and degradation they had suffered was somehow irrelevant. It was enough that he was Ilokano, that he was a powerful man, and that the whole world seemed to be against him, for them to close ranks behind him.
In 1986, when he fled Manila for Honolulu, Ferdinand may not have thought he was flying to Hawaii, but rather to Paoay—an idyllic place in Ilokos Norte—the phonetic similarity further confusing an already confused and depressed man. There, not far from Batac, where he would eventually come home to, he had built a spacious lakeside villa that was soon dubbed Malacañang of the North. It was a simple, lovely place, with well-tended grounds and without the grandiose details that would have signalled the hand of Imelda.
Had Marcos been flown to Paoay instead of Hawaii, he would have been at his mother Doña Josefa’s bedside when she passed away in 1988, a year before he did. Because he wasn’t, she lay unburied, her coffin in the parlor of their home in Batac, visited by the curious and the faithful. The family vowed that she would be interred only when Ferdinand was allowed home. On the streets outside her temporary quarters banners proclaimed her greatness, and the residents’ devotion to her son.
A few months after her son’s demise, a friend and I had hired a car and driver to take us to Doña Josefa’s Batac home, a solid-looking unostentatious residence done in the Antillean style so favored by the bourgeoisie during the Spanish colonial era and still popular among the monied class. At the far end of the ground floor parlor, which opened up into a garden, lay Doña Josefa. A small woman to begin with, she looked even tinier as a corpse. Neat rows of chairs cordoned off one section of the parlor, where a few people sat. They eyed us warily since we were clearly not locals. Our Ilokano driver spoke with one of them briefly, then motioned to us that it was all right to view the body.
As it so happened, the mortician had just come for his regular weekly visit. As we watched, he opened the casket and bent over, retouching Doña Josefa’s makeup swiftly and expertly, as he had been doing already for a year. Finished with his ministrations, he stood aside to let us gaze upon her. The newly applied rouge glistened under the lights, heightening the fact that it had been put on skin that had been powdered and drained of fluids. Not brilliant, but he had done a reasonably good job; it was hard to tell how long she had been dead.
The son, on the other hand, had apparently suffered under the clumsy hand of his embalmer in Hawaii. Scuttlebutt had it that his skin had deteriorated so much that it came off easily when touched. Fueling this view that the sight of Marcos’s corpse would have repulsed viewers was the fact that the casket when it was flown in from Honolulu was shut. No one was allowed to view it until it had been moved to the Batac mauseoleum, and then only after Imelda, the embalmer, and a trusted aide had spent several hours alone with the corpse. By then, a long queue had formed to get a glimpse of the dead man, and visitors were hurried through the dimly lit mausoleum.
It wasn’t impossible then that that trim, fit body on view in Batac could be a wax model. Anyone who has visited Madame Tussaud’s in London can tell you it is often impossible to distinguish between wax and flesh until you come close enough, and even then some uncertainty lingers on. In the right hands, with the right amount of money, such deception wouldn’t be too hard to carry out.
The example of Madame Tussaud’s isn’t just fortuitous. Nearby is a museum, the converted second story of the old Marcos home. There, Marcos memorabilia from his sports gear to the false medals he claimed to have been awarded by the U.S. government are displayed. But what really startle a visitor are the glass cases that contain upright mannequins resembling a healthy looking Marcos—and the Marcos in the mausoleum. Dressed in identical fashion, but sans medals, there are two Ferdinand clusters, one at one end of the room and the other in the middle. The whole undertaking feels brazen; I have no doubt there must be townspeople who feel uneasy about this wholesale mythologizing. But who in Marcos’s hometown would expose the emperor’s nakedness?
This is what it amounts to:
we’ve been bitten off, excised
from the rind of things.
What once gave us pulp
has been chewed off
and pitted—dry.
—Alfrredo Navarro Salanga
from “A Philippine History Lesson”
FEET ON FLOOR BOARDS, FEET SHOD, feet attempting to feel earth, its veins of memory. I tap. Haunting mountains that bisect northern Luzon, the Gran Cordilleras are refulgent, regally indifferent, appraising us coolly: passengers in a bus maneuvering the twists and turns of this dusty, pebble-filled road, a sinuous brown finger tracing this range’s elevated contours. Rice terraces, brimming with water, gleam like giant mirrors, Ifugao villages (sometimes perched improbably up there) bathed in the waning light of a western sky that propels us on. In the monsoon season, when the world turns into water, this road will be impassable. The peaks and precipices deceive, make us believe we are moving past them, but it is the road that pulls us, and the trees, crowding the steep mountainsides to get a glimpse of us, lasso these travelers with their fragrance and emerald beauty.
I hope these mountains, scarred in places, would regard me as one who trod lightly, an inconsequential but friendly breeze. Nationality, ethnicity, history hardly mattered to the landscape, yet it had helped shape a culture, the basis of a collective identity, the highlanders’ identity, that had been around for millennia, that had resisted for centuries the assertions of colonizers, reminding me, a lowlander, a coastal dweller and Manileño, of how my own sense of self often lay inert, inarticulate, in danger of being forgotten.
WAKE UP. STOP THIS BUS. NOW. Bladders speak and, by the roadside, sing their trilling song. Some of my fellow passengers start pointing their cameras and clicking. There on our right, carved from a cliff face some 150 meters away looms the gigantic bust of Ferdinand Marcos, a Mt. Rushmore-like construction. The men take a leak in the bushes, right under the dead dictator’s humongous nose, though his nostrils fail to quiver. The stone face reflects not just every tyrant’s wish to be forever memorialized but the unsettling depth to which personality matters in this archipelago’s social and political landscape, the way it obliterates abstract ideology by embodying the desire for redemption in the solidity of human flesh, in someone seemingly heroic or even godlike.
Carving up this mountain has meant the dislocation of the Ibaloi, one of several tribes collectively known as Igorots who have lived in these mountains for centuries. The Ibaloi’s ancestral spirits, it is said, haunt the area, mourning for a lost kingdom. Dipped in melancholy, these peaks teem with dispossessed souls, a legacy of warfare, of social upheaval. Benedictions passed on, we resume our journey. After we’ve gone a bit further, I see, from a bend in the highway, Marcos somehow looming larger, a grey-shaped gorgon, something like resentment in his eyes.
The bus squeezes through Dalton Pass, which cuts across the Sierra Madre range. Its eroded mountainsides, oozing desolation, resemble a pack of dogs with mange. A year ago, an earthquake origamied this area, crushing vehicles and burying their occupants. These slopes are now their nature-wrought mausoleums, grander and sadder than anything any funerary merchant could have dreamt of. Only flame trees, now in full flower, provide a welcome fugue to the drab, desert colors, red bursts against a searingly blue sky. Their flowers once signaled the start of the headhunting season by the Ilongots, the Igorot tribe indigenous to this area. Or so I had been told as a child, scared by stories of how unwary travellers or campers would be set upon by tribal headhunters and decapitated, the heads carried away as trophies. The Ilongots don’t do much headhunting now, their fierceness of spirit—a spirit that once matched and revered that of the mountains—now much diminished.
The bus roars through small towns, corrugated iron roofs glinting in the sun, dogs lolling about on the road, barely getting
