are no crucifixes, only crosses. The reason she gives resembles Islam’s interdiction: “We do not use portraits for God forbids it. No one knows God’s true visage.” Like the other Banahaw sects, Ciudad is a cooperative endeavor where members help one another, especially the less fortunate. Most of them live by farming rice and vegetables, and by raising pigs. As we sit there in the living room, we hear singing. A small procession is winding its way through the compound. The believers—a motley crowd of women, men, and children—enter the Suprema’s home, bearing a cross and singing Tagalog hymns. They proceed to the other rooms, then exit, still singing. After we enjoy a simple but hearty supper with the Suprema, Jaime remarks on the presence of other sects in town. She emphasizes her group’s ecumenism: “We don’t think ill of any group. We do not interfere with any other faith, and we respect the rights of others. There is only one God, and all people were created by God.”
WHILE EDUCATED PEOPLE TEND TO dismiss the Banahaw sects as atavistic, such groups have existed throughout Philippine colonial history, largely as a way to endure oppressive conditions and to keep alive their own aspirations. This is a country continually on the lookout for saviors; more than a yearning for a pre-history, the populace seems to want to escape the straitjacket of a history of defeat and colonialism. Part of the Catholic Church’s appeal has been that it offers figures ranging from Jesus and His mother Mary to a pantheon of saints, all of whom are capable of negating that history. Nationalist traditions also offer their pick of heroes, with José Rizal at the top of the list. And then there is Bernardo Carpio, a mythical Filipino hero-king, said to be buried deep within a mountain (many believe this to be Banahaw) and whose resurrection will herald the salvation of all Filipinos. In this, Carpio seems like Godot, however: eternally awaited, eternally elusive.
Ferdinand Marcos shrewdly drew on this longing by casting himself as a heroic figure who would lead the masses from a benighted present to an idyllic future. And as expert and adroit as he was in steering the body politic, this native son of Batac—a town up north in the Ilokos region—has proved equally adept in death in employing politics of the body, following a macabre tradition that includes Napoleon being returned to Paris nineteen years after his demise on St. Helena, and the 1976 internment of Eva Peron in Argentina, twenty-four years after dying abroad. In this overwhelmingly Catholic country, where ritual and symbol figure prominently in the national pysche, and where animist ancestral and spirit worship thrives under the guise of folk Catholicism, Marcos brilliantly manipulated both the collective consciousness and its superstitions. He defined the modern Filipino through speeches and ghostwritten books, recast history to fit his story, and appealed to nationalist pride by seeming to stand up to the Americans (though in reality his regime was propped up by Washington). In the process, he succeeded in projecting the aura of a man in charge of a whole nation’s destiny. Indeed, a film bio he had commissioned about himself is titled Iginuhit ng Tadhana (Decreed by Fate).
Ferdinand’s 1964 official campaign biography by Hartzell Spence, For Every Tear a Victory, goes so far as to describe how, though a devout Roman Catholic, he had a talisman—embedded in his back:
Among [the talisman’s] virtues, it permits its holder to disappear and reappear at will. It has other supernatural attributes, one of them being that under some circumstances the use of it can restore the dead to life.
At Bataan, men knew that to go on patrol with Lieutenant Ferdinand Marcos, an intelligence officer who ranged well behind the enemy lines, was an infallible way to win the Purple Heart if not a gold star.… Selected to patrol with him, the men would rub his back, each in turn, a superstitious gesture. But several who did not participate in this ceremony did not return.
No surprise, then, that there is even a sect that believes not only that Ferdinand is in heaven, but that in fact heaven is his. To the members of the Alpha Omega Hesukristo Espiritu Santo Samahan ng Mga Anak ng Diyos (Alpha Omega Jesus Christ the Holy Spirit Company of God’s Beloved Children) Ferdinand Marcos is God the Father, his death an illusion, a shadow play. Formed in 1979, a decade before Ferdinand’s demise in Honolulu, the group awaits his resurrection; his second coming will herald, they believe, the advent of a new golden era for the Philippines. The Alpha’s members are joined in this belief by another cult based in Marcos’s home province of Ilocos Norte, Kapatirang Rizalista–Iglesia Filipino Independiente–Sagrada Familia Marcosians (The Rizal Fraternity–Philippine Independent Church–Holy Family Marcosians). On the day in 1993 when the government finally allowed Marcos’s body to be flown from Hawaii to Laoag, three hundred members of both cults were on hand to greet it.
When I visit the Marcos mausoleum in his hometown of Batac, I am met by Teresita, a meek thirty-nine-year-old woman. Dressed all in white, she has been assigned there by the Alpha’s sixty-four-yearold founder, Mama Rose. Mama Rose claims to heal people by communing with Apo Marcos whose corpse is on display. Once the patient tells her what the ailment is, she falls into a trance, relaying the information to Marcos, who then instructs her on a cure. By the mausoleum entrance, Teresita recites what is clearly part of the Alphans’ theology: “While we see his corpse here, he is in communion with Mama Rose. Apo [Father] has instructed her to circle the country thrice before coming to Batac.”
However, many nonbelievers wonder if the corpse in the mau-soleum is the real “Macoy” (the nickname given the strongman by activists during his regime). It bears little resemblance to the dictator who died at the age of seventy-two, his features bloated by illness, medication, and the regrets of a man who wanted to reign forever. Instead, what the faithful and curious see in that dimly lit space is a man who looks to have been in his early—and healthy—forties when he passed away, dressed in traditional attire of Barong Tagalog and dark pants and enshrined in a glass coffin.
Is this simply the embalmer’s art carried to its extreme, the corpse a fake, as most of Marcos’s own official history was? If only this dead mouth could talk! That charm embedded in his back having failed to raise Marcos from the dead, which beautiful princess would be brave and foolhardy enough to wake him with a kiss? Could the platform on which the glass case rests contain the authentic corpse, like some rare hidden slab of beef’? Such a lovely corpse. Why then, on a Sunday afternoon about a year after he died and two years before my visit to Batac, was the casket in which he reposed closed? Curious to see the body the Philippine government wouldn’t allow back into the country, I had gone to visit the place where it was being kept on a two day layover in Honolulu on my way to Manila. Housed in a whitewashed open-ended shed marked with the seal of the Philippine presidency, the casket was draped in the Philippine flag. At one end, an official photograph of a robust Marcos when he was still president hung above the coffin.
A young Filipino couple walked up the steps with me from the road, speaking in hushed tones and walking reverentially around the bier. One of them took out a camera and asked me if I could take a shot of them in front of the casket. Sure, I mumbled. But I wanted to shake them, to pull away the flag from the coffin, to open it and, like Brando talking to his dead wife in Last Tango in Paris, unload some of my own anger at the way Marcos had betrayed his promise and his country.
Instead I spoke briefly to the security guard, a garrulous, middle-aged army veteran and an Ilokano. He spun wild (then again, maybe not so wild) tales of CIA intrigue and deception leading to his hero’s downfall. It was curious, however, for beneath his apparent tone of bitterness could be discerned a note of grudging fascination, even admiration, of how this imaginary-or-not double-cross of a staunch ally had been carried out. Even in his damnation of America there were hints of praise.
Expatriate Ilokanos in Hawaii like him were delighted to have Marcos amongst them, though he and Imelda lived in Makiki Heights, an expensive residential enclave far from such working-class neighborhoods as Kalihi, where the bulk of the Honolulu Ilokanos lived. They or their forebears had immigrated to Hawaii because of the near-impossibility of improving their lives back home, where their fortunes had been circumscribed by a tiny, greedy oligarchy—an oligarchy that Ferdinand, their “favorite son,” had belonged to, and had in the course
