When Richard Fernandez was growing up, Manila was a haunted city:
The scars of the Second World War were still everywhere in evidence. There were shrapnel marks on public benches. Every now and again new construction would unearth a set of skeletons, which was only to be expected in a city that suffered more civilian casualties than either Hiroshima or Nagsaki. The bodies were everywhere. They would never find them all. Not far from where I lived, a group of men from the provinces, believers in some strange occult faith, charged police demanding land reform. They were wearing amulets that they thought conferred immunity to bullets. They were wrong. Thirty three men belonging to the Lapiang Malaya died just down the street. Not that it bothered me.
Anyone who grows up in the Third World is exposed early to the sight of death. I remember finding a man dead early one morning on the street as I was heading off to my fourth grade class. The man had electrocuted himself while trying to steal electric wire. I knocked on the nearest door and asked the householder to call the cops and went straight to school, ate my lunch and went right back home to watch Gunsmoke or something. School itself had a chapel where a plaque marked the spot where 70 people, including 16 German and Italian religious, were bayoneted by the Japanese. It didn’t bother anyone because in our childlike faith, we assumed they were all in heaven, together with the heroes of Bataan and Corregidor. Nobody gave anyone “counseling” back then in the matter of death and dying, and nobody seemed to need it.
As I grew older I decided to find out a little more about the backstory of these Manila mysteries. That eventually led me to visit the remnants of the cults based in Calamba, Laguna and to descend into the “holy” caverns of the mysterious sects which are burrowed into the side of Mt. Banahaw, an extinct volcano, which I did at 3 pm on a Good Friday, naturally. The caverns were lit at intervals by stumps of candles, by whose fitful light you could read as you grasped the guide ropes in tunnels no wider than a couple of feet, the mysterious inscriptions in pig-Latin, decorated with occult symbols. What the inscriptions meant, God only knew. I never divined the tenets of that faith, though I spoke to many a survivor. They spoke in riddles. Maybe they did not know themselves. But whatever their doctrines were it had been it enough to send the Lapiang Malaya charging against the M2 carbines of the police.
Even the Japanese battlegrounds attracted my attention. I would wander in the hills around the area of the Battle of the Dams. While tramping the trails, I met an old farmer who showed me where some unit of Japanese Naval Infantry had been overtaken and killed. I realized that the Japanese unit had been trying to walk 300 miles north over the Sierra Madre range to join with Yamashita, who himself was doomed. Anyone who has tried walking 30 miles in that terrain knows how singularly hopeless effort that must have been. The fact they even tried it filled me with awe and not a little sadness. It left me with renewed respect for the Japanese soldier and the Army dogfaces and Filipino guerillas who ran them to their deaths.
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