She Broke My Heart and Made It Whole Again
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A young Carmen Guerrero Nakpil (Source: Inquirer.net)
Awe at the presence of this woman of such elegant prose, unmatched by any of them, became a life-changing moment for this eavesdropping young writer. I was deeply intrigued by her unrelenting barbs against Uncle Sam. Trying to find out why, she turned into my guide to a long, puzzling history that so fascinated me.
Then my boss, Chitang’s old friend and classmate, Amelia “Mile” Valencia, editor of “Woman & Home” was beside herself when, Chitang’s daughter Gemma, my old phone pal, made history herself as Miss International, the first global beauty title for the Philippines. I finally met her formidable mother at the launch of her first book, “Woman Enough”. Too star-struck to converse, I settled for listening to towering Chitang’s wisecracks with two generations of our women writers’ tribe.
Carmen Guerrero Nakpil with President Ramon Magsaysay (Source: philstar.com)
Getting home, I tore into her book. There I found two new insights on the Filipina that would stay with me for life. First, she called Jose Rizal’s shy young heroine Maria Clara “the misfortune that has befallen Filipino women in the last one hundred years.” And how, in truth, the matriarch, not the patriarch, rules the Filipino roost. Again, I just had to find out more.
What a coincidence that Mrs. Nakpil next quit the Chronicle and transferred to the Sunday Times Magazine with a new column, “Consensus of One” in 1966, the same year I left the Chronicle’s union problems behind for the larger Manila Times. That’s when it hit me: we were both Theresians, with St. Teresa of Avila looming over us, she who faced off with bishops and wound up reforming the Spanish Catholic Church with its “Holy” Inquisition.
Decades later, Mrs. Nakpil finally wrote the story of how CIA harassment tagged her and Soliongco red, in collusion with the NBI chief warning a Senate hearing of a communist plot in the Chronicle.That was my first glimpse of the fate of our shared activist temperament in Cold War.
By the early ‘70s my essay “Ermita in the Kali-Yuga,” telling the tale of my own maverick life in our counter-culture abloom in tropical Bohemia, caught her eye. In her column she asked, “Any relation?” between my title and my surname. Then she pointed out the difference between Ermita, where she was born, and neighboring Malate, where I lived. Details on her “citadel of civility” before it vanished in WW II deepened my own sense of nostalgia among Art Nouveau ruins disappearing one by one in the onslaught of white backpackers and Japanese tour groups.
Thrill at our shared spirit of place would soon be mixed with pain. Beyond my understanding was how my exemplar would join Marcos’s martial law team. In its crackdown on a free press, many of my friends, if not dead, were jailed and tortured, or captive in its “crony press.” Heartbroken, I swore never to write a word for them. Neither would I speak to Mrs. Nakpil and her fellow anti-American, Adrian Cristobal ever again.
Imagine writers and artists in their creative 20s under a humorless dictator suppressing Filipino humor and natural wisdom, flattening our world, making it one-dimensional, utterly predictable. Marcos had guns and prisons to keep everyone and everything in total control. Mrs. Marcos was a shellacked “patroness of the arts,” a Barbie doll declaiming on the ancient Filipino soul she hardly understood.
Carmen Guerrero Nakpil with President Ferdinand Marcos (Source: philter.com)
Once my lively second home, the press became so boring I read the papers only whenever Mrs. Nakpil’s scholarly irreverence bubbled up. In that chasm between the sovereign democracy we won back from the Americans and what her new boss euphemistically called “constitutional authoritarianism,” she was now teaching me the most painful realpolitik.
On August 1971, one year, one month before Marcos’s declaration of martial law, his opponent Liberal Party’s miting de avance in Plaza Miranda was bombed. Blaming the CPP, Marcos suspended the writ of habeas corpus. Teodoro Locsin, Sr.’s “virulent manifesto” against it was signed by Chitang, fellow-writers and journalists. That manifesto foreshadowed our own Free the Artist, Free the Media’s full-page manifesto in the Inquirer 11 years later, the beginning of the end for the Marcos juggernaut.
Back in 1971 most Filipinos thought Marcos was behind the bombing. Fifteen years later, former NPA commander Victor Corpus claimed to me that it was Joma Sison who ordered the bombing to hasten the outbreak of their communist revolution. That was difficult to confirm with authoritative sources underground.
Easier to confirm was the revelation of Eduardo Quintero from Mrs. Marcos’s Leyte, telling the world in 1972 that he and fellow delegates to the Constitutional Convention Marcos convened were bribed to delete the new Charter’s provision for only two terms for a Philippine president. The grapevine in gossip-soaked Manila was rife for months on Marcos’s next move. They needn’t have bothered to stage defense secretary Juan Ponce Enrile’s “ambush” before finally declaring martial law on Sept. 21, 1972. No more elections. Marcos could now reign forever and ever.
