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IF
history is like Neruda’s awaiting for a “symmetrical
time beyond measure—el tiempo uniforme, sin medida...,”
then Baler and its stories of gallant Spanish soldiers
defending a church, a territory sacred, must be a site
of facts and fictions rolled into one historical volume.
Baler is a place anticipating a thick description. It is
a book longing to be read, a story at the edge of the
cinematic sea.
The
Siege of Baler is also a strange story. Based upon
recollections and documents on the side of the Spanish,
and on memories and notes from Filipinos, the story of
bravery and resoluteness and patriotism on both sides
could have been pathetic vignettes for a nation about to
lose its grip on the world and a town threatening to
become a capital of insurrection. And yet, Baler would
soon become the place for a last stand for Spain in the
Philippines. The Spanish soldiers inside the church, who
were mostly campesinos, or peasants, would hold on and
on not believing that the war had ended, and that they
were gazing at the waning days of a once mighty empire.
Strangely enough, this strangely fantastic tale is not
well known in the Philippines. In Spain a film and a
popular book about the historical book have been made.
Los Ultimos the Filipinas is a film student’s
treasure as it contains the Spanish imagination of the
Philippines. But now, Baler is once more the site of a
stand, not the last but the first. Lt. Saturnino Martin-Cerezo,
the commander of the group, wrote Under the Red and
Gold: Being Notes of the Siege of Baler. Now, a
documentary called the Returning to the Siege of
Baler by Jose Angel Valbuena Garcia may be mainly
responsible for this resurgence of interest in this town
that is noted for its isolation more than its connection
to the outside world. Garcia happens to be a grandson
and direct descendant of Pvt. Jesus Garcia Querijero,
one of the survivors of the siege.
Respecting memories and possessing a massive dose of
love for the exotic past, Garcia goes back and forth
between Spain and the Philippines. It is a journey
between the histories written by colonizers and the new
stories being crafted by the inhabitants of this
island-republic. In this space, however, there are some
things that have remained unchanged, like calling the
Filipinos rebels and the quest for independence of the
Katipuneros an insurrection.
There
were survivors: 33 men, dejected and mostly bitter, if
we are to believe the remembrances of their great-great
grandchildren. As accounts go, the soldiers eventually
sent messages that they were surrendering. As stories
go, the people outside the church did not punish them;
the townspeople were there outside calling them amigos.
If this ending were a film, many viewers would soon have
called it unrealistic. But it did happen.
A
different kind of realism was waiting for them Spanish
soldiers in Spain. It was a country that did not honor
them enough. The pensions given to them were said to be
measly. This is where the documentary’s critical
function should be appreciated. This is the current
value of the film.
Garcia,
the documentarist, will perhaps agree that there is more
to cut out of Returning to the Siege in Baler.
There is so much “deconstruction” happening when right
now the duty of a filmmaker is to make a terrific
construction first of those twilight days of an empire
happening in a town that is bounded by the ocean and the
thickest of forests. The scenes of the schoolchildren
reenacting the siege while convincing us that the town
has remained faithful to the remembering of the event
are tedious. Retelling the colonization tale against the
backdrop of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, some scenes
of which were shot in Baler in the late ’70s, and the
fusing of cinema and history is a source of great
discomfort rather than articulation. Baler is not about
the heart of darkness but more of a triumph of hearts in
the darkness of colonization.
Historians may say we have enough of the Spanish
perspective and that our histories had always been
written from the perspective of the colonizers and yet
the documentary brings us into the Spanish views from
below. This is rare.
The
documentary moves away from the answers of the
government then and into the questions of the kin of the
“Ultimos.” There are many pieces of information that are
new, like how the impoverished Spanish male of the 1800s
could escape military enlistment if he had enough
pesetas to give the state. As a result, those men holed
in the church were those who did not have enough money
to avoid being sent to some distant tropical jungle.
The
director of the documentary describes it as an
“unfinished business.” In the screening of the film at
the Instituto Cervantes Manila, Garcia and Jose Ignacio
Bidon talked about the many projects they were working
on that would link further Baler and the descendants of
the soldiers in Spain. Bidon is the grandson of Dr.
Rogelio Vigilde Quiñones, doctor of detachment during
the Baler siege. Bidon was recently named consul of the
Philippines in Sevilla. He also formed a football
cooperation program between Andalucia and the Philippine
Football Federation, and is working on fostering a
relationship between the University of Santo Tomas and
the University of Sevilla.
Garcia
and Bidon were declared as Baler’s adopted sons in
ceremonies marking the 109th anniversary of the siege.
The day marked also the sixth anniversary of
Philippine-Spanish Friendship Day, which is observed on
the 30th of June of every year since 2003 courtesy of
Republic Act 9187, authored by Sen. Edgardo Angara and
Rep. Juan Edgardo Angara.
In Spain
many descendants have expressed their desire to visit
Baler. In Spain, too, markers have been erected for the
57 soldiers to rectify a country’s amnesia.
The
filmmaker said there would be a second part to this
documentary. Already, a Filipino group is preparing its
own version of the siege. It can be a romance. It can be
fact and fiction. Interestingly, Dr. Jaime Veneracion,
the historian, asks for the widening of perspective
because data and documents are indicating that Filipinos
who participated in the siege were not mainly from
Baler. Soldiers from San Miguel, Bulacan, were also
there in those 333 days.
The
suggestion of the historian will not diminish Baler. It
will enshrine, in fact, the small town in our histories
and in the histories of another nation. From there, we
will learn once more what one Spanish descendant called
a quijotada, a tradition of idealism and valor of
the highest kind not unknown to both the Filipino and
Spanish people. |
