Читать книгу The Eye Of The Fish - Luis H. Francia - Страница 9

A BLUE-UNIFORMED SECURITY GUARD on Gandara Street resists the afternoon heat’s seductive call to sleep by doing pushups on the sidewalk, his legs propped on a chair. I can only wonder at this burst of activity as I walk by, my lunch of curried noodles and steamed fish, consumed in a crowded panciteria, filling my gut. The guards for the other stores—all of them shuttered on this somnolent, humid Sunday afternoon—slouch on chairs, unbuttoned, some dozing in their undershirts. Binondo, Manila’s Chinatown, has an almost demure air, wearing her secrets the way a grande dame wears her perfume: discreetly but distinctively, hinting at a bouquet of other fragrances. The world passing by has grown smaller and more compact, as though past, present, and future had settled down into one dense layer, and could no longer offer her any surprises.

On Dasmarinas Street, a calesa plies the street, the clip-clop of its blindered horse pleasant drumbeats on the brain. Binondo is mostly deserted today, the colonial-era buildings aspiring to modest heights, their sooty wooden facades, iron-grille windows, stone columns, and solid doors evoking the days when the Chinese grew shy of the Spaniards’ disdainful gaze. Behind the walls, a congested mass of humanity breathes quietly, comfortably, even opulently. Here is the Old Manila still, the Manila that existed before that monument to the mall and American efficiency, aseptic, modern Makati, reared its skyscraper heads south of the Pasig River. Binondo forms part of the city’s cholesterol-choked heart, cheek by jowl with Santa Cruz and Quiapo, neighborhoods that embody the essence of Manila—bustling, brawling, blustery, full of the commerce and vigorous life brought by the river and the sea.

The Chinese trace their presence here to the days when Manila was still a Muslim entrepot. Never proselytizers, worldly to the point of disdain, confiders only in themselves, the merchants and workers from Guangdong, Amoy, and Fukien were distrusted by the Iberians who forbade them to enter Intramuros, the old Walled City, except for trade, and then only through the Parian Gate. Binondo, where they lived right across the river, was within easy reach of Intramuros’s guns. For the Spanish never forgot that their early tenuous hold on the city had been nearly broken in 1574 by Limahong, a Chinese warlord, and his marauding fleet of junks. After a series of battles, the Spanish finally repelled the invaders. Subsequent uprisings by the Chinese in the seventeenth century were all bloodily suppressed.

Binondo’s large esteros, or canals, reenforce the feeling of frag-mentation and separation from the rest of the city. Their murky waters, refuse laden, assail pedestrians on the short bridges with the sweetish smell of decay. The approaches are crowded with shops that sell chestnuts, fruits, sweetmeats, ham, noodles, and Chinese delicacies. In a ritual antedating conquest, shopper and shopkeeper bargain till they reach common ground.

Something happens that jolts me back into these unruly times. A small crowd has gathered on one side of an estero bridge. I go over and look down at what everyone else is staring at: a body wrapped in black plastic, the rope around its sheated neck clearly visible. A man nearby remarks: “na-salvaged.” No one is certain of the word’s provenance, why an English term that refers to the act of rescue, of retrieving something of value, especially from the sea, now has this grisly connotation. But the scene before me does bear an eerie resemblance to a maritime salvage.

A burly security guard with a line and a hook has snagged the black plastic. He tugs at the body, managing to lift it out partly before it falls back in. He does this repeatedly. Does he really think he can land this human fish, or is he playing to the crowd? A silent crowd, morbidly fascinated, that shows no outward signs of anger. Does the bag contain a man or a woman? Petty thief, human rights activist, or just a person who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time? Now just a body thrown up against the embankment like a bad dream. In this city of bad dreams, this is one of the worst, a nightmare that has become one measure of how vastly different this Manila is from the Manila I grew up in.

The salvagings that used to come to light only in the city’s more obscure corners now brazenly turn up under the public’s noses. Take a good sniff, the killers seem to say, you could wind up smelling like that. Friends relate casual awakenings to the nightmare of these twisted redemptions: two bodies on the sea wall by Roxas Boulevard, across from Aristocrat, a popular twenty-four-hour eatery; a friend as she comes out of her residential compound who sees a dead man outside the gates; activists I knew gunned down in the hills.

