Under a Tropical Sun

By Pasky Pascual

On a moonlit evening in 1951, three American Navy men are beheaded on a Philippine beach. The CIA suspects the elusive Pulog, a rebel leader with communist ties. Ben, a young operative based in Washington, is sent to find him. The two have crossed paths before, as students at an elite Jesuit college in Manila.

A decade later, the choices they made during World War II, their spiritual ties to the same Catholic priest, and the attraction they share to a beautiful Eurasian woman, complicate the search for justice and raise issues that reverberate today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pasky Pascual
• Release date: Mar 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780988757110

Pasky Pascual

Pasky Pascual grew up in the Philippines during the tumultuous years of the Marcos dictatorship. After spending time in a Jesuit seminary, he left Manila to continue his education in the U.S. A lawyer and scientist, he frequently publishes and lectures on environmental policy. This is his first novel.

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interior cover

Copyright

Under a Tropical Sun

Pasky Pascual

Copyright © 2013 by Gerardo Pascual

Smashwords Edition

Published by Plot Hound Press

plothound

plothound.com

Ebook epub version ISBN-13: 978-0988757110

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This is a work of historical fiction. Public personages both living and dead may appear in the story under their right names. Scenes and dialogue involving them with fictitious characters are invented. Any other usage of real people’s names is coincidental. Any resemblance of the imaginary characters to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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In memory of my best friend and brother, Bobby Gana (1961 -1998). He was a lawyer for social justice, a writer, an artist, and a downright funny guy.

In his name, I am donating twenty per cent of any profits from this novel to the Philippine Jesuits and the Subic Bay Freeport Chamber of Commerce.

Table of Contents

Dedication

Epigraph

Map of the Philippines

MOUNTAINS TO MANILA

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

1951

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

MONDAY

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

TUESDAY

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

WEDNESDAY

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

THURSDAY

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

FRIDAY

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

SATURDAY

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

SECOND TUESDAY

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

HOME AGAIN

About the Author

A Note to Readers

Copyright

That the inhabitants of the Philippines will be benefited by this republic is my unshaken belief. No imperial designs lurk in the American mind. Our priceless principles undergo no change under a tropical sun.

- U.S. President William McKinley, 1899

Map of the Philippines

map of the Philippinesbanner

Mountains to Manila

Chapter 1

ifugao and animals

On the day Pulog saw General Douglas MacArthur, a typhoon was about to strike the city of Manila. When Pulog recounted the events of that afternoon to his American interrogator ten years later, he was certain of that detail.

Fierce winds blowing in from the Pacific that Thursday in August 1941 had transformed the normally clamorous city—the Pearl of the Orient, America’s outpost in the Far East—into a ghost town. Most of Pulog’s classmates had gone home to wait out the floods the typhoon would surely bring. With no family in Manila, Pulog left the empty hallways of his college dormitory to walk alone through the city’s deserted alleys. Vicious, forcible winds pushed against him as he trudged west, toward the Manila Hotel at the center of the American zone.

Everyone knew General MacArthur lived in the plush hotel’s penthouse suite with his family—a perquisite the general demanded before agreeing to help the Filipinos prepare for war. In the past year, a preoccupied Europe had done nothing to stop Japan’s march across Burma and Indochina. Now Japanese troops controlled the shoreline opposite Manila, across the South China Sea. City residents flitted through the streets, exchanging specious gossip about a coming invasion.

Guys! Listen, guys, hollered a classmate of Pulog’s the week before. My dad’s been to the States. He says they’ll never let Japan steal the Philippines away. That’s why they assigned a tough guy like MacArthur to lead the troops. The students crammed the narrow hallway outside their classroom, waiting for their theology professor to show up.

Don’t be so sure, countered another. Americans don’t like the Japs, but they’re more worried about Europe. Most of them have family in Europe—right, Ben?

All eyes turned to Ben Madison, the sole American among the mosaic of Filipino, Chinese and Spanish young faces. Trying to flatten himself into inconspicuousness against the wall, the lanky sophomore, hands shoved in his pockets, loomed above the other students. Manila-born Ben was uncomfortable when his friends made him the voice for U.S. colonial policy.

