by Ian Barclay
“We like to say,” Benjael added, “that that’s what happened to us Pinoys—four hundred years of monks, then Hollywood.”
Dartley laughed. This was a good description of a lot of what he had seen, such as statues of medieval saints in Barbie Doll costumes, American jeeps with graffiti-style prayers, shades and box radios along with smiling courtesy—he was constantly being hit with unexpected combinations. “Pinoys” was what Filipinos often called themselves. At their insistence Dartley stopped twice—once at a grove of mango trees whose white flowers gave off an overpowering perfumey scent, which both Harry and Benjael claimed worked well as an aphrodisiac.
“We’re not coming up here to get laid,” Dartley said.
The second stop was for sweet, soft candy called pastillas, made from the milk of the carabao, the Philippine version of the water buffalo. The playful mood of the two men puzzled Dartley at first, until he thought to ask how well they knew this area. They looked at each other for a moment, then Harry admitted that they never had been this far from Manila before. Prior to this, their only trip outside the city limits of Metro Manila had been their expedition to Happy Man’s Laguna estate. Dartley began to understand now why Benjael had set up the whole stunt at the Pagsanjan River rapids—he had just wanted to see them while he had the chance! They were both in their late twenties and had hardly strayed farther than the slum in which they were born. This explained the excited way they were staring out the car windows at the passing countryside, which was nothing very exceptional. Here he was, taking a pair of underprivileged, overgrown kids on an outing, on their way to kill one of the richest, most powerful men in the Philippines and who had his own private army. Dartley wondered why he was enjoying himself all the same.
The next province, Nueva Ecija, was mostly low-lying flat plains irrigated for rice. They drove on as far as San Jose, an agricultural market town two-thirds of the way up the province. There they left the main road and followed a set of progressively narrowing and deteriorating roads, pausing frequently for conflicting directions.
The church bells in the town square were striking eleven as Dartley parked his car in the shade of a tree and they got out to find Benjael’s cousin. At that moment a procession poured into the square and passed the church doors. Dartley stared. The procession was composed of about thirty men, followed by large numbers of townspeople chanting hymns. The thirty men were bare to the waist except for white cloth hoods over their heads, and they struck at their backs over each shoulder with leather thongs into which glass spikes were fitted. These whips ripped into their skins, causing fresh wounds with every blow. Blood flowed from their backs and arms, and down over their pant legs and shoes. The white hood over each man’s head was held in place by a headband of twisted thorny vines. Red bloodstains spread into the white cloth.
Benjael ran alongside the flagellants and settled on one. He shouted at this man, who either didn’t hear or see him or was too far gone in his torments to bother about him. Some of the townspeople pushed and shoved Benjael for bothering one of the penitentes, and he returned to Dartley and Harry.
“I think they would have attacked me if I had lifted the kapirosa to see his face,” Benjael explained. “But I’m sure that was my cousin.”
“You think he’s going to be in any shape to come with us after all this?” Dartley asked doubtfully, not caring for the idea of having to nurse someone with a flayed back.
“My cousin is like a carabao,” Benjael boasted. “In a few hours, after he has repented his sins like this, he will be in good shape again. We will follow them now, and I will talk with him after it is over.”
Dartley couldn’t see how the man would even be able to ride in a car seat because he could not rest his back against it, but he decided to be patient and go along to see what happened.
One of the penitentes picked up a huge wooden cross in the square, hooked it over one shoulder, and dragged it along at the head of the procession.
“He has made a panata,” Benjael said with approval, and glanced at his watch.
Harry made a face of disgust. “A panata is a vow or promise if something is given to you,” he explained to Dartley. “I suppose you can guess what the vow was.”
Dartley nodded. He asked Benjael, “Is that your cousin with the cross?”
“No, no,” Benjael said. “My cousin is only a flagellante. He is not crazy.”
They joined in at the end of the crowd of chanting townspeople and followed the procession out of the town toward a bare, dusty hill. The crowd gathered around the summit of the low hill, the chanting men in cloth hoods at the middle. Ceaselessly lashing their backs with the leather thongs holding shards of glass, they cleared a small area in their midst. Two men dug a hole with a pick and a shovel. Four others placed the cross flat on the earth. The man who had made the panata willingly lay on the cross. First one man held his right wrist while another hammered a nail through his palm into one extremity of the wooden crosspiece. Next they nailed his left hand. They placed one foot over the other and used one nail through both to attach them to the upright. All six men raised the cross and placed it in the hole. The church bell in the town beneath struck twelve times. It was midday.
The crucified man, who was in his early twenties and already gone to flab, did not squirm. His face wore a dull look of anguish, and his eyes were half closed. His body weight began to pull the nails through the flesh of his palms. The nails seemed likely to tear upward between the fingers and caused him to fall face forward from the cross, so he was hurriedly lowered and the crowd began to disperse, making way for the flagellantes. These men had now stopped whipping themselves and supported one another and talked together, like a football team leaving the field after a hard-fought game.
Benjael approached his cousin and spoke with him. This man raised his kapirosa to show Benjael his face.
