ALL IS GRACE: An Autobiography

“The tools of politics alone cannot reform the social order…. Morality—and yes, religion—provides the higher paradigm.”

“[I represent] a country that wishes and desires nothing but peace, friendship, and cooperation between and among peoples and nations.”

“I found so much peace and joy in St. Josemaría Escrivá’s wise and priceless fatherly counsel: ‘to do and disappear.’”

ALL IS GRACE is not only the story of a politician and public intellectual; it is above all the story of a man who let his faith guide him in every step and who dedicated his life to the good of his country and people.

ISBN 978-971-8845-69-1

9 789718 845691

Francisco S. Tatad

When Francisco (“Kit”) Tatad was just a little barefoot boy in Gigmoto, Catanduanes, he used to entertain adults by imitating the speech of the mayor of his town, thus earning the nickname “Little Mayor”—and prefiguring the long career that, in a few years, would make him one of the more remarkable public figures in Philippine politics. Now eighty-two, Tatad, like Janus, the Roman god with two faces, one looking at the past and the other to the future, gives an intimate account of his fifty-year public career and reflects upon the destiny of his beloved country. With sustained journalistic rigor, he reveals details of the difficult and controversial choices that have marked the nation’s history, the scandals that shook Malacañan Palace, and the delicate relationships with foreign countries.

ALL IS GRACE

“We could form what I would now call—for want of a better word—a transterritorial republic of families, made up of men and women of all nations and faiths, determined to maintain the original dignity and role of the family and make it a living source, channel, and object of authentic human goodness.”

ALL IS GRACE

An Autobiography

Francisco S. Tatad

ALL IS GRACE

ALL IS GRACE An Autobiography

FRANCISCO S. TATAD

Published Month 2021 by Copyright ©2021 by the author All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher.

Book and cover design: Jaime Jim O. Hilario Published by Solidaridad Publishing House Printed by Inkwell Publishing Co., Inc. Printed in the Philippines ISBN 978-971-8845-69-1 (hardbound)

In memory of my late parents who taught me everything I knew from childhood about love, honor, hard work, and self-sacrifice, and with love and devotion to my wife, children and grandchildren.

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EVERYTHING IS GRACE, everything is the direct effect of our Father’s love.… Everything is grace because everything is God’s gift. Whatever be the character of life or its unexpected events—to the heart that loves, all is well.

—St. Therese of Lisieux Her Last Conversations

CONTENTS Foreword ......................................................................................ix Acknowledgments ....................................................................................xiii Prologue ..................................................................................... xv PART ONE

EARLY JOYS AND EARLY SORROWS............................27 1.

“Not another child”..............................................29 2.

“As smart as any other boy”..................................39 3.

A little red ant......................................................51 4.

An audacious move..............................................61 5.

A newspaperman’s trials.......................................67 6.

Breaking state secrets...........................................93

PART TWO

IN THE NATION’S SERVICE........................................105 7.

Entering the Cabinet.........................................107 8.

A wedding in August.........................................123 9.

The New Society is born....................................141 10. Fighting the fake news.......................................151 11. Most powerful president....................................161 12. Windows on the world......................................171 13. Batasan elections................................................187 14. Leaving the Cabinet...........................................197 15. Who will fight Marcos?.....................................209

PART THREE

TURMOIL AND TRIAL.................................................221 16. The assassination of Ninoy.................................223 17. A snap election...................................................235 18. A farcical election...............................................257 vii

Contents

PART FOUR

FIGHT FOR HUMAN LIFE............................................275 19. “Moral conscience of the Senate”.......................277 20. A presidential challenge.....................................301

PART FIVE

OUSTING OF ESTRADA...............................................319 21. President is impeached.......................................321 22. Hang him first, try him later..............................349 23. Prosecutors walk out..........................................377

PART SIX

THE ARROYO INTERLUDE..........................................387 24. Justice confesses.................................................389

PART SEVEN

AQUINO’S WRATH.......................................................411 25. The death of Cory Aquino.................................413 26. The fight vs. “reproductive health”......................431

PART EIGHT

CALL FOR NATIONAL TRANSFORMATION.................455 27. On the brink of moral collapse..........................457 28. Time to retire?...................................................469 29. The Chinese factor.............................................485 30. Decapitating the Supreme Court..........................495

PART NINE

BATTLING THE PANDEMIC........................................519 31. Locked down and isolated.................................521

EPILOGUE

THE SHAPE OF THE FUTURE.....................................531 I. What will survive?..............................................533 II. Beyond and after the crisis.................................559 .....................................................................................573

Index

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FOREWORD

AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES, TYRANNIES by their very character, have no redeemers. There are, however, well-meaning workers of such regimes who make them livable with their understanding and compassion. One such figure is Francisco S. Tatad, author of this autobiography and press secretary, presidential spokesman, and information minister under President Ferdinand Edralin Marcos, the Philippines’ long-serving authoritarian leader, who was ousted at the EDSA revolution of February 1986.

