Leader Limping and Bandaged; Kidney Ailment Reported : Filipino Voters Focus on Marcos’ Health

President Ferdinand E. Marcos was not due for several hours in this remote little town 150 miles south of Manila, but already the three men outside the Roadside Cafe had claimed a prime spot along the route for the parade.

One of the three, Jose de la Paz, said they had not come to show their support for the president in his bid for reelection. Nor were they interested in what the president had to say that day--the first time Marcos had been to San Jose since he first asked them for their votes 20 years earlier.

They had come to take a good look at a man they fear may be dying.

“It is like a cockfight,” De la Paz, a retired local trader, said, referring to what many regard as the Philippines’ unofficial national sport.

‘We Came to Size Him Up’

“We have an expression we use for inspecting the cock before the fight,” he went on, changing to his native Tagalog language. “Kakaliskisan namin siya. We came to size him up--to see if this one is still strong enough to win.”

At 68, limping and bandaged, Marcos is in obvious pain, and his health has become a crucial issue in the last weeks before the special Feb. 7 election he has called to test his political strength.

For more than two years, reports of Marcos’ failing health have been a top concern of officials in the U.S. Congress and in the Reagan Administration. They believe that since 1983, Marcos has suffered at least two debilitating bouts with a kidney disease that has left him a questionable protector of American interests in the Philippines.

Intelligence reports in Washington last week, fueled by Marcos’ weakened physical appearance in two dozen recent public rallies across the country, indicate that Marcos has suffered at least a mild relapse.

Reports to this effect have renewed fears that even if he is reelected, Marcos may not be strong enough to govern much longer. And the signs of Marcos’ infirmity have left Washington wondering who might be chosen to replace him if he dies or is incapacitated.

During Marcos’ campaign appearance Monday night in a Manila suburb, Marcos’ son, who had just helped his father to his chair, was overheard telling a Cabinet minister, “He really looks bad.”

In the last week, Marcos has been seen taking pills on the speaking platform. On one occasion, his left hand bled profusely as he sat waiting to speak. He said later that he had stumbled on the stage that day, then said that the blood came from scratches inflicted by clutching admirers as he moved through the crowd.

Face Puffy, Swollen

At every rally since the campaign began, Marcos’ face has been puffy and swollen. He has walked with uncertainty. He has winced with evident pain. He has leaned heavily on railings and been carried on the shoulders of his bodyguards. He often breathes in short, measured, staccato breaths.

Before every appearance, a doctor has preceded Marcos to the foot of the stage carrying a three-foot-by-three-foot plastic box bearing a small red cross. A security guard at the San Jose rally on Saturday said the box was a medical kit. Another hinted that it was an emergency dialysis machine.

Marcos’ advisers have tried to make light of the issue. They note that on every occasion the president has stood and spoken for at least an hour. Commenting on the spate of publicity over Marcos’ bleeding hand last week, Information Minister Gregorio Cendana said it was “like comparing a burp to a heart seizure.”

But as the reports have spread through the rural towns and provinces of this country of 7,000 islands, it has become clear that the issue of Marcos’ health is a crucial element in the campaign. Even at the grass-roots level, Filipinos are beginning to worry, as De la Paz put it, “whether we are not being asked to vote for a ghost.”

“This question of the president’s health is a very grave issue for all of us now,” De la Paz said, and the men with him outside the Roadside Cafe nodded in agreement. “It may just decide the whole thing. I would guess that most of the people who came to see President Marcos today came just for this one thing--to see how he looks. I voted for Marcos in 1965 when he first ran for president--and every time after that. But this time I’m asking myself, should I elect a dying man?”

The men outside the cafe were not the only people curious about the state of Marcos’ health that day. When the bronze Ford carrying Marcos from the airport neared the San Jose town square, several thousand people crushed against one another for a better look. Many of them commented on the president’s appearance and his wobbly walk.