He drawled a heart-felt response. Well, guys, America would never abandon our country. Thinking he sounded trite, he quickly added, That’s just my opinion.

The excited chatter meant little to 19-year-old Pulog, who kept quietly to himself in a darkened corner of the corridor. To him, war was a whisper of a rumor, a distraction from the inner voice he was trained to heed above all else. This voice had summoned Pulog from his village in the remote Cordillera Mountains. It drew him from the seminary, where he studied to be a Catholic priest, to the Ateneo de Manila College, where the city’s richest families sent their sons for a Jesuit education.

And ten years later, when his interrogator asked about the afternoon of the typhoon and about his encounter with General MacArthur, Pulog realized this voice had compelled him to make choices that were driving away the woman he loved, perhaps driving her into the arms of his interrogator.

Chapter 2

ifugao and animals

Centuries before the United States won the Philippines from Spain in 1898, before Ferdinand Magellan claimed the islands in 1521, Pulog’s tribe—the Ifugaos—had been carving vast terraces of rice paddies from the slopes of the Cordillera mountain range with little more than hand tools and the service of water buffaloes. Flush with budding grain, the paddies cascaded down the craggy Cordilleras like interlocking shards of jade that sparkled in the sunlight. The rugged geography had insulated the Ifugaos from 300 years of Spanish rule. To reach the mountains, the conquistadors journeyed months on horseback—driving their horses from the mangrove swamps of Manila Bay, pushing through the marshy valleys of the island, and scaling arduous trails overrun by head hunters.

America penetrated the Cordilleras in 1903, when the colonial government dispatched anthropologist Albert Ernest Jenks to survey the mountain villages. Few Ifugaos had ever seen a white man or encountered such a curious question: Where did your people come from? To Professor Jenks’s inquiry, a puzzled village elder replied: We have never lived elsewhere. We have never driven other people out before us. And we have never been driven away from here.

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Scott and Martha Anderson—the first Americans whom Pulog would meet—had never strayed beyond Ohio’s borders when their pastor excitedly spoke of President William McKinley’s call to uplift and civilize the Filipinos. Shortly after their fourth wedding anniversary in 1908, the Andersons escaped a gray, Midwestern February to emerge two months later on the opposite side of the globe—on the balmy, bountifully blue waters of Manila Bay. Their steamer, the U.S. Army Transport Thomas, pressed toward the shore bearing hundreds of American schoolteachers. Laughing giddily, Scott held tightly to Martha’s waist as she leaned precariously over the ship’s railing to glimpse the scintillating greens and yellows of submerged coral reefs.

The Andersons reached their alpine home in the Cordilleras just as U.S. soldiers were putting the finishing touches on a schoolhouse of concrete and pine. The villagers snickered at the squat building that sat on the ground. Their own huts were perched on wooden stilts to keep foraging animals at bay and to withstand the unpredictable tremors that shook the mountain range.

Yagao, a village elder, met the Andersons with caution, recalling the lowlanders’ stories about the abusive Spaniards. "These Amerikanos will be like the Spanish priests, he warned his neighbors. Friendly at first. Then they will flog us when we refuse to embrace the white god." Yagao did not know that the schoolteachers, hired by the U.S. Government, were expressly forbidden from teaching religion in their classrooms.

Besides, the Andersons had more worldly concerns. As they went house to house with an interpreter, trying to enroll pupils in the new school, they discovered that half of the Ifugao children died in the first years of life. Even prosperous Yagao had lost five of his eight children. The reason for these tragedies was soon clear to Scott Anderson. He struggled to find Ifugao words to explain modern sanitation to the skeptical villagers. Tiny creatures your eyes cannot see are killing your children, he said.

