Luis H. Francia - The Eye of the Fish

Several parts of this book are based on these previously published pieces: The Use of Farce, National Midweek (August 6, 1986), an account of the rst coup attempt against Corazn Aquino; Cordilleras in the Mist, The Village Voice (Summer Travel supplement, 1991), on Sagada; The Blood Feuds of Jolo, The Graphic (December 30, 1991); Dreams, Snakes, and Fairies, Asiaweek (January 3, 1992), on Siquijor; Old Lamps for New, Special Edition (1994), on the Baguio Artists Guild; Body Double, The Village Voice (June 7, 1994), on the Marcos mausoleum; and Days and Nights in Manila, Bomb Magazine (summer 1998).

This publication is made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, and by the generous contributions of Wook Hun and Sun Hee Koo, Ronald and Susan Yanagihara, and many other supporters.

Copyright 2001 by Luis H. Francia All rights reserved.

Published by Kaya Press Post Ofce Box 7492 New York, NY 10116

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On the cover: Detail from Contemplating Innito Dios and Vermeer. Copyright 1997 by Santiago Bose. Collection of Edward F. and Joan T. Simpson. Reproduced with permission from the artist.

Cover design by Sandra Watanabe. Interior design and typesetting by Sunyoung Lee.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

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Where am I from, I sometimes ask myself, where in the devil
Do I come from, what days today, whats happening,
A roar, amid the dream, the tree, the night,
And a wave, rising like an eyelid, begets
A day, a ash with a jaguars snout.

Pablo Neruda
from The Magellanic Heart
(translated by Jack Schmitt)

IF THIS ARCHIPELAGO COULD COMMENT on my existence, what would it say? What memories, if any, would it have of my passage? Did mountain talk to plain, and plain whisper to sky that bore me away, to ocean that separates me from these islands? Did Manhattans bedrock pick up, through riverine delta, through tremor, news of an Asian walking its grounds? Did it decipher in an islanders footfall and read in a Spanish name a tangled history of blood and bone and spirit? Imagination, trace if you can this landscapes ineffable power, its sources of joy and sorrow.

I had been coming back to the Philippines regularly over the course of more than two decades, a process that began as something purely instinctual, moved by the same urge that compels salmon to travel up the waters of their genesis, moved by the need to feel familiar ground, to add to the store of memory and association that nourished me in my sojourning. The trips gradually took on a conscious edge. Upstream to home: what did that mean? Where was the I in all this, where the we? Death for the new self, resurrection of the old? But home had changed. And so had I. How then to measure each other? And what of that other seapassionate, calm, deep, shallow, hot, coldto which I returned after each visitation, a sea called New York City? I: awkward sh swimming simultaneously in different oceans.

A BLUE-UNIFORMED SECURITY GUARD on Gandara Street resists the afternoon heats seductive call to sleep by doing pushups on the sidewalk, his legs propped on a chair. I can only wonder at this burst of activity as I walk by, my lunch of curried noodles and steamed sh, consumed in a crowded panciteria, lling my gut. The guards for the other storesall of them shuttered on this somnolent, humid Sunday afternoonslouch on chairs, unbuttoned, some dozing in their undershirts. Binondo, Manilas Chinatown, has an almost demure air, wearing her secrets the way a grande dame wears her perfume: discreetly but distinctively, hinting at a bouquet of other fragrances. The world passing by has grown smaller and more compact, as though past, present, and future had settled down into one dense layer, and could no longer offer her any surprises.

On Dasmarinas Street, a calesa plies the street, the clip-clop of its blindered horse pleasant drumbeats on the brain. Binondo is mostly deserted today, the colonial-era buildings aspiring to modest heights, their sooty wooden facades, iron-grille windows, stone columns, and solid doors evoking the days when the Chinese grew shy of the Spaniards disdainful gaze. Behind the walls, a congested mass of humanity breathes quietly, comfortably, even opulently. Here is the Old Manila still, the Manila that existed before that monument to the mall and American efciency, aseptic, modern Makati, reared its skyscraper heads south of the Pasig River. Binondo forms part of the citys cholesterol-choked heart, cheek by jowl with Santa Cruz and Quiapo, neighborhoods that embody the essence of Manilabustling, brawling, blustery, full of the commerce and vigorous life brought by the river and the sea.

The Chinese trace their presence here to the days when Manila was still a Muslim entrepot. Never proselytizers, worldly to the point of disdain, conders only in themselves, the merchants and workers from Guangdong, Amoy, and Fukien were distrusted by the Iberians who forbade them to enter Intramuros, the old Walled City, except for trade, and then only through the Parian Gate. Binondo, where they lived right across the river, was within easy reach of Intramuross guns. For the Spanish never forgot that their early tenuous hold on the city had been nearly broken in 1574 by Limahong, a Chinese warlord, and his marauding eet of junks. After a series of battles, the Spanish nally repelled the invaders. Subsequent uprisings by the Chinese in the seventeenth century were all bloodily suppressed.

Binondos large esteros, or canals, reenforce the feeling of frag-mentation and separation from the rest of the city. Their murky waters, refuse laden, assail pedestrians on the short bridges with the sweetish smell of decay. The approaches are crowded with shops that sell chestnuts, fruits, sweetmeats, ham, noodles, and Chinese delicacies. In a ritual antedating conquest, shopper and shopkeeper bargain till they reach common ground.

Something happens that jolts me back into these unruly times. A small crowd has gathered on one side of an estero bridge. I go over and look down at what everyone else is staring at: a body wrapped in black plastic, the rope around its sheated neck clearly visible. A man nearby remarks: na-salvaged. No one is certain of the words provenance, why an English term that refers to the act of rescue, of retrieving something of value, especially from the sea, now has this grisly connotation. But the scene before me does bear an eerie resemblance to a maritime salvage.

A burly security guard with a line and a hook has snagged the black plastic. He tugs at the body, managing to lift it out partly before it falls back in. He does this repeatedly. Does he really think he can land this human sh, or is he playing to the crowd? A silent crowd, morbidly fascinated, that shows no outward signs of anger. Does the bag contain a man or a woman? Petty thief, human rights activist, or just a person who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time? Now just a body thrown up against the embankment like a bad dream. In this city of bad dreams, this is one of the worst, a nightmare that has become one measure of how vastly different this Manila is from the Manila I grew up in.

The salvagings that used to come to light only in the citys more obscure corners now brazenly turn up under the publics noses. Take a good sniff, the killers seem to say, you could wind up smelling like that. Friends relate casual awakenings to the nightmare of these twisted redemptions: two bodies on the sea wall by Roxas Boulevard, across from Aristocrat, a popular twenty-four-hour eatery; a friend as she comes out of her residential compound who sees a dead man outside the gates; activists I knew gunned down in the hills.