‘No chain can prevent the spirit to soar’

CLARK SPECIAL ECONOMIC ZONE-Five letters from Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr. to Jose Antonio Gonzalez are made public for the first time since they were written in the 1970s.

Tourism secretary during the administration of former President Corazon Aquino, Gonzales opened his vault, where the letters had been kept to reproduce them for the second time. Ms Aquino had the first set of the reproduction. A copy of a second set was made by Gonzalez for the INQUIRER readers.

“Five in all, which I treasured,” he said of the letters either signed with the famous nickname “Ninoy” or with a simple “N.”

The letters Gonzalez said are very important to the youth.

“A lot of our population are very young and may not know Ninoy. Through these letters, he is sharing a life principle: One should not accommodate,” Gonzalez said.

“We should remember that he was a man who could have very easily accommodated and compromised and not suffered. He was a very, very energetic fellow who decided that imprisonment was better than subjugation,” he added.

Gonzalez said the most impressive expression that Ninoy ever had to make was “it was better to be on your knees than to have the whole world at your fingertips.”

According to Gonzalez, the first letter came five years after he had been giving, in Ninoy’s own words, “goodies” to the jailed arch critic of the Marcos martial law regime. Most of these were books that the military censors had approved for Aquino‘s reading.

Ninoy was 45 years old then and on the fifth year of his detention. Gonzalez was 39 then.

Not close friends

The two were not close friends before the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos declared martial rule on Sept. 21, 1972. But their respective houses in New Manila were several corners away, Gonzalez said.

“The saddest thing is although we knew each other before martial law and I would see him here and there, (he only said) ‘Hi, Tony.’ That’s about it,” the businessman said.

“When martial rule broke out and he was jailed, somehow I thought it was very, very unjust. So my heart went out to him and I thought, what can I do (to sympathize with him)?”

He said he knew Ninoy to be an active man and the fact that he was in prison “led me to believe that the best thing I could do was send a few things such as puzzles, books just to while his time away.”

“So I did that over the months and years and all of a sudden one day he reached out to me. The way he started to do that was through letters,” Gonzalez said.

Because he could not see Ninoy, as only the immediate family members and his lawyers were allowed to visit the senator, the letters got to him through the ingenuity of Aquino‘s eldest daughter, Ballsy.

Candy wrappers

“These letters were wrapped inside candy wrappers. He tied them and then these were rolled up inside candy wrappers and Ballsy sent these to me,” he said, serious at the thought that Ballsy herself courted danger for getting out messages from the tightly secured prison.

Without referring to his daughter, Ninoy, in one of the letters, said he had a “carrier pigeon.”

“I would send him things through Paul, his youngest brother or Ballsy. That was my only contact with him. And then when he started these letters, that’s when we began to really strike up a friendship,” Gonzalez recalled.

The letters, he noted, ringed not only with truth and wisdom, but contained intimate glimpses of that dark phase of Philippine history and described the painful ordeal of Ninoy.

“As you would read his letters, you couldn’t help but have your heart go out for this man who was so brave,” Gonzalez said.

“This was a man who was so full of life yet was caged. So he had to reach out. And he did so with every bit of his soul. That’s how I felt when I read the letters. And I was so happy that I was able to give him a little bit of consolation. He was so expressive,” he said.

The typewriters Ninoy used in his letters to Gonzalez are on display at the Benigno S. Aquino Jr. Museum inside the Aquino Center in Hacienda Luisita, Tarlac City. At the museum, which officially opened in August last year, Ninoy’s prison cell had been recreated. (See related story on Page A17.)

All single-spaced and bearing a few typographical errors, the five letters are not yet included in the Ninoy memorabilia.

First letter

Ninoy wrote Gonzalez for the first time on Dec. 30, 1977. He talked of fighting loneliness and boredom:

“(These) have been my two greatest nemesis. I have sought the help of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Aguinas Kierkegaard, Proust, Niehbur, Kung and even the more earthly Robin Moores, Harold Robbins and the Wallaces in my never-ending battle against these two vicious enemies. I’ve changed my specs thrice-my eyesight has so deteriorated I can’t recognize people barely (15) feet away. The puzzles you sent me were literally ‘hours of fun’ and helped me in my struggle.

