For the road less traveled: Notes on the Ateneo HS class ’54 Diamond Jubilee

MANILA, Philippines - In their sophomore year the Ateneo de Manila High School Class of 1954 made the big move from Padre Faura to the present campus in Loyola Heights. This was in 1952, and from Ermita to Katipunan was a wide expanse of green and open fields, kites seen in the sky, an extremely bucolic setting worlds away from C5, the highway that today dissects the eastern section of the capital.

White shirts and khaki pants were the order of the day, and only a few buildings stood at the time in the shadow of the iconic gymnasium that bore the image of the eagle, and you could still actually count the number of cars on campus.

On April 3, 1954, 169 high school seniors graduated from the Ateneo. Of those graduates, 75 have died. Of those alive most reside in the country; about 30 live abroad, mainly in the US and Canada.

The senior class had five sections, with the Honors section, 4A, being a microcosm of Class 54.

4A was comprised of a select group of highly intelligent students with diverse interests, and they took more advanced subjects than the other sections.

Most of them pursued traditional careers in business, medicine and law.

But three of the brightest became Jesuit priests. Edmundo Martinez now runs a school in Marikina. Felix Unson is a guidance counselor at the Ateneo. Antonio Samson does pastoral work at Mary the Queen Parish in San Juan.

And three exceptionally talented members of 4A entered the world of Arts and Letters: Roberto Chabet, Robert Ylagan Arevalo and Benjamin Bautista.

Chabet, considered to be the most influential artist of his generation, died in May 2013. Generations of students at the UP College of Fine Arts, from the top floor of the library to the former vet med building, have been under his tutelage, including Lani Maestro, Binggay Caguiat, MM Yu and Poklong Anading. One of the last exhibits he attended was that of Maestro, a collaboration with Anading called Digital Tagalog in Bonifacio Global City late in 2012.

In an interview with the now shuttered Midweek magazine, Chabet was asked about life in academe.

“The students are always better than the teacher. I learn a lot from my students. Teaching is kind of like a seduction; you try to get them into coming up with their own. My role is more of a guide. Virgil to their Dante in the circles of hell. Besides, how do you teach art theory?”

Does he intend to sell his work?

“If they’ll build a room for it.”

On the newness of art: “Someone might come up with a similar thing one day and say it’s all new, but we all know it’s not.”

The occasion was the closing exhibit of Pinaglabanan Galleries, and Chabet’s Cargo and Decoy was the San Juan gallery’s last stand. There were large canvases of blue, face to face, as if about to be folded up. There was a thin white boat hung diagonally, upside down. There were large expanses of red and chains revealing unpainted surfaces. Like filling the blanks, you work your way through a gigantic, three-dimensional crossword puzzle. His students come in to fill the empty spaces.

Maestro, now based in France, came home for the funeral and soon enough there was an exhibit tribute of former Chabet students to their teacher, who died at age 76.

Of all the accolades and awards he has won, Arevalo’s being named best actor in the Cinemalaya X director’s showcase entry “Hari ng Tondo” was a signal event because it proved he could shift from stage to TV, from mainstream to indie and back with equal ease. Earlier this year he had essayed the patriarch’s role in Nick Joaquin’s “Mga Ama, Mga Anak,” decades after playing the role of the son.

In interview with STARweek before the run of the Tanghalang Pilipino play, Arevalo was asked about the difference between film and theater.

Physical preparation may be similar in theater and film, he said, but theater requires more stamina because less piecemeal; the discipline honed on stage is carried on to the cinema. Sometimes the work can straddle both mediums, as with the late Behn Cervantes’ “Sakada.”

In the same article, Arevalo expressed misgivings that theater can’t be made into a livelihood, but that he can never totally abandon a most enjoyable avocation because feedback is immediate. The dynamic too changes every night, and no two performances are the same. In this way theater is like baseball – no two games are alike.

Like the rest of Ateneo HS 54, Arevalo had spent his childhood during the Occupation, though he remembers very little of it. But in elementary school he participated in an elocution contest and performing on stage got him hooked. This role he would reprise decades later at the launch of his classmate Bautista’s book of short fiction, “Stories from Another Time,” at the Ateneo Professional Schools in Rockwell, Makati.

Bautista, a multi-awarded fictionist, says that in addition to objective biographical facts about him, he would like his grandchildren to know that:

1) He once stood at the peak of Mount Santo Tomas with Father Lino Banayad and watched the sunset over the South China Sea;

2) got drunk on separate occasions with Nick Joaquin and Horacio dela Costa, who shared an uncommon talent – they knew how to drink;

3) appeared in a Swedish movie “I am Blushing” with Bibi Anderson;

4) saw snow for the first time, falling softly from a high wintry sky in Burley, Idaho;

5) sat in a Paris bistro sipping very old scotch, and listening to Charles Aznavour sing of unrequited love;

6) peered through a glass panel of the Manila Medical Center nursery and saw his firstborn child for the first time;

7) discovered in a Hong Kong alley a wooden hand carved Chinese Madonna which turned out to be more than a hundred years old;

8) wrote short fiction which the Ateneo University Press considered good enough to publish as a collection;

9) posed for a Christmas picture with his parents in New Manila, his mother 98 and his father 100 years old, and

10) developed his own special fried chicken recipe that shall be his gift to posterity.

When asked about how the writing was coming along, Bautista, retired from the board of directors of Monsanto Philippines and now New Manila recluse, said: “What writing?” He has a number of works of Chabet in his house, all gifts from his lifelong friend and master of conceptual art.

The Grand Homecoming celebration of the Ateneo falls in early December around the feast of the Immaculate Conception, a date auspicious enough for the Hail Mary University and its alumni. Among the Class 54 Ateneans observing the occasion are the Diamond Jubilarians Cesar Sarino, Willie Sanchez, Leony Gonzales, Tigi Barcelona, Art Alafriz, Jimmy Bautista, Marc Siongco, Chito Brillantes, Nene Syquia, Toto Mapa and Jesse Paredes who will hold a Jubillee thanksgiving reunion organized by Pasky Guerzon. The late Jimmy Ongpin and Jun Katigbak who served together in the Cory Aquino Cabinet will be remembered.