When Old Walls Become New

    

October 20, 2008 by Migs  
Filed under Feature, Migs

Show me how to make old walls new. I know that that happens, but not how.

Last week, Davao City correspondent John Grant and I decided to take a walk in Intramuros, to tour the walled district and to step on Spanish-era cobblestone. “To waste a Tuesday,” I thought to myself, before we were able to hail a cab. You know, I had almost protested –Intramuros sounds a corny idea to young urbanites like me, because the site hardly has any romantic appeal, and if it does, it’s for the ancient, and for the granny-glass-wearing scholarly, and unlike us they would never risk sunburn by going at midday– but I kept quiet. I chugged on my bottle of C2 Green Tea Apple and furiously fantasised about air-conditioned spaces.

When the handlebar-moustached cab driver decided to take, unnecessarily, a longer route, with Love Radio and its either proletariat or unintentional humour at full volume, I still kept quiet. Some crimes are better left uncaught. He wants to go round in circles, fine; I’m not the one who’s paying for the bloody fare. So instead of travelling straight through Roxas Boulevard from Vito Cruz Avenue, then turning right on T.M. Kalaw Street, then left to Maria Orosa Street and into Calle Real del Palacio, we zigzagged through grey and strange thoroughfares, past nightclubs, karaoke bars, pool bars, bad restaurants, fly-infested eateries, dentist clinics, gloomy Internet cafes, Muslim-owned jewellery shops, Chinese- and Korean-owned pawnshops, money exchangers, twenty-dollars-a-night hotels, abandoned office buildings, and other holes in the wall in whose haphazardness, I thought, not even the enchanted city surgeons of Metro Manila Development Authority would be able to find hope – until, half an hour into the journey, we were welcomed at the gates of Intramuros by a security guard who was uniformed in a Spanish, sixteenth-century sort of way. A prim and proper Guardia Civil of Malaysian descent, with no trace of mestizo in him.

“Good afternoon, sir!” he greeted, not really addressing me.

I hadn’t been to this part of the city for such a long time. My uncle’s golden wedding anniversary, held in Sofia Garden at Patio Victoria and for which I had written the program script, was two years ago. And I had stopped visiting the third-floor Tradewind bookstore at Silahis Arts and Crafts Centre ever since I discovered the F. Sionil Jose-owned La Solidaridad in Ermita. Understandable, then, that Intramuros suddenly seemed strange in the October sunlight, with the stones looking so brittle, and the statues charmless, and the shadows oppressed. The clatter of horse-driven kalesas jolted me, as did the buzzing population of college students who loitered away the hours in and out and around the medieval halls of their schools. John mingled with and took snapshots of them while I stood veritably transfixed. Everything seemed unfamiliar, awfully unfamiliar, as though I was observing with a new set of eyes. I even mistook San Agustin Church for Manila Cathedral. And I consider my roots Catholic!

Actually, I could have gone to any part of the city and felt a similar feeling, that which might be described as the inverse of déjà vu: what I thought I had previously known would strike me as unusual. My job, after all, this writing gig for offshore clients in America, requires me to stay at home, face the computer all day, and write and behave according to pay-per-click doctrines.

This quiet, almost unreal existence must have estranged me from the world. Which is kind of sad, if you come to think about it. I now don’t even know where I belong! I went to old Manila, the old walls became new, and Manila became just another city in the Philippines.

About the Author:  Migs Bassig is a freelance writer and journalist with a background in Mass Communications. After working for a Manila-based advertising agency, PR firm, and events organizer, he now contributes to various locally published magazines and newspapers, and is one of the authors of Metroblogging Manila. A suburbanite commuter, Migs has lived all his life in the Philippines and loves scouring the Philippine capital’s rich patina of arts and literature.