“I have kept up my physical and mental exercises-running (6 mins., 45 secs. to a mile), push-ups, sit-ups, knee-bends, bullworker, barbells . . . I devote six hours to reading and at least two hours to writing daily. I’ve completed three manuscripts including my various pleadings and letters to the Supreme Court, Mil(itary) Commission, memos to my lawyers etc. And yet the fight against loneliness and boredom continues.

“There are days when I just sit down and listen to the silence. Tyrants can imprison the vessel of man (but) there is no chain that can prevent the spirit to soar. All that a prisoner has to do is close his eyes and suddenly the doors of freedom are flung open. All one must do is imagine a door, the one in the kitchen of his childhood with an iron handle and a bolt. There is no walled-in room that could not be opened by such a trusted door, provided one were strong enough to suggest that such a door exists.”

On blind ambition

“Last year, if you will recall, you sent me John Dean’s ‘Blind Ambition.’ I do not know what force led you to pick the book. Call it ESP or clairvoyance-I needed that book for it proved better than a psychiatric couch. I too was a victim of ‘blind ambition’ not to (sic) long ago. Again, I think you were used by Divine Providence to remind me through Dean’s traumatic experience that I must re-order my priorities before it is too late.

“Like Dean, I was assistant to three Presidents: Magsaysay, Garcia and Macapagal. I was barely 21 when RM entrusted me with the grim task of dismantling the communist-led Huk insurgency in the early ’50s. In May 1954, I successfully negotiated the surrender of then Huk Supremo Luis Taruc together with some of his 30 field commanders . . . which caused the decline of the insurgency in Luzon for almost a decade.

“It is indeed ironical that after two decades or (23) years after the government awarded me the highest civilian award-the Philippine Legion of Honor-I was convicted of subversion and sentenced to die before a firing squad by the same military establishment that in my salad days could not mint enough medals to do me honor.”

Impossible dream

“To the pragmatists, I may indeed be a fool. But I sincerely believe that if our people are presently groaning under the yoke of tyranny, it is because we have bartered our idealism for the crass materialism of this scientific age. We have become like Eunuchs-we know what to do, but have lost the capacity to do it.

“In this age of darkness there are two ways of spreading the light: either be the candle or the mirror that reflect it. There are days when I feel like speaking in a desert: where only stones listen to me, or men with hearts of stone.

“Some well-meaning friends have advised me to give up my seemingly lonely and hopeless struggle for truth and freedom. Some cruel souls even venture to whisper that like a man from La Mancha, I’m all alone. The tragedy of these friends as I see it is that they want to be loved by a virgin but solaced by a whore.

“I do not fear this prison of Marcos, the only prison I fear is the prison of my own making-the prison of fear and self!”

Dictators, corruption

On dictatorship from the Nov. 28, 1978 letter:

“Dictators may be tolerated if a) the people are well fed and economically contended; b) if the dictator is truly well-meaning and incorruptible. But if the people are undergoing economic hardship in the midst of corruption and the enrichment of a few-the critical mass is attained and you have the explosive brew for a genuine revolt.”

Ninoy went on to describe how a “handful never had it so good” under Marcos.

In his Jan. 1, 1979 letter, Ninoy said he refused to accept as a fact that the Filipinos are “less patriotic” and “illiterate” so as not to understand history.

He said Filipinos understood the lessons of history, “which has already been proven at the turn of the century by the bolo-wielders of Bonifacio.”

“It is therefore my last hope and prayer that our countrymen would be encouraged and inspired by the examples of the Iranian people and would finally transcend petty interests and unite to demand our freedoms. More than history, the Bible tells us that: God helps those who help themselves!”

His June 30, 1979 letter, one of the last letters Ninoy had written in Fort Bonifacio, contained information that he wanted Gonzalez to treat in “strictest confidence.”

This listed an 11-point program of the United Opposition to oust Marcos and rebuild the nation.

The last letter, dated April 20, 1982 and written two years after Ninoy went into exile in Boston, talked of a “mission” in Malaysia where he had a “fruitful meeting with all our friends in Sabah and Kuala Lumpur.”

“Their dedication inspired me to carry on the struggle in the face of seeming indifference on the part of many of our smug countrymen,” Ninoy told Gonzalez, whom he called “Tony,” “T” or “TG” in the five letters.