Strugglest, Crises and New Tryst

Telling the Story of Tony Mercado 1

An Innovator in Philippine Advertising

Struggles, Crises and New Tryst A biography by Lorna Kalaw Tirol with Monina Allarey Mercado

Struggles, Crises, and New Tryst

A Biography by Lorna Kalaw Tirol with Monina Allarey Mercado

Gabriel Books Manila, Philippines

Telling the Story of Tony Mercado An Innovator in Philippine Advertising

Struggles, Crises and New Tryst A biography by Lorna Kalaw Tirol with Monina Allarey Mercado

Editorial Consultants Ramon C. Sunico Rogelio A. Mercado Book Concept Monina Allarey Mercado Text Editor Felipe L. Reyes Graphic Artist Mary Jane T. Rojas Photographs Sources Alfonso Tolosaz Ed Dames Mercado family Publisher Gabriel Books Š2010 Gabriel Books Quezon City, Philippines All rights reserved.

No copies can be made in part or in whole without prior written permission from the publisher.

Layout and Printing Inkwll Publishing Co., Inc. 3 Brixton St., Bo. Kapitolyo Pasig City 1603, Philippines Tel. No. (632) 634-3355-57 Fax No. (632) 631-1196

ISBN 978-971-8547-10-6

To Rogelio Galang Mercado (1906-1961) Luz Roa Mercado (1905-1977) James B. Reuter, SJ

Antonio Roa Mercado 26 December 1933-26 July 2000

Charity is patient, is kind; charity feels no envy; charity is never perverse or proud, never insolent; does not claim its rights, cannot be provoked, does not brood over an injury; takes no pleasure in wrongdoing but rejoices at the victory of truth; sustains, believes, hopes and endures to the last.

I Corinthians13:4-7

Table of Contents I. Introduction II. Preface III. Chapter

1

The First Forest

2

Loloy Becomes Tony

3

Falling Flat

on

4

Strategies

Crises

in

Her Face

5 Through Thick and Thin

6

Choosing a Family

7 Innovator

8 A Lot of Joy, a Lot of Work

9 The Rituals of Home

10

11 Ahead of His Time

12 A Lot More Love

13 The Second Forest

14

15 The Vintage House

16 On Their Own

17

Material

at

for

“Mama Mary

Work

Grace

is

Here”

Being The Secret Lover

IV. Writing Folio

Introduction Tony Mercado and I took over a bankrupt advertising agency in 1977.

Restlessness was a trademark of Tony. He was on his umpteenth job, I was on my fifth, and we were in our late blooming forties. Tony was an intense person, a true creative spirit and a risk-taker, like a wild stallion bursting with energy.

We complemented each other. He was the visionary and the organization man. I was the go-getter and the friendly client contact man.

He was temperamental. I was the cool dude. He had strong organization skills, the inside man. I was the salesman and image projection, the outside man. I ignored him when he was paranoid. He disliked me when I was a fatalist. But we had a high tolerance for each other’s eccentricities.

We enjoyed investing money in ideas too ahead of their time. When we lost money, we simply shrugged our shoulders and laughed at ourselves.

Tony’s formative years were influenced by two Catholic priests, Fr. James B. Reuter, SJ, his Ateneo teacher, and Saint Josemaría Escrivá, founder of Opus Dei. As playwright and actor, he imbibed from Father Reuter the love for acting. From Saint Josemaría, he was attracted to the idea of the struggle for holiness, of doing ordinary everyday work well as the way to perfection. Tony became a contemplative, making excellent work his prayer manifested. In business, he was a search-for-excellence nut.

Within a few years, we made that bankrupt agency that we bought for a song Number One in size and revenue. We shared profits generously with all employees, and our agency thrived in a family culture. Everyone’s morale was very high, so was our pay. I call our years together. Camelot.

Tony died on July 26, 2000. He was sixty-six.

— Minyong Ordoñez

Preface He was quite a man. People say that of Tony Mercado again and again.

A Renaissance personality, a visionary, a genius, a trailblazer, a person of great faith and of even greater charity. They call him that, and more.

But at heart he was a simple child of the earth, whose happiest memories were those of wartime days—no, years—spent learning how to grow vegetables, to catch freshwater shrimp and crabs and to fish for eel, to drink tuba, to be a man.

This is his story, as told by his family, friends, colleagues and staff. His wife, the writer Monina Allarey Mercado, has added her own personal notes, her sotto voce, at the end of some chapters to elaborate on key points, to enrich the narrative, and to deepen our understanding and appreciation of this extraordinary man.

— Lorna Kalaw Tirol

The First Forest

17

1F

The First

orest

From the first moment I saw the valley beside the river, I knew it was my paradise.

—Antonio R. Mercado He was writing about Cagolcol, the Shangri-La he discovered in Misamis Oriental between 1941 and 1944 while fleeing the Japanese invaders with his family. Cagolcol was the Mercados’ sixth, and last, evacuation place during an era which evoked in Tony “a sense of wonder, discovery and joy” rather than “pain, hunger and suffering.” After almost four years of “miserable scarcity” that “sapped us of strength and will,” the family settled in Cagolcol and Tony could finally sing of “abundance from the sea, the river, the corn field and the coconut trees.”

Decades later, he would acknowledge that a childhood spent in wartime, the lean years and the subsequent years of abundance had all helped to shape him into the man he eventually became.

The genes were impressive to start with. Rogelio Galang Mercado, Tony’s father, was a man who exuded finesse and a tremendous sense of joy. Tall, good-looking, and charming, he was the typical Kapampangan in his passion for the good life—well-prepared food, fine clothes, dancing, fishing. He was a teacher who spoke pure, fluent English and Cebuano

The First Forest

18 without the Pampango accent. He got along well with people, and was patriotic but quietly so.

A few months before the outbreak of World War II, he completed the required course in military training and earned the rank of lieutenant.

Despite suffering from adult-onset diabetes, he became a soldier of the United States Armed Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) in Cagayan de Oro, and when that town fell in 1942, he was captured by the Japanese and taken to Camp Casisang, a concentration camp in Bukidnon.

There, deprived of medication and the right food, he lost almost a hundred pounds and worse, contracted tuberculosis. The Japanese, thinking he would soon die, allowed him to escape, and so he walked out of the camp before dawn one morning and found his way home.

He never told his family how, in that weakened state, he managed to reach them. Years later, in a poignant essay about growing up in Mindanao, Tony wrote that his father was never the same again after the war: “Once an ebullient, fun-loving man, my father became a thin and silent shadow.”

Tony’s mother, Luz Roa, on the other hand, was a romantic soul who liked to take her family to the beach at night to watch the moon rise.

She would sit there with other people, listening to the waves, entranced by the movement of the moon. She liked books, too, and spent all her afternoons with them. At Ateneo de Davao where Tony spent grades four to six, he would always borrow two books from the library—one for himself, the other for his mother. She could finish two or three books a week. He liked the Hardy Boys; she preferred novels. Often they would read together. She hoped that the boy, her only son for eight years, would become a writer, and so spoke to him in English, an oddity at the time in their hometown, Balingasag, Misamis Oriental.

Luz liked to sing and dance, and even after her marriage continued to be the star of the velada musical program for the town fiesta. When she and Rogelio became affluent in the 1930s, owing to the high price of Philippine coconuts in the U.S. market, they bought themselves, among other things, a piano. It was the very first one in Balingasag.

When it arrived by ferry boat from Cagayan de Oro, the whole town came to witness the spectacle of a piano being brought into the Mercado house through a window because it would not fit into the door. The townsfolk cheered as the piano got in through the window.

The First Forest

19 Later on the house shook with their dancing, as the Mercados invited friends over after dinner to dance to boogie, foxtrot and rhumba tunes that a friend of Luz's played on the piano.

During the Japanese Occupation, Luz built herself a large twostory nipa hut with a wide veranda in Magdangua, a coconut farm that she and Rogelio owned. She called it a chalet, and had all of her life's precious possessions—aparadores, beds, other pieces of furniture, but especially her piano—moved into it by banca.

Luz was a dreamer, the source of her Antonio’s own dreams later on. A scholar at the Philippine Normal School, she became a teacher in Misamis Oriental and dreamed of sending her three children to the best schools. The eldest, Lourdes, was sent to Manila when she was in grade four to be an interna at St. Theresa's College, a colegio run by Belgian nuns. She finished high school there, then went to the University of the Philippines to major in English literature and minor in piano. Rolando, their youngest child, went to school in Ateneo de Cagayan and in Araneta University.

For her first son, born December 27, 1933, and named Antonio after his mother’s favorite saint, Luz nurtured the loftiest of ambitions. Loloy, as the boy was called, would be a brilliant student, and grow up to be an intellectual, a writer, or even a doctor. She dreamed that one day he would be like Jose Rizal. But Antonio did not do too well in school. He preferred to play and he talked too much, and was not conscientious with homework. Why, after all, did he have to prove himself in the classroom when his mother was a teacher and his father was the principal? He might as well have been at home. And so Luz scaled down her dreams for him—no longer Rizal, but Carlos P. Romulo, a small man but of great stature, a writer and an orator. Rogelio, on the other hand, hoped his son would be a “patriot of the pen” like Leon O. Ty of the Philippines Free Press, who specialized in political exposés, an investigative journalist even before that term came into popular use.

After the war, Rogelio was hired to start a lumber camp and sawmill in Compostela, North Davao. Nothing but jungle lined both sides of the road in this camp with no name. The Mercados took to calling the road Km. 82. They lived in three army tents in

The First Forest

20 the forest clearing—Rogelio and Luz in one tent, Loloy and his little brother Rod in another. The third tent was where Luz cooked and served their meals. Loloy was thirteen.

Almost half a century later, he recalled that period in his life: “The camp smelled sweet and sour all the time. It was the smell of newly cut lumber from the sawmill. We walked on a carpet of sawdust, which blew around and got into our nose in the dry times and squished under our feet on rainy days ...

“By day, it was a noisy camp. Dragged by bulldozers, fallen trees were hauled in from the forest. The sawmill whined and screeched to slice the logs into boards. The men heaved and yelled as they loaded lumber onto ten-wheeler trucks. The trucks groaned on the mud as they moved out with their load of wood for the Davao City yards. I learned to drive on one of those ten-wheelers ...

“We slept early in the camp. The small generator provided us with light only until 8 p.m. We slept in the dark, with only the hooting of owls slicing the silence”.

Loloy had already spent three years in public school when the war broke out. War and the lack of public transport to take him to Nabunturan, the nearest town which had an elementary school, cost him a year out of school. To keep his son occupied, Rogelio gave him his rifle, a .22-caliber Remington, and a thousand rounds of ammunition, and taught him how to shoot and hunt birds for food. Later on Loloy aimed for bigger birds, squirrels, monkeys, wild doves and ducks, and occasionally, wild boar and deer. He became expert at dressing all the game he had shot, and almost every day, thanks to his father's Remington, his mother served fresh meat rather than canned food, the staple at the camp.

Wartime—and his father—turned Loloy the boy into a man. From his father he learned not only how to shoot but how to drive a truck as well.

Rogelio also bought his son a pair of boxing gloves and made him spar with the lumberjacks at the camp.

Like most boys, Tony had his share of mishaps while growing up, maybe even more than the average child. He would tell his wife Monina in later years that he went through incredible pain as a child. As a first grader in Camiguin rushing to beat the morning bell, he climbed over the

The First Forest

21 school fence, caught himself on an iron spike and gashed the underside of his forearm. Another day he joined a group of boys who were pelting a beehive with stones. The beehive turned out to be home to black bees, the biggest of which came for Loloy and stung him on the forehead. He had high fever for days until the toxin wore off.

When his father was a guerrilla, Loloy was bitten by a dog and Rogelio had to leave the guerrilla camp to bring him the anti-rabies injection.

In another incident, he was out hunting with his father when he walked straight into the remains of a fire that the camp guards had lit the night before. The entire sole of one of his feet was burned.

But of his most traumatic experience as a boy, which happened when the family was living in Davao City, he never spoke to Monina in detail.

All he would say was that an intruder entered their house at dawn, and his father came down the stairs with a rifle, with him following close behind.

In the darkness Rogelio mistook his son for the robber and shot him in the hand, which was holding on to the stairway. The bullet shattered the bones of Loloy’s left hand.

Rogelio moved his family to Davao City after losing his job at the lumber camp. In that land of promise, he hoped, he and Luz could become pioneer entrepreneurs. He built a house and looked forward to becoming a shopkeeper or rice distributor. But diabetes had taken its toll on his health by then. Loloy did not have to be told that his parents would be relying on him more and more. They gave him an American Swan bike, provided he would do the marketing for his mother.

Every morning at five-thirty, while most of the town, including the girls he was starting to eye, was asleep, he would go out on his bike and head for the market. He would buy enough food for lunch and supper that his mother would cook in the morning, because she did not want her afternoon reading routine to be interrupted. She also taught Loloy how to draw up a menu and what dishes went well together.

His marketing errand over, he would shower, get dressed, and bike to school. The Jesuits had just opened Ateneo de Davao, and Rogelio and Luz had enrolled him there for the fourth grade. Being at the Ateneo was mind-blowing for the boy whose most memorable experiences so far had been wartime and camp life. Now here he was, learning from the Jesuits,

The First Forest

22 especially the young scholastics, about excellence of character, idealism, sportsmanship, and manliness. Of one Jesuit priest in particular, James B. Donelan who taught literature, Tony “always spoke of with a singing heart,” Monina says. Although he lacked the skills for reading, writing, and spelling and so did not do too well at the start, Ateneo helped Loloy to bloom. Years later, Monina would recall that whenever Tony looked back on his success he always credited his mother's dreams for him, and her sensitivity and foresight in sending him to the Ateneo.

From his mother, Loloy acquired not only dreams and visions and a love for reading, but also the virtue of generosity. Every Saturday morning after Mass, Luz practiced caridad, a tradition among certain religious orders of having poor and hungry people over for breakfast. At the Mercado home there would always be six or eight of them, beggars all. That was not the extent of Luz’s generosity. She and Rogelio were not wealthy early in their marriage, relying as they did only on their monthly salaries, but she would welcome into her house nieces and nephews of school age whose parents lived far away. She herself would support some of them through school.

Despite her generosity, Luz was frugal. Rogelio, being Kapampangan, was lavish, but Luz saved her money and bought rice and coconut land.

Prosperity finally came to the Mercados just before the war, thanks to the harvests from their coconut farm which were exported to the U.S. They could now afford not just rice and fish, but cheese and butter, fruits and ham, which they bought in Cagayan de Oro. SOTTO VOCE COMPOSTELA WAS A DEFINING MOMENT FOR ME, A VIVIDLY ETCHED commitment. at our first-one on-one dinner conversation, Tony told me about attending school in Km 32. In a single classroom, he was bunched with other children of all ages, perhaps twenty boys and girls.

Their schoolhouse was made of log bark strips, the first layer before lumber is shaped. The strips dried up and shrunk. The classroom became a see-through wall looking out to the nearby forest. Always bored in that class, Tony said he looked through the wall and daydreamed. He

The First Forest

23 could have been out swimming, hunting, shooting his Remington.

At that moment of Tony’s retelling over our first dinner, when I was just out of college, sheltered and living half of my life in books, tentatively starting as a Manila journalist—I knew that my life would be with Tony. It was a conviction of the moment, without a past and without a future. Across me was a man soft-spoken, finely sensitive and even literary, who was once a boy longing through chinks on the wall to be out into a cool and dark forest pierced with birdcalls. Giving in to life is surreptitious that way.

24

Loloy

2 B

ecomes

Tony

I knew this was a talent because he could act without any words, without any lines. He could act with his eyes, with his eyebrows, with his body, just with the whole expression.

—James B. Reuter, SJ As Rogelio’s diabetes grew worse, the family decided to leave Davao and return to Balingasag. Loloy became a boarder at the Ateneo de Cagayan in Cagayan de Oro. His father’s benefits as a war veteran enabled him to go on from there to the Ateneo de Manila, where he ceased to be the provinciano Loloy and became instead the urbanized Tony. In departing Cagayan de Oro, he left behind not only his Cebuano accent, but mentally and spiritually, the ways of the small town.

If he had any illusions of immediately conquering the Ateneo de Manila, however, he was in for a disappointment. He had a disastrous start—zero grades in algebra and Latin. Fr. James B. Reuter, SJ, his Latin and English teacher, recalls that the boy would have done much better in Latin if he had been interested in it. Where he excelled was in English class and, Father Reuter says, “he was far and away the best. He had extraordinary talent.”

To Tony, Father Reuter was more than an English teacher; years later he would tell Monina that, thanks to the priest’s artistry and drama and

LOLOY BECOMES TONY

26 deep understanding of human nature, “many of the definitions of his youth were defined in, by and through Father Reuter, including a life of piety.” There was another Jesuit who affected Tony deeply, but in quite another way. From the esteemed and well-loved historian, Fr. Horacio de la Costa, he imbibed a sense of humor.

By his second year in college, Tony had begun to discover that he could write well. One of his admirers on campus was Father de la Costa himself, who went out of his way to get to know the young writer. Taken into the features staff of the college paper, The Guidon, Tony started a humor column which he called “The Campus.” It specialized in short takes on personalities and happenings as well as engaging trivia about the Ateneo— from the priests to the teachers to the students to the maintenance staff.

The column was funny rather than silly, informative rather than trivial, gossipy but not malicious, thought-provoking but not pedantic.

Here are excerpts from “The Campus” in 1955: “Bobby Tañada absentmindedly locks his car with the key inside.”

“Ping de Jesus, when asked what he does so that he studies consistently: ‘I just think of the wife I will marry in the future and the beautiful children we will have. Who will support them?’”

“Mon Hofileña never gets a wet back. Perspires through his palms.

Has to carry a sponge all the time.”

“A few weeks ago this column went to post. Father Bello assigned this column to pick up all the junk around the building. Round figures: picked up 251 cigarette butts, 78 bus tickets, 3 kilos worth of assorted wastes—cigarette wrappers, candy wrappers, a test paper that had a red mark of 13%, a rusty spoon, a torn Maryknoll book cover, 2 empty tin cans with half a Vienna sausage in one, 67 grains of half-cooked Saigon rice, chewing gum wrappers, thoroughly masticated chewing gum, and a paper bag with 3 red ants.”

“The college cafeteria sells an average of 7 packs of cigarettes a day ... The college drinks an average of 36 cases of soft-drinks daily ... The sandwich stand earns an average of P17 a day ... There are 31 garbage cans in the college building ... 60 per cent of collegemen sport crewcuts

LOLOY BECOMES TONY

27 ... The Guidon ashtrays average 30 butts and one and one-half ounces of ash a day.”

“People Other Than Ourselves: The man who takes care of the building and opens the rooms early in the morning is the janitor and he has a name— Felino Toledo. He is married and manages to support his six children with P6.50 a day. The other janitor is Johnny del Valle. He is also married and has three children ... ” “There are three married students in the college ... 59 collegemen wear glasses ... Thirty-seven collegemen go home for lunch regularly.”

“The Junior AB Spanish class was suspended for general disturbance.

Each student got three cuts; did miles of assignments, took exams on Sundays, and paid a peso for each exam.”

“Colegiala to Mass server whose services had just been refused by the Sisters: ‘Please, try asking again.’”

Tony went on to become The Guidon’s news editor. He would also try his hand at writing short stories and a play for Heights, the Ateneo’s literary journal. His characters were invariably common folk—fishermen, farmers, slum dwellers —and he wrote about them and their circumstances with compassion and an easy familiarity, as though he were one of them.

“His writing was out of this world,” says Father Reuter.

The themes of Tony’s writings were those of idealistic student writers: a young person’s pains and frustrations, dreams and hopes. In “The Land Beyond,” a short story published in the August 1955 issue of Heights, he showed how keenly and fondly he remembered, from days spent in Cagolcol where tuba was plentiful, the making of that coconut drink and the villagers who loved it: “First, the gatherer himself who had to climb the tall coconut trees morning, noon and evening. Then the thirsty farmers and the workers in the fields who harvested the corn and the rice with thick clothes. Then, the fishermen and the market vendors and the young boys who had pomade in their hair, who had clean shirts and were careful not to spill the tuba on their shirts because they might smell when Sister Bernardita taught them about God.” He had memories of himself at age ten gathering fallen coconuts, carrying as many as eight of them strung on a bamboo pole up and down hills for several kilometers, and sipping his first taste of tuba from a pitcher—“How good it was.”

LOLOY BECOMES TONY

28 Another short story, “Scars from Early Dawn,” published in August 1954, was told from the perspective of a young boy at wartime whose friends are all leaving the barrio but who must stay behind to care for his sick mother: “I watched the carts pulled by carabaos and bulls, loaded with mothers and their babies and sacks of rice and pots and jars and all sorts of things—I watched them move away with the people as though in a procession. I did not know what to compare them to: to a fiesta procession or to a march to the cemetery to bury the dead.”

“The Moon Came,” which appeared in Heights in October 1954, showed Tony’s familiarity with, and love for, the sea. It starts: “That was the day I could not go fishing because the sea was angry. I just squatted by the roadside and brooded over the sea. The sea to me is what the earth is to the farmer, so that when she is unfishable I sulk the whole day. I guess it was all because of the rain. It had rained and rained. At first, although the heavy drops punctured her still surface, the sea did not seem to mind it. But as the rain kept pouring down like a river, the sea’s face began to wrinkle until there was only the great foam and the great roar.”

The clarity and simplicity of his prose could not but be noticed at the Ateneo. His language was unpretentious and his images were striking, his dialogues earthy. His stories were also distinctive for their spiritual undertones and for his devotion to the Blessed Virgin, so evident in his frequent mention of the Rosary and Mary’s powerful intercession for those who sought her help.

In 1954, which Catholics all over the world celebrated as a Marian Year, Tony ventured into playwriting. He entered a competition at the Ateneo for the best one-act play revolving around the Marian theme. The time was doubly significant for Tony as a Marian devotee because the competition was held in October, the month of the holy Rosary. His entry, “Death of a Dream,” won the gold medal and was staged, along with the two other winning plays, under the direction of his teacher, Father Reuter.

The priest recalls that “Death of a Dream” swept all the medals in the competition—best script, best production, best actor, best actress.

A review published in Heights described the plot of Tony’s play as “the old story of a mother who dreams of a beautiful future for her promising son who in reality is nothing but a bum. Caught in murder trouble, he sacrifices his life—Sidney Carton style—to save that of a

LOLOY BECOMES TONY

29 policeman friend. Thus he dies a champion, an answer to his mother’s prayers to Our Lady.”

The character of the mother, fiercely ambitious for her son and strongly devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary, who told her son about Jose Rizal and prayed every day before a statue of Our Lady that her son may someday be a champion, a president, was evidently modeled after Tony’s own. As he lies dying at the end of the play, Lito, the main character, tells his mother, “I prayed ... At first I said the prayers you had taught me when I was small but I could not talk to her that way. Then I just talked and it’s just like talking to you. I asked her to help me. Me, I’ll see Our Lady and her Son tonight.’”

Unlike the tragic young man in his play, Tony was fulfilling his mother’s dream for him. Father Reuter smiles as he says, “I didn’t mind that he was not doing well in Latin. It happens that way sometimes. Somebody is very good in mathematics, but no good when it comes to creativity. Well, Tony was superb when it came to creativity.”

Tony’s good fortune did not end with that playwriting competition.

The following December a short story of his, titled “Thick, Ugly Walls,” won second place in a Christmas short story contest at the Ateneo.

Two years later, The Guidon proudly reported that Tony and a fellow Atenean, Demetrio S. Camua, had had their story, “Pretty Little Ligaya,” reprinted in the January 28 issue of the Philippines Free Press. The national magazine, which had been Rogelio Mercado’s bible, devoted a five-page spread with a half-page illustration to the story.

But it was not only as a writer that Tony was excelling at the Ateneo.

It was Father Reuter who realized, even before he discovered that the boy from Cagayan de Oro was an exceptional writer, that he could act and that he enjoyed being onstage. As soon as he saw Tony in a supporting role as a doctor in Father de la Costa’s Woman of the House, Father Reuter says, “I knew this was a talent because he could act without any words, without any lines. He could act with his eyes, with his eyebrows, with his body, just with the whole expression.” The Aegis 1956 yearbook listed Tony as a cast member of the Ateneo Players. He appeared in the annual play The Lady’s Not for Burning and later had starring roles in Reuter-directed plays. He remained active in student theater all throughout his college years.

LOLOY BECOMES TONY

30 Thus did Tony Mercado evolve from a nobody at the Ateneo into a campus star, one of the brightest in the Loyola Heights campus in the late 1950s. He toured the country with Father Reuter’s Glee Club, not to sing but to provide the intermission numbers.

Monina recalls a favorite story of Tony’s, of how he enjoyed traveling with the Glee Club so much that when December 27 came around during a tour he completely forgot it was his birthday. He had been so happy, he said, he did not have time to think of himself.

Father Reuter discovered as well that Tony was a natural leader.

Rehearsals for James Barrie’s Dear Brutus were going badly, the priest recalls, and the cast had become demoralized. Tony was quick to act. “At one rehearsal,” Father Reuter says, “he simply went up front, spoke to the group, rallied them ‘round, and got them to learn their lines and perform.

When there was a problem, he would face it, he would never run from it. The others would give up, but he’d stay right in there and pitch.” As early as then, the observant Father Reuter could see that what prompted Tony to be a leader was not just courage, but faith “in the value of the Gospel.”

Despite all of Tony’s achievements, however, Ateneo would deny him what he prized most of all, a college diploma. In his time, enrolment per semester was by invitation. Ateneans waited for a letter telling them they were welcome to return. No such invitation came to Tony in his last year of college. No explanation was given. He surmised, though, that it must have been either his identification with a “rebel” group on campus or the publication of his short story in the Philippines Free Press, or both.

Whatever the reason, Tony was devastated.

He enrolled at the University of Santo Tomas’s College of Philosophy and Letters, but feeling unhappy there, left after a year.