Manila: a name I utter deliberately, consciously, contemplating what it signifies, the strong and often evocative feelings it evokes in my lived imagination. What terrible and beautiful histories a place contains that one grew up in! I mean not just the impersonal accretion of events and circumstances that give cold shape over the centuries to a city, but those secret stories, those remembrances of people and places that make of it more than an accident of geography, or a backdrop against which lives unfold and end in manifold ways; that make of a city the intimate possession of those whom it possesses as well.

My old Manila wasn’t really old; in reality, the Manila I grew up in grew up with me, though it was a little older and grew much faster. The fabled Noble and Ever Loyal City—as the original sixteenth century Spanish charter described it—had ceased to exist because the world around it had changed. If in my beginning was Manila, if I had come out the natural way, in my Manila was a beginning, yanked out in rough Caesarean fashion and thrown into the dislocations of a confused modernity. The world of the Spanish colonizers had been almost obliterated, not so much by the retreating Japanese during World War II, but by the heavy guns of an army led by that pipe-smoking cowboy General Douglas MacArthur. The Manileños who survived may not have heard the phrase “friendly fire,” but they knew intimately and precisely the dimensions of its cruel irony.

Across from Binondo, the Walled City of Intramuros—built up four hundred years earlier by Malay forebears commandeered by the Spanish—bore the brunt of the bombardment. This was the second time around: the original settlement, the Muslim Malay kingdom under rajahs Lakandula and Suleyman, had been razed to the ground by the Spanish as they began to Hispanicize a far-flung archipelago and to enfold near-naked Pacific islanders in the guilty robes of European religion. What I emerged into, straight out of my mother’s hospitable womb, was a city still devastated by war. Its destruction, its human loss, meant nothing to an infant still pondering its own loss, still seeking the warm maternal island-belly and now moored, between shadow and light, to the larger world of mother and father and other, dimly perceived family members. Nothing that my infant’s clear eye saw when my mother carried me through the city’s shattered neighborhoods has been retained, but the city had its own memories by then. The incomprehensibility of human bestiality, the lengths we would go to to measure our darknesses, was its own rude birth into a vastly different universe.

The memories of that much older, vanished Manila came to me through the recollections of people who had lived in it before the war: my parents, my aunts and uncles, various writers I read growing up. As it is, my earliest memories of the city are devoid of the traces of war: a huge house, dogs, and a yard in a neighborhood noted only for a famous child actress living on the aptly named Hollywood Road; Sunday lunch at a panciteria in the Ermita district, made memorable by the steaming bowl of bird’s nest soup that occupied center stage; strolls by Manila Bay, near Rizal Park, still known to my parents by its Spanish name, Luneta.

Sometimes my parents would take us for a ride on the Matorco double-decker bus, and naturally everyone wanted to sit on the open-air top deck. The bus would amble the length of palm tree-fringed Roxas Boulevard that skirted the bay, its passengers enjoying the cool sea breeze. We would gaze out to that matrix, the sea, as if to reassure ourselves by its presence that the world still existed as it had the day before, that we had remained islanders.

The bus turned around once it reached Baclaran Church, near the boulevard’s southern end. The church was famous for its icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, believed to be miraculuous by thousands of devotees who came every Wednesday to entreat Her Lady for intervention in seemingly hopeless cases—and causing monumental traffic jams. Those wanting to avoid this motorist’s nightmare stayed home and listened to the novena over the radio. Sometimes our family would gather and pray along with the jumble of voices that came through the airwaves.

Perhaps we didn’t pray hard enough, for those days of family harmony were short-lived, as relations between my mother and father grew strained, and unhappiness set in. A child’s memory is intuitive as much as it is a recollection of actual events, and I knew the unhappiness had to do partly with my father’s dissatisfaction over his role as family provider, the many disappointments in his career as a civil engineer, and his hurtful pride when my mother had to assume a larger burden than either he or she was prepared for. (Dear father, would that you had understood and forgiven the temper of the times!) The blurring of roles was never an option for my dad, who as the oldest son was used to getting his way. There was a deep sense of discontent at how his life had turned out. His imperiousness, which would have stood him in good stead earlier in the century, had nothing to brighten it in an age that looked eagerly, steadfastly, at a new world.

