Migs Bassig

There I was one pleasant morning on a long sweaty walk that starts at the Davao City Hall and leads to the unimposing South Ilustre Mall downtown: moving, maybe lost, but moving. Even though according to the locals I actually came close to the Chinatown of the largest city in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, it was a stretch that struck me as more Western than Oriental: diners and billboards; no teahouses and no lanterns.

No matter. Why exchange sixty minutes of sun and solitude for anything else? The weather was agreeable, and I was enjoying being a traveller, as opposed to being “just a domestic tourist”. Only briefly did I stop: upon a minor assault of hunger I breakfasted at a McDonald’s at one corner of an intersection. I forgot for one reason or another to take mental note of the streets’ names, a habit I had acquired in Manila. It was something else which I let guide me: the kites being flown above –looking like seven sperm cells in the clear blue sky– or something simpler perhaps, and vaguer, such as an impulsive fearlessness of the unknown. Whatever it is, if the guide disappointed, I still would’ve moved, just moved, in what R.L. Stevenson had once expressed as “the great affair.”

See, I wasn’t intent on arriving anywhere specific. I had the morning and early afternoon to myself, and was thus half-witted enough to prowl downtown Davao –a land of which I still knew very little, except for its being rashly heralded as “the most livable city in Asia”– in an unaware sort of way.

Don’t get me wrong: there were plenty of reminders that this was the Philippines still, where one was served Coke seconds after ordering Sprite. “But I ordered Sprite,” I mumbled to the teenage girl in a French fries hat. She didn’t hear me. I walked away with a drink I didn’t want and a McMuffin sandwich I didn’t particularly care for.

Looking out through the glass window I observed the absence of Ped Xing signs. The ones motorists in Manila ignored to the dismay of commuters? Where were those yellow signs? This was as unusual to me as the occurrence of here seeing a smooth sunburnt road, one whose noiselessness was broken only by the quick hello-goodbye of a friendly security guard. He greeted the customers. The customers, save for me, greeted him back.

Right across from McDonald’s there stood a drab and advertisement-plastered commercial plaza called Times Square, and I was reminded of New York City. Pigeons dove and foraged for what little biodegradable litter there was, and I fantasized about Venice. A bike with a multicoloured umbrella rolled past and I thought of a busy district in Thailand. You see, one needs only to use his imagination and he’d be all over the world.

I resumed my journey on foot and thought it strange that the people walked ever so slowly. (I almost cursed a nursing student for listening to her iPod instead of letting me pass.) Here, rarely did one pedestrian sidestep another. Have they no urgent jobs they must rush off to? No game to catch? Where are the moving cars, and if no one can answer that, what are these stoplights for? These were inappropriately Manila questions, mind, but I was not to be blamed for being presented this world of sterile, style-cramping newness.

This means, of course, that I thought of home oftener than I had expected, or wanted to. I heart-shatteringly pined for my second-hand Penguin Classics (there aren’t, so far as I can tell, many decent bookstores in Davao) and my guitar. I actually missed the people; and the dirt; the traffic; the contemptuous stares; Manila’s notorious unrest. I found that all these were dear to me; being far away, I thought I would become none the more colourful, or interesting, or – what? Street-wise? Hardened? Davao felt safe alright, as alleged, as though it kept everyone on an even keel.

Seeing Chinatown might have changed this. I wonder now if it looks like Manila’s infamous Binondo. I wonder if it’s a place just as fresh and just as rotten: alive with unkempt Chinese temples, marble dragons, DVD pirates, sidewalk stalls selling unlabeled bottles of herbal medicine, and wet streets permeated by the blatant smell of soy sauce and sewage. I missed it while I was there. But I’ll keep on moving, and in moving I might find what I’m looking for.

My cousin Johnny from Los Angeles visited last week. And he had to throw a party every night. (He could not escape this very Filipino duty to family and friends.) His last night, before he left again for America, invitations were sent for his send-off, or despedida, which was to start at 9 p.m.

