The Eye Of The Fish. Luis H. Francia
beneath prim apparel. One colegiala held us in thrall for two summers. Slim, with exquisite eyelashes and wide, doe-like eyes, she gave no sign of noticing us; to her we must have seemed mere extensions of the good father. What drew us to her was a beauty mark just above a full upper lip. Set against porcelain skin that promised resilience and framed by long dark tresses, it was a black ruby to be touched and kissed along with the rest of her. Ours was an innocent carnality, and the hoary rituals we were engaged in imbued us with a kind of medieval, even chivalric, feeling.
Easter rites were themselves suffused with carnality, a reminder of the pagan ways of celebrating darkness and fertility. The most magical moments were those heralding the bodily resurrection of Christ. In Assumption’s darkened chapel, at the point where Christ comes back to life, the congregation lighted candles, the chapel’s lights were switched on, and the ringing of bells commenced. The celebration was grand, theatrical, a reaffirmation of the supremacy of light.
On Binondo’s northwestern edge, right by the Pasig River, is Escolta Street, once the fashionable heart of Manila’s downtown. When I was growing up, Escolta had all the chi-chi shops, but best of all it had Botica Boie’s, a venerable pharmacy cum department store, with a café on the mezzanine. Sometimes my mother would take us shopping there. Seated at one of the café’s plush banquettes, I would watch the shoppers on the main floor, wondering if their lives bore any resemblance to ours.
Near the Escolta ran Avenida Rizal, where Manila’s burgis went to shop, take in a movie, and then dine at one of Binondo’s numerous panciterias. Lyric, Society, Palace, Ideal, Galaxy, Odeon: the names conjured up celluloid fantasies, a world to escape into and be enlightened about other states, other forms of being. Some of the older theaters, like the Clover, harked back to the turn of the century, and combined vaudeville, burlesque, and cinema. The best known was Opera Theater which, as its name suggested, had higher pretensions and was the favorite venue for zarzuela, or musical-comedy, stars.
The Ideal, however, with its Art Deco lobby, was my favorite. It was my mother who introduced me and my sisters to the Ideal. She knew the ticket taker, a morose-looking, balding gentleman who in our kids’ eyes seemed quite important in his russet and brown uniform. We would purchase one ticket, and at a moment when not many people would be entering, my mother would go up to him and make small talk while he looked around to see if the manager was around. Once the coast was clear, we would enter the cool interior, with our bags of lanzones, a round bittersweet fruit, and hopia, Chinese bean cakes purchased from a bakery on nearby Echague Street. Ensconced in our seats, we would munch merrily away.
The Ideal became a shrine where I discovered film noir, Antonioni, the French New Wave, Dr. Zhivago, and the Beatles. The hip, pixilated cheekiness of John, Paul, George, and Ringo in A Hard Day’s Night—along with the snot-nosed attitude of the Rolling Stones and the unabashed sexuality of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison— encouraged Jesuit-school brats like me and my friends in our tentative rebellions. The most visible sign of this rebellion was growing our school-regulation crew-cut hair past our ears towards mop-topped independence—much to the dismay of our prefect of discipline, a balding ex-Marine.
The Ideal was also where I first saw the films of Greta Garbo. Hers was a face that contained a luminescent sadness, whose apparent sangfroid masked an exquisite vulnerability. To see her smile in delight, or succumb to the unruliness of love, seemed a miracle. Like a troubadour, I paid homage with each visitation, waiting for that wondrous transformation onscreen. Garbo was a secular Virgin Mary, an oedipal dream whose hinted-at intimacy precluded guilt. Her film life exuded melancholia, with a broken heart somewhere at the end. Delicious sadness, yes, but never any regrets: nectar for a young poet.
Nearby Quiapo had other moviehouses, but these were either fleabags or showed Tagalog movies. My friends and I were hip, or so we, thoroughly colonial, thought, preferring the company of English-speaking strangers on the silver screen. We disdainfully referred to local movies as bakya, a reference to the wooden clogs rural folk and the poor wore. “Bakya” became a catchall term of derision for any cultural artifact or mode of decidedly proletarian origin. What was “native” was déclassé. We were completely enthralled by Hollywood, that garden of dazzling delights.
Sometimes I accompanied my mother on shopping trips to the Quinta Public Market, Quiapo’s large, sprawling area of tin-roofed one-storey sheds by the Pasig River. Anything and everything could be bought there, from handwoven baskets and brooms to coffee beans and fresh fish. My favorite section was the brightly lit row of food stalls, or turoturos, where a customer could point at the desired item displayed in glass cases—hence the name, which means “point-point.” As we walked through, the tinderas, or female stall owners (and they all seemed to be women, with a bawdy sense of humor that reddened my Catholic ears), would pull at us and insist that the snacks they served were the tastiest. The women’s dark bodies glistened in the light, their sleeveless short dresses allowing unselfconscious displays of flesh in an easy interplay of sexuality and food I secretly delighted in. At such times I was thoroughly bakya, though I was ignorant of the world represented by the market’s inhabitants—by the vendors and the crowds of haggling, deal-making patrons.
Across from the Quinta were Plaza Miranda and Quiapo Church, the hub of Manila’s heart. In this configuration of church, plaza, and market lay the essential outlines of a Filipino’s public life. Accepted through baptism in the church, fed by the market, politicized by and entertained in the plaza, the Filipino lived a lifetime of days in a perpetual commute between these places. Plaza Miranda was a sort of compacted Hyde Park where orators of every creed and belief, religious and secular, harangued small knots of listeners. Political candidates held their final mammoth rallies here in their bid for office. The plaza would be packed by the party faithful and the curious, eager to hear the bombast and vituperative attacks on their opponents, but even more eager to be entertained by an array of show business celebrities. This was an indispensable bread-and-circus, a palabas, without which no political rally was deemed a success.
Right outside Quiapo church was another, smaller open-air market, a talipapa, offering products for the soul, for the future, as well as for your health. Here notions of the sacred outdated and often contradicted Catholic ones. Plaster images of the saints, of the Virgin Mary, of the Santo Niño, were displayed in rows alongside anting-antings, bronze amulets with inscriptions of pig Latin that could, for instance, make you bullet-proof or irresistible to a beloved, as was the case with one that depicted the Christ Child with an erect penis, his left hand holding the globe, his right extended in greeting. The charm worked by rubbing the divine penis while chanting the beloved’s name.
Fortunetellers 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,