nalists and cameramen, and yesterday’s great array of military men was nowhere to be seen. I looked very closely at Marcos and thought: it isn't him. It looked like ectoplasm. Like the Mighty Mekon. It was talking in a precise and legalistic way, which contrived to sound both lucid and utterly nonsensical. It had its left hand under the table, and I watched the hand for a while to see whether it was being deliberately concealed. But it wasn’t. So Marcos was still hanging on. Indeed he was back in his calm, lawyer’s frame of mind. I remember somebody asking him whether he was going to go ahead with his inauguration the next day, as planned. Marcos replied that it was his duty to do so, as laid down by the constitution. The inauguration had to take place ten days after the proclamation by the National Assembly. If he’d been pressed any further in the matter he would have started quoting acts and statutes. That part of his brain was functioning perfectly. The bit that wasn’t functioning, it appeared, was the bit that should have told him the game was up. At first I felt embarrassed, as if I had been caught red-handed by Marcos, trespassing in the palace. Then I felt embarrassed because, there being so few pressmen around, I might be expected to ask the president a question. And I couldn’t think of a thing to ask. People hovered around the microphone, and whispered to each other, “ D’you want to go next?” Very few people did. One journalist actually went to the side of the room, sat down and buried his head in his hands, as if overwhelmed by the irreality of the occasion. General Ver was quivering and in an evident panic. He stepped forward and asked for permission to bomb Camp Crame. There were two government F-5 jets circling over it, he said. (Just outside the palace someone had told me that the crowd at Camp Crame appeared to think that these jets were on their side, for they cheered every time the aircraft came over.) Marcos told Ver they were not to be used. Ver’s panic increased. "The air force, sir, is ready to attack were the civilians to leave the vicinity of Camp Crame immediately, Mr. President. That’s why I come here on your orders so we can immediately strike them. We have to immobilize the helicopters that they g o t . ” (Marcos had sent he licop te r gunships against the camp, but the pilots had come out waving white flags and joined the rebels.) Marcos broke in with tired impatience, as if this had been going on all through the night and he was sick and tired of Ver. “My order is not to attack. No, no, no. Hold on; not to attack.” Ver was going wild. “Our negotiations and our prior dialogue have not succeeded, Mr. President.” Marcos: “All I can say is that we may have to reach the point we may have to employ heavy weapons, but you will use the small weapons in hand or shoulder weapons in the meantime.” Ver said: “Our attack forces are being delayed.” The Christian Science Monitor, at my elbow, said: “ This is absurd. It’s a Mutt- and-Jeff act.” Ver said: “ There are many civilians near our troops, and we cannot keep on withdrawing. We cannot withdraw all the time, Mr. President.” All this was being broadcast live on Channel Four, which Marcos could see on a monitor. Ver finally saluted, stepped backwards and left with the other officers. I forget who they were, just as Marcos, when he introduced them to us, had forgotten all their names and needed prompting. Now the family withdrew as well. An incident then occurred whose significance I didn’t appreciate at the time. The television began to emit white noise. A soldier stepped forward and fiddled with the knobs. The other channels were working, but Channel Four had been knocked off the air. The rebels had taken the government station, which Marcos must have realized. But he hardly batted an eyelid. It was as if the incident were some trivial disturbance, as if the television were simply on the blink. For me, the most sinister moment of the morning had been when Marcos said that if the rebels continued they would “ be chewed up by our roaming bands of loyal troops.” Someone asked why the troops at the gate were wearing white arm-bands. They had said, he told Marcos, that it meant they would surrender to the rebels. Marcos explained that this was not so. The arm-bands were a countersign. A soldier in the audience said that the countersign was red, white and blue. The questioner then said, “ No, these were plain white arm-bands.” Marcos said, a trifle quickly, “The colours are changed every day.” Somebody asked him whether he was going to leave the country. “ No,” he said, “ as you can see, we are all still here.” And as he said these words he turned round to discover that there was absolutely nobody standing behind him. Back to Malacanang A £ M.s I came within view of the palace I saw that people were climbing over the railing, and just as I caught up with them a gate flew open. Everyone was pouring in and making straight for the old Budget Office. It suddenly occurred to me that very few of them knew where the palace itself was. Documents were flying out of the office and the crowd was making whoopee. I began to run. One of the columnists had written a couple of days before that he had once asked his grandmother about the Revolution of 1896. What had it been like? She had replied: “A lot of running.” So in his family they had always referred to those days as the Time of Running. It seemed only appropriate that, for the second time that day, I should be running through Ime lda ’s old vegetable patch. The turf looked sorrier than ever. We ran over the polystyrene boxes which had once contained the chicken dinners, past the sculpture garden, past where people were jumping up and down on the armoured cars, and up onto the platform from where we had watched Marcos on the balcony. Everyone stamped on the planks and I was amazed the whole structure didn’t collapse. We came to a side entrance and as we crowded in I felt a hand reach into my back pocket. I pulled the hand out and slapped it. The thief scurried away. I couldn’t believe I would be able to find the actual Marcos apartments, and I knew there was no point in asking. We went up some servants’ stairs, at the foot of which I remember seeing an opened crate with two large green jade plates. They were so large as to be vulgar. On the first floor a door opened, and we found ourselves in the great hall where the press conferences had been held. This was the one bit of the palace the crowd would recognize, as it had so often watched Marcos being televised from here. People ran and sat on his throne and began g iv ing mock press-conferences, issuing orders in his deep voice, falling about with laughter or just gaping at the splendour of the room. It was all fully lit. Nobody had bothered, as they left, to turn out the lights. I remembered that the first time I had been here, the day after the election, Imelda had slipped in and sat at the side. She must have come from that direction, I went to investigate. And now, for a short while, I was away from the crowd with just one other person, a shy and absolutely thunderstruck Filipino. We had found our way, we realized, into the Marcoses’ private rooms. There was a library, and my companion gazed in wonder at the leather-bound volumes while I admired the collection of art books all carefully cataloged and with their numbers on the spines. This was the reference library for Imelda’s worldwide collection of treasures. She must have thumbed through them thinking: I ’d like one of them, or I've got a couple of them in New York, or That’s in our London house. And then there was the Blue Drawing Room with its twin portraits of the Marcoses, where I simply remember standing with my companion and saying, “ It’s beautiful, isn't it.” It wasn’t that it was beautiful. It looked as if it had been purchased at Harrods. It was just that, after all the crowds and the riots, we had landed up in this peaceful, luxurious den. My companion had never seen anything like it. He didn’t take anything. He hardly dared touch the furnishings and trinkets. We both simply could not believe that we were there and the Marcoses weren’t. I wish I could remember it all better. For instance, it seemed to me that in every room I saw, practically on every available surface, there was a signed photograph Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1988 45
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