Not having taken the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) course at either the Ateneo or UST, he did not qualify for graduation.

In later years, when he had become established and respected in his field, he would say that the only reason he wanted a college degree was to have something to show to his children.

Done with school, Tony went out to look for a job. He found one as a contributor to the Saturday Weekly Magazine and Weekly

LOLOY BECOMES TONY

31 Women’s Magazine. He also became a cub reporter at The Manila Times, turning out news stories for two years until he discovered advertising—and fell in love.

Sotto voce WHATEVER FATHER REUTER DID, TONY JOINED. FIRST, THERE WAS drama. then there was the Ateneo Glee Club that Father Reuter organized, directed and brought on concert tours in campuses around Manila and the provinces. Born tuneless, Tony auditioned and failed.

He continued to hang around, looking pitiful. Always kind of heart, Father Reuter took him aside and said: “Okay, Tony, you may join the glee club. When we sing, open your mouth but do not utter a sound, my son.”

Tony’s friends in the glee club told Father Reuter that in their parties Tony recited funny poems that made the girls laugh uproariously.

They were Tagalog ditties, silly pieces, that Tony claimed to have composed. He recited them deadpan, with earnest fervor to the party audience. They pulled Tony to recite them to Father Reuter who, with some translation, understood them and, infected by the boys’ hilarity, found them funny too. He made the ditties part of the glee club.

Tony as poet, draped in a white bed sheet and crowned with laurels, became the two intermission numbers. Solemnly he introduced them in profoundly deep Tagalog: “Hamak man ako at di kilalala, nais kong mag-alay sa inyo ng kaunting ligaya at saya. Nais kong halughugin ang inyong puso at piga-in ang inyong luha. Nguni’t bago ako pumagitna sa laot ng kahihiyaan, pasalubungan ninyo sana ako ng masigabong na palakpakan.”

Some of Tony’s silly ditties were: MONUMENTO Konting bato Konting semento— Monumento!

LOLOY BECOMES TONY

32 ANG KALBO Hanggang batok Ang noo— Ang kalbo!

ANG ULILA Masdang nakatirik Apat na kandila— Piso!

ANG MUNISIPYO Tatlong pulis, Isang preso— Munisipyo!

In October l955, during school break, the Ateneo Glee Club performed in Maryknoll Academy, Lucena. I was in the audience and saw Tony for the first time. I thought he was effete but in the end as the audience filed out, I heard people talking more about him than about the singing. My companion, Letty, was even reciting the ditties and still laughing heartily.

That night Tony and another glee club member, Jun Cruz, were houseguests in the upstairs room of my ancestral home in Lucena.

My spinster aunts lived there and were hosts to the Ateneans who were apportioned by Father Reuter in several Lucena homes. My mother and I lived downstairs.

The two houseguests arrived late. Unwell with a fever, I was in no mood nor condition to meet them. But I heard them laughing in the upstairs dining room where my aunts served them after-dinner snacks. Early the next morning, they were off to the next stop in their itinerary. But my aunts told me that they were charming guests and that the chubby one ate all the sandwiches.

k TWO VERSIONS CAME TO ME ABOUT TONY’S LOCK-OUT. ONE VERSION was told to me by tony himself, still in pain many years later. The other was told to me by Luz Mercado, then already my mother-in-law.

LOLOY BECOMES TONY

33 Through Father Reuter, Tony inquired why he was not invited back to his fourth year in college. He learned that the dean, Father Nicholas Kunkel, refused Tony’s admission. While his grades were acceptable, it seemed to Father Kunkel that Tony’s demeanor was not.

Count number one: Tony had violated a rule that an Ateneo student should not have any of his written works published in a publication that is not the Ateneo’s own. In the previous year, Tony had an essay published in the Philippines Free Press. Count number two: Tony was the campaign manager for Steve Silva who was running for president of the incoming student council against Tony Ayala. Silva was an independentminded student, quiet but stubbornly recalcitrant. Ayala was the docile favorite of teachers and faculty. Tony Mercado ran a vocal and highly visible campaign for Silva who lost. So to Father Kunkel, Tony Mercado was no longer welcome because he seemed a firebrand.

According to Luz Mercado, when she learned from Tony that the door was shut on his face, she went to their town parish priest, the Jesuit Father Reisacher, to pull strings. He appealed to Father Kunkel who did not relent.

As faculty, Father Reuter appealed to Father Kunkel too and was refused.

Asking to be reconsidered, Tony went to Father de la Costa, also in the faculty, who obviously liked Tony’s acting and writing. He too was refused.

Such was the depth of Tony’s pain that he spoke about it to me only once, before we were married and never again. Obviously pained too, Father Reuter never brought it up to me neither. Luz Mercado was more outspoken, no less bitter as the years went by. But she stressed to me that Tony told his parents they no longer have to pay for him to finish college. He said that he was going to earn his way. As a working student, he enrolled for his fourth year at the college of philosophy and letters in UST. He did not earn a degree because he did not have the time to complete the student military training program.

Tony told me that his lock-out from the Ateneo was one of two major boosters that propelled him to work with intensity in order to build his self-confidence. The other propulsion was the engagement that his fiancée broke in l960 because her parents did not consider Tony acceptable.

34

3

Falling Flat

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Her Face

He said he realized that in marriage would be fulfilled all the loose ends of his life ... He had the vision, I the details. I understood the details congruent to the vision, and he needed a details person to make the vision real. That was our marriage.

—Monina A. Mercado

Tony met Monina Allarey when he was ready for marriage. He was on leave from the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson and had gone home to his mother in Cagayan de Oro to nurse a bad case of burnout.

As he would tell Monina later, he spent his time digging a lagoon for his mother in her yard and thinking about his life and the direction he wanted it to go. About advertising and anything related to it as a career, he felt very sure; he felt equally sure that he would not go back to that profession unless he settled down to family life, “working and earning for a family and from a home and for a home.” And so he made a decision. He would go back to Manila and find himself a wife.

He knew exactly what kind of woman he wanted to marry: someone educated, a graduate of either Maryknoll or St. Theresa’s College; a literature major; not wealthy but not poor either; and from a coconutproducing region like himself so that she would understand the economics of life in such an environment. Every girl he met was measured against that

Falling Flat on Her Face

36 checklist. He did not want a wealthy woman because an earlier relationship with one had ended disastrously for him. He had nothing against being poor, but surmised that a poor girl would have “many defenses, many desires for compensation; and probably a deficient education.”

He allowed himself to date, but found many of the women dull. One day he discovered the Rizal Room at the Ateneo Law School on Padre Faura Street in Manila, a sort of library and conference room where senators and other specialists sent their staff for research. There he met interesting colegialas like Ma. Paz “Chinggay” Diaz, Araceli Salazar, and Belinda Olivares.

There, too, was Monina Allarey, a reporter who was aspiring to become a political writer. None of them appealed to Tony until one day Belinda took him aside and told him to take a good look at Monina. She is, Belinda whispered, quiet, sensitive, womanly. Immediately he replied: “She’s not my type.” He liked fair-skinned girls, and she was morena; he also admitted to a prejudice against women journalists, who struck him as loud, greedy, and shallow. Belinda asked him to think about Monina anyway.

At the same time Belinda took Monina aside and told her to consider Tony Mercado seriously. He is, she advised her, the most manly of all the guys here. Monina told Belinda in turn that while she was not lacking in suitors, she was not interested in any of them because she was leaving for graduate studies in America in six months. Born and raised in Lucena, Quezon, she had recently graduated from Maryknoll with a major in English literature.

But as with all love stories worth retelling, this one developed a serendipitous twist. The same week Belinda tried to play matchmaker, Monina was invited to join a panel interview at a radio station. An ardent suitor of hers had offered to take her there and fetch her afterward. She waited, and waited, in vain. It was Tony Mercado who showed up with the message that ardent suitor had asked him to take her to dinner and he would pick them up at the station later and then take her home. Tony suggested dinner at El Bodegon, a cozy Spanish bistro in Malate that offered guitar music in the evenings.

On their way out of the Ateneo campus, Monina tripped on a flagstone and fell flat on her face. Tony, hiding his amusement that a journalist

Falling Flat on Her Face

37 should be so clumsy, gently picked her up and held her by the elbow as they made their way to El Bodegon on the next block. Over dinner of tenderloin tips and garlic bread complemented by red wine, he talked, it seemed to her, nonstop—about his childhood in Compostela and about the girl who broke his heart.

Monina recalls: “I will never forget how he described his schoolhouse made of the barks of trees. He said perhaps in the beginning they were close to each other, but by the time he and his classmates were occupying the schoolhouse the barks had shrunk so badly there were spaces between them. He said he spent a lot of time looking through the cracks and watching the world go by. The other story he told was of how he hunted because his father had given him a gun—monkeys, birds, and once a deer and wild boar—and he skinned them in the river and gave them to his mother to cook.”

Monina found him fascinating.

After dinner they went to the radio station for her interview, and following that, sat in the lobby waiting for ardent suitor to show up.

He never did. In the meantime, Tony continued to regale this girl he was taking out for the first time with stories about his family and even his dreams. He was staying with his married sister in España Extension, Quezon City, he said. He also intimated to her that “he wanted to have many children and he wanted to raise them in a house that was filled with music and paintings and he would take them to the theater and to concerts.” They sat and waited some more, until at midnight, with no sign of ardent suitor, they decided to take a cab. Tony was not sure he had enough money left over for a cab, and told Monina so. She found his candor endearing, his stories sincere.

After that night, they no longer went out with their Rizal Room barkada, then it was just the two of them. When their relationship grew serious, Tony told Monina about his wife-hunting checklist. She accused him of having made it up to fit her own profile. Not so, he insisted. But there she was: a colegiala from Maryknoll, an English lit major, middleclass, from the coconut-producing province of Quezon.

They were married on February 11, 1964, the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, his choice of a date because of his devotion to the Blessed Virgin

Falling Flat on Her Face

38 Mary. Monina wore a white butterfly-sleeved gown with a lace train and carried a bouquet of sampaguita; Tony, a dark suit, black-framed, thickrimmed eyeglasses, and a happy smile.

Sotto voce IN APRIL 1964, ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON, WE SAT IN THE COVERED terrace of our brand new rented house. We were newly married, just barely two months. We had met ten months before.

Tony was tinkering with a small Underwood portable typewriter that he cherished. It was a US Army surplus. His father bought it when Tony was in second year high school. He told his parents that he was going to be a writer. Since he got good grades in English class, his mother was delighted.

He wrote short stories, plays and essays on that typewriter both when he was in high school and then in college. On that typewriter, he wrote his articles when he was a cub reporter and when he was a regular feature writer in the weekly magazines of The Manila Times.

When we moved into our first home that February, the typewriter came along. Aged and battered that it was, the typewriter was very important to Tony.

In June l963, we met and within the week that we met, he wrote his mother that he planned to marry me. He told me too. But I was due to leave in August on a Fulbright grant given to journalists. The grant allowed us to apprentice in any newspaper of our choice.

After the grant, I planned go to any of the three graduate schools to which I had applied. Two had accepted me on tuition grants, Radcliffe and Marquette. Marriage was very far from my mind and certainly not to a man I had just met. So I went to the States for the grant and thinking to remain for graduate school.

Faithfully, nearly every day, Tony wrote to me on that battered typewriter while I was away in the fall of l963. Once in a while, his

Falling Flat on Her Face

39 letters spoke about the home we would have, even if I had not agreed to marry him.

In November, John F. Kennedy was assassinated on the very first day that I reported as an apprentice in the San Francisco Chronicle.

My newspaper in Manila wired and assigned me to cover the Kennedy wake and funeral in Washington, DC. I went to Washington and covered the event. The experience was seismic to me. America had become very lonely and hostile.

Tony too became seismic. He wrote that I should go home right away and we will get married. If I chose to remain in the US, his ultimatum was that he would not be around for me. I went home in January l964 and married Tony the following month.

So there we were in April, newly married and no longer lonely but surprisingly becoming bored during Sunday afternoons. Maybe becoming domesticated is the better and apt term, considering that we both worked at hectic day jobs. He was in advertising and I was a newspaper reporter.

We had fixed our house well enough, energetically and speedily.

So for something else to do, Tony started to clean and brighten up things that we brought into our newly shared home. We did not have too many things. So on Sundays, he liked shining his shoes. After the shoes, what else? Ah, his typewriter needed attention.

When a typewriter is light and agile, it can be wings of thought while writing. It can be a best friend as this typewriter was to Tony.

So with a stout puff brush, he dusted the keys of the Underwood.

Then he tipped it over and dusted the underside. Not satisfied, he unscrewed all its parts and soaked the pieces in a small basin filled with gasoline. Then he took each piece and wiped it in flannel.

The typewriter, by then mostly disassembled, was on a low coffee table. I watched him quietly. I had learned as a new wife not to speak out my doubts, fears or mordant wit. But how I longed to say: The whole thing looks like a crab that you just ate and picked clean.

Tony had lined up every cleaned part on a flattened carton, part of one of the boxes we used to bring stuff to our new home. He sat

Falling Flat on Her Face

40 on a low stool with his knees close to the coffee table. Then he stood up rather suddenly. His knee caught a corner of the carton. Out to the floor spilled every key, screw, nut and bolt of the typewriter.

Tony turned pale. I looked at him and shivered. He silently and quickly went away to the bathroom. I dropped to the floor, reaching for every fallen piece. When he came back, he groped for the pieces too. We said not a word.

We got a box to contain every piece that we found. That done, we hugged each other. I blurted out my piece about the typewriter looking like a picked crab. When Tony turned away to laugh, I saw his edge of tears.

The next day, with our box of the typewriter in pieces, we went to the repair shop in Quiapo. The mechanic was amused but kind. He promised that if any screw, nut or bolt or any piece at all was missing, he would replace it.

In two weeks, the Underwood was intact again and newly painted.

We gladly paid for the repair. Then Tony gave me the refurbished typewriter to use at home when I wrote my newspaper reports.

I continued to use his Underwood for close to twenty years, writing countless articles on it. As it did in his time, it was an agile typewriter that took the thoughts fleetly out of my reporter’s mind.

4

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Crises

In this job, you cannot be too adult. You have to have childhood wonder.

—Minyong Ordoñez

The advertising giant J. Walter Thompson hired Tony in 1959 as a copywriter, and three years later promoted him to associate public relations director. After two years he moved to Ace Compton (now Ace Saatchi and Saatchi) as creative director for Procter and Gamble brands.

In 1968 he left Ace Compton to serve as general manager of SCAN, Inc. a film production house of ABS-CBN Broadcasting System. From 1973 to 1977 he was president and general manager of another production house called Filipino Films, Inc. and was also station manager of Banahaw Broadcasting Corporation (Channel 2). In 1977 he returned to advertising big time, as chairman of Basic Advertising which he steered through partnerships with foreign advertising agencies, the Chicagobased Foote, Cone & Belding in the late eighties and the Paris-based Publicis Groupe in 1996.

That summary of his professional life is contained in a threepage résumé that Tony wrote, an unadorned listing of all the jobs he ever held according to category: advertising, media, publishing and communications, film production and public relations. A separate section lists his civic and business affiliations, and another his many awards.

Strategies in crises

42 Despite its stark simplicity, the résumé is an awesome description of the man and his many and varied talents and gifts.

Minyong Ordoñez worked closely with Tony for about twenty-five years, and is probably the person who knew him best as a worker. They had met previously at the Ateneo in the 1950s when Minyong was singing with the glee club and Tony provided the intermission act during the group’s provincial tours. Tony, Minyong recalls, was a roly-poly comedian-actor but a great one who “would freeze the ball on the stage, lampooning Shakespeare’s orations,” while the singers changed costumes backstage.

But even when they became colleagues at J. Walter Thompson, the two did not become friends until they found themselves together as creative directors at Ace Compton, a leading advertising agency in 1963. Tony was assigned the toughest client, Procter and Gamble; Minyong took on other clients like Carnation, Chrysler, Esso.

“We were,” Minyong says, “young professionals, rat racers. Mayabang, full of confidence, aggressive. Tony was full of tantrums. He was a fighter, madaling mainis, and very passionate. Madaling makipag-away pag hindi magaling, pati Kano tinatapon niya. But we had a lot of fun.”

One day Tony disappeared, and Minyong learned that he had gotten married.

Procter had many rules regarding its ads, according to Minyong, and it would reject an ad outright if one of them was violated. Those rules did not sit well with Tony. He was a highly creative person who gave his best to every job, but sometimes, Minyong says, he was too creative. “When we submitted scripts, they were in English so that the Americans would understand them. Sa kabubusisi, gumugulo. We had Filipino culture in the script, and if you translated that, you had to explain endlessly. Tony got very upset. He said we would never submit an English script to P&G, and if they didn’t understand Tagalog, sorry. It was a major victory for us, a breakthrough. In the agency, professionalism rules. If it’s the right thing to do, we don’t care.”

Tony was, Minyong says, “one of those rare individuals who were both left- and right- brained—the right being very creative and imaginative, the left being very entrepreneurial. In fact I’d always tell him, ‘You’re a Jew and a Chinaman. He loved to be called that. It was a rare combination.”

Strategies in crises

43 He had the stamina of a wild stallion, Minyong says of Tony, and he tries to explain its roots by going back to his friend’s childhood.

“He grew up during the hardship years of World War II, and he had to live in the jungle to survive. He also lived in a small town. Everything about being a promdi, at the same time he became a city boy. He went to Ateneo. That combination of being exposed to hardship and the wild was liable to release so much energy, so much insight, when he became a businessman. That’s what happened to Tony. All the energy of his upbringing bore fruit when he applied it to business, especially in advertising where the whole expertise is originality, imagination and rule breaking.”

During brainstorming sessions, says Minyong, Tony “could pick people’s brains and make an idea run. He encouraged people to talk and he listened to everyone. He would bring out the nugget in everyone, pursue an idea, then add to it, and the idea would keep rolling. He brought excitement to brainstorming sessions, and expected everyone else to be excited, walang cold fish.” At Ace Compton everyone in the creative department wanted to join Tony’s group because there was always a lot of laughter. Romy Virtusio, who was then training to be an account manager, recalls that Tony at the time was already recognized as the best copywriter of his generation.

Tony’s group produced a number of exceptional advertising campaigns. He launched Safeguard soap as a germ-killing bar used by doctors in the U.S. The landmark strategy, which Procter and Gamble (P&G) still uses today, almost wiped out the beauty-soap industry.

But Tony also resurrected Camay beauty soap to top position with the campaign slogan “Ang lahat ay napapalingon” and local movie stars as endorsers. An instant hit was the “Utos ni Mayor” commercial for Tide, on which Minyong and Tony collaborated. It was the first time humor was employed in Philippine advertising and it marked the commercial debut of top comedian Pugo and comedienne Chichay. Tony followed up the success of that campaign with “Inday, Palalayasin Kita” and “Understanding.” All three TV spots for Tide became icons of pop culture and, with the permission of P&G, all three were spun off into full-length commercial movies. “Day after” research done by P&G on “Utos ni Mayor” showed it achieved the gold standard, unprecedented in the company’s history. P&G was so pleased it aired all three radio campaigns in all the Third World countries where Tide was marketed.

Strategies in crises

44 Tony wrote most of the radio commercials for Tide that are considered classics today. He also conceptualized the “Hiyang” campaign for Palmolive shampoo, catapulting the product, then an old low-tech brand, to number one in awareness, recall, and brand share. It helped that the star of the commercial was Lea Salonga, fresh from her success in Miss Saigon at London’s West End. It was the young star’s very first commercial, and Tony himself flew to the British capital for the play’s opening night so that he could sign her up. The concept of “Hiyang” is still Palmolive’s comeon line today.

“Tony was very good at breaking rules because he had very deep insights on human beings,” Minyong says. “We’d find people very funny with their many foibles and weaknesses. When we were brainstorming about products we’d simply talk about our uncles and aunts and other relatives in the province. They were very funny people. But we also knew how deeply they felt, what their longings were, some of them ridiculous, very funny. We would always have fun thinking how vulnerable, how naïve, how ambitious people are, and how seriously they take themselves. Tony came from that kind of world, and he brought it to Ayala Avenue where it sounded very fresh and original. We understood each other very well on that aspect. Tony had a lot of stories about hometown fun which became very useful to us in our understanding of people.”

“Tony and I,” Minyong reminisces, “always knew that advertising is all about creativity, creating great ads that would bring dramatic changes in the sales of a brand. We also knew that we were very skillful in communicating with the masa. Our strength was to create great advertising for the masses.

That was our basic principle. We knew what to target—clients and brands which the multinationals could not handle; secondly, brands that were having a problem.”

While acknowledging Tony’s genius, though, Minyong concedes it was not easy working with him. There were those, including friends and associates, who misunderstood him, and there were those who could not work with him for very long, and quit. Minyong remained steadfast because he understood Tony and appreciated and admired him.

They were not, however, best friends. “We were good friends, but we were the best partners. We had the same intellect, the same instincts, the same insights. We both grew up in World War II. His survival years and

Strategies in crises

45 hunger years were my survival and hunger years. His movie idol was my movie idol. His parents were my parents, as far as ugali was concerned.

So we would simply look at each other and we knew what the other was thinking. We could feel out each other without talking. When he scratched his nose, I knew his mood. When we expressed ideas and thoughts, we knew exactly how these felt. We got excited about the same idea, and we looked for the same idea. So our partnership was very, very fulfilling. My biggest pleasure in working with him was we had such great respect for each other although we never expressed it, and we never asked anything of each other, but we gave each other so much without asking.

“It is a rare case,” Minyong admits, “when your business partner knows you inside out, and there is full acceptance.”

In their quarter-century partnership, Tony was the visionary and astute businessman while Minyong provided the creative imagination and pizzazz. Their generous sharing of individual gifts saw them through lean times as well as years of plenty. Minyong says, “Most of our ventures were great, but sometimes they were big ideas too advanced for their time and so hard to implement. We lost millions on a great idea, but it didn’t matter to us.”

They would have arguments as well—over ideas or over copy—but these were petty and rare. Minyong would occasionally lose his cool when Tony was being onion-skinned. “In a way he was sometimes childish, he couldn’t control his emotions. But those instances were not to be taken seriously. In this job you cannot be too adult. You have to have childhood wonder.” Once, Minyong recalls, he learned that Tony had said of him, “Alam mo, si Minyong ang idea niyan baduy, but it works.” Minyong says he was not at all offended by Tony’s remark: “I know I’m baduy.”

Tony was a master at strategizing. When he and Minyong set up Basic Motivators in 1977, for instance, they reached such a low point that they could not pay their staff. Tony came up with a plan. Among the casualties of President Ferdinand Marcos’s imposition of martial law five years earlier were the country’s elite social clubs, such as the Visayans’ Kahirup and the Kapampangans’ Mancomunidad Pampangueña, whose members could no longer stage their extravagant balls. Why not, Tony thought, ballroom dancing at The Manila Hotel? After signing up the Carding Cruz band to an exclusive one-year contract, he went to the hotel

Strategies in crises

46 and proposed ballroom dancing on weekends, the music to be provided by the Cruzes. The earnings from the project supported Basic Motivators for over a year.

Tony’s mind seemed to be at its most brilliant during a crisis. The economic crunch of 1985, an aftermath of Ninoy Aquino’s assassination two years before, brought in no new business to the agency. Cash flow was very tight, and Tony again faced the prospect of not being able to meet the payroll. This time his solution was to get a project outside the country that would earn the company precious dollars. Bidding against New York publishers, he won a contract from industrialist Enrique Zobel to produce a world-class book about Brunei’s independence day titled Brunei Merdeka. The Sultan of Brunei had already commissioned Zobel, his polo crony, and the architect Leandro Locsin to build a palace, the Istana, for him. The book was to be issued in time for the inauguration of the palace, giving Tony very little time to be ambitious about the project.

Unfazed, he decided to do a family-album type of book and commissioned international photographers to contribute their best shots of Brunei. Basic was paid $50,000, a small fortune in those days, and earned money from printing the book besides. Not only did the company meet its payroll, it even awarded generous bonuses to its employees that year.

Tony would produce another book in 1986. Titled People Power: An Eyewitness Account and edited by Monina, it was inspired by the EDSA People Power revolt in February that year. In a creative profile of himself that he wrote in 1998, Tony said, “This book was published in order to soften the agency’s crony image. Some of our people were moonlighting, making commercials for the administration during the snap elections.

One particular commercial was quite offensive–‘Babae’–saying that Cory cannot run the country because she is only a housewife. Basic did not do the work, but since the moonlighting creative people did the ad, the backlash on the agency was quite strong.”

Tony’s idea was to gather vignettes from people who had been at EDSA during those crucial four days that culminated in the fall of the Marcos dictatorship. He knew he had to move fast with his concept. “He who is first is king,” he wrote. “It was a race. The emotion of the revolution was so intense that people would buy the first book that captured the spirit of EDSA.” But there was a problem: “how to write an accurate record of the revolution in record time.” Tony’s solution? “We ran an ad asking

Strategies in crises

47 people to write their own experience of the revolution. Bring photos of the revolution. After the ad came out, we were deluged with write-ups, oral testimony, letters and photos that we published without fees. So we beat everybody else.” Always the creative adman, he organized a storytelling fiesta at the Malacañang grounds which he dubbed “Kwentuhan sa EDSA.” Tents were put up at the frontyard of Malacañang itself where people came and narrated their stories to designated interviewers.

Tony’s next problem was how to launch the book with maximum impact but very little money. At that time two other books on the EDSA phenomenon were being readied for publication. Again, Tony knew that People Power had to be launched ahead of all the others so as to give it the publicity it needed, and that the launching had to be nothing less than spectacular. And so he conceptualized a “Reunion of Heroes” and, with his usual flair for superlatives, dubbed it “the biggest book launching in the world” in the parade grounds of Camp Aguinaldo. It may well have been, for the heroes of the EDSA revolution were there—Cory Aquino, Jaime Cardinal Sin, Fidel Ramos, Juan Ponce Enrile, Gringo Honasan— along with almost a million Filipinos. It was EDSA all over again, except that this time it was a celebration. A dashing Colonel Honasan, his pet snake coiled around his neck, skydived from a helicopter with a copy of the book in one hand. Upon landing, he handed it to President Cory, who proclaimed the book the “official history of the EDSA Revolution.”

