Goodbye, Superboy: a Fond Farewell to the Last Romantic Essay

MANILA, August 21, 2003 (STAR) BY THE WAY By Max V. Soliven – Much has been written about Ninoy Aquino, whose name needs no introduction to many of our readers. Commuters pass by his statue daily on Ayala Avenue in Makati’s Golden Mile, and another monument to him in Manila. But monuments and statues, and glowing encomiums do not a hero make. But my thesis is that today, Ninoy is a forgotten hero. There was so much hype in the first halcyon years after the overthrow of the tyrant Ferdinand E. Marcos, and too many silly celebrations, with excessive hoopla, of each succeeding anniversary of the EDSA â€Å"people power† revolution (and then an EDSA II, and, sanamagan, even an EDSA III so-called) that the man whose heroism and sacrifice inspired not merely the first people power barricades, but a national upsurge I prefer to call â€Å"The Spirit of 1986† has been forgotten. These days, in fact, the Filipino spirit has been dampened, our self-confidence crushe d under the weight of each revealed inequity, and tales of resurgent corruption, graft, vaulting ambition — plus the disgraceful debacle of a contrived escape of the Jemaah Islamiyah mad-bomber, Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi, from police â€Å"prison.† This is a time for us to remember a man who believed the Filipino was â€Å"worth dying for,† and from him gather the renewed resolve that the Filipino is worth living for, as well. But let us not sound maudlin. Ninoy would have laughed at such sticky sentimentality. When he was sent by the old Manila Times to cover the Korean War (the 50th anniversary of whose conclusion was just commemorated some weeks ago) he was 17, the youngest correspondent of them all. The Time’s editors Dave Boguslav and Joe Bautista had spotted that gung ho quality in Aquino that was to rocket him to fame — and, in the end, impel him remorselessly to his final rendezvous with treachery at the Manila International Airport. Ninoy was a hard-nosed newspaperman, and what set him apart from so many others was precisely his nose for the news. He had an eidetic memory for facts, figures and detail. â€Å"You get the facts,† Dave Boguslav told him when he sent him off to war, â€Å"and I ’ll take care of the grammar.† Ninoy delivered — and a star reporter was born. Ninoy paid his dues as newsman. He took risks where others preferred to be prudent. For him life was a great adventure — and a short and glorious life better than a long and dull one. God granted him his wish. Everyone has already written a torrent of words about how Ninoy had been a Young Man in a Hurry. He became the youngest town mayor — just a shade underage; the youngest deputy governor, then governor, the youngest Senator (he almost topped the polls, coming in slightly behind late his comprobinsyano, Tarlac’s elder Sen. Jose J. Roy). If a free election had been held in 1973 (but martial law intervened and dashed that prospect), Ninoy — whose only rival in his own Liberal Party was the late Senate President Gerry Roxas — would almost certainly have been elected president. Aquino had that golden tongue to which every politician aspires, but with which only a few are gifted. It goes beyond rhetoric or eloquence on the entablado: a strange power to move hearts, provoke laughter, attract loyalty and affection, whip a crowd up to a frenzy and the fervor of a crusade, inspire hope in listeners miserably perched in the brink of despair. Ninoy was so eloquent in English, Tagalog, Kapampangan, and even Ilocano (his native Tarlac, after all, is a province of three dialects) that he was accused of glibness. He was dubbed â€Å"Superboy,† partly in admiration, party in derision. It took martial law and cruel imprisonment to make us realize that the Boy had become a Man. By a quirk of fate, I was assigned to be his cellmate in the maximum security compound of Fort Bonifacio when we were arrested as â€Å"subversives† in September 1972. Out of the 400 prisoners crammed into the Camp Crame gym, after we had been picked up between midnight and dawn, 11 of us were singled out by name and told by a colonel to step forward. Ninoy had nudged me cheerfully in the ribs and exclaimed in a stage whisper, â€Å"Eto na, eto na! Firing squad na tayo.