The Eye Of The Fish. Luis H. Francia
Government officials were underpaid too, and illegal enterprises like these were a sure source of income.
Vigan isn’t the best place in the Philippines for paltiks. Danao, a city on the southern island of Cebu, is. According to Carlos, the yakuza shop in Danao then smuggles the guns to Japan. I had always heard that paltiks were more dangerous to the wielder than to the potential victim; not surprisingly Carlos and his boss say that they still haven’t had any accidents, test-firing each gun as it is finished. Carlos shows me the .38 he carries. Compact, cold, and hard against my palm, an inert thing capable of rendering someone history, symbolizing perfectly the way in which the present relentlessly bludgeons the past. And vice versa.
NATURE HAS BEEN GENEROUS WITH SAGADA, a town deeper into the Cordilleras and northeast of both Baguio and Vigan, endowing it with an almost preternatural beauty: pine groves, rice terraces, waterfalls, an underground river, and burial caves, where, until Christian rites took over, the dead were placed in pinewood coffins and interred in crevices high up in cave ceilings. Strikingly unusual limestone formations, with their grasses, lichens, and shrubs, dot the town’s landscape like primeval cairns, though a beautiful huge limestone rock that had served to mark the entrance to the town has been blown up by a property owner who proceeded to erect an ugly concrete building—a profane blot on the landscape—in its place. Once a turn-of-the-century Protestant missionary outpost, Sagada, from all accounts, has always been a fairly tolerant, fairly prosperous, tightly knit community of Kankanai, an Igorot tribe, one that continues to rely on the land and on small businesses to get by.
Whenever they talked about Sagada, friends in Manila would always mention Scottie, otherwise known as William Henry Scott. Scottie was a transplanted Yankee who had lived in Sagada since the 1950s, when he had come as an Episcopalian lay missionary to teach at St. Mary’s. Once described as “a Filipino nationalist with white skin,” Scottie was known and respected for his scholarship on Filipino life, particularly during the Spanish colonial era. His books were written with the fluidity of a good storyteller. He could, however, be curmudgeonly when questioned about his ideas, as I found out on more than one occasion. He had grown comfortable with his reputation both as a scholar and as one of the town’s eminences grises, and I suppose he expected a churchy reverence from the younger generation. Nor had the missionary persona—seemingly benign, but proselytizing and even patronizing at times—ever left him: It was there in his pronouncements, though by the time I met him, a bit subdued.
Decades of living in Sagada had tempered his irascibility, had softened that New England fondness for moralizing. And yet I couldn’t help but think that underneath every white man living in such felicitous circumstances of high regard, of totemistic status, was a nascent Kurtz who saw himself as a sacrosanct redeemer, and sometimes, as in Scottie’s case, as one of the redeemed as well. For surely in his nationalist emphasis on the primacy of the Cordilleran voice, as separate from the Western overlap brought over by American missionaries and teachers, he was helping to unearth what had been buried, covered over, at times obliterated, by Christianity. If Christianity were a foreign spear that had pierced these mountains, Scottie himself had been a spear carrier, had helped in the scarring. So his scholarship could be viewed as evidence of a conversion and an atonement.
One morning, Scottie and I are having beers at an inn. Through its picture window, we can see St. Mary’s, an Episcopalian church, and hear the prayers of the congregation. Scottie lives with his adopted family behind a pine grove, just below the church where he plays the organ during Sunday services. The resident cat comes by, ignores Scottie, and leaps onto my lap. “She’s always being unfaith-ful,” complains Scottie. “If no one else is around, then she’ll come to me—especially if I’m eating chocolate cake!” Today, Scottie is in a playfully inventive mood and tells me gleefuly of a movie he’s think-ing of writing: set in Sagada, it is about two lovers, visitors in the midst of a stormy relationship. The town and its various characters form the backdrop. In the end, of course, Sagada and Sagadans wind up as the real story. Or rather, the real story is the love between the old man and the town.