No other book has sold as many copies at its launching as People Power did that day. Booths were set up on the grounds where the staff of Basic sold the books. Tony himself could not believe the book’s success. He exulted, “Millions worth in free publicity. Front-page headline photos in all the newspapers. Three hours of free coverage on national television.”

Best of all, except for the print ad announcing the “Reunion of Heroes,” Basic did not shell out a single centavo for the project.

Sotto voce TONY NEVER SHOWED FEAR OF ANYTHING. HIS FATHER’S PAMPANGO lore was in the bloodstream: Of lion or tiger, I am not afraid nor am I afraid of you. Queng leon, queng tigre, ecu tatacut queca pa! But I knew of the one fear that he often spoke of in himself and in others.

Strategies in crises

48 He was afraid of being stuck in a rut. He was afraid of doing the same job in the same way in the same place over and over. He was afraid of congealing.

One day I read to him this portion from a book that was reviewed in Time magazine. The quotation came from the book, The Finishing School by Gail Godwin, published in l985. This is the year when Tony was deeply immersed in the shaping of the culture of his agency.

I remember that the words were spoken by a grandmother: “There are two kinds of people. One kind you can tell just by looking at them at what point they congealed into their final selves. It might be a very nice self but you know you can expect no more surprises from it. Whereas the other kind keeps moving, changing. With these people, you can’t say, ‘X stops here’ or “Now I know all there is to know about Y’. That does not mean they are unstable. Ah, no—far from it. They are fluid. They keep moving forward and making new trysts with life, and the motion of it keeps them young. In my opinion, they are the only people who are still alive. Beware, my little one, of congealing.”

Tony felt that this caution exactly articulated his own fear. He made the quotation into a bookmark that he gave away to his people in the office. I believe that the motion of keeping young—and fearless—was the fountainhead of many innovations that Tony introduced in his ad agency. Not the least of them were the ad school, the foxhole and the transparency which the profit sharing required.

Through

5 T

hick and

Thin

He was very creative about how an agency is run. He didn’t want it to run like a cliché office. He spoke about creating a culture, one with a family spirit, that everybody is working for his family, and that therefore the office became a family as well.

—Monina A. Mercado During the martial-law years Tony took on odd jobs. He managed a film production house called Filipino Films and was station manager of Channel 2. With Minyong’s help, Tony conceptualized Channel 2 as the Banahaw Broadcasting Corporation with the theme “Big beautiful country.” Together they hit upon a twin blockbuster strategy: show new Tagalog movies on prime time and professional basketball three nights a week. While at Channel 2, Tony also thought up the idea of hiring Dolphy for the situation comedy “John en Marsha.”

Then Tony was recruited by Freddie Elizalde to chair a small agency called Motivators. Again he called on Minyong to join him as president of the agency. It was a ragtag operation, Minyong says, that was not even making a million pesos a year.

In 1977 Tony realized that the time had come for him to institutionalize himself. Meralco, PCIBank, KBS, ABS-CBN, among other companies,

through thick and thin

50 were all making use of his expertise as a marketing, public relations and communication consultant, but, as Monina describes the nature of consultancies: “It was like something hanging on the washline, you’re always flapping in the wind, you’re anchored on only two sides. They could always say we don’t need a consultant, goodbye.” With three of his children entering college in a few years, Tony needed a more stable livelihood.

And so without too much money but with a lot of bravado, he acquired Motivators from Elizalde and Basic from Telly Bernardo, and fused them into Basic Motivators. His mother had just died, and it was on the last day of the novena for the dead that he told Monina he had bought the two companies.

Going off on his own was an act of courage for Tony, as there was a proliferation of ad agencies at the time. Monina says he never imagined that he would someday be running an advertising agency. “Creative people didn’t do that, and he always believed he was on the creative side.”

When Tony was at Ace Compton, an American named Connie Reed gave him his first inkling that he had the capacity to lead an ad agency.

Impressed with his work, Connie told him that someday he would be president of the company. He was, Monina says, “flabbergasted, surprised and thrilled.”

But in 1968 he and Minyong left Ace Compton and, with a few other colleagues, tried to set up their own agency. They called it ZMMP, for the partners Zorilla, Martinez, Mercado and Pimentel, but a month later they decided to go their separate ways and the company was dissolved.

Minyong moved to another agency, while Tony worked for a movie production company called SCAN, Inc. When Tony and Minyong started Basic Motivators, they knew what to target—first, clients and brands which the multinationals could not handle; and second, brands that were having a problem. They recruited highly creative and recognized talents such as Nonoy Gallardo, Albert Grupe and Telly Bernardo. “We were going to build an agency whose main product was creativity,” Minyong recalls. Never mind that, as he puts it, “in advertising it was common practice that the managers knew how to manage creative people; creative people couldn’t manage.” He

through thick and thin

51 and Tony were confident about their chances of succeeding. “We weren’t very big,” Minyong says, “so we were looking for young people who were energetic and multiskilled. Pag bata pa, puro idealists ‘yan.”

Basic Motivators had a staff of twelve and billings of less than a million. At the end of their first year Tony called Minyong into his office and said the agency had made a profit of P20,000, what could they do with it? They had already given bonuses and Christmas gifts to their staff. What would you like to do with it, Minyong asked his partner.

Tony thought for a while, then said, “Ibigay na lang nating lahat sa mga empleado natin. Kawawa naman.” Let us give them away to our employees, too. They are hard-up. Minyong says the suggestion took him by surprise, and then they both laughed and indeed gave away the money to their employees. “I guess,” he says, amused at the memory, “we were laughing at our poor situation.”

Their breakthrough came two years later. Multinational Warner Lambert gave Basic brands like its cough syrup and Chiclets, and Basic reciprocated its trust with impressive campaigns. Along came Jollibee, and from 1977 to 1980, Minyong says, Basic was billing P80 million.

“Our ambition during those years was simple. We wanted to stop at P80 million with eighty employees. We thought that was a cozy size, we had collegiality and a family atmosphere, we could communicate with everybody very well. But that didn’t sit well, we weren’t in the top five or even the top ten. So we made plans to get to the top.”

Then came what Minyong calls Basic’s lucky break—“Palmolive, which has multinational agencies, tried us on one brand, Palmolive shampoo, just the creative, and we made a very good impression”— followed by another good impression. Foote Cone and Belding was shopping around for an agency partner in the Far East, and chose us when they came to Manila.” Thus did Basic enter into a partnership with FCB to become Basic Foote Cone and Belding. With P215 million worth of Palmolive business, the agency landed among the top three in 1990.

Money, however, was not the top one among Tony’s goals. Monina clarifies, “Tony didn’t own an agency to earn money although he became wealthy because it was a big and profitable and successful agency. He owned an agency in order to give people a share in the profit.” He also

through thick and thin

52 wanted to help people grow, “to be able to plan their own enterprises, run their own business, go to another company and give as much participation.”

Tony introduced profit sharing as a company policy at a time when it was unheard of in the advertising industry, at a time, in fact, when his own company could hardly afford to do so. Nestor Reantaso, Tony’s finance man at Basic, recalls that before the employees went off for the Christmas holidays, they would wait for Tony to call them into his office one by one. He would hand each of them his gift, a generous check. During the program he would distribute heavy Christmas baskets filled with holiday goodies like ham, queso de bola, and chocolates, and raffle off as much as P20,000 or P30,000 in cash prizes.

Monina says Tony did not like to use the word bonus “because it looks like you’re just skimming the fat, you’re just spoiled, but if it’s profit sharing then you work to have a profit and therefore they also automatically did cost cutting, which meant profit. He made it a personal concern first of all, and then a group concern.”

Sotto voce CREATIVITY IN ADVERTISING WAS THE MAIN ATTRACTION FOR TONY. Initially he thought that it meant that the creativity would be shown through his writing. He worked as a copywriter, hopping from one agency to another, until his big break in J. Walter Thompson. He was in accounts like Shell, Procter and Gamble, Atlantic Gulf and Pacific and P and O Lines. They were premier accounts in the entire Philippine advertising industry at that time. Tony was in the thick of it as JWT copywriter. Then he quit cold just like that. He resigned, sold his car and the residential lot that he paid for and went home to his mother in Balingasag. He needed to think.

6

Choosing a Family

He liked to encourage people who were in need because they were supporting somebody else—a mother, a grandmother, nephews and nieces. He liked people who were working for something other than themselves.

—Monina A. Mercado When he was starting Basic, Tony told Monina that he wanted to create a culture of respect and dignity in his new office—professionalism first of all, and secondly, a family spirit. He wanted the family to be the motivating factor for his employees. In that family atmosphere he wanted cleanliness and neatness, not people in the office walking around in slippers and eating at their desks.

Says Monina, “He liked to see the willingness to work hard, whether it was in a driver, or a janitor, or a copywriter, or in a prospective executive in the office. Someone who wasn’t counting the hours, and someone who wasn’t counting the pay. He was very generous with remuneration, but he was turned off by people who were working for the pay, for counting the pesos and centavos.

At the same time he liked to encourage people who were in need because they were supporting somebody—a mother, a grandmother, nephews, nieces. He liked people who worked for something other than themselves, but he also encouraged them to cut away from

Choosing a family

54 the overdependence of certain family members. He was adamant in drawing that line.

“He liked to see very much resourcefulness. He’d give you a task and he wouldn’t tell you how to do it. So you were supposed to go and find the data and resources. If he found a resourceful person, Tony was just delighted.

“He appreciated people who were worthy of trust—that they would do the work, be responsible, deal well with people, not be two-faced, plus of course handle the money wisely. He knew immediately who these were. A lot of times he acted from intuition, and I’d say 98 percent of the time he was right, his intuition about the people he encouraged was correct.

Nestor Reantaso adds that Tony also considered the spiritual factor— “closeness to God”—when choosing his people. “I think he felt more comfortable working with people of the same faith.” Nestor credits Tony with the changes in his own life—not only financial and professional but, more significantly, spiritual. Through Tony, Nestor learned about Opus Dei and eventually became a member. “He was,” Nestor says, “the apostle that God called.”

Nestor says he admired Tony’s knack for choosing the right people.

Because the agency was his family, he cared about what type of people came to work for it. At times he insisted on interviewing even applicants for clerical positions, and he would ask about the applicant’s family rather than his technical skills.

Monina expands on that point: “He liked to ask questions about family relationships in a very nice, gentle way, without intruding. And the young people would be surprised. They expected to be asked about grades, about their competence.” But he did inquire into the applicants’ scholastic background, such as what organizations they joined and were officers of, what kind of work they did there. Involvement in cocurricular activities was his test of a person’s leadership and willingness to go the extra mile. Tony was wary of young people who did not belong to any organization because he believed that they lacked the experience of working with others, an important asset in an agency.

Monina says he also had “a way of spotting the ninnies, the weak ones,

Choosing a family

55 the mama’s boys. Immediately he closed the door on them because he said in the workplace there’s no mama, no one to wipe your nose.”

Adds Minyong: “Tony was always concerned about families.” He was known to make time for personal chats with his employees, from the account supervisor to the artist to the janitor. Monina says he found ways to spend twenty or thirty minutes with each of them as often as three times a year. His number one question always was: how is your family? It was easy for Monina to understand why Tony had to know his people personally: “He had come to that stage when he realized that an ad agency is people, special people.”

As the company’s top finance person, Nestor Reantaso handled administration as well. He was often amazed that even when the staff had ballooned to 200, Tony knew before he did that an employee’s mother had died or another employee’s wife was in hospital. Tony would ask him to go to the dead woman’s wake or to give X amount of money to the spouse of the ailing employee. When an eighteen-year-old girl at the accounting office who was her family’s breadwinner became pregnant, Tony firmly advised her against having an abortion and promised to be her child’s godfather. True to this word, he threw a christening party at the office, complete with a lechon, after the baby was born. Minyong says that even in its early days, Basic subsidized not only employees’ meals but also their children’s school tuition up to the college level.

A food vendor named Aling Bebeng became an institution of sorts at Basic. She showed up every day for many years to sell banana-cue and packed lunches to the employees. Before long, she had become a part of the Basic family and was invited to the company’s Christmas parties. When she became ill, Tony shouldered her hospital expenses and gave her money besides, and upon her death, spent for her funeral and made sure her daughter was provided for.

“I was amazed at how he saw beneath some obvious physical misery in a person,” says Monina. She recalls two such employees: a man who had no teeth and was poorly dressed, but who cheerfully worked at the most menial jobs, kept late hours, and was appreciative of any kind of attention or appreciation and a girl who was unkempt and awfully quiet and lacked self-confidence. “Tony saw something in her, something trustworthy, and she bloomed because of his trust,” Monina says.

Choosing a family

56 Never judgmental of people, Tony helped even those he knew to be adulterers or bigamists in his office or among colleagues. He was as sensitive to the creative talents of the gays among his staff as he was to their anguish.

“He appreciated talent in people,” Monina says, “but he was not a user. He would work with you and create good things with you, and he never forgot anyone he worked with. He kept in touch, and when you met again some years later, it was as if you had lunch yesterday. He nurtured people by working with them, but when they had to part because the fellow wanted to go to another job, he made sure they never parted with rancor. He wasn’t planting trees for his own backyard, he was planting trees for wherever that tree would thrive later. If anybody said goodbye to him, it was goodbye, I hope you have more opportunities.”

7

Innovator

at

Work

Invest in people first. Then in business.

—Minyong Ordoñez “He was, more than anything else, a chairman in the sense that he shaped organizations. He shaped Basic, gave it the character it has now which I would describe in many ways: very God-oriented, very family-oriented, entrepreneurial, with a high degree of integrity and fortitude. This was his character, and that’s the character of Basic and of the people who worked there at one time or another.”

“Investing in people was a big part of our culture,” says Minyong.

Tony’s basic concept, according to Minyong, was “always put your money on people for training, for benefits. Unahin ang investment sa tao, saka tayo maghanap ng negosyo. Malakas ang instinct niya diyan. Invest in people first, then on the business. In this, his instinct was strong. True enough, it was a great strategy. Accounts came in because of the spirit our people radiated. Whatever we set out to do, we did.” Basic always came out on top, whether it was landing a big account or winning a sports event.

That Basic spirit—of excellence, integrity, teamwork, competitiveness— was developed and promoted primarily through mini agencies which

Innovator at work

58 functioned as business units and were called foxholes. It was not an original idea, but one based on a Japanese management system of quality circles, bottoms-up management, that became popular in the 1980s. The foxholes, Minyong explains, were independent teams of twenty to twentyfive workers each—a full complement of creative, account management, writing, media, and finance people—who were empowered to assess themselves, correct themselves and make decisions.

Each foxhole was a profit center. Tony emphasized to his people that the foxhole was a team and “if you don’t paddle your own canoe, then you’re pulling down the rest of the crew.” He told the groups, Nestor recalls, that “if somebody was not carrying his weight, he must be thrown into the water. He asked someone to design a card with a paddle and gave it to everyone. That was the only control, and it was implemented. The reward was very clear. If you were successful, you got the reward, and if somebody wasn’t contributing, he was literally thrown out.”

Under the foxhole system, every member of the group, even its leader, was evaluated by the entire team at least once a year. The agency’s Executive Committee was itself a foxhole, and so Tony, on his own insistence, was subjected to evaluation by his teammates. Each foxhole or mini agency was a profit center, an efficient productive unit. “It made for some healthy competition,” Monina says. It rendered the profit-sharing policy that Tony had instituted logical and inevitable. With everyone working together for profit, it was only fair that profit, when it came, be shared by everyone.

Foxholes worked for Basic because, Nestor explains, “we had no rules.”

One of Tony’s philosophies was “we are not a government institution, that is, we are not bureaucratic. There are no rules, there is a culture.” The other agencies, Minyong adds, “could not behave the way we did because they were multinationals with a management culture that was global.”

At Basic, people would ask about time, for instance, and Tony would tell them, your time is the time the client wants from you.

When Basic lost its bid for the Pepsi account to a relative newcomer, Campaigns, Tony realized that his agency needed fresh blood. Ever the maverick innovator, he conceptualized a school within Basic that would combine theory with hands-on training for promising young graduates.

This he preferred instead of the costly practice of pirating people from

Innovator at work

59 the competition. And rather than taking in mass communication or communication arts graduates, he preferred those with backgrounds in the humanities, economics, even theater, because he believed that “they must have good grounding because then we can teach them the technical part of advertising ourselves,” Monina says, on hearing the rationale from Tony.

The school, which was known as the Basic Ad School, took in twentyfive students at a time, mostly fresh graduates from the premier schools (Ateneo, UP, De La Salle, UST, and later, the University of Asia and the Pacific when Tony began teaching there). They were paid full wages while attending the six-month course which would immerse them in the culture of Basic. They listened to lectures from every unit of the agency and put in time in the various sections. At the end of the course they faced a heavyweight panel of interrogators led by Tony himself. Those who passed the revalida were honored at a graduation ceremony to which their parents were invited. They signed two-year contracts for a start.

Many Ad School graduates who eventually opted to leave the agency became product managers of other companies, or set up their own businesses. “They never forget the experience,” says Nestor of those who went through Ad School. “So when they went to a traditional agency, they were disoriented. A lot of people came back after exploring the other side. They found out we have a unique system here.”

Nestor sums up what the Ad School, which lasted ten years, accomplished for Basic: “When you add it all up, we made more than we invested, and we made the agency young.”

Besides the Ad School, Tony also launched a mini liberal arts course at Basic that he called “Lawak-utak.” It stemmed, Monina says, from his unhappiness with the “lack of education, the lack of a sense of wonder, the lack of culture.” Tony himself supervised the course and brought in such cultural superstars as Rolando Tinio for language and Zeneida Amador for drama.

Tony introduced other innovations at Basic. One was the monthly gettogether during which, amidst much cheering and yelling, teams presented their best campaigns. “I heard many such meetings,” Monina says, “and the building seemed to shake because of the sense of competition.”

Innovator at work

60 Another innovation was the corporate planning (corplan) meeting which was open to everyone from the chairman of the board to the janitor and the company driver. At those meetings employees learned about the workings of their agency, from its sources of income the mechanics of earnings and profits.

Nestor recalls that Tony wanted his agency to be dynamic and his people to be passionate, to have fire in their bellies, as a quotation tacked on the walls of the agency reminded its employees. “The worst thing that can happen to any individual is to congeal,” went another of Tony’s favorite quotes.

Sometimes, Nestor admits, “we would secretly laugh at him because he would think of ideas that we found wild or crazy.” One such idea came about at a corplan meeting during the Gulf War. Nestor remembers, “He made a big issue of it, blew it out of proportion.

He said this war will kill our business. He told us about his ballroom dancing project during martial law, and he said the time was the same.

So during the whole corplan meeting, the agency’s creative juices were focused on how to do quick turnaround projects.” As it happened, the war in the Persian Gulf was shortlived and did not adversely affect the Philippine economy. But, as a result of that corplan meeting, Basic ended the year with seven months’ worth of bonuses for its employees.

Tony had the last laugh.

Minyong has his own “crazy idea” story about Tony: “He had an idea for a client, something about promoting peace. His idea was to sell one spoonful of Bataan land as a soil of peace, and he would promote that all over the world.”

More often than not, though, Tony’s creative ideas were brilliant.

He was basically a problem solver, an idea man. During one summer, at the peak of an economic crisis, Meralco needed to increase its rates.

Tony wrote a fifteen-second TV commercial, a public service campaign that he titled “Electricity Burns Dollars.” A low-cost production, it showed only one shot, a $20 bill burning. The audio said, “Electricity burns dollars. Save electricity.” The public was being warned to conserve electricity and to blame only itself if its power bills shot up.

Meralco experienced no backlash from the public that year, despite the increase in its rates.

Innovator at work

61 For Varemoid, an anti-hemorrhoids cream, Tony came up with a oneshot TV spot—the face of someone suffering from hemorrhoids while sitting “on the throne.” Viewers complained about the “violent” nature of the commercial, but since Tony’s budget was good for only a month, he had run out of money by the time the spot was taken off the air. By that time, though, Varemoid had achieved high media awareness and a jump in sales.

Basic’s growth from the start of the 1990s was nothing short of phenomenal. By 1992 it was number one, edging out McCann Erickson.

Two years later Foote Cone and Belding lost the global account of Colgate-Palmolive, which meant about a fourth of Basic’s billings. Tony resigned Basic away from Foote Cone and Belding.

In 1996, Publicis Groupe, a French agency that ranked number one in Europe and whose major client was Nestlé, decided to go global and expressed an interest in Basic. Before the year ended, Publicis Groupe had bought majority shares in Basic, giving rise to Basic Publicis.

Tony introduced the concept of value advertising in the country. Father Reuter said that “Tony never produced anything that was going to bring people away from God. He went out of his way to make his advertising positive and to bring people to the virtues Christ our Lord was trying to preach.” Thanks to Tony, the Development Bank of the Philippines (DBP) became one of the institutions most admired for ethical practices.

His Values series of ads for the DBP focused on time-honored Filipino virtues of integrity, patriotism, and respect for the elderly, a welcome change for televiewers tired of crass commercialism. Following the same line of positive messages, Tony created a series of mini documentaries called the “The Good News” for the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company. The series won the Grand Anvil award for a TV campaign twice in a row, an unprecedented feat.

In 1994 Tony won awards as best creative director for three commercials for Caritas Manila, the social action arm of the Archdiocese of Manila. The following year, one of these commercials, “Street Children,” was given the Foote Cone and Belding Chairman’s Award for best TV commercial produced in the worldwide organization. All three commercials were done pro bono, as were “Langgam,” a campaign for diabetes awareness (winner of the Creative Guild award for best campaign in one medium), Baboy (for

Innovator at work

62 an anti-smut campaign (Platinum awards for radio and TV), and Bowling for Motolite (highest award for best TV ad).

In 1996 Cardinal Sin, through Father Reuter, asked Tony to help set up a self-sufficient Radio Veritas. Tony’s concept for the station was to turn it into a commercial outfit that would provide parish-based news and feature the best-known commentators from the country’s leading radio stations. Tony’s supervision of the project was disrupted, however, when he had to undergo a heart bypass. To his disappointment, his concept for the station was not followed and the impact he wanted it to have did not materialize.

Years later the Cardinal would seek his help again, this time to source funds for the Catholic Mass Media Awards. Tony suggested institutional changes in the CMMA and in the early 1990s it was launched as a reinvigorated awards-giving organization of the Archdiocese of Manila.

He himself chaired its board.

Sotto voce SITTING ACROSS FROM TONY AT HOME OR IN OFFICE MEETINGS AS one of the designated writers, I learned about values in advertising in several ways. One way: the values are outrightly stated in radio and tv commercials or in print. Tony and his group did this for Meralco to save money for the consumer and for the service provider itself. For Avon beauty products, Tony’s advertising agency promoted marathon running for women. As the designated writer for the campaign, I was also into running at that time.

Being copywriter was Tony’s first immersion into advertising. The effective advertising message is short but packed with meaning, catchy but not cute, with impact on memory and idiom and powerful in persuasion. Writing copy can be learned, not in school but in one’s own love for language and literature. Absorbing the raw data about the product is the first step to selling it. Figuring out the numbers— who will buy, where and in what media—is vital. You have to be very bright and compact in thought as a copywriter. The facts and figures first, Tony was heard to say, before the bells and whistles. I began to

Innovator at work

63 think that really good copywriting is a lot like writing poetry with its learning and discipline.

Another way that advertising presents values is through real people in profiles, anecdotes and vignettes. As born storytellers and with sincerely feeling hearts, Tony and Minyong were masters in this line. Trusted but tightly reined in, I was hired as their interviewer and writer. We worked together in the DBP Values series and with the Grepalife family insurance series.

Yet another way: campaigns with no commercial purpose but in pressing advocacy for obvious and necessary benefits and aptly called pro bono. For several years, Tony’s group did it for Caritas Manila and the Diabetes Foundation, among others. In l999, Tony’s ultimate campaign was for Trees Consortium in support of managed forests.

For the advocacy, I wrote the full-page ads, calling tree planting as an act of patriotism.

64

1977. Tony in Basic Advertising shortly after its incorporation

65

1978. The board of directors of Basic Advertising (from left to right): Dr. Ned Roberto; Tony Mercado; Minyong OrdoĂąez; Manuel Escudero; Gabino Mendoza, chairman; Monina A. Mercado; Florentino P. Silayan; Galicano Calapatia, Jr., board secretary; and Telesforo Bernardo.

The first board members were Tony’s choices from his best friends and trusted colleagues in the advertising industry.

66

1980. Sports break during the two-day corporate planning session of the whole staff of Basic Advertising.

From the agency newsletter published in 1985

67

68

1985. Celebrating as champions of the 4A’s sports competition. Basic Advertising creative director Nonoy Galliardo is in the forefront.

69

1986. President Cory Aquino launches the People Power book, produced by the staff of Basic Advertising and published by the James B. Reuter, SJ., Foundation

70

1996. Tony with Maurice Levy, chairman of Publicis Groupe, Paris

71

72

1998. Tony at his offce desk

8 , L

A Lot of Joy

a

ot of

Work

When I think of our marriage, I get a sense of pressure. Oh yes, a lot of joy, a lot of exhilaration, but I had to work for it. He was the eagle and I was the donkey. In the family he was vision and love, I was the mundane partner dealing with the children day to day, making the menu, dealing with the househelp, running the house, reporting night after night on the details. I was very happy, but it was a very demanding marriage.

—Monina A. Mercado Early in their marriage, Tony told Monina they would take care never to be ships passing each other in the night.

