freezing and crank up the volume on their stereo just for you, so that the Bee Gees fly high-pitched and crystalline from the speakers by your ears. Soot-caked cops do their best to direct the beast that is our traffic, their ineffectual whistles exacerbating the chaos that is our order. It takes you two hours to get anywhere; and when you arrive, it’s almost time to go. Let me welcome you to my first country, my Third World.
*
The country has changed so much, my childhood years before the war seem improbable. I’m not sure if I remember the events as actual or if they were stories later told to me, Salvador folklore in which I reportedly took part. Most wonderful in my mind are the caged animals on Tito Odyseo’s farm. At dusk, when no other humans were afoot, Lena, Narcisito, and I would creep slowly between the cages. There was the jaguar, with his immense paws. The pair of aardvarks, named for Saints Peter and Paul. The Palawan bearcat. The ring-tailed lemurs. The buff-faced gibbons. The Philippine monkey-eating eagle named Bonifacio. And the baby giraffe, who died before he grew to his full height. I’d run with my brother and sister, around the slow-footed cassowaries that were permitted to roam freely. On those Sundays when his family would host all the others (or at least those in good grace), Tito Odyseo would sometimes release the gazelles, a fleet trio that ran without knowing the estate was a larger, inescapable cage, or ran because a dozen children gave chase, or ran for the opportunity and sheer love of running. I remember how we took after them, for those very same reasons. If only someone had taken a picture of that last picnic, with the animals in the background and the family all present. That was the last time we were together, the last time our ancestral land was still ours, the last time the spirits were still present there in the shadows beneath the trees.
When the war came, the animals were quickly stolen, one by one, by hungry farmworkers. Tito Odyseo was severely beaten one night when he fell asleep guarding the cages.
—from
Autoplagiarist
(page 188), by Crispin Salvador
*
From the window he can see Manila. Rain streaks sideways across the glass. Suddenly the plane dips again, and his thoughts take on the tinge of desolation, as they do in such moments. He closes his eyes and tries not to pray.
*
The airplane comes down low. From above, the city is still beautiful. We pass over brown water off the coast, fish pens laid out in geometrical patterns, like a Mondrian viewed by someone color-blind. Over the bay, the sunset is starting, the famous sunset, like none anywhere else. Skeptics attribute its colors to pollution. Over there’s the land, the great gray sprawl of eleven million people living on top of each other on barely more than 240 square miles—fourteen cities and three municipalities, skyscrapers and shanties, tumbling beyond Kilometer Zero and the heart of every Filipino, the city that gave the metro its name: Manila.
The megalopolis’s components, when named, sound like mountain music, all drums and cymbals and gongs: Parañaque, Mandaluyong, Makati, Pasay, Navotas, San Juan, Cubao, Quezon City, Caloocan, Taguig, Malabon, Pasig, Las Piñas, Marikina, Muntinlupa. Connecting them, the grid and the superavenues—Edsa, Roxas, Aurora, Taft—countless overpasses built like Band-Aids, innumerable billboards, restaurants for every nationality and budget, huge shopping malls with Bulgari, Shoe Mart, Starbucks, Nike, you name it. You want it, you can get it in Manila, in shops and tabloids, alleyways and boardrooms. There, by the shadow of our airplane, near Rizal Park, where the statue of our hero stands as centennial testament to a stolen revolution, we’re now flying low enough to see tangled lines of jeepneys and buses bringing people home from work; that crowd there, with the banners, is a small part of a million worshippers en route to the weekly, desperate, El Ohim prayer
*
The country has changed so much, my childhood years before the war seem improbable. I’m not sure if I remember the events as actual or if they were stories later told to me, Salvador folklore in which I reportedly took part. Most wonderful in my mind are the caged animals on Tito Odyseo’s farm. At dusk, when no other humans were afoot, Lena, Narcisito, and I would creep slowly between the cages. There was the jaguar, with his immense paws. The pair of aardvarks, named for Saints Peter and Paul. The Palawan bearcat. The ring-tailed lemurs. The buff-faced gibbons. The Philippine monkey-eating eagle named Bonifacio. And the baby giraffe, who died before he grew to his full height. I’d run with my brother and sister, around the slow-footed cassowaries that were permitted to roam freely. On those Sundays when his family would host all the others (or at least those in good grace), Tito Odyseo would sometimes release the gazelles, a fleet trio that ran without knowing the estate was a larger, inescapable cage, or ran because a dozen children gave chase, or ran for the opportunity and sheer love of running. I remember how we took after them, for those very same reasons. If only someone had taken a picture of that last picnic, with the animals in the background and the family all present. That was the last time we were together, the last time our ancestral land was still ours, the last time the spirits were still present there in the shadows beneath the trees.
When the war came, the animals were quickly stolen, one by one, by hungry farmworkers. Tito Odyseo was severely beaten one night when he fell asleep guarding the cages.
—from
Autoplagiarist
(page 188), by Crispin Salvador
*
From the window he can see Manila. Rain streaks sideways across the glass. Suddenly the plane dips again, and his thoughts take on the tinge of desolation, as they do in such moments. He closes his eyes and tries not to pray.
*
The airplane comes down low. From above, the city is still beautiful. We pass over brown water off the coast, fish pens laid out in geometrical patterns, like a Mondrian viewed by someone color-blind. Over the bay, the sunset is starting, the famous sunset, like none anywhere else. Skeptics attribute its colors to pollution. Over there’s the land, the great gray sprawl of eleven million people living on top of each other on barely more than 240 square miles—fourteen cities and three municipalities, skyscrapers and shanties, tumbling beyond Kilometer Zero and the heart of every Filipino, the city that gave the metro its name: Manila.
The megalopolis’s components, when named, sound like mountain music, all drums and cymbals and gongs: Parañaque, Mandaluyong, Makati, Pasay, Navotas, San Juan, Cubao, Quezon City, Caloocan, Taguig, Malabon, Pasig, Las Piñas, Marikina, Muntinlupa. Connecting them, the grid and the superavenues—Edsa, Roxas, Aurora, Taft—countless overpasses built like Band-Aids, innumerable billboards, restaurants for every nationality and budget, huge shopping malls with Bulgari, Shoe Mart, Starbucks, Nike, you name it. You want it, you can get it in Manila, in shops and tabloids, alleyways and boardrooms. There, by the shadow of our airplane, near Rizal Park, where the statue of our hero stands as centennial testament to a stolen revolution, we’re now flying low enough to see tangled lines of jeepneys and buses bringing people home from work; that crowd there, with the banners, is a small part of a million worshippers en route to the weekly, desperate, El Ohim prayer
Similar Books
