This is how it went.
I arrived in Manila early in the
morning, sleepless, with an upbeat taxi driver, vaguely Latin-sounding
radio in Tagalog announcing NBA games (“Kyrie Irving, wowwww!!!”),
before segue'ing into what I have long-known in Bangkok as “Filipino
karaoke music,” those cheesy '80s power ballads that have been
completely forgotten in the rest of the world, but remain close to
the hearts of the 100 million-odd inhabitants of this benighted
archipelago. The sun is rising, and Starship's 1987 number 1,
“Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now” is playing. The kick drums come in,
and Grace Slick starts to sing.
“Let 'em say we're crazy, I don't
care about that
Put your hand in my hand, baby
don't ever look back”
We come down off the freeway into a
tangle of shacks and machine shops and freeway exits and railway sidings, and as we pull into our first stoplight, a gang of
street urchins surround the taxi on all sides.
“Let the world around us fall
apart”
“Lock the door! Lock the door!” the
cab driver screams. I'm slamming the manual locks down, reaching over
my luggage.
“Baby we can make it if we're
heart to heart!”
The American-style street signs with
Spanish names are smeared with smog, nine-story high slum towers
spiral above us, tiny shops on their ground floors, young men of
questionable mental capacity squatting on the curb, staring into the
distance with vacant expressions.
“And we can build this dream
together, standing strong forever, nothing's gonna stop us now!”
That is what set the tone for Manila. Mabuhay, motherfucker.
It is a city of greasy noodles and
traffic-choked streets, Diego Rivera-type murals and hand-painted
signs alternating with gorgeous mid-century graphics on the
billboards, screaming transsexual hookers on Adriatico Street,
cheery groups of youths harmonizing Taylor Swift songs and playing guitars at early morning coffee stands, jeepneys painted in peacock tones announcing “CHRIST IS KING!,”
solitary teen mothers on park benches, the only other Westerners
being beer-gutted American expats sweating through their tucked-in
polo shirts, a cathedral full of schoolboys screaming
English-language hymns with the lyrics on video screens, and ruin
after ruin after ruin, dating from the Golden Age of Spanish
exploration to just last week.
But the Philippines in general are an
assault on the senses, and I say this who has spent years in
Southeast Asia. It is a riot of color, a sublimely beautiful
landscape subjected to every form of destruction known to man –
earthquakes and volcanoes, typhoons and tsunamis, mudslides,
insurrections both Maoist and Islamist, countered by even more
horrifying state violence, most recently in Rodridgo Duterte's death
squads sent for small-time drug offenders, political clan wars, petty
street crime, far less petty mass-scale exploitation by the
insulated, grotesque ruling classes (safely ensonced in the
freakishly clean, heavily policed, Singapore-aping streets of Makati
and Bonifacio) with the quiet backing of countless Chinese- and
American-based multinationals, a vicious Spanish colonial regime, the
suppression of Emilio Aguinaldo's revolt by the American
“commonwealth,” the corrupt dictat of Ferdinand Marcos and his
shoe-collecting wife, the naval assault on Corregidor, the largest naval battle history in the Leyte Gulf, the soldiers left by the wayside on the Bataan Peninsula, and in the case of Manila, wholesale
destruction, a city savaged, bombed, and gang-raped into oblivion by
both the retreating Japanese army and the American bombers at the end
of World War II, leaving a city of smoldering craters and
cordite-scarred marble Virgins Mary wondering what became of their
shrines.
The Catholics came in the Spanish
colonial quest for gold and soul, and they imprinted the ideals of
Spain at the height of the Inquisition on the populace, bringing with
them the icons of Medieval Catholicism, the eerie-eyed doll that
would become the Santo Niño
of Cebu, and the dark-faced Christ figure that would become the
Nazareno Negro
of Manila, and the combination of religious zeal and bodily
mortification that continues to play out in the processions of
penitentes
flogging themselves, in the men who crucify themselves each year
during Holy Week on the high plains of Pampanga, blood and sweat
hitting the volcanic-ash soil in the height of the hot season.
Then
came the Americans, winning the islands in William Randolph Hearst's
manufactured war, Rooseveltian men with bushy mustaches in
broad-brimmed cavalrymen's hats suddenly filling the islands,
occupying the country for a few decades with all the brashness of a
newly ascendant empire, leaving a city plan for Manila modeled on
Chicago – subbing Manila Bay for Lake Michigan, and Roxas Boulevard
for Lake Shore Drive, along with streets named Taft and McKinley,
Forbes and Lawton, Babbittian institutions like the Rotary Club and
the Jaycees, diners and art deco hotels and billboards taken straight from Humphrey Bogart film noir, archaic English-language first names left as if
preserved in amber from the Coolidge administration, men named Archie
and Gilbert, women named Edith and Daisy, along with odd
constructions that sound like English names but which aren't,
“Marzee” and the like, along with a taste for Hormel corned beef
and Del Monte canned pineapple, the Jackie Gleason diet still going
strong.
And
so the whole country becomes a whirlwind tour of the 20th Century in
all of its disastrous unfoldings.
Yet
as soon as you get out of Manila, the country reveals itself to be a
marvel. I ran into relatively few international tourists. Most of
those that come stick to the beach towns of the South, Coron and El
Nido, Puerto Princesa and Boracay. I was alone as I walked along the
rim of the volcanic caldera in Tagaytay, overlooking the island on a
lake on an island on a lake on an island. I was alone as I walked
through the streets of Taal lined with ancient, earthquake-proof
houses with oyster-shell windows and whitewashed arcades, the
belfries of its Spanish basilica crumbling, ancient women in dresses
with leg-of-mutton sleeves fanning themselves in the doorways. I ran
into few other tourists in the rice terraces of the Cordillera that
tumble down the sides of the deliriously high mountains like giants'
stairwells, or in Sagada, where coffins are perched on piney cliffs,
or in cozy Baguio, another town planned by the Americans and heavily
bombed during the war, where I sat in the appropriately named “Cafe
by the Ruins,” where elderly Filipino bohemians drank coffee brewed
with cardamom and listened to Joan Baez, where I ate freshly made
sweet potato rolls and local buffalo cheese and chocolate rice
porridge to stave off the evening chill.
In
1884, a graduate of the local merchant marine academy from the Ilocos
region in the Northern Philippines named Juan Luna de San Pedro y
Novacio Ancheta went to Madrid to show his painting Spoliarium.
He followed the old Spanish style of bloody and aquiline saints, of chiaroscuro and martyrdom, as pioneered by El Greco,
Velazquez, and Goya, and painted the dead gladiators of the Roman
Colosseum being stripped of their armor and dragged through the sand.
It
hangs on the first floor of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Rizal
Park, near where the park's namesake was executed for his resistance
against the sclerotic Spanish regime, where it stands as a metaphor
for a long-suffering people struggling for freedom.
And
yet when I looked at it on that sweltering day it still seemed
hopelessly modern. The incomparably sweet, wonderful people with whom
I drank shots of gin and San Miguel beers, the betel-chewing
guitarists who bade me to sing Merle Haggard songs with them, the
balut
vendors who chuckled as I tried to suck down a half-formed duck fetus
in the shell on the streets of Ermita, I saw them all in the
painting.
I
don't put much stock in the Bible, but it comes to mind when I'm in a
Catholic country, and I'm always struck by Ecclesiastes 1:9.
“The
thing that has been, it is that which shall be, and that which is
done is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the
sun.”
And
it says something that in 2019, I see the greatest of truths in a 140
year old painting of a dead gladiator and the weeping Christians in
the catacombs beneath Rome.
