CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY (MindaNews/18 February) — I was in my first year of high school in February 1986. I can no longer recall whether it was on the 23rd or the 24th. But I can still remember how I came to know that there was an EDSA People Power unfolding in faraway Manila.
I remember it was an ordinary day at Xavier University High School. At that time, if you were a boy, you went to XUHS; girls went to Lourdes. Or to some other private school your family could afford, like Kong Hua, the Chinese exclusive coed school.
It was midmorning. The class I was in, Pilipino I think it was, was just beginning. We were starting with the day’s lessons when our young Jesuit moderator, sweat dripping from his brow and visibly out of breath, barged into class and asked our Pilipino teacher for a moment with us.
“Boys,” he began almost in sing-song. “Boys, Marcos is gone (wala na si Marcos)!”
I glanced at my classmates, not quite sure what to make of the news that has gotten our moderator excited so early in the morning.
His eyes were happy, like a kid’s at a toy shop. But his excitement dimmed as he looked at us uncomprehending 14-year-olds, ignorant or indifferent to the consequential events in Manila.
Before class the next day, we spied our Jesuit moderator coming from the Jesuit house on his way to class. You see, the Jesuits live in a building in front of the old high school classrooms, across the soccer field, past the XU Chapel on the right.
Our classrooms had windows that spanned almost the entire wall, with just an intricate metal grill separating the inside from the outside. We could see him walking with his shoulders hunched, dragging his feet, almost as if he were weighed down by the books in the crook of his arm.
“Yehey,” shouted a classmate as soon as the young Jesuit stepped inside.
“Marcos is still here!”
“Yey,” we cheered.
That classmate was a standout presence since childhood. He was always coming up with naughty tricks that many of us enlisted in, the kind that on more than one occasion spelled trouble that you unfortunately realized only when it was already on top of your head. That classmate’s father was also a prominent lawyer in town and a fixture at the local KBL chapter (or the Movement for a New Society).
“Marcos is still here!”
The young Jesuit froze at the doorway, his dark countenance turning darker and darker, almost like gathering clouds sucking up moisture, summoning the thunder and the lightning.
“Out! In the soccer field, all of you! Squat! Sqqquaaat!”
This memory still gets us laughing when told and retold during high school reunions. We laugh at the naughty, sometimes even mean pranks we played on our teachers and on ourselves. We laugh. Even as our laughter echoes like the ignorant laughter of Edgar Allan Poe’s Fortunato: “Ha! ha! ha! — he! he! — a very good joke indeed.” Fortunato, who continued to laugh even as Montresor began walling him brick by brick into a niche in the wall.
When I came home to CDO Christmas of ’96, I remember my father asking me to come to dinner with him at his employer’s. My father was a hard worker with a solid job working for a family of generational wealth breeding horses and cattle.
They wanted to see how I was doing, to see what had become of me, I whom they had seen very little since I was a boy tagging along with my father on horseback.
We were ushered in and told to wait in the hallway beside the kitchen. After some time, a servant relayed that the Señorita was now ready to receive us. We climbed the stairs leading to the patio where the Señorita was waiting, seated on a wooden rocking chair under a soft light, warm with a thick blanket spread over her legs.
She asked me how I was. I answered what I was asked, politely. In measured speech I replied that I was fine, doing this, doing that after which we were invited to dine with the rest of the family.
Both my father and my mother, who was with an American multinational before emigrating to the US, had jobs that gave us lives of relative privilege, allowing my siblings and I to enroll at schools like XUHS and Lourdes. That was probably the reason why the most terrible thing that I remember from Martial Law was turning the TV dial and finding out that Voltes V, Daimos, and Mazinger Z were no longer there. Or that arcades, the sort where you drop coins unto colorful machines to play video games, were henceforth banned.
I was blissfully unaware. I was unaware of the lucky circumstances I was in. I never pieced together, even with my privileged education, why, when spending summers at the ranch, I was distinctly treated as the boss’s son, allowed to do pretty much what I reasonably fancied, even while playing games with other children.
I began to partly understand only when I went against the wishes of my father and enrolled at a university he disliked. In that university, I was introduced to Renato Constantino’s A Past Revisited and given a reading list that included, among others, a book by Stanley Karnow detailing how America built its empire in the Philippines.
I was able to visit Neuengamme, a town about 30 minutes away from Hamburg, Germany, in the winter of ’98. The town was quiet, in the dead of winter. But during the Nazi era, Neuengamme hosted a work camp that was part of a larger network of concentration camps across Europe. Over 100,000 POWs, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gypsies, communists, homosexuals, and other ‘undesirables’ were incarcerated in the Neuengamme camp between 1938 and 1945.
My German brother-in-law brought me there to see the camp, now a museum, and see the exhibits and understand the context of his country’s dark past. For the most part I was by myself. Until a bus arrived with some 50 police recruits.
Soon I was looking at ordinary, everyday, mundane objects— prisoners’ personal effects, prisoners’ uniforms, clothing, tools, rows of bunk beds, and the like—with one or two of these police recruits. There was no conversation. Not even polite acknowledgement of each other’s presence.
Looking at those objects encased in glass, I began to understand what took place there, I began to feel the suffering the walls must have witnessed.
The camp was not far from town, old houses stand scattered just outside the camp’s walls. Not too long ago, men laughed, played with their children, ate dinner with family, and slept soundly in bed in winter, embraced by warm blankets. And then went to work in the morning, work that coincidentally involved inflicting unimaginable cruelty to other human beings.
Unlike the Germans, we are taught history in a manner that made and continues to make Fortunatos of many of us. Names, dates, places, and events to be committed to memory. Exams testing if we remembered correctly the names of dead heroes or villains, of events from the distant past, of crumbling places long overgrown with weeds.
It is no wonder why, forty years hence, we are still stumbling around, drunk like Fortunato, trusting Montresor to lead us to a cask of Amontillado.
We’ve had a succession of Montresors– Erap, Macapagal-Arroyo. Duterte who many continue to adore even as he faces charges of committing crimes against humanity.
A Marcos is back at Malacañang.
“For the love of God, Montresor!” “Yes,” I (Montresor) said, “for the love of God!” (JB R. Deveza/MindaNews)
