Old Ermita and its Illustrados

As a native Manileño, I found Carmen "Chitang" Guerrero Nakpil’s latest book, Myself, Elsewhere , a truly fascinating read. A lot of what she describes of Manila before World War II had been part of the stories I have heard from my father and from other family members who lived in that era. Manila then was supposed to have been one beautiful city. Designed by the famous Chicago urban planner Daniel Burnham, Chitang recalls a "marvel of boulevards and the magically beautiful cityscape I was driven around as a child."

Chitang writes of the good old days of the 30s. It was a Manila that sounded strange and foreign to me, as strange as the coin they call "kusing". It seems the biggest sin of the Japanese, for which they must eternally make amends, is disturbing that paradise existence… because it was simply downhill after Pearl Harbor, Bataan and Corregidor.

Indeed, from Chitang’s account, the pre-war era or as my own folks used to refer to it, peacetime Manila was a different world. "Safe, patrolled streets with every last gutter sanitized by the "Sanidad" inspectors in their white smocks, an expanded electric train system and a municipal bus network, free mass education, a fire department that responded instantly to the faintest alarm, a magnificent police force, a public general hospital and indeed, an entire civil service system consisting of Filipinos of sterling efficiency and honesty, supervised by American dignitaries and an appointed Filipino mayor."

Could be done pala! In fact, once upon a time, Bayani Fernando’s Metro Guapo was a reality. Sounds like a government run like heaven by Americans! Yoohoo Mr. Quezon, how could you have said what you said? Surely Mr. Quezon couldn’t have imagined the hell we have now.

Not exactly an admirer of the Americans, Chitang confesses she "hated to admit that all those wonderful amenities of my girlhood in Ermita were courtesy of America… the Americans has parsed every aspect of modern urbanization and Manila has become the cleanest, most resplendent city in the orient." But what the Americans gave, the Americans took away. All that was beautiful in that portion of Manila south of the Pasig River were leveled by American bombers, unwarranted excessive use of force as it turned out, during the "liberation of Manila." Talk of America’s "napalm mentality!"

Chitang grants that "the frenetic American efforts to prove they were better and more worthy colonizers than doddering, effete Spain produced the urban miracle I knew as the Ermita of my childhood." However, she and the illustrados of Ermita, cannot forgive the treachery of the Americans in conniving with a defeated Spain to steal a victory already won by the Filipino revolutionaries at the turn of the century.

Myself, Elsewhere, is a colorful journal of the life and times of my father’s generation in a Manila that, from all accounts, was more civilized, more livable. I am not presumptuous to claim illustrado roots for my own family, but Chitang’s description of the illustrado Guerrero family sounded like mine… not exactly rich tycoons but proud professionals. Okay, maybe my grandparents in Paco did have pretensions of being illustrado, Spanish-speaking and all… a frame of mind I failed to inherit.

Still, I can identify with Chitang’s family of doctors… dedicated scientists who kept themselves busy advancing the frontiers of science without much thought about making the money that their knowledge could have brought to the family fortunes. Like Chitang, those dinner table conversations taught me some medicine and a lot of self confidence to express myself.

I even share with Chitang, the same experience of having the Belgian nuns mold our early years… the same Belgian nuns in St. Theresa’s where Chitang spent all her years studying up to college, were running Paco Catholic School where I had my elementary education.

Of course Paco Catholic is very much pang-masa compared to St. Theresa’s. My father who claims to have been a batang kalye in Paco, wouldn’t allow any of his children anywhere near the so-called "exclusive schools" that my cousins attended. Reading Chitang’s account of life at STC, I appreciate my father’s point. One of Chitang’s biggest regrets is that her folks refused to let her attend the egalitarian, and yes, godless UP, the school my father insisted on for me and all my siblings. It was not just a question of tuition money.

