The last chapter of Legends and Adventures, the second volume of Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil?s intended trilogy of memoirs, illumines its first twenty-two chapters with the eerie light of a very long day a quarter of a century ago.
On Aug.21, 1983, sharks fin soup had just been ladled at a luncheon meeting with Imelda Marcos on the subject of the National Censors Board and its problems under Mrs. Nakpil?s recommendee, Maria Kalaw-Katigbak, when Madame is summoned to a phone call from Gen. Fabian Ver. It had her rushing back to Malacañang with everyone following, not knowing why.
They find out soon enough: ?Mrs. Marcos excused herself, and came back wearing a hostess gown, saying she had to go and talk to the President at the Guest House. We knew he was receiving medical treatment for his kidneys in the impromptu hospital that had been set up there. The rumor was that he had undergone a transplant.
?After a short while, Mrs. Marcos came back. Her color had changed. Her face was so pale and sallow that the rogue in her cheeks stood out in clownish blotches. ?Ninoy has been shot dead at the airport!? she said in a vehement whisper. I had stood up and felt my knees buckle. ?My God! My God!? Everyone else was stricken into silence. It felt as if a bomb had exploded in our midst. People moved around like somnambulists??
A few days later, Mrs. Nakpil found herself with Mrs. Marcos, alone. ?I asked her whether she and the President had watched Ninoy?s funeral on TV, and she said, yes, they?d done so, together, in his bedroom. And that they?d been crushed, struck dumb by the enormity of what they were seeing on the video screen. She added that they had felt overwhelmingly humiliated because they had little inkling of the public mood, and that Marcos had said, ?So, after all these years, all our efforts, our trying and striving, it has come to this??
??Ninoy did not die that day on that sunny, Sunday afternoon in August 1983, at the Manila International Airport, for that was when he began to live forever in the hearts of his countrymen. It was Ferdinand Marcos who died that day, and he knew it.?
Mrs. Nakpil goes on to reflect on how she herself ?had not been seeing the forest for the trees for years. I probably knew less about the facts of the Marcos regime than the outsiders who kept up with gossip, and certainly much less than the bold, ingenious reporters of the ?mosquito?-turned dragon press.?
In March of 2006, Myself, Elsewhere prodded the end of my self-imposed distance from a well-loved exemplar since she went to work for the Marcos regime. NowLegends and Adventures made it feel as urgent as the day?s headlines to beg her for more memories.
?I read your last chapter several times. And the way you recounted Imelda?s surprise, you practically exonerated her from any blame for Ninoy?s assassination,? I ventured at the end of the launching in the home of her old friend, Chito Madrigal-Collantes. ?I don?t know, I really don?t know,? said Mrs. Nakpil with furrowed brow.
?And Marcos was on the dialysis machine at that hour?? I pursued. ?He was unconscious!? she said, lapsing into journalist-to-journalist. That wasn?t in the book, I realized, as she asked, ?You saw the latest theory? That Danding Cojuangco ordered it?? ?Doubtful,? I said. ?I was told by a mutual relative that Danding was actually sending money to Boston, to help Cory and Ninoy?So that brings us back to the military high command.?
?Fabian Ver?? she asked. ?Yes, or someone close,? I said. ?It?s really still a puzzle to me,? she said slowly, ?although at some point, Marcos threw something at Imelda.? That detail had a still live coal bouncing back to the Romualdez camp just as it had in 1983. Meanwhile a born historian now 84 years old continued with unmistakable feeling, ?Ninoy did not have to die! He could have done so much for the country. What a loss!?
There are more interesting details in this ?minor Palace insider?s? account of Aug. 21, 1983, told in the style of a brisk historical thriller. That day remains intriguing, but we lose the book?s deepest lights if we isolate this last chapter and the reasons, also told in this book, why Carmen Nakpil ? well-named Guerrero ? began and continued to work for a martial law regime incarcerating and torturing some of the best Filipinos.
Memoir-writing at its best, this book taken whole weaves nation and self together with a feel and intimacy that cannot fail to move Filipino and non-Filipino, loyalist, disloyalist or un-loyalist from both camps. Its value lies not only in its broad historical strokes, but also in the single thread of a gifted, passionately nationalist consciousness carving a paradoxical niche, for its own deeply felt reasons, in what is still a black hole in Philippine history.
