The day someone else’s safe house was raided back in the anti-Marcos days, I got three guys to stake out all the approaches to it. The idea was to head off, from a distance, anyone who didn’t get the word. The safehouse was located in a poultry in the first foothills of the mighty Sierra Madres that rose east from the suburbs of Manila to the distant coast where their peaks ran northward like a wall. I learned of the safehouse after some friends helped the chicken farmers pluck the birds, and they were paid in a sackful of chicken heads and chicken feet; they gave us some and we ate stewed chicken heads and feet for weeks. So when it got raided, we watched the roads.
Even sitting in the hot, high grass was a great change from the warrens of the inner city, with their overhanging roofs and crazy streets. There had been a deal table in the poultry shed, and the story was that the guys had the trick of mixing seething water with instant coffee which bubbled up to produce a foam. Guests would be gulled into thinking they were being served coffee with milk. The impression lasted until you actually tried to drink it. Then the vision of coffee with milk passed, and there was only the deal table and the clucking of chickens.
The raid in retrospect, was probably the work of a mole. There had been earlier suspicions and a consequent redeployment just in case, but the poultry had never been moved. I wound up in a place across from the southeastern wall of the vast cemetery in the Retiro area. It was advertised as a “studio” but it was really a glorified store-room constructed by roofing over an alley between two buildings. One wall belonged to a house that had seen better days and the other to a greasepit equipped with a jukebox where sounds screeched out from blown speakers. It had volume; that was about it. They had real vinyl records in those days. You dropped in coins, made a selection and a little mechanical arm grabbed a record from the carousel and put it down on a turntable. The sound came through the wall like it wasn’t there.
One of my professors in later life had been a naval officer aboard a destroyer. He told me that when they were tracking Soviet subs they’d sometimes play the Volga Boatman loud over the transducers, just to get on the enemy’s nerves. If he could travel back in time to visit his future student, he might find it a little like that in that dark tunnel of a place. The jukebox blaring from that greasepit was probably more weirdly terrifying in its own way than those transducers. At the end of the passageway with its alcove-like dividers was a bathroom with a 55 gallon drum. The drum was left under an open faucet to catch the drips which passed for a water supply and cumulatively provide enough water to cook, clean and bathe. A 25 watt bulb in the bathroom gave it that Das Boot-like touch. The shadows were welcome; nobody was in any hurry to change the bulb for fear of what might come to light. The place was built like a trap and nobody liked it.
It was always a treat to escape from the sour smells of the city and get out into the feet of the great mountains, even if it was only for road watching. The air was fresh, if dusty; and half the fun was getting there. If you were so inclined, and security was paramount, you could avoid the main roads and approach from a long way off, circling through the gardens, fields and goat paths which stubbornly survived in the interstices of the property development of the expanding city and make your way through abandoned or half-finished gated communities until you stood beneath the denuded peaks of what had once been primary forest. The fabled jungles of Luzon had long since been defeated by three things: the gasoline-powered chainsaw (which only became widely available after the Second World War); the front winch of surplus Army 6×6 trucks (left in great quantities by the departing 6th and 8th Armies) and the bulldozer and grader, which made road-building and hence logging possible. What you had left after the forest was gone was tough high grass, brush and lots of ants.
When it was plain that no one was coming, and the watch duty was done, darkness offered a choice of occupations. You could go back to the tunnel house by the cemetery, with its preview of the torments Soviet sailors would endure under the lash of a USN destroyer, or you could drift. Become part of night with all the riff-raff of the world: the vendors of peanuts, boiled duck eggs and pork cracklings. Join the tide of garbage scavengers with their wooden carts. Attend an all-night wake at a funeral home where you could pretend to be a distant friend of the deceased. Or bum a space among sidewalk vendors who slept beside their covered tables of fake watches, costume jewelry, plated necklaces, plastic sunglasses and other things. Maybe on your way you’d look into the lighted windows of decent people gathered round a television set or eating a family dinner with its soup, vegetable and fried fish. Then sometimes an aching desire to become “normal” would wash over you and a tune would run through your head almost as if your submerged self was trying to outrun the transducers of your soul. But the moment would pass; and you found yourself at the door of the tunnel house. Then you turned the handle and left the mountains outside before you realized that you would never see them that way again.