Tatad served in the Marcos cabinet for ten years but resigned six years before that People Power revolt.

Now in his eighties, Tatad joins the ranks of our senior statesmen and public intellectuals pointing out faults and fallacies in government, most of which could be avoided if officials were sincere. Kit draws his stamina and courage from his rootedness on native soil, from his knowledge of history, from his civic conscience and consciousness, and, most of all, from the lasting guidance and protection of his Catholic faith. ix

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Because of an academic misunderstanding with the authorities of the University of Santo Tomas, where he read philosophy and letters, Kit Tatad failed to earn his degree from that university.

That notwithstanding, he may well be that venerable institution’s most outstanding journalism “graduate,” for he was and continues to be an outstanding journalist. Then, at 29, he became a Cabinet minister and, later, senator of the Republic—another affirmation of the truism that in this country a poor boy—“Promdi” (from the boondocks)—can become somebody.

Kit, while in college, wrote poetry and fiction. Soon after, he joined the French News Agency as a deskman and then the Manila Daily Bulletin as a reporter, with the Department of Foreign Affairs as his beat. The Foreign Office was then on Padre Faura, a short walk from Solidaridad Bookshop, where he used to drop by, and that is how I got to meet him. He was perhaps the youngest press officer to be hired, and I am sure that Marcos early on had his eyes on him because of his initiative, perspicacity, and doggedness, all of which was obvious in the stories that he managed to squeeze out of the Foreign Office.

As the press secretary during those turbulent years, Kit was a figure of calmness and goodwill. He was extremely helpful to the foreign journalists, the cultural leaders, and the writers who visited Manila to plead for press freedom and for the imprisoned writers, their liberty.

He facilitated the meetings between PEN writers and President Marcos. I know for one that he interceded for several of them. I myself was not allowed to leave the country for four years.

It was Kit who saw to it that I got my passport back.

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After EDSA, Kit Tatad stayed on. When he ran for senator, it was his judicious nature I believe that helped him get elected for two consecutive terms.

Kit Tatad never stopped being a journalist. As such, he has continued to raise probing questions about the performance in office of whoever the country’s sitting president might be. For doing so, he is now often at the receiving end of the incumbent president’s vulgar attacks. It is such a shame that the response to many of the questions Kit raises consists of smugger and gutter language.

Not only is this autobiography a candid retelling of Kit Tatad’s life; it is also a dramatic commentary on the many national figures and events that have shaped this country’s future. True to his calling as a man of letters, Kit imbues these personalities and events with the knowledge and deep insight that others, being distant actors, never had.

Solidaridad Publishing House is delighted to be able to bring this work to its readers in the middle of a global pandemic that everyone everywhere is trying to beat. The pandemic has given Kit Tatad the opportunity to finish writing his autobiography, as well as a good reason to shelter in with Fenny Tatad, his devoted wife of 51 years, with whom he has raised seven grownup children, including one daughter-writer (Gabriela Tatad), and eleven grandchildren to date. The publication of All Is Grace, both in the Philippines and in Europe (by Europe Books), hopefully will make the author more accessible once more to the public.

F. Sionil Jose Philippine National Artist for Literature Publisher, Solidaridad Publishing House xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

TO BRING THIS WORK to fruition, I had to persuade a good personal friend who now specializes in developing educators and leaders of learning in various types of organizations to come out of his retirement from editorial work to lend final form and structure to a continuous text of reflections and remembrances that has grown over the years. He agreed on the condition that we not disclose his real identity to the public, except only as Noel Eric Contigo, a nom de plume. It was not an unreasonable request, considering that Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, O. Henry, Saki, and George Orwell, among others, are but pen names. Viswa Nathan, editor-in-chief emeritus of the Hong Kong Standard, collaborated in the copyreading.

As author, I assume full responsibility for everything in this book, but so much of it I owe to the work of these generous and skillful editors.

Jaime Jim Hilario designed the cover and the entire book.

Micky Makabenta prepared the Index, and Jose Karlo Magno xiii

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Tatad, my eldest son, reviewed the page proofs. My daughters, Maria Erika Victoria Tatad and Maria Gabriela Tatad and Maria Michaela Veronica Tatad-King, collaborated to select the photos that form part of the book. My wife, Maria Fenny Cantero Tatad, kept me in good health and good spirits throughout the whole period of this authorship, the last part of which coincided with the global lockdown imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many friends who will remain anonymous accompanied me with their prayers.

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PROLOGUE

EVERY BOOK LIKE THIS has a genuinely good reason for being. I only had to turn eighty to write this one. I hope I could be forgiven.

Indeed, we look to the extraordinary lives of others and hold them up for the world’s appreciation, imitation, and acclaim.

