Editors’ Note: This article first appeared in the author’s column “There’s the Rub,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, October 28, 1994. We have thought it as appropriate and timely to re-post his column “Coming Home” after his passing last November 2023. In a sense, Conrad has gone home.

Foreword

The late Nagueño and Philippine Daily Inquirer columnist Conrado de Quiros, who passed last November 6, wrote the October 28, 1994 “There’s the Rub” column piece “Coming home” shown below based on his earlier remarks at the Naga City book launching of Heart and Mind in Bicol 1975-1993 (Forty Selected Activist Writings by Soliman M. Santos, Jr. self- published in 1994.) This column piece is ultimately not so much about the book or its author as it is about the place Conrad called “home,” Naga City. In another piece on his Bicol roots, Conrad wrote: “My own hometown is Naga City, though I was born in Manila,” he once wrote. “It is where I spent my boyhood and adolescence and learned my first language, which is Bicol. It is where I go to charge my psychic batteries. I barely know anybody there anymore from childhood, but the place itself holds a raging volcano of memories for me, which sends electrical surges through my soul. Hometowns give you a sense of bearing in a world—especially so this country—seemingly drifting in space, bound for nowhere.” 

Judge Soliman M. Santos, Jr. (Ret.), Naga City, Camarines Sur, Bicol

Coming Home

WHEN Soliman Santos Jr. asked me to write a blurb for his book about his sojourn in Naga City, I agreed. I had to. Some offers you simply cannot refuse. Writing a paragraph or two for a book about Naga is such a one for me.

As I’ve since found out, my decision was completely wise. Not least of the reasons for this is that he and I share some common personal circumstances. Sol was born in Manila but took up elementary school in Naga. He left soon after that but came back later to spend his next 18 years there. For this, he considers himself a Bicolano/ Nagueño. He has every right to.

I, too, was also born in Manila but grew up in Naga, where I took up elementary and high school. My first language was Bicol, and a first language is as indelibly carved out in the soul as a first love is in the heart. You do not forget it. I left soon after high school, and this is where Sol and I part ways. He came back and spent nearly the rest of his life in Naga. I spent mine in Manila, managing to come home to Naga only about six or seven times since then. That is Sol’s fortune, and that is my misfortune.

But note that I say, “come home to Naga.” For Naga is my home, too, however I have been away from it for so long. Home is not always. where the heart is. It is also sometimes where one’s boyhood, or girlhood, was. That is the Garden one keeps trying to go back to or yearn for. But the bridge that led to Naga City collapsed for me long before the Mabulo Bridge did.

If you grew up in one place but lived away from it for most of your life, you tend to bathe it in the colors of spring, or the mists of mountains. I guess it’s the same thing with the expatriates too, when they think about the country. It’s no longer just a place, it’s a state of mind. That was how Naga was for me for years after I left it until I came back to it in the dead of martial law.

Of course, I had always known how the claws of martial were tearing up the land. Never mind the news reports, official or underground. Many of my friends were in jail and being tortured. Some had been killed in lonely fields, though never far from their loved ones, which were the masses. But martial law never became more real to me than when I went home to Naga many years later. All thoughts of seeing the Naga of my boyhood leap back to life evaporated on the stretch of road from Camarines Norte to Camarines Sur. Instead of bridges and palm fronds swaying in wind, I saw rolls of barbed. wire wound in big logs laid out across the road, soldiers in sandos with Armalites slung on their backs manning them. A sign on nearly all the checkpoints asked motorists to donate to the fiesta in that town. I did not realize there were so many fiestas in the Camarines. And it wasn’t even May.

Home was gone, as cleanly as though a storm had blown it away. I’ve always wondered since if there was really any road that led back to it.

Well, Sol’s book is at least a small bridge that lies in that direction. It is quite stoutly titled, “Heart and Mind in Bicol, 1975-1993.” It is by no means the definitive guide to the place, but it gives the reader a good glimpse of it. Not the Bicol of tourism or the Bicol of Spanish times (for some reason, too, I keep associating Bicol with the more distant past) but the Bicol of more contemporary times — the times of Marcos and Cory, the times of darkness and failed hopes.

Sol is probably one of the best persons to observe and contemplate Bicol. It’s not only that he was in the thick of the fight to raze the house of Marcos and build democracy in its place — Sol was among those who made Naga a peace zone, an idea that swiftly spread across the land. It is also that he has one foot inside Bicol, or Naga, which is arguably the heart of it (do I hear violent objections?), and another outside of it. The second allows him to look at the events there with a broader perspective and impartiality, while the first allows him to do so with the passion and concern of one who has a stake in it. Indeed, Sol’s stake in Bicol goes beyond the political or economic fortunes of particular individuals. It goes to the political and economic fortunes of Bicolandia itself.

Whether Sol is writing about the politics of the dakulang tao or the sadit na tao, whether about the physical or moral geography of Bicol, he shows a capacity to step back and look at the scene with the eyes of a detached observer and to go back and take part in it with the heart of an impassioned lover. Indeed, whether he is writing about events as far away as in Eastern Europe or as near as in the University of Nueva Caceres, his favorite learning institution, he shows at once a broad-mindedness that comes from having trodden many paths and a rootedness that comes from always being able to tread the path that leads home.

There’s much here to interest the reader, Bicolano or non-Bicolano. Having come from Bicol myself, however, my interest was naturally drawn to the events, particularly the smaller ones, about people and places I am more familiar with. It’s amusing to know that cheating, a vice that afflicted both school and politics in our time, still rages to this day. And it’s thrilling to know that a fearless press (possibly the most fearless in the country, Sol claims), a virtue that crowned the head of Naga in our time, continues to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable to this day.

If it’s true that a life unexamined is a life unlived, then Sol has lived well. And done that too– oh, lucky man — in Naga, without argument the most blessed spot in all the world.

(Header image: Aerial View of Naga City, photo credit – Around Bicol and Apol Baldemor