Though my father had been born in the first decade of the twentieth century, when American colonial rule was barely in place, the essential flavor of the times—the way he and his siblings had been brought up by his Filipino mother, my Lola Morang, and his wealthy Spanish mestizo father, Lolo Pepe—was quintessentially Old World Hispanic. This meant a precise hierarchy through which one interacted with the larger world. For my father, as well as for my mother, knowing the proper social rituals and the weight and context of clan relations, of surnames, was crucial. Establishing the background of someone you had just met was common in a society where the important thing wasn’t so much your self as it was your clan, and how the clan and its antecedents stood in relation to the larger world. In a way, it was a form of ancestor worship both my parents practiced quite well.

The Puritanical notion of hard work as redemptive, the Yankee stress on social and economic mobility, rooted in a frontier mentality, and the belief in the fixability of just about anything, that floated vaguely about was alien to the emotional and psychological landscape my father was accustomed to. He was from the upper class—in charge, answered to—a station he felt inexorably his. Fate’s indifference to his background and the fact that impoverishment was much closer than he ever thought possible bewildered him, shoring up rather than breaching his imperiousness, which became a fortress against an increasingly impersonal mercantile world.

He was truly Lolo Pepe’s son. My father’s father, who passed away before I was born, had been a wealthy landowner in nearby Laguna Province. The estate was considerable, with a perimeter that supposedly took three days to cover on horseback. Lolo Pepe showed no inclination for business, preferring the leisurely life of a gentleman of means. He liked to whittle, was fond of music, and could play the violin passably. With friends he was generous, often paying off their gambling debts, using parcels of land as collateral for the money he’d borrow on their behalf. Lolo Pepe never saw those monies again. By the time he passed away, very little remained of his lands. On the day of Lolo Pepe’s demise, he asked to be carried to one of the remaining rice fields, where he spent some time looking about. He then signalled for his attendants to bring him home, where he died.

According to various accounts by my father’s siblings, the family lands had been taken over by usurers—two brothers and a sister—from the neighboring town of Santa Cruz. One brother went mad, while the other was so detested by the townspeople, he had to carry a gun wherever he went. The sister wound up a reclusive, miserable spinster. These were the stories I was told as I was growing up, the unspoken moral being that this unholy trio had been found guilty by God.

My father’s customary disdain for the practical never sat well with my mother. Her own mother Agatona had been a strong-willed woman with a career as a school superintendent—the first woman to occupy the post in La Union, a northern Luzon province. Agatona’s mother, my great-grandmother Quiteria Narciso, objected to the marriage. Henry was a foreigner, an unknown quantity, and a representative of the imperialistas: what clan was he from? Where were his roots? He had no context beyond what he was. To top it all, he was a soldier in the army that had defeated the revolutionary forces. He was, in short, the enemy. Quiteria refused to attend the wedding and wore black that day. Later on, however, she relented, having grown fond of her son-in-law.

As the education superintendent in La Union, Granny (as we called her) would visit barrio schools on horseback. She impressed her superiors and was offered a government scholarship so she could pursue higher studies in America. Her father, however, fearing that she would metamorphose into a barbarian and lose her soul in the New World, wouldn’t hear of it.

Instead she lost her heart and married my American grandfather, Henry Joseph Hunt of Philadelphia, a soldier in the U.S. army during both the 1898 Spanish-American and the 1899 Philippine-American wars. Soon after marrying, my Granny quit teaching. Whose decision was that? It’s impossible to say; kind and easygoing as he was, Lolo Henry most likely expected a traditional marriage. And though tough and independent-minded, Granny thought men should lead. The compromise may have been for her to start a business of making and selling her own bagoong (fermented shrimp paste) and basi (palm wine) from home. For a while the couple ran a small hotel in San Fernando.