Benjael came back to Dartley and Harry with a silly grin on his face. “That wasn’t him. My cousin didn’t come this year. But he told me where he lives.”
A pregnant girl, eighteen or nineteen years old, opened the door of the little stucco house. She was pretty but sullen-looking. Benjael asked for his cousin. She shouted back over her shoulder, and a man came out of the dark interior of the house. He was about thirty, unshaven and bleary-eyed. His face broke into a smile when he saw Benjael, and the two men embraced each other.
“I go to Manila all the time to visit you,” he said to Benjael. “At last you come here to see me!”
“We thought you would be in the penitensya.”
He glanced at the pregnant girl beside him and laughed. “This year I am a sinner. Next year I do penance for this year’s sins.”
They all went inside the house, and over coffee Benjael’s cousin told them stories of his days as a logger in the northern provinces. He had worked several times near Balbalasang, always for lumber companies owned by Happy Man Velez. There was not much logging in those parts nowadays, he said, because of local troubles there and attacks by the New People’s Army. He agreed to act as their guide in the area.
“I’ll pay you a thousand U.S. dollars per week,” Dartley told him.
The smile disappeared from the man’s face. “Why?”
Dartley was pleased to see that he was no fool. He looked around to make sure the girl could not hear before he said, “I want to kill someone.”
“What do I have to do?”
“For a thousand, be our guide. For anything more I ask you to do, I will pay extra.”
Benjael’s cousin sighed. “All right. But I make a panata for next year.” He held his arms out in the shape of a cross.
The small girl waved the huge carabao, which loomed over her, toward a bank of earth on which her two little brothers stood. When the giant animal with swept-back horns lumbered close to the bank, its huge shoulder muscles rippling beneath its hide, the little boys leapt onto its back and held tightly on to its hide hair. The enormous brute then obediently followed the small girl alo
ng a path between two sugarcane fields. The children waved to men cutting cane with long-bladed knives resembling machetes. The men paused at their work to wave back, then wiped the sweat out of their eyes and made a few hopeless slaps at the countless mosquitoes and other insects swarming around their bodies in the sticky equatorial heat of Negros Occidental.
The path wound through more sugarcane fields and descended to a marshy area too waterlogged to cultivate. The girl’s father had noticed fresh swamp grass here the day before, which would provide good grazing for the family’s carabao. As she bossily brought the animal to the patch of new grass she considered best for it to eat, something caught her eyes in a patch of tall reeds. Something cloth… She pushed the reeds aside and looked. A dead man lay there with dried blood caked all over his body. She screamed and backed away.
She stopped only to beckon her two little brothers from the carabao’s back. They slid off expertly, hit the ground with a parachutist’s roll, came to their feet, and were running, all in a single, smooth movement. The three barefoot children charged back along the path between the cane fields, leaving the carabao contentedly munching grass behind them, unconcerned about the mutilated human corpse a few feet away from it.
When the little girl saw the men at work in the field, she called to them. Her brothers also shouted at them to come, not knowing why but happy to imitate their older sister’s urgency. All five men came with them when they heard what she had to say. She and her brothers led them to the marsh, and she pointed out the patch of reeds. The carabao lifted its head and gazed placidly at them, chewing the cud.
The men looked through the reeds at the corpse. The clothes were no more than tattered rags stuck to the skin with dried blood. Knife punctures covered the man’s body and four limbs, and blackened areas of skin showed where he had been burned. His eye sockets were empty. His cut-out tongue was placed carefully on his right thigh. His cut-off penis was stuffed in his blood-caked mouth.
“Don’t touch him,” one man said, warning the others. “The body may be booby-trapped.”
“It’s that lawyer fella who came down here from Manila to work with the militia against the rebels. I seen him in town twice. They warned me to pretend to be a half fool if he ever questioned me.”
“What is that paper with writing on it?”
“Get it. We have to find out what it says. Maybe it puts the blame on us.”
One man stepped carefully through the reeds until he could reach for the paper. The sheet of paper was attached to the skin of the corpse’s chest by a large safety pin. He pulled at the paper and it tore, leaving a patch still held by the safety pin. But they got all the writing. Each of the men held the paper and looked seriously at the writing. None of them said anything. Then one of them took it to the little girl, who stood some distance away.
“Read it to us,” he said.
The girl drew herself up self-importantly, held the paper up, and cleared her throat. “It’s not very neat handwriting,” she pronounced judgmentally. Then she read, “’This man lied to our comrades in prison camps. He said he could help them. He was a spy. The New People’s Army brought justice to him. Do not be a government spy.’”
The men took the paper from the girl and stood to one side to discuss things.
“We have to move the body from here.”
“I say we don’t touch it. Call the militia.”
“If we do, they’ll blame us. Maybe shoot us. Or burn our houses down.”
“You think anyone in our village had anything to do with this?”
“No! If any people from here did, they would not have left the body on our village lands.”
“The militia should understand that. But they won’t. They’ll take it out on us because the body turned up here.”
“That’s why I say we have to move it. Dump it somewhere else.”
“Those bastards in San Ramon always think they’re better than we are. This would bring them down a notch or two.”