A year after our afternoon tête-a-tête, Scottie passes away in Manila, accidentally infected after routine surgery for the removal of gallstones. His body is brought up to Sagada during a heavy downpour and interred in the cemetery adjacent to St. Mary’s. Most of Sagada is there, as it had been once before in the 1970s to cheer Scottie’s return after he had been detained in Manila by the Marcos regime for supposedly filling up young people’s heads with subversive notions. That detention solidified the bond between Scottie and Sagadans, confirming that even a white man was worthy of salvation. In Sagada, Scottie had found his home, a place where he could not be refused. No one has said so, but I suspect a certain cat came to the cemetery the day of the burial and rubbed itself on Scottie’s tombstone after everyone had left.
Given its remoteness and beauty, it is easy to think of Sagada as some kind of Shangri-La, a place spared the usually destructive hand of modernity. (This was one reason Scottie decided to stay rather than to return to the daunting winters of New England, where he had grown up.) But there are also obvious reminders that it remains caught up in, if not on center stage of the conflict between the government—here viewed with indifference at best—and the communist New People’s Army. The latter has been a presence in the Cordilleras since the beginning of the 1970s, having found natural allies in the ruggedness and the highlanders’ own distrust of the central government.
In Sagada itself, this deadly conflict usually seemed distant, a war that was taking place elsewhere. Sometimes, however, the violent face of the conflict would emerge in the form of trickster spirits belonging to the NPA and to government troops. Because the Philippine army had long suspected Sagada and its surrounding areas as being hotbeds of guerrilla activity—a charge that the village elders denied—an infantry battalion moved in in the early 1990s and occupied the municipal building without so much as a by-your-leave. The military was in Sagada because of an age-old frustration with highlander resistance to lowland ways, inevitably portrayed as emblems of “progress.” Highlanders were seen as primitive, from the boondocks (from bundok, the Tagalog word for mountain).
The regional guerrilla outfit took the army’s presence as a provo-cation, and soon guerrillas and government troops were clashing in the town market and in outlying areas. The ensuing deaths of three village youths, all bystanders, saddened and infuriated the townspeople. The clash also revealed ideological fault lines: a few came out in support of the government, though the locale hardly encouraged it, but most of the Sagadans simply wanted to be left alone. The villagers subsequently negotiated for a “zone of peace” under which their town was to be neutral territory. Combatants from both sides could come in, provided they did so without their weapons. The guerrillas agreed to the arrangement, but the military balked at the idea, hardline officers arguing that only the guerrillas would benefit from such an arrangement, as they could then organize freely. The army’s enduring suspicion was that the town was a hotbed of guerrilla activity. As a compromise, the army agreed to move out, but chose to encamp on a hill close by, still a visible presence.
Sagada’s vice mayor at the time of my visit, Tom Killip, was a stocky, droll fellow and had been active in promoting the idea of a peace zone. Later the town’s mayor, he would often meet with his constituents on the streets rather than at the municipal hall. Tom was bothered by the fact that the datelines of news stories concerning counterinsurgency operations in this part of the Cordilleras always named Sagada, even if the town had been quite a distance from wherever the conflict had occurred. In this respect, the fact that Sagada was better known than the surrounding towns was to its disadvantage. When, for instance, the army claimed to have captured an important NPA camp on Mt. Sisipitan, which they described as the site of the guerrilla army’s regional headquarters, all the news reports, mostly based on army accounts, identified Sagada as being the location of the camp itself.
Killip laughed dryly at the idea that a small town like Sagada, with a population of about fifteen thousand, could contain a mountain as huge and rugged as Sisipitan. Around the mountain’s base were at least three other municipalities. One of them, Bontoc, about an hour’s drive away, was larger than Sagada, and the capital of the adjacent province, Ifugao, yet it rarely figured in news accounts. The mountain is so remote from the town, he said, that