The Andersons set up a hand washing station next to the schoolhouse, where they cleaned and covered the children’s wounds and scrapes. Parents pulled back bandages and marveled when they didn’t see the purple hues of infection. Yagao became so convinced of the benefits of these ministrations that in 1921, he implored Martha Anderson to deliver his next child. But I’ve never delivered a baby—or had my own, she protested.

My wife is no longer young, Yagao insisted. This child might be our last.

The villagers rejoiced when Yagao’s son, Pulog, drew his first breath and bawled loudly in the arms of the blue-eyed schoolteacher.

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More fantastical changes were sweeping into the Cordilleras. American engineers hewed roads from narrow mountain trails so trucks from American-owned mines could reach the lowlands. A half day’s walk from the village, near a sharp bend in the road that caused even the most foolhardy truck driver to slow to a crawl, an enterprising Ifugao set up a food stand, offering water, rice and dog meat to the dusty truckers. A vegetable vendor soon joined him, followed by a young goatherd who cleared a swath of pine brush near the road and built a shanty for his pregnant wife.

By 1933, Pulog’s twelfth year in the white man’s calendar, the bend in the road had settled into a small barrio. Walking through the market with his teacher, Mrs. Anderson, Pulog watched a precariously loaded American mining truck rumble past.

Why are those men taking those boulders away? he asked.

They will take the metal from those boulders and turn it into money—like this. Mrs. Anderson rubbed two copper coins between her fingers. She pointed to the wooden stall in front of them, where goods had been brought up from the lowlands: kerosene lamps, battery-operated torches, canned foods. You can’t always barter for things you need, Pulog. Sometimes, the shop keepers want you to pay with money.

In quiet amazement, Pulog absorbed what his teacher said. To him, it was mysterious and magical—to transform metal to money, and money into all those useful items from the lowlands. Where is metal turned into money? he asked.

In Manila.

Manila, Pulog repeated reverently. Once a year, the Andersons visited Manila. They returned with cartons of books—castoffs from the city’s American expatriate community—which they asked Pulog to shelve. It was when he was surrounded by these heaping stacks of musty treasure, breathing in the stale scent of their yellowing pages, that Pulog was happiest. Sitting cross-legged by the wooden planks that served as the school library, he dipped into these books, catching glimpses of foreign worlds. The Minnesota of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, as well as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s New York City, became as vivid to him as the pine forests that circumscribed his village. Young Pulog sensed an enormous gap separating him from the outside world, a gap that could be bridged by way of Manila.

Standing beside Mrs. Anderson at the market, Pulog’s eyes swooped down the curving mountain road and followed the truck bearing its cargo of copper ore. One day, I will live in Manila, the boy vowed.

You will soar, Pulog, Mrs. Anderson replied, encouraging him to greater heights, as she always did. You will accomplish great things. Since delivering Pulog into the world, Martha Anderson was ever-devoted to the exuberant child, who was quick-witted, amiable and insatiably curious about life beyond the Cordilleras. Perhaps you might even visit America, she said.

I will visit your home in America, Pulog promised. I will tell your family how you and your brother taught me everything I know about the outside world.

Mrs. Anderson smiled tautly as she affectionately stroked Pulog’s hair. She and her husband had lived in the village for twenty-five years without children of their own. Among the Ifugaos, being childless was grounds for a man to leave his woman. Long ago, the Andersons stopped correcting villagers who assumed they were siblings.

ifugao

Though surrounded by fellow priests and hemmed by a bustling city recovering from the Great Depression, Father William Keyes, age 47, had never felt so alone. Assistant pastor at New York City’s Church of Saint Francis Xavier, Father Keyes had slipped into a spiritual crisis that left him unable to recognize his church, his faith or his God. His discontent was further fueled by the banned writings of a fellow Jesuit, the theologian and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin. Surreptitiously passed around the Jesuit community like contraband, Teilhard’s manuscript spoke of a divinity unbound by religious orthodoxy. To Keyes, this God was radically different from the one to whom his church had been professing for nearly two millennia—the "one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and of all things visible and invisible." The Catholic hierarchy condemned Teilhard’s work as heresy. But Keyes recognized this God: not just Creator, but woven into the very fabric of creation.

