideward accordingly as the boat swayed with the waves.

            Lala seemed to jerk off the recollection as the car came to a sudden stop at the shifting to red of the traffic light at an intersection.

            Busy writing at his desk in the Makabayan editorial office, Maurito was distracted by a calling by the office secretary.

            “Ed Mau, telephone call.”

            Maurito rose to the stand where the secretary put down the phone receiver on the set. He picked up the phone receiver.

            “Hello…”

            “Hello, Maurito,” said Lala on the other end of the line.

            “Oh, yes, Lala.”

            “You always know it’s me.”

            “It’s always nice to hear your voice. Like the gentle sigh of morning… or the breath of evening…”

            “Beautiful. Is that a poem?”

            “No, it’s a song,” Maurito said and sang softly, not wanting to catch attention from the other personnel busy in their respective works. “See the golden smile of moonlight, streaming through a dark night, that’s the smile of my sweet Lala…”

            “Oh,” Lala swooned.

            “Hear the gentle sigh of morning, or the breath of evening, that’s the voice of my sweet Lala…” Maurito stopped singing. He asked, “Like it?”

            “Like it? Love it. You compose nice songs, too.”

            “Very rarely. But for you, the tune comes easily.”

            “And the lyrics… What beautiful words.”

            “Because they’re real. My true feelings for you.”

            “Oh…Wish you wrote them to me. I’d love reading them over and over again. Not like the letters that fresh guy keeps sending me. Just this afternoon at the school gate he gave me another letter. That’s why I called. I wanted to tell it to you.”

            “What letter?” asked Maurito.    

            “Just like the many ones he had been giving me before.”

            “What about?”

            “I don’t know. He says he loves me and asks me to sneak away from Mommy and go out with him on a date. He says he will make me happy.”

            All of a sudden, Maurito raged inside him. His impulse was to think that Lala already had an understanding with that boy.

            “The gall. He must be your boyfriend.”

            “Course not. He is too old for me.”

            “How old is he?”

            “Twenty one.”

            “Ouch! I’m twenty nine,” Maurito said to himself.

            “Why don’t you just junk him?” he suggested.

            “Told him that. I said I cannot have an old guy for my boytfriend.”

            “Ouch!” again cried Maurito to himself. “Stop it, Lala. You’re hurting me really.”

            “But he is so stubborn. He irritates me now. I’ll burn all his letters to me.”

            “You’ve been keeping his letters… And you said he irritates you.”

            “Ok, I’ll burn them.”

            “No. Let me burn them.”

            “Why take the trouble? I can do it myself.”

            “I want to read them first.”

            “Ok. I’ll sleep in the steakhouse tonight. That’s where I keep the letters. I’ll give them to you.”

CHAPTER VI

COMING to the Ermita steakhouse of Aling Lydia had become normal for Maurito. That’s where, in the woman’s defunct photo studio, he had been developing the photographs he took of Lala. That night, the studio was the most natural alibi for Maurito to come and thereby get the letters from Lala.

            As usual, Aling Lydia was making an accounting of her finances at the sala of the third floor living quarters when Maurito arrived.

            “Good evening,” said Maurito.

            “Oh, Maurito. Come in,” said Aling Lydia, quickly keeping in her bag the notepad and papers she was working on. “Have you eaten supper?  Weve got food here.”

            “Please don’t bother,” said Maurito, sitting on the sofa and taking his Nikon FT out of the case. “I came to develop the black-and-white photos I took of Lala at the Cultural Center.”

            “The ones for the Free Press?”

            “No, for our own albums. Those for Free Press are color slides. I had them processed at Kodak.”

            Maurito unwound the last reel of film in the camera.

            “I wish we still got fixer chemicals. I forgot to buy.”

            The door of the room opened, revealing Lala in typical sleepwear.

            “So you’re there,” she spoke to Maurito. “I thought I heard you arrive.”

            “I thought you’ve been asleep,” said Aling Lydia. “You’ve got early classes tomorrow.”

            “I’m not finished with my homework. Help me, Maurito?”

            “He’s got work to do,” said Aling Lydia.

            Lala pulled Maurito into the room.

            “Help me solve a few Math problems,” she said. “I’ve been cracking my skull doing them. You studied engineering so you’ll find them easy.”

            Lala closed the door as soon she and Maurito got inside the room. Aling Lydia suspected something not nice for a moment but instantly dismissed her ugly thoughts.

            Once inside the room, Lala snatched from a drawer a bunch of letters tied with a ribbon.

            “Here are the letters,” she said in a hush.

            Maurito had a hard time trying to squeeze the letters into the pocket of his pants.   Lala saw it. She snatched the letters and inserted them into the front of his pants.

            “Put the letters beside the pen,” she said, giggling cutely.

            Maurito slightly thrust his butt backward.

            “Careful. The ink will spill.”

            They got a cute laugh.

            Aling Lydia gathered her things and put them aside on top of a shelf. She  then headed for downstairs, speaking aloud toward the room.

            “I’ll look for the fixer chemicals. Find them in the darkroom.”

            Lala got a sudden idea. She wrapped Maurito tight in her arms and kissed him hard on the mouth – a kiss too wanton, too passionate it seemed for a fourteen-year-old. It became obvious that she had planned it all: pretend to her mother to have Maurito into the room for him to help her in her Math problems. When she realized her mother was going downstairs thus giving her and Maurito the rare chance to be closeted for a moment of privacy, she let loose of all inhibition.

            How could a man nearing thirty have possibly avoided the opportunity?

            Besides. Maurito wanted it, too. He had not planned this moment specifically but had resolved to himself that once it came, he would seize the opportunity. So now, he  reciprocated Lala’s letting loose of all her adolescent fire with his own release of inhibition.

            Maurito had had this kind of moment with all sorts of sluts countless times before, but in all those moments, happiness went only as far as the quivering of his flesh to get it over with once and for all. There had been no such pleasant fire at all as possessed him now; that fire, neither he nor Lala wanted to end but rather to burn in, melt in, over and over again.

            Sex, Maurito thought in that blissful melting of his flesh, must be the ultimate expression of love. For how else can a man and a woman express their caring, and sharing, and giving and taking for each other but through that primeval act of being one to bring forth a fruit and contribute to the propagation of humankind. They were on the verge of giving in to that act when Aling Lydia climbed back up the stairs, calling out to Maurito.

            “Maurito, the chemicals are complete in the dark room.”

            Maurito and Lala did not seem to be alarmed, continuing to kiss and clinch passionately. Meanwhile Aling Lydia approached the room nearer and nearer.

            Once she reached the door of the room, she threw it open, revealing Maurito seated with Lala at the study table, appearing to be intently doing the Math lessons.

            “Lala, enough of that assignment. Maurito has got work to do. He’ll be late coming home.”

            “He can sleep here,” said Lala excitedly, a gaze of subtle mischief to Maurito.

            Aling Lydia lit up at the idea.

            “Yes, why not. We’ve got a folding bed for you to use.”

            “Yes,” said Lala, hurrying to a corner where she pulled out the folding bed from behind a clothes cabinet. “It’s here.”

            “Let’s get on with the photo developing. I can travel home anytime.”

            Maurito cast a subtle chiding glance at Lala. She giggled to herself.

LIGHTS turned off inside the photo laboratory, throwing the whole place in darkness. From his stint with Danny Holmsen, Maurito had grown adept at the process of black-and-white film developing and printing, but up until now he had not stopped marveling at what he thought was the magic of it all. In the middle of the dark, the enlarger light shone, projecting on the white printing paper a vague, hazy image which through manipulation of the enlarger lens ultimately was focused to be that of Lala, garbed in a girlish playsuit among rocks backdropped by Manila Bay in a sunlit morning.

            A clock with luminous hands stood by the foot of the enlarger to indicate the time of exposure of the printing paper to the projected image, but Maurito actually had no more need for it because such element as duration of exposures had long become part of his system. By mental count, he knew when it was time to turn off the enlarger and immerse the exposed paper in the chemical-filled developing tray and turn on the red printing light to see the picture on the paper getting developed.

            That coming of light from dark, of Lala’s image out of nothing, Maurito had always wondered if that was not itself creation. Of course, he knew it was the chemical coated on one side of the printing paper that enabled the light waves projected through the negative from the enlarger to get impressed there permanently to be made manifest upon contact with the developing chemical. But although realizing this technical element to be the fact of photography, Maurito could not get off the idea that something in that interaction of chemicals made possible the imagery brought about by the interplay of dark and light. That something must neither be in the chemical ingrained in the printing paper nor in the liquid developer, for if it were in either of the two, then the photograph could come into being without need for their interaction.  That something – that power to create the image of a photograph – must already be there, precisely to make the interaction of the two chemicals result in the photograph. In other words, the capacities of the two chemicals to bring a photograph to life had been designed a priori and it is this design that makes a photograph, not the chemicals which serve only as agents of photographic life.

            Maurito realized that his present thoughts were confined only to the stage of developing and printing; there was the initial stage of picture-taking. In this stage, much of the photographic creativity actually takes place: visualization that requires mastery of the elements of  composition and interplay of light and shadow, requiring in turn masterful use of  the technical components of the camera like lenses, aperture and exposure speed. How are all these ramifications taken together, exquisitely integrated to one another in that split-second clicking of the shutter to be captured on film inside the camera – with apparently nothing and no one intervening between the camera and the subject. There must be that a priori something on the operation of the technical components of the camera, on the emulsion side of the film inside it, and in the nature of light waves reflecting each micro-component of the subject so that in one click is achieved the desired image of the photograph.

            This a priori element in photography had baffled Maurito immensely. He had come to the conclusion that it was a problem that defied solution. For he realized that granting it was possible to discover what that primeval something was, still logic would demand that that primeval something necessitated the existence of a more primeval one that must give rise to it, in which event, the question would lead to another, on and on in a ceaseless, infinitesimal number of questions which at any instance would be completely unanswerable.

            Maurito came to the point where he thought it pragmatic to leave the matter of photography simply as it occurred: the subject taken through a shot with the camera, ingrained on the negative inside, which after being developed projected through the enlarger and imprinted on the printing paper.

            With a rubber-tipped tong, Maurito stirred the exposed paper through the chemical in the developing tray, reciting to himself a passage in the Genesis.

            “In the beginning, there was only darkness. And God said, let there be light. And suddenly, voila! There is Lala!”

            Lala’s photograph now appeared clearly in the print paper under the developing chemical.