Only in Chitang’s memoirs would I learn that her buddy, SSS chairman Adrian Cristobal, warned her the day before. By 2:00 a.m. the next morning, the military was in the Forbes Park home of her daughter Gemma, member of the leftist Makibaka, and her husband Tonypet Araneta, one of the few Con Con delegates who refused to sign the new Charter without a provision prohibiting Marcos from another term. Tonypet managed to escape but after the military found his high-powered guns in his father’s stables, he was caught hiding in his father’s house nine months later.
“She called Jose Rizal’s shy young Maria Clara “the misfortune that has befallen Filipino women in the last one hundred years.” ”
Had I known that, how could I have avoided Mrs. Nakpil at the Afro-Asian Writers Symposium she opened in Manila in 1975 with the Russian rebel poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko? In the following years even the most impressive international events with brilliant scientists and artists in Manila would be tainted by Marcos’s martial law. Despite its achievements in infrastructure and Cold War diplomacy, martial law would remain irreconcilable with the democratic spirit to the end.
Seeing Chitang Nakpil flit in and out of photos of foreign trips, chaperoning Marcos’s “secret weapon” Imelda, was staring aghast at a Fellini film. A Question of Identity, her second anthology of essays written before but published under martial law, brought sharp pangs of loss. Marcos had silenced even our flag-bearing free spirit the Jesuit historian Fr. Horacio De la Costa once called “a leprechaun in the archives.”
She obviously enjoyed pride of place. When she resumed column-writing in the straightjacket of unfreedom of the press, she got away with lines like, “Then as now, the Malays of the Philippine archipelago responded to kindness, resisted coercion but bowed gracefully to the inevitable. It is after all the same spirit in which the Manilan confronts every street, BIR notice or presidential decree.” (The Philippines and the Filipinos,1977)
She later confessed to also spending time in “gold-rimmed ghostwriting” and “elucidating Marcos’s policies” under the collective byline of one Filosofo Tasso. She even took a second government job as director of the new Technology Resource Center in 1975 “to spread appropriate technology throughout the country.’’ Ever au courantChitang even had an astrologer on her staff, helping her convince skeptics to make “This Nation Great Again”. Under propaganda’s veil, her loss of credibility shadowed even our common cause in appro-tech.
Thirty years later in the last of her memoirs, Exeunt, she candidly admits: “It wasn’t really just that I had compromised myself for my activist daughter and son-in-law…but also, at the bottom, because Marcos was doing important things I swear by. For one thing, he’s nationalistic...he thinks history is important and genuinely loves Filipino ways of life.” C’mon, I retorted in my mind, are you saying all “Filipino ways of life” are good for the country?
History eventually refuted one major reason she gave for staying with Marcos -- his land reform program. Professor EmeritusBenedict Kerkvliet of the International School of Political & Strategic Studies pointed out that “Marcos had skirted the Agricultural Reform Code of 1956 in his first term, nor did he need martial law to implement land reform. The program, in fact, had practically come to a standstill in 1974.”
Then Filipino scholar Saturnino Borras, Jr. wrote in his PhD thesis: “After more than a decade of implementation, the land distribution outcome of Marcos’s program was far below the level of its original intentions and promises…it remained unclear how many beneficiaries actually got their Certificates of Land Transfer and were able to take possession of awarded lands. It is also unclear from the data how many peasant beneficiaries were actually able to pay for the land and secure the actual land titles.”
In short, land reform remained the most grievous failing of Marcos’s “New Society.” No different from its predecessors, it granted just enough concessions “to keep agrarian unrest to manageable levels.” Interestingly, Mrs. Nakpil’s personal insights on land reform and the Filipino peasant found their way to her lone novel,The Rice Conspiracy, published four years after Marcos’s flight.
Reconciliation
In 2009, 23 years since Marcos fled, the moment came to break 37 years of silence. The long winding road had given me my own column in the Manila Bulletin after the “lifting of martial law” in 1981, only to be fired by Marcos through his dummy Hans Menzi in 1982 when I got back from communist Russia. History was moving fast. The day before Ninoy Aquino’s assassination, I was given a column in the “mosquito” press (Malaya), then a second column (Veritas), to help fan anti-Marcos flames. Three years later, resistance finally led to the People Power revolt in 1986.
Carmen Guerrero Nakpil (Source: The Philippines Graphic)
A quarter of a century later, the centennial of International Women’s Day was coming up in March. Think as I might, no one but no one I knew would be as erudite and sharp-edged on women for my Inquirer7 column than Carmen Guerrero Nakpil.
So, one fine morning, there she sat on her sofa facing me, the idol who broke my heart, she in her 80s, I in my 60s. “Why haven’t you come to see me before?” she asked. “Because you betrayed me by working for Marcos!” I exclaimed. “You should have told me long before,” she said gently, bringing back the happy memory of our last face-to-face. She was chair of the National Historical Commission then, delighting me with her program giving new life to all-but-forgotten history of what we both knew as our amnesiac country.
“It’s Marcos’s fault!” I burst out. “You let him use you, you and Adrian of all people! I was following both your footsteps and now there was no one to guide me!” Eyebrows arched, pouring us coffee, she said, “Okay, let me tell you what happened with Marcos and me. I’m writing about it now.” Oh?” I said.