He could not have made a wiser choice of a wife and a mother to his children. But it was not easy being married to Tony. Monina says candidly, “I think early in our marriage he was having problems with my independent mind and ways. I was never a clingy girlfriend or bride or wife. I could go on my own. I think he was afraid that I would be uncontrollable, too independent. He was afraid of a domineering woman, someone who would run his life. To the very end, I did not dictate his life.�

Genteel and well-educated, with her own thriving career as a writer, Monina posed an entirely new challenge to Tony. Although she met all

a lot of joy, a lot of work

74 his criteria for a dream spouse, he still felt that he had to form her into the wife he wanted her to be.

When they were newly married he would admonish her against laughing out loud. He did not want her to grow her hair long (because it would be unruly), or to wear dusters and step-ins, or to use thick makeup (he wanted his wife to have a clean face). She may have resented some of his rules at first, but she began to understand that they were all part of his sense of beauty and finesse. He did not like strong scents, and advised Monina not to allow perfume to grow stale on her. She stopped using perfume altogether. He was always punctual for appointments, and so Monina had to learn to dress quickly and simply because he had no qualms about leaving her if she took too long. Punctuality, he often reminded her, is a royal virtue. She was by nature a simple and sensible woman, but from Tony she learned to be simple as well in the way she thought, meaning, to be direct to the issue. She was his sounding board, but being a macho husband, he always emphasized, when testing his ideas on her, that he merely wanted her opinion. The final decision was always his.

Monina had a job as managing editor of Graphic magazine when the children were growing up. Tony asked her to resign. Don't let the tail wag the dog, he simply told her. She did as he asked, but it was not until two years before he died that she finally understood what he meant. He felt that she had become too engrossed in the magazine and was giving her family only her spare time. She thought, on the other hand, that she was giving priority to their children and doing the magazine in her spare time.

As an alternative to a career, Tony suggested that she enrol at the Ateneo for a master's degree in sociology/anthropology, believing it would make her a writer of greater substance. She agreed. “People who knew me when I was young,” Monina says, “are astonished at the way I have changed because of the demands he made. He was very demanding.”

Before their wedding, Tony told Monina he wanted to have many children because it had been lonely growing up with only two siblings.

And so they had seven who came in two early batches: An, Robbi, and Wawel, then Miguel, Paolo, and Gabe and then Samantha, the youngest.

a lot of joy, a lot of work

75 “Our children,” Monina says, “were a joint enterprise. They were our main project. We wanted fine, well-brought-up children. We wanted them to be literary. All those outings to the forest, to the beach, and having a second home, all those were meant to bring up children with a sense of wonder, a sense of joy, in being with each other and with us.”

“He enjoyed his children enormously,” Monina continues. “They were his main sources of joy.”

Each time a child was born, Tony would gaze at the baby and examine its eyes, hairline, hair, fingers, toes. “He loved it when his boys were barrelchested,” Monina says, “and they all were, and he said it was like him.”

He would shower Monina with roses at each delivery.

An was always Daddy's little girl; he was her hero. Her earliest memory of him is of waiting for him to come home. Much of her life, she says, was spent that way. Another early memory of hers is of Daddy taking her and kid brother Robbi to the zoo while their mother was in hospital awaiting Wawel’s birth. An says she and her father started to become “pals” when she was in grade school. Occasionally the two of them would go off on Sunday outings, while Monina was left at home with the boys. When Tony became interested in photography, he invited An inside the darkroom so that she could see how magically images would appear on a clean sheet of paper when immersed in a tub of water. As she grew older, he talked to her about television commercials and explained why, for example, all the detergent commercials at the time made use of fairy tales.

The family’s first house, when An was an infant, was in San Juan, Rizal. The second was in a compound in Cubao, Quezon City, where the Trinidad couple, stage actor Koko and journalist Lina Flor, also had their home. When An started her formal schooling, the Mercados transferred to Philam Homes along the now historic E. de los Santos Avenue, or EDSA. An was in high school when they moved again, this time to San Francisco del Monte. In 1987, after her college graduation, Tony gifted his family with an American-style chalet in Mandaluyong. Finally, in 1997, he got his dream house, a vintage house, in Corinthian Gardens, Quezon City.

Tony was very meticulous about his houses. The chalet on Yulo Street in Wack-Wack subdivision, Mandaluyong, had once been part of the Atlantic Gulf and Pacific Company’s compound for its expatriate executives. With

a lot of joy, a lot of work

76 its open spaces, wide windows and huge mango trees, seven bedrooms and a sprawling garden, the house evoked images of cozy summer homes in Baguio. Tony wanted a lot of space to allow his children to invite their individual sets of friends over, and they did. One of the Mercado boys would have a basketball game with friends in the driveway, while another had a gabbing session in the game room upstairs, and An and her friends had the lanai all to themselves. Tony himself designed the garden, which had brick pathways that skirted the mango trees, a rose garden, and a square fishpond. A fountain lorded it over the Spanish-style patio.

The children remember that while they were growing up they always had a second house, a weekend sanctuary, outside the city. The first one, which had belonged to Tony’s aunt, Leliang de Castro, was a little cottage on a hill in Antipolo, amidst other small hills and cliffs and ravines. There Tony would take his children out on walks and exploration trips.

Their next second home was in Victoria Valley, Antipolo, a threebedroom townhouse. In 1976 they acquired a home in Baguio, and spent summers and Christmases and even the children’s semestral vacations there. The family also frequently rented a cottage in Maya-Maya beach in Batangas.

Tony was a busy man but devoted much time for his children on weekends. Every weekend therefore the young Mercados looked forward to an adventure with Dad. Robbi feels fortunate to have been, with An and Wawel, in the first batch of children. Their father was still in good health then and physically active; he also had more leisure time. He would take them jogging, encourage them to play football, gave them motorbikes.

Robbi remembers biking with his father and Wawel all the way from Antipolo to Quezon—he on a medium-size bike, Dad on a large one, and Wawel on a small one. On one such trip, Robbi failed to notice that Wawel was no longer trailing them, for he had fallen into a deep ditch. Robbi says he panicked, but Dad kept his cool.

Wawel recalls weekend camping trips to Nasugbu, Batangas, with his father and Robbi when he was around eight. Dad taught them how to pitch a tent. But it was the breakfasts Dad cooked that Wawel remembers most—Spam and eggs and rice fried in butter. Best of all, Dad would serve his boys. Waking up on their first morning, Wawel recalls, he longed for a toilet but got instead his first lessons from Dad on how to respond to

a lot of joy, a lot of work

77 nature’s calls in the wild. His father handed him a shovel and helped him dig a hole in the bushes, after which, Dad said proudly, there is your toilet.

He never wasted an opportunity to impart lessons to his children.

Nights at the beach were for stargazing, and he would tell them about the constellations, the North Star, the Big Dipper. On one occasion, he also told them about the birds and the bees.

At the backyard of their home in Philam, and later in Antipolo, Tony would stage a great barbecue on Sundays, with himself as the chef.

The children loved his cooking, and even today insist that no one can cook pork liempo barbecue—crusty on the outside but tender and juicy inside—quite like Dad did.

Although quick-tempered like his mother, Tony was gentle and patient with his children. Monina would smash their toys when they fought among themselves, and spank them on their hands and buttocks. But not Tony. Only once does An remember being spanked by Dad, along with Robbi and Wawel. Their father had a cardinal rule: everyone home when he was home. One day he arrived home to find that the three children were at the neighbor’s. When they finally showed up, he spanked them with a belt, but was so remorseful afterward that he rubbed the resulting welts with Vicks.

True to the dream he shared with Monina that night at El Bodegon, he exposed his children early to art and classical music. He liked art and enjoyed buying paintings and finding space for them in his home. An remembers that her parents spent whole afternoons arranging frames on the walls. Tony installed speakers throughout the house and constantly played classical music, and he taught his children how to tell who the composer was by just listening to a few bars. He also assigned them to read biographies of the composers and expected them to tell him afterward what they had learned. A great source of bonding for him and An was Broadway musicals. He loved them and wanted An to be familiar with them as well.

From their earliest years Monina impressed upon the children that they were not wealthy, that their father denied himself material possessions so he could provide for them, and give them privileges like weekend outings and summer vacations. Trained not to expect more than they needed, the

a lot of joy, a lot of work

78 children learned to take no for an answer when they dared to ask for little luxuries for themselves.

“I never felt we were rich,” says Gabe.

“When we were growing up,” says Wawel, “I knew that we were from a simple middle-class family. Dad would give us only what he could afford and what was adequate. If there was a toy we were eyeing, we wouldn't get it until Christmas.” During the economic crisis of the early 1980s, Monina told the children they would have to economize. Wawel and Robbi, for example, had to be content with Dad's hand-me-down rubber shoes.

Then in grade school and a football player, Miguel thought he could outwit his father. He wanted a new pair of the six-stud Adidas that all his friends seemed to be wearing. His strategy was to have his father all to himself when Tony arrived late that evening. While Dad was having dinner, Miguel told him that Paolo needed a new pair of shoes, and offered to give his own to his brother. Dad’s reply stopped him in his tracks. “So you want to buy new ones, right?” he said, then added, “No, you don't need one.” Miguel recalls that he was disappointed, not so much because he was not going to get new shoes, but because Dad had seen through his ploy.

Wawel could not understand why for four straight years his father’s gift to him was a watch—Dad’s. “He would wake me up, take off his watch and give it to me. It hurt because I thought I was getting secondhand watches. It was only when I got to know him better that I realized that he was in fact giving me something that was of great value to him.”

One evening when the family was still living in Philam, An asked her father for a Minitrail, which was then the rage among the kids in the subdivision. His face fell, she recalls, and without looking at her, he said he could not afford one. A few months later, though, he got An a secondhand Minitrail, over the objections of his mother, Lola Luz, who was living with them at the time. Tony never told his daughter that a girl should not be messing around with a motorcycle.

With his children, he was the organization man that he was at the office. On weekends when he went off by himself on his motorcycle, he

a lot of joy, a lot of work

79 made sure his children were productively engaged in his absence. He would assign them an activity, like drawing, and promise cash prizes to the best artist. Wawel remembers a weekend when they were all in the car en route to Lucena and all the children were coughing, to Dad’s irritation. Rather than scold them, he offered them an incentive: a prize for whoever stopped coughing. Everyone, of course, worked mightily to be the winner.

For his children’s formal education, Tony specified that they should go to a small school, citing his own positive experience at the Ateneo de Davao, which was just starting when he entered it. His and Monina’s first choice for their children was O.B. Montessori Center in Santa Ana, Manila, but when a group of its teachers left to form the Maria Montessori Cooperative School, the Mercados joined several other parents there.

Tony and Monina would later on help to establish Southridge, the Opus Dei school for boys in Alabang. But college had to be the Ateneo. On that score Tony gave his children no alternative.

Paolo, the fourth son, remembers an elocution contest in school when he was in grade three at Southridge. Assigned Mark Anthony’s eulogy to Julius Caesar, he thought all he had to do was memorize the piece by Shakespeare. When Tony learned about the contest, he devoted many hours in the evening to coaching his son, rehearsing him line by line, explaining its meaning, demonstrating the proper inflection and gesture.

Paolo won the contest and was launched on a stage career. As a college student at the Ateneo years later, he found out he preferred directing and writing plays to appearing in them, and won awards for his work.

While researching in the Ateneo library, he found “Death of a Dream,” his father’s award-winning play. As Dad had done before him, Paolo eventually became involved in Father Reuter's productions.

Sotto voce BEFORE WE GOT MARRIED, IN FACT AT OUR FIRST EVER DINNER conversation, tony told me that he wanted to have many children.

He had been lonely growing up with only two siblings. And so we had seven children who came in two sets plus one. The first set was An,

a lot of joy, a lot of work

80 Robbi and Wawel; the second set was Miguel, Paolo and Gabe. Then we had Samantha, the youngest.

Our first child, An, was born three weeks before term and fought for her life in the incubator. In an anxious haze, Tony saw his frail daughter, wearing only a diaper. She was tied hands and feet to each corner so that she would not pull out the tiny IV line inserted at her temple. I was not allowed to get up and see her in the nursery. I only saw Tony’s celebratory bouquet of pink roses at my bedside. Tony touched one of the lightest rose hues and murmured to me: “She is like this petal.”

9

The Rituals of Home

He had a great sense of joy. It was not mere enjoyment, but a sense of joy and an appreciation of his children, of his gardens, of music, of good food, of travel. He had a great sense of joy in driving his motorcycle and going to faraway places. —Monina A. Mercado Monina says she realized at some point in their marriage that Tony had to earn well because he had to have the means to afford his pursuits of joy. But while most men of means and achievement collect women, rare wines, cars, jewelry, and real estate, Tony had simple but fine tastes. Nor was he self-indulgent. He was extravagant with gadgets, for instance, but not with his personal needs. He did not even own an expensive watch. His trusty Seiko was good enough for him.

He enjoyed ritual; it was a way of nurturing himself. He made a ritual of everything in his life, from the way he cared for his collection of knives to the way he cleaned his camera and his pipe and smoked his cigars, and even the way he took off on his motorcycle. It seemed to An that Daddy took forever to clean his camera with an airbrush. When he took up photography, he gave himself an air-conditioned darkroom and the best equipment. Monina says Tony liked photography for the aloneness it gave him.

The rituals of home

82 An found her father’s cigar ceremony so fascinating that she devoted an entire essay to it when she was editor of Heights at the Ateneo. She recalls, "He would empty out the pipe, then tap it, then open the tobacco pack, then smell it before slowly filling it in. Then he would clean out the pipe tube. As a child, that made me feel he was so regal because he was savoring the ritual. It would take a long time because he was chatting the whole time. That was about the only time I would hear small talk from him. For his Tabacalera cigar he would first remove the cellophane wrap.

One of us kids would be awarded the red ring and I would wear it like a tiny crown. Then he would stroke the cigar to get it even or to let it breathe. Then he had a special cutter to snip off the edges. Then he would dip his fingers into brandy and wipe the cigar with it. Then he would punch holes on the edges, and only then light it. The whole thing would take twenty minutes.�

Tony spent hours oiling the blades of his knives and sharpening them, and cleaning his air gun and the Remington rifle his father had given him.

While cleaning the rifle as his children watched, he would point to the scar on his hand and tell them the story of how he got it. An remembers outings with Daddy to the markets of Baguio, where they would rummage among U.S. surplus stuff for knives, dogtags, army jackets, even instant mashed potatoes that reminded Tony of army rations during the war.

Like his father, Tony radiated joy. He was lighthearted, quick to laugh and to see with a child's eyes. Monina remembers how delighted he was, on a visit to Sydney in 2000, as he watched the sailboats coming out of the harbor. On their first morning there he roused her from her nap just to point out a small harbor surrounded by houses, each of which had a small boat.

Everyone, it seemed, had his own little harbor. Of that same visit to Sydney, Monina recalls how he laughed at the sight of four old men at the pier playing jazz and holding up a sign that said passersby could look at them for free but must pay a dollar to take photographs and five dollars to take video shots.

To the Mercado boys, Dad on his motorcycle was a Power Ranger.

He would let them ride with him in convoy, but mostly he would go off by himself. He always made sure he wore regulation attire, with padded knees and elbows, custom-made boots, and the best motorcycle helmet in the market, but he had accidents nonetheless. Monina would worry about those trips, but he would return from them feeling energized and ready to face the new work-week.

The rituals of home

83 In fact Monina was not too happy about those forays, which started when they were living in Philam. She never knew exactly where Tony was going, and would find out only when he came home with mud splattered on his pants. He would cross rivers in Antipolo, go on the road to Infanta or to the mountains of Morong and Cainta, or to Tagaytay. He went because he wanted to be alone and to enjoy buffeting the wind on his face.

For a man with a growing family, getting away in such fashion was a great luxury. It also took enormous courage. One day Monina learned that Tony had gone to a seminar in Tagaytay on his motorcycle. He would spend the night there, he said, but to her surprise he was back home by midnight. It was a furious Monina who ran outside to open the gate. “I was just speechless with anger at the risk that he took,” she recalls. “He told me the seminar ended that evening, it wasn't going to be continued the next day, where was I to sleep, aren't you happy that I'm home?"

Who could argue with that?

Sotto voce FOR AS LONG AS THE CHILDREN CAN REMEMBER, WE ALWAYS HAD a second home, a week-end sanctuary. Sometimes it was to the beach where we had a reserved cottage in the Maya Maya resort in Nasugbu, Batangas.

Starting in the mid-70s, Tony bought a second home in Baguio, a top floor condominium on Legarda Road. Three times a year, throughout summer, during the semester break and the year-end holiday, we stayed in Baguio so that the children began to consider it as our probinsiya.

Our first ever out-of-town sanctuary was a hilltop cottage in Antipolo that was lent to us by Tony’s aunt, Tia Leliang. Terraced flowers went up to the wrap-around porch where we had picnic meals. At night Tony trapped fireflies for the children to keep as fragile pets inside his white hankies.

Up and down the nearby hills and ravines, Tony took his children out to explore, sometimes taking all morning. Sliding down to the bottom of the ravines, they discovered fresh rivulets and pretty stones. To get up again, they grabbed vines and took toeholds on rocks and packed red clay.

The rituals of home

84 More than once, the climb petrified a Mercado child who hanged at midpoint and shivered in fear. Tony spoke softly and gently and waited beneath him till the child gathered courage. Back to the top, no one spoke about it nor teased nor tattled to Monina who was tending the barbecue. He only told Monina later in the day when they were by themselves. But again and again, next time once more, Tony and his children explored other hills and ravines and conquered fears.

Our next week-end home was a townhouse in Victoria Valley, also in Antipolo. We were close to my first cousin Cielito and her husband Nonong Calapatia whose children—three girls and three boys—were the same age as our children. The Calapatias lived within Victoria Valley itself in a sprawling house with spacious grounds. There were yet more hills, caves and ravines for the children to explore.

Most of all, Tony loved the Antipolo terrain where he rode his motorcycle, a Yamaha DT 250. But every day in our Philam Homes village, Tony rode the bike to go to early morning Mass followed by a tennis game. As soon as a Mercado child’s toes could touch the ground while astride, Tony taught him or her to ride the motorbike. When a Mercado turned 13, he was assigned his own motorcycle, a Yamaha DT 175 for Robbi and a DT 100 for Wawel and An. They were never allowed out of the village, which is in the pinch of two great highways. Our urban village was spacious and snug with friendly homes and great trees. With a girls’ barkada also riding on their brothers’ motorcycles around their village, An made ronda and did errands. Barely of age, Miguel got a Yamaha Minitrail for whom it sprouted like his own legs.

The Mercados rode with the Calapatia boys and girls up and down Victoria Valley in full view from the Calapatia hilltop veranda. One day a dog chased the girls as they rode by. An skidded and fell off her motorcycle. Her face and arms bleeding and deeply abraded by the sharp stones where she landed, An looked like a police case when she was brought to the emergency room. The doctor dressing her wounds muttered: “What young people do nowadays and you a girl!”

Did she stop riding afterwards? No way. The next day was her first day in a girls’ exclusive high school. Looking the way she did, An went to class with the open though tinctured abrasions. The next weekend she was out riding on the Victoria Valley hills and dales.

The rituals of home

85 Robbi and Wawel rode with Tony far afield beyond Antipolo on the road to Infanta. Still too young, Miguel never went that far, but he had his own Minitrail where he rode along with Tony on his way to the tennis court. Much younger yet are Paolo and Gabe who rode the motorcyle, too, but not with their Dad’s passion.

k TO ATTEND AN OVERNIGHT SEMINAR IN TAGAYTAY, TONY WENT OFF early one morning on his motorcyle from our home in Quezon City.

But at close to midnight that same day, I heard his motorcycle puttputting at our gate. Worried and angry that he drove at night, I opened the gate for him. He said that the seminar ended after dinner, so he drove right back from Tagaytay. He was flushed with joy at completing the stretch from the dark countryside to our by then deserted city streets. We women fear the risks men take. But how else can they be man enough—and women be the true courage?

86

10

Material

for

Grace

With all his gifts, all his charisms, with all his circumstances and occasions to be arrogant because he was powerful and wealthy in addition to being successful and brilliant, he approached his spirituality, his life of piety, with the simplicity and obedience of a child.

—Monina A. Mercado Spiritual direction, Monina believes, was the final refinement in Tony’s life. It was, she says, spiritual direction “that was of this world but did not take him out of this world; he made this world his material for grace.”

Once he found it, as he entered his mid-thirties, and for the next thirty-two years, he never felt that he had to leave this world in order to serve God. Monina tells why: “He knew that a man can serve God through his marriage, through his wife, through his children, through his job by which he supported his family, through his profession by which he developed himself. And that is the material for his spirituality—a very realistic, practical, hands-on spirituality. It had no dreams, no illusions. It did not say I wish I didn’t marry, I wish I were a priest, I wish I had less children, I wish I were in a profession where I didn’t have to deal with too many people. He took whatever his circumstances were in life and made that the material for his spirituality.”

Material for grace

88 As a boy living in a dormitory at the Ateneo, Tony loved the ritual of benediction and the singing of “Salve Regina” in the chapel at five o’clock every Saturday afternoon. He would drop whatever he was doing, or rush from wherever he was, get dressed (everyone had to come in neatly attired), and run to the chapel. Like most Ateneans, he kept a rosary in his pocket all his life, but unlike many others, he actually prayed his beads.

The Rosary, Monina says, “was crucial to him.”

In 1968 Tony discovered Opus Dei and found in it the spiritual framework and program of prayer he had been looking for. The year before, on a colleague’s invitation, he had joined a cursillo, a fad among Catholics at that time. He found the experience unsettling. Monina says, “He was shocked with every inch of his life. He had never been in anything like that, that was confessional, public, emotional, and exhausting, that kind of vulnerability. In the end he became really frightened, thinking is this our only way to God, is this the way I am being led. He said to me, ‘I’m afraid I will lose my faith if this is the way.’ He went around being bothered for a little more than a month, I think.” And then his good friend JJ Calero, president of J. Walter Thompson, tried to interest him in a group that “believes you can live the gospel in ordinary life in a quiet, ordinary way on your own, as you are, where you are.”

The group was Opus Dei. Tony became interested, started to attend the recollections and found them to his liking. Monina explains why Tony was drawn to Opus Dei: “He liked the intellectual aspect, the fact that they taught you doctrine, they didn’t make you sing and dance your prayer, but they made you comprehend your faith and why you should pray.” Opus Dei’s program of prayer—daily Mass, spiritual reading, and mental prayer—reminded Tony of the benedictions in the Ateneo chapel of his boyhood.

What was not at the Ateneo, but was in Opus Dei, was the concept of the study circle. The formation in Opus Dei, Monina says, is “very personal and continuous.” Opus Dei forms its members through yearly seminars and retreats, study sessions on the gospel, classes in philosophy and theology and social justice, and the history of the church. Members have a regular confessor with whom they talk about their family life and prayer work. Tony would emerge from the seminars, especially those on social justice, with new ideas he could apply to his company. He kept a thick notebook in which he jotted down his plans based on what he had learned.

Material for grace

89 Monina says Tony’s formation in the intellectual and spiritual dimensions and the life of prayer were the refinement that he sought.

It was very important to Tony that Monina understand what Opus Dei and spirituality were, but he never coerced her into joining him. She did, however, eventually follow him. He formed her, she says, with gentle reminders and sweet rebukes. “While I know that he took me for what I am, there were bumps and spots and corners in me that he needed to smooth out in order that we may live well together, that we may be good parents, that I may help him in his spiritual life,” she says.

Their family life, with its regularity, gave Tony the framework for order and for peace that he needed in his daily schedule, and so he was able to fit in time for prayer, for Mass, for spiritual formation. He woke up early in the morning and he would leave the house by five, attend the earliest Mass, and play tennis, change into office clothes, and go to work.

He made time for mental prayer even while in his car. He would discuss his day with God in the light of the Gospel, and ask for guidance with his decisions and difficulties. Always his major consideration was, “Lord, what would you do if you were in my place? Mama Mary, how would you deal with this?” In the afternoon he devoted another thirty minutes to prayer.

When the children were very young, the whole family would pray the Rosary every day. Tony was always home for dinner unless there was an emergency or a deadline at his office.

He made resolutions, small and concrete, to be a better person— for example, to be more cheerful to a specific someone, to speak to an employee about his family, to make a pilgrimage with so-and-so, to offer his mortifications for so-and-so. In a small notebook he wrote down his resolutions, which sometimes involved Monina—for him to exercise more patience with her, to have more conversations with her, to listen to her more—and at other times his children. After he acquired a Palm Pilot, he used it to record his resolutions and formulate his prayers. These prayers usually appeared on the computer as brief ejaculations. His spirituality, says Monina, was “very concrete, hands-on, not dreams nor illusions.” An puts it another way: “He embraced the computer so it could bring him to prayer.”

Material for grace

90 Monina became certain that Tony had achieved a spiritual life that went beyond Masses and Rosaries when she began to see that “he seemed to have a kind of equanimity and peace.” She says, “He had such great cognizance of the will of God. He had many problems, he was starting companies, he had trouble with people, but despite all these he had great equanimity and peace. And then he was openly, materially generous.”

Of particular significance to Monina are two statements of Tony’s that he repeated like a theme song in the last four years of his life: “Embrace the will of God” and “Love, only love.” They were, she says, “the sum total of his spiritual formation.” When faced with a setback or a rebuff or failure, he would, Monina says, “lift his head, as if seeking fresh air, and say, ‘It is the will of God.’ If I wept in sorrow, he comforted me, saying, ‘It is the will of God.’ If I raged about a loss or a frustration, he soothed me, saying: ‘Omnia in bonum, it is for the good.’ At the same time, when blessings came, big or small, he murmured within my hearing or in front of our children: ‘Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Jesus.’”

He was not ashamed to pray, and made time to pray anywhere, everywhere. He welcomed being caught in traffic jams because they gave him time to pray all fifteen decades of the rosary, sometimes over and over again. It was, Monina says, “extraordinary behavior from a man so important in his own industry, so listened to, a giant, an icon, to make time to pray, and not to be ashamed about it. He recognized his dependence on prayer. Because he prayed, he was saved from the bitterness of his own failures. Because he prayed, he saw little by little that his job was the formation of people, and to create a culture of work and family life in that office.”