BEFORE LONG, Lala was filling up nice spaces in the pages of Movie Confidential and Weekly Nation. That photo session on Talim Island was just the first of many photo trips Maurito took Lala on in his obsession to see her shine as a fashion queen. Or even a beauty queen, too, like Sabsy, if it came to that. She was just fourteen and thus had all of three years to fill her body up with flesh in the right places. At five-foot-seven, she already looked majestic, and with the regular training she was getting at the Cora Doloroso Finishing School, she could imbibe queenly bearing in no time at all.

            Meantime his employment by Danny Holmsen had also set him on a prosperous film career.

            Aside from publishing magazines, Danny Holmsen was the house musical director of Sampaguita Pictures, one of the three major film companies in the country, the other two being LVN Pictures and Premier Productions.

            Maurito was always in the entourage of Danny when he recorded film themes with his orchestra at the Sampaguita Pictures sound studio and when he re-recorded the themes on the films for the musical score. Maurito’s gift for keenly observing things made him study the various processes being done in the studio. Without him realizing it, he was actually learning filmmaking.

            On the other hand, a dear friend of Danny, Medy Tarnate, who was constantly in the entourage, was a scriptwriter. In times when she was pressed for time in finishing a script, she would assign the job to Maurito, who needed not much time getting oriented into the mechanics of screenplay writing: when to fade in and out, dissolve to, cut away and cut back, etc.

            When Maurito joined Makabayan Publishing Corporation, he had sufficient grasp of the craft of screenwriting. In 1970,  Dindo Reyes, another movie magazine publisher, produced a movie and asked him to write the script. Titled “Tag-araw,” it starred a completely new female star, a third year high school student of Torres High School, protegee of press phtotographer Eddie Villanueva, who  named her Laarni Luna. Dindo was confident that by pairing the unknown girl with Fred Galang, the movie would click with the film audience.  Fred  had been packaged big in the Luis Nepomuceno Productions movie, “Dahil Sa Isang Bulaklak,” a Charito Solis starrer publicized as a blockbuster.  That packaging didn’t help. “Tag-Araw” was a big flop.

            Dindo had provided the gist of the story and Maurito accepted the scripting job largely for the purpose of having a grab at the craft of screenwriting. That was a  mistake, to think that he could write somebody else’s story.

            Writing is the author’s living out the story of his life. For some reason or another, he changes the names of characters, places, times and situations, but always it is a telling of the author’s own thoughts and feelings, the author’s own dreams and inner longings, of things ugly and beautiful he has done, gone through in his life, the telling of which,  though done in guises,  is  always a telling of the story of his life.

            If this be not true, no author will find reason to write at all.

            For Maurito to write a good movie then, that movie should be a telling of his own life story. And in the making now was the merging of the first with the second of his two destinies at this stage of his life.

CHAPTER VII

THE JANUARY 26 CONFRONTATION

A HIGHLY PERSONAL ACCOUNT

By Pete Lacaba

IT WAS FIVE MINUTES PAST FIVE in the afternoon, by the clock on the Maharnilad tower, when I arrived at Congress. The President was already delivering his State of the Nation message: loudspeakers on both sides of the legislative building relayed the familiar voice and the equally familiar rhetoric to anyone in the streets who cared to listen. In front of the building, massed from end to end of Burgos Drive, spilling over to the parking lot and the grassy sidewalk that forms an embankment above the Muni golf course, were the demonstrators. Few of them cared to listen to the President. They had brought with them microphones and loudspeakers of their own and they lent their ears to people they could see, standing before them, on the raised ground that leads to the steps of the legislative building, around the flagpole, beneath a flag that was at half-mast. There were, according to conservative estimates, at least 20,000 of them, perhaps even 50,000. Beyond the fringes of this huge convocation stood the uniformed policemen, their long rattan sticks swinging like clocks’ pendulums at their sides; with them were the members of the riot squad, wearing crash helmets and carrying wicker shields.

I came on foot from the Luneta, which was as far as my taxi could go, and made straight for the Congress driveway. A cop at the foot of the driveway took one look at my hair and waved me away, pointing to the demonstrators beyond a row of white hurdles. When I pointed to the special press badge pinned to the breast pocket of my leather jacket, he eyed me suspiciously, but finally let me through the cordon sanitaire. The guard at the door of Congress was no less suspicious, on guard against intruders and infiltrators, and along the corridors it seemed that every man in uniform tightened his grip on his carbine as I passed by, and strained his eyes to read the fine print on my press badge.

The doors of the session hall were locked, presumably to prevent late entrances from disturbing the assembly listening to the President’s message. A clutch of photographers who had arrived late milled outside the session hall, talking with some men in barong Tagalog, pleading and demanding to be let in. The men in barong Tagalog shook their heads, smiled ruefully, and shrugged; they had their orders. I decided to go out and have a look at the demonstration.

Among the demonstrators it was possible to feel at ease. None of them carried guns, they didn’t stand on ceremony, and there was no need for the aura of privilege that a press badge automatically confers on its wearer. I took off the badge, pocketed it, and reflected on the pleasurable sensation that comes from being inconspicuous. It seemed awkward, absurd, to strut around with a label on a lapel proclaiming one’s identity, a feeling doubtless shared by cops who were even then surreptitiously removing their name plates. Also, I was curious. No joiner of demonstrations in my antisocial student days, I now wanted to know how it felt like to be in one, not as journalistic observer but as participant, and  I wanted to find out what treatment I could expect from authority in this guise.

I found out soon enough, and the knowledge hurt.

At about half past five, the demo that had been going on for more than four hours was only beginning to warm up. The colegialas in their well-pressed uniforms were wandering off toward the Luneta, munching on pinipig crunches and dying of boredom. Priests and seminarians lingered at one edge of the crowd, probably discussing the epistemology of dissent. Behind the traffic island in the middle of Burgos Drive, in the negligible shade of the pine trees, ice cream and popsicle carts vied for attention with small tables each laden with paper and envelopes, an improvised cardboard mailbox and a sign that urged: Write Your Congressman. In this outer circle of the demo, things were relatively quiet; but in the inner circle, nearer Congress, right below the mikes, the militants were restless, clamorous, chanting their slogans, carrying the streamers that bore the names of their organizations, waving placards (made out of those controversial Japanese-made calendars the administration gave away during the campaign) that pictured the President as Hitler, the

First Couple as Bonnie and Clyde.   

There were two mikes, taped together; and this may sound frivolous, but I think the mikes were the immediate cause of the trouble that ensued. They were in the hands of Edgar Jopson of the National Union of Students of the Philippines, the group that had organized the rally and secured the permit for it. The NUSP dubbed its demonstration “the January 26 Movement”; its chief objective was to demand “a nonpartisan Constitutional Convention in 1971.” Demonstrations, however, are never restricted to members of the organization to which a permit has been issued. They are, according to standard practice, open to all sympathizers who care to join; and to the January 26 Movement the veterans of countless demos sent their representatives. Swelling the numbers of the dissenters were youth organizations like the Kabataang Makabayan, the Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan, the Malayang Pagkakaisa ng Kabataang Pilipino, the Kilusan ng Kabataang Makati; labor groups like the National Association of Trade Unions; peasant associations

like the Malayang Samahang Magsasaka.

Now, at about half past five, Jopson, who was in polo barong and sported a red armband with the inscription “J26M,” announced that the next speaker would be Gary Olivar of the SDK and of the University of the Philippines student council. Scads of demonstration leaders stood with Jopson on that raised ground with the Congress flagpole, but Olivar was at this point not to be seen among them. The mikes passed instead to Roger Arienda, the radio commentator and publisher of Bomba. Arienda may sound impressive to his radio listeners, but in person he acts like a parody of a high-school freshman delivering Mark Anthony’s funeral oration. His bombast, complete with expansive gestures, drew laughter and Bronx cheers from the militants up front, who now started chanting: “We want Gary!  We want Gary!”

  !
Arienda retreated, the chant grew louder, and someone with glasses who looked like a priest took the mikes and in a fruity, flute-thin voice pleaded for sobriety and silence. “We are all in this together,” he fluted. “We are with you. There is no need for shouting. Let us respect each other.” Or words to that effect. By this time, Olivar was visible, standing next to Jopson. It was about a quarter to six.

When Jopson got the mikes back, however, he did not pass them on to Olivar. Once more he announced: “Ang susunod na magsasalita ay si Gary Olivar.” Olivar stretched out his hand, waiting for the mikes, and the crowd resumed its chant; but Jopson after some hesitation now said: “Aawitin natin ang Bayang Magiliw.” Those seated, squatting, or sprawled on the road rose as one man. Jopson sang the first verse of the national anthem, then paused, as if to let the crowd go on from there: instead he went right on singing into the mikes, drowning out the voices of everybody else, pausing every now and then for breath or to change his pitch.

Olivar stood there with a funny expression on his face, his mouth assuming a shape that was not quite a smile, not quite a scowl. Other demonstration leaders started remonstrating with Jopson, gesturing toward the mikes, but he pointedly ignored them. He repeated his instructions to NUSP members, then started acting busy and looking preoccupied, all the while clutching the mikes to his breast. Manifestoes that had earlier been passed from hand to hand now started flying, in crumpled balls or as paper planes, toward the demonstration leaders’ perch. It was at this point that one of the militants grabbed the mikes from Jopson.

Certainly there can be no justification for the action of the militants. The NUSP leaders had every right to pack up and leave, since their permit gave them only up to six o’clock to demonstrate and they had declared their demonstration formally closed; and since it was their organization that had paid for the use of the microphones and loudspeakers, they had every right to keep these instruments ot themselves. Yet, by refusing to at least lend their mikes to the radicals, the NUSP leaders gave the impression of being too finicky; they acted like an old maid aunt determined not to surrender her Edwardian finery to a hippie niece, knowing that it would be used for more audacious purposes than she had ever intended for it. The radicals would surely demand more than a nonpartisan Constitutional Convention; they would speak of more fundamental, doubtless violent, changes; and it was precisely the prospect of violence that the NUSP feared. The quarrel over the mikes revealed the class distinctions in the demonstration: on the one hand the exclusive-school kids of the NUSP, bred in comfort, decent, respectful, and timorous; and on the other hand the public-school firebrands of groups like the KM and the SDK, familiar with privation, rowdy, irreverent, troublesome. Naturally, the nice dissenters wanted to dissociate themselves from anything that smelled disreputable, and besides the mikes belonged to them.