They are a source of so much joy. Thus, we savor the Lives of the Saints, Plutarch’s Lives, the lives of the great painting masters, musical composers, and famous men and women in various walks of life like Joan of Arc, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Oliver Cromwell, Jane Austen, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Johnson, Marie Curie, Florence Nightingale, Jose Rizal, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Zhou Enlai, Jawaharlal Nehru, Achmed Soekarno, Eleanor Roosevelt, Che Guevara, John Nash, Alan Turing, and so many others.

But unless one is an Augustine of Hippo, an Ignatius of Loyola, a Teresa of Avila, a Therese of Lisieux, a Teresa of Calcutta, an Anne Frank, a Mahatma Gandhi, a John Henry Newman, a G. K. Chesterton, a C. S. Lewis, a Viktor Frankl, a Rabindranath xv

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Tagore, a Nelson Mandela, a Fidel Castro, a Lee Kuan Yew, or someone with an epic story to tell, it is not easy to summon the courage to write a book about oneself in the first person.

The greatest man who ever lived, perfect God and perfect man as he was, never wrote a single line about himself, although Scripture says, “He did all things well” and “No man has ever spoken like this man.” Indeed, nothing more remarkable has ever been written than the New Testament, which speaks of his life, passion, death, resurrection, and eternal kingdom.

The Blessed Virgin who gave him humble birth never uttered anything memorable beyond her Fiat and Magnificat. Yet, she is exalted as “the most blessed among women.”

How then can one write a book about oneself, without having done any heroic thing?

This was my first problem here: why should anyone ever think my story is worth telling?

Cardinal (now Saint) John Henry Newman wrote his Apologia Pro Vita Sua to defend his religious convictions and respond to attacks questioning his truthfulness and impugning his honor.

I make no such defense of my life in this book. Neither is it my wish, in writing the book, to “square accounts with history.”

When I first thought of writing this autobiography, my only motive was to record my journey as an act of thanksgiving for my modest life and recount a story that I thought belonged to someone else, but which by God’s grace became mine instead. I wanted my friends and grandchildren to read the story of a poor kid from the storm-tossed Philippine island beside the Pacific who became a journalist, a politician, a social critic, a humanitarian worker, and part of the nation’s search for its inner self.

However, what unfolded, as I retraced my steps, was not just

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the passage of an earthly traveler trying to find his place in the sun, but the journey of a soul in search of his true meaning in the overall scheme of things, with the irrepressible hope and dream of finding at the end of the road, not himself, but his Maker and Father, who alone is the source of all that is good within and beyond the material world.

It has been a long journey home. Through God’s grace and mercy, my journey has brought me to a destination I never dreamed of or ever imagined possible. I sense I have been led— throughout my life, even if mostly unawares—by an unseen and unexplained hand, which I can only call Providence. I can draw no other conclusion as I look back at the past eight decades of my life and present a brief chronology of it at the start of this book.

I began my career as a journalist in 1963, a young diplomatic reporter and political columnist, specializing in international affairs. After six years on the job, I became President Ferdinand E. Marcos’s press secretary, spokesman, and secretary/minister of the Department/Ministry of Public Information. I was twentynine, the youngest Cabinet appointee in the third Philippine Republic—the first-ever and, to this day, the country’s only minister of public information. Perhaps because Marcos was reputedly the most brilliant of Filipino presidents, no one questioned my appointment, which was offered to me without my seeking it. It gave me little comfort to find myself in the same age group as some named young Filipinos in the late 1800s.

General Emilio Aguinaldo was twenty-nine when he became president of the first Philippine Republic and proclaimed Philippine independence from Spain in 1896. Emilio Jacinto was twenty-three when, as the “brains” of the Katipunan, he wrote the Kartilya, which served as a guidebook in fighting the Spanish

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colonizers. Gregorio del Pilar was twenty-four when he provided the rearguard action at Tirad Pass to delay Aguinaldo’s capture by the Americans during the 1899-1902 Philippine-American war. Fr. Mariano Gomez was twenty-seven when the Spanish authorities garroted him with Fr. Jose Burgos (thirty-five) and Fr. Jacinto Zamora (thirty-seven) at Bagumbayan in 1872. Two hundred years earlier, Saint Pedro Calungsod was eighteen when the Chamorros executed him as a Catholic catechist in Guam.

In the year I was appointed, Marcos became the only Filipino president to get reelected. The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the New People’s Army (NPA) threatened to bring him down. Ambuscades and gun battles raged in the countryside; protest marches demanding the “death” of Marcos and the installation of a communist government exploded before Malacañan Palace.

In September 1972, Marcos suspended the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus and placed the entire country under martial law. Opposition leaders were arrested and jailed, and Congress and the mass media were shut down. I read the martial law proclamation to the nation and later spoke about it at every turn.

A monstrous political storm blew across the country, and I found myself in the eye of the storm. After the mass media shutdown, the lone remaining TV station regularly showed only three faces on the screen: Marcos, Tatad, and the Bicolana diva and movie queen Nora Aunor.

