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Vibora,” as any student of Philippine history
knows, was the nom de guerre of Gen. Artemio Ricarte, the first
chief of staff of the Philippine Army formed by the Aguinaldo
revolutionary government after the Tejeros assembly in 1897.
Ricarte when captured during the
Philippine-American war refused to take the oath of allegiance to
the US. He was exiled to Guam together with Apolinario Mabini. On
their repatriation Ricarte again refused to take the oath with
Mabini and was put on a ship for Hong Kong. He slipped back into the
country and tried to foment a renewed rebellion against American
Occupation. He was arrested and put in prison at the Bilibid for six
years (1904-10)—after which he managed to seek political asylum in
Japan where he spent about 30 years until his return in 1941 to the
Philippines together with the Japanese invasion force. He fled to
the Cordillera when the American forces returned to retake the
islands. Starving and hunted by guerrillas in the mountain
fastnesses, he died of illness. He was in his late seventies.
National Artist Frankie Sionil
Jose has recently issued Vibora, a historical novel based on the
life of Ricarte—a project that had preoccupied the author for
years. When he showed me a copy he made a dismissive gesture with a
remark that sounded like he was through with this
“collaborator.”
The issue of
collaboration—which also goes by the term “cooptation”—is
indeed the burden of the novel. It is an issue which, in the words
of Jose, “riles” many Filipinos particularly those who
experienced the brutal Japanese occupation. But one can go back in
time to note instances of cooptation and collaboration during the
colonial period—defining the relations between the colonizer and
the colonized, the privileged (like the principalia) or the less or
underprivileged of the indios.
Mabini and Ricarte who were true
to the revolution saw for themselves how ilustrado members of the
Malolos Congress commuted by train from Manila to Malolos and back
on the same day or weekend and consorted with the Americans who
needed their services in aspects of early city administration like
sanitation and the judiciary. When hostilities broke out between
Filipino troops and American soldiers many ilustrados simply crossed
over to the American lines. They would form the Federalista Party
with statehood as their goal.
During the Pacific War, Ricarte
returned to the Philippines in the uniform of a shogun, complete
with boots and samurai sword, and was said to be linked with the
Makapili, the dreaded militia as notorious as the Japanese in
committing atrocities. Commonwealth officials collaborated with the
Japanese in running the bureaucracy on the pretext that they were a
buffer to harsh Japanese rule. After the war these collaborators,
charged and sentenced, were given amnesty by their “untainted”
colleagues in elite politics. A case of noblesse oblige.
The author maintains his
aesthetic distance from this sensitive material through the use of
what Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad would call “rendered and
reported speech”—the use of multiple narrators (including
several historians, a treasure hunter, a Japanese researcher,
Ricarte’s wife and a grandson, and Ricarte himself) cited by the
principal narrator, Ben Singko, a novelist (sounding sometimes like
Jose’s doppelganger) encountered in an earlier work. This emphasis
on “multivocality” enables the telling of the saga of Ricarte
from the time of the revolution, years in prison, exile in Yokohama,
to his return and last days in the Cordillera in 1945.
The aging and ailing narrator Ben
wants a “definite answer to this issue which riles many Filipinos
to this day” and stands before the statue of Ricarte in his
hometown of Batac. Ben taunts him by calling him a “traitor.” At
this point, Ricarte suddenly comes alive and admonishes the
novelist:
“And you did not betray your
people by siding with the Americans? Look at what they have done to
you, to all of you who now look at me with condescension, who demean
me. They did not kill you with the sword—they did it with their
schools, their sweet admonitions, their goods. It is the same—they
stole your soul!” Then Ricarte swings his sword “gleaming for an
instant” before it cuts across Ben’s face. A clever dream
device, aided by suspended disbelief. Ben actually loses
consciousness—a blackout said to be common to the elderly because
of the broiling heat, tensions, or something he ate.
There are two stories here: that
of Vibora and that of Singkol. Singkol has his own daemons to
wrestle with: a diminishing health, the memory of a loved one
tortured and killed in Fort Santiago, the anxiety for a daughter who
has joined the underground, and what bugs one who believes in a
purposeful existence: “What have I really done with this life?”
His life quest is ranged against that of Vibora who perished
unlamented and unsung for all the years of patriotic dedication to
Filipinas. Frankie thinks of this steadfastness or recalcitrance as
a stubborn trait of the Ilocano. Sheer cussedness? I suggested,
thinking of my Ilocano father. He nodded.
Ultimately the novel is a
sustained meditation on the revolution, patriotism, loyalty and
betrayal, and on the narrator’s self-reflexive quest for meaning,
truth, justice and moral certainty. A short but profound novel.
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