At every previous rally, Marcos had traveled the last hundred feet to the stage on the shoulders of his security men, and this provoked Gabriel Iglesias, a university professor, to remark: “When he is carried on the shoulders of the people, I think it is not popularity. It is because he cannot walk.”

At San Jose, Marcos changed tactics. Here his car inched through the crowd all the way to the stage, and the audience watched a feeble Marcos slowly mount the steps under his own power.

But once at the podium, the president went on the offensive. His voice was hoarse and often cracking, but he confronted the health issue head-on and revealed his strategy to combat it: to cast his obvious physical weakness as a moral strength.

He conceded in San Jose and in subsequent rallies that he is sick, that he bears wounds and that he bled the other night.

“Yes, I bled,” he said. “I am used to bleeding. I’m your old soldier (a reference to his days in World War II as a guerrilla soldier fighting the Japanese occupation). I suffered five wounds in the war. One of those wounds was shrapnel that hit my knee. . . . So when I’m tired or it is cold, I limp.”

He chided the opposition for using his health as an issue, and said: “They jest at scars who have never felt the wound--at a veteran who has almost given up his life for his people. They said that I am sick, that I will die in six months. They have been saying that since 1983. . . . I say, let them laugh.”

Throughout the speech, Marcos flaunted his heavily bandaged left hand and a right hand that bore three Band-Aids. He waved both in the air, flashing victory signs and jabbing a gauze-wrapped finger for emphasis.

Uses ‘Health Politics’

In an interview a few days after Marcos’ first serious illness, in 1983, the president’s wife, Imelda, said that Marcos enjoys “playing a game” with the concern about his health. He knows how closely he is inspected when he appears in public, she said, and he uses this as a kind of “health politics.”

At a rally on Sunday afternoon, though, Marcos suggested for the first time the possibility that he may have to be replaced at some point by his vice-presidential running mate, Arturo Tolentino.

“I pray to God--knock on wood--that I don’t get sick any further, and that I don’t befall an accident,” he told the audience on the central island of Negros. “But if so, . . . Tolentino is the only man who can replace me.”

Throughout Marcos’ appearances, his security men have taken elaborate precautions to protect him. At every stop, thousands of soldiers are flown in to guard his parade route and take up positions on rooftops overlooking the stage. His entourage travels with grenade shields, and Marcos always wears a bulletproof vest, security men say.

Despite such security, Marcos came within seconds of disaster Saturday when his twin-engine plane nearly collided with an air force plane while landing at a small airstrip.

Marcos’ reference to Tolentino in the context of accidents and illness also cuts to the heart of the health issue--the question of what would happen if Marcos should die in office. But it did not address directly the opposition’s contention that if Marcos dies or becomes incapacitated before election day, his party may suddenly substitute Imelda Marcos for the post.

The new election code, written when Marcos called the special election, contains a clause providing that in such an event, a candidate can be replaced anytime before noon on election day by anyone chosen by the candidate’s party.

In an interview last week, Victorino Savellano, chairman of the election commission, who was handpicked for his post by Marcos, said that in his opinion all votes tallied before any such substitution would automatically be counted for the new candidate.

“But I have no reason whatsoever to believe that will happen here,” Savellano said. “I don’t think anyone intends to die before all the votes are tallied.”

In San Jose, opinion on the subject was mixed. When the rally was over, a 23-year-old Bible school teacher who identified herself only as Liberty was asked whether she believed Marcos was healthy and strong enough to govern.

“Mentally, yes,” she said.

Cen Rayton, a San Jose businessman and longtime Marcos supporter, had sat just a few feet from Marcos on the stage throughout the rally. “He’s not as strong as before,” Rayton said. “That could be seen by all of us. But I don’t think he’s dying.”

Over at the Roadside Cafe, Jose de la Paz was not so sure. He said: “He looked pretty bad to me. If President Marcos was a fighting cock, he sure wouldn’t last long in the ring. But I’m not so sure I’d bet against him, either. After all, this isn’t a cockfight. In a cockfight, everyone knows the rules of the game. Here, only one man knows for sure.”