Gloria Macapagal Arroyo launches Deus Ex Machina, a memoir published by the Manila Bulletin Publishing Corporation
How I wish, as a presidential election is coming up, already dominating the news reels, the news pages, and the news sites, that each presidential aspirant had a memoir to show us, in which to help us navigate the ins and outs of what made them who they were as well as the shape and size of their dreams born of the life they had lived.
Alas, a memoir by nature, derived from the old French memoire and the Latin word memoria, is only a portion of a life—a high or low point thereof—that has been lived and, in it, as in former Philippine president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s just released Deus Ex Machina, examined in hindsight in search not of victory, “a powerful word, but it often reeks of pride and hubris,” she writes, and not of vengeance, “sweet, but it is hateful,” she asserts, but of vindication, “my preferred word.”
II hesitate to call it a presidential memoir. The strength of a memoir, as opposed to an autobiography—which often demands that its author be as famous as the leader of the nation, a rockstar inventor, or a tragic artist—is its laser-sharp focus on feelings. Gloria has many things the average reader isn’t likely to have in common with her, among them being president to a country of 80 to 94 million people, the total population of the Philippines from the time she ascended to power in 2001 to the time she stepped down in 2010.
Yet, the pages of her memoir are rife with feelings not unfamiliar to the common reader, even to those who have no fond memories of playing chess in the sunny balcon of a family home on a street called Calle Laura or Calle Florante. She grew up on those streets that flanked their home in San Juan that in the author’s youth was a small town in Rizal Province instead of the bustling city it has now become in the megalopolis that is present-day Metro Manila.
Like any girl growing up, Gloria has memories of throwing a tantrum for not being given permission to watch the concert of visiting American teen idol Neil Sedaka and—having moved to Malacañan at age 14, when her father Diosdado Macapagal became president—of hanging out with her fellow Assumption girls, learning the latest dance steps, and listening to records like those of the Beatles, Ricky Nelson, and Frankie Avalon.
Gloria spent many of her childhood summers in Iligan, “the oldest frontier town in northern Mindanao,” where her spunky maternal grandmother, Irinea de la Cruz, kept a farm “with a beachfront, waterfalls, and a cold freshwater spring,” in which she and her playmates would put the bottles to keep their drinks cold.
Like any girl growing up, Gloria has memories of throwing a tantrum for not being given permission to watch Neil Sedaka in a live concert, of hanging out with her fellow Assumption girls in Malacañan, listening to the records of the Beatles, Ricky Nelson, Frankie Avalon.
My interaction with Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, as president, was limited but memorable to me. One was a dinner at Malacañan Palace, just before she made up her mind to run for president in 2004, as the remainder of her dethroned predecessor Joseph Estrada’s term was drawing to a close. At the dinner table I was one seat away from her. Between us was veteran journalist Jullie Yap Daza, in whose ear, thinking the president was too preoccupied entertaining someone else at the other end of the long table to hear me, I whispered, “Why maybe, why not yes, or why not no?”
Gloria Macapagal Arroyo finished what she was saying to our other dinner companion before, swiveling in my direction, she called me by my first name and, in the manner of a teacher to an errant student, said, “Because at this point, it is not a yes and it is not a no, so it’s a maybe,” something to that effect.
But in this memoir, short and sweet, just a little over 200 pages, including the preface and the forewords, which I read like a bedtime story in no more than three sittings, I thought I understood that circumspection was in the author’s nature. From her lola, her Lola Irinea, who kept a shotgun under her bed, she learned to live it tough, with a fair amount of guardedness. From her mother, she learned about grace that, beyond the surface, was an expression of care, concern, and consideration. From her father, she learned about the concept of “idealism with a minimum of realism to make a measure of the ideal come true.”
In Deus Ex Machina, Gloria examines the highs and lows of her life even as a resident of Malacañan, as if removed from them. She writes about the facts and the feelings, as if, like a teacher, she gave herself instructions to reveal only what could be revealed by the tactical senses, what was seen, what was heard, what was spoken. Of her triumphs as president, for instance, she lets the numbers speak. In recounting those harrowing days of what she considers her political persecution in the hands of “my tomentors in President Noynoy’s administration,” she lets the voices of the political kibitzers in the media to take control of the narrative,” refusing even to correct their grammatical lapses, if any, to stay true to what they said and exactly how they said it. If there is any anger, it appears as restraint. If there is any fear, it appears as circumspection. The beauty of this memoir is that, as much as it is personal, so personal that I am emboldened to refer to the author by her first name, instead of Arroyo or President Arroyo or Mrs. Arroyo, it is also detached from the weight of the goings-on in her life.
If there’s any emotional heavy-lifting involved in the writing of this memoir, it is in her brave retelling of a profound loss. On Nov. 2, 2014, “the saddest day of my life,” she laments, her grandchild Jugo, the son of her only daughter Lulu Arroyo Bernas, died. He was only 13 months young. It was to this beloved grandchild, along with her father, mother, and her late stepbrother Arturo, that Gloria dedicates this memoir.
A memoir is distinguished from a biography on account of its scope, often limited to a singular event, phase, or episode in a life. Contemplative and introspective, Deus Ex Machina takes the reader from summertime in 1947 when, on April 5, “a day of the full moon, on Sabado de Gloria,” Gloria was born, to July 21, 2016, the day she walked free, after nearly four years on hospital arrest, upon the Supreme Court’s dismissal of a plunder case against her. Immediately following the acquittal, compressed in a few pages, like an epilogue but without the flourish of an epilogue, are the highlights of her political vindication, particularly the day she, “the most maligned woman in history,” as the author describes herself, took her oath as speaker of the house of representatives in 2019, the first ever female to hold the position in the history of the Philippine Congress.
It’s an entire life that exists between the covers of Deus Ex Machina, but in its feel, it is a memoir more than a biography. At the core of this broad sweep of history, the entire lifetime of a nation emerging from the shackles of centuries of colonialism, spanning 16 presidents, including the author as the 14th, are the deeply personal memories of a woman, flesh and bone, just as human as you and me, who is—and remains—caught in the swirl of triumphs and troubles in a saga that, like any life, like yours and mine, like the life of our beloved country and countrymen, is in search of a happy ending or—if all else fails, with faith in the invisible forces of the universe—a deus ex machina.
Deus Ex Machina by Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is published by the Manila Bulletin Publishing Corporation.