In 1978, Marcos called for parliamentary elections. It was the first since martial law suspended electoral exercises and the first under the transitory provisions of the 1973 Constitution.

I ran in that regional interim Batasang Pambansa1 election and “National Assembly,” the former parliament of the Philippines, established as an interim assembly in 1978. Often referred to as the Batasan.

1

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garnered the highest number of votes in Bicol for a six-year term.

I served concurrently as an assemblyman and a Cabinet member in the quasi-parliamentary government. I authored the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the first Cabinet measure approved by the Batasan.

In 1980, I resigned from the Cabinet but remained in the Batasan and joined the parliamentary opposition, made up of Pusyon Bisaya party representatives from Central Visayas. In the local elections in Catanduanes that year, I organized a local party ticket to oppose the administration’s candidates. Marcos’s official candidates took the province’s governorship and the capital town’s mayorship, but my municipal candidates won ten of the eleven towns.

Marcos moved to amend the Constitution anew to allow him to revert to presidential elections, which had been set aside by his previous shift to quasi-parliamentary government. At the Batasan, Assemblyman Salvador (“Doy”) H. Laurel and I led the floor debates against the proposed amendments. After we lost in the Batasan, I debated a Batasan colleague and Cabinet member from Bicol in Plaza Rizal, Naga City. After our spirited exchange, a part of the audience carried me on their shoulders in a jubilant procession. During the plebiscite, the amendments were overwhelmingly approved across the nation, but they suffered a devastating defeat in Bicol.

When Marcos finally called for elections, the old Nacionalista Party leaders, including the Laurel brothers Jose Junior (“Pepito”) and Doy, who had been asking for elections, announced a boycott.

They said it was the only way to force Marcos to resign. I saw no sense in that line of thinking. As secretary-general of the party, I tried to find a suitable opposition candidate. With the

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help of some young party members, I reached out to the only qualified person who was willing to face Marcos: retired General Alejo Santos, who was defense secretary in President Carlos P. Garcia’s administration. He agreed to run, provided I would agree to manage his campaign.

Marcos prevailed, as feared. His victory intensified the protests. But the opposition leaders were all in jail, and the most prominent of them, former Senator Benigno (“Ninoy”) Aquino, had been diagnosed with a heart ailment and needed immediate heart surgery in the US. On May 8, 1980, Marcos approved Aquino’s medical furlough to the US. That same year I was invited to speak before the Asia Society in New York. Some Filipino expatriates tried to arrange a meeting between Aquino and me in Boston, but I politely declined. Having broken with Marcos on a matter of principle, I did not want to be seen as having inserted myself in Aquino’s camp as a “foot soldier.”

In 1982, Aquino and I finally met. I had gone to Harvard for a short executive program at the Institute for International Development. At the time, Aquino said he had no plans of going home to fight Marcos, who, he thought, would remain in power unless and until the economy crumbled.

In 1983, however, Aquino decided to return home. Marcos advised him to defer his return for security reasons. He came home nonetheless and fell victim to an assassin’s bullet upon arrival at the Manila International Airport on August 21, 1983.

The assassination created a firestorm that would culminate in Marcos’s ouster three years later.

In the 1984 regular Batasan election, where I was seeking reelection, Malacañang ordered its political operatives that “under

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no circumstance should Tatad win.” This directive was carried out to the letter.

This squeeze play prompted me to go back to journalism. I wrote columns and op-ed pieces for national and international publications, including Business Day, Philippine Daily Globe, Manila Times, International Herald Tribune, Wall Street Journal (US and Asia editions), Far Eastern Economic Review, and Asiaweek. I also became publisher and editor-in-chief of Philippines Newsday, the newly launched political-economic daily newspaper.

In 1986, Marcos, at the behest of the US government, called for a snap presidential election. I supported Cory Aquino’s presidential bid and accompanied her on her first campaign sortie to Bicol. She lost the election but was installed as revolutionary president by the military during the EDSA revolution.

I attended Cory’s oath-taking as president at Club Filipino, while Marcos also took oath as president at Malacañang. I was offered a position in Cory’s government. I declined it but I joined her triumphal visit to Washington, DC in September that year.

In the 1987 senatorial election, I ran against Cory’s candidates and was tear-gassed at EDSA for protesting the election results.

In 1992, I won my first Senate seat as a pro-life, pro-family candidate for a term of three years. I chaired the committees of natural resources, energy, labor, and. for a brief period, the committee on women, after none of my four women-colleagues agreed to chair it. This designation provoked a major controversy in the run-up to the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, where the Philippine Church took a firm position on reproductive health.

In my first term, I delivered speeches on critical issues and sponsored major legislations to address various “crises”—in electric power, mining, and the nation’s rapidly receding forest. xxi

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Reelected in 1995 for a term of six years, I chaired the foreign relations committee and then the all-important committee on rules to become Senate majority leader to a succession of six Senate presidents. The Senate press referred to me, light-heartedly, as the “moral conscience of the Senate.”