Now the mikes had passed to a young man, a labor union leader I had seen before, at another demonstration, whose name I do not know.

It had happened so fast Jopson was caught by surprise; the next thing he knew the mikes were no longer in his possession. This young labor union leader was a terrific speaker. He was obviously some kind of hero to the militants, for they cheered him on as he attacked the “counter-revolutionaries who want to end this demonstration,” going on from there to attack fascists and imperialists in general. By the time he was through, his audience had a new, a more insistent chant: “Rebolusyon! Rebolusyon! Rebolusyon!”

Passions were high, exacerbated by the quarrel over the mikes; and the President had the back luck of coming out of Congress at this particular instant.

WHERE THE DEMONSTRATION LEADERS STOOD, emblems of the enemy were prominently displayed: a cardboard coffin representing the death of democracy at the hands of the goonstabulary in the last elections; a cardboard crocodile, painted green, symbolizing congressmen greedy for allowances; a paper effigy of Ferdinand Marcos. When the President stepped out of Congress, the effigy was set on fire and, according to report, the coffin was pushed toward him, the crocodile hurled at him. From my position down on the street, I saw only the burning of the effigy—a singularly undramatic incident, since it took the effigy so long to catch fire. I could not even see the President and could only deduce the fact of his coming out of Congress from the commotion at the doors, the sudden radiance created by dozens of flashbulbs bursting simultaneously, and the rise in the streets of the cry: “MARcos PUPpet! MARcos PUPpet! MARcos PUPpet!”

Things got so confused at this point that I cannot honestly say which came first: the pebbles flying or the cops charging. I remember only the cops rushing down the steps of Congress, pushing aside the demonstration leaders, and jumping down to the streets, straight into the mass of demonstrators. The cops flailed away, the demonstrators scattered. The cops gave chase to anything that moved, clubbed anyone who resisted, and hauled off those they caught up with. The demonstrators who got as far as the sidewalk that led to the Muni golf links started to pick up pebbles and rocks with which they pelted the police. Very soon, placards had turned into missiles, and the sound of broken glass punctuated the yelling: soft-drink bottles were flying, too. The effigy was down on the ground, still burning.

The first scuffle was brief. By the time it was over, the President and the First Lady must have made good their escape. The cops retreated into Congress with hostages. The demonstrators re-occupied the area they had vacated in their panic. The majority of NUSP members must have been safe in their buses by then, on their way home, but the militants were still in possession of the mikes.

The militants were also in possession of the field. Probably not more than 2,000 remained on Burgos Drive—some of them just hanging around, looking on; many of them raging mad, refusing to be cowed. A small group defiantly sang the Tagalog version of the “Internationale,” no longer bothering now to hide their allegiances. Their slogan was “fight and fear not,” and they made a powerful incantation out of it: “Ma-ki-BAKA! Huwag maTAKOT!” They marched with arms linked together and faced the cops without flinching, baiting them, taunting them.

“Pulis, pulis, titi matulis!”

“Pulis, mukhang kuwarta!”

“Me mga panangga pa, o, akala mo lalaban sa giyera!”

“Takbo kayo nang takbo, baka lumiit ang tiyan n’yo!”

“Baka mangreyp pa kayo, lima-lima na’ng asawa n’yo!”

“Mano-mano lang, o!”

NOTHING MORE CLEARLY REVEALED THE DEPTHS to which the reputation of the supposed enforcers of the law has sunk than this open mocking of the cops. Annual selections of ten outstanding policemen notwithstanding, the cops are generally believed to be corrupt, venal, brutal, vicious, and zealous in their duties only when the alleged lawbreaker is neither rich nor powerful. Those who deplore the loss of respect for the law forget that respect needs to be earned, and anyone is likely to lose respect for the law who has felt the wrath of lawmen or come face to face with their greed.

The students who now hurled insults at the cops around Congress differed from the rest of their countrymen only in that they did not bother to hide their contempt or express it in bitter whispers. In at least two recent demonstrations—one at the US Embassy on the arrival of Agnew, the other at Malacanang to denounce police brutality and the rise of fascism—students had suffered at the hands of the cops, and now the students were in a rage, they were spoiling for trouble, they were in no mood for dinner-party chatter or elocution contents.

In the parliament of the streets, debate takes the form of confrontation.

While the braver radicals flung jeers at the cops in a deliberate attempt to precipitate a riotous confrontation, the rest of the demonstrators gathered in front of the Congress flagpole, listening to various speakers, though more often outshouting them. Senator Emmanuel Pelaez had come out of Congress, dapper in a dark-blue suit, and the mikes were handed over to him. Despite the mikes, his voice could hardly be heard above the din of the demonstrators. Because Pelaez spoke in English, they shouted: “Tagalog! Tagalog!” They had also made up a new chant: “Pakawalan ang hinuli! Pakawalan ang hinuli! Pakawalan ang hinuli!” Not after several minutes of furious waving from student leaders gesturing for quiet did the noise of the throng subside.

Pelaez made an appeal for peace that received an equal amount of cheers and jeers. Then he made the mistake of calling MPD Chief Gerardo Tamayo to his side. The very sight of a uniformed policeman is enough to drive demonstrators into a frenzy; his mere presence is provocation enough. The reaction to Tamayo was unequivocal, unanimous. The moment he appeared, fancy swagger stick in hand, an orgy of boos and catcalls began, sticks and stones and crumpled sheets started to fly again, and Pelaez had to let the police chief beat a hasty retreat.

With Tamayo out of sight, a little quiet descended on the crowd once more. Speeches again, and more speeches. The lull, a period of watchful waiting for the demonstrators, lasted for some time. And then, from the north, from the Maharnilad side of Congress, came the cry: “Eto na naman ang mga pulis!”

Thunder of feet, tumult of images and sounds. White smooth round crash helmets advancing like a fleet of flying saucers in the growing darkness. The tread of marching feet, the rat-tat-tat of fearful feet on the run, the shuffle of hesitant feet unable to decide whether to stand fast or flee. From loudspeakers, an angry voice: “Mga pulis! Pakiusap lang! Tahimik na kami rito! Huwag na kayong makialam!” And everywhere, a confusion of shouts: Walang tatakbo! Walang uurong! Balik! Balik! Walang mambabato! Tigil ang batuhan! Link arms, link arms! Ma-ki-BAKA! Huwag maTAKOT!

The khaki contingent broke into a run. The demonstrators fled in all directions, each man for himself. Some merely stepped aside, hugging the Congress walls, clustering around trees. The cops at this time went only after those who ran, bypassing all who stood still. Three cops cornered one demonstrator against a traffic sign and clubbed him until the signpost gave way and fell with a crash. One cop caught up with a demonstrator and grabbed him by the collar, but the demonstrator wriggled free of his shirt and made a new dash for freedom in his undershirt. One cop lost his quarry near the golf course and found himself surrounded by other demonstrators; they didn’t touch him—“Nag-iisa 'yan, pabayaan n'yo”—but they taunted him mercilessly. This was a Metrocom cop, not an unarmed trainee, and finding himself surrounded by laughing sneering faces, he drew his .45 in anger, his eyes flashing, his teeth bared. He kept his gun pointed to the ground, however, and the laughter and sneers continued until he backed off slowly, trying to maintain whatever remaining dignity he could muster.

The demonstrators who had fled regrouped, on the Luneta side of Congress, and with holler and whoop they charged. The cops slowly retreated before this surging mass, then ran, ran for their lives, pursued by rage, rocks, and burning placard handles. Now it was the students giving chase, exhilarated by the unexpected turnabout. The momentum of their charge, however, took them only up to the center of Burgos Drive; either there was a failure of nerve or their intention was merely to regain ground they had lost, without really charging into the very ranks of the police.

Once again, the lines of battle were as before: the students in the center, the cops at the northern end of Burgos Drive.

In the next two hours, the pattern of battle would be set. The cops would charge, the demonstrators would retreat; the demonstrators would regroup and come forward again, the cops would back off to their former position. At certain times, however, the lines of battle would shift, with the cops holding all of the area right in front of Congress and the students facing them across the street, with three areas of retreat—north toward Maharnilad, south toward the Luneta, and west toward the golf course and Intramuros. There were about seven waves of attack and retreat by both sides, each attack preceded by a tense noisy lull, during which there would be sporadic stoning, by both cops and demonstrators.

Sometime during the lull in the clashes, two fire trucks appeared in the north. They inched their way forward, flanked by the cops, and when they were near the center of Burgos Drive they trained their hoses on the scattered bonfires the students had made with their placards and manifestoes. Students who held their ground, getting wet in the weak stream, yelled: “Mahal ang tubig! Isauli n'yo na 'yan sa Nawasa!” Other demonstrators, emboldened by the lack of force of the jets of water, came forward with rocks to hurl at the fire trucks. The trucks hurriedly backed away from the barrage and soon made themselves scarce.

At one student attack, the demonstrators managed to occupy the northern portion the cops had held throughout the battle. When the cops started moving forward, from the Congress driveway where they had taken shelter, the demonstrators backed away one by one, until only three brave and foolhardy souls remained, standing fast, holding aloft, by its three poles, a streamer that carried the name of the Kabataang Makabayan. There they stood, those three, no one behind them and the cops coming toward them slowly, menacingly. Without a warning, some cops dashed forward, about ten of them, and in full view of the horrified crowd flailed away at the three who held their ground, unable to resist. The two kids holding the side poles either managed to flee or were hauled off to the legislative building to join everybody else who had the misfortune of being caught. The boy in the center crumpled to the ground and stayed there cringing, bundled up like a foetus, his legs to his chest and his arms over his head. The cops made a small tight circle around him, and then all that could be seen were the rattan sticks moving up and down and from side to side in seeming rhythm. When they were through, the cops walked away nonchalantly, leaving the boy on the ground. One cop, before leaving, gave one last aimless swing of his stick as a parting shot, hitting his target in the knees.

The cops really had it in for the Kabataang Makabayan. The fallen standard was picked up by six or seven KM boys and carried to the center of Burgos Drive, where it stood beside another streamer, held up by members of the Kilusan ng Kabataang Makati, bearing the words: “Ibagsak ang imperyalismo at piyudalismo!” When the cops made another attack and everybody in the center of Burgos Drive scattered, the KM boys again held their ground. The cops gave them so severe a beating one of the wooden poles broke in half.

