Tuesday, December 17, 2019

In the Islands

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.