MANILA, Philippines - The very first role that Tatang cast me in was as the clueless judge of Fr. Pedro Poveda in a play he had written and directed when I was in Grade 7. He had me up on a high chair, with a wig and oversized robes. My lines were simple – all I had to do was feign the barest of coherence before sentencing the poor priest to death via firing squad, finding him guilty of 72 counts of sedition. And while this was my first role for a major production outside of my own school, I regarded my lines with more than a little share of incredulity back then – after all, 72 counts of sedition? Wasn’t that stretching things a little too far?
It would only be while rehearsing it that Tatang would tell us all that while Poveda probably wasn’t charged with as many counts of sedition, Tatang had drawn from personal experience and put that bit in the script to refer to the charges of sedition filed against him on the onset of martial law. And he laughed as he told us that story during rehearsals. How he was acquitted, he never told us.
A year later, as my brother and I were sent out to man the radios of Radyo Bandido with June Keithley during the height of the 1986 revolution, my mom called Fr. Reuter and demanded to have her sons back.
Tatang told her, sternly, that her boys had the chance to die as heroes and that she shouldn’t stand in their way. And then he hung up.
Tatang taught me two precious lessons in life: how to laugh at things even when odds are overwhelmingly against you, and how to embrace fear and death with no drama and no tears.