Tip Jar.
Thanks, Wretchard.
I’ve been reading your blog every day for a couple of years now, I guess. Its obvious that you’ve had a lot of time to think over the course of your life, and have experienced more in that life than most of us ever will, or would want to.
I’ve been grateful for you ability to put down in writing the lessons you’ve learned and the clarity you have with philosophy, truth, and life. I’ve been envious, too, wishing that I were as eloquent as you; able to communicate complex but fundamental truths with brevity, insight, and most of all, completeness.
However, I think the things I enjoy reading most on the Belmont Club are these stories from your past. To me, they are stories from another world, another era, that I have no experience with. I haven’t seem them on TV or in movies. I haven’t read about them in a book. I haven’t even glimpsed them in my dreams and imagination. You bring them to life so effortlessly (at least it seems that way) and with it, you inspire in me that most special and powerful of things, hope.
That you have come from a world that I was completely ignorant of, and have survived, thrived, and contributed so much thought and intelligence to me in my life astounds me. No matter the state of the world, global affairs, politics, or what-have-you, it is possible for the very best in this world to emerge from the very worst. That no matter how dark times get, a dawn is always waiting just over the horizon.
Obama doesn’t have anything on you, ol’ boy. Hope. God bless, and keep it up. Cheers to the Belmont Club.
I wish you would write a book. Ive seen your reminiscences of the PI as a guerrilla, or revolutionary, if you will.
Some of us haven’t had that interesting a life and enjoy the vicarious treat of observing lives that have been.
I value very much your reflections and your gradually emerging memoir. Thank you.
My father was what he called a hobo during the Depression. Years later in his life, I always had the feeling at Christmas as he watched us, that he was astonished that he’d been able to put together a normal life with a family and a Christmas tree and money enough to buy everyone the presents they wanted. And that normality and decency compared to what he had come from was what he was enjoying on those occasions.
During those days Wretchard, did something
called the “Philippine Expeditionary Force”
(Woodrow Wilson Smith, Commanding) ever come to your attention?
Likewise for a little thing called “Oplan Cletus”?
The former seems to have reduced fraudulent cash flow to some Marcosonian schemes by some $540 million. The latter may well have
distracted enough attention to help the 1986
People Power along.
At any rate, I am glad you did not buy the farm doing your thing.
Thanks Wretch.
Belles Lettres…You’re an original Wretch – the soundtrack is fine too. Reminds me I should thank you for that steer to Mark and Emmy. Sang “All the road-running” with my bro yesterday who passed on an old poem re life and music this morning – tone isn’t exactly yours, the clime is diff and the music is a little farther out (Nigerian pop) but – what the hey – you still might dig it…Thanks for your angle of vision and your ears…
winter storm/monkey yanga
snow falling gently in the lamplight
park is lightly covered with a hopeful coat
but pavement black and wet
trees stark and wintry
my window wide open to chase out the heat
and encourage cold memories
and it works instantly like the
smell of chesnuts cooking at a Lisbon train track
none of that moves as much as Sir Victor Uwaifo
plucking all the way from Lagos kicking
that guitar on Joromi/Monkey Yanga
but it could have been so many records
jesus, to play music, those lucky dogs
i love this life
Wretchard, thank you. You keep reminding me of why I came to your blog in the first place.
the ending in here veres off to joseph conrad & that indian guy from the carribean.
