The Philippines Midsummer Night's Dream

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In Shakespearean drama, both tragic and comic, the storms and calamities that shake the sublunary globe are reflections of turmoil in the hearts of men. So too, when the state of nature is disordered, do they often portend the same upset in the nature of the state. It therefore seemed a distinctly Shakespearean augury when Typhoon Gading drowned Manila in torrential rains last week, sending coconut trees swaying wildly in the wind and plunging much of the city deep into darkness. For in recent weeks, tremors and uncertainties have had all of Philippine politics listing between tragedy and comedy, swept up in a whirlwind of coups rumored, imagined and aborted.

At the heart of much of the confusion is the strange and shifting alliance between President Corazon Aquino and her wily longtime antagonist and current Defense Minister, Juan Ponce Enrile. Throughout the 7 1/2 years that her husband Benigno was in jail, Aquino had to negotiate on his behalf with Enrile, who was then Defense Minister under former President Ferdinand Marcos, even for conjugal visits. In February, it was Enrile's startling volte-face that helped topple Marcos and bring Aquino to power. Ever since, the former architect of Marcos' martial law, who has never concealed his own presidential ambitions, has remained a great unknown within Aquino's Cabinet. Enrile, 62, still commands the loyalty of the 230,000-man military, and all sides are well aware that what the army giveth, the army can also take away. Shakespeare might have been addressing Aquino when he wrote, "That Power that made you king/ Hath power to keep you king in spite of all."

The most recent of the Manila disturbances was a 40-hour comedy of errors that seemed to parody the February revolution. The charade began when about 8,000 Marcos loyalists gathered in the capital's Rizal Park, as they have done every Sunday since mid-March, to champion their exiled leader, now reigning over a seaside villa in Honolulu. Then, as is their custom, more than 1,000 members of the ragtag group drifted into the nearby Manila Hotel, the onetime playground of Imelda Marcos, for drinks. This time, however, they were joined by two truckloads of armed soldiers. The next thing they knew, Arturo Tolentino, Marcos' vice-presidential running mate in last February's elections, was reading out a letter from Marcos asking him to take over as the country's "Acting President," and was having himself sworn in.

As at least three more truckloads of soldiers pulled up, thousands of loyalists formed a barricade around the hotel, waving and chanting in the afternoon's sweltering summer heat. Inside the hotel, the leaders of the siege kept dropping dark hints about the intentions of the military. "We expect more troops to join us," said their spokesman Gerry Espina.

At 7 p.m., the escapade entered an even more surreal phase. Holding a decidedly impromptu press conference on the steps in the lobby, Tolentino began naming the members of his Cabinet, among them, none other than Juan Ponce Enrile, who would remain as Defense Minister. Meanwhile, the gate- crashers continued to make free use of the facilities of the historic hotel, ordering drinks from the bar, lounging by the pool and stretching out on the floor of the chandeliered lobby.