IN AD 1100 the area now occupied by Metro Manila was low, swampy grassland full of deer. It flooded readily in the monsoon rains, during typhoons or at seasonal high tides. Shellfish were plentiful and so were mosquitoes. As in all flatlands the least undulation was pronounced; there were definite areas of rising ground amid the general marsh, even a lump or two which might qualify as hillocks. However, there was nothing high enough to obstruct an inland view of real hills – almost mountains – to the east. It was not an ideal place to live compared to the nearby foothills where fruits and timber were abundant and the terrain well suited to the indigenous people’s slash-and-burn agriculture. Yet at some time in the early Twelfth century people began moving down into the marshes surrounding the bay to take advantage of trade offered by southern Chinese who sailed up in their junks bringing ceramics and cloth and metalwares. The pre-Filipinos, who had long been using their own pottery for ritual and burial purposes, must have been overwhelmed by the sophistication and beauty of the Chinese ceramics, for the archaeological record shows they began adopting them more and more extensively. The boggy settlements grouped around the Pasig’s estuary cohered in time into a small port. The Tagalogs who lived there (taga + ilog, ‘inhabitants of the river’) had unwittingly founded Manila. Such, at least, was the received wisdom.
It was precisely the small undulations in a landscape that a modern city so effectively obscured, just as its lights did the stars at night. Nowadays it was nearly impossible to detect amid the traffic and concrete the hillocks where deer had once raced through shining grasses. They had to be deduced by the way floodwaters ran, tumbling with them the yellow worms of noodles beside the kerb. Moreover, except from the top of the very tallest blocks downtown one could no longer see the foothills of Laguna and Marikina, not least because of the brown smog rising in the foreground like urban halitosis. Yet the bumps and lumps were still there, mainly identifiable as places which scarcely ever flooded. The great necropolitan triangle up past the San Lazaro racetrack (La Loma cemetery, the Chinese cemetery and North cemetery) was on somewhat raised terrain from where it was actually possible to look down on a few roofs. In one particular place at the foot of a cemetery wall the ground rose again, forming a small valley through which a black estero called the Kapilang ran in its shattered culvert. This rise of ground, whose topmost point remained for ever ill defined, was the San Clemente squatter area.
By squatter standards San Clemente was old. A whole generation had grown up not thinking of it as makeshift or temporary. Many of the lower shanties had concrete block foundations to withstand the sudden rises of the Kapilang, which acted as a storm drain in monsoon weather. This generation was now giving birth to its own children who would be even less aware that at the stroke of a pen bulldozers could raze the village without so much as a day’s notice in the name of the city or of a private individual who had suddenly dusted off his title to the land. Village? But in all important ways that was what it was. Back in January 1981 the Minister for Human Settlements had hastily dressed her stage for the visit of Pope John Paul II. She had given orders for high cinderblock walls to go up along the inner angle formed by the junction of two major thoroughfares. They had been painted white, of a shade popularly referred to as ‘sepulchre’, against which a few remaining prewar trees offered a plausibly verdant prospect. Thus screened from sight, San Clemente effectively vanished as far as the pelt of roaring traffic was concerned. Even today’s sandwiched commuters on the elevated LRT trains glimpsed little between the foliage; just another faint swelling of tin roofs among so many. Imelda Marcos’s action had intensified the village effect by demarcating San Clemente’s outer boundary. And not just in San Clemente, either. Even the foreign back-packers and good-timers of the tourist belt daily walked unknowingly past entire shanty villages, tucked away behind their walls, now no longer white. (And even after all Imelda’s beautifying zeal, the papal visit had turned out less than a total triumph. The man had struck her as obtuse and lacking in class, breaking with the divine tradition of neutrality by making impertinent remarks about poverty, human rights and even elections. At least, that was how the Press had interpreted them. The whole thing had culminated in a monstrous public snub during an open air Mass when His Holiness, faced with a front row of concupiscent oligarchs with their eyes closed and their tongues out, had turned down the obvious and glamorous first choice and instead called up some scruffy unknown brat who, she hoped, had choked on the wafer.)
To strengthen the village analogy still further, many of San Clemente’s inhabitants had originally come from the same area of a single province in the northern Visayas and had largely preserved their dialect, customs and outlook. If one closed one’s eyes it was sometimes possible to believe oneself back in a distant barrio, for on two sides the high walls shut out much of the traffic noise and on the third lay the comparative peace of the cemeteries. The sparrows which lived among the Chinese tombs became audible between LRT trains as they flittered and scrabbled on the tin roofs. For human inhabitants, meanwhile, there were two ways in and out of San Clemente. One was across a rickety board spanning the estero and leading to a muddy passage between shops which faced the roaring canyon beneath the light railway. The other was a breach in the cemetery wall most frequently used by people fetching water, for the Chinese dead were well supplied, some of the mausoleums being plumbed.
