Someone once told me that she thought that the Philippines in particular Manila reminded her of "a ragged whore waiting to be f**kd, raped and beaten again and again." She never did tell me why and I never bothered to ask her before she finally flew off to the sterile hospital wards of Canada. I always rejected that assessment as being unfair even if I did admit to myself that it had some element of truth. Driving around Metro Manila, there are indeed many parts of it that have the worn-and-used feel of old brothels, littered with half-fulfilled promises and the debris of violent upheavals. The denizens here wear very "lived-in" faces. (One might even say a "lived… and died in", to borrow a line from Eddie Campbell’s Bacchus.)
Blame it on our history (which on my more pessimistic days reads like a lurid account of a gangbang of our Mother Country by the Spaniards, Americans and Japanese if not Filipinos themselves) but Manila has its scars both visible and subcutaneous. One would be tempted to retort "what city hasn’t" if it didn’t sound too easy, dodging the issue until it gets lost in all manner of historical jargon and sociological disputes. (To what has to be done, I leave this to more capable and exceptional people like Conrado de Quiros or Vim Nadera to explain.) What one can say without debate though is living in Manila is unlike anywhere else, an opinion I only quote from another friend who’s quite older and has pretty much seen the world. "It is unique as its people," he added, condescending in tone. He betrayed his true feelings later when he asked me, apparently aghast, "How the hell can you live here?"
I told him I cannot answer for the rest of the population, majority of which live below the poverty line, but – as for myself – I can’t complain. Sure, one gets stressed out with the traffic and the other dangers of living in the urban jungle but one copes. Indeed, that may be our defining characteristic as a people: We all cope. And we do so by finding happiness wherever we can. The way I find succor in buying a good book from my favorite store, some child in a Payatas dumpsite finds upon discovering a working toy. Maybe the happiness I get from holding my girlfriend’s hand while watching some slasher-flick or a film by Quark Henares a Makati professional gets (off on) in his new Toyota with a transvestite hooker. Or the hope I feel when I fine-tune a sentence in what is otherwise a rambling mess (that has no business being printed in a major daily) is the same that appears in the eyes of an old woman in a squatter area in Quezon City when she looks upon a faded photo-reproduction of FPJ.
It’s all the same: we’re just coping.
But there are happy people in Manila – lest anyone get the impression that we’re no fun. Peruse all the other columns in this section of the newspaper and witness the "happy, happy, joy, joy" sentiments and parties on display, filled with people who are opening their mouths and moving their tongues in either what I presume to be humorous conversation or laughter. For those who are too tired of reading, you can always look at the pictures and see the smiles that would make Poe’s narrator Egæus in "Berenice" salivate. You have to admit they look happy, don’t they? And who’s to say they’re wrong? Certainly not this sinner and hedonist (more imagined than actual, really). Again, we’re all just coping.
One of the things that goes with being a columnist (and I dare not call myself a writer yet in deference to people like Gregorio C. Brillantes and Butch Dalisay) is that you get interesting mail. (I, for some reason, receive considerable amount of e-mail from the gay community — something that I’m quite proud of despite my heterosexuality.) Of course, no two letters are alike; there is however an overwhelming loneliness that pervades every note, each one as disparate as Eleanor Rigby is to Father McKenzie, with but their solitary suffering in common. It never ceases to move me when I see my e-mailbox full of their letters, an experience akin to what that fallen idol Sting describes in the final verses of The Police’s Message in a Bottle. Ah, look at all the lonely people, indeed.
Of course, I can’t pretend to understand what they’re all going through although I do feel many of those things they seek my correspondence for. I’m glad they’re trying to reach out (although I’m not sure I’m the right person they should talk to). It shows me that these people – who have many interesting stories and, most of the time, bleak outlooks – are trying their best not to succumb to their depressions. They’re doing the best that they can with the given situation, which, frankly speaking, is f**kd. (I never patronize my readers with platitudes culled from the Paolo Coehlo’s freakin’ The Alchemist, the Chicken Soup for the Soul series or Tuesdays with Morrie – books for people who don’t like to read. Anyone who wants truly valid and startling insights on living and the "real world" I offer William S. Burrough’s Nova Express, Philip K. Dick’s V.A.L.I.S, the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, Gregorio C. Brillantes’ On a Clear Day in November, Shortly Before the Millenium particularly stories like The Cries of Children on an April Afternoon in the Year 1957 and Journey to the Edge of the Sea, Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, Alan Moore’s A Small Killing, Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo and the Tom Ripley novels of Patricia Highsmith. And that’s just for starters.)
From what I’ve learned from those wiser, things aren’t as pat, bland and conveniently tied up in the end like a Marilou Diaz-Abaya film (and thank God for that). But there’s only so much "variety" one can take – what with all the rumors of coup-medies, the depreciation of the peso and the literal flowering of presidential candidates (if only the sweetest looking of them all would explain why he abandoned Ninoy Aquino at the height of martial law). The more cynical of us would ask that we look for the proliferation any day now of street preachers, with sandwich-boards declaring that the end is near. (We interrupt this boring harangue with a news flash: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are coming to Manila this Chris – Er…Hold on, sorry, my sources clarify that it’s only F4.)
"Manila is hell on Earth," a writer-acquaintance recently confided to me in slurred Tagalog at a popular watering hole in UP. "But I sure do love it!" Coming from a Bicolano who has only been here for the past six months, it does sound a little suspect but one can appreciate the sincerity of his words. I won’t go as far as that but it does seem that Armageddon is bedding this picture, this vision of our beloved city. (As I’m writing this, our house helper is playing loudly Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart – if that ain’t the sound of impending doom I don’t know what is.) Yet again the Filipino copes. No matter how hot it gets we just learn to enjoy the heat — but not without a price that seems as inevitable as the sound of a flushing toilet.
Given that psychiatry is the new priesthood, I visited my local shrink to gauge the state-of-the-nation’s mental health. Apparently, he prescribes tablets with names like Lupra and Luvox for depression, costing as much as P100 a pop – communion hosts for the intolerable post-millenium neurotic. I did ask him though if he felt Metro Manila as a city was slowly going insane. "No," he was quick to reply. "Not slowly," he laughed with a wink (no middle-age man should ever do this to someone half his age). It would all be funny if it weren’t so painful.
Yet we laugh. And dance like Bayani Agbayani’s Ocho Ocho. Or are held entranced with the gyrations of the Sex Bomb girls. However, all of these are only welcome diversions that we happily take up to forget, to lose ourselves in our fantasy of a "strong republic." Let’s cut the crap, shall we? And take the necessary and very painful operation to remove the tumor. If electing another ignoramus to the presidency is the way to cure us finally of our disease, then so be it (although I earnestly hope for another solution). It will be bloody but if it allows the infusion of new life it will be worth it.
Remember it’s only hell if you make it one.
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