“Are we going yet?” I asked FJ, another cousin, at 9 p.m. We were planning to go together.

“I need to sleep first,” he said. And then off he went to sleep.

So we left at around midnight and arrived at the venue in White Plains 30 minutes later. The party had trickled down to four guests, many empty beer bottles, a potpourri of cold leftovers, and a slightly sleepy Johnny. He told us that there came American guests but that they were on the dot, and that they’ve already gone, maybe sleeping now as we speak. There might have been a musical show or a game of poker held earlier but we never would have known. We were late. Unfashionably.

But that’s Filipino Time. Better to be late than to wait.

It’s the phrase used to describe the chronic tardiness of the Filipino – tardiness in business meetings, weddings, social gatherings, flights, blind dates, deadlines, and pretty much everything that has a schedule. It’s the conduct expected (regrettably) of Filipinos by fellow Filipinos. It’s the reason why a three o’clock rendezvous at your local coffee shop will start at four o’clock, and why my five o-clock shadow doesn’t appear until after the six o’clock sunset.

Of running on Filipino Time, I myself have been guilty; and, like my fellow countrymen, I’ve fabricated so many phenomenally unbelievable lies to excuse myself. I’m sorry, horrendous traffic. Front gate was flooded. The taxi broke down, and then a police officer in Makati Avenue pulled us over for swerving. And my eyesight is so poor, I had read the wrong address, I think I need to set an appointment with the ophthalmologist.

Johanna Fransisco of Suite101.com offers a theory that might explain this off-putting behaviour:

Filipino Time is indicative of our complacency. Blame it on colonialism. In fear of insurrection, when the Encomienda (landownership) system was introduced to the Filipino natives, goal-setting was not part of the seminar – a cue that was taken by the later succeeding dictatorship regime. Filipinos are not encouraged to look further than today, or even this very hour. What is encouraged is the laid-back attitude bordering on apathy. In more recent years of democracy, the disease has still gone undiagnosed. Planners and palm pilots, definite tools of promptness, are seen as privileges of the bourgeoisie. Unfortunately the majority of those who can afford it regard it as accessories for show rather than tools of the trade.

No matter the level of complacency, there is no lamer excuse to be late than saying, “Hey, I’m Filipino. I’m naturally tardy.” That’s not what makes us who we are. On the contrary: we’re a people known to be hospitable, well-mannered, and polite, with supposedly sensitive (and almost embarrassed) regard for others.

But if we keep someone waiting, he’ll be bound to think otherwise.

(This piece was written on my second night at a Quezon City apartment I had rented last year.)

I only recently found out that there are two kinds of cockroaches in Manila.

Both emerge from a room’s blackest corners, or invisible cavities, when at night you’re lying in bed and sweat is forming at the back of your neck, or at your back. They come when there is nothing left to sense but darkness and nothing left to feel but the sweltering effects of our city climate and its dust and doggedness and quiet restlessness. When your cheeks don’t feel the air from the night outside, the air that you hope might penetrate your space through the window screen but which doesn’t anyway, not even scantily – well, that’s when the first and second kinds of cockroaches make their appearance.

Proceeding as stealthily as possible, and concealing the location of the rotten little hiding place from where they had come out, these creatures are always irritatingly, senselessly wary of being seen by a human eye; senseless, for what else might their agenda be but be seen by a human eye?

Now I don’t know about other countries and cities. But a cockroach in Manila is the only thing that can make me reach the higher octave I’ve otherwise never been capable of since undergoing tonsillectomy. (And how do I know I am Filipino? Always I am equipped with Baygon.)

The first kind –the kind I’ve encountered many times at home– will, after its initial display of bravery, be terrorized by the sight of my size-11 Nike Zoom Generations. Soon as I’ve forgotten my having shrieked like a girl, the second war will be waged, and cockroaches of the first kind shall crawl or fly away, retreat, dash almost funnily in a kind of mad panic to the nearest shadow. Damn it if they even find the time to mourn over a freshly squashed cousin whose innards would serve as Exhibit A on the outsoles of my shoes.

