Nothing Will Be Strange

    Migs

July 8, 2008 by Migs  
Filed under Migs

Whereas before it was the adults stealing from the young and innocent, now our children have learned. They’ve joined the ranks of shirtless men and careless women prowling the ruins and rails of our city as those whose fate we might mourn, or, if we’re lesser beings, fear. Are they still honest? Are they still bright little things who we can hope will awaken someday on their first experience of school? During a jeepney ride from student-infested Dapitan Street, through flagrantly dingy Quiapo and the architecturally irregular Manila City Hall, and then finally through messily modern Taft Avenue, I saw in the eyes of our children what our city might be like ten years from now.

Ten years from now the golf course in Intramuros where no one plays –and which is before everyone’s gaze– will have eaten up the highway. It’s doing that now, as I saw awhile ago, a peaceful sea of green on display, much vaster than the cement shore that’s getting narrower for our people and our vehicles to pass. In a decade’s time the shore will have eroded completely for the sake of golf, and we’ll see instead the death of equality, buried beneath our feet along with its possibilities, and its unconsoled ghost defiling the city air, already grey and insipid, for it was a cheap and inexorably slow death. Where the wicked police officers used to be posted, we’ll find caddies with heavy gold wristwatches. And we’ll catch them stealing sad glances at us in between moments of their appraising sand traps and the golfer’s swing.

Since we know nothing of the sport except that Tiger Woods dominates everybody, and since we know nothing of Tiger Woods except that he is disciplined unlike us and terrifyingly rich, we’ll turn our heads away and our eyes will fall on the other side of the road. It will be crowded, a thick throng of people shuffling along the sidewalk in a slow procession, sidestepping each other, shielding their eyes from the sun with their abanikos: commuters; nursing students; tourists; young couples brandishing fat cups of iced coffee from Starbucks where they had a date; maids on a dayoff; gigolos with Oakley sunglasses on the way to a mall; loiterers who grew old in the streets, as evidenced by their thick, silver hair and dirty whiskers and papery mouths; homeless, one-legged men on a sort of wagon made out of scraps of wood and basic carpentry skills; illegal sidewalk vendors howling the bargain prices of oranges, pirated DVDs, rat poison, fake Nike rubber shoes, fresh vegetables, herbal medicine for pregnant women, amplifiers, brooms, slippers, towels, cellular phones, camera lenses, Japanese sweet corn, Rubix cubes, thirty-five-peso striped t-shirts, and all other cheap things that be.

“What’s that pungent, putrid smell?” we’ll ask ourselves –this question can be paraphrased according to our varying vocabularies– and the sense of memory will remind us of the invariable stench at Quiapo, which we traversed just awhile ago, a Chinatown without the China, littered with cigarette butts and red plastic straws and oil spills and animal excrement and frothy human spit. And the smell of all this will have wandered all the way up to Padre Burgos Street, as did the overspill of blackmarket commerce from Manila’s famous old downtown.

But not all things change. Ten years from now the rallyists calling for a repeal of the Oil Deregulation Law will still have gotten no rest. Transport strikes shall go on like they did yesterday and today. These members of organized civil society groups –TUCP, KMU, IBON, KKK, whatever else has been baptized with such incomprehensible acronyms–, all of them will make noise out on our roads and around the marble monuments of our heroes, pretend to ignore the journalists and TV reporters documenting their show, and shove placards, pamphlets in front of our faces, just as they’re doing now as we sit squirming inside silver jeepneys on hairy red upholstered seats frayed by the sun and weather and tattooed passengers with twenty-nine-centimeter balisongs. “Oust Gloria,” the painted words will read still. Oust whoever it is that’s running our country. By then, however, the message will have been lost in its medium (so un-McLuhan, yes; Sir Marshall will have gone out of style, too), and the people will have lost its power. We lost our power years ago, actually, when we surrendered it to those with important surnames.

Not all things change. Our vehicles will still belch the blackest plumes of smoke. Buses. Taxis. Tricycles. Tamaraw FXs. Chrome wagons of the third world. Remember how, when we were younger, we used to gawk at the jeepney driver’s earnings? Oh, it was a sight to behold. He’d fold the twenty- and fifty-peso bills horizontally, then vertically, and deposit the bills in between the fingers of his left hand. See with new eyes, and you’ll find, as I did today, that such a simple quirk can still be amusing; the colors of money having sprouted from beneath the metacarpals may remind you of peacock feathers, fluttering now at full throttle – red, orange, purple, seldom yellow. And we can expect it to be just as convenient: in the same way a librarian might quickly eye a set of books across a shelf to spot the title being asked for, the jeepney driver has only to look between his fingers to see if he has got enough change, or to determine how much he’ll be able to gas up on the next stop, or to know if he’s on track to reach the imposed boundary by noon. The left hand transforms into a bill holder, an abacus…

…and a temptation. Whereas before it was the adults stealing from the young and innocent, now our children have learned.

Steal from the jeepney driver was what three boys attempted to do this afternoon while I was on my way to Taft Avenue. They were on standby near a stoplight, with Carmelite scapulars round their necks and cigarettes nestled behind their ears. I was eavesdropping on their jokes and giggling noiselessly at their shallow crudeness, when suddenly they dashed to the other side of the jeep, one of them swatting the driver’s left hand. Their little modus operandi failed, however, and they retreated to a corner, laughing and exchanging crunchy obscenities with the driver.

Will we manage to keep money away from thieves? I can’t tell. We are all, in one way or another, struggling for survival, and this goes on and on, and those struggling the worst will, ten years from now, have smothered their sobs with scowls and covered their weary breasts with tattoos. Like the rallyists, they will have strengthened their stand; like the vendors, they will have multiplied and scattered across the city’s gloomiest corners; like the caddies, they will have gotten used to the absurdity of this impossible game, the absurdity of it all, the silliness, a hapless servility to the moods of the wind.

Even though you know not my name and I know not yours, maybe we’ll sit closer to each other in the jeepney and together we’ll look out at Manila, passing by. Your hair, flying in all directions, will brush against my face – which is annoying – while beads of sweat seep from my armpits – which is embarrassing. But it’s okay. We’re not exactly strangers. There is something in this city they can never ever take away from us.

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.