While money is important to the illustrados of Ermita, it was considered bad taste to talk about it in polite company. As Chitang recalls, "in pre-war Manila, a politician, whose family wealth came from renting out slums, once said about my family, ‘they’re famous, but they don’t have any money… Our friends joke that we must have all taken a vow of poverty."

Chitang’s partial autobiography (only covers her life up to the Japanese occupation) provides the reader with a good understanding of why Chitang is Chitang. She is definitely not typical of the women of her time. Even for the already somewhat atypical standards of the Guerrero family, Chitang comes across as irreverently strong willed, a headache for the nuns at St. Theresa’s. Chitang had always taken women’s rights for granted, freely competing with men without giving it a second thought. "I decided very early in life," Chitang wrote, "that the only way to get along with men was to think like a man. Not be a man, but think like one."

Halfway through her book, I was wondering to myself, how cool it would be to have Chitang as a mother… one who speaks your language, no generation gap problems, speaks her mind and always comfortably irreverent to society and its conventions. Who knows… I might have even imbibed the proper illustrado social graces that set her Ermita family apart from the hoi polloi of Paco.

Then again, it must be tough keeping up with a mother like her and not letting her extremely strong personality make you an intellectually insecure introvert, unless, like her children I know, you are able to develop the right coping mechanisms. No wonder Gemma had to join that Miss International beauty contest in 1964 and win it, against her mother’s wishes.

I can almost imagine Chitang squirming at the thought that she would henceforth be known as the mother of Gemma, the beauty queen. Why couldn’t Gemma be content with being known as Chitang’s daughter? That has to be Germma’s own declaration of independence from Chitang, the micro managing, all knowing mother who is not reluctant to make her sentiments strongly felt.

Still, overall, it should be pretty cool to have Chitang as your mom. She’s simply one of a kind. Just look at her now… all of 84 years and unlike most people we know in her age group, she doesn’t think or act like anyone’s lola just waiting for the inevitable in some nursing home. She lives by herself, is still moving around meeting people, making sharp (okay, catty) observations in her copyrighted ironic style and yes, she’s writing books. She told me she’s not done yet. She has fifty more years of her life to write about. Expect a volume 2 and maybe a volume 3, hopefully with gossipy footnotes so we can understand the undertones.

What I do understand now is that Chitang is difficult to figure out. Some months ago, she stopped writing her weekly column in Malaya. I thought she wasn’t well but other than the usual vertigo, Gemma assured me she was fine and was just taking time off to write this book. I found out later, that was not the whole truth. There’s another reason why she stopped writing her column.

According to Chitang, Lupita Aquino Kashiwahara had lunch with her and told her she is being hurtful and unkind in her usual acerbic comments about the political dispensation, and advised her as a friend to stop it. She took that to mean as a warning of sorts. "I want to die comfortably in my own bed," she half jokingly explained to me her decision to stop her regular column at a time when journalists are either being sued or shot.

I think Chitang just caught the paranoia bug endemic with a lot of the folks who attend our Wednesday lunch at Havana in Greenbelt. I don’t think Lupita threatened her nor is Lupita capable of doing so. Lupita, of all people, understands what journalism is all about, hard hitting and personal, being married to an American journalist and being sister to Ninoy. It doesn’t make any sense for Chitang to feel threatened. It is so out of character for Chitang to be intimidated at 84. She must stop denying us the pleasure of reading her column again.

I only got to know Chitang in the 80s, initially at the 365 Club and later as regulars in that Wednesday get together of journalists and assorted characters. I have been happy in the many years I had known her, to delude myself with the thought that somehow, I had passed the standards of this seemingly snooty Ermitense. We have had a lot of animated conversations which I found satisfying for me and which she seemed to have enjoyed too.

Hopefully, she was not just being Ermita-polite. One never really knows for sure with those very proper illustrados.

Viagra

Got this note from Dr. Ernie E.

 I’m so depressed. My doctor refused to write me a prescription for Viagra. He said it would be like putting a new flagpole on a condemned building.   

Boo Chanco ‘s e-mail address is [email protected]