Ermita revisited

It wouldn’t have happened if a legal mission hadn’t sent me down to the old neighborhood. Last Wednesday, along with several dozen other writers and artists, I trooped to the Supreme Court in Padre Faura to file a petition for an injunction in the dagdag National Artists case.

As interesting as that was, what followed next was even more invigorating, as I found myself treading streets I hadn’t walked in ages, in a part of the city — a corner of the memory — where I had grown up very quickly more than three decades earlier.

For it was on Padre Faura and its side streets where, in the early 1970s, my life took sudden and sometimes dizzying turns. I’d stepped out of martial-law prison in August 1973; I was out of school and out of a job, having dropped out in my freshman year to work for a couple of newspapers, which martial law had shut down. Then I was detained for seven months in Fort Bonifacio where, under the tutelage of artist and fellow detainee Orly Castillo, I indulged a childhood fancy for drawing and painting.

With release came the unfamiliar strangeness of nowhere to go and nothing to do — the Left was crippled for the time being, there were no jobs in the much smaller media, and school seemed pointless in the grand scheme of things — so I drifted to Ermita to look up Orly, who had been released as well, and took up printmaking.

There, in a small nook on Jorge Bocobo rented by the Printmakers Association of the Philippines as a gallery-cum-studio, I learned how to etch with nitric acid and how to cut a design directy onto a zinc plate using a compass point. I made cheap prints of nipa huts, bamboos, carabaos — anything that would sell to the tourist trade. On good days a generous dealer bought my prints wholesale so she could stuff them into the picture frames which were her real business.

One time I drew and etched something different, a portrait of a pretty girl who had come by the studio to say hello to some friends. Her name was June, and after a few months of courtship carried out in letters written with a Mars-Lumograph, I told her — and my mother — that I wanted to marry her. I was convinced — given how so many of our comrades were dying young — that if there was anything important we wanted to do, we couldn’t wait for tomorrow. “Get a regular job first,” said my mother; she may also have meant “Get a little older,” because I was only 19.

Later that same day I was walking around Ermita, thinking of a job, when I ran into a friend from my days at the Herald. He was now working as a PRO for a new government agency — the National Economic and Development

Authority or NEDA, just around the corner from J. Bocobo on Padre Faura — and they were looking for a feature writer; would I be interested?

The idea of working for a government for whose downfall I had been willing to go to prison seemed a bizarre novelty, but I had other things in mind that day. Jun ushered me into his boss’s office; Dr. Sicat asked me if a starting rate of P700 a month sounded fair enough. In those days, it was a lot of money. I said yes, and when I went home that night I told my mother, “I have a job. I’m getting married.”

I had yet to ask June (or Beng, as I would come to call her); I did some figuring on a napkin the next time we were in a restaurant. “I think we can afford to get married, so let’s.” She couldn’t dispute my computations, and I think she liked my voice, so within a few months, we were.

I would work in Padre Faura for the next few years. The NEDA then was a collection point for many smart young people, one of whom was a bright economist and a fraternity brother named Bienvenido “Boy” Noriega, who also wrote plays. For a time we were working in the same office, pounding away at our opuses on adjacent typewriters. We took long lunches in nearby restaurants like Ermitaño, Hongkong House, and Shady Lane, and browsed the shelves of Erehwon and Solidaridad. One day in 1976 I discovered a book titled One Hundred Years of Solitude, and I felt like another, secret door had opened on that street.

Boy’s gone, and so is Erehwon, as are many of our old haunts. Last Wednesday, with some time to spare, I decided to take a walk around the area, thinking that I might stumble across some vestige of my remembered youth

The NEDA compound itself had been taken over by the University of the Philippines-Manila; the old PAP studio was now an employment office, although, surprisingly, the Norba nightclub that stood beside it — a laughing funnel that sucked in many a printmaker’s take for the day — remained where it was, reincarnated as the Ginza, or the Geisha, or some such stretch of fantasy. The only landmark that stood unchanged on Jorge Bocobo was the conjoined Hizon’s/Za’s Cafe, a haven for the equally immutable pleasures of pastries and politesse.   

I remembered how hungry and eager I was to be an artist and a writer then, and Ermita seemed to be the best place to be for that to happen. Those were the days my fingers grew blisters doing drypoint plates, when I typed my manuscripts with secretarial care. I longed for my first book, my first screenplay, my first CCP production, my first Palanca. Whenever Boy or I finished a new play or won a prize (especially over the other), it was time for a treat of a free lunch, over which we dreamt furiously and loudly of all the great work we were going to do, as only 20-somethings can. 

The greatness aside, all that would come to pass. And on a day when I went to the Supreme Court seeking justice for Art with friends (a white-haired Orly among them) who had gone through the same urges, the same fatigue, the same exhilaration, all for the love of an inconstant Muse, it felt good to see where it had all begun, and why we were there, and how — no matter how much the place had changed — we had never left.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.