The Eye Of The Fish. Luis H. Francia
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