T his time last year, Penguin Southeast Asia released Amado V Hernandez’s first novel The Preying Birds (Mga Ibong Mandaragit), a classic of modern Filipino literature that had somehow more or less missed the attention of international publishers up to that point. This has been followed, in just the space of just twelve months, with Hernandez’s second and last novel Crocodile Tears—or Luha ng Buwaya, first published in 1962.
Crocodile Tears centers on Bandong, a teacher at the local school in the village of Sampilong, who has just been appointed as interim principal due to the serious illness of the previous occupant of the post. Bandong doesn’t restrict himself to teaching and school matters, but also becomes what today might be called a “community organizer”, involving himself in labor rights and establishment of self-help household industries.
The antagonists are the local landowners, the less-than-subtly-named Grande (“Big”) family, who keep their tenant farmers and almost everyone else in a form of debt bondage. Donya Leona, the family matron, and her husband Don Severo have a finger in every pie and every local official in their pocket. Donya Leona is the crocodile of the title; the tears derive from the old belief belief that crocodiles shed tears while preparing to consume their prey.
As in The Preying Birds, the names are clues to character: Donya Leona is “Lady Lion” while Don Severo is “Mr Severe” (although he’s severe only toward the villagers; at home, he’s under his wife’s thumb). Their without-a-care-in the-world kids like to party.
There’s a love story: Bandong is courting the lovely Pina, who is also being targeted by the insalubrious Dislaw, the Grande’s overseer, who never goes anywhere without his handgun prominently in view. But the social and political drama overshadows the romantic subplot, which acts a human-sized counterpart to the larger themes of social justice.

Compared with The Preying Birds, Hernandez’s second novel is more tightly constructed, with greater attention to narrative coherence. But it also lacks much of the former’s swashbuckling brio that led translator Danton Remoto to find echoes of The Count of Monte Cristo. Teacher Bandong is unrelentingly earnest. In its large cast of characters, succession of set scenes with dilemmas that are never resolved and characters meant to embody particular virtues or vices, Crocodile Tears has something of the feel of a long-running TV series. Hernandez’s first novel was originally serialized in a popular weekly; perhaps this influence extended into this second novel.
Once again, Hernandez’s politics seem more social-democratic than revolutionary. The villagers organize, entirely legally, make use of the legal system to fight injustice, and form cooperatives to break into the market economy. None of this quite works in light of the Grandes’ systemic control of the levers of power, but it is the Grandes and their associates, not the villagers, who resort to violence, fraud and extortion. Indeed, the villagers’ various dilemmas extend to within a few pages of the end of the book without any evident solution in sight, when resolution comes in an unexpected and entirely tangential form. As a result, beyond documenting the plight of the economically and socially oppressed, Hernandez’s message remains ambiguous: the Constitution (which Bantong references explicitly) and its institutions are the tools to protect the people from injustice, but they can’t be relied upon (almost at all in Hernandez’s telling). Nevertheless, when fortune (or perhaps God) steps in to deliver justice, they are the vehicles through which justice is delivered, there being no alternative. Bantong is more Martin Luther King, Jr (“the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”) than Fidel Castro.
In his translation, Remoto has once again filled a sizable and unforgivable English-language lacuna in Filipino literature. He has also done Hernandez a great service. He can’t do anything about the occasionally preachy tone, or characters whose purpose can sometimes seen more political than dramatic, but he has produced a very readable novel. His affection for the author and his characters is evident.
This English translation of Crocodile Tears is a worthy effort, well-executed. The stunning cover (featuring, as far as I can tell, the work of Filipino artist Ang Kiukok) of a villager carrying the harvest, also deserves mention; rarely does a cover reflect a novel’s tone and intent as well as this one does.
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