with their cards allowed anxious clients a peek into the different corridors of time. The vendors were again mostly women, among them herbolarias, their stalls and bilaos—round, shallow baskets—overflowing with medicinal bark, vines, roots, bottled potions. One popular herbal potion was an abortifacient; inside those huge, heavy church doors, however, the idea of abortion was anathema and regularly condemned. But the intensity of belief, the belief in the efficacy of spiritual agents, was the same. Many of the faithful crawled on their knees to the altar in fulfillment of a panata, or vow, or lined up to say a prayer of entreaty before the Black Nazarene, a life-size hardwood dark Christ kneeling under the weight of a cross. Carved by an Aztec craftsman during the seventeenth century, this Christ sailed over on one of the galleons that plied the trade route between Acapulco and Manila. Even now the statue is taken outdoors every January, during Quiapo’s fiesta. In a reenactment of its initial voyage, the dark Christ sails on a float in the center of a swaying, sweating sea of men (for only men can carry the Christ), each one jostling and pushing to earn a place among the rope-pullers and move the carriage through Quiapo’s narrow streets. The faithful, standing on the sidewalks, ball their handkerchiefs and throw them at the men riding on top of the float, in the hopes that they will be wiped briefly on the dark arms and doleful face of the Nazarene and, so blessed, flung back to their owners.
body in a bag,
body mangled,
body shunted aside,
body brown,
body bled dry,
may heaven hold you,
may heaven remember
a body once crucified.
I can’t bear to look at the salvaged any longer. I deny this body, now beyond resurrection, and walk away. The curious crowd ebbs and flows on the bridge. Still no cops have arrived. Unless the dead is someone well-known, chances are he/she won’t make it to the evening news. I walk to the Pasig, wilfully removing my mind’s image of a guard attempting to salvage the savaged. Or perhaps it is the other way around.
Images of loss pervade the afternoon, slouching towards night. Now Escolta lingers on in faded dress, an aging star bereft of her crowds, grown dusty and forlorn. Botica Boie’s has vanished, along with most of the first-class cinemas. A few people are about who seem to like coming here to savor the desolate half-life of another era, sitting in the dark in the district’s remaining movie house, watching flickering images with other like-minded viewers.
Images of loss: the Ideal is gone, in its place a department store filled with cheap items; outside, the elevated mass-transit train courses down Avenida Rizal, blocking out the light and adding to the sense of congestion. Plaza Miranda and Quiapo Church still remain revered points for pilgrims wending their way to eternity, and for politicians embarked on a more worldly voyage. The talipapa around the church bustles, noisy as ever. And Carriedo Street, linking the Avenida to Quiapo Church, remains a maelstrom. Shoppers in a feeding frenzy maneuver the narrow spaces between the street stalls. And I hear that familiar refrain, “Pasalubong para kay Boy!” (“Gifts for Boy!”) Once upon a time I was that boy. Now the hawkers assume I have a boy, maybe a brood of children whose appetite for gifts I must satiate.
Images of loss: the river Pasig into which the city’s esteros empty has itself been salvaged and is now a black corpse moving towards the bay, bearing deadly gifts—one thousand tons daily of industrial effluents, sewage, and the odd body. Sticky with sweat, a handkerchief to my nose in a futile attempt not to breathe in the vehicular fumes that have turned the once-blue sky a hazy gray-brown, I cross the river via the old Puente España Bridge and walk all the way to Ermita and Malate.
Images of loss: between Pedro Gil and Padre Faura streets, the old schoolgrounds of the Ateneo and the Assumption are now occupied by a huge luxury hotel and a shopping mall. The wonderful jacarandas that witnessed our childhood games have been cut down, and the chapel where we once served mass and secretly longed for our colegiala has been gutted, the interior used for offices and boutiques.
Walking to the bay offers some relief from the heat that squats malevolently over the city; intermittent sea breezes barely stir the carbon monoxide or the lead particles that hang in the air like swarms of killer bees. Taxicabs, jeepneys, and rickety trucks on Roxas Boulevard weave through the traffic, schools of mechanical squid propelled by inky spumes. Despite their anemic look, the palm trees remind me of a time when Manileños came down here to refresh themselves, and swim in the bay. Now the city’s shit flows into it, though this doesn’t stop the children of the squatters living in colonies along some parts of the boulevard from swimming in the waters. The once-magnificent bay is dying, the people on the streets are dying, the no-longer noble and loyal city is dying, ravaged by vehicular exhaust, by concrete, by the disappearance of public space and civility—the sordid and grim process of urban entombment.
The more desperate of the homeless—the displaced—live literally on the edge, their shanties on the other side of the sea wall, on a thin strip of rock. When the typhoon season comes, they will have to abandon their homes or be swept away by a sea furious at their encroachment. No one knows for sure how many people inhabit the patchwork of jerrybuilt communities spread through metropolitan Manila—one estimate places them at half the population of eight to ten million—but the number seems to grow every year. People migrate to the city from the provinces, searching for work, filled with the illusion that in this city by the bay there will be reprieves for their pitiful lives. Their children beg on the streets, importuning driver and passengers alike for whatever change they can spare, or sell garlands of sampaguita (fragrant jasmine) for a few pesos. The cliché about the poor wearing smiles is true, though the smiles are more rueful than blissful and do little to soften the relentless claims of poverty.
More images of loss: on Roxas Boulevard, the elegant old clubs have gone; boarded-up buildings line a whole stretch of the thoroughfare—Havana after the revolution—but here one that has nothing to do with morals or ideology, only with mass-market capitalism. Alongside the sushi bars, the hamburger stands, the wiener und schnitzel dives on M. H. Del Pilar, the skin trade has become a fast-food business. The massage parlors and the girlie bars that have mushroomed pretend neither to elegance nor to a cheeky up-yours nod to the establishment. This is a straight-up, no-time-for-romance, whambang-thank-you-ma’m cash business. The Marcos regime promoted sex tours avidly, trumpeting the country’s female charms abroad as a natural resource, like so many stands of virgin forest to be felled. And in lumbered Tokyo’s salarymen; farmers from the Japanese countryside with their cameras and garish tropical shirts; and middle-aged Teutons and Aussie adventurers, slack-bellied and dull-eyed, searching for the perfect Asian doll. Or, worse, a child.
Images of loss: nothing startles and repulses more than the easy availability of street children whose faces, a mixture of world-weariness and innocence, make you want to weep. You see them, walking hand in hand with much older tourist men. You want to cry out, putangina mo, you whoreson, motherfucking foreign devil, and pummel them senseless, but you hold your tongue and jam your useless fists into your pockets. You know the city has always been tough, but was it ever this tough, this cold? Sex with prepubescents in the afternoons, and salvagings at night? The child in you shudders, retreats.
Now my recollections are as much elegy as anything else, not just for the city but for my childhood. Yet in the heart there is that place forever sacred, that child who refuses to die, immune from the mutability of time and even place, a place finally beyond place. Out of love, and even out of self-preservation, I hold my Manila in its niche, in my own peculiar history, a city no less tangible than that encountered in the real world, a Manila also of the imagination.
IT IS EASY TO STILL BELIEVE IN INNOCENCE and redemption in Kinabuhayan (a Tagalog word meaning “Resurrection”), a barrio on the lower slopes
