NEWSFLASH

SAMAR OF '02

Tacloban City, February 17, 2002 (STAR) by Butch Dalisay - I knew that we weren’t driving into Tokyo or Singapore when my cellphone signal gave out shortly after we crossed San Juanico Bridge from Tacloban and entered Samar. I hadn’t been there in 20 years, but nothing much seemed to have changed, except the roads, which were as smooth as anything you can find in Malaysia or Japan. The last time I was in Tacloban, it was stormy as hell, and the light plane that took off ahead of us never reached Manila; we had chatted with its passengers, and so were the last to see them alive.

Now once again we were in Leyte-Samar, on a mission to make some cinematic sense of even more distant and certainly not accidental deaths. I was with film director Gil Portes and production manager Peping Almojuela to visit Balangiga on the coast of Eastern Samar, facing Leyte Gulf. It’s one of those places, like Gettysburg and Verdun, made forever famous by the carnage of war.

More than 100 years ago, on Sept. 28, 1901, 74 American soldiers died in Balangiga at the hands of several hundred Filipino rebels, who lost 50 of their own number on the spot; when the Americans took their revenge, cutting a swath of fire and destruction across the island, many thousands more Filipinos died. Samar was turned – in the words and by the orders of Gen. Jacob Smith – into a "howling wilderness."

The few people – Filipinos and Americans alike – who know anything about the Filipino-American War have taken to calling that event the "Balangiga Massacre," perhaps unwittingly assuming the American view. Today, the people of Balangiga themselves prefer to call it the "Balangiga Encounter," which they re-enact every Sept. 28.

This was the challenge and the burden Gil and I had taken on: transforming the Balangiga Encounter into a movie. It’s been done before – Joey Gosienfiao directed Sunugin ang Samar a long while back – but we wanted to do a more factual, semi-documentary version keen to the temper and the rhetoric of these Balikatan times and to the clamor for the return of the three Balangiga church bells carted home by the Yanks as trophies of war and now on display in Wyoming and Korea.

But first we had to see Balangiga itself. On the way there Tony briefed us on the realities of Leyteño politics circa 2002. He had refused to vote a junior Romualdez into Congress, he said, because "he used rubbing alcohol when he shook our hands"; still, he would vote for Imelda Marcos anytime, anywhere, and was certain she would win hands-down. We talked about safer subjects, like food. "There are no restaurants in Balangiga," he told us helpfully.

As it turned out, there were two or three carinderias, and one lodging house whose last visitors, according to the guestbook, had come a month before. The town itself was as typically Filipino as towns can get: a plaza by the national highway with the church and the municipal hall taking the measure of each other across the lawn, and the elementary school and camposanto within spitting distance. The river led to the sea, and the beach was fringed by slender coconut trees. The church looked freshly painted in creamy yellow; a new belfry had been built in anticipation of the return of the three bells in time for the 1998 Centennial, but they never came.

We made immediately for St. Anthony’s Lodging House, which doubled as a snack bar and videoke lounge on busier days. Its proprietor, councilor Tony Baldenor, was up on business in the mountains when we arrived, so we had to cajole the girl he had left in charge to give us rooms, of which there were, unsurprisingly, plenty. Each room cost P75 a night, and could sleep three people in a bunk and a folding bed; we decided to splurge, and gave ourselves a room each.

Balangiga a century after its trademark event has a population of around 11,000, and it seems quiet, even mildly prosperous, with dust rising constantly from all the concreting being done to its streets. Most of the houses are old, with thatch roofs and walls of blistered, unpainted wood. There is no moviehouse, although we espied a VCR in Brgy. 6 screening Yamashita, presumably for paying customers.

* * * Visual artists – especially the more quiet and less popular ones – don’t get noticed in the press often enough, which is why it’s a pleasure for me to invite you to view the work of an extremely fine painter, one of our best and yet perhaps most underrated. His name is Nestor G. Leynes, and he turns 80 later this month.

Leynes’s work has been described as "super-realist" and "magic realist," and you’ll understand why when you view his paintings, which infuse the genre of what’s been called "local color" with a distinct vitality and certainly with the kind of application and care that you just don’t see too much of these days. If you’ve been spoiled by modern art and think that painting is easy, study Leynes and think again.

From doing sketches of American GI’s after the war for P5 per portrait, Leynes moved on to assisting Vicente Manansala on the latter’s murals and to making a name for himself as a painter and as an advertising man, spending many of his years at J. Walter Thompson. He left JWT in 1980 and went full-time into painting. His second one-man show at the Philippine Plaza in 1984 was sold out.

On Feb. 22, at 6 p.m., we get the chance to encounter Nestor G. Leynes and his lifetime’s work in an 80th birthday restrospective exhibit, opening at the RCBC Plaza on Ayala Avenue in Makati. See you there! * * * Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com..