Rodolfo D. Llamas is actually the ex-mayor, and not of Moncada but of the next town down the road, Paniqui. He was there because he’s the UNIDO District Coordinator.
At sunrise on the previous day Arsenio Cainglet was sitting in front of his house holding his favorite fighting cock. A man in civilian clothes drove up. The villagers described him as “with a big hat, big jacket.” He shot Arsenio five times with a .45 automatic. Arsenio said, “Bakit?”—“Why?”—and fell dead on the spot. He was forty-three years old and had nine children, ages one to eighteen.
“Arsenio was looking for me a couple of days ago,” said Llamas, “but I was in Manila on election business. I would have gotten him to a safe house if I had known in time.” He said he’d given money to his own family and sent them out of town. “I go home by the back way.”
The Cainglet house was made of nailed and lashed bamboo and set on stilts. Its two rooms were reached by walking carefully up a set of steep bamboo-log rungs. I could feel the structure sway from our weight. They’d brought the coffin up there somehow, a crude but elaborately carved and gilded casket with a glass cover, like a reliquary’s, over the open top half. Arsenio’s mother, a tiny old woman, was trying to embrace the whole box, wailing and rubbing her forehead on the glass. The corpse was fierce, Mexican-looking—black hair combed straight back and dead features set in an angry frown no American mortician could have accomplished.
“The KBL was trying to turn him,” said Llamas, “get him to change sides, but he wouldn’t go along.”
Sunlight shone into the little house through the walls and even the floor. A modest buffet had been laid out for the mourners on a table beside the household altar. Arsenio’s widow showed me, in the palm of her hand, one of the .45 slugs that had been dug out of his body. She had an expression on her face I don’t think we have in our culture, a kind of smile of hatred.
Cory Aquino didn’t even carry the barangay. The vote had been Aquino 99, Marcos 206. I asked the people in the house—the eldest daughter, who’d been to high school, translating—if this reflected the political feelings of the village. There was an audible collective snort. The mourners looked startled. Some of them laughed. Then they were silent.
“They don’t want to talk,” the daughter said. “They’re scared.”
When I came outside Llamas hinted I might escort him back to the paved road. He was traveling with four bodyguards.
FOUR HUNDRED YEARS
IN A CONVENT, FIFTY
YEARS IN A WHOREHOUSE
Spain owned the Philippines from 1521 to 1898, and America from 1898 to 1946. Pundits summarize this history as “four hundred years in a convent, fifty years in a whorehouse.” Manila today looks like some Ancient Mariner who has lived through it all. The boulevards are tattered and grim and overhung with a dirty hairnet of electrical and phone wires. The standard-issue third-world concrete buildings are stained dead-meat gray by the emphysematous air pollution. Street lighting is haphazard. Ditto for street cleaning. The streets themselves are filled with great big holes. Fires seem to be frequent. Visits from the fire department less so. There are numerous burned-out buildings. Every now and then you see what must have been charming Old Manila architecture—tin-roofed houses with upper stories that jut over the streets and windows boxed by trelliswork. Now these houses sag and flop. They don’t seem to have been painted since the Japanese occupation. In fact, the first impression of Manila is of a defeated city, still occupied and exploited by some hostile force. Which has been more or less the case—Imelda Marcos was governor of the Metro Manila region for the past decade. You see her handiwork in occasional pieces of huge, brutish modernism rising uninvited from Manila’s exhausted clutter. There is, for instance, the Cultural Center Complex, plopped on some landfill disfiguring Manila Bay. One of its buildings is the Manila Film Center, which Imelda rushed to completion in time for a 1982 international film festival. The story goes that the hurriedly poured concrete roof collapsed, burying forty or more workers in wet cement. No attempt was made to rescue them. This would have meant missing the deadline. The floor was laid over their corpses. Supposedly, Imelda later held an exorcism to get rid of the building’s malevolent ghosts.
During the election, standard journalistic practice was to go to Forbes Park in the Manila suburbs, where Marcos’s cronies were wallowing in money, then make a quick dash to the downtown slums—“Manila: City of Contrasts.” Tony Suau was shooting a polo match in Forbes Park when one of the players trotted over between chukkers and said, “Going to Tondo next, huh?”