Among my peers, I had the most extensive body of political writing and the highest number of speeches delivered on the floor of the Senate and outside, including the United Nations, the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the Asia-Pacific Parliamentary Forum, the International Right to Life Federation, the World Congress of Families, and various international forums on human life, marriage, the family, and human rights.

Toward the end of my second term in the Senate, I figured in the impeachment trial of President Estrada. [This trial is discussed in my book A Nation on Fire: The Unmaking of Joseph Ejercito Estrada and the Remaking of Democracy in the Philippines (Icon Press, Manila, 2002).]

Ilocos Sur Governor Luis “Chavit” Singson accused Estrada of receiving protection money from gambling lords. This accusation was repeated by Senate minority leader Teofisto Guingona Jr. in a Senate privilege speech entitled, “I accuse.” Immediately after this speech, the chairman of the Senate blue-ribbon committee, Aquilino Pimentel Jr., decided to investigate the president. This investigation, in my view, violated the Constitution and due process.

Under the doctrine of separation of powers among the three co-equal and coordinate branches of government, Congress cannot investigate a sitting president unless and until he is impeached by the House of Representatives, which has the exclusive power to initiate impeachment cases. The correct procedure in the Estrada

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case was an impeachment complaint in the House, not a Senate committee investigation.

However, Pimentel was bent on investigating the president.

So, he brusquely brushed aside the constitutional doctrine, despite my earnest effort, as chairman of the committee on rules, to make sure the Senate and blue-ribbon committee adhered strictly to the correct constitutional practice. Ironically, all the other senators, except for Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago, a constitutionalist and former judge, supported the investigation.

Even after the House committee on justice started hearing the impeachment complaint, the Pimentel investigation continued, live on TV, without Estrada being present at the committee or represented by counsel.

This constitutional travesty unfairly exposed Estrada to grave political peril. Despite this threat, he did not object to seeing Pimentel elected as Senate president after our bloc of eleven senators moved to replace the incumbent Franklin Drilon for lack of confidence. Estrada had expressed the desire that I take over as Senate president, but I begged off because of my close friendship with Drilon.

Then former Senate president Ernesto Maceda came down from Washington, DC, where he was now the Philippine ambassador, to propose that our group of eleven senators coalesce with Pimentel and Senator Sergio Osmeña III and install the former as Senate president. This proposal would have fallen apart had I turned it down; but since I was not willing to kill for the position, I agreed to the proposal on the naive condition that, as Senate president, Pimentel should be fair to Estrada, although he was not fair or just to him as blue-ribbon committee chair. Fewer things could have been more wishful.

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Finally, Speaker Manuel Villar dispatched the Articles of Impeachment from the justice committee to the Senate without the formal participation of the members of the House, who were in a scuffle inside the hall, fighting for the possession of the mace, because of the Speaker’s unconstitutional and unparliamentary action.

Estrada was then tried by the Senate as an impeachment court, presided over by Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr. The House appointed its members as official prosecutors.

But unable to build a case on the basis of the approved charges, the prosecutors tried to introduce charges not included in the Articles of Impeachment. These new accusations they sought to support with improperly procured evidence. When even this ploy failed to work, they opened a second front: the “Estrada resign” movement. Eight to ten of the twenty-one senator-judges openly called for Estrada’s resignation, even as they sat in court as senator-judges.

The “resign” movement quickly overshadowed the trial.

So, when eleven senator-judges refused to admit an envelope volunteered by the Equitable Bank without the benefit of a court subpoena, the prosecutors walked out, followed by the chief justice. Pimentel protested the vote of the eleven by announcing his “resignation” as Senate president, “as soon as his successor shall have been elected.” It was a bogus “resignation,” but it added fuel to the anti-Estrada protests. They then took their case to EDSA, where Davide swore in Vice President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo as “president” without any vacancy in the office, and with Pimentel, instead of a military aide, holding the microphone for Arroyo as she took her oath.

Estrada was then removed without having been tried or convicted of any crime for which he had been impeached. xxiv

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For standing against the lynch mob and defending the rule of law and the Constitution, I became the “most hated senator,” together with ten other members of the impeachment court.

Even my family was harassed by our anti-Estrada neighbors. But I stood my ground and refused to budge on the issues. (Even with the passage of time, I have seen no need or reason to apologize for my position.) In fairness to my accusers, most of them eventually confessed they had been blinded by their own emotions and failed to distinguish right from wrong. I have since forgiven them.

These and many other events that have inalterably shaped my life are recounted in detail in the following chapters. To some, those events now seem so much water under the bridge. I see them as so many turning points on my long journey home.

