|
Fort Santiago
MY FIRST MEMORY OF FORT SANTIAGO DATES back to my grade-school
days when our teachers dumped us in the place and escaped
for lunch and gossip. Left to fend for ourselves, we hurriedly
ate our pack lunches and explored the place. We were not given
any historical background before or during the field trip,
so we walked aimlessly about, and that is probably why the
trip is memorable.
We did not need a history lesson to know the place was old;
we could see that. Fort Santiago was simply a teaching aid
that was bigger than life, allowing us to experience the interiors
of the musty presidential limousines then displayed in one
of the vaulted structures. We watched couples making out in
the bushes, and last but not least, we visited the Rizal Shrine,
where the national hero was imprisoned before his execution
in Bagumbayan on Dec. 30, 1896.
It was here where I met my first Rizalista. My students write
papers on them today, they are the subject of academic study
and doctoral dissertations, but meeting a Rizalista as a child
has its own charm. A classmate and I saw an old man praying
outside Rizal's cell. We peeked behind his back and saw Rizal's
wax likeness, frozen in time, writing what everyone presumes
is his "Ultimo Adios" with a quill. (Quills were
not used in Rizal's time; he used a metal-tipped pen. Quills
were passé for over a century before Rizal's time,
but heck its part of Rizal iconography now. Just look at all
those monuments showing him holding a quill.)
There was another anachronism there. The old man turned to us,
pointed to the ceiling and asked the great philosophical question,
"Bakit may ventilador sa selda ni Rizal?" Then as
now, I was critical and answered that there were no electric
fans in Rizal's time.
Not satisfied with my commonsense answer, the man repeated
the question, and my classmate, Kenneth Ferrer (now deceased),
provided an alternative answer, "Siguro naiinitan!"
To my surprise, the man did not get upset with this smart-ass
answer and even followed up his question with another, "Bakit
naiinitan?" My classmate replied, "Naka-Americana
kasi."
I was dumbfounded, but more was to come as the old man explained
that Rizal needed the fan because he was alive. Our hero was
actually living in quiet retirement on Mt. Banahaw. I tugged
my friend's shirt and prepared to run away, but stayed a while
longer when the man flashed the numerous laminated photographs
of Rizal hanging by a string around his neck. Of these pictures,
one is imprinted in my memory: that of Rizal standing in the
clouds holding two books and in the fond embrace of a severe
old man with a beard, Jesus Christ carrying a cross watches
on the side, and the Holy Spirit, as a dove, spreading rays
of light over everyone.
Wow! Rizal and the Holy Trinity. Then came the prophecy:
Rizal savior of the Philippines will return at the end of
time, when seven moons appear in the heavens and cover the
face of the earth with red light. Then seven suns will rise
to dispel the darkness and signal the coming of a new age.
Forty years later, I'm still waiting for all this to happen.
I would return to Fort Santiago when I was in college. The
late Doreen Fernandez introduced us to Peta performances in
the open-air Rajah Sulayman Theater near the Rizal Shrine.
It was then that I realized that Fort Santiago was literally
built over Soliman's palisades, when the Spaniards took over
in the 16th-century and drove the valiant Filipinos across
the Pasig and made them vassals in their own land. No wonder
some rabid UP professors once proposed that an archaeological
survey be conducted here to find the remains of Soliman's
city: Maynila (not May nilad).
It was a good idea and an attempt to rewrite history from
a Filipino viewpoint, pushing knowledge past the founding
of Spanish Manila to an earlier time. The underside to this
was that Fort Santiago would be sacrificed to find something
that might not even be there. So much for the re-writing of
Philippine history.
Excavations were undertaken in the Fort in the mid-1980s
not so much to find Soliman's palisades but in the hopes of
finding Yamashita's fabled treasure. To date there has been
no official report on those diggings in Fort Santiago. All
we are told is that the extensive excavation weakened the
foundations of the building behind the Rizal Shrine and Rajah
Sulayman Theater that has been closed to visitors since.
An article in the December 1932 issue of the Philippine Magazine
by Martha Oliver Daugherty tells us about "The romance
of Living in Old Fort Santiago." She was one of the family
members of the 13 young American officers who lived there
at the time and she described both the romance of history
and the everyday concerns (and fears) of living in the Fort.
She wasn't worried about the ghost of Spanish Governor General
Bustamante who had been murdered by a mob led by friars. She
was more scared of the snakes in their homes, which were tolerated
because they fed on rats and other household rodents. She
described the old walls and tunnels, the famous gate and the
irritating chatter of magpies on the almond trees. She retold
stories about water dungeons that drowned prisoners when the
tide was high.
All the stories about Fort Santiago were already current
in 1932. When do we start to separate fact from fiction?
Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu
Copyright 2005 Inquirer. All rights reserved. This
material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
|
Looking Back
