Fidel de Castro

Song for REDEMPTIION

by Fidel de Castro

BERNARDO CARPIO died in the middle of a song. The bullet opened a hole in his t.hroat, but to those who loved him, his death is an indictment against democracy. ,

He died the evening of the day Truman, Attlee, and Stalin sat at a round table in Moscow to talk about controlling the atomic bomb.

Bernardo Carpio died in a little barrio in Nueva Ecija where moonlight hangs like a banner under the eaves. Where the seed, at last, has found its place in soil and in men's hearts to unfold its miracle.

The miracle, or rather a part of it,

was unfolding in BeTnardo's song when

a bullet hit his throat and stopped the beautiful revelation. The song was silenced in the middle of its direction but the beginning and its implications were clearly defined.

The music and the words died not on a note of triumph.

The pitch was just beginning to rise. It was an intelligent note, a little ambitious perhaps, impassioned, but responsible.

That was how the song died in the middle of a night made for love.

Bernardo Carpio's death-song was actually a love song. And more.

For he was twenty-five years old, a poet with a guitar, a soil tiller with bi22

ceps and perception, and in love with Marcelina Arcuego.

For nights while the moon grew in size Bernardo would sit down on the bamboo floor strumming his guitar softly before an oil lamp on the squat dining table. .on the table before him was a piece of paper and a pencil borrowed from Terio the j ueteng collector.

Plucking the strings searching for the right tune. Softly for the hesitant heartbeat. And then warmly enflamed for the swift splendour that knows no time

and waiting now: I love you, Marcelina,

and the mOon and the plow are both for us, and forever for our children the dreams and the toil between the seedling and the star.

And the fevered finger wrote. The notes and the words and more. The pencil performed a blueprint for the summer and the future of love, for the querulous heart and the fire and the bells in the blood.

That was Bernardo Carpio's love song that night, and when his voice vibrated in the moonlight, the wind from the fields carried the notes clearly under the leaves, over the listening growth on neglected yards, into the friendly open windows.

And the people knew that Bernardo Carpio, at last, had decided to ask Marcelina Arcuego to be his wife.

THEY all knew about the plans. The clean bamboo house by the stream with a window to greet the sunrise and a papag near the stairs for the tired worker

from the fields thirsting for a dipper of cool watel' and bright communal talk.

A farm of their own: the government will see to that.

And the children: Clothes on their backs to go to school on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, and to church in town on Sundays. And after thirty-five years, maybe Manuel Sergio Carpio, the eldest, will be delivering speeches in the town plaza

during election time on how to serve

and not fool, cheat and bleed the peopie, on how to run the government and kill the evil forces working against demo-

cracy.

That night the people in the barrio

f:rst heard Bernardo's nervous guitar

prelude, and then his voice, and then the men went out into the night and congregated in the unfenoed yard in front of the Arcuego home.

They wanted to see the bewitching effects of the lover's serenade: Marcelina

arising from . her dream, and dreamy

with sleep but heavenly with excitement and the unworded surrender, opening the window to reveal the flower of her face through the moonlight hanging like a banner under the eaves.

The barrio folk wanted to see the sweetly aching consummation of a quiet and idyllic romance interrupted by the violence of World War II.

They knew everything that had happened between the time enemy bombs first fell on Philippine soil and the hour the last guerrilla bullet was fired in the hills.

How Bernardo grew in stature.

How the barrio wrote history.

How a legend was born.

And the following were the highlights: 1. In the hills Bernardo Carpio was referred to as Commander Luna of Squadron 26. 2. Each twilight he died and lived with

his men, and the unresurrected deaths he

monumented in blood-tingling ballads.

3. He carried in his heart courage, hate for the enemy and love for God, country and Marcelina. 4. In his pocket, her rosary and her portrait taken in the town's only photo studio a year before the first bomb fell. 5. He knew what Democracy was all about.

Bernardo Carpio: Poet and songwriter. Lover and patriot. Farmer and stalwart.

The silence in the yard as Bernardo sang that night was full of respect, and in the heart of the men who listened memory leaped like a dancer weaving the pattern of a lifetime crowded with the first life·engulfing touch of finger against the beloved reality and the words and music un spooled from there until each setting of the moon through the long unremembered years.

Bernardo Carpio sang with his eyes identifying heaven with the closed window that was, he knew, about to open.

The pitch was just beginning to rise. It was an intelligent note, a little ambitious perhaps, impassioned but responsible.

I love you, Marcelina, and the moon and the plow are both for us, and for-

ever for our . . .

THERE was a volley. Nobody can tell even now how many shots were fired that night.

The men ran and stumbled in confu-

sion. There were many noises. Ugly,

sharp, splintering. And through all this Bernardo kept on singing.

The pitch was just beginning to rise. The note was not a note of triumph.

And then the bullet hit its mark and the unfolding miracle died before its completion.

The unfinished song was silenced forever in the ugly hole that gaped in Bernardo's throat.

That was the gravest casualty of that night's tragedy.