Surely, there are so many other lives far more interesting and inspiring than mine. However, younger friends tried to persuade me that after sixty years in public life as a journalist, Cabinet member, legislator, public intellectual, and humanitarian worker, my life and work had become part of a much larger history and that I had incurred a binding obligation, particularly to the young and the yet unborn, to say something about that history. This duty becomes particularly acute as we try to define our roles in the third millennium after five hundred years of Catholic Christianity.

Having been born in the most impoverished little town in the typhoon-ravaged island-province in the poorest region of this third-world country and having had to walk barefoot under sun and rain every day to see the inside of a makeshift classroom, I find no rational explanation for my having gotten this far in this temporal world. There has to be an all-wise, all-loving, and allmerciful God who takes good care even of his most unworthy creatures.

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My grandchildren have asked me: Were I to live my life all over again, would I go up and down the same rugged and bumpy road, pursue the same elusive goals, fight the same unrewarding battles, endure the same bitter defeats, and be content with the same small quixotic victories?

I believe I shall always try, as I have done all these years, to do everything within my modest means to accomplish, but I shall always be grateful to leave the best part to Him who knows best.

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PART ONE

EARLY JOYS AND EARLY SORROW

Chapter I—“Not another child”

MY EARLIEST MEMORY is of the mountain, the river, and the sea. These are the landmarks of my youth.

In the mountain, I wanted to sing like a bird. In the river, I wanted to play like a perch. In the sea, I wanted to surf like my big brother Dolfo, who drowned before I had barely learned to float.

In this small coastal and mountainous village of Gigmoto in Catanduanes in the Bicol Region of the Philippines, life held very little promise: the journey there, from birth to death, was short.

“Our life is unwelcome, our death unmentioned in The Times,” wrote the poet T. S. Eliot. But in this village where I was born, there was no such thing as The Times, and we did not know what kind of world existed beyond our mountains and our shores.

The village was mostly illiterate. My poor parents were among the few who could read and write. But it did not make much of a difference. They did not know—or did not care to know—much whether beyond our little space there was war or peace.

In Europe, the bloodiest war of the twentieth century had 29

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already begun; the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and on our islands would soon follow. But in the early morning hours of October 4, 1939, what roused our quiet little neighborhood from sleep was my first shrill cry as a newborn babe.

There was nothing particularly remarkable about my birth.

But it gave the women in the neighborhood something to gossip about. My mother already had five children, and she was, according to her best friends, long past her limit—what was she trying to prove, so stubborn to keep on having babies? I would grow up genuinely in love with babies and large families up to my present age.

My parents were not as poor as the other parents in our village, but they were not well off either. Raising a large family was already hard even then. But my parents believed each child was a gift from God. This idea helped them deepen their love for one another and their pious practices that guided them in raising their offspring. It also became a core belief of mine, especially in bringing up my seven children and many grandchildren.

My father, Apolinar, was born to farm, having no other skills or trade. But he was allergic to the soil. His whole body blistered and swelled every time his skin was exposed to dust or mud. So, he left the work to his wife Gertrudes, my mother, and some hired help. But he was a just and honest man. Whenever families, friends, or neighbors had any disagreements, they would turn to him for advice.

The village had no court of law then, no civil authorities, no police or prison cell to detain anyone who had disturbed the peace.

So, the crime rate in the place had to be held way down.

Soon enough, my father became the village’s unofficial settler of family and neighborhood disputes. No one else could and

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would do what he willingly did: patiently listen to the opposing sides, pose a few questions, and then ask both sides to accept each other’s apologies and to forgive each other, just as God forgave them their trespasses.

Somehow, it always worked. The contending parties would send him a wild chicken, some mountain vegetables, a pumpkin, or a jackfruit in appreciation of his help.

My father was such a patient and tireless peacemaker that the elders thought he should serve as their mayor when the village became a town. But he begged off. He had no interest in politics and could not see himself running for any public office. To avoid getting dragged into politics, he asked his best friend Victor to become the mayor instead. Still, the elders insisted that he sit at least on the town council, even without running for office or getting paid for it.

My father was such a gentle and sensitive soul that, like the fictional Bishop Myriel (Monseigneur Bienvenu) in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, he did not have the heart to embarrass a thief, even if he had caught one red-handed. This I saw on the day he took me to the forest.

We had barely begun our climb inside the woods when my father saw a man up our pili tree gathering its fruits. He recognized the man at once but did not say a word. Instead, he took out his bolo and started cutting some dry wood on the ground to announce himself.

The intruder heard him and looked below. My father looked up and their eyes met. He then asked the intruder if he would gather some nuts for us too, so we need not climb ourselves. The thief felt so embarrassed that once on the ground he gave us every nut he had picked. My father took some and then told him to

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have the rest all for himself. The man became very close to us after that. He never again climbed our tree without asking my father or my mother first.

It was not only to thieves that my father showed such kindness.

He was also such a sucker for hard luck stories that he would go out of his way to help anyone, even if the person’s story sucked.