I’m less than a week a way from leaving the north shore of oahu. after a month I’ve only just started to get a proper routine of work swim work. my favorite coffee shop in haleiwa has a constant circus of classic rock. so much so that I’m starting to hear the old songs again even when I’m not at the coffee shop. I don’t like that. the surfers have an aesthetic about surfing. they call the ocean a great canvas upon which they’re free to paint with their surf boards. Its low tide out this morning. One of the local pasters had a men’s group meeting last friday night which I attended. they were looking for ideas for outreach. I mentioned that my pastor back in washington dc did 30 second spots on the radio which he entitled “not a sermon. just a thought” the spots were aimed at guys 15 to 25 who listened to the local rock stations. the pastor has a good ear for the proverbs of hell these guys adhere to. when I was that age they would have been things like “whatever doesn’t kill you will make you stronger.” “too much of everything is just enough.” I don’t know what the surfer dudes tell each other at drunk parties. or what they say to impress the local chicks. at the local coffee shop a repeated theme among the women is that they are totally ripe and no one is marrying them.
(of course they’re psych & soc majors so they don’t know that that they’ve been educated to be idiots.)
a good line on the radio can save the local dudes a decade or more of wandering around.
certainly nobody preaches to themselves. everybody just lays down and lets their bodies play back to them in dreams what they heard during the day. then its up onto the boards to ride the wild waves. well I exaggerate. the sea is tame this time of year. no storms in aleutians. gotta wait till winter for that.
What Herb said. That would be a story worth reading I think.
“We’ve all been waiting
We’ve been wondering – will we ever know the truth?
What it’s like washing windows
When you know that there are pigeons on the roof?”
Wretchard, your poignant little reminiscence brings up a question to me.
You said the fall of the poultry safe house was due most likely to a mole.
It is not hard to imagine why someone would choose to infiltrate the FARC. Taking them down would make any decent person feel proud.
But what would cause someone to spy for Marcos? Threats against their family? Or fame and glory?
Or just fear?
Or just a love of evil? I recently read an account of the life of Hannah Reitsch, the famous German aviatrix, as they called them in those days. With Germany and ruins and the true horror of the Nazi regime revealed to anyone with eyes, she remained a committed Nazi. She was one of the very last people to see Hitler alive; he gave her a suicide pill and 34 years later, in 1979, she used it to commit suicide. Loyalty is one thing, but such love of evil is inexplicable.
Wretchard:
When you moved to your new digs at Pajamas, I was afraid that we might lose some of your magical humanity to what seemed like the peer pressure of the quest for semantic legitimacy. I’m glad to have been proven wrong.
What has kept you one of my favorite commentators is your ability to not only find a greater truth within otherwise mundane stories on politics, technology, etc., but also the ability to find (and describe) beauty, humor, absurdity and deep meaning within those stories. To seek poetry amidst chaos, destruction, despair and evil is a quality that I wish all could discover and express.
Thank you for helping to remind us all that truth and beauty, and the Divine, are ever-present – if we can only open our eyes to see them.
RWE,
But what would cause someone to spy for Marcos? Threats against their family? Or fame and glory?
You forgot money. Marcos had plenty of it to throw at impoverished informants.
I echo cetera el al. What a great blog.
Also, RWE, Marcos was not the cause of the Philippines’ troubles, he was partly a symptom, partly a manipulative showman, and always a generous benefactor and patron. He was at the top of a system that predated him and still exists, to a large extent. I’ve been visiting those islands off and on since the early eighties and my first impression was that most people were loyal, first and foremost, to “family.”
Not family in the strict sense of blood, but in the intertwined network of personal loyalties and connections, somewhat akin to the old Roman patron/client relationship. One did not enter the Philippine military or police or bureaucracy from a sense of patriotism or desire to serve your nation, but to take care of these obligations to the extended family. A fine book on the topic is Stanley Karnow’s In Our Image, which while predominantly about the US-Philippine relationship, necessarily gives much attention to the manner in which Filipino society developed (in short, it was a result of the Spanish colonial administration superimposed over a village or tribal structure).
From our perspective it’s all to easy to view Marco as nothing but a repressive autocrat, which he of course was. However, he had a large segment of the population behind them, because he took care of them and thus they owed loyalty. In such a culture it would never be difficult to find any number of willing tools (even today you’ll find many Filipinos bitter about the “shabby manner” in which the US “pulled the rug” from under him). But lest we become complacent of our own respect for the rule of law, consider how many of our fellow citizens would willingly cooperate with a totalitarian state, for their own advantage, or simply for their own comfort or security.