I had taken shelter beneath the Kilusan ng Kabataang Makati streamer during the attack; we were left untouched. The KM boys had to abandon their streamer. One of them, limping, joined us, and when the cops had gone he asked me, probably thinking I was another KM member, to help him pick up the streamer. I thought it was the least I could do for the poor bastards, so I took hold of the broken pole and helped the KM boy carry the streamer a little closer to the Congress walls. There I stood, thinking of the awkwardness of my position, being neither demonstrator nor KM member, until a few other guys began to gather around us. I handed the broken pole to someone who nodded when I asked him if he belonged to the KM.

About this time, or sometime afterwards, Pelaez was down on the street, surrounded by aides and students all talking at the same time, complaining to him about missing nameplates and arrested comrades. He was probably still down there when the cops advanced once again. Panic spread, and I found myself running, too. In previous attacks I had merely stepped aside and watched; but I had already seen what had happened to the KM boys who refused to flee, and I had seen policemen, walking back to their lines after a futile chase, club or haul off anyone standing by who just happened to be in their way, or who seemed to have a look of gloating and triumph on their faces; and I realized it was no longer safe to remain motionless. I had completely forgotten the press badge in my pocket.

Meanwhile, it seemed that certain distinguished personages trapped inside the legislative building had grown restless and wanted to get on to their mansions or their favorite night clubs or some parties in their honor, but cars were parked up front. At any rate, some cars started moving up the driveway to pick up passengers. The sight of those long sleek limousines infuriated the demonstrators all the more; the sight of those beautiful air-conditioned limousines was like a haughty voice saying, “Let them eat cake.” Cries of “Kotse! Kotse!” were followed by “Batuhin! Batuhin!” Down the driveway came the cars, and whizz went the rocks. Some cars even had the effrontery of driving down Burgos Drive straight into the lines of the demonstrators, as though meaning to disperse them. All the cars got stoned.

One apple-green Mercedes-Benz, belonging to Senator Jose Roy, screeched to a stop when the rocks thudded on its roofs and sides. The driver got out and started picking up rocks himself, throwing them at the students. A few cops had to brave the rain of stones that ensued to save the poor driver who had only tried to defend his master’s car. The demonstrators then surged forward with sticks and stones and beat the hell out of the car, stopping only when it was a total wreck. “Sunugin!” rose the cry, but by then the cops were coming in force.

The demonstrators had hired a jeepney in which rode some of their leaders. It had two loudspeakers on its roof, was surrounded by students, and inched its way forward and backward throughout the melee. The cops, seemingly maddened by the destruction of a senator’s Model 1970 Mercedes-Benz, swooped down on the jeepney with their rattan sticks, striking out at the students who surrounded it until they fled, then venting their rage some more on those inside the jeepney who could not get out to run. The shrill screams of women inside the jeepney rent the air. The driver, bloody all over, managed to stagger out; the cops quickly grabbed him.

When the cops were through beating up the jeepney’s passengers, they backed away. Some stayed behind, trying to drag out those who were still inside the jeepney, from which came endless shrieks, sobs, curses, wails, and the sound of weeping. It was impossible to remain detached and uninvolved now, to be a spectator forever. When the screams for help became unendurable, I started to walk toward the jeepney, and was only four or five steps away when, from the other side of the jeepney, crash helmet, khaki uniform, and rattan stick came charging at me. The cop’s hands gripped his stick at both ends. “O, isa ka pa, lalapit-lapit ka pa!” he cried as he swung at me. I stepped back, feeling the wind from the swing of his stick ruffle the front of my shirt. In stepping back I lost my balance. Before I realized what had happened, I was down on my back and the cop was lunging at me, still holding his stick at both ends. I caught the middle of the stick with my hands and, well, under the circumstances, I don’t think I can be blamed for losing my cool. “Putangnamo,” I shouted at him, “tutulong ako do’n, e!”

I jumped to my feet, dusted myself off angrily, and glared at my would-be tormentor. If my eyes had the gift of a triple whammy, he would be dust and ashes now. We stared at each other for a few seconds, but when I dropped my glance down to his breast, to see no nameplate there, he turned his back and slowly walked away. I had no intention of doing a Norman Mailer and getting arrested, so I let him go. By this time, the jeepney’s passengers had decided, screaming and swearing and sobbing all the while, to abandon their vehicle with its load of mimeographed manifestoes and various literature, and to look for a safer place from which to deliver their exhortations to their fellow demonstrators.

On two other occasions, I found myself running with the demonstrators. Once I jumped down with them to the golf course and got as far as the fence of the mini-golf range. Behind us, the cops were firing into the air. When it was the students’ turn to charge, I found my way back to the street. Another time, running along the sidewalk down rows of pine trees toward the Luneta, I saw a girl a few meters away from me stumble and fall. I stopped running, with the intention of helping her up, when whack! I felt the sting of a blow just below my belt and above my ass. When I turned around the cop was gone; he was swinging wildly as he ran and I just happened to be in the way of his rattan. The girl, too, was nowhere to be seen; there was no longer anyone to play Good Samaritan to.

As I stood there, rubbing that part of me where I was hit, I heard more screaming and curses from the golf course. A boy and two girls, who had decided to sit out the attack on a mound, had been set upon by the cops. People inside the mini-golf enclosure were yelling at the cops, shaking their golf clubs in helpless fury. “Tena, tulungan natin!” cried one demonstrator; but the cops had retreated by the time we got to the trio on the mound. The two girls were cursing through their tears; the boy was calm, consoling them in his fashion. “This is just part of the class struggle,” he said, and one girl sobbed, “I know, I know. Pero putangna nila, me araw din sila!”

IT WAS NOW EIGHT O’CLOCK. The battle of Burgos Drive was over, Burgos Drive was open to traffic once more. I decided it was time to go to the Philippine General Hospital for a change of scene. Crossing the street, on my way to Taft Avenue, I saw for the first time, on the Luneta side of the traffic island, a row of horses behind a squad of uniformed men.

At the PGH, confusion reigned. More than thirty demonstrators with bloody heads and broken wrists had been or were being treated along with three or four policemen hit by rocks. Other students kept coming, looking for companions, bringing news from the field. The battle was not over yet, they said, it had merely shifted ground. The cops were chasing demonstrators right up to Intramuros, all the way to Plaza Lawton; were even boarding jeepneys and buses to haul down demonstrators on their way home. There was a rumor that two or three students had been killed—did anyone know anything about it? (It proved to be a false alarm.) Even NUSP members were at the PGH. Some of them had called up Executive Secretary Ernesto Maceda, and he came in a long black car, mapungay eyes, slicked-down hair, newly pressed barong Tagalog, and all, accompanied by a photographer and scads of technical assistants or security men.

The next day came the post-mortems, the breast-beating, the press releases, the alibis.

“We maintain,” said MPD Deputy Chief James Barbers, “that the police acted swiftly at a particular time when the life of the President of the Republic—and that of the First Lady—was being endangered by the vicious and unscrupulous elements among the student demonstrators. One can just imagine what would have resulted had something happened to the First Lady!” Barbers did not bother to explain why the rampage continued after the President being protected had gone.

Manila Mayor Antonio J. Villegas commended Tamayo and his men for their “exemplary behavior and courage” and reportedly gave them a day off. Then he announced that Manila policemen would henceforth stay away from demonstration sites. “I’m doing this to protect Manila policemen from unfair criticism and to avoid friction between the MPD and student groups.”

“The night of January 26,” said UP president S.P. Lopez, “must be regarded as a night of grave portent for the future of the nation. It has brought us face to face with the fundamental question: Is it still possible to transform our society by peaceful means so that the many who are poor, oppressed, sick, and ignorant may be released from their misery, by the actual operation of law and government, rather than by waiting in vain for the empty promise of ‘social justice’ in our Constitution?”

The faculty of the University of the Philippines issued a declaration denouncing “the use of brutal force by state authorities against the student demonstrators” and supporting “unqualifiedly the students’ exercise of democratic rights in their struggle for revolutionary change.” The declaration went on to say: “It is with the gravest concern that the faculty views the January 26 event as part of an emerging pattern of repression of the democratic rights of the people. This pattern is evident in the formation of paramilitary units such as the Home Defense Forces, the politicalization of the Armed Forces, the existence of private armies, foreign interference in internal security, and the use of specially trained police for purposes of suppression.”

From the Lyceum faculty came another strongly worded statement: “Above the sadism and inhumanity of the action of the police, we fear that the brutal treatment of the idealistic students has done irreparable harm to our society. For it is true that the skirmish was won by the policemen and the riot soldiers. But if we view the battle in the correct perspective of the struggle for the hearts and minds of our youth, we cannot help but realize that the senseless, brutal, and uncalled-for acts of the police have forever alienated many of our young people from our society. The police will have to realize that in winning the battles, they are losing the war for our society.”

While he deplored the “abusive language” he read in some of the demonstrators’ placards, Senator Gil J. Puyat said, “I regret the use of unnecessary force by the police when they could have used a less harmful method.” IF the police had “kept their cool,” said Senator Benigno Aquino, there would have been no violence—“it takes two to fight.” Senator Salvador Laurel said he had witnessed “with my own eyes the reported brutalities perpetrated by a number of [police officers] upon unarmed students, some of them helpless women.” Senator Eva Kalaw warned: “The students set the emotional powderkeg that may become the signal for wave upon wave of unrest in the streets, in the factories, on the campuses, in our farms.”

“Students,” said President Ferdinand Marcos, “have a legitimate right to manifest their grievances in public and we shall support their just demands, but we do not consider violence a legitimate instrument of democratic dissent, and we expect the students to cooperate with government in making sure that their demonstrations are not marred by violence.”

Some of the students began talking of arming themselves the next time with molotov cocktails and pillboxes, of using dos-por-dos as placard handles, of wearing crash helmets. Everyone agreed that the January 26 confrontation was the longest and most violent in the history of the Philippine student movement.

And then came January 30

THRICE OVER had Maurito read the Philippine Free Press article before Pepito showed up at their rendezvous in front of a snack shop at the rotunda junction of Timog and Quezon Avenues in Quezon City that February afternoon. He had called Pepito for what he merely told him as “a purpose” and Pepito had advised about him joining up with marchers from the UP campus in that area, together with whom to join up in turn with marchers from other areas at the Welcome Rotunda and from there proceed to what Pepito had informed Maurito as “people’s congress” at the Plaza Miranda in Quiapo, Manila.