The only time I saw him and my mother quarrel was when she sent him to go after a couple of farmers who owed her some money and whom she had not seen for months. At first, my father told my mother that her debtors had gone up to the mountain and had left no word about when they would return. The next time, he said both of them had fallen ill and were taking time to recuperate. He was not a very good liar, and my mother knew he was making up excuses for the debtors because he did not have the heart to press them for their debts.

So, they argued. They stopped only when they saw me listening under the table, beside their feet. With misty eyes, my mother accepted “defeat” when my father suggested that the poor debtors be allowed to do some work for her instead as payment for what they owed.

Gentle as granite As gentle as my father was, he also could be as hard as granite.

During one town fiesta, a stranger from Manila got into a drunken brawl and had to be forced to sleep it off inside a neighbor’s house. But instead of sleeping, the fellow continued drinking and, worse, challenged everyone to a fist fight. Finding no takers, he disappeared in the dark.

The next morning, he reappeared in the middle of the street,

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brandishing a long-bladed instrument. Two local policemen, armed with Springfields, accosted him from the other end of the street, a few hundred meters away. They shouted at him, asking him to turn himself in. He responded by dancing and swishing his weapon in the air. The policemen took aim, fired, but missed.

Then they gave chase as the man ran away.

They ended in the open field, where the chief of police joined his men. There they killed him at close range. My father rushed to the scene of the crime and asked the police chief, who was married to my mother’s younger sister, why they had to kill the stranger. “It’s murder,” my father said, “and you’ll have to pay for it.” He never spoke to my uncle again.

My mother was the village and town seamstress. She clothed everyone—man, woman, child. She was a handsome, highly intelligent, deeply religious, and very strong woman. There was nothing she could not do. She did everything for my father, her nine children, and my paternal grandmother, Lola Incay, who lived with us until she died at nearly a hundred years old. My mother never turned away anyone who needed food, clothing, or shelter. Our modest table welcomed all sorts of passers-by and strangers.

Our village sat on the typhoon belt. More than ten typhoons lashed our village every year, destroying most homes, cattle, and crops and leaving all the coconut trees stripped to the core like wax candles. Each time a typhoon approached, my mother would build a fire in the middle of our earthen floor. We would all sit around it while the typhoon raged through our thatched roof and walls.

She kept us supplied with camote,2 cassava, yam, and bananas 2

Sweet potato 33

All Is Grace

from our mountain farm, which grew a wide variety of vegetables and root crops that served as staple especially during typhoons.

My mother also ran a small store, where she sold basic goods to neighbors and visitors from the next village, usually on credit.

The store allowed her to practice her philanthropy on a modest scale.

War comes to the village My mother’s courage would be put to the test when the Japanese invaders came and the local guerrillas chased them out of town.

This was at a turning point in the war and also in my mother’s character.

Until then, the village had heard only rumors about the war, without seeing any of it. Lola Incay had no doubt the war would come. So, the farther away we were from the village, she thought, the safer we would be when it came. My father and mother found the idea laughable. But they did not object when Lola Incay took my older sister Milagros and me to live with her in her hut up in the mountain.

There, we made fast friends with a native who set traps for wild boar and deer on the other side of the mountain and who stopped by our hut in the afternoons. To cure some problem of memory lapse, I shall simply call this hunter Pedro. Lola Incay liked chatting with him. She would sit outside the door of her hut, singing Tara Hadeng Santa Maria,3 before an open fire. I would sit with her and together we would wait until Pedro came around, sometimes with a wild game slung over his shoulder, sometimes with stories of the big one that got away.

Pedro would sit lotus-style facing Lola Incay. He would then 3

The Bicolano version of “Hail, Holy Queen.”

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offer her the heart or liver of the deer or boar he had caught, along with a drink of jungle juice that went for wine. She would toss the meat into the fire until it turned into a golden roast, and then we would nibble at it as Lola Incay and Pedro talked about the war.

The war seemed to be everywhere but nowhere. So, Lola Incay and Pedro wondered if and when it would ever come to the mountain. Planes droned above our heads now and then. They just flew over. They did not drop any bombs. So, Lola Incay would say, “Hitler flying above,” in the vernacular, and I, still unable to pronounce names well, would awkwardly repeat the phrase after her, Hitlet ragan taas! As darkness covered the mountain, Pedro would say goodbye, light his torch, and disappear under the growth that hid his place near the ravine.

One day, Pedro stopped coming. As evening fell, an immense sea of torches covered the far side of the mountain and began coming our way, like a swarm of overgrown fireflies. Lola Incay said it was probably the guerrilla leader “Lapasige” and his men, coming over for supper. (Lola Incay never had an education, but sometimes she could out-English the English with her dry humor.)

I waited for the torchbearers to arrive. But I got tired waiting and fell asleep. The next morning, Lola Incay said they had come looking for Pedro. They had gone through the bracken and found his place hidden under, but not Pedro himself.