But just as he did not compel his wife to join Opus Dei, or apply hardsell tactics on her, he never tried to talk any of his children into becoming members either. To him it was enough that he was a good example to them. To them Dad was a prayerful man who prayed the Rosary and went to Mass and Communion every day. He expected his children only to say grace before meals, to say the Rosary, and to go to Mass on Sundays—not just to any Mass, though, but to one with a good liturgy.

Wherever the family lived, Tony always kept a little room in the house that served as his office. After he joined Opus Dei, he instituted a system of weekly chats with each of his children, following much the same style

Material for grace

91 as his weekly sessions with his spiritual director. They were friendly chats, not small talk, and hinting but not pressuring them about his dreams and plans for them. The chats now became his way of getting to know his children better and of listening to them. He had a mental checklist against which he would follow up on each child’s progress. He would ask them gently about their prayer life but bore down more on their physical regimen because he wanted all of them to be in fine physical shape.

On weekends he and Monina would encourage their sons to go to the Opus Dei boys club for sports activities and An to the girls club for cooking classes. When An was a freshman at the Ateneo, Tony sent her to Rome for Opus Dei’s annual youth congress. She says, half in jest, that she and her brothers believe their father made a mistake in sending them to the Ateneo for college because some Jesuits introduced them to the theology of liberation, which runs counter to the teachings of Opus Dei. An in fact remembers having had arguments and discussions with her father on the subject.

At work, Minyong Ordoñez noticed a radical change in his partner.

In their early years, he recalls, “we were just happy-go-lucky guys full of enthusiasm for our work. All we’d talk about were fun and jokes.”

Minyong noticed not only that Tony had become more prayerful and disciplined about going to Mass, but also that he liked to invite his friends at the agency to join him on pilgrimages to various churches in May, the Marian month, and October, month of the holy Rosary. He would abruptly end a meeting, even when he was discussing an urgent problem, and suggest that everyone there join him on a pilgrimage.

“He was really a contemplative in action,” says Monina. “He was very eager for friends to discover the richness, the wealth, the practicality and wisdom of his way of life.” He invited friends to join him as well at Opus Dei retreats, and conducted study circles for a select few.

Says Minyong, “It was rare on Ayala Avenue that you had a guy who did his Christian thing, told his friends about it in an easy way. He wasn’t preachy. He did it by example. He was concerned about your family and your salvation. His priorities at work were his relationship with God, the welfare of his people, their competitiveness and that of his agency.”

Material for grace

92 Minyong also noticed that Tony was now able to keep his temper in check and to practice more tolerance and patience. “It was amazing because he was a very strong, opinionated guy. He could be perceived as cruel because he hated mediocrity. He was full of passion, but you could see that in spite of his passion and his pride and his hatred of mediocrity, he struggled to be humble and quiet.”

Sotto voce AS I LEARNED BY GRACE, THE SPIRITUAL FORMATION IN OPUS DEI IS personal, joyous and lifelong, because it is all about being close to Jesus. “May you seek Christ, may you find Christ, may you love Christ” is the rallying call of St. Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei. Like breathing itself are the Norms that are the bread and butter of Opus Dei. They are daily Mass and Communion, weekly Confession, weekly prayer circle, monthly recollection, yearly three-day retreat and yearly weeklong seminar. Then there are always the Norms that include mortification, study, work, order and cheerfulness. They mold a lifestyle that is defined and focused on loving Jesus. Norms are all about learning love, the love of Christ—its length and breadth, its fullness, depth and height.

While Tony struggled with the Norms, he was particularly eager for the weeklong seminar every year with a curriculum that included theology, philosophy, the virtues and Bible history. He felt that it was like going back to school. Especially from topics on charity and social justice, Tony learned practical ideas that apply to his company and they filled his planning notebook. He scribbled notes as well for his family life, notes that even today I stumble across at the margins of the books that he was reading or if I open his daily agenda of the years before July 2000. There I find the names of the people that he was praying for, including my own that I be healthy and cheerful.

11H

Ahead of

is

Time

They were the two outriggers in his boat, the two wings in this eagle: the brilliant mind that could identify issues, that could see logic, that could come to conclusions; and high intuition. Those are gifts you are born with, but they are nurtured by your parents, by opportunity, education, the kind of spouse you have, your successes as much as your failures, and by your pain.

—Monina A. Mercado Many people have gifts, Monina says, but they do not have the opportunity to use or to refine them because they are “too disordered, too much in the grip of their passions, too much of greed or avarice or lust that could becloud the gifts they got from God.” Tony certainly was not perfect, Monina clarifies, but he had his charisms. He could identify fears as well as strengths, and he could read people’s minds and motives although he never let on. He had great personal dynamism. Although physically small, he projected a strong presence and exploded with intellectual energy at the discussion table. In many ways he was a man ahead of his time.

As early as 1981, he was talking about the modem and predicting that information technology was the wave of the future. He told Monina that the best way to keep herself young was to learn the computer, and he

Ahead of his time

94 proved to be a better teacher to her than those at the two computer schools she attended. When texting came into fashion, he used it to keep in touch with his children. On trips to Hong Kong, he would buy the latest-model computers, laptops, and finally a Palm Pilot. Surfing the Internet became a ritual with him. So did typing his prayers on his computer.

In his later years, he would burst out in thanksgiving to God for the many joys he had received. “I guess,” Monina surmises, “that’s why he had many more joys—because he had a grateful heart.”

In 1995, hearing from a friend about a plan to set up a hospice for the indigent in Los Baños, Laguna, he signed on, helped to make the vision a reality, and became its first president. He wanted the dying to be immersed in the mercy of God through the sacraments. The Los Baños hospice serves the very poor who need emotional and spiritual comforting in their final months and alleviation of their physical pain. Volunteers called nangbibisita, mostly retired professors from the University of the Philippines, visit the patients and bring priests to those who wish to have the Catholic Church’s last sacrament. Tony bonded with the local parish church, urged the trustees to become prayer partners to the dying, begged his friends to support the project, and contributed generously to the hospice fund. As he himself lay dying, he asked Dr. Josefina Magno, who founded the first hospice in Virginia, USA and has been actively involved in Los Baños, to carry on.

In the last three years of his life Tony fought against vanity and pride, and struggled to forget those who had hurt him deeply. After undergoing a heart bypass in 1991, he began to make conscious efforts to overcome his impatience and quick temper, a Roa trademark and a weakness Monina did not detect in him until after their marriage.

Monina would be the first to say that Tony the perfectionist had his own share of imperfections. He was a poor speller, for one thing, and although he was right on target in terms of professional, moral and spiritual directions, he was impulsive. He was impulsive about buying the best, whether it was a camera or a motorcycle. He once bought a big car because he said he had to have something big enough for six children.

When the price of gasoline shot up, he quickly sold the car and replaced it with a Kombi. Years later, at a clubhouse bazaar, he bought a Volvo because he heard Samantha saying that she liked it.

Ahead of his time

95 On a more serious plane, Monina says, “He was impatient, because he thought fast. He could see what you should be doing to achieve something and you were not doing it. Or you were too slow.”

Sotto voce TONY FIRST LEARNED ABOUT HOSPICE IN 1981 WHILE AT LUNCH IN New York City with the then chairman of Warner Lambert, Ward S. Hagan. The gentleman was about to retire the following year. He told Tony that he had a home in Nantucket where he would spend his retirement raising funds for the local hospice. With thoroughness and commitment, he explained what hospice is. Tony was deeply impressed and kept the idea in his mind.

After his coronary bypass in 199l, Tony followed his doctors’ recommendations. Giving up stress was one of the recommendations.

This Tony could not do since he was running an advertising agency full time. But what he took up with enthusiasm was the doctors’ recommendation to have a farm.

That same year, he found Puypuy, a barrio in Bay, Laguna. Tony bought a property there, developed it as a mini forest and a weekend home that included a mineral hot spring pool. One day, while immersed in the pool and looking at the sky awash in glowing streaks of orange and pink from the setting sun, Tony turned to me and said: “This is not heaven yet. We have to earn it.”

That was June 1995. That weekend, we were invited to lunch with our favorite neighbor in Puypuy, Marcia and Angel Sandoval. Among the other guests were friends from Manila and a couple, Dada and Fermin Adriano whose teenage daughter Sarah had just died of cancer a few months previous. As faculty members, the Adrianos lived in the nearby University of the Philippines, Los Baños.

While having coffee, the convivial conversation turned serious when the Adrianos began to talk about hospice care for the dying. They heard of the concept from Dr. Josefina Magno, a hospice pioneer in the U.S., who was sent by WHO to start hospice in the third world. Being

Ahead of his time

96 Filipina, Doctor Magno came to her home country first. The Adrianos said hospice would have helped them a lot when Sarah was dying. In view of this, they would like to start a hospice in Los Baños.

Tony sprang to attention, recalling the Nantucket hospice that impressed him so much. Drawing more from enthusiasm and imagination than from what he actually knew, he presented the hospice idea for them to work out. Coupled with the Adrianos’ conviction, hospice idea caught fire with the group and they thought of the name right away: Madre de Amor Hospice, in honor of Our Lady.

Since I was not at the meeting, Tony told me later that he just left the table briefly and when he returned, he was already voted president. He was glad. Reaching out through the hospice, he believed that the dying will be able to receive the Sacraments, if Catholics, and everyone can be accompanied by prayers at the most crucial end of their lives.

Attending Sarah Adriano at home in Los Baños was Dr. Rhodora del Rosario, a young doctor who became very close to the family. At the meeting that crafted the new hospice, Dr. Dory was voted the medical director. Present too was the assisting nurse at Sarah’s bedside and she became the first nurse in the newly minted hospice. Other guests during the meeting became trustees and officers: Dada and Fermin Adriano, Archie Costales, Marcia Sandoval, Carole Guerrero and Ning Basa. By unanimous choice, Dr. Josefina B. Magno became the founding chairman until her death in 2003.

The hospice made itself known in the Los Baños community through the parish bulletin board and through Dr. Dory’s physicians. Hospice volunteers were invited and many retired faculty members from the university signed up. Tony was impressed at the roster of doctors who became hospice volunteers; they were Ph.D’s in agronomy, chemistry, food technology and education.

The first hospice patient was a young woman who was the breadwinner of the family. She died only three weeks after admission.

Then as now—the year 2010, being the l6th year of Madre de Amor Hospice—the dying patients are visited by the hospice physicians, nurses and volunteers in their own homes. There is no inpatient

Ahead of his time

97 facility as yet but by 2010 more than 550 patients have died in the care of the Madre de Amor Hospice.

The hospice center in Los Ba単os serves as the meeting place for the volunteers to report and update patients, convene for group meetings, lectures and celebrations. For the first two years, Tony rented a Los Ba単os office as the hospice center. In 1996, he bought a house with spacious grounds and assigned it for the use of the Madre de Amor Hospice. Tony was always present in hospice meetings and celebrations. He insisted that I should be always present too although I became a hospice trustee only when he had died.

98

A Lot

12 M

ore

Love

He was living for Samantha.

—An Mercado Alcantara Gabe, the youngest of the Mercados’ six children, was seventeen in 1990 when Samantha came into their lives. They knew she was joining the family months before she was born, and so when Tony and Monina took her home from the hospital they could not contain their joy. As Monina laid her down on their huge bed, everyone looked on in wonderment.

They had all said yes when Dad asked them, one by one, how they felt about adopting a baby into the family. Tony needed their approval; he knew that he would not live long enough to see this child grow up, and he wanted to make sure that they would care for her when he was gone.

He was fifty-five and no longer the healthy, physically active man he had been in midlife.

The baby, tiny and oh so pretty, arrived with only the clothes from the hospital and a little blanket, and so off Mom and Dad went to shop for her. An remembers, “Dad called me on his cell phone and said, we’re having a hard time choosing a crib. He was describing to me the kind of crib he was looking at, which Mommy didn’t want but which he wanted.

So he was trying to get my vote long distance. He knew I would go for whatever he said.”

a lot more love

100 An chose the name Samantha for her baby sister, and it was appended to her baptismal name, Anna Maria Rosario. She was nicknamed Sam. The year after Sam arrived, Tony had to confront his first major health crisis. He needed a heart bypass. The family implored relatives and friends to storm heaven with their prayers for Tony, and their request was granted.

The seven-hour procedure, which was performed in Pamplona, Spain, was a success. Tony came home in buoyant spirits and with a heart as good as new.

It was the thought of Samantha, the baby he was now responsible for, that steeled his resolve to fight for his life. He had kept her picture by his hospital bed.

Sotto Voce IN JULY 1991, TONY WAS AT A BUSINESS MEETING IN BANGKOK. I WAS with him and we were checked in at Shangri-La Hotel. One morning after breakfast, Tony went to his meeting and I sailed out to windowshop. As the morning turned sultry, I returned to our room and found Tony sprawled on the bed. He said he was very tired.

Within a month, on August 19, 1991, Tony had a heart bypass surgery. The quadruple bypass procedure took seven hours. Following recommendations, Tony had opted for the surgery to be in the hospital of the University of Navarre in Pamplona, northern Spain. The doctors there were known throughout Spain for coronary cases, including heart transplant.

Tony’s personal doctor in Manila, Dr. Amado Enriquez had trained and worked in Navarre and accompanied Tony throughout. My nephew, Juan Jose Cabanero, was then in the same hospital as a cardiologist in training. I accompanied Tony, so did Robbi who had studied at the University of Navarre.

Attending doctors and nurses and many visitors noted a baby picture at Tony’s bedside. He told everyone that she was our daughter Samantha and that he was eager to get well and live several more years for her.

a lot more love

101 For post-surgery monitoring, Tony remained in a Pamplona hotel for three more weeks. Being diabetic, Tony’s wounds took time to heal.

Nonetheless his doctors wanted him to live normally. In the morning, we walked around the campus of the university that was across our hotel and paid a visit to the shrine of Our Lady. In the evening, we went to the bus stop to get a ride to the old city of Pamplona where we attended the Mass and made paseo at the plaza.

While Tony was in hospital and as he recovered, I made some friends in the neighborhood. One of them, Begonia, ran the newspaper kiosk.

Cheerfully snoopy, she learned from me that Tony was a coronary patient. Ever the charming subversive, Begonia greeted me each day: “!Oye, guapa, dale hamon, chocolate y mucho amor!” Listen, give him ham, chocolate and lots of love!

Gaining more confidence, Tony traveled by car as far north as Roncesvalles, close to the border with France (for a pilgrimage to the small exquisite Gothic shrine of the Madonna of Roncesvalles), and as far east as Guipuzcoa (for a pilgrimage to the cathedral of St. Ignatius of Loyola). Since Robbi had left for home, our guide and driver was Juani Cabanero.

At the farewell dinner in Pamplona, Tony took Juani to dinner at the famous grill across the university. He ordered the specialty for Juani, the chuleton de Baztán, a huge steak. He ordered it only for Juani who exclaimed: “Is this the way you eat, Tito? No wonder, you needed a bypass!”

k WHILE ATTENDING A BIG PARTY IN MAY 1990, I NOTICED THAT ACROSS the room, Tony was in an intense conversation with one of his very close friends. Their heads were close together for some minutes, then they looked for me. When they saw me, they smiled big bright smiles. Even their eyes were smiling. Seeing them so happy, I hurried to them.

Tony’s friend reached out for me as he said with a radiant smile: “You are going to have a baby!” Then Tony hugged me and said with

a lot more love

102 an equally radiant smile: “We are going to have a baby!” Since I knew the two men well, I thought that they were going to start a new business. But the friend, whom I trusted deeply, explained that we would indeed have a child because he asked Tony to adopt a baby who needed a home. The baby was yet to be born in June and the mother wanted to be sure that it would be in a good home with a good family. Readily Tony offered his own family and he was certain I would agree.

Unable to sleep that night, I asked Tony why we, already in our fifties, should have a new baby. “We have so much more love to give,” Tony said. “All of us, you and me and the children, have so much more love to give. Our baby will bind us close together in loving her.” As coup d’grace, Tony told me: “The baby will be baptized and raised a good Catholic.”

We had to tell An and her brothers, one by one, about their new Mercado sibling. We did not want to announce to the group at the dining table. We wanted to quietly look into their eyes. Tony chose to speak to An, Robbi and Wawel. I spoke to Miguel, Paolo and Gabe.

Some of them agreed at once, smiling with joy and expectation.

Only Miguel had a query: “Do we have to take care of the baby?”

At that time, our household staff consisted only of the home secretary but I was in active search for other domestics. I promised Miguel that certainly there would be a yaya for the baby.

We were surprised with joy at their young alacrity that would yet have to meet the mundane.

An and Gabe needed time to think. Being the youngest, Gabe was hesitant to abdicate. But lounging in the sala that weekend, he asked me: “If we have a baby girl and she goes to a girls’ school when she grows up, will you allow me to drive her to school?” When I said yes, Gabe became all enthused: “Ok, Mom, let’s have the baby and she must be a girl. Then she can point me out to the bigger girls in school and introduce me as her big brother.”

In hesitating, An explained that she had to think it through very well. For sure, she will be the second mother, being the eldest in the

a lot more love

103 family and the only girl and given her parents’ age. Moreover her college degree from the Ateneo is in early children’s education and that she was, till a year before, a teacher in a Montessori school.

Plus she was planning to have her own family very soon, a suitable gentleman was already in the wings.

Two days later, with a radiant smile, she came down to breakfast: “Mom, Dad, I dreamed that I will have a sister. We will have a baby girl and she is so pretty. I want her!” Forthwith she learned from me how to bathe an infant, how to mix a formula, how to sterilize feeding bottles, how to burp.

On June 9, 1990, the new Mercado was born: a girl. We took her home from the hospital within the same morning that she was born.

At the top of the driveway in a celebratory semi-circle, the brothers were all smiles, in awe about the lovely sleeping baby in my arms.

Early that morning, An was already at work in the office but hurried back home in time to welcome their sister as she arrived.

Every one called her Sam. The name Samantha was at ready every time I had a baby after An. Only boys followed: Rogelio, Emmanuel, Miguel, Paolo and Gabriel. At long last, the youngest Mercado child acquired her long-awaited name.

On the Saturday after her birth, Father James Reuter baptized her with the name Anna Maria Rosario Samantha. Her godmothers were her sister An and Alice Raroque who was my best friend. The godfathers were An’s friends, the twin brothers Lino and Lito Rivera.

Tony hosted a big party at home that spilled out to our garden. He invited many relatives and friends, including the top people in his advertising agency and colleagues. Tony was never a big party giver, but this fete for Sam was the rare occasion.

Every day before she went to the office, An bathed the infant Sam. Two weeks after Sam was born, I went with Tony to a business meeting in New York that had long been scheduled. Since there was yet no yaya for Sam, An took an office leave. One day, friends Lino and Lito insisted for An to attend their birthday dinner. They were assured that their own godmother, a practicing pediatrician, would be there.

So An brought along Sam to her first big dinner party.

a lot more love

104 In the same week, Father Reuter needed an infant for a scene in a tableau of the Nativity. His first choice was Sam to represent the Christ Child. Of course, no one could refuse Father Reuter, young though Sam was. An brought her to a few rehearsals and Sam behaved as the Christ Child, beautiful and serene.

The play itself was presented in the early evening on the open embrasure at the top of the stairs of Our Lady’s shrine at the corner of EDSA and Ortigas. It began to drizzle but Father Reuter never allowed any drizzle to stop any play, An was soon to learn.

Watching close by, An wept with tears bigger than raindrops during Sam’s scene. She was so afraid, she told me later. She was afraid that Sam would get very sick and die. She was afraid of what I would think of her care for our baby. She was afraid of how distressed Tony would be when we got back.

Sam was the perfect trooper. She never thrashed nor whimpered.

She slept beautifully throughout. She may have been just a doll so that An wondered why Father Reuter had to cast a real live infant. He always did.

Every day An bathed Sam. She did it from the first day that Sam was home, every day for more than two years and even when she already had a yaya, the beloved Diding who took care of Sam until she was ten. Early in the morning, before An went to work, she presided at Sam’s bathing table. As an infant, Sam liked the ritual. She smiled and held on to any brother’s hand who was home to watch, coo and sing to her.

I have to say at this point what I always tell the girls who married the Mercado boys. They should be eternally grateful to Samantha who inaugurated their sweet and gentle fatherly hearts. Except giving her a bath and changing her diapers, the brothers eagerly did everything for Sam. They mixed her formula and held her while she finished her bottle. They sang her to sleep. They played with her, danced with and sang to her. They taught her to talk. They went to her upon waking, on leaving for school and at the very first moment that they came home. It was of great encouragement and joy that Sam was a perfect baby, beautiful and healthy, calm and quiet.

a lot more love

105 An married Boots Alcantara in December 12, 1992. Their wedding was in San Pablo. Two days before her wedding, An was packing her going away suitcase. Sam was unhappy that An would be leaving. So she curled up inside the suitcase and refused to vacate it.

At the wedding itself, when An and Boots marched out of the cathedral, Sam held on to An and hopped in as well into the bridal car. At the reception, she held up An’s train or hid under it.

k THAT FATHER REUTER BAPTIZED SAMANTHA AND GAVE HER A ROLE in his play when she was only a week old were amazing blessings.

They confirmed how tightly bonded was Tony and our family to Father Reuter.

Was it a circle bond? Or was it a direct descending line? Whatever it is that love conveys, that is what took us to bind with Father Reuter.

When Paolo was l3 years old, he told Tony that he would like to meet some girls. Easily done! Tony took him to Father Reuter who was then directing a play­­—he always had a play to mount in some school or for some cause.

In Father Reuter's current play on Fatima, Paolo became one of the crowd in the scenes where the Blessed Virgin appeared. Paolo brought along his brother Gabe to be in the crowd scene,too.

The following summer, Father Reuter took the Fatima play north and south of the Philippines, north to Vigan and south to Zamboanga.

Cast and crew travelled too. Paolo and Gabe went to Vigan in an open truck together with the sets; they went around Zamboanga in the same way, getting there third class by inter-island boat. They slept in school rooms and seminaries. Paolo said he ate so many kinds of kangkong adobo wherever they were. At the end of the Fatima tour, Paolo and Gabe were tanned, trim and incredibly happy. They became officially part of the Reuter Babies, boys and girls—even adults—who were drafted into his plays. It did not matter that they did not know how to act, sing or dance; they were bodies to fill the stage in the cast

a lot more love

106 of thousands that school plays liked to mount. In fact, that was what Father Reuter called them—“bodies”, a wise term that did not allow star treatment should anyone indeed shine out on stage.

Paolo was the star in a presentation that Father Reuter presented throughout the Philippines, in the U.S. and in major cities in Europe.

Paolo took the role of San Lorenzo Ruiz and, true to life, Paolo hanged upside down from the cross, which was the way the saint won martyrdom. Paolo fainted only once, during a rehearsal. He had to be rushed to the nearest hospital where there was great puzzlement as to what this boy was doing hanging upside down from a cross.

Thereafter, Paolo was fitted with a tight corset that Father Reuter thought would temper the blood rush into the head.

In Rome where Father Reuter took cast and crew to present the play at the canonization of Lorenzo Ruiz, Paolo the star was first the errand boy. He and another cast member had to look for lumber to make the cross. Father Reuter did not tell them where and how to look, he just told to find the lumber. They found the planks of wood, care of the Philippine embassy, and forthwith had to nail them together, Paolo making sure that his own cross would stand.

That was l986, the year of People Power. In February, most of the Reuter Babies were Namfrel Volunteers, not officially but as errand boys and girls. Paolo and Gabe were attached to June Keithley as telephone assistants. When they were trapped in the DZRJ penthouse as Radyo Bandido, Tony wanted to pull them out as Marcos forces were looking for them. He did not want his sons, both of minor age, to be hauled to military jail.

"Oh, Monina, give your sons a chance to be heroes," Father Reuter replied when I informed him that we were pulling them out. So Tony agreed to keep them with Radyo Bandido and I went up to their lair to hug them, not sure when I would see them again.

13 F

The Second

orest

Joy was his garden, which he developed with great passion, great intensity, great extravagance.

—Monina A. Mercado After the operation, Tony looked for a parcel of land that he could make into a farm. He would no longer be able to keep his former pace, he said. The truth was, Tony did not have to buy a farm. His parents had left him and his siblings farms in their hometown, but Misamis Oriental was too far away from Manila. Someone tried to sell Tony an island on the bay facing Cagayan de Oro, but that would have been too costly to visit.

Sometime after his surgery, Tony mentioned to An’s prospective mother-in-law, Vinya Alcantara, that he was looking for land to buy.

He wanted one with an Amorsolo landscape—mountains, ricefield, sunlight. Vinya, who is from Laguna, said she had just the place for him, a two-and-a-half-hectare ricefield in a barangay called Puypuy, just outside the town of Bay in Laguna. It was embraced by the mountains of San Pablo on one side, and on the other, Makiling. Monina recalls that when Tony went to see it, he stood on the roadside and said, “Good. I want it.”

the second forest

108 The land became his in 1992. His vision for its development was clear from the start: it would be not just a weekend place for his family, but also a venue for Basic’s out-of-town staff meetings and conferences.

He developed the property little by little, using up his Christmas bonuses and stopping when the money ran out. The first thing he built was a family house, and then cottages for guests to which he gave names like Molave and Narra, a conference room, a dining room for a hundred people, a lagoon, and a swimming pool with a mini-waterfall. Tony christened the compound Forest Club.

He refused to hire a landscaper because “I’d rather have all the fun myself.” He did discuss a general plan with a landscape architect, but when they could not agree, he decided to go at it alone although he followed the architect’s basic plan. He drove out to the highways of Laguna and returned with carloads of plants. He planted full-grown narra and mahogany trees because, he told Monina, he did not expect to live long. Not for him were neatly landscaped gardens. He wanted his plants to look as though they had grown from seeds that birds had dropped on the ground. He planted all kinds of palms—royal, champagne, traveler— and all colors of gumamela, and African tulips, rubia, and rare plants like Surinam berries that Monina had brought back from Capiz.