“I went to Marcos soon after Gemma was interrogated and placed under city arrest. Tonypet was detained in solitary confinement, charged with subversion. That has a death penalty, you know,” she said somberly. Two months later, not knowing that Mrs. Marcos had her name dropped from the arrest list, this writer of my heart was in Malacañang, begging for her son-in-law’s release.
“Without a word, Marcos slid a paper across his desk, hiring me, silently waiting for my signature,” she said. Marcos knew his chess. For one political prisoner pawn, he captured a queen, a first-rate historian with a mother’s heart. “I signed,” she said, fixing her eye on me. Now a mother myself, something clicked. I finally understood.
On our way to continue over lunch, her knees buckled and she stumbled. In the old candor I loved, she remarked, “This is what I get for all my drinking years.” Relaxed, we proceeded with my interview on the subject of women, peppered with more CIA stories and her warning me to watch my own back.
Our long reunion ended with her asking me into her bedroom to gift me with a cloisonné jewel box that just happened to be in my favorite turquoise and coral. Walking out by mid-afternoon, I realized I’d begun thinking of her as “Mama Chitang.”
I returned for a second visit on the way to a multi-sectoral protest rally calling for Gloria Arroyo’s resignation. To my amusement, she drew her condo curtains, peeked out to Ayala Avenue and said, “Konti pa’ng tao. Bantayan muna natin.” When she saw the crowd thickening, she said, “Go now. Run back if there’s any trouble.” We were on the same side now. After scores of protest rallies, I never went to a rally with a lighter heart.
But there was still so much to talk about from the opposing sides that divided us for 37 years. Arriving early at the launch of Legends and Adventures,the second of her memoir trilogy, I instantly asked, “So who do you think had Ninoy killed – Marcos-Ver or my cousin Danding?”
Carmen Guerrero Nakpil's autobiographical trilogy
She took me aside from Chito Vasquez-Collantes, her billionaire amigahosting the launch. “I’m writing about Ninoy in the last of my trilogy, but I still honestly don’t know.” We exchanged what we heard from our separate circles, winding up with the same blank.
Revisiting the EDSA Revolt in Legends, she professed ignorance on the Marcos regime she worked for, “For years I had not been seeing the forest for the trees. I probably knew less about the facts of the Marcos regime than the outsiders who kept up with gossip… certainly much less than the bold, ingenious reporters of the ‘mosquito’ turned dragon press.” Hah! Poor you, I thought. We won that one.
Years later, again she saw the CIA hand in the EDSA Revolt and what followed: “I believe that EDSA as revolutionary reform failed because, from its inception, it was tainted by foreign interests and even its native elements were blighted by self-serving motives…
“Filipinos are supposed to have taught several other peoples how to peaceably change an unwanted regime, but they also taught themselves the more valuable lesson: that it doesn’t work unless your hearts are pure.” I couldn’t agree more with my former nemesis, born and named on the feast day of a radical of purity, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel.
There’s so much more in these memoirs of both Rizal’s and Andres Bonifacio’s storytelling grandniece-in-law, Carmen Guerrero-Cruz-Nakpil. Everyone who really wants to know Philippine history backwards and forwards through centuries should read her trilogy in toto,as well as all her books – perhaps to glimpse the shining soul lodging there, waiting for understanding beyond age and genes, religion and ideology.
My third visit was a family Christmas reunion with Mama Chitang’s two daughters, Gemma Cruz-Araneta and Liza Guerrero Nakpil, and two grandchildren from her son Toto Cruz, Jr. Our distinguished matriarch sat there, demolishing time as she compared Ermita’s archaiccastellano and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s provincial Colombian with Spain’s modernidioma del paiz, making me see our islands floating in space.
The author (left) with Gemma Cruz Araneta and Patricia Araneta (standing). (Photo courtesy of Sylvia Mayuga)
She received me in bed on my fourth visit. It turned out to be the last, an image I would keep for the rest of my life. She fell into coma in 2016. For two years I was in close touch with Gemma, now my partner curating as I spread the news of historian Saul Hofileña’s own capture of Philippine history in magnificent surreal art. We, too, were demolishing time.
Always, my first question was, “How’s Mama?’’ “She doesn’t speak,” Gemma said. “Sometimes she opens her eyes but doesn’t recognize anyone”. I suggested marijuana oil to stimulate the speech center of her brain. Gemma tried, to no avail. The woman her husband Angel once called “Speaker of the House” would never speak another earthly word.
When Gemma texted early on July 30, 2018, “Mommy died 1:30 AM today,” it dawned on me. The way she mothered us in life would be more powerful now. I spoke to her in prayer, “It’s hard dealing with China like you did with America, Mama, so please guide us in our dreams from eternal Ermita.” The day after her ashes were inurned, this story emerged, a living thing, like the sun breaking out in typhoon season. In sun and rain,semper fidelis, Mama Chitang.
Sylvia Mayuga
Sylvia L. Mayuga is a veteran Filipino writer on the arts, culture and history of the Philippines. She has three National Book Awards to her name.
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