Sunday, July 24, 2011

Thank You, Iloilo



Iloilo City is a gritty city, particularly downtown. To me, it looks like certain parts of old Manila, the parts where I don’t usually go, like Escolta in Santa Cruz or Carriedo, where the dear old fountain is. While on a three-day, two night stay in the capital of the Western Visayan province of the same name, as I was taking an afternoon walk along the streets and sidestepping shards of beer bottles on an abandoned lot, the absurd thought occurred to me that if I were to live in this city, if I were to fit in here and survive for a long period of time or at least look like I’d be able to, I’d probably have to get myself a tattoo, try my best to look like a scoundrel.

Maybe it's not that absurd, for Iloilo seems to be that kind of place. Not that there isn’t anything beautiful that awaits visitors to the city –because, mind you, there’s plenty– but as I explored its downtown area on foot, the sun shining hard on its roads and, at best, only the mildest breeze stirring in the afternoon heat, there wasn’t much else that struck me harder and more profoundly than did its general - what? Artlessness? Lack of urbanity? And I have seen Philippine provinces with weather more agreeable and tropical than this one – sidewalks less littered, too. Cigarette butts decorated the pavements. Dogs strayed, ugly dogs. Faded tarpaulin posters, most of them from the last elections, covered the cracked walls of broken-down buildings. In front of one such building on Calle Real, I saw vendors selling fake Rolexes and blocking the entrance to a local pharmacy. Jeepneys, taxis, tricycles, and pedicabs staggered in all directions, heedless of jaywalking pedestrians and traffic lights on roads which, surprisingly wide though they were, looked nevertheless to be in surgery. At Plaza Libertad, a public park five minutes from the hotel where I was staying, a statue of Rizal stood almost irrelevantly, a marble monument of one of the great Filipino artists ignored by shirtless, brown-skinned boys playing basketball and crying foul in Ilonggo. I wondered if the churchgoers inside nearby Iglesia de San Jose de Placer could hear the fun they were having, what fun, shooting hoops to the soundtrack of spoken sermons and holy hymns, and with a view of one of those Spanish-era structures dilapidating in a way that texture photographers would find accidentally beautiful, along with Iloilo’s other ruins, churches, temples, bell towers, art deco stones, ancestral houses, government offices, and heritage buildings.


As soon as the young men finished a pick-up game, they resumed another. I took pictures; I took notes. They probably played basketball here until it was lights out, and perhaps days here weren’t done until after the closing hours of Plaza Libertad.

To tell you the truth, I had expected differently. But what? I can’t say for certain. When, from the gleaming Iloilo International Airport, I jumped into a taxi, I immediately noticed that the driver had not turned on his meter. He instead proposed a fixed fare, “four hundred pesos, sir,” revealing that he had a family of four to feed and that yesterday’s bread wouldn’t have been enough. Naturally, being from Manila, I didn’t budge.

“I didn’t know I was at home,” I remarked, not without the dripping sarcasm of suburban collar-poppers. “Manong, turn on the meter, please.”

His face was creased with lifelines and his mouth wouldn’t shut; he seemed just of the kind of swindling Filipino taxi drivers to which I am particularly averse. Passionately, he continued to argue. “I’ve been waiting five hours to get a passenger. Five hours! Since seven in the morning!”

“How’s that my fault?” I replied. “If you think you’re getting such a raw deal then change your job.”

It was later that afternoon, after no more than five minutes in my suffocating room at the City Corporate Inn on Rizal Street, that I headed out to walk. Walking, after all, is my greatest equalizer – or should I say tranquilizer?; it calms me down and keeps me from being irrational; and, since any ride would be too fast, a walk has also proven many times to be my richest source of material for writing (that is, if I am writing at all). How else can I describe Life but with the impressive memory of this papery-lipped old man sun-drying his fish out on the asphalt road in the middle of a March afternoon, howling his last price per kilo in a pleading vernacular that I can perhaps never politely condescend myself to understand, but at the sound of which I felt at once blessed and broken? And what else can I say about Love but that it occurred before me as a split-second kiss planted tenderly on the whitener-whitened cheek of a nursing student’s beloved in a jeep that was rumbling and heaving its way to who knew where – might it have been to the woefully commercial Robinson’s Place or the woefully kept University of Iloilo? And how else can I capture Loneliness than by saying it was what I felt at the sight of a middle-aged woman in Jollibee, by herself, all by her damned motherly self, auburn-dyed hair, tinted glasses, pearl earrings, a very 80s print skirt, velvet fingernails, and a faltering appetite, fiddling with and poking her seventy-nine-peso Chicken Joy as though she was performing a poultry autopsy? I would have come nearer as a friendly stranger and struck up a conversation, so that the world would seem to her less unkind, but no sooner than when I closed my book (My Name is Red) and stood up to do that did I notice that there were quiet tears that filled her eyes.

I was determined to avoid fast-food chains the next day and thus ended up breakfasting in Ted’s. If there’s anything, after all, for which Iloilo is nationally famous, it's Batchoy. Rumor has it that it was originally conceived by Chinese immigrants in the provincial district of La Paz. Somewhat like the city, the dish looked to me like a thoughtless muddle – of miki noodles, pieces of meat, and abused bits of garlic, pepper, leeks and pork cracklings, all deposited in a bowl of spiteful-looking broth.

Of course, it was good. I even slurped my soup.