Seeking distraction at the New York Public Library, Father Keyes stumbled across Professor Jenks’ 30-year-old ethnological survey of the Ifugaos. Keyes was mesmerized by the Ifugaos’ elemental existence in the distant Cordillera Mountains, which concentrated life to its essence—birth, family, death. A week later, when his Jesuit superior asked him to consider missionary work in the Philippines, Father Keyes felt he could see God’s will unfolding with utter clarity. By 1934, he was working with the nascent Cordillera diocese to open a small chapel in the barrio that grew from the sharp bend in the mountain road.

A few days after the priest’s arrival, a young Ifugao dressed in a simple undershirt and loin cloth—a shy, lop-sided smile on his face—appeared at the doorway of Father Keyes’ shack. With his slight frame and round cheeks, his bangs hanging straight and flat against his forehead, the boy looked no older than ten. The Jesuit held his hand to his chest and introduced himself in one of the few local phrases he had mastered. "Ako si Father Keyes."

The Ifugao startled the priest by responding in perfect English. Good morning, Father Keyes. My name is Pulog Dalipog. My teachers said you would be coming. They said you may have books to lend me.

Father Keyes laughed in delight. I would be happy to lend you some of my books. Let’s see now, how old might you be?

I am thirteen.

I have the perfect book for you, Pulog. Father Keyes knelt to pick up a book lying on the straw mat that served as his bed. Removing the pine twig he used as a bookmark, the priest handed the book to the young Ifugao. Pulog’s eyes widened as he looked at the book cover, which depicted an oddly familiar scene. There was a cluster of mountains much like the Cordilleras. Beyond the mountains was a bridge, partially blocked by a man in a cassock very similar to the one Father Keyes was wearing.

"The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Pulog read the title aloud. Is this you?" he asked.

The priest smiled and shook his head. No. That’s a character in the book—Brother Juniper. Father Keyes rested his index finger on the cover. Five people fell from that bridge and Brother Juniper spent many years trying to understand their lives. That’s what the book’s about.

Why did he do that?

The priest hesitated. Well, he believed, as I do, that one best catches glimpses of God in the way people live and in the way they treat each other.

Remembering his father’s cautionary words, Pulog asked, Have you come to the barrio to bring us the Christian God?

No, Pulog, the priest answered. I’ve come to look for God. And to help anyone who wishes to do the same.

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The following year, an inquisitive Pulog piped up during one of Scott Anderson’s history lessons. Mister Anderson. Mister Anderson!

Yes, Pulog. Mr. Anderson turned and settled his gaze on his prized pupil.

The American rebels fought the British because they believed that they should rule themselves.

Quite right.

And before the Americans were here, the Filipinos fought the Spaniards for independence.

Y-e-e-e-e-s, said Mr. Anderson carefully, anticipating where Pulog was headed.

After defeating Spain, why didn’t the Americans just let the Filipinos rule themselves?

Well, people have to be prepared. They have to be ready to rule themselves.

But when do you know when people are ready? Who gets to decide?

I suppose there’s really no way of knowing, Mr. Anderson answered honestly. And I suppose that, ultimately, the Filipino people will decide when they are ready for independence.

But how, Mister Anderson?

By joining together, not as many tribes or clans, but as one people with one shared vision.

Do Americans have one shared vision?

America was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, Mr. Anderson declaimed, that each of us has an inalienable right to life, to liberty and to pursue our own happiness.

Pulog remembered those words when, a year later in 1936, he visited Manila for the first time. The Governor-general, the country’s highest ranking American official, invited the Andersons to deliver a speech commemorating the 35th anniversary of American public schools in the Philippines. Like proud parents, the couple planned to present Pulog to the assembled guests at the American Embassy.

For the trip, Mrs. Anderson tailored Pulog’s first trousers—ill-fitting, scratchy pants that her husband had outgrown. Pulog was self-conscious in his uncomfortable clothes, but Mrs. Anderson assured him that he looked