            Until then, Maurito had not joined any protest actions that were efflorescing in downtown Manila at the advent of the year. But he had been keenly following them in news reports which increasingly made him want to get involved. He could not quite place his feelings over the events, particularly since it struck him as odd that the reported agitations for the downfall of “imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism” were agitations as well for the crushing of the “Lava-Taruc revisionist clique”. He had made some extensive reading of the history of the Hukbalahap and had seen its struggle to institute a socialist regime in the country as nothing short of heroic. He had loved reading the books Born of the People and He Who Rides The Tiger by Luis Taruc, the HUK Supremo, and believed he had gained sufficient insight into the man so as to feel quite uncomfortable with the current damning he was being subjected to in current rallies and demonstrations. To Maurito, this attack on Taruc was reminiscent of the obsession Stalin was seized with in wanting to crush Leon Trotsky which Maurito just would not understand; he had read much about Trotsky and had known that it was Trotky’s defection to the Bolsheviks together with the Russian army which he commanded that was most crucial in bringing about the downfall of the Tzarist regime and thus the success of the February 17 Revolution. And already, Maurito was noting this distinction: that while Stalin’s pursuit of Trotsky took place after the success of what clearly was a socialist revolution, the damning of Taruc as a revisionist was taking place even before a clear picture of  what the current risings were all about could be made.

            Maurito had begun arguing if only to himself that revisionism in socialist reckoning is a sliding back to capitalism.  Revisionism, therefore, presupposes the establishment of a socialist state upon the overthrow of capitalism. How could charges of revisionism be valid against anybody in a set-up in which according to the prime accuser of the offense, Jose Maria Sison, capitalism had not succeeded yet? Sison called the Philippine society “semi-feudal, semi-colonial.” And even granting that Maurito’s own view were correct, that the installation of the Republic of 1946 signaled the ascendance of the Philippine bourgeoisie and thus the corresponding ascendance of the capitalist system in the country, still it behooved the socialist system to be in place before there can be any revisionist act against it. How can there be any sliding back to capitalism in a society where capitalism has not even been in place yet pursuant to the Sison line? Pursuant to Maurito’s line – in fact, a line trudged by a multitude of others – how can revisionism be committed as an offense in a society where socialism had over the years only been struggling to get on top, from which alone it could be made to slide back down. Only in a socialist state can revisionism be a valid offense.

            All these ideas by Maurito were still in gestative stages at the time; it would require his eventual practice of the theory of proletarian revolution for these ideas to crystallize.

            The promotion in marches, rallies, demonstrations, and all sorts of protests actions  of the Sison strategy of a national democratic revolution had popularized the general notion of oppression and exploitation against which the oppressed and exploited must rise in arms. In factories and other places of employment, workers greatly influenced by activists were experiencing an exhilarating feeling of being the creators of society’s riches and therefore are these riches’ owners. but that the oppressors and exploiters were arrogating those riches to themselves through the use of the state as an instrument of class oppression. Workers, therefore, must seize control of the state by the use of which alone they can exercise political power over the oppressors and exploiters. Society thus turned upside down, the once oppressors and exploiters are now the ruled, while the workers are the ruling class.

            Already, euphoria over the prospect of themselves getting to be the rulers one day was the common seizure employees and workers got from the daily occurrence of rallies and demonstrations. This was the distinct advantage Maurito found handy when he began the moves for organizing a labor union at the Makabayan Publishing Corporation. He didn’t have to do a lot of convincing for employees of the company to enlist. On the contrary, it was Maurito who needed to be talked into the idea.

            At that time, Maurito had just been elevated to the company’s management committee. which ranked him with the company’s top brass: Celso Al. Carunungan, publisher of the Makabayan magazines; Consorcio Borje, Editor-in-Chief of the Weekly Nation; and Suzana de Guzman, Editor-in-Chief of Tagumpay Magazine. It was a matter of course that he would be president of the union to be formed and this would entail some complication. As a member of the management committee, he would fall under the classification of supervisor which under labor laws was banned from heading a union of rank-ane-file employees. Maurito had pondered the problem and thought that there was a legal remedy to it: supervisors were not so by mere designation; they had to have the power to hire and fire, which Maurito didn’t have, and so he was no supervisor.

            What could not be remedied was the sure loss of the potential for big personal gains he stood to make from having been elevated to the management committee. In terms of economics, those gains could last a lifetime.

            But as  Karl Marx put it, social consciousness is determined by social being.  Having been born poor, lived poor in the formative years of his life, and experienced the wretched existence among the poorest of the poor in Manila, Maurito could stand as a shining example of that Marxist dictum. Still, more than Marx was the inscrutable trait of Maurito of ever feeling the Big Brother, the Good Neighbor, Teacher of the Unschooled, Provider of Succor, Fighter of Evil.

            About the last-cited trait, Maurito would debate against himself: who was he to pretend to righteousness when many times he, too, had been evil. But then again soon he would realize that experiencing evil was a necessary stage of his recognition of it. Man does good knowing that doing otherwise would be bad. But how would he know a sinful act if he had not done such act himself!

            Evil must then consist not of doing evil but of not realizing that the evil one does is not to be repeated anymore.

            Maurito was human enough to gloat in the glory of his elevation to the management committee of the Makabayan Publishing Corporation. And he did savor the prestige and privileges accorded him as a result of the promotion.  But it is in the nature of the capitalist system that management functionaries perform tasks that are part of the mechanism for  oppressing and exploiting workers. Maurito needed not Marx to realize this. It was the concrete agitation, albeit silently at first, by the Makabayan workers to counter their exploitation by the company with union organizing that threw Maurito into having to make a choice: on whose side was he, the management or the workers?

            Persevering in seeing Pepito now would indicate that Maurito had made the choice.

            Pepito’s reportage on the upheavals of the first quarter of the year had placed him in Maurito’s high esteem. Particularly in regard to the article he had been reading over and over again, Pepito’s intimate participation in the events and the candid way he reported them made Maurito wonder if Pepito was not playing the role of Ernest Hemingway covering the Spanish civil war. He seemed not content with being just on the peripheries of activists’ skirmishes with the police but always in their midst, getting beaten and bruised and shouting invectives as were the wont of youth and students against what they called state fascism. If an otherwise cool, cultured, unpretentious fellow was willing to risk his balls advancing the cause of the national democratic movement, then that movement must be worth Maurito’s own genitals.

            Pepito had not been known to Maurito personally for long. Andy Salao had introduced them to each other not too long ago in one of those typical movie conferences where outside of the conference subject matter, the main attraction were sumptuous food and plenty of drinks; envelopes were not yet in vogue at the time. But Maurito had been reading Pepito’s articles in a leading magazine, which despite the Weekly Nation was Maurito’s favorite. He admired Pepito’s style which to him was strikingly down-to-earth and straightforward but nonetheless brimmed with literary flair. Maurito thought that with the literary approach being kept unobtrusive, Pepito had succeeded in coming up with a brand of writing that was masa and intellectual all at once. Hence even before the two met, Maurito already had an image of Pepito as a role model for writers seeking literary fulfillment and social relevance – a role model for himself. When they met in that movie conference, Maurito’s role model image of Pepito was bolstered even more. Pepito struck Maurito as somebody amiably austere, his face always ready with a smile for everyone, though his good looks always tended to be downplayed by faded denim pants and drab polo shirt tucked in and long sleeves rolled up. If he had the predilection to clip his thumbs on the front pockets of his pants and slightly slouched to a side, with a crouch of his shoulders to boot, while one end of his tucked-in shirt flapped out in front, then one would understand why Fernando Poe, Jr. was such a smash hit among lowly folks.

            Maurito hurried out of the snack shop as Pepito looked around on the sidewalk. Already he could hear agitators blaring their slogans through megaphones at the head of a colum of youthful activists  marching from the east, repeating the chants. Carried by the marchers were streamers indicating their respective groups [as Kabataang Makabayan (KM), Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan (SDK), MAKIBAKA, Movement for a Democratic Philippines (MDP)] and slogans like ISULONG ANG DIGMAANG BAYAN, MABUHAY ANG KONGRESO NG BAYAN; placards carried red-painted slogans against Marcos, imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism.

            “Marcos Hitler! Diktador! Tuta!” (“Marcos Hitler! Dictator! Puppet!)

            “Down with imperialism!”

            “Down with feudalism!”

            “Down with bureaucrat capitalism!”

            Pepito saw Maurito approaching. 

“Mao,” he said.

“They’re approaching,” said Maurito, indicating the march. “That’s the group you’re joining?”

            “Yes. We don’t have much time. What purpose was it you were telling me about?”   

           

PEPITO AND MAURITO were flowing with the continuously-chanting marchers as they continued the conversation down Quezon Avenue, heading toward the Welcome Rotunda.

            “The Makabayan rank-and-file have been asking me to lead in the formation of a labor union. If it happens, it will be the first labor union to be established in the Araneta empire,” said Maurito, straining his voice to get it heard by Pepito in the din of the agitations and chants.

            “What are your chances?” asked Pepito, cool and composed as ever.

            “Very good. The whole editorial staff want to join, so do management personnel who otherwise should be categorized as supervisors.”

            “So what did you want to see me for?”

            “Teach us how to go about it. “

            “Why me?”

            “You’ve done it successfully at the Free Press.”

            ”We’re just lucky I guess to not have had to go on strike.”

            “Strikes are necessary elements of workers’ struggle.”

            “The management immediately agreed to  a conciliation meeting after we presented our demands. And we came to a settlement.”

            “I’m prepared for the worse.”

            Pepito paused from the conversation as the march abruptly shifted to a running rush on the approach to the Welcome Rotunda.  Pepito and Maurito flowed in the rush, joining in the chants.

            “Imperyalismo!” (Imperialism!)

            “Ibagsak!” (Bring it down!)

            “Piyudalismo!” (Feudalism!)

            “Ibagsak!” (Bring it down!)

            “Burukratang kapitalismo!” (Bureaucrat capitalism!”

            “Ibagsak” (Bring it down!)

            “Marcos! Hitler! Diktador! Tuta!” (Marcos! Hitler! Dictator! Puppet!)

THE LAST CHANT continued as the running marchers traversed Espana, crossing the railway that cut through the main thoroughfare from Manila to Quezon City. The air is filled with the single agitation by the speaker at the head of the march haranguing onlookers on the roadsides with condemnation of “US imperialism”, “local feudalism”, “bureaucrat capitalism”, “Japanese imperialism”, and “Soviet social imperialism along with its lackeys in the Philippines, the Lava-Taruc revisionist clique”.

