The Eye Of The Fish. Luis H. Francia
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.
SEA-BREEZE-BLESSED ROXAS BOULEVARD winds its way through my memory as a major artery, mimicking its role in the city. Originally used as a carriage path by the Spanish, the boulevard was then named for the American admiral George Dewey, who easily vanquished the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay in 1898, during the Spanish-American War. Later on, it was renamed to honor the Philippine Republic’s first president, Manuel Roxas. At the boulevard’s northern end stood Intramuros, the Manila Hotel, the Luneta, the U.S. Embassy, the Army and Navy Club—fitting emblems of four hundred years of colonial solitude. The boulevard’s southern reaches were dominated by nightclubs. Tropical, brassy, very much twentieth century, their neon names beckoned: Bayside, Riviera, Eduardo’s.
Like the human body, Roxas’s northern part was the administering rational self, while southward, towards Baclaran, other human needs were met. These glitzy nightclubs were expensive, the favorite haunts of politicians, businessmen, and the scions of wealthy families. If Filipinos were the Latinos of the East, Manila was our pre-Castro Havana: the clubs had their own big bands and floor shows, as well as beautiful, well-groomed hostesses whom a customer could “table.” That meant having her sit with him as he paid for “ladies’ drinks,” outrageously priced, watered-down cocktails the lady could drink all night without getting drunk. Invariably, the loveliest women wound up as mistresses of the clubs’ well-connected clients. One of my teenage fantasies was to have an exquisitely lovely hostess as an inamorata, unbeknownst to her sugar daddy whose largesse would benefit a young lothario as well.
Neither I nor my friends could afford these clubs. They could be dangerous, frequented by the sons of powerful politicians, spoiled and spoiling for trouble. Accompanied by bodyguards, they would swagger in, seemingly taller because of their command of men and money. Anyone looking at them with even a hint of disrespect