People who heard about Forest Club donated plants. One day the family electrician shyly gave Monina a plain-looking stalk and said that when the plant flourished the hummingbirds would come. And they did, as did all kinds of birds and butterflies, and fireflies. Tony did not want orchids, though, because they would require pesticides. He did not plant fruit trees, because they would be tempting to children and he did not want to have to send the neighbors’ children away. The only fruit tree allowed on the farm was a mango tree that had come with the property.

For his grandchildren Tony brought in animals, too: bantam-size chickens, geese and ducks.

On their weekend visits he and Monina relished eating simple meals of fresh vegetables and fish, and watching the sunset together. He installed benches and trellises in many corners of the compound so that people could sit by themselves, he said, and catch up with God. He himself had a particular place by the lagoon. Early in the morning, he went by himself

the second forest

109 from the house at the entrance to the ricefield on the other end of the property two hectares away. Monina joined him, each of them carrying a notebook on which they noted down what facility needed repairing, or what plant or tree needed pruning. To inspect the place, Tony drove out in a golf cart to greet the dawn first.

Wilson Saavedra, who supervises maintenance operations at Forest Club, recalls that on Saturday mornings when Tony arrived in Puypuy he would stop briefly at the house for a drink of water, and then he would be off to inspect. He would leave for Manila on Sunday afternoon. When Wilson last visited Tony just before his final hospitalization, Tony asked him to tell the people in the barangay to care for Forest Club as though it were their own. He had given them jobs there, and he wanted to give them more. But, he cautioned Wilson, they had to work hard and efficiently and show some initiative. He spoke to Wilson about the cattle-raising project he was thinking about next, and assured him it would make jobs available to more people.

Sotto voce THROUGH THE YEARS WITHIN HIS HOME, TONY TOOK BLOWS. SOME came from his own children, not deliberately aimed at him but because they are his own. An illness or infirmity, a loss or an accident, a personal choice or decision became hurtful to Tony and drove him to tears. As the Filipino saying goes, Hampas sa kabayo, latay sa kalabaw.

Strike the horse and you hit the carabao too.

In l986, when Wawel’s wife, Mila went into a coma due to hemorrhage after childbirth, Tony wept. Many mornings, I met him pacing in our living room or riding his stationary bike with tears running down his cheeks.

In 1998, Robbi’s marriage broke up. Tony wept. Years earlier, in l989, Tony had wept for Robbi because he did not march for his college graduation at the Ateneo. Robbi did not submit his thesis on time. He was busy that senior year as chairman of the registration committee and company manager of the Tanghalang Ateneo. While his grades were topnotch, there was no room for the thesis.

the second forest

110 Tony wept when he learned that Robbi would not graduate. With An at his side the night that he was informed, he drove around aimlessly, his tears unchecked.

In 1999, when Miguel’s wife, Aimee, was diagnosed with bladder cancer, Tony wept. Aimee was then pregnant with their second child.

The anxiety was double. Tony’s anguish went deep. Aimee was a bright copywriter in Tony’s agency, a graduate of the Ad School. That was how she met Miguel.

For a second opinion, Tony sent Aimee with Miguel to Stanford University hospital in California. The cancer was confirmed at stage two. Her treatment so far in Manila was agreed upon by Stanford oncologists as the only cautious manner to allow her to keep her baby. In November 1999, Aimee gave birth to a lovely and robust baby daughter, Rocio.

In June 1999, Miguel was posted in Publicis Thailand where he brought his family. In mid-2000 when Tony had his heart attack, Miguel slipped into town on weekends to see his Dad. Still being treated for cancer, Aimee was never with him, however much she protested. She was very hurt and vocal about it when Miguel did not take her either to Tony’s wake and funeral.

When Aimee herself was dying in 2003, she said with her winning smile to Miguel and his siblings nearby: “I will see Dad ahead of you all.”

In March 2000, Paolo was abducted in his car, beaten up and thrown into a ditch in a deserted place in Antipolo. He crawled out and walked some kilometers away to the nearest guard post. Bleeding from head wounds, Paolo begged for a ride out. Tony wept when he learned that Paolo was safe although in hospital. By then, Tony was on a plunging physical decline, more than he wanted to show, and was indeed dead within four months.

the second forest

111

k TONY KNEW PAIN. SUCH AS I HAD NEVER HEARD FROM ANY MAN as a growing boy, it was physical pain as told to me by his mother and by Tony himself. As well it was a pain of inner sensitivity, not articulated but perceived by those who were close to him.

Inwardly, Tony’s greatest pain as a young man was watching his father grow old and weak, a ghost before his time. Always called Mr. Mercado even in his own household, Tony’s dad was a tall, handsome and vibrant gentleman. He loved to dance, play tennis and go fishing, was friendly and had good conversation, smoked a pipe and was a genial host. On the eve of the war, he finished the army officers training and joined the guerrillas when the Japanese came. He was captured and brought into the Japanese-run concentration camp.

There his diabetes flared up along with tuberculosis. He was never the same again.

He had a few good years as the manager of the lumber camp and in then in Davao City, where he built a house for his family. But when he began to lose weight and vibrancy, he brought his family back to Balingasag, his wife’s hometown. There he built the final house for his family, there he lived off the land that he and Luz had bought with their savings. There Tony saw him change into a gaunt and quiet man but gentler, much gentler, than he ever was. Once, Tony said, he saw his dad darning Tony’s own socks.

Speaking of physical pain: one weekend when Tony and I were a few years married, we drove back just by ourselves from the beach in Nasugbu. Our car was a neat Austin mini, second hand. At the top of the zigzag in Tuy, the engine began to smoke. When Tony opened the hood, hot water spewed out of the radiator, scalding him on the face and chest. He needed a plastic surgeon to mend his injuries.

About this pain and others too, he never complained nor whined.

But I found what he wrote in his agenda in October 1999: “Pain in my legs. Pain in my feet. Pain to get up. Pain to walk. Pain to exercise.”

I should not wonder then that he never pampered me. When I was

the second forest

112 frustrated and having difficulty, he always and only said: “Struggle�.

That was no comfort and I often resented it. Toward the later part of his life, when I complained or was angry about someone, he said: Mahalin mo na lang. Love, only love.

Four short words: struggle, love, only love. They spelled out his nitty-gritty spirituality in learning the love of God.

“Mama

14 M

ary is

Here”

His face looked as if he were in deep sleep, but I knew that he was at his most aware.

—Monina A. Mercado

Tony was not a complainer. He did warn Monina when they were newly married that he was prone to stomach aches, but that all he needed was a doctor’s prescription. Aches and pains were no cause for fuss or alarm.

He would dismiss a headache and sleep off a fever after having taken his medicine. Monina attributed his forbearance to personal courage first and foremost, but also to his deep spirituality.

In 1960, when Tony was twenty-six, he was diagnosed with diabetes, the same disease that had afflicted his father and caused his mother’s death.

Fortunately, diabetes in Tony’s case did not involve slow healing. When he suffered superficial burns on his face and chest in a car accident about seven years after having been found to be diabetic, his wounds healed fast.

But diabetes kills slowly but surely.

As 1990 set in, Tony developed diabetic neuropathy, which caused him unbearable pain in his feet and stomach. If he ate too much, he risked developing a stomach ache. Sometimes, after a big meal or when he ate

mama mary is here

114 too fast, he would suffer heartburn and palpitations and had to be rushed to hospital. At one such time, he and Monina were caught in a traffic jam in Batangas while on their way home from Laguna. They decided to stop at a McDonald’s, which by then had nothing to offer except deep-fried fish fillet with mayonnaise. The meal gave Tony a terrible stomach ache and heart palpitations, but he did not complain. He asked only for hot tea, a remedy he had discovered during a trip abroad.

Tony was his usual jovial self on June 28, 2000, as he shared his friend JJ Calero’s elation over the launching of JJ’s book. But the next day he was at the Makati Medical Center fighting for his life. Diabetes was running its terrible course in his body.

On the morning of July 9, as Tony lay in the intensive care unit of Makati Medical Center, fully awake and lucid, he told Gabe, who was on the midnight-to-morning watch, “Mama Mary is here.” When Monina arrived later that morning, he told her the same thing. Monina asked him what the Blessed Mother looked like. “Is she very beautiful?” He nodded happily, Monina said later, but with a hint of impatience said, “Why does she not take me home with her?” He had “a look of longing in his face,” Monina recalled, and so she asked him, ”Do you want to go home to Mama Mary?” His reply was an immediate “yes.”

The next day, Tony called his family to his bedside. Although he had difficulty speaking, he wanted to talk to each one while he still could. He was the CEO still very much in command, calling his team to an urgent meeting. “It seems that God’s will is that no miracle is forthcoming for me,” he began. “When I am gone and people ask you what my life was all about, tell them that it was about charity. Not philanthropy, but charity— the charity that St. Paul writes about. Being kind, being patient, being understanding.”

Then he began to talk about legacy—his own. There is no will, he said, “but my will is that you remember charity.” At that point, An recalls, he asked Monina to read the Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, after which he said, “That’s the will I leave to you.”

One by one he called his children to his bedside. For each of them he had a special personal message. Each child to him had always been a unique individual. When they were younger he expected Monina to give

mama mary is here

115 him a report on each one of them every night when he came home. He also was always curious to know from Monina what his children thought of him, what they said about him.

Here is Monina’s account of Tony’s final hours with his children: “Starting with the son nearest to him, on his right, around the bed, Tony spoke to each of us. Everything Tony said was in the context of love and appreciation: what each son and daughter meant to him. ‘Robbi, you have become my best friend ... An, you are my treasure ... Gabe, you are the one most like me ... Sam, you are my happiness ... Wawel, God has blessed you with his own cross ... Miguel, you have always been my barkada ... Paolo, my brilliant son, study more and teach more, if that is what you wish.’ Even if it was not yet my turn, because I was far to his left, he turned to me abruptly, as if suddenly becoming aware of me. Then he said: ‘I love you very much, my darling.’ When he was done speaking to each of us, he said: ‘As I was close to you in life, so much closer will I be to you when I die.’ He gave instructions to us about his wake. ‘Dignity, dignity, dignity,’ he said. ‘Remember—dignity. No funeral. Celebrate.

Throw a fiesta. Spend some money.’”

He was setting the tone for his wake. There were to be no tears.

Even An was surprised that she did not break down and cry as her hero lay waiting to be fetched for the beginning of his new journey. She told herself Daddy expected her to be cheerful and to rally him on, as she had always done when she was a little girl. She promised him he would have the dignity he deserved.

On his deathbed, too, Tony entrusted to his older children their little sister, who had transformed him into an openly affectionate father. Give Sam a grand wedding, he told them. Sam, in turn, was reminded to be like Ate An, a good girl.

The following morning, as An came into the ICU and greeted her father, he said, “Why am I not dead yet?” It was as though, An says, having bade goodbye to the most important people in his life, he now could not wait to get on to the next phase.

The next morning, July 12, he struggled to whisper to Monina despite severe difficulty breathing, “Stay with me. Never leave me.” She stayed

mama mary is here

116 beside him and coached him to breathe. As they inhaled together, they intoned, “Jesus, have mercy.” As they exhaled, they said, “Holy Spirit, breathe in me.” Tony said to Monina, “Never show any fear of dying.”

When his nurse came into the room, Tony looked at him and then at Monina and said, “Thank everyone who has helped me.” They were his last words to her.

That day, Monina says, Tony fell into a deep and irreversible coma.

His internal organs, including his kidneys, were starting to function again, but there was almost no activity in his brain. The Mercados thought they could in fact take him home to await the end with dignity. Since that was not possible, they decided to do the next best thing—move him out of the ICU and into a regular room. They chose a brightly lit room with windows from which they could see the trees outside the hospital. An made sure her father’s bed faced a window.

It had rained all the while Tony was in ICU, but on the morning that he died the sun was shining brightly and the sky was a beautiful blue.

Monina was at Mass in the hospital chapel. An turned on the short-circuit TV in the room so that she and her father could follow the televised Mass as he was being cleaned up. At Communion time An whispered the prayer of spiritual Communion into his ear, and as she looked up at the television she saw her mother on the screen. “Look, Dad, Mommy’s at Communion so she’s with us now,” she said. A tiny tear appeared in Tony’s eye, which An took to mean her father was longing to receive Communion.

The Mass over, Monina returned to the room. An started to sing, like a lullabye, an old hymn that one of her mother’s aunts had said she wanted sung at her funeral. “Heart of Jesus, meek and mild, hear oh hear, thy feeble child. When the tempest most severe, heart of Jesus, hear. Sweetly we rest, on thy Sacred Heart-- ... ” “An could sense, even without the nurse telling her, that the end was near. “Let’s wait for Mom,” she whispered to her father. Monina was in the shower in the next room. The children had earlier agreed on a code they would use to tell one another that Dad’s time had come. The code was “Time to sing for Dad.” An calmly sent them the message. Monina had now joined her in singing “Mariang Ina Ko,” at the same time saying over and over, “Daddy, thank you for giving me a good life.”

mama mary is here

117 Then there was just a flat line on the monitor. An broke into another song, “Purihin ang Panginoon,” and again Monina joined her. As a final prayer, An recited the “Glory Be.” Tony’s doctors attributed his death to congestive heart failure. He had suffered a stroke, his lungs had become congested, and his kidneys had failed. For three months he had struggled with a stubborn and debilitating cough that robbed him of sleep. His heart was the last to surrender. It had been nine years since his bypass.

In 1991 Tony and Monina prepared a booklet of instructions for wakes and burials in their family. A copy was given to An and another to Tony’s executive assistant; a third went into Monina’s files. On July 13, the day after Tony lapsed into an irreversible coma, the document was retrieved.

The children organized themselves into working committees that would take care of the obituary, the wake, the liturgy and the choir, the catering, the cremation, and the crypt.

Three years before his death, Tony had told An that when he died he wanted immediate cremation and absolutely no wake. For the sake of his friends and colleagues, however, the family agreed to hold a wake at the Santuario de San Antonio mortuary in Forbes Park. Paolo chose the urn, a dark bronze box with an embossed pattern of grass. An ordered longstemmed red roses. A candelabra with seven candles, one for each of the children, took pride of place.

Looking back on his friend’s passing, Minyong Ordoñez says, “We usually pray for a peaceful death or a happy death. More than a happy death, I think Tony showed us how to die.”

In 1998, while still in good health, Tony was invited to speak on the Sacrament of Holy Anointing. In the notes he prepared for that talk, he recalled that he had been given the sacrament before his open-heart operation. He said, “I was very happy receiving the sacrament. I was very much at peace. I felt the grace come into me. I had the grace to endure all the pains and sufferings I went through after the operation. The thirst, the terrible discomfort at the ICU. The pain in the chest and the legs. But all the time I was cheerful.”

How could someone in terrible pain have been so cheerful?

mama mary is here

118 Let Tony explain in the talk that he gave: “I was cheerful because I felt my pains and sufferings were doing a lot of good for my family (specially our Samantha who was a little baby then). I was praying for so many people, friends, and people in the office, clients, and relatives. You see, before I left for the operation, I sent out a circular to many, many people, asking them to send me a note if they would like me to pray for their special intentions. I told them that the prayer of the sick is very powerful. So many people wrote and called, asking me to pray for their special intentions. Some simple, some really complicated. I had a long long list—about three pages single-spaced.

“So before and after my operation, I was too busy praying for each one of those intentions to worry and have anxiety and to feel the pain too much. But here was the huge bonus—so many people prayed for me. Up to today, I would meet total strangers who would say, ‘Oh, you are Tony Mercado. My prayer group prayed for you when you had your heart operation.’ My prayers for people’s intentions were multiplied a hundredfold for my own recovery. It was one of the most profound and heartwarming experiences I have had in my lifetime.”

The

15 V H intage

ouse

This house is really the best symbol for my dad. He didn't want to build a new house. He wanted a house that was already built. He had a very specific house in mind—an old house, something different. He didn't want to come home to a house without a soul.

—An Mercado Alcantara The house on Sanso Street is a vintage house, an oddity in Corinthian Gardens, where most homes are massive and modern, solid concrete and steel, impregnable and cold, lacking a distinct personality and character.

It took Tony some years to find this house. He was, An says, “determined to have the house of his dreams.” But where to find it? He thought of buying a house in Mindanao, and he did find one in Misamis Oriental, right across the street from where his family had lived before the war. Alas, it was rundown, impractical to transport to Manila.

Obsessed with finding the right house, Tony took off on weekends, sometimes weekdays, skipping work in pursuit of his quest. At one point it seemed as though the search would end in Lucena. There was a house he liked, but somehow the deal fell through. Friends, architects, and restorers who got wind of his search advised him to stop looking farther.

the vintage house

120 Try Sampaloc, they said, because that section of Manila was spared by Japanese bombs in World War II, the American civilians having been interned at the nearby UST. With that lead, Tony scoured Sampaloc, and finally found his house. The land was being sold; the owner had no plans for the house.

The first time An saw photographs of the house her father had just bought, she was aghast. “It looked terrible,” she recalls. The paint was chipped in several places; the interiors were painted a “sickly green automobile kind of paint,” and the floor was black. But Tony and Monina had seen the gold beneath the dross. They quickly saw, for example, that underneath the faded paint, the intricately carved wood was a priceless red narra.

Thus began the last big project, the magnum opus, of Tony’s life. His plan for execution was nothing but grand. He transported the entire house from Sampaloc to Corinthian Gardens. It was an incredibly ambitious operation that entailed careful dismantling, labeling, classifying, storing, transporting, saving the floors, the wall panels, the latticework, the whole house. Architects from the UP had to be hired to supervise the work of piecing the house back together. The entire project took two years to complete from the day the materials were transported to Corinthian Gardens. Tony went to the office in the morning and supervised work at the site in the afternoon. He liked to tell people that he was making amends for his father who had worked in a logging company—by buying this house, he was giving new life to wood rather than cutting down more trees.

Dad loved projects, An says, and he loved to solve problems. This house gave him the chance to do both. Because it was an old house, it had only one bathroom, which was in the kitchen area. Instead, he made ten bathrooms. He also figured out a way to have the house, with its high ceiling and large, airy windows, air-conditioned. He had the ceiling lowered somewhat and installed what he called a glass curtain, actually glass doors that allowed people inside the house to still see outside.

The house, when pieced together, was awesome. It has a grand staircase, wide narra floor boards, ornately carved dividers between living and dining areas, latticework running the length of the sala and the dining room, candelabra-ed chandeliers, a sunburst effect on the window grills,

the vintage house

121 huge mirrors, massive doors, antique aparadores. Tony liked to cook, and dreamed of someday having time to do so. He insisted that his kitchen be furnished with industrial-type equipment.

A few years later, after lunching with An at the Glass House restaurant in Malate, he had a replica of it added to the house as a balcony. There, where magenta bougainvillea framed the glass windows, he and Monina would sit waiting for dusk while they listened to Narciso Yepes romancing his guitar. In an adjacent area were his exercise machines, where he faithfully exercised every morning.

122

On

16 T O heir

wn

In the earlier years I didn’t like it that he was such a big figure. It’s hard to be your own person. With my dad, you felt you were in the presence of a great man. That’s what I miss the most. That’s what makes me feel lost.

I think for my brothers a great weight was lifted from their shoulders, and now they can look at Dad for the example that he was without feeling so much pressure.

—An Mercado Alcantara As his children grew into adulthood, Tony took a more active interest in their fields of study and their choices of career. All opted for the humanities.

They all knew that nothing would please their father more than having all of them work for him. Most of them did, some longer than the others.

They always knew that they would have to work much, much harder than anyone else in his company, and that even if they succeeded, they would always be known as Tony Mercado's children.

He became anxious when one by one his children decided to get married. He did not want to see them go, An says, and he articulated his anxiety in different ways. When they were still in school, he made it clear to them that his only obligation as a parent was to provide them an education, and that they would have to fend for themselves once they started working.

He warned them that they would be on their own once they got married,

on their own

124 and so they were to live simply. But, An says with amusement, “when we all started getting married, naku, nataranta siya.”

On Paolo’s wedding day Tony sat him down and told him he could not possibly support a family with his earnings as a teacher and so he should give serious thought to what he would do for the rest of his life.

Paolo had tried the Jesuit pre-novitiate midway through college, but he did not have the vocation. After college, he took a teaching job at the Ateneo de Manila. After two years of teaching history, Paolo realized that Dad was right. He also realized, at a time when Basic needed people with a background in psychology, that he had skills in market research.

Despite the admonition to his sons not to depend on him after they married, Tony wanted to buy a house for each of them. He bought Paolo a duplex but placed it in the name of the holding company, and charged Paolo token rent. An, who was the first of the children to marry, took the other half of the duplex. When Miguel's turn came, Tony bought another house. He also helped Robbi get started. Wawel opted to stay with his parents after his marriage, and moved with his bride into the ground floor of the house in Corinthian Gardens. Tony did not live to see Gabe, his youngest son, marry.

When most of his children had married and were living on their own, Tony decreed that they all gather for a family dinner one weekday evening.

Weekends, he granted, should be for his children to spend with their own families. His secretary would call to remind the children about dinner, and Tony would be very disappointed when someone did not show up. In his cell phone, he had a message programmed for his children to remind them about their weekly dinner. Conversation at those gatherings inevitably centered on Tony, who talked about his new ad campaign, his projects, or Puypuy.

When An went off to live on her own, Tony would invite her to lunch or dinner, particularly when he had a problem at work or a good idea and was starting yet another campaign. “I never contradicted him,” An says. She was his rah-rah girl, always ready to boost his spirits about a new project with “Ang galing, Dad!” Each of Tony and Monina's children has a personality distinct from all the others, and yet there is a little of their parents in each of them. Monina

on their own

125 says that An, her father's pal and confidante, inherited his organizational skills. Robbi became his dad's second in command where Tony's dreams were concerned. When his dad wanted to start a cattle farm, Robbi learned all there was to learn about cattle, bought grass and a tractor.

Wawel was the second in command where Tony's business was concerned.

Tony admired Wawel for his total devotion to his wife Mila. Miguel was Tony's playmate, the child he spoke with about cars. Paolo, An says, grew in their father's eyes in the last two years of Tony's life. Family friends say it is Gabe who is emerging as the son who is most like his father. Tony himself said so at his deathbed. Gabe is articulate, funny and irreverent, and a totally uninhibited performer.

An, despite her absolute devotion to her father, was not always his obedient and submissive daughter. Tony was outraged when she became an activist while at the Ateneo and, in defiance of him, joined other students at rallies and pickets and supported transport and factory strikes.

To An, her activism was a way of living out her faith; to her father, rallyists were nothing but troublemakers. “Ke-babae mong tao,” he used to berate An. He would threaten to embarrass her by having her fetched from a rally in his Mercedes Benz. When that failed to stop her, he threatened to pull her out of the Ateneo. And he actually did so.

An missed a whole year of school. Her father had a desk installed for her right outside his office so he could keep an eye on her. “I was very angry with him,” An says. She never showed her anger, and they never discussed his decision regarding her activism. He agreed to allow An to go back to the Ateneo only when she was invited to become editor of Heights, a source of delight and pride to Tony himself.

In 2010, An is the editorial director of ABS-CBN publications. Robbi is the managing director of ARM Holdings. Wawel is the partner of Patrick Paige in the recruitment of nurses and physical therapists in the U.S. Together Robbi and Wawel run the Forest Club with two sites. Miguel is in ABS-CBN as vice-president for TV programming. Paolo is in global strategic marketing in Nestlé, Vevey, Switzerland. Gabe is an actor in the movies and TV. He is the director of SPIT, the improvisation theater.

Towards the end of her father's life, An muses, “I think he was struggling with the fact that his kids weren't going to be like him, and so he was trying to get to know who they were.” Then she adds, with such

on their own

126 poignance, “Now they're not only inspired from heaven, but the shadow is not there anymore, and they can move in their own steps.”

All in their thirties and forties now, the young Mercados individually reflect on their father’s personal legacy to them.

An: “The ability to see possibilities.”

Miguel: “Charity, giving until it hurts. Appreciating what you get and what you work for. Living within your means. Seeing people are basically good. Seeing beyond the masks that people put on.”

Wawel: “Simplicity. Not being attached to material things. Detachment.

Acceptance of God’s will for me. Fidelity. Being fair. Being generous.

Being kind. Living the best way one can in the profession one was given to live.”

Robbi: “Dad believed in charity but he also believed in justice, meaning, you get what is due you.

“Life is basically a steady uphill climb. Sometimes the grade will be a little steeper, sometimes it will be more doable. But it’s always an uphill climb.

“The passion to learn, the passion to overcome the little struggles of life. He always said man is made to work. And he said man’s enemy is the temptation to be lukewarm. He said you should never, despite your age, your accomplishment, your achievement, your status in life, be complacent. One of the last things he was trying to understand was the game of cricket.”

Gabe: “Striving for excellence. Good work ethic. A social conscience. Whatever you do, always consider the effect it has on others. Treat employees well. Share of your success.”

Paolo: “Dad taught me to act out Mark Anthony's eulogy to Julius Caesar from Shakespeare when I was eight years old.

“Dad found out I was participating in a school elocution contest, so he sat me down on three separate evenings to coach me on my

on their own

127 delivery. He gave me all the tips he learned from his acting days in Ateneo. He taught me how to stand, how to raise my voice with ‘Lend me your ears!’, how to gesture with my arms (minimally) and use pauses (dramatically). He even pointed out where in the text I should let my voice break, then pretend to wipe a tear from my eye (“Bear with me ... my heart is in the grave ... with Caesar”). In other words, he showed me that I needed to do more than just recite a memorized text. He showed me how to ham it up to get full audience impact.

“It worked. I won the elocution contest that year, and in fact for several more years afterwards until I graduated high school.