The running march slowed down on the approach to Forbes Street where at the intersection the traffic light turned red.

            “So now, Pepito…” Maurito said, panting somewhat at the slow-down in the march.

            Pepito essayed him with a fleeting stare then said, “I think... You should seek Ninoy’s help.”

            As casually as the statement came, so did Maurito let it pass without commenting on it at all. Ninoy was a capitalist and Maurito, in his utter lack of political savvy, had not completely learned about having to build alliances with class enemies. To him no capitalist stood to take the side of the workers in the matter of organizing a labor union at the Araneta empire.

            The march resumed on a slow pace even before the green light could turn on.

            “I feel we’re in for a hard fight,” Maurito laid it out to Pepito.

            Pepito took time to comment, appearing more focused on the speaker’s agitation.

“Araneta security guards number 300. If we enlist one hundred percent of the Makabayan employees, that’s a one-on-one odds. Tough for the union. We should have 3,000, going by the ratios in guerilla warfare, 10 to 1 against the enemy. We don’t have those numbers, but with you, we can.”

            Pepito stared inquisitively.

            “If you could assure us of your support, that would be comfortable enough for us. Where you are, the movement will be there.”

            Pepito flashed his ever-restrained smile in showing his amusement.

            “I’m just one writer. Like now, just one reporter covering the event,” he said.

            “Precisely,” retorted Maurito nearly exclaiming. “Just writing about the Makabayan strike, you become thousands upon thousands of youth activists taking up the struggle of the first-ever union in the Araneta empire.”

            Pepito stared at Maurito, his smile turning into one of amazement.

            “At the rate we are going, we should be ready to organize come April. We will he happy to have you in our organizational meeting.”

            Pepito instantly quickened his pace accordingly as the marchers turn to running once more in the final approach to Plaza Miranda. The place was now cramming with demonstrators, flashing their respective streamers and placards carrying battle cries and names of organizations. Standing out among the signs is a large streamer proclaiming: “PEOPLE’S CONGRESS.” At the instigation of a speaker through the public address system, the crowd cheered the arrival of the group Pepito and Maurito were in.

            “Cheers to our comrades from Quezon City and Marikina!”

            The marchers rushed on into the midst of the crowd.

            Even as he rushed along with the marchers, Maurito scanned with his eyes the militantly-cheering crowd. He inwardly beamed with a great feeling of assurance. His circular scanning of the crowd ended up on Pepito staring at him inquiringly.

            Maurito anticipated Pepito’s question. He said, “With a support like this, how can the union lose?”

           

CHAPTER VIII

           

CLOUDS OF DUST billow at the tail of a convoy of four passenger jeepneys traversing the rough road that traced the banks of a river flowing down a gorge at the foot of the Montalban mountain. As agreed upon, a picnic would be held as a ploy for gathering the Makabayan Publishing Corporation employees for the formal organization of KAMAO, thus divert the attention of the management from the event; any premature exposure of the move to the management could alarm the Aranetas and prompt them to take preemptive action, whatever that might be.

            The people aboard the vehicles, all in picnic attires, did enjoy the trip like true blue picnickers, delighting at the scenery they pass or already anticipating the excitement they would be indulging in at the end of the journey.

            “Look,” said a man, pointing to the river. “Water so clear. It sure would be nice taking a splash there.”

            “I’d do it with beer, too,” said another, who is already gulping the brew from the bottle.

            “You’re such a sot,” said one girl to the drinker. “How do you expect a girl to love you with that kind of drinking?”

            “’Tsokey. With beer I get to kiss lips to lips morning, noon and night.”

            And the drinker sucked beer through the mouth of the bottle like kissing.

            Laughter from the folks.

            Aboard another jeepney, a young man appeared getting entertained by lively talk among the passengers. He was Ed Oliva,  an eighteen-year-old, able-bodied, slightly tall young man, who wore a boyish ubiquitous smile everytime he spoke. It was less of a character than a learned manner of dealing with people, no different from the way salesmen conduct their business. He was a student purusuing an AB course at the Philippine College of Commerc (what the Polytechnic University of the Philippines was  then), a member of the Kabataang Makabayan (KM) who found a way among the personnel in the advertising department of the Makabayan Publishing Corporation. Since joining the company, it had been routinary for Ed during break times to engage the printing personnel in discussions about labor relations, stressing the need for the Makabayan employees to unionize. His intention, of course, was to sway the corporation’s labor force into the KM agenda in the intensifying national democratic movement, roughly outlined by Jose Maria Sison in a mimeographed pamphlet entitled “Struggle for National Democracy” or SND as popularized by slogan-loving student activists.  Ed particularly joined up in this effort with Danny Macapagal, who, as proof reader,  had natural camaraderie with editorial people and those in the production department. Danny, who lived among the informal settlers in the coastal slums of Navotas, could easily have been the top choice to head the union but that he himself saw the need of having somebody there with a stature which gained ascendancy over the editorial department. This matter was taken up in the final meeting of the adhoc committee for formalizing the union and it was unanimously agreed that Maurito, who was thought to hold sway over the entire editorial department but for the Publisher and Editors-in-Chief of the Weekly Nation and Tagumpay, would be president; Danny, vice-president; and Ed, secretary, among other officers.

            In that meeting, it was agreed that the union would be called “Katipunan ng mga Makabayang Obrero (KAMAO) ng Makabayan Publishing Corporation.” At this, Ed expressed some aside, though spoken with his learned geniality, saying the union’s name glorified Maurito whom he had already popularized in the Makabayan premises as “Ka Mao”, in line with activists’ way of  addressing one another; “Ka” is a contraction of “Kasama”, meaning “Comrade.”

            Thus did Maurito from then on gained the changed name: Ka Mao.

For the purpose of formally organizing the union, Ka Mao proposed the idea, which was approved, to conduct it as a traditional summer outing of the Makabayan employees. He was increasingly feeling he was performing his own historical destiny and what better grounds were there on which to hold the organizational meeting of KAMAO than the same hallowed site on which Bonifacio organized the Katipunan.

            “I brought my two-piece swimsuit,” said one girl.

            “Ay, me, too,” said another.

            “Bikini?” asked a boy.

            “Well… Sort of. Just to show a little of my… the navel.”

            “Wow, we’ll have a show then,” said another boy.

            “You said it. We’re sexier than Brigitte Bardot, didn’t you know?” teased the girls.

            “All the better for my camera,” said one man.

            “Share me your shots, Pare, eh?” still another man said.

            “Revolution is no picnic,” Ed finally saw it fit to make the talk political. He had not imbibed much tact in pushing his activist agenda and he would go intruding into a discussion expounding on it at the slightest provocation.  What he said were actually words by Mao Tse Tung, quoting of which was a favorite pastime of activists of various affiliations.

            “Wait a minute,” Danny reacted sharply. An obese thirtyish fellow, with a truly big bulge on his belly, he could have been physically the better to have done a Mao Tse Tung but that he didn’t have the pleasant beam of the Chinese leader’s face as popularized in photographs; in contrast, the guy’s reaction was expressed, as always, with that slant in tone that made him sound like complaining.“What revolution? We’re here to organize the union.”

            “The proletariat can no longer liberate itself without liberating the whole of society,” countered Ed, clearly priding in his posture as a Marxist demagogue. “True, we are organizing a union. But it is not a union similar to those organized by yellow labor leaders like the Ocas and the Lacsinas, but one sharpened along proletarian revolutionary ideals.”

            “What revolutionary ideals?”

            “Being the most advanced class, the workers must take up their historical task of leading in the national struggle to crush US imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism…”

            “Hey, Ed, we don’t care about no isms. We want security of employment, increase in our wages, remittance of our SSS payments, etcetera…”

            “Ka Danny,” countered Ed. “What you  are saying is pure economic struggle and in the words of Lenin, economic struggle is the ideological enslavement of the working class.”

            “Oh, my God,” lamented Danny.

            Ka Mao was on the front seat of the vehicle together with Pepito. He turned to Ed.

            “Discuss that in the meeting, Ed.”

            One nice thing about the young activist was that he deferred to elders; when a 29-year-old like Ka Mao spoke, he listened, not in surrender of his political views but as a fundamental regard to good manners and right conduct.

            “Well… okay.”

            “That guy seems hot,” said Pepito.

            “He is a KM,” said Ka Mao.

            “I think the meeting should focus on organizing the union. Revolution can be an alien agenda as yet,” said Pepito.

“…AND SO in order to escape suspicion by the Spanish authorities, Bonifacio and the other leaders of the Katipunan would undergo the arduous paddling of their canoes from the Pasig River, down through the Wawa Napindan, upstream the Marikina River, and finally to the falls where we are now to plan the moves of the Katipunan in the revolution of 1896. I thought it would be nice to walk the paths of history in organizing our own Katipunan, KAMAO,” went the speech of Ka Mao in the formal meeting.

            Evidently the folks had gone through their picnic activities. Many were in their swimming outfits. Picnic paraphernalia were laid out by the foot of trees, beside rocks, or under improvised shelters. In a fire place cauldrons sat on top of stone stoves and over a grill, fish and pork continued to be broiled by a man even as he listened to Ka Mao speaking to the crowd huddled among big rocks.

            “Now that we have formally organized our own Katipunan, I think it is not a bad thing that in doing the fight which we are about to make through our union,  we take inspiration from the struggle that Bonifacio and the Katipunan made which brought the downfall of Spanish colonialism in our country.”

            Pepito’s reaction was not quite clear. He betrayed an ambivalent feeling of being impressed but not wanting what he heard. He got to express that feeling when, at Ka Mao’s calling, he took the front of the gathering.

            “About that fight, let us hear from our good friend and supporter, Mr. Pepito...” The crowd burst in applause before Ka Mao could complete the introduction.

            Pepito stole a whisper to Ka Mao as he took the front of the gathering, “It’s revolution you also talked about.”

            Pepito addressed the crowd in his characteristic slow-paced manner, like weighing in his mind every word before uttering it.

            “I thank you for inviting me to your meeting. I promise to help in your struggle in whatever way I can, though I am afraid it’s not much. Our experience in organizing a union at the Free Press had gone through a process which did not require us to go on strike early on, because the union and the management immediately reached an agreement after we presented our demands. So there is not much I can help you with in terms of conducting a strike. But there is one thing I can be sure of. You have no one to depend on but yourselves. Supporters will be there, yes. I will be there for sure.  But only your unity can make your union succeed.”