Neither business lasted; her heart simply wasn’t in it.

For his part, shortly after the marriage, Henry quit the service. The U.S. army frowned upon racial intermarriages, and Henry knew his chances for further advancement were nil. But he was liked well enough by the civilian authorities for he was soon appointed chief of the secret service in Manila. The Secret Service! Did Lolo Henry aggressively pursue clandestine anti-American groups and keep an eye on foreigners? He received P600 a month—a princely sum in those days—the use of a car and chaffeur and a stately house by Manila Bay. Eventually, he gave up on the secret service. “He couldn’t abide the corruption in its ranks,” my mother remembers. Later he worked with the Bureau of Agriculture, supervising the aerial spraying of crops in different parts of the country. He may also have had another family somewhere in the Visayas, the central part of the archipelago; there had been rumors that Henry had married before, and that we had cousins in the military surnamed Hunt.

His liver weakened by his love for drink, Lolo Henry died in 1930 at the age of fifty-seven, when my mother was only fifteen. My mother recalls how Henry “would call me ‘lomboy’ [a berry] and your Auntie Josie ‘mango.’ He loved to socialize. [How he lives on in my mother!] He loved animals and hated seeing a dog on a leash or a bird in a cage. And whenever he had to make extended trips to other parts of the country, everything that Mother packed—sewing kit, socks, shirts, handkerchiefs—Papa would give away before coming home.”

My mother’s memories of her mother are not as loving. She felt Granny was frugal not just in matters of money but also in displaying affection and warmth towards her own daughters. She would often criticize them in public, humiliating them. My mother recalls, “From the time she got up, she would start nagging. We didn’t need a radio.” She meant that Granny had the lowdown on everyone. And to this day my mother resents having had to live in a dorm at a Manila all-girls Catholic high school, St. Theresa’s, unable to go home on weekends or even occasionally step out in the evenings with friends: dormitory rules forbade this, and if they hadn’t, my mother said Granny certainly would have.

Granny had a loud, commanding voice, partly because she had grown hard of hearing but mostly because she was accustomed to having her way. As a boy, I would often accompany her, already a septuagenarian, on shopping trips within the city; she could reduce shopkeepers to tears striving for a bargain, as I cringed nearby in embarrassment. Sometimes she would treat me to a film, buy me candy, and then snooze in the dark as I consumed both sweets and the images onscreen. When death visited Agatona at the age of eighty-nine, it was only fitting that it be quick, painless, a stroke in the brain, an immediate dousing of the fire. She would have hated a slow, drawn-out death, a diminution of her authority, herself no longer in command.

Against Agatona’s domineering and my father’s traditional notions of primacy, my mother’s sense of independence came reluctantly to the fore when she started to work as an insurance agent, taking up the slack whenever my father was between contractual assignments— which, as he got older, grew fewer and fewer. She soon became the major household provider, a fact that fuelled my father’s resentments. And my mother’s insistence that he do something else, like teach Spanish, for instance—he spoke the language perfectly—would infuriate him. To have followed her advice would have been an open admission of failure, resulting in loss of face in front of his friends and professional peers. My parents would often have raging arguments, my father scorning my mother’s efforts to earn money, and my mother alternately bewildered and angered by his refusal to deal with the world as it was. As a child, I found it difficult to be with them in public, sensing the tension between them and dreading the possibility of a flare-up.

I sometimes wonder how we would have turned out had Lolo Pepe’s vast tracts of land been passed on. Difficult as it is to picture myself as anything other than what I am now, I can imagine growing up as the son of a wealthy landowner, servants and bodyguards at my command, accustomed to the power and privilege such a position carries in a society still shaped by the land, its values dictated by a feudalistic Catholic patriarchy. Those values might have corrupted me, transforming me into an active defender of an inequitable system that I have been harshly critical of precisely because I recognize in it an alternative self: the submerged tyrant, benevolent paterfamilias, uncaring hedonist. We are never harsher than when we see our darker side in others, our harshness a warning to ourselves as much as anything else.