They combed the surrounding growth without success. At last, they found Pedro, sprawled at the bottom of the ravine, obviously after a nasty fall. They did not try to move or pull out his body for burial. They simply carted away all his possessions, including his hunting tools and a small sack of raw metals.

I asked Lola Incay if we could go near the ravine and have a last look at our friend. She said the earth was soggy, we could slip 35

All Is Grace

and fall, and so we would just pray for him. I made a cross out of two tiny bits of sugar cane and stuck it on the ground. I said something in imitation of prayer, while Lola Incay chanted her usual Tara Hadeng Santa Maria.

We bade our hut goodbye and returned to the village where our family had borne heat, rain, storm, and famine through the years. Then the enemy soldiers came.

Until that time, our village had no idea it was the Japanese, rather than the Germans, who had overrun the country and who had forced, on one hand, the commander of the US army in the Far East, General Douglas McArthur, to escape to Australia after the fall of Bataan and Corregidor and, on the other, some Filipino politicians to form a puppet government under the invaders.

Yet, the Japanese army did not garrison our island-province.

So, our village never saw any Japanese soldier. We did not hear anything from anybody either. Thus, we were not aware of the Japanese occupation until McArthur landed at Leyte Gulf on October 24, 1944, to liberate the Philippines. The Japanese soldiers were forced to flee for their lives in all directions—some of them to our island.

My older brother Dolfo was playing in the streets when several of them came. He could not understand what they were saying, so he took them to a village elder. But because the elder spoke no Eng-rish or Nippongo, and the invaders no vernacular either, they could not understand each other. They needed an interpreter. So, they knocked at my uncle’s door (he was known to speak a few languages and he taught school).

That knock on his door at that hour disrupted his slumber.

When he peeped through the window, he saw the elder escorted by several fierce-looking soldiers. That sight sent his temper flying.

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Instead of opening the door, he slipped out through the back door and sought out the guerrillas at the outskirts of the village. By morning, the Japanese were on the run, pursued by the guerrillas and some villagers.

Too young to be heroes Unbeknownst to my parents, my two oldest brothers, Antonio, fifteen years old, and Bernardino, thirteen, had joined the guerrilla band. Dolfo, nine, had wanted to join too but was sent home for being too young.

On hearing of it, my father thanked God that my brothers had finally become men. But my mother stormed out of the house to have it out with “Major” Rodolfo, the self-styled guerrilla leader.

She found him at his base, with a handful of young men preparing to join those who had gone after the invaders.

She went straight to the point and told him she had come to take back her children. This demand instantly angered the “Major.” He said her boys had come on their own free will and had not been forced to join. They were patriots who were willing to sacrifice themselves for their “motherland,” he said, and it was such a shame that they had such a cowardly and selfish mother who wanted to tie them to her apron strings. She replied that they were still minors and needed their parents’ consent. She said the “major” could have told them that himself, if he knew what was right and what was wrong.

“Your children are heroes already, even if they don’t die fighting,” said the guerrilla chief. “But you want them to hold on to your skirt forever.”

“I wouldn’t mind it if my sons were killed in battle, Major,” my

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mother said. “But if they must die, I want them to die as officers like you, not as your lowly runners.”

The major touched his holster, ready to shoot her. She said she was ready to be shot for her children.

I was not old enough to know any of this first-hand, but my brothers never stopped talking about it. Soon enough, the entire village was talking about how my mother had bearded “the Lion,” which was the major’s other name, in his den.

As it turned out, there was no need for my brothers to be in that operation. The invaders quickly gave in. They had run out of ammo as the ragtag guerrilla band chased them all the way up to the mouth of the river where it turned into a waterfall, and the invaders could proceed no further. So, at the foot of the waterfall, they knelt like samurais preparing to lose their heads, according to their ancient ritual.

No one but the guerrillas witnessed this bloody ritual. Still, they refused to talk about it even as they paraded the invaders’ severed heads around the village, tied to bamboo poles.

These images had been engraved on my mind forever.

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Chapter 2—“As smart as any other boy”

OUR VILLAGE BECAME A TOWN after the war. It acquired its first parish priest, its first mayor, and a primary and intermediate public school.

All my friends were now in school. I was too young to join them. My uncle Felicito, the one who did not want to talk to the Japanese, was now the school principal; Miss Banil, the English teacher, was my mother’s boarder; and the other teachers were either relatives or friends. All of them thought I was as smart as any other boy and did not have to be seven years old to start schooling. I, too, liked the idea of going to school because it would allow me to put on my favorite shorts and shirt, the likes of which no other boy wore.

Thus began my schooling.

The school was just a short walk from home. But on the first day, it rained. I had neither a raincoat nor an umbrella. So, I took off my clothes, rolled them under my arm and ran under the rain, then put them on when I reached the school.

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