RWE:
Aviators and Nazis
“Detroit thought so little of Lindy,” Bullard concluded, “that it had the house he was born in torn down for urban renewal in 1973.”
His home on Maui is also now in pieces on a different property.
The govt did not want to spend the small amount of money it would have taken to preserve it.
“One did not enter the Philippine military or police or bureaucracy from a sense of patriotism or desire to serve your nation, but to take care of these obligations to the extended family.”
—
Steve,
Couldn’t it be a combination of both in many cases?
Filipinos here continue to serve in the US Military way out of proportion to their numbers.
…and tend to be far more patriotic on average.
“that indian guy from the carribean.”
Do you mean V. S. Naipaul?
Doug, the program to enlist Filipinos was an extremely competitive one, the USN really got the best and brightest. Major win-win, I think, in that we got very highly motivated people, self starters, and of course service did provide a shortcut to US citizenship. I had a few guys serving under me who were sworn in as US citizens, and you won’t find prouder new Americans anywhere than a foreigner in the US military who just took the oath. Very focused people, who knew exactly what they were going for and had no compunctions about busting butt to get there.
I think that program self selected atypical people. And of course there were, and are Filipino patriots who really want to serve their nation, but I don’t believe they represent the norm. It’s standard there to pay bribes to the cops, the local military, the civil service, whomever you need to get services from the local government. Sure, we have corrupt judges and cops and politicians in the US, but they aren’t supposed to be and their discovery always provokes outrage and much scuttling for cover.
Well, maybe not always, say in Chicago or parts of NYC, where indicting some influential scumbag brings out the ordinary Joe citizens loudly proclaiming the sterling civic qualities of this stand up guy, who looks out for his neighbors and is always there the help out.
And that’s been the modus operandi in much of the Philippines for a very long time. It will take generations, I think, for it to fade out. Recall that the American colonists were heir to a long tradition of political thought concerning the nature of citizenship. The PI, along with much of the rest of the world, was shortchanged that. Case in point, Russia. They still have figured out how to be free sovereign citizens, or even why they ought to be.
Still have NOT figured out… damn it, I swear these typos get put into my posts after I hit submit. Because I am way smirter that that. Smorter.
“that indian guy from the carribean.”
Do you mean V. S. Naipaul?
yes
Everybody’s a critic… At least some of us are.
I read “How can I tell you” four times; (I didn’t listen to the linked tune because my computer doesn’t have audio). Each time I labored through it I found it stronger. This was my response: Disjointed, though evocative; or, alternatively, evocative, though disjointed.
I mean two separate things. If it’s disjointed though evocative it means that the emotions are solid but the artistry needs work; if it’s evocative though disjointed, it means that it’s the personality that hasn’t yet gotten things sorted out; there’s a lot of emotion, it communicates, but it doesn’t yet quite make sense within the personality of the artist. In this case artistry isn’t the problem, but understanding.
Taking the last first. It was Hemingway who said: “The hardest thing about writing is knowing how you feel about things.” (That may not be an exact quote but it’s close enough.) Hemingway was a simple fellow, so he knew what he felt about things by the time he was twenty-five and was able to write The Sun Also Rises. His understanding never moved much beyond that. More complex men, like Hawthorne or Melville, didn’t write their best work until in their forties; it took them awhile to discover how they “felt about things.” In general, the more complex a man the longer it takes him to find his voice.
As to the artistry. I personally find the transducer stuff clunky. It’s hard to move from a destroyer tracking a Soviet sub to a greasepit blaring the weirdly terrifying to the submerged self trying to outrun the transducer, and hold all that in mind well enough for it to finally communicate an impact. It’s a concept, but to work it would need work, (even though I admit that the “aching desire to become ‘normal’” in a society in which to be normal would presumably mean to abandon personal values is something that is communicated with some sharpness).
The piece becomes stronger on several readings, but it has to be “figured out”; that I take as an indication that the artistry doesn’t yet match the event, but whether the problem lies in lack of the clarity of the art, or in lack of clarity of the feeling isn’t clear. Probably a little of both…
Since I’m in the process of being nobody’s friend I might as well continue.
