Pain

This being a month for celebrating the arts, please bear with me for indulging the ego. As memory unfurls, I know now that much of my writing is pain remembered. During the war, I knew the rawest fear that shriveled the heart, hunger and endless anxiety that numbed the spirit. I did not aspire to be a writer; I wanted to be a neurosurgeon, but I fell in love with literature when I was ten years old. My Grade Five teacher, Miss Soledad Oriel, gave me Rizal’s novels, Willa Cather’s My Antonia and Cervantes’s Don Quixote. I was entranced – addicted; she also made me write themes and book reports which I did happily, easily, and in a language that was not mine but which became mine like my Ilokano mother tongue. Grade school – how different it was then. Classes were held the whole day. I recall lessons in history, mythology, stories from the Bible. When I was in Grade Five, I memorized that classic, Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. I was immersed in mythology – Ulysses, Medusa, ancient phrases like “delenda est Carthago” – Carthage must be destroyed!

My hunger for books was appeased when in 1938, a kindly uncle in Manila took me under his wing and enrolled me in high school. Now, I had all the books at the National Library which was then the basement of today’s National Museum of Fine Arts. It was in the high school paper, the Far Eastern University’s Junior Advocate that I first saw my name in print, a brief essay – I cannot recall it anymore, but I will never forget that sheer joy, that exalted lifting of the spirit of seeing Francisco Jose in print!

The day after the Pearl Harbor attack on Dec. 8, 1941 when I was a high school senior, I returned to the old hometown and lived with a cousin, Dr. Eustaquia Alberto. Her family was landed, I worked in her clinic and learned basic procedures, take blood pressure, administer injections, dress wounds; that early I aspired to be a doctor.

During the Japanese Occupation, I commuted between Manila and the old hometown, bringing rice to Manila. In June 1945 when the universities opened, I took the pre-med course at the University of Santo Tomas in Intramuros. We were having Nippongo classes that September morning when American carrier planes raided Manila and classes immediately ceased. By November 1945, there was no more food in Manila and a cousin, my mother and I walked for a week to Rosales.

In January 1945, the Americans arrived, and I promptly joined the American medical corps as a civilian employee and left the Army when the war ended with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945. I went back to the University of Santo Tomas where my literature teacher, the writer Paz Latorena, “discovered” me and told me to join the college paper, The Varsitarian. I had embarked on a writing career – my first published short story, The God Stealer, was used by Salvador P. Lopez, editor of the Phil-American magazine, published by Benjamin Salvosa. I got fifty pesos for it – a minor fortune in 1946. I also worked part-time at the Sentinel, the Catholic weekly, where I met Eggie Duran (later Mrs. Apostol). I was not earning enough to feed myself. I wrote love letters for classmates and more stories until I found a job as assistant editor at the United States Information Service. In 1949, I joined the Manila Times, and when I visited the United States in 1955, I was 30 and had written three novels in the Rosales saga, Tree; My Brother, My Executioner and The Pretenders, all serialized in Telly Albert’s weekly Women’s Magazine. By then, I had also written several articles on agrarian reform, a subject that had truly gotten me involved given my rural background. In those ten years (1949-1960) that I was with the Manila Times, the Roceses, publishers of the paper, gave me all the freedom to write as I pleased. I traveled widely, first in our country, then in Asia. I met many of the newsmakers of my generation and, in almost all cases, looked at them as possible fictional models. I also tried to understand and analyze our social structure, the intertwining personal relationships that explained social behavior, the sources of power, how it was acquired, maintained and abused. Most relationships are based on power, and we must realize this if we are to have harmony and peace. Writers write from their lives, and so I ask myself very often how I had lived, if I had examined this life, and since it is so finite, have I used it well and given it meaning – again, that dreadful but unavoidable cliché. It keeps coming back, that old Shakespearean dictum – “to thine own self be true.” God knows I’ve lied to myself, but I always knew it, hurt those we love and eventually lost them. So, I am also filled with remorse, hoping and praying for forgiveness just as I have forgiven all those who have hurt me, too. Peace – it’s ours if we forgive but not forget.

I am writing this in my hospital room. An old friend, Dr. Vince Gomez, had just left after lecturing me on food – how I love it – and losing weight. My doctors, Gia Wassmer (diabetes), Milan Tambunting (kidney), Raynato Kasilag (heart) and Ricardo Quintos (cardiovascular surgeon), had kept me alive all these years and presented me with two options – have an angiogram or suffer my present condition – chest pain and fatigue brought about by anemia. I decided to go home and simply wait for my time to come. And while my mind is still sharp, I continue to write not just this column but whatever else is worth remembering.

Amber Rodriguez, that dedicated worker from Bread of Life, asked me once what is my deepest pain. Looking back, it was only natural and expected when I wept upon knowing the passing of Nick Joaquin, my dear friend, the deaths of my father-in-law, Dr. Antonio Jovellanos and, most of all, my beloved mother. But my deepest pain? It was in Tokyo one crowded afternoon in that country’s largest train station, Shinjuku. It had three levels, and I could not find the orange-colored train that would take me to Nishi Ogikubo where I was staying as a house guest of Reiko and Akira Kanda. This was sometime before EDSA I, and I was in Tokyo – it’s my favorite writing retreat, and I was working on my novel, Ermita. It would have been easy to get around this sprawling station if I could read Japanese. I finally found the platform and I got into the train which at this time in mid-afternoon was not crowded. I was vastly relieved. Surrounded by fellow commuters, my thoughts drifted away from Tokyo, to Manila, to home and the vicissitudes, the crippling life under dictatorship, the bleak future of my poor unhappy country. The tears came, unbidden, in a flood, so I turned to the window so that no one could see me in my sorrow and deepest pain. Upon reaching the Kanda house, I immediately wrote down what happened. I titled it “Lost in Shinjuku.” I used it as the epilogue, supposedly written by the narrator in my novel, Ermita.

Looking back at my youth and my development as a writer, I realize that I began writing because I wanted to tell a story, to entertain my readers just as I was entertained by Rizal, Cather and Cervantes. I did not read Chekhov until I was in college, but early enough, I wanted not just to entertain but for my readers to profit from what I am writing, to understand life – oh such a highfalutin term, but this purpose was instinctive even in my earliest stories.

It is always tempting to recreate real people in my fiction, but I have avoided this as a challenge to my imagination; better to write from my life with all the senses working to make my writing throb with life.

I have just described my deepest pain. Wait for my narration of my highest joy.