For the disappeared

The book Subversive Lives, A Family Memoir of the Marcos Years (Anvil Publishing 2012) by Susan F. Quimpo and Nathan Gilbert Quimpo has been gaining notice of late for its detailed account of a crucial period in the country’s history, set against the backdrop of one middle class Filipino family’s evolution into revolutionaries and eventual falling out with the left. One need not call it disenchantment with the revolution because a number of the Quimpos kept many a friendship begun at that crossroads, but here it is as if the roles and plot management are reversed, with each Quimpo sibling — yes even letters of the dead — becoming a cipher and witness to a time gone bad.

The revolution as we know it may be the main construct of this multifaceted memoir, but in the end it is the ties of family that survive the political unraveling into the personal. That which rent them apart is the same thing that made them cleave to one another as only siblings can.

It was upon the suggestion of the writer and academic Vince Rafael that the Quimpos put together this memoir that reads like a kaleidoscope, indeed some instances and details are repeated albeit in different contexts, like the rearview mirror placed at the fire escape overlooking the alley of apartment 1783-H Concepcion Aguila Street in the San Miguel district so that the Quimpo activists would be forewarned if any of Marcos henchmen were at the gate.

The mirror in effect becomes a metaphor for life on the run, and how it throws back into big brother’s face his surveilling eyes. A popular poster slogan can in fact be reversed or stood on its head: just because they’re watching you, doesn’t mean you’re paranoid.

Those surely were difficult years, an inkling of which we had browsed through in Jose Lacaba’s Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage collected reportage of the First Quarter Storm. The difference being that Lacaba’s work is journalism while the Quimpos’ is autobiography, though both may fall under the category creative non-fiction. Come to think of it, the Lacabas too as family are also qualified to come up with such a memoir, a number of them also having gone underground and tortured and one brother (Eman) summarily executed, or “salavaged” in the milieu’s lexicon.

The pain however of the Quimpos is double because two sons were lost to the revolution, the Philippine Science High scholar Ronald or Jan, and his younger brother Ishmael or Jun, a victim of the deadly internecine politics of the movement. It is Jun’s letters to his wife and fellow cadre Cristina Pargas that are well preserved like a snapshot of the fugitive, and the narrative of how the other family members try to reconstruct the circumstances of his death is heart wrenching. Even the manner by which the news of death is spread has a clandestine quality, as if passing away itself were an illegal act or something that carried with it moral lessons of the state.

Among the elder Quimpo girls is Emilie, who for her part had been enveloped into a different fanaticism altogether, the Opus Dei, whose stringent nearly ascetic code served simultaneously as counterpoint and distorted mirror of the underground’s own regimented existence. It is as if to say, if not revolution then religion might save us, or the mere living of the day to day like the one served by one of the sisters, the taong bahay Caren, because someone has to become the ballast and keep the home fires burning.

Even the polio-stricken son Ryan is drawn into the movement mainly as propagandist, and his story includes a flight abroad with his sons under passport aliases.

One of the elder sons Norman, the Ateneo math instructor, becomes a fellow at the Silliman Writers Workshop in 1966, and in the group photo of that batch we could recognize Marra Lanot, Eric Torres, possibly Badong Bernal and one of the Matienzo brothers, and panelist Kerima Polotan.

The chapter written by Nathan, “Where’s Jun? Where’s Jan?”, recounts the days leading to the disappearance of Jan in 1977, and their fruitless search for him:

“When Susan entered college in UP in the early 1980s, she sought out Jan’s former classmates… Among the various stories she heard was a series of sightings that seemed to reveal a pattern and seemed to be the most credible. A couple of Jan’s friends, all former kasama, said they had seen him in several public places: standing in a busy walkway in Cubao, having a snack in a popular restaurant, taking a bus. Jan, they said, behaved oddly. He seemed not to recognize any kasama, snubbing anyone who came close. Sensing that something was wrong, the kasama would move on without greeting him. They surmised that the military had probably captured him and were using him as bait to identify and capture others.

“This was a new twist and only reinforced our worst fears. At some point, Jan would have outlived his usefulness or tried to escape. Then the military would have taken the most expedient option. Despite all the loose ends and the confusing stories, we all became even more convinced that Jan had been salvaged.”

Nathan it was who was arrested at the San Jose Recoletos in Cebu in the midst of organizing/outreach work, while Norman was implicated in a gun running charge in the Dona Andrea-FB Elvie case, his face splashed across the front pages of the then controlled newspapers along with that of other suspects.

In 2009 the eight surviving Quimpo siblings had a reunion in Siquijor, a number of them already grandparents. The epilogue contains information in a where-they-are now format written in the first person, a diverse summing up of an evolution of one Filipino family caught in the maelstrom of history.

Though the revolution wasted some of the best and brightest of its generation, those who survived did so precisely to tell the tale, and what a story it is. Stranger than fiction, yes, but also no stranger to fiction and the bubble that was martial law, those monstrous years it would be best for us not to forget.

It was while reading Subversive Lives, which I have not yet quite finished, that I learned of the death of a former co-worker at the leftist magazine Midweek, Edith Galve. On a jeepney bound for Port Area, a fellow passenger and ex-Midweek typesetter told of Edith’s passing in the summer after a long battle with cancer, and it was if she had disappeared a second time from this life constantly on the run.