“When I joined Dad in advertising, he continued to coach me, especially when we were preparing for high-level pitch presentations for new business. Professionally, I learned a lot during these sessions.

“However, I still remember and value best how he coached me to take on Shakespeare's Mark Anthony, a text well beyond my age, ability, and understanding at that time. But with Dad, I learned that a little bit of chutzpah is all you need to succeed.”

And Monina?

“His legacy to me is clear, logical thinking. Secondly, a trust in my own intuitions, which are not as rich as his were. Thirdly, laughter and a sense of joy and a relishing of small, everyday things.”

Sotto voce OUR SON, PAOLO, DELIVERED THIS EULOGY FOR TONY AT THE FUNERAL mass on July 29, 2000 in Santuario de San Antonio, Forbes Park, Makati: Please allow these words to be more than words as I thank you in behalf of my mother and our whole family. First and primarily, we thank God for Dad’s life and talent, for his caring heart, for his successes and defeats, for his joys and sorrows.

on their own

128 We thank God for giving us Tony Mercado as husband, father, grandfather, co-worker and, above all, as friend.

During my father’s illness, at his wake and at this memorial Mass, you enfolded us in your prayers, affection and concern.

Our hearts are full. We ask God in His infinite goodness to thank you for us.

In this spirit of gratitude, permit me to briefly consider Dad’s life with you.

In every man’s life, as in my Dad’s, we can discern two streams of grace.

The first stream consists of gifts that a man is born with. I believe that this is called his charisms. We can easily see, hear, touch or feel charisms. They are as varied as a good singing voice, the ability to act, the deft hand of a painter, or genius at cooking, writing or composing music.

The second stream of grace consists of the good habits that man strives for during his life. I believe that these are called his virtues.

Our humanity strives for virtues that relate to God—faith, hope and charity. As well they include human virtues like diligence, prudence, temperance, caring and kindness.

Of charisms, God gave my Dad personal charm, leadership, courage, finesse, a sense of joy, wit and good humor.

And if you were close to my Dad you know that he had the charism of high intuition together with the uncanny ability to read your mind and motives. But most important God gave Dad the charism of recognizing a person’s talents and abilities. In this way, he helped us and many, many persons to grow in character and in our work and profession.

Of virtues, Dad had a few for which he had to struggle mightily, with the help of God’s grace. Outstanding of these is charity.

on their own

129 Twenty days ago, before Dad fell into a coma, he spoke to us one by one and as a family. The theme of our final conversations with Dad was charity. “If people ask you,” he said, “what my life was all about, tell them that it was about charity.”

It is the charity that St. Paul writes of—as being patient, kind, not envious, proud or insolent; not claiming its rights, not brooding over injury or being provoked; rejoicing in the victory of truth; sustaining, hoping, believing, enduring to the last.

My father was not born charitable. He worked hard to be charitable—with blood, sweat and tears, with fervent prayer.

Whenever Dad had to meet with someone he had differences, he always asked Mom to pray at the time of his meeting, to pray that he be kind, smiling and silent. He knew that he had words that could easily cut a man down to size, and it was often a struggle for him to keep these words to himself. As some of you know, he was not always successful, but he struggled.

Whenever Mom had trouble with us or with people she works with, my Dad’s constant advice to her was simple, “Mahalin mo na lang.”

Charity is a decision. Loving is an act of the will. To live charity is to strive mightily, with grace, to strip ourselves of our hearts and lay it on the floor so that other may step softly.

This we learned from Dad: to live charity is to be fully a man—a man who struggles to rise above himself for love of God and of neighbor.

You may wonder where Dad got his strength and serenity. He prayed.

While he lived the active, hectic and prestigious life of chairman of the board, he prayed.

In the recent eight years, when his daughters and sons left home, got married, had children and their share of the cross, he prayed. Dad prayed for us with all his heart.

on their own

130 Dad prayed at 4 a.m. every day, when the house was still. He prayed when he could not sleep on many nights.

Last month, my sister An was in Boston for a summer course in Harvard. By e-mail, my Dad wrote to her, sometimes twice a day.

An said that Dad’s letter slipped into prayer. They were short prayers from the hearts—glances at God. I quote some of Dad’s prayers in his letters to An: Thank you, Lord Jesus.

Thank you, Mama Mary.

Jesus, help us.

Jesus, give us peace.

Dad had a tender love for Our Lady. He called her Mama Mary. He learned to love Our Lady from his mom, Luz Roa Mercado, from the Ateneo as a young boy, and from Opus Dei as a mature man.

He said the Rosary every day, many times all 15 mysteries. He greeted Our Lady with loving glances and kisses while he worked and when he left and arrived home. He wore her scapular to the moment of his death.

Last July 9, fully conscious and alert, he said Our Lady was in his room, Room #9 at the ICU of Makati Med. “Mama Mary is here,” he told my Mom, my brother Gabe and two of his friends at separate times that same day.

This is Tony Mercado. This is my Dad. This is my Mom’s best friend and your friend too.

Allow us to say with Gerard Manley Hopkins: “Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east spirit.”

Let us with singing hearts thank God for him.

17 S

Being the

ecret

Lover

On November 26, l999, Tony wrote this letter to Monina in his own handwriting on fourteen pages of long yellow-lined pad.

Dear Mom: I am praying over your request to be kinder to you. First, I have to ask you for pardon for my lack of charity to you all these years—by God, how many years has it been?

You poor woman. So please forgive me. My prayer resolution is to consciously struggle to be charitable to you by being kind to you. I will consult my director if I can use the particular examination to succeed in gaining this godly virtue.

Please help me with this personal struggle. With grace from the Holy Spirit, this will be my fight—to gain the virtue of kindness to you.

My lack of kindness to you must have developed into a reflex. I am not even aware of it. What a disgrace for a husband who is a longtime member of Opus Dei. Shame. Shame. Shame. I will try very hard to root out this reflex action of lack of charity to my wife. I hope that

being the secret lover

132 other people have not noticed it because then I have done the Work an injustice and I must struggle to root out this shameful reflex.

Please pray for me. You can also help me remove this terrible lack of virtue. I cannot, should not, even use the excuse that deep in my heart, I care a lot about you. I pray for you every day—top priority in my list of people that I should pray for every day.

Deep in my heart, I love you so much because you are my kindred, my friend, my soul mate. You are a very good person with a beautiful soul.

That is why I married you and stuck with you despite disappointments, hurts, unconscious resentments and disillusions.

I continue to love you and will always love you, despite warts. It was your soul I fell in love with from the first time—because I think you have a beautiful soul.

So I endure warts, disappointments and resentments, because my love for you is so fundamental. Everything else is silly details. I want you to be my soul mate while here on earth.

Sana God will grant us the grace to enjoy this world together for a little longer. I would like us to love Samantha and Therese together for as long as possible.

I care about living a little longer in this world because I have you as my soul mate, my friend—and sweetheart!

Yes, I will struggle to be that too for the sake of Samantha. So that she will bask in the joy of seeing her parents being friends—loving each other.

So show, show it —darn it!

Yes, Lord, thy will be done. I will love my wife outwardly for the sake of people we wish to pull to your Sacred Heart. Help me, Lord.

Monina, you can also help me in this struggle. How? By being kind yourself to the little people who serve you. Sure, you are generous and full of true charity with them. You even drive them to church on Sundays. So you care for their souls.

being the secret lover

133 Perhaps your own struggle is to show your charity outwardly too —do it for the sake of saving their souls.

I know how much this struggle for you is because your lack of kindness and tenderness is only skin deep. It is tough to root out reflex action because it just comes out without forethought and without malice.

It will be as hard a struggle as my resolve to struggle to show my love and kindness to you—outwardly.

But we are neither too old nor too late because we have the gift of grace from all the Norms that we struggle to fulfill every day. God will give us the grace. God will help us if we bring this to our prayer, our chats and our confessions.

How tragic if we don’t succeed because God knows how kind and charitable and full of caring we both are—deep in our hearts.

The tragic flaw is in not being to communicate this genuine kindness and gentleness we have in our hearts. Just because we failed to communicate what is in our hearts.

It is tragic if we are not able to inspire people to love God just because of our failure to communicate. How really tragic it is because God has given us the gift of communication in our professional work.

Perhaps we learn the subtle way to communicate God’s love in our actions, tone of voice, gentleness of togn (how do you spell dila, by the way?). Anyway, you know what I mean. You are a bright girl, super bright, in fact.

Please don’t get angry with me what I am about to tell you—this is fraternal correction. Or is it matrimonial correction? Yes! Sounds better— matrimonial correction.

Could it be possible that my reflex lack of kindness to you is a reaction to your lack of outward kindness and tenderness to the little people? And therefore this could have built a reflex action on me towards you with lack of kindness and tenderness towards you.

being the secret lover

134 Sure this is farfetched and you are already boiling inside which is your reflex when you are criticized.

But it might be possible because it came out in my examination of conscience—examining myself why I have not been demonstrating kindness and tenderness towards you.

I am not excusing myself. I know I have been a heel. And I am not helping Opus Dei. But you know self-excuse or not, there might be a grain of truth in this.

Because, Darling, I must confess to you that I recoil every time you are unkind to little people, to your children sometimes. I recoil and I hurt many times a day living with you. I must have built up such resentment and anger towards you that it may be a self-defense mechanism built up through more than 30 years living with you.

Please don’t be angry and get depressed when I tell you with all honesty that comes from my love for you.

I must tell you na mahirap mahalin ang bruha. Mahirap po mahalin ang masamang ugali. Opo, ang hirap.

I tell myself in prayer that this could make me a saint—magmahal ng isang matandang bruha. Nguni’t mahirap—sapagka’t ako ay tao lamang, kahi’t madasaling tao.

Dios ko po, patawarin ninyo itong taong hindi kaya magmahal ng bruha (hindi naman matandang bruha dahil bruha ka na, Mom, bata ka pa. Ipagtawad po ninyo, Ale. Ooops, Misis pala.)

So I keep telling myself with God listening: Baka tama na naman na mahalin ko ang asawa ko sa aking puso. At tiisin na lang ang araw araw niyang pagkamasamang ugali niya.

Hindi ba puedeng maging santo ang secret lover?

God is telling me now: Hindi, hijo. You have to love God and your neighbor not just with your soul but with your humanity too.

being the secret lover

135 Ano po yung humanity?

Anak, ang ibig sabihin ng humanity ay matuto kang magmahal sa kapwa with your body—your tone, your voice, touch, body language.

These are powerful tools of communication when it comes to communicating kindness and tenderness. Jesus was so good at this. That’s why he successfully pulled with him multitudes of souls to Heaven. Do ye likewise—if you want to be his followers.

Lord, hindi po ba puedeng iligtas ang aming mga kaluluwa sa empiyerno sa paraan ng purity of heart lang? Wala na yung body language. Mahirap po yun, eh.

God says: Seguro naman. Kasi yun ang basic, yung nasa puso. But don’t you want to graduate from basic to intermediate to expert?

Ano po ba yung expert?

God says: Santo. Sa madaling salita, santo.

Gaya po ba ng sinasabi ni Blessed Josemaría?

Kilala mo ba siya?

Aba, opo! He used to be my “hang around” since more than 30 years.

Ang ibig mo bang sabihin member ka ng Opus Dei! For more than 30 years po, my Father God. Eh, hijo, hindi naman seguro maganda kung hanggang basic ka na lang. Strive to be an expert.

You mean be a saint like what Blessed Josemaría spent years to convince us all to become saints?

Yes, be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Mahirap po yun, God. You mean I need the art of body language so

being the secret lover

136 I can become an expert—a saint? Mahirap ho yun. Talaga hong masama akong ugali bata pa ako. Ngayon matanda na po kami. Malapit na po kaming makipagkita sa iyo.

Blessed Josemaría: Sasambit ako with your permission, Lord, dahil anak ko po ito. Mga anak, hindi ba sinasabi ko sa inyo na talagang mahirap because you, my poor children have a wounded nature. It is impossible to go to heaven kung masamang ugali.

But with God, nothing is impossible. So go ahead, my daughter and son, humingi kayo ng tulong. Sure hit yun! At alam mo malakas ata itong ama mong ito sa kanya. Tulungan kita, mga anak. Pero kailangan humingi muna ng tulong kay God. Sure fire yun, hindi po ba, Lord. You see, o sigue na, sulong mga kapatid, sa langit.

Don Alvaro: Tony, Monina, kayang-kaya ninyo yan. Kilala ko kayo.

How can God not help you when you have the support of Opus Dei? So Tony, my son, alisin mo na ang pagkasamang ugali, hijo. Ang ganda mong tao, eh. Monina, my lovely, lovely daughter, hindi bagay sa iyo ang image na bruha. First of all, member ka ng Opus Dei. Ipinagdadasal kita araw araw, Napakaganda mong babae. At mahal na mahal mo naman si Mama Mary. Kayang-kaya mong labanan ang pagka bruha. Hindi bagay sa iyo.

Ang ganda ninyong tao—ikaw at si Tony. Para namang hindi ko kayo kilala. Ako ang bahala sa iyong dalwa. Hala! Gamitin mo ang prayer card ko every time or before you encounter my little sons and daughters who may not be in Opus Dei pero mga kapatid at anak ninyo yun. Ipakita ninyo with body language na mahal mo sila, the less fortunate ones, that you love them for the sake of God. Pobre naman ang mga kawawa. Maawa naman kayo, mga anak ko.

Father, Don Alvaro, nahihiya po kami sa inyo.

Blessed Josemaría: Hindi bali, mga anak, kayang-kaya ninyo ang maging Pogi. With God’s help. Sige, idaan ninyo ang inyong request sa prayer card ko. Baka hindi ninyo alam, mga anak, ang lakas ko kay God tungkol sa relationships. Ang galing ko diyan. Kaya ako santo, mga anak.

Hala sulong, mga mahal kong anak. Wag na maging pangit. Mga pogi naman kayo sa mata ng Diyos. Now try that sa tao. Wow, ang sarap yata ng Pogi sa mata ng tao. Alam ninyo kung bakit? Sapagka’t kung pogi ka sa

being the secret lover

137 tao, marami kang madadala sa Sacred Heart of Jesus. O di experts ang labas ninyo —you know, saints. You, you. Simple, no?

Hala, mga mahal kong anak, magmahal kayo ng kapwa for the sake of being experts by the time you are ready to come home to God. Travel first class, my children. Ok lang to get here by coach. But first class is something else.

Naka travel na ba kayo ng first class? Ang sarap, di ba? Pero please take care of your spirit of poverty next time you travel. Okay, sa bagay matatanda na rin itong mga anak ko. Sige mag first class kayo lagi hanggang sa langit.

I love you, Tony. I love you, Monina. Call me any time when you need my help. Ang lakas ninyo sa akin, hindi ba ninyo alam?

I thank you, my God, for the resolutions, affections and inspiration that you have given to me in this prayer. My Immaculate Mother, St Joseph, my father and lord, my Guardian Angel, please intercede for me.

Amen.

So Mom, my Darling, ang haba nitong prayer ko ngayon—two hours ata.

Your loving (to be) husband,

Pogi Sotto voce IN THIS LETTER, TONY REFERS TO BLESSED JOSEMARÍA NOW ST. Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei. He was canonized a saint in 2002, three years after this letter was written.

Don Alvaro was Bishop Alvaro del Portillo, the first successor of St. Josemaría as prelate of Opus Dei. He had met Tony and me several times in Rome and in Manila. When Don Alvaro visited Southeast Asia two times, Tony was part of the TV and radio coverage in Manila and in Singapore. He became familiar to Don Alvaro whose personal advice was: No hay que engordar mas, hijo mio. Do not gain any more weight, my son. Don Alvaro passed away in 1994. Since then, as father and friend, he was

being the secret lover

138 often asked by Tony for his help, especially in his work and finances.

Being in Opus Dei means being in a family here and in heaven.

Learning how to pray in Opus Dei means speaking to God and to the saints face to face as within a warm and close family.

Tony’s letter is precious because it captures what prayer is: a frank, trusting and affectionate chat directed to the heart of our Father God and through beloved intercessors.

k

139

1938. Luz and Rogelio Mercado

140

Tony at age three with his sister Loury and their parents

141

Tony at age fourteen

142

Tony with friend Dodong Almendrala

143

1963. Monina’s ID photo as a newspaper reporter in Philippines Herald

February 11, 1964. Tony and Monina in bridal car at their wedding in Ermita church

144

In the 70s, Tony mastered photography including dark room work, like contact printing below.

145

1979. Tony took these pictures of Gabe with favorite pet, MIx-up, and the living room of the first Mercadoowned residence in San Francisco del Monte.

146

May l972. Family picture with the children thus far.

Gabe was born seven months later.

l976.

Maryhurst, Baguio

147

l986. With favorite dogs, Mix-up and Pepay

l990. Maryhurst, Baguio

148

April l976. Visiting Lola Luz in her Balingasag home, Misamis Oriental. She died the following year.

In the 70s-80s, on this motorcyle, Tony took off alone very early Sunday mornings along countryside routes.

150

1990. Sam’s baby portrait taken by Tony

1991. Sam seeking solace from Dad

151

December 12, 1992. At the wedding reception for An and Boots Alcantara in the Gomez estate, San Pablo, Laguna

l986. Tony dancing with An at the Fiesta Pavilion, Manila Hotel

152

October l997.

Tony with his first two grandsons, Gio and Luis

June 2000.

One of Tony’s last family dinners with An, Sam, Therese, Luis and the infant Rocio

153

1997. With Bishop Xavier Echevaria, prelate of Opus Dei

Aimee Villase単or Mercado (1969 - 2003)

154

Father James B. Reuter, SJ, with Tony.

In college, Father Reuter said that Tony failed the singing audition, but allowed him to join the Ateneo Glee Club anyway with the caution: “You may open your mouth, my son, but do not utter a sound.�

155

Tony’s only sister, Loury Agbulos, with An

Tony’s only brother, Rod, with his wife Tita and An

156

July l990. Tony and Monina on their way to dinner in Santa Barbara, California

157

An, Boots and Diego

The first four Mercado grandchildren: Therese, Gio, Luis and Rocio

Mila, Wawel and Therese

Robbi and Patty with their son, Gabi, and daughter, Bela

Miguel, Luis and Rocio

Paulo, Gio and Pepi

Gabe and Beeto

Samantha

Writing Folio

GROWING UP IN MINDANAO, 1941 TO 1947

By Antonio Roa Mercado

EVACUATION—the word alone is keenly evocative. To a generation of Filipinos who were children when the ’40s began with a war, the word switches on pictures. Textured with pain, hunger and suffering, they evoke for me ever a sense of wonder, discovery and joy.

They were hard times but I remember being happy. Whatever happened then helped to shape me into the man I have become.

History places the Japanese occupation from 1941 to 1944. During those three years, our family evacuated six times from our home in Balingasag, Misamis Oriental, to the countryside by the sea or into the rain forest. We evacuated to farmlands which my parents owned or which were owned by our relatives or by friends. We squeezed into farm households or into borrowed huts. In time, in Mandangua, a coconut farm which we owned, my mother, Luz Roa, built a large and handsome airy nipa hut which she liked to call a chalet.

The first time we fled, we carried only a kettle of adobo. Other times we looked like a safari with bearers carrying our sacks of provisions and clothes. To that hut which my mother built, we brought her precious possessions: large aparadores or wardrobes, a dressing table, a dining table and chairs, beds, a sala set and the piano. My aunt and I rode in the large banca, which hauled some of the furniture.

The banca was called a balingan. To ferry the furniture, it was managed by ten men. Two men pushed the banca forward with bamboo poles while others paddled. The load was still too heavy so some of the men pulled the banca from the shore by long ropes. And suddenly a squall whipped in.

The waves rose up to six feet and even more. The banca bucked and reared like a wild horse. With each pitch, the banca seemed about to capsize and throw all my mother’s possessions into the sea. The men leaped as one to counterbalance on the opposite outrigger. My thoroughly drenched aunt was shouting her Rosary above the roar of the waves. Under the bow, I was curled up, wet and frightened.

growing up in mindanao

164 We were always running away because my father, Rogelio Galang Mercado, was with the USAFFE and then because he was a guerilla. We were running away because we heard that the Japanese were cruel. We were running away because everybody was doing it.

But in those three years, I saw only one Japanese soldier. Of him, I will say more later. Japanese soldiers never occupied our town. Patrols only passed through. The nearest Japanese military contingent was in Cagayan de Oro, 50 kilometers away. When there were rumors of patrols coming in, we ran and hid in our evacuation places. So we never saw any Japanese soldier in those three years. We kept running and hiding, too scared to believe that no one was looking for us. I was seven years old when we began running and ten years old when we stopped.

The first time we evacuated was in December 1941. Over the radio we heard that the Japanese had taken key cities and towns and had invaded Bataan and Corregidor. My father, a lieutenant in the USAFFE, had immediately joined the army of Colonel Manuel Roxas in Davao.

One morning the people who lived on the beach saw a large ship moving toward Balingasag. The warning rang through the town: “The Japanese are coming!�

My mother grabbed my brother who was only one month old and gathered what she could of the baby things. Tiay, my aunt, carried the kettle of adobo. My sister was nine years old and could only carry the baby things. I was in charge of the statue of San Antonio, my patron saint. My mother had a great devotion to San Antonio, my patron saint. She told me that I was never to let go of San Antonio wherever we went. Down our street, past the schoolhouse and into the nearest barrio, we ran, carried by the flow of people who were also evacuating.

Nearer and nearer, the ship came. Faster and faster, our townspeople fled. By noon, the town was deserted. Acting as lookout, a few men hid on the beach.

The ship dropped anchor a few yards from the shore. To the watching men, it did not look like a Japanese navy vessel. It did not have armament.

It did not carry Japanese soldiers. Then a small boat was lowered. Out came Mameng Fuertas in a magnificent dress, looking like a queen.

Mameng was a widow from Balingasag who made good in Cagayan de

growing up in mindanao

165 Oro as department store owner. She had hired a ship and was coming home with her goods. Down came bales and bales of her merchandise and her piano and her furniture. She too was evacuating.

We came home the next day. People were more mad at themselves than at Mameng Fuertas. Not to add insult to injury, she did not open a store in Balingasag but, if cajoled, she allowed a woman to come to her house to buy a dress or a bag or a pair of shoes. Once in a while, in those three years, she too evacuated to the hinterlands with 45 bales of inventory.

Most horrifying was the time we fled in the middle of the night. We heard gunshots from the town plaza. The night was blazing red. Our beautiful old church was burning. The guerrillas had cornered a Japanese captain with two Japanese soldiers inside the parish church. They had locked themselves in the tall belfry and refused to surrender. So the guerrillas decided to burn the church.

That was how the Guerrilla Movement was born in Mindanao.

Before then, there were just some resistance effort by the stragglers who were Filipino soldiers and a few Americans who had refused to surrender. After General Wainwright surrendered the Philippine Army, the Japanese installed Jose P. Laurel as president, and, under the Japanese, the government functioned again. The cornered Japanese captain and his two men came by boat to Balingasag in order to establish the municipal government under the Japanese army.

Warned against possible Japanese retaliation, we ran to the next town, Salay. As we fled, we passed only a few meters away from the burning church. Our beautiful church, an exact replica of San Agustin church in Intramuros, was in flames.

My mother cried. She went to Mass there every day. My Tiay cried.

My sister cried because everybody was crying. I cried because I forgot my duty. I was not carrying the statue of San Antonio. I believed that was why the church got burned. I was also crying because I saw three Japanese lying dead, side by side, on the ground, lit up by the flames.

In Salay, I saw the first and only Japanese soldier ever in those three years. He was the pilot of a fighter plane, which crashed on a hillside. The

growing up in mindanao

166 guerrillas picked him up and disarmed him. Bruised and dazed, he was not otherwise injured. With his hands tied, he was marched to the people waiting in the town plaza. The guerrillas asked everyone to form two lines facing each other. The Japanese soldier was prodded to march between the lines. As he came near, each person pinched him. There must have been 300 persons in that line.

Our part of Northern Mindanao was never under the Japanese since the burning of our beautiful church. From that time, it was and remained guerrilla territory. The guerrillas I saw were slim, trim, handsome young men partying and dancing the afternoon away with the belles of our town.

Only once in a while did they go out to ambush some Japanese patrol.

One of those guerrillas was a smart USAFFE officer named Nicanor Jimenez. He married the most beautiful of the Vega girls in our town.

They became the parents of Letty Jimenez Magsanoc, writer and editor in chief of the major newspaper, Philippine Daily Inquirer, and Inday Badiday, the doyenne of movie writers and broadcasters.

CAGOLCOL, MY SHANGRI-LA. Towards the end of the war, we evacuated to Cagolcol, only about 15 kilometers away from Balingasag.

We went with our cousins, the Ludeñas, They were a big family, seven sons and three daughters. Their father was Papa Romaning, the son of a Spaniard from Seville, who in the previous generation served in Misamis Oriental as a member of the Guardias Civiles. Their mother was Mama Charing, my mother’s older sister.

After three years of running away from the Japanese, Cagolcol was our sixth and final evacuation place—as it turned out. There was a lower and an upper Cagolcol. Central to both locales was the Cagolcol River.

Deep in the jungle, upper Cagolcol was where the river bagan from a small spring. For the most part a rich delta, lower Cagolcol was where the signature river met a much bigger river which joined the sea at Punta Gorda at the boundary of Jasaan and Balingasag.

As a hide-out, Cagolcol was actually nearer to Cagayan de Oro where the Japanese were. We believed that it was safe though because it was hidden in a beautiful valley. Besides it was not easily accessible. We got to Cagolcol in one of two ways. Either we took a banca and paddled up the

growing up in mindanao

167 big river and then walked following the small river. Or we walked on the highway and then got off the road at Barrio Baliwagan, picking our way through the nipa swamps if the tide was low. Whichever of the two routes we took, we then went up through several hectares of coconut land and two hills. From the top of the second hill, we saw the full splendor of my Cagolcol.

From the first moment I saw the valley beside the river, I knew it was my paradise.