† (This is it, this is it. We’re going to the Firing Squad). Yet, they didn’t shoot us. They trucked us instead to Fort Bonifacio, where they sent a military chaplain to hear our confessions — thus reinforcing our conviction that we were to be executed. Once more, we were disappointed. All throughout, it was Ninoy, who surely realized he was the number one target, Marcos’ favorite bete noir, the dictator’s pet nemesis, tried to cheer us all up. The days of captivity stretched into weeks, the weeks into months. Nobody who has never been in prison can understand what you suffer from is simply being caged — you suffer from the uncertainty of it all, and from boredom. You never know when your military jailors, who have the power of life and death over you, will drag you out and shoot you, at any hour of day or night. Afte r a while, the world outside becomes a memory — you begin to forget that there are streets with people and vehicles in them, and noise, and hustle and bustle, and bright colors and pretty girls. One gray day follows the other and you learn to live from one day to the next. Yet, I wasn’t bored, because I had Ninoy to entertain me. We talked, we read. We swapped ideas, jokes, argued ideologies. We dreamed dreams. We went jogging during the exercise hour and steeled ourselves to run a mile in seven minutes. It was then that I realized that Ninoy Aquino, for all his wit, his air of bright cynicism, and his veneer of tough political pragmatism, was an incurable romantic. He had visions of the Filipino rising up to overthrow any tyranny. He had pinned his hopes on the Filipino’s love of freedom and his will to resist either coercion or seduction. He had faith in the Filipino. At nightfall, the soldiers — many of them Ilocanos — would come to our barracks-prison and Ninoy would regale them with stories of the Korean War. Or the Vietnam War, which we had both covered. We would talk of the Huk campaign, which we also had covered. Ninoy’s spellbinding recollections were so mesmerizing that after a week or so I had warned him: â€Å"Watch out brod. You will soon be accused of conducting teach-ins. Those guards are beginning to like us too much.† Sure enough, after three weeks, we found a notice on our bulletin board. The guards had all been replaced. The notice said: â€Å"Our guests (yep, that’s what they called us at the â€Å"Bonifacio Hilton†) are requested not to talk to the guards who have been ordered not to talk to them.† â€Å"You see, you see,† I chided Ninoy. â€Å"Those poor fellows have been sent to the battlefront in Mindanao, just because they laughed at your jokes!† When this writer and the rest of us were released, Ninoy and the late Pepe Diokno were left behind, but in separate barracks. Ninoy spent seven years and seven months in solitary confinement. On the front page you’ll find a photograph of the two of us arm in arm with each other. This was taken when he was allowed home at last — under heavy guard — for a brief â€Å"Christmas leave† after seven years in jail. We hugged each other at the entrance of his Times Street home in Quezon City: â€Å"Max, Max,† he laughed. â€Å"How right you were. I thought I would be out in six months or a year because the people would demand for my freedom, but you were the one who told me to dig in for the long haul — I remember you said from five years to 10 years. But you know, prison has been good for me. I have had time to think, to read, to formulate my ideology, to find God. What is ambition? It’s nothing. I have put all ambition away — all we must fight for is for our people to be happy, and to be free.† We talked about proposing a formula for a return to free elections to Marcos. He had written Marcos a letter, he said, suggesting national reconciliation. Everybody knows the rest. Aquino, after his two-week furlough, went back to his lonely prison. He suffered a heart attack. Worried about international reaction, particularly the reproof of the American government (although President Ronald Reagan and Nancy were good friends of Macoy and Imelda) they let Ninoy go off to Texas, and exile, for an emergency heart operation. We warned him not to return. I told him, â€Å"They will kill you.† But on Aug. 21, 1983, a Sunday, he came home to die in his own country. In a last interview with Radio Veritas, Aquino had declared: â€Å"Kamatayan lamang ang makapipigil sa akin (Only death could stop me from coming home).† Most politicians bet on a sure thing. Ninoy gambled on the goodness and sense of decency of the Filipino. A pragmatist would have kept himself safely in the United States preserving his life â€Å"until a better day.† But Ninoy was a romantic who believed that promises must be kept, pledges must be redeemed, and death — if awaited him — must be faced in order to show the people that there are things more important than life. When he died, I penned an adieu entitled: â€Å"Goodbye, Superboy! A Fond Farewell to the Last Romantic.† Thus the title of this piece. Yet, I hope Ninoy was not the last romantic — for such romantics are what we desperately need in these painful days of harsh and bitter realities. Someone once said that it is far better to soar with the eagles, braving the hunter’s gun, than to scratch on the ground with the chickens. The hunter’s gun finally found Ninoy Aquino at the airport which now bears his name. His spirit was freed to soar among the stars. I am proud to have known him. To have been touched by him. To remember him now.