Where the thread began
That single thread began with Carmen Guerrero?s birth and childhood in old Ermita, ending thus in Myself, Elsewhere : ?I had lost my husband, both my homes, my hometown, my city, all resources of every kind except my parents and my brothers who were also destitute. And I was 22.?
Legends and Adventures picks up that thread a few months later in 1945, in the ruins of a once uniquely beautiful Manila equaling the destruction of lives (?100,000 Filipinos in Manila and 1,000,000 all over the country?), and most of what illusions remained of security as an American colony.
From heartbreaking ?wasteland and rubble? where her genteel hometown Ermita became a haunting mirage of an irretrievable past, young Chitang and her two babies, a touch of Scarlett O?Hara about her, moved with her paternal family to a ?hovel in Sampaloc,? where hunger and despondency in much reduced circumstances were constant companions.
From there she found herself a first job as proofreader for the Evening News of the era, amid ?derelict, rickety buildings, shell-pocked muddy streets, rows of shanties, girlie bars, G.I. honky-tonks, and foul-smelling alleys?(with) pimps, floozies, and, of course, journalists roam(ing) over the cityscape like lost souls.?
It?s no hyperbole to add that World War II also destroyed a good part of Manila?s old soul. ?The steely rules of old Ermita are gone and the only etiquette is Dog Eat Dog,? she writes of the physical and moral ruin of the city to its present ?effervescent ugliness.? Her journalistic career blossoms with her womanly beauty as Chitang Nakpil proceeds to the peak of punditry, capturing to the last nuance the widespread poverty and desperation, the wild new dreams and manic existentialism that my own generation of journalists found in full bloom two decades later. Meanwhile she was raising her first two children and the three more she had in a second marriage.
The events, sociology, history-makers and historians she summons as subjects and witnesses can be found in other written records and the oral tradition of other WW II survivors. But not quite like this. Wit, style, courage and self-confessed impudence, matched by scholarship and unquestionable love of country, offer a precious gift of context to succeeding Filipino generations in these memoirs.
Each generation?s experience of the tattered fabric of our historic legacy, what it?s tried, continues and will continue trying to do about it, joins the ever larger story of a common life, filtered through history-in-a-hurry a.k.a. journalism in this book. What each lives and fights for in its day adds up to a growing collective wisdom that enhances collective survival, if it?s passed on as clearly and trenchantly as this.
And the past six decades from the eyes of a Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil renews faith and deepens compassion in common cause ? as she walks her talk on the picket line of a newspaper labor union in the ?40s, madly drinks and dances to forget as well as to remember in the ?50s; raises funds to build a gleaming, modernist National Press Club designed by her second husband, architect Angel E. Nakpil, in the Magsaysay era, only to see it eventually run aground through the ?70s and ?80s, meanwhile dreaming, always dreaming, of better ways.
These memoirs also travel the world with Chitang as journalist, Marcos government official and member of the UNESCO Board successively. Much more waits to be recalled and more widely understood in a globalizing world. In wait for Part III, no lover of country should meanwhile miss reading both volumes for memories to live by, good and bad, in the sheer pleasure of its feisty elegance. Style is the woman, empathically Filipina.
The author?s near look-alike beauty queen daughter, Gemma Cruz-Araneta, an equally tall and sassy nationalist, throws a bon mot in her own recent column sympathetic to the reasons for Trillanes? latest coup, coincidentally also describing her mother?s memoirs, ?History never ends.? The point is that we carry on, taking turns at the head, the middle or the back of one uninterrupted line, backwards and forwards in history, each time trying to get it right and, by God, saying so.
?Legends and Adventures? is available in Powerbooks, other National Bookstore outlets and Fully Booked. It can also ordered by e-mail from nakpil@gmail.com.
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Previous columns:
Between Two Heroes ? 12/02/07
An Idea Whose Time Has Come ? 11/18/07
Sacred Moon, Flying Crab ? 11/11/07
Farewell, October ? 11/04/07