“Maybe we should just bury the body.”
“Then the New People’s Army would come after us! They want this body found with this message attached. They don’t care whether it’s found here or in San Ramon, but if we bury the body, they will think we hid it because we are pro-government.”
“Simplest thing is to wait till dark, pin this paper back on, and leave it in San Ramon.”
“Those people there are real bastards.”
“They’ve had this coming a long time, they way they look down on us.”
Hidden on a jungle ridge dotted with coconut palms, some of the New People’s Army guerrillas finished their morning meal of wild cabbage stewed in coconut milk over rice. Others washed in a stream, collected clothing that had dried overnight on bushes, and cleaned weapons. The men went about their tasks and unhurriedly broke camp. They never camped two nights in the same place and carried all their equipment and possessions. Living like this for months on end had hardened them into methodical, disciplined survivors who wasted nothing, neither things nor time. When they were ready to move out, their leader called them together and explained the plans to them. Some of the men asked questions, some made jokes. The leader went over everything several times to make sure everyone understood.
The men moved out in two platoons of eleven each, plus five scouts. They had no uniforms. Some were barefoot, though most wore sneakers. Each carried an M16, and some had sidearms as well; two carried M79 grenade launchers.
They hit the village first. The eleven men of one platoon first climbed higher up the hill and then turned around to descend among the houses, M16s at the ready. Most of the men and many of the women had already gone down into the valley to work in the fields. This was what the guerrillas wanted—the four men they were after spent little time in the fields. A pair of men went to each of four houses while three covered the village. Two came outside, dragging an old man between them. He was the village headman, a known government sympathizer who encouraged the young men of the village to join the region’s paramilitary civilian home defense force to fight the New People’s Army. Another man dragged from his home was a member of this local militia. The other two pairs drew a blank—the men they were looking for were on a patrol looking for them. They put the two men before a row of coconut trees and cut them down with M16 fire. The men touched off fires in the four palm-thatch-and-bamboo houses with matches, but they did not try to prevent women and children from escaping the burning houses or from carrying out their possessions. As smoke from the four burning houses rose into the air the guerrillas fired volleys from their rifles.
The government soldiers at the prison camp saw the smoke and heard the gunfire. The lieutenant in command ordered the sergeant to put an armed group of men together and investigate.
“It’s a trap, sir,” the sergeant said. “They’re trying to draw us out of here so they can either attack the rescue party or storm the camp here while we’re gone.”
“We can’t stay put here and let the guerrillas burn down villages right under our noses,” the lieutenant pointed out. The sergeant was four years older than him and had three times his experience in the field, so the lieutenant listened carefully to what he had to say. But it came down to this: An enlisted man’s advice was mostly to stay put and keep his head down, while an officer was trained to send men out, even when he stayed behind himself. “If they attack us here while you are gone, we can hold them off with our machine guns. Take enough men with you in case they decide to ambush you.”
So the sergeant, who wanted to stay put, had to take the men out, while the lieutenant, who thought something should be done, stayed put. To make his point the sergeant took ten of the fourteen soldiers garrisoned in the camp, leaving the lieutenant four soldiers, eight prison guards, and a hundred and forty-three inmates. Two of the five rebel scouts spotted the sergeant and ten men heading for the village and radioed in their codes. This was the signal for the platoon to abandon the village, swing south of the approaching soldi
ers, and head for the position of the scouts.
The platoon near the prison camp waited fifteen minutes, then attacked. The camp was ringed by a barricade of felled coconut palms and topped by rows of sharpened bamboo stakes, which made it impossible to scale the defenses. Two M60 machine guns were emplaced among the palm logs to the north and south and could be moved where needed. The eight prison guards were trained to use M16s, and all of the inmates were under lock and key in the concrete cell blocks. This was a holding place for political prisoners only, its existence and precise location a military secret, and so the authorities did not have to concern themselves with such things as exercise and visiting facilities. There were few outsiders in the backcountry canefields of Negros Occidental.
The guerrillas came at the camp from the south. The M60 spat lead at them, and they dived in the dirt. Half the guerrillas crawled around to the east side and tried to mount an assault from there, while the five others exchanged fire with the two soldiers manning the machine gun facing south. The defenders pulled the second M60 to face east and set it up among the heavy palm logs. They dropped one guerrilla with their opening burst of fire and forced the others to take cover. M16 assault rifles were no match for an M60.
Just as the sergeant and his ten men reached the village, only to find two bodies, burned houses, and the guerrillas already gone, they heard heavy fire from the direction of the prison camp. The sergeant cursed the lieutenant and ordered his men back on the double. Their movements were again monitored by two of the scouts, and their position was reported to the rebel platoons by radio. They were ambushed midway by the platoon that had attacked the village. Their point man walked into a clearing and took a single bullet in the side of his head. The sergeant and three other experienced men threw themselves on their bellies and rolled out of the path they were traveling on and into the cover of the heavy brush. Five men who did not move fast enough were caught by the fire as the rebels used the clear line of sight along the path to knock them over by automatic fire like skittles in an alley.