In a previous comment you wrote: “Writing fiction is a whole lot harder than writing essays…” (True, and recreating a past world utilizes exactly the same talents used in creating a fictive world) “…fiction requires the construction of a backdrop; a fictional universe in which to set your tale. Tolkien spent decades creating Middle Earth before he set the first story inside of it.” True, and all of us spend decades creating our own Middle Earth, it’s called our own life; but before we can “set a story in it”, or write of it well, we have to understand it, we have to know “what we feel about things”. Tolkien did something necessary to him, he created a fictive world that made sense of the world in which he lived, but for most of us that’s not necessary. It’s not necessary to invent, it’s necessary only to understand what we’ve lived, and most of that understanding comes through just plain writing.
Further: “Then there is the tale itself. A story is a special construct, in which all the virtues of the essay –clarity, directness, brevity– become vices.” Wrong. Clarity, directness, brevity, are exactly the virtues of a good story –never an unnecessary work, never a word out of place. The very best writing is always breathtaking in it’s directness, inherent logic, and simplicity. –There is of course a huge difference with the essay. The essay is purely analytical, the story is purely imaginative, with all that’s analytical in it hidden behind the clarity, brevity, and directness of image. The analytical and imaginative functions can exist in the same man, but they can not function at the same time. It’s the analytical that has to take a walk, and modestly hide itself as the artist goes about his work of portraiture.
“In the essay you maintain a distance from the subject. But in a story you’re in the subject itself.” Nope. In writing a story you’re ice cold, even if you’re the subject. Great excitement is possible, but if, while writing, you have more attachment to the subject than to a corpse then you’re not concentrating. Imagination is a cold business. Simply write accurately. It’s the reader who gets emotional. You can have your emotion two or three years later.
So, I have pontificated. I do this to my friends too. Their wives like me.
I do think that the struggle to simply express the powerful emotions of the past, and put them into some comprehensive order, is one of the finer things a man can do with his life.
Hi Wretch,
I have been a regular reader since you were blog-rolled by Steven den Beste. You have one of the most rewarding blogs on the Internet. Thank you for all that you have written.
I had an an assignment in Manila for about five years. (I was a contractor.) I learned to like Manila and I long to return for a very long visit. I recognized in your story much of the details of Manila, (e.g., the mountains east of Manila that I have driven through many times, the balot vendors, and so on.)
For what it is worth, I want you to know that I enjoyed this story of life in and around Manila. I will welcome future stories of this nature.
all of my best,
Great writing, Wretchard. Loved the part of the revolutionary dining on stewed chicken heads for days, tunnel life.
I also really liked your observation you could truly disappear amongst the street vendors that the military and ruling elites in the Philippines saw as invisible.
Dear Wretchard,
Reading your essays, especially those that look back to your own experiences, reminds me that dystopias miraculously seem to create and stimulate wholesome and optimistic people, who somehow carry an idea of a better way.
I’m sure a lot of folks became most acutely aware of life in the Philippines only in the unquiet days following the assassination of Ninoy Aquino, and the grace of his widow Corazón responding to the vast arousal of the population.
I remember being thunderstruck at the resolute courage of nuns, students, street vendors, merchants, jitney-drivers, and workers facing armed soldiers in the demonstrations after Ferdinand Marcos was prounounced the winner of the next election, widely perceived as a blatant fraud. In the U.S. we assume the government will not fire on crowds except where violence has already been going on, but that doesn’t seem to be a common constraint in other places.
What I particularly remember is how the (mostly) quiet and determined non-violent resistance of the Philippine people won the admiration and respect of many millions of folks around the world.
The image comes to mind of residents of Calcutta’s shanty towns emerging in spotlessly clean business suits to make their way to work after navigating dingy narrow passages and open sewers, trying day-by-day to make a better life. Many of us would give up, faced with relentless grime and chaotic physical and moral situations. I can only wonder at the journey that Wretchard has made.
Did Carding ever see her again? To tell her?