CHAPTER IX

EVENTS seemed to come in quick flashes for KAMAO after that Montalban organizational meeting.

In what had the trappings of a conspiratorial move, Ka Mao intimated to National Labor Relations Commission Commissioner Gat Amado Inciong the need to register the union in as discreet a manner as possible, and with dispatch as well. And betraying his heavy leanings toward trade unionism, the commissioner acquiesced.

Thus did the Katipunan ng mga Makabayang Obrero (KAMAO) ng Makabayan Publishing Corporation  promptly get its registration  certificate.

Ka Mao reported early at the office the next day and immediately busied himself typing the union demands. Ka Ed stole a moment from his  Advertising Department post to remind Ka Mao on how to formulate the union demands. He glanced at the letter Ka Mao had typed so far.

“You’re making it too economic,” Ka Ed said. “Make  the political demands stand out.”

“What political demands?” asked Ka Mao.

“Union recognition, that’s one,” said Ka Ed.

“Couldn’t that come as a matter of course. If they accept our economic demands, automatically they recognize the union.”

“It is better to have that stated categorically.”

As it meant retyping what he had written over again, Ka Mao was feeling irritated. But he kept his cool. He rolled the letter off the typewriter, subtly letting out a sigh of disgust.

“Ok…”

The phone rang meantime, and after taking the call, the office sccretary spoke to Ka Mao.

“For you, Ka Mao.”

Ka Mao rose to take the phone which the office secretary settled on the stand. Ka Ed walked after him, saying, “And don’t forget. Their recognition of our right to join political rallies and demonstrations. That should be stated clearly also.”

Ka Mao waved Ka Ed away. “Ok… Ok…” He took the phone. “Hello…”

“Hello, Maurito…”

“Yes, Lala…”

Ka Ed cut in.

“And, yes, our right to strike.”

“My God, that’s provided for in the Magna Carta of Labor!”

Ka Ed realized Ka Mao was losing his cool. He turned away.

“Hello, Lala,” said Ka Mao on the phone.

“Maurito…” Lala was suddenly crying.

“Hey, what’s the matter?”

“It’s about Mommy…”

“What about…”

No answer came but just sound of Lala’s sobbing.”

“Lala, what is it?”

Still no answer but just sound of Lala’s continuing sobs.

Ka Mao was getting piqued..

“Look, Lala. I’m busy rushing something. Call you in half an hour.”

Ka Mao hang up. He resumed typing the demand letter.

In her house, Lala was slouched on the floor, leaning against the side of the low cabinet on which the phone was rested. She was continuing to sob, sulking to herself even. She lifted the hem of her house wear to reveal her belly which she felt with a gentle rub of her hand. A faint smile shone through her sobbing. And then she gritted her jaws. She reached for the phone set and staying on the floor, dialed a number.

Ka Mao was pounding hard at his typewriter when he realized he had made another mistake.

“Not again,” he grumbled to himself. “Why do I always miss that political demand?”

He snatched the paper off the roller of the typewriter, compressed it into a ball which he threw to the waste basket. It missed the target. The office secretary, just then walking toward the ringing phone, picked it up and dropped it into the waste basket. Ka Mao inserted another paper into the typewriter while the office secretary answered the phone.

“Hello…”

“Maurito please.”

“A minute.”

The office secretary put the phone down on the stand, then walked back to her desk while informing, “For you, Ka Mao.”

“God.,.,” Ka Mao gnashed the words through his teeth as he threw himself up. He walked to the phone in a huff.

“Hello!” he said, almost yelling.

“Why are you mad?” came Lala’s lightly complaining voice.

“Oh, Lala…”

“I said, why are you mad?”

“It’s not you...”

“Who?”

“Didn’t I say I’d call you in half an hour?”

“So it’s me you are mad at.”

“No, God. Of course not. Look, I’m busy writing a letter. I’ll call you once I’m done.”

No words came from Lala. She sobbed. Ka Mao now realized Lala was in some serious trouble.

“Lala…”

Lala just sobbed on.

“What is it you really want anyway?” Ka Mao said, sounding exasperated.

“Take me away.” Lala said it clear and precise. Ka Mao appeared stunned.

“Lala, are you serious?”

“Take me away. Before Mommy does what she wants to do to me.”

Ka Mao is speechless. He did not have to find out what it was Aling Lydia wanted to do to Lala. The fact that Lala was asking him to take her away was burden enough. Already worries were rending his mind. How would  she house her? How to sustain her bourgeois lifestyle? She was only in high school, a long way off to finishing a college course. Where would he get the financing for her education in exclusive schools?

At the long silence he took, Lala tearfully pleaded, “Maurito, please. Take me away now. Please…”

“Ok, ok. Don’t cry. I’ll plan it out. Tonight. Let me just finish my urgent business here. Ok?”

“Ok.”

“Bye.”

“Bye. Love you.”

“Love you.”

Ka Mao replaced the phone receiver on the set and hurried to proceed with the letter he couldn’t quite compose. This was what immediately worried him the most. How would he ever be able to settle down with Lala at precisely these times when he was bracing himself for the big strike expected to follow the revelation to the Makabayan management that its workers had unionized?

Ah, Lala, he uttered in silent plaint, even as he began pounding at the keys of his typewriter, furiously now, it seemed. How so cruel of you, to put me into this torment. I love you, oh, God knows how truly I love you, as I have never loved anybody before, but this devotion I had vowed to hold high ever for the workers is just as so much the fire we burned in over and over again, and it is a terrible, terrible agony now to have to make a choice. I should never forsake you, but by not forsaking you, I forsake the fight that has been the mother of all of my life’s passion.

And so, with every furious strike of his fingers on the typewriter keys, Ka Mao threw in torrents of remembering…

THE TAXI pulled up in an unlit section on the frontage of the old wooden house. Maurito deliberately made a loud enough banging of the cab door as he stepped out. That was the signal he and Lala had agreed on. And as the taxi sped away, Lala opened the porch window from where she signaled to Maurito to come right in. Stealthily he stepped up the wooden stairs. No sooner that he reached the landing than she rather urgently snatched him into the porch which served as a foyer, walled all around, offering complete privacy which both of them seized in throwing themselves into each other’s ecstasy.

            “Are you sure this is okay?” asked Maurito even as he rummaged his mouth on her face with passionate kisses.

            Matching his passion, she said, “Mommy won’t ever let me go out on a date with you. So I cannot come to you, you come to me.”

            “We come together,” she added, giggling, and then tugged at him, pulling him to her room across the sala. For a moment, Maurito confronted in his mind his amazement at an otherwise innocent fourteen-year-old doing a Marilyn Monroe. Once inside her room, she kicked the door closed as she threw herself into her bed, pulling him along.  And there, finally, she gave vent to releasing every yearning of her flesh to take him, as he took her, taking and sharing all of  their bodies, from their watering mouths to the burning bowels of their beings.  The night was long, and yet every minute brimmed with bliss from ejaculations of ecstasy.

               By three o’clock in the morning, the two had been so spent they dropped to sleep exactly as they were after that one last orgasmic satisfaction: Maurito on top of Lala. Now, that had been the normal hour for Aling Lydia and Mang Timmy to arrive home from the Malate steak house. And by routine, Aling Lydia’s first act after stepping into the sala was to proceed to Lala’s room to check her. Good thing enough that Lala awakened at the opening of the door so that she was able to leap out of bed and shut the door back and lock it.

            “A ,minute, Mom,” she said as she hastily put back on her sleep wear, while prompting Maurito to hide into the clothes cabinet, which he did in his naked glory, forgetting to take along his garments which lay in bed. Lala made sure to close the cabinet sliding door before throwing the room door open, a way of impressing upon anybody that there was nothing to hide in the room.

            Aling Lydia scanned the room interior with her eyes, and if this made her notice anything unusual, she didn’t show it. She just cast a sorry, mad glance at Lala then turned to her room. Lala followed her.

            “Did you bring anything for me, Mommy?” Lala asked.

            Aling Lydia took out a footlong hotdog sandwich as she entered her room and handed it to Lala, who followed her in.

            Meantime Mang Timmy walked into Lala\s room to double-check the man’s garments in Lala’s bed. But no one appeared to be inside the room, except if, as he rightly suspected, that somebody was hiding in the only place anybody could hide in. He rolled open the sliding door of the clothes cabinet and was shocked to find Maurito crouching inside.

            “Maurito!” was Mang Timmy’s suppressed exclamation.

            Maurito could not utter any word. What a sorry sight he was, covering his front with his hands while casting at Mang Timmy a look that was less sad than helpless. If that situation called for an upright manliness on his part, Maurito was a miserable failure. Mang Timmy hurried to their room as Lala got back to her room, continuing to act out her pretense of innocence.

            She found Maurito putting his clothes back on.

            “Mang Timmy found me out,”  he said.

            “My God,” she gasped.

             

            Instantly Lala thought of getting away with Maurito.

            Meanwhile, in their room, Mang Timmy had revealed to Aling Lydia about Maurito and now she was taking out a knife from a drawer.

            “I’d kill that snake.”

            Aling Lydia moved to rush out of the room. Mang Timmy held her back and managed to take the knife from her.

            “Will you be quiet. You’d wake up everybody in the house. Your folks could really end up killing Maurito.”

            “He ought to get killed.”

            “And us get scandalized?”

            “Snake! “

            “Lala is just my stepdaughter, but I’d suffer just as much shame as I would if I were her real father.”

            “Snake!”

            Mang Timmy flailed the knife at Aling Lydia’s face. “You be quiet, I’m warning you. I’ll settle this matter.”

            Mang Timmy rushed out of the room  He rather surprised Lala and Maurito when he threw the door of Lala’s room open. He addressed Maurito..

            “Be quick. Go away. Go.”

            Mang Timmy rushed back to their room. Ka Mao looked to Lala inquisitively. She could almost cry, still she said it.

            “Go.”

WITH THAT final recollection, Ka Mao finished typing the union demand letter. He gave it one last go-through, grabbed a pen, signed it, then rushed over to the office of the Personnel Manager and handed to him the letter.

            The personnel manager read it, then eyed Ka Mao unbelievingly.

            “We are exercising our right to unionize.”

            The personnel manager was at a loss for words. He flashed an ambivalent smile.

