“Time is an eraser leaving the board of consciousness blank. Only chalk marks of thought and feeling remain…Stories and poems are their maker…They are what he thought and felt when he crafted them.” — Teodoro M. Locsin, Trial & Error [Preface].
I wasn’t much of a reader then. But our house would have reading materials such as books and newspapers available for me to read whenever I had the desire to read them. Once in a while we would have a copy of the Philippines Free Press, the country’s leading weekly magazine in pre-Martial Law years. I would attempt reading the articles without so much understanding but I could sense that the writings were of excellent quality. Fast forward to the present and sitting on my library is a book by Teodoro M. Locsin, the publisher and editor-in-chief of the Philippines Free Press, entitled Trial & Error [1994]. I decided this time to make an effort in experiencing and enjoying Locsin’s writings.
The book contains 29 short stories and 50 poems. It starts off with a wartime story, A Matter of Necessity, during the Japanese Occupation. The narrator of the story killed a sentry and set fire of the village comprising of fifty families. Prior to the burning of the village, Japanese soldiers were observed to have stayed overnight. Afraid that the village would be set up as a Japanese garrison which would be close to the guerillas’ supply route, the narrator was ordered by his commanding officer to eliminate the problem. The narrator was conflicted and had to justify his actions as necessary as the cost of war, especially when he was confronted by the headman of the village. “But where shall we live?” the headman asked. The narrator answered “I do not know. I have only my orders.” The headman continued “What will happen to us when it rains and we do not have a roof over our heads?” The narrator brusquely answered “We all have our problems. If the Japanese catch us, we are dead. Worse than that, we are first tortured, to get information, then death, which comes as a mercy. You have the cold and the rain. Go to your relatives in the other villages. You could live with them. They would not deny you shelter.” The headman defiantly responded, “They are as poor as we are and there is hardly room in their homes for themselves. We are all so poor we cannot help others. If we tried to, we would not survive. You have seen how many of our women do not even have enough clothing to cover their breasts. Even the young ones. You can imagine their shame. And now you will set our homes on fire.”
Those biting words from the headman sealed his fate. The narrator decided to kill him. “There was no other way, he would later argue with himself. The enemy was near and it was necessary to dispose of the man. The work must not be imperilled that had taken so much to start and keep going; the station must be made secure. The man had to be killed. Anybody could see that.” Locsin ended the story with this beautiful phrasing “The dead man’s blood would flow downstream, the body lagging behind, and though diluted in the endless flow of water, though no longer discernible, would, he knew, stain all the land.”
The cruel reality of war brings a lot of personal and psychological challenges. Locsin confronted some of these issues in his other wartime stories.
In The Eyes of Love, the protagonist was justifying his collaboration with the enemy: “You may think it sweet and proper, when you are young, to die for your country; when you are older, you know better…Let others die for their country, if it is in their temperament to do so, regardless of the cost of those who love them; let them indulge in the mindless orgy of patriotism, he had his family to think of and would live for them.”
In The Traitor, how long would a man endure torture before he would betray his countrymen? Four men were in a boat on a dangerous mission of delivering time bombs inside tin cans. They were discussing the possibility of being caught and then tortured for information. One of them realistically and ghastly described the situation: “I wonder how those men feel whom they starve to death for refusing to talk, to give information. What do they think about while they die slowly from hunger in their cells? The starving have been known to fight savagely for food, like wild animals, to eat the bodies of their companions whom they had killed in their frenzy to survive. Now, all they have to do to stop the pain of hunger is talk, just a few words to lead the enemy to where their comrades are. After all, in their places, what guarantee is there that the others would not do the same, would not betray? It is always the ones who are caught who must carry the burden of the resistance, who must suffer for all, while the rest go free and think of nothing of the price with which their freedom is paid for. If I were caught…”
Leadership was the gist of the story in the Leader of Men. How should a true leader be like during the war? The person in command answered he wanted to be a dictator: “Dictatorship is simple. You give the order and it is done. No debate. If your heart is in the right place and the results are good, you are called the father of your people. The people are like children who do not know what is best for them; they need an older man, an experienced hand, and a disciplined mind, to tell them what to do. And if all power is vested in you, there are no problems except floods, earthquakes and an insurrection. These can be controlled or their effects minimized.”
So many Filipino dramatic movies have plot lines involving love frictions because of social status. Locsin was well familiar with them. In The Body of Love, Margarita was the youngest and favoured child of Don Pedro, a wealthy landowner. Yet she preferred to love a poor, young lawyer. As expected, Don Pedro intervened and offered the young man a better job with a big law firm in Manila. “I will be frank with you, Margarita, and brief,” Don Pedro said. “If you love me as I love you, give up this young man, who is only after your money, or I will leave you poor. Then you will know how much, truly, he loves you.” After a year of feeling heartbroken, Margarita died and buried with a simple slab of stone in a family plot in the cemetery outside the town. Don Pedro followed her after six years. That should be the end of the story. But with a twist, Locsin continued with a miracle story line. After five years, the living children of Don Pedro decided to bring the two bodies together in a common sepulchre. Don Pedro’s body was in a bad state while Margarita’s was preserved perfectly even though she was not embalmed. Margarita’s body was taken to the church in order for the whole country to see the miracle. In a country where superstitions ran rampant, Margarita’s body became a religious object of God’s blessings. As the crowd passed by in single line, they touched or rubbed her glass coffin hoping for a miracle to come to their lives as well. Later on, Margarita’s body was turning black and emitting awful smell. It was found out she died of tuberculosis. People now considered the miracle as the work of the devil instead. Locsin ended the story with these lines: “Thus, the marvelously preserved, the uncorrupted body of love, delivered to the designs, of men, had changed, had decomposed. In the end, it poisoned the very air one breathed.”
Men’s twisted and narrow view of sex with prostitutes was highlighted in this brief story, Sentiment. I quoted verbatim the conversation between the man and the woman after their sex was consummated:
“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me, do you have to do this?”
“Do what?”
“This.”
“Do you have to?” he insisted.
“What difference does it make to you if I have to or not? You had your money’s worth.”
“Do you like it?”
“What do you think?”
“Who did it to you the first time?”
“All right, I’ll tell you. I get so tired of it. It’s always the same. The same question. It never fails. Who did it to you the first time? Please tell me! How did you feel? I am not naked enough, I’ve got to take off more. What do you get out of it, being told? Does it excite you?
“What’s the difference between the first, second, the third—the hundredth time? Do you really enjoy yourselves more? It’s all in your head. You don’t make love to a woman with your body, you make love with your mind. You are all perverts.”
Poems invoke emotions in few words and symbols which make them difficult to understand sometimes. But they are powerful enough to open our hearts and minds to their meanings. In Definitions, for example, Locsin described God as follows: “What is God?/The saints know Him,/I know Him only through His absence,/Holding an endless dialogue/With One who does not answer/Asking what to do to be saved,/Knowing there is no salvation./What is God?/The last question,/The ultimate longing.”
23 July 2025