Cagolcol was the kind of river that Fernando Amorsolo liked to paint.

Small, dark and intimate in parts, sparkling in the sun in other parts, the embankments were high and steep. When it rained heavily in the forest, the river rose as much as ten feet from a gentle, crystal clear steam. The first lesson I learned in Cagolcol was: never tarry by the river when it begins to rain, climb to higher terrain at once because the river swells and rises suddenly and relentlessly.

Down the hill in lower Cagolcol, where we first lived, were some small farms and four nipa huts. Maui owned the land where we stayed and our hut was beside his corn field. He was the father of Modesto and Victoria who, although some years older than me, became my friends and guides. Known as pari-pari, Maui knew some power words which, if uttered over tilled land, brought in good harvest–or so people believed. When Maui was summoned for his benediction on farm lands, he was paid with live chicken or slabs of pork, which were part of the ritual offering and which he always shared with us.

The Ludeùas lived in a small coconut grove across the river in the hut next to Pirio, who was Maui’s brother-in-law. Tall, lean and strong, Pirio was a very amiable man, someone we could trust with our livcs. He nurtured some coconut trees as sangutan. A sangutan is grown only for its nectar which is fermented into coconut wine. Every day its florets were wounded so that the nectar would drip into the collection tube. Twice a day, Pirio climbed the sangutan trees to gather the nectar, pouring it into a big bamboo container slung on his back.

Remembering Cagolcol, I sing. I sing of abundance from the sea, the river, the corn field and the coconut trees. It was abundance after miserable scarcity that brought as close to death and slowly sapped us of strength and will.

growing up in mindanao

168 Before we came to Cagolcol, we had starved and suffered for many months in Balagnan, a mountain barrio. There we were always cold. We ate nothing but root crops. We were sick with malaria. Rare were the times when we had protein.

We had fled in haste to Balagnan from our nipa chalet in Mandangua because a Japanese ship was firing mortal shells at us. It took us two days to climb up to Balagnan where lived Mr. Ocab, my father’s friend and coteacher. He welcomed us with open arms even if we brought no food with us. We said we were expecting our man to follow shortly with the carabao bearing our rice supply.

As it turned out, the load was too heavy for the carabao, the climb too steep and the sun too hot. It died before reaching Balagnan.

The sacks of rice got to us somehow. Only the meat of the carabao reached us and we shared it with our host and with the people who helped carry the rice up the mountain. For weeks we ate dried carabao meat.

Although we tried to make the meat last for a long time, eventually only the skin was left hanging to cure over wood fire in the kitchen.

On cold, lonely nights when the men gathered for story telling, they sliced a piece of caraboa skin and threw it into the fire. When it was almost charred, they picked it up and thinned it out by hammering. Then they gave out small pieces to everyone to chew like chewing gum. One piece lasted each of the men through the night.

For protein, my mother imitated her sister, Mama Charing, whose husband, Papa Ramoning, retained his Spanish habits and taste buds. Even those times, he insisted on pork tocino. Where Mama Charing found the pork is one of the great mysteries of our evacuation period, but she had a hefty slab being smoked perpetually above the wood fire in the kitchen.

When they needed flavor for the vegetables or the soup, Mama Charing sliced tiny bits from hanging slab.

My mother’s tocino was mostly pork fat, which she bartered with a couple of nice dresses. She too hanged it above the wood fire in the kitchen. To make it last a long time, she kept it intact, not slicing even a sliver from it. Instead, she lowered the smoked park fat, like a flag in reveille, down to the soup she was cooking. When she thought it had

growing up in mindanao

169 given enough flavor, she raised the slab again, only to lower it another day for another soup.

But after a while in Balagnan, the flavor ran out. The rice ran out.

Vinegar and salt ran out. Even the carabao skin was all chewed out. The taste of fish was but a vague memory, although it must have been only a year since we had fresh fish to eat.

Once we got to lower Cagolcol, our first supper was fish. How sweet it was. At the edge of the delta by the sea, my father waited for the men who were catching fish. When anyone lent a hand as the net was being drawn in, he got a share of the catch.

My father’s share was a few small fish, three shrimps and two large clams. My mother threw everything into the kettle and boiled them with tomatoes and green onions. I can never forget my first sip of that fresh fish soup. The sweet and fresh taste of the sea went directly to my soul. I was revived from malaria that night.

My father was revived, too. He immediately started a few vegetables plots. I helped by watering plants. I fetched water from the river every morning and afternoon. I watched the vegetables grow. I felt that I owned every cabbage, every eggplant, every string bean, every tomato. In my father’s garden was first seeded my passion for gardening.

Besides watering the garden, I went to the river to catch freshwater shrimps and crabs. My friends, Modesto and Victoria, were very good at it. Going rock to rock, they slipped their hands under and felt from the shrimp or the crab resting there. I learned from them. When something moved, I grabbed it and brought it up. If it was a shrimp, I pinched its head to kill it. If it was a crab, I held it on two sides at its back. Shrimp or crab, I slipped it into the narrow-necked basket which I wore at my waist.

My mother cooked the shrimp right away. If I caught lots of crabs, she kept some alive for the next day’s meal. In this way, I helped to put some protein in our meals every day.

Modesto also taught me how to use an underwater slingshot with wire arrows powered by stout strips cut from the inner tubes of rubber tires.

Wearing wooden goggles, we dived into the deeper part of the river and poked our heads into the underwater caves made by the roots of the big

growing up in mindanao

170 trees. There hid the bigger catch: river shrimps with real claws, mudfish and, once in a while, an eel.

One time in such a cave, I spotted a large and fat mudfish. I could not believe how big it was, so I called Modesto. The mudfish had not moved at all. Modesto said that I must hit it squarely on the head. Our thin wire arrows would not work elsewhere. He called Victoria to help.

I went down to the water again, aimed at the head and stretched the sling as far as I could and let go of the arrow. Instantly Modesto and Victoria jumped in to and grab the injured fish. We couldn’t see anything because the water was all muddied by the struggling fish which was still alive when we heaved it onto the bank.

We divided the fish into two. Victoria and Modesto got the lower part and I got the upper part because I knew that my father loved fish head soup. The mudfish was so big that my mother cooked it for our lunch and for supper.

In lower Cagolcol, too, I learned to eat shipworm, called tamilok.

Modesto taught me how. In the swamp, we looked for fallen trees with holes which we poked. If there was something white and soft inside a hole, we sucked it out. The tamilok is round, fat and very clean, tasting like oyster and soft like custard.

Fish from the river and the sea, the shrimps and crabs which I caught provided the protein my father needed as he recuperated from prison camp.

As early as 1942, together with other USAFFE soldiers, he was captured by the Japanese and imprisoned in Camp Casisang in Bukidnon.

My father had adult-onset diabetes. He should never have gone to war.

In the prison camp with little and very poor food and without medication, my father lost close to one hundred pounds. TB set in. He was skin and bones.

Thinking he would die soon, the Japanese looked the other way and allowed him to escape. He walked out of the camp one morning before dawn. How he found the way and the strength to reach us, I never knew because he never told. Once an ebullient, fun-loving man, my father became a thin and silent shadow.

growing up in mindanao

171 To make him well again, my mother thought he should take eggnog, which she called cutir. To make it, she whipped two raw eggs into tuba. My father drank one tall glass of cutir before going to bed every night. In Cagolcol, there was plenty of tuba. I understand that the quality was also very good. It was supposed to be the sweetest tuba ever.

Every day as my father recuperated, my mother sent me to our neighbor Pirio across the river for a pitcher of tuba. I was curious about tuba. I knew that drinking it made the men noisy and apparently happy. I sipped my first taste from the pitcher. How good it was.

The next day, I took two sips. The third day, I gulped nearly half of what was in the pitcher. Every day I tippled. One time my mother remarked that I brought back less than half a pitcher of tuba. I said that I stubbed my toe and fell and spilled the tuba. She must have noticed that I staggered away to nap at midmorning.

The coconut tree was very important for its nuts. Besides all the snack treats from young coconut, my mother cooked great pancit with buko strips. She made buko pancit on special occasions like birthdays. But most important to my mother at this time was oil.

We needed the oil for light and for frying and for rubbing onto itches and bruises.

Every week, I went out with the Lude単a boys to gather fallen coconuts on the far side of the hills several kilometers away. Although they lived in a coconut grove, the trees were sangutan which never bore nuts. Their flowers were cut morning and afternoon for the nectar that became tuba. That was why we had to go quite far to the other side of the hill. There we just picked up coconuts that had dropped from the trees. People did not harvest their coconuts because there was no market for copra during the war.

The Lude単a boys were much older and bigger than me so I needed to go with them but I carried my own coconuts. I strung them at the two ends of a bamboo pole, as many as eight coconuts.

With this load I went up and down hills for several kilometers and I was not even ten years old then. That was why, my mother insisted, I did not grow tall.

growing up in mindanao

172 One day, the Chavez family passed by Cagolcol. They were on their way back to Tagoloan, their hometown very near Cagayan de Oro. They said they were disgusted with evacuating. After their son died of malnutrition and malaria in their hiding place, they were willing to take their chances in town.

Tita Nita Chavez was my mother’s best friend since college in Manila.

As she poured out her grief to my mother, she said that her son who died had a beautiful pony. They were not bringing it back with them to town.

She said she would like me to have it. Their son loved the pony very much and it was right, she felt, that I should take care of it and enjoy it.

They would send a message to their caretaker and the horse would be brought to me.

In Cagolcol with my own horse, the idea made me leap for joy. Every day, while I waited for the horse, in my imagination I galloped with it up the hill, to the house of my friends Modesto and Victoria, down the river to where we bathed and fished, to the delta where lived the beautiful Milagring, my first crush. I knew that she would look out the window to see who was cantering by. I heard his hooves thudding over grass and earth, I felt his flanks between my knees, I heard him snorting as I pulled the bit. Never will he carry coconuts, I vowed. He was not a work horse. He was a show pony, a gentlemen’s mount. The neighbors saw me running up and down the hill, neighing and snorting, as if astride a large and handsome horse.

The days of waiting turned into weeks. No horse came. No caretaker came. Not even a message came. When my father could stand it no longer, he sent a messenger to where this horse was supposed to be. After many days, the news came. The horse died.

My parents hurriedly got me a billy goat. Although it was a large goat, my feet dragged on the ground when I rode on it. Strong and surefooted, it could cross the log bridge with me on its back. It could run downhill carrying me. I could load it with sack of rice.

Up and down Cagolcol I rode on the goat, by the river, into the woods, sometimes to catch a glimpse of the sea. I think I began to love it. He even had a name. My mother suggested that I call him Billy and I did.

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173 One day, I heard that the Japanese were becoming desperate because they knew the American liberation forces were on the way. On my part, I was distressed because my goat had disappeared, I asked where he could be and no one answered. I thought no one answered because everybody was preparing to evacuate again. I saw that Papa Ramoning was even more nervous than usual because he heard rumors that a desperate Japanese patrol was heading straight to Cagolcol. All the chickens and pigs were being butchered and cooked for food for the evacuation.

We went to upper Cagolcol by the river where it was dark jungle on both banks. The river itself was just little rills among big rocks. Since there were no houses, during the first night, we slept atop large rocks on the river. We had lots of food—chicken and pork adobo and kaldereta, which is goat stew.

When we had settled down many days later, my father gave me a gift, a kickball, he said. It was a large transparent ball pumped with air, more oval than round. With just a little kick, it flew briskly and surely.

I heard my father say that it was a goat’s bladder. I played with that ball for a very long time.

Since Papa Ramoning refused to go back to lower Cagolcol, we built shacks under trees at the foot of the mountain, which was the edge of the jungle. There were three shacks. Once shack was for Papa Ramoning and his family. Another shack was for his newly married son Oswaldo and his wife. The third shack was for us. The wood was still green and the joints were tied with strong vines from the jungle.

I don’t remember what the roof was but, as in all mountain houses, the floor level was high as protection from animals at night and from flood waters. Actually, our houses were on stilts, reached by long steep ladders.

Behind us was the mountain. Below us was the river which I heard running among the rocks. There I learned to fish for eel with a secured hook and line. When the river was swollen from the rain, the eels came.

Early one rainy morning, before anyone is up, I ran down to check my hook and line. I used a live frog as bait. I saw right away that the line was moving wildly. Something very strong was at its end. I tried

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174 to pull it in but could not. I yelled for help. My mother and my sister came down to help. The three of us pulled in the biggest eel I ever caught in my whole life.

Monsoon rains in upper Cagolcol were dreadful. One night, it seemed as if it was raining more heavily than usual. The river rose and reached the second to the last step of our ladder. The lashing wind and the downpour kept us awake.

Victoria, the farm girl from lower Cagolcol, had come with us and was serving as our maid. As the water rose, she sat on the top-most step of the ladder. With a spoon, she stirred the murky water. She said that her grandmother told her to stir the boiling rice so it will not spill. She believed the river would not rise and spill on us if she kept stirring it.

We were particularly frightened because my father was not with us.

Feeling stronger, he reported for duty at the guerrilla outpost a day’s walk away. Papa Ramoning had fled yet again with all the Ludeñas to an unknown evacuation place. We were completely alone: my mother, three children and Victoria who fortunately knew the countryside.

The river rose relentlessly. The wind snuffed out our oil lamp. Our matches were soaked. We heard rocks, dislodged by the rain, rolling down the mountain. My mother said that we had to get out of the house. We decided to transfer to the empty Ludeña shacks on higher ground and out of the way of the rolling rocks.

In pitch darkness, we groped our way. Both wind and rain had slackened but the mud at our feet was thick and slippery. Suddenly to each side of us, we saw many glowing half orbs. Quite small, perhaps the size of a rosal leaf, they gave gentle light, somewhat like moonlight, sometimes blue, and sometimes green. I believed they were fairy lights. I went to them and gingerly touched the nearest. One touch and I knew: it was a mushroom.

It was the kind my mother called rat’s ears, tengang daga.

To make a path in the forest between our shacks, some trees were cut down. As they rotted, the stumps became host to mushrooms. In the night, especially after the rain, mushrooms glow with their own phosphorescence. And in the very darkest night, they could be like neon.

This I learned that stormy night in Cagolcol when clusters of glowing mushrooms showed us the way to higher ground.

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175 A SUBMARINE BEARING CHOCOLATE. I remember two curious young boys in our town both the same age, a year or two younger than me. One was called Japon because he was the son of the Japanese store owners in our town before the war. The other was Walter, an American boy. Both were orphans.

The parents of Japon were killed when the war broke out. Nobody knew anything about Walter’s parents. The boys were fostered by poor but kind townspeople who loved them like their own children.

After the war, quite a lot of effort was exerted by the townspeople to contact the relatives of Japon through the Japanese Embassy. After a long while and a lot of work, his relatives were found. Japon was brought to Japan but he returned to our town right away. He went to school, worked and got married there till everyone forgot that he was a Japanese. On the other hand, Walter went to States for good when relatives claimed him.

I have always wondered what happened to the wild rooster he kept for a pet.

American presence was among us throughout the war. First, there was Abbot. He did not have a first name as far as the town was concerned.

Remarkably lean, he had long legs and was more than six feet tall. I had a pet chicken, which had very long legs, and I called him Abbot. He joined the guerrillas and was one of those who burned the church.

Another American presence was Colonel Fertig, who was quite a legend. I understand that he was an airplane mechanic, a sergeant in the American army but a colonel in the guerilla force. He mounted an airplane engine on the rear of a banca and strapped two 50-calibre machine guns at the sides. He called it “Fertig’s Flying Machine.” He could sink or elude any patrol boat that the Japanese sent.

Close to the time of the American landing in Leyte in October 1944, a Navy pilot crashed into the sea near us. His plane was shot down during a dogfight. The guerrillas picked him up and gave a barrio fiesta for him that night. The following day, he was picked up by a big, black amphibian plane. A flotilla of well-wishers escorted him. The pilot’s rescue was easy because by that time the guerrillas were well equipped with communication equipment smuggled into our area by American submarines, in anticipation of the Leyte landing.

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176 The Mindanao guerrillas boasted that they were the first to receive American weapons, the first to smoke Lucky Strikes and Chesterfields and chew American chewing gum, and the first to wear GI fatigues.

I remember the first time an American submarine came. It was supposed to be a big military secret but somehow I knew. Somehow all the kids knew. That midnight all the kids were on the beach, behind the bushes. Nobody dared to breath for fear of being discovered. My chest thumped with excitement. I was sure I would be sent home.

Although it was a dark and moonless night, we saw this black thing come out of the water between two bancas that went out to the deep.

We saw men coming out of the hatch. They signaled the two bancas to approach and hoisted the men from the bancas atop the submarine.

Hundreds of others waiting on the shore clambered into their bancas and paddled towards the submarine as fast as they could. It was a race. The prize was goodies from General MacArthur—chocolate bars, chewing gum, cigarettes, fatigue jackets, even fatigue handkerchiefs.

Later in the morning, our clan received our share of the goodies: one bar of Hersheys chocolate in a white wrapper printed with the portrait of General Douglas MacArthur with his corncob pipe. Red letters on the wrappers spelled out: “I shall return.” My mother sliced the bar into little tiny chips, which melted in my mouth in pieces of sheer joy. It was the happiest day of my boyhood.

THE LUMBER CAMP AT KM. 82. After the war, my father got a job to start a lumber camp and a sawmill in Compostela, North Davao. The nearest town to the camp was Nabunturan. The place where the camp was had no name. With jungle on both sides of the road, the camp was at Km. 82 which we used for giving directions. Letters got to us with that address alone: Km. 82.

In that forest clearing, we lived in army tents nestled between the buttress roots of the trees. My father was entitled to three tents for us. He and my mother slept in one tent. My kid brother and I slept in another tent. My mother cooked and served our meals in the third tent.

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177 The camp smelled sweet and sour all the time. It was the smell of newly cut lumber from the sawmill. We walked on a carpet smell of sawdust, which blew around and got into our nose in the dry times and squished under our feet on rainy days.

By day, it was a noisy camp. Dragged by bulldozers, fallen trees were hauled in from the forest. The sawmill whined and screeched to slice the logs into boards. The men heaved and yelled as they loaded lumber on to ten-wheeler trucks. The trucks groaned on the mud as they moved out with their load of wood for the Davao City yards. I learned to drive on one of those ten-wheelers.

All around and above us was the forest. The trees were huge. I was 13 years old, already five feet plus in height. If I stood behind one of the logs lying on the ground, I could not be seen from other side. There was no question of one man embracing the tree to show how big it is. Three men holding hands would be the likely measure of the circumference of the average trees.

A tree was cut about ten feet from the ground. Lower than that the trunk was too thick and tough. On scaffoldings, the lumberjacks stood, two to a giant saw which they pushed back and forth. It took more than half a day to cut down one tree. The cut trees stood like massive headless ghosts. The tents where we lived were between the buttress roots of the decapitated trees.

I believe the trees were red lauan. The sawdust was red and the cut lumber was red. There was a great demand for wood. Some of the lumber remained in Davao and most of it was shipped to Manila for post-war rebuilding.

Some of the junior lumberjacks were young, about 15 to 17 years old.

My father wanted me to be a strong boy. At hand he kept some boxing gloves. He chose some lumberjacks to be my sparring partners. At the end of a working day, on a carpet of sawdust, I learned boxing with the lumberjacks.

The nearest school to the lumber camp was the elementary in Nabunturan at Km. 100. That was about an hour’s drive from Km. 82 and there was no public transportation. I had to stay in the lumber camp

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178 for one school year when I should have been in Grade Four. My schooling was delayed because of this and also because of the war.

To keep me occupied, my father gave me his .22 caliber Remington rifle and one thousand rounds of ammunition. The Remington was my father’s own prized rifle. Rim-fired and long barreled, it was beautiful but a bit heavy for me at my age.

Meticulously, in fact more meticulous than he ordinarily was, he taught me how to shoot. The bullets he gave me were all bird shot. He said only wanted me to hunt birds for food. At the edges of the camp, along the main road and beside the river were giant trees where lived flocks of all kinds of birds. I became a good shot after a while. I always came home with few birds for my mother to cook.

When my father believed that I was ready for bigger game, he said that I could try hunting in the jungle. He gave me hollow-point bullets— Winchester Super XX. These bullets flatten on impact and tear a bigger wound inside the body.

Sometimes alone, but many times with younger boys who were my guides and my retrievers, I hunted in the forest. I shot bigger birds, flying squirrels, monkeys, an occasional wild boar and a rare deer. My father said: “Never shoot a wild boar from ground. Even when badly wounded or dying, he will attack and kill you. Go up a tree, wait, shoot from there.

Make sure you are against the wind or the boar will smell you and never come your way.”

Only once did my father allow me to go on an overnight hunting trip in the jungle. It was only because I was with grownups with high-powered guns. How foggy and cold it was that night. We wore thick jackets. Our Mandaya guides were practically naked but they had a way of keeping warm. First, they made a big campfire which they allowed to burn down into embers. Through the night, one or two of them tended these embers as the others slept with their bare soles exposed to the radiant warmth.

They told us to take off our shoes and do likewise. We formed a circle with our bare soles toward the embers. That way, we were warm all night.

From December until early March, our jungle home was chilly night and day. Also from a Mandaya, I learned how to keep warm all day. At

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179 the crack of dawn, my young Mandaya guide took me to the spring pool.

There he told me to dive with him into the deep blue water. Not knowing any better, I did. What a shock! The water was as cold as ice. But I felt that my body was burning.

When we got out of the water, our bodies were steaming. Then I felt warm all day. My Mandaya friend and I took that dawn dive several more times, until my mother found out and put a stop to it.

I was alone when I shot my first big monkey. He was up on the trees. I could not see all of him because of the foliage. I could tell that he was huge by the way the branches bowed under his weight. He was alone. That was unusual because monkeys travel in packs, making a big racket. I must have gotten him in the heart with one .22 bullet. He fell with loud thud.

I was terrified. I could not believe that he could be dead with one bullet, even a hollow point bullet. I thought he was still alive. I crept into the thick brush below the trees to look for him. After every step, I stopped and listened. He might still be alive. But there he was, very still and really dead, the biggest monkey I have ever seen. All by myself I dragged him to the rivers to skin and dress him. I could swear he weighed more than 50 kilos.

Whatever I hunted, I learned to dress. My mother went into hysterics when she saw a bleeding wounded animal. She was willing to cook it, but she did not want to see what it was, especially not a monkey. But boy, she made a really delicious monkey adobo.

I learned that the place to dress any animal was by the river. With the tip of a sharp hunting knife, which was my prized possession as a boy, I made an incision in the skin along the backbone, from the neck down.

Then I peeled off the skin as if removing clothes from a baby.

If it stuck at the paws, I cut off the paws; if at the neck, I cut off the head. I skinned fowl in exactly the same way. Wild game has tough skin, too tough for cooking. Even wild doves and wild ducks must be skinned.

The skinning done, I opened the stomach and threw all the innards down the river. I then washed and chopped up the game into chunks.

My mother made into adobo whatever I brought home. With meat all cut up and washed, what did it matter to her what animal it was?

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180 That was just as well. Otherwise we would have eaten Vienna sausage every day. Or sardines. Or canned squid. In the wilderness where our lumber camp was, the staple was canned food from my parents’ buying sorties in Davao. My favorite was sautéed canned mackerel, with onions and soup, which went well with rice. But fresh game was much better.

We had it almost every day, thanks to my father’s Remington rifle. We slept early in the camp. The small generator provided us with light only until 8 p.m. We slept in the dark, with only the hooting of owls slicing the silence.

One dark and quiet night, the camp guard fired his gun several times.

My father came out and check. The guard said that there were creatures menacing him from the forest. In the light of the next day, my father warned the guard against wasting bullets.

That same night, the guard fired his gun again several times. He made the same excuse to my father. On the third night, not gunfire but bloodcurdling screams tore into our sleep.

The screams were coming from a field supervisor’s tent. It was his wife. She was crying and screaming and tossing on the ground. My father came in to investigate. The woman screamed at him. Then she began to talk in a man’s deep and large voice.

She called him by his name, his rank and his serial number in the USAFFE. She spoke to my father in perfect English. She said other things about him that were true but which she could not have known since he never talked to her before then. She was new in the camp.

Every time she gave out some information in her deep voice, she laughed and tossed and heaved. Then she began to talk in Spanish and in other languages.

My father concluded that she was possessed. My father was not superstitious nor naïve. He was a very rational man, a college graduate and an officer of the USAFFE. Before the war, he was a teacher but taught only briefly because he was once promoted to school principal, then to supervisor. He spoke English impeccably and managed some conversation in Spanish and he could recognize Latin or French or German when we heard it. The woman spoke to him in these languages.

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181 From time to time, in the next days and nights, the woman screamed and yelled, her face torn, her eyes ferocious. The camp was in turmoil. My father asked for counsel from his field supervisors. One of them suggested a visit from the Mandaya shaman several hills away.

The Mandaya came in full regalia—feather headdress, layers of necklaces, some oils and unguents, and a female assistant, also in full regalia. They brought out the woman to the center of the camp. We all watched. I believed no one went to work that day.

Once laid on the ground, with all our attention on her, the woman began to scream and yell, heaving and tossing, ranting and screeching. A powerful force flung her from side to side.

In a seeming trance, the Mandaya chanted and waved a wand at her.

His assistant sat quietly beside him. Then suddenly she too began to toss and heave and rant. As she became more violent, the woman from our camp began to subside.

Soon it was the Mandaya woman who was speaking in a man’s deep powerful voice in English and Spanish and Latin. She was flinging from side to side. She became a total mimic, while the woman from our camp fell into a deep sleep.

It was late in the day. Still the Mandaya witch doctor chanted and waved, until his assistant seemed to fly into the air. Then she fell to the ground and was still. She too fell into a deep sleep.

The next day, the woman from our camp was back at her chores.

She cooked and fetched water and washed clothes. She said she did not remember anything that had happened.

— Published in Mindanao: a Portrait, Bookmark 1999

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