CHAPTER X

THE MEZZANINE of the Blumentritt apartment appeared too cramped for comfort. One side, the one with the windows, had a bed, for use by Ka Mao’s siblings, Violeta and Ellen. Tatay Simo and Nanay Puping had their sleeping spaces downstairs where Mamay Oliva also had her quarters.  Toward the streetside of the apartment, the mezzanine stopped midway with a railing from where to look out into the ground floor, the front of which was occupied by the family’s sari-sari store. At the moment, Tatay Simo and Mamay Oliva were engaged in casual conversation while minding the store and Violeta and Ellen were studying their school assignments at the dining table. On the railing side of the mezzanine, Nanay Puping was setting up the space for some purpose.

            Observing as he stood by the railing, Ka Mao said after a long while of silence, “I think it’s ok for now, Nanay. You hang a curtain or a blanket across this area and it can serve as our room for the time being.”

            “What time will you pick her up?” Nanay Puping asked.

            “Toward midnight I suppose. We will have to wait till her folks are soundly asleep.”

            “If you ask me, I’d rather that we sit down with her parents and ask for her hands…”

            “Nanay, that’s out of the question. Her mother has high ambitions for her. It’s not my kind she’d like her daughter to settle down with. They’re all the same, those mothers. Grooming their lovely daughters to be some rich guys’ mates.”

            Nanay Puping chose not to argue. She knew Ka Mao’s ill temper. Ever the understanding mother that she had been, she gave Ka Mao a glance that said whatever his decision was, she was with him. The noise made by Tatay Simo and Mamay Oliva in closing the store distracted Nanay Puping.

            “Your Tatay is closing the store. It must be late,” she said.

             She took a large white blanket out of a cabinet and moved to hang it across that section of the mezzanine so as to closet it; arrangements had been done so that the area now contained amenities such as an improvised bed with old mattress made neat with clean sheet, an old shaded lamp, a stool to one side, and a corner made into a section for keeping and hanging clothes in.

            Ka Mao started for downstairs.

            “I had better be going,” he said.

THE TAXI, as in the many times of Ka Mao’s stealing moments with Lala in the past, stopped in the unlit section of the frontage of  the old wooden ancestral home.

            “Wait a while,” Ka Mao told the cab driver. “I’m fetching somebody.”

            The cab driver nodded, immediately sliding on his seat to steal some nap.

            And as usual, after stepping out, Ka Mao banged the cab door loud enough for his signal to Lala.

            The cab driver straightened up on his seat, looking to Ka Mao inquiringly.

            “It’s ok,” Ka Mao said. “Just my signal.”

            The cab driver resumed his sleeping position.

Ka Mao leaned on the cab side to wait. His understanding with Lala had been that as soon as she heard the banging of the cab door, Lala would sneak out of the house and that’s it, they’d be up up and away. But a minute went by, then two, and then three. Ka Mao had not expected it would take that long for Lala to come out. Unless, he thought, she must have fallen asleep. So he decided to make another bang, this time a little louder, of the cab door – prompting the cab driver to straighten up again on his seat. Ka Mao gestured to him to relax.

“Oh, yes. Signal,” said the driver, slouching on his seat again, covering his face with the face towel hung around his neck.

      

            Another minute went by, then two. Ka Mao was getting impatient. At the strike of the next minute, he banged the door really hard, arousing the snoring driver, who complained.

            “You’re wrecking my car!”

            Ka Mao gestured with his hand for the driver to be quiet.

            “You be quiet.,” said the driver, instantly turning the engine on. “Pay me and you can take another taxi.”

            Now the window of the porch opened.

            “Wait,” Ka Mao told the driver. “She’s here.”

            Lala did show herself at the window, but at Ka Mao’s prompting for her to be quick, she waved him away with her hand. Ka Mao couldn’t make it out. He motioned for her to come down. She waved him away with her hand harder. He motioned for her to come down more urgently. And harder still, she waved him away with her hand, and then with that closed the porch window.

            Ka Mao realized Lala was not coming out at all. Though he spent another minute just standing there, hoping that Lala would still be coming down, all his spirit for the elopement had gone. Soon he stepped back into the cab and told the cabbie to drive away.

            “What’s happened?”

            “Mind your own business, will you!” Ka Mao growled.

            The cab driver stepped on the gas.

KA MAO went home to the Blumentritt apartment sagging inside him.

            “Where is she?” asked Nanay Puping.

            He could only respond with a lame shake of his head.

            “What happened?”

            Again, just a shake of his head. How was he to explain? Lala just waved him away.

            Nanay Puping sensed something had gone wrong, but because Ka Mao would not speak a word, she chose not to speak anymore, too. Ever the understanding mother, Nanay Puping needed not many words from Ka Mao to know what was going on in his mind and in his heart. This time, his deep silence indicated his grief just as deep.

            Ka Mao proceeded to the mezzanine quarters that Nanay Puping had meticulously prepared for him and Lala. It would have been a cozy enough corner of the world for two people in love to start a family from. He lay on the bed, felt the smoothness of clean lenin made even more savory by the scent of air freshener indicated by the canister lying on the stand by the lampshade. This could have been a blissful night, after all.

How heartless of Lala to have driven him away just like that. So much was between them, so much of dear value, always to cling to, never to let go, and yet she let go, with an, oh, so utterly slighting slight wave of a hand. It had made him feel he was nothing to her – nothing at all.

For a moment, Ka Mao felt succumbing to rage, the kind one feels from being rejected. Can Lala be like anyone of those Ermita bitches to whom smudge from sex was only a matter for bathsoap; a little scrubbing here and there and presto, you’re fresh again.

But Lala had been the dearest darling he had had in his life to whom he had been just as such a darling, too. It was just too bad that he did not care to find out why she suddenly refused to come with him. For him to have had the guts to barge into the house in the dead of the night and forcibly take her away was out of the question. This was no fairy tale where a prince charming engages in bravado to rescue his lady love. In the reality of their relationship, he would have caused Lala great harm had he sought to force the issue then and there.  The shame, the scandal, all the nasty things that would result from such an insistence by Ka Mao to take her away, could forever damage Lala’s career in the glamor world. Ka Mao had all this in mind when finally he allowed himself to be just waved away by Lala. He could clear the matter up later.

Sadly they never got to talk to each other again after that – that is, not after two and half decades.

In the mid-nineties, Ka Mao was getting hailed as a top movie box office director. He was supervising the post-production work on a movie he was doing when he got a call on the phone at the information desk of the post-production outfit, Magnatech.

“Hello,” he spoke on the phone impatiently.

“Hello, Maurito,” said the voice at the other end of the line.

All of sudden, Ka Mao felt melting in a mix of exquisite shiver and warmth that crept all over his flesh. His eyes were glassy in an instant.

“Lala!” he exclaimed, though in a hushed manner.

“How are you?” she said.

“I’m ok,” he said.

“You must be. I’ve been hearing a lot of nice things about you.”

“Oh…”

“I’ve been following things about you.”

“How did you trace this number?”

“When  you follow somebody, you follow him all the way.”

A surge of fire in his chest was getting Ka Mao’s eyes wet.

“So how are you and Ricky?” Ka Mao found himself asking, if only to divert his mind from the tear threatening to form in his eyes. “I only heard about it from stories. That it’s him you eventually married.”

“Oh, well, that’s not what’s forever.”

“Oh…”

“After a time, we’re off.”

“Why did you call by the way? Anything I can do for you?

“I’ve always been this way since we parted. Everytime something big happens in my life, good or bad, it’s always you I’d like to be with. So I do my damn best to reach you wherever you are.”

Ka Mao was getting ill at ease. He sensed where all the talk was leading to and he did not wish to encourage it. Lala, for all the beautiful memories, had been an ended story, let her stay at that. But the phone addict that she had always been, Lala would go reminiscing on and on.

“You did a pretty good job of our story, do you know that?”

“What story?” asked Ka Mao in surprise.

“Tag-Ulan Sa Tag-araw,” she said.

That was the title of the film Ka Mao wrote in 1976 based on his first fiction,  “Forests of the Heart”, which appeared in Weekly Graphic Magazine in the mid-sixties. The film version told of a boy and a girl falling in love with each other at first sight, only to find out later that they were first cousins; the love relationship is taboo according to Philippine social norms. Pursuing the relationship resulted to the girl getting pregnant by the boy. Discovering this, the parents of the girl decided to have the child aborted, and the boy, learning about this,  decided to elope with the girl. The elopement was discovered, with the girl’s father having the boy mauled so badly that he had to be hospitalized. Defying doctor’s order, the boy escaped from his hospital confinement in order to rescue the girl as she was being rushed away in a car by her parents for abortion of the child. But for all his human grit, how could the boy, on foot, catch up with the car. On this note of pathos, the film ended.

The film, which featured the first pairing of Christopher de Leon and Vilma Santos, was a smash hit, propelling further Ka Mao’s rise as a screenwriter.     

“Oh, yes, ‘Tag-Ulan Sa Tag-araw’,” Ka Mao just found himself remarking at Lala’s recollection.

“I saw the film, and I cried and cried. How so true, I said. I saw it with Mommy, and she cried, too. She knew that’s what she did to me.”

Suddenly, Ka Mao sensed something serious in Lala’s words. It intrigued him.

“What did Mommy do to you?”

“She brought me to Hongkong and there had our baby aborted.”

The lobby of the Magnatech that afternoon was crawling with all sorts of movie personalities, stars, crewmen, technical people, and Ka Mao would have created a scene had he let out his grief and rage at knowing that his first baby ever had been killed. Yes, killed, he protested to himself. Abortion is murder! My God! But he could only revolt to himself. He was so shocked that any capacity in him to react with emotion was totally numbed.

“I should have gone with you that night. We could have just had our baby. But Mommy threatened to harm you or bring you to court for whatever charges if I went away with you. And I was afraid for you. And so I thought it best to follow her order. I said to myself, it’s ok that we parted. At least you’re safe.  I didn’t know that she would bring me all the way to that abortion in Hongkong.  Maurito it hurt. I lost you, and then lost our baby, too. Oh, how it hurt.”

Ka Mao couldn’t take it anymore. He shifted his face away from the lobby crowd, pressing his head close to the wall to hide the tears forming in his eyes.

“Lala, I’m busy.”

“I want to see you.”

“No more, Lala. It’s all over.”

“Nothing is over that is forever.”

Tears welled in Ka Mao’s eyes. He put the phone down.