My dreadful discovery of the second kind of cockroaches in Manila took place several days ago during my first night at the new apartment, where I had forgotten to initially bring an electric fan. I found that these crawlers were infinitely creepier and –consumed perhaps by deeply familial ties– downright suicidal. They kept coming and coming, in between chapters of Colm Toibin, the first one taking off from the edge of a splintery closet door and fluttering straight to the wild hairs of my left leg. After getting it off with a violent jerk, I began chasing the cockroach, whereupon its short life came to an end with the vicious smack of a Pony sandal. And yet how many of them had followed!

My mass murdering these devil-may-care insects made me unspeakably queasy, not only because of their inherent anatomical ugliness but also because their kind seemed to find gratification –just immense, even obscene gratification– in infuriating a human being and then dying. Theirs is the kamikaze way.

Neither the subsequent pleasant dream about a day in the beach nor the arrangement of having my own bathroom could excise the horror of that first night. I didn’t even have coffee the following morning; no, no bitter beverages please. It may be the strange case that I’ve begun to sense, vaguely, a kind of nostalgia about the cockroaches from the L-shaped bedroom in which I had lived for the past twenty-two years – those which prowled the dry floorboards my bare feet now miss, especially the spot with permanent specks of dust underneath the Yamaha piano that father had bought more than a decade ago and which the bared parts of my heart and memory just as badly miss. Now –a nocturnal hour wherein a soap opera on cable TV can be heard from the adjacent room, though only distantly, as though it was being played in another world– now I remember that cockroaches of the first kind would disappear whenever someone would knock on the door but no one knocks anymore.

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.

Forget what mathematical logic ordered. I wished that 23 –and not 22– came after 21. It was, after all, Michael Jordan’s (or LeBron James’ if you’re a next-generation basketball fan) number that was printed on the piece of cardboard I had taken from the counter of Mercury Drug, and which would then give me the right to face the lipstick-smeared lady by the cashier and order my paracetamol.

But 21 was taking long. Too long. Whoever had taken that number must have been filling a really odd prescription. Maybe a technical problem was holding up the cash registers. Or was it that they were determining what the order was: Simeco, Senecot, or Xenical? They all sounded the same. Whatever the case was, neither my bladder nor my patience could take it anymore. There was no bathroom in sight. The rest of the employees in uniforms all looked busy doing something else. And, based on the snail-like pace at which the drugstore’s transactions were being made, 22 seemed an eternity away. Thus 23 seemed two eternities away.

Priority Numbers. I used to encounter them only whenever I would book and buy a plane ticket out of town.

Now, the system is being applied everywhere – well, not everywhere, but increasingly more prevalent in the Philippines than how it used to be. Sir, Madame, please take a number and we’ll serve you later. Whether I go to a drugstore, a photocopying centre, a computer service shop, an airline ticket office, the Dickensian post office, the barber’s, the savings bank, enrolment at the university, neighbourhood-friendly Bayan Wireless, the local water supplier, or even the blood bank, I’d have to wait in line with a number to hold and a paperback to read. There’s no getting around or ahead of the line, no matter what your name is and how much money you’ve got. In today’s digital age, you see, we’ve turned even ourselves into digits.

Not that I’m against it; the early bird, of course, always deserves to catch the worm. A fantastic justice system! In fact, I am waiting for the day when taxi queues would employ the same scheme. No more long-, smooth-, bare-legged women or wealthy-looking Caucasians with fat wallets for the drivers to give a lift before me. Forget sophistication, eliminate discrimination. Arrive first or wait your turn.

But I am not going to wait to pee in my pants before I am called. No matter if the order is paracetamol or a cross-country trip, “Priority” should just as much be the operative word as “Numbers”. Otherwise, a 23 flashing across the screen will mean nothing at all.