‘Which would you rather be, a dead Chinese or a living Filipino?’ ran the joke question that was neither question nor joke and expected no answer, lnsofar as there was an answer it lay on the other side of the cemetery wall in the shape of a parody suburb in miniature. Here were well-swept, empty roads with proper pavements and neat plots with patches of lawn, each with its little building. Or house. Or palace, even, for some were cased in polished marble. Behind their padlocked wrought iron gates a sarcophagus rested in what could only be a living room, given the mats and vases of flowers, the brooms tucked neatly behind the staircase in one corner. Stairs because there was often another room above which no doubt (according to those from over the wall) contained a fax machine, a Betamax, a telephone and all the other things essential to dead Chinese businessmen. Votive lights burned in the tombs of the Catholics, otherwise in shrines containing curling photographs, old joss sticks and scraps of red tissue paper. Solidly built and mostly well maintained, these vacant houses with their water and electricity were visited on anniversary and feast days by families who parked their cars in the empty street and bore supplies of food and metal polish through the iron gates.
Not all these tombs were well looked after, just as many were not palaces. Some – especially those of such flamboyantly weird design as could only have belonged to the sort of lone eccentrics who leave no family – were in sad disrepair. They were cracked, tumbledown, overgrown. One or two were broken into and inhabited briefly by squatters until noticed and ejected by the cemetery’s police detachment. Generally, the grander and newer tombs were those offering services and it was behind one of these that an illegal standpipe had been plumbed into a water main and supplied the people living on that side of San Clemente. The ordinary muser, the stroller in the cemetery (it being one of Manila’s few oases of comparative calm) might wander for hours in this Lilliputian townlet without knowing of San Clemente’s existence, or of its barely distinguishable neighbouring slums separated each from each by a stretch of wall, a muddy lane or a rivulet of effluent. Only, from one or other vantage point grey waves and crests and hollows could be glimpsed as the shanty roofs spread out below in a frozen sea of tin. True, children came up from these barrios to play, but they stayed close to the gaps in the wall, ready to scuttle back at the sign of a patrol by the cemetery police. This detachment was billeted in an infrequently used chapel somewhere in the middle. Their presence was assured by the city’s predominantly Chinese administration, as well as by the privately donated funds of the Chinese community. They were there partly to prevent the ever-rising tide of squatters from lapping over the walls and flooding in (swirling around the classical columns, eroding the very marble!). But they were there also to stop the stealthy bands of grave robbers who might otherwise come by night and dig to their hearts’ content. Never mind gold teeth: there was a brisk market in any old teeth to supply the nation’s thousands of dental students, each of whom had to acquire some for practical exam projects. Many a body lay in a provincial cemetery minus lower jaw or entire skull. Much, too, might be mentioned of more occult purposes.
San Clemente, then, rose to the flanks of this cemetery from a miasmic dell of sewage to a lesser eminence, sandwiched between the living and the dead (if the mainstream of city life was represented by howling boulevards like José Abad Santos and Aurora Avenue). Upwards of two hundred families were crammed in. Inside this walled village were no streets, only trails scarcely four feet wide which twisted and dipped according to the haphazard siting of the shanties. Here, some casually abandoned planking jutted untrimmed from somebody’s wall, forcing passers-by to dogleg around it. There, certain of the huts with upper storeys (houses, really) had fused together at head height and the path plunged into a slimy tunnel for yards at a stretch. In the dry season these thoroughfares set hard into the lumps and bumps left from winter’s mud, peppered with embedded bottle caps, wicks of plastic and stumps of wood polished by bare feet. Tiny stores opened their shutters onto the paths, their shelves lined with staple goods, a courtesy box of matches dangling on a string for those who bought their cigarettes singly. There were always surprises. Cold drinks and ice were often on sale, arguing a refrigerator. Behind curtained doorways or up stygian staircases more like bent ladders might be veritable parlours with a bamboo settee, a colour TV, an electric fan, as well as that hallmark of the returning overseas remittance man, a suitcase-sized radio cassette player. Such things gave San Clemente an illusory aspect of permanence. One could forget that these homes were often little more than huts cobbled together from scraps, resting on bare earth which at any time might be reclaimed. Indeed, a certain patina of age hung about them and in places it would have been impossible to say for sure how old a group of shanties was. At night, especially, or during brownouts when the little stores glowed yellow with candlelight, San Clemente might have been an impoverished souk of great antiquity.
Epifania Tugos – or Nanang Pipa, as she was generally known – ran a sewing cooperative from her house about a third of the way up San Clemente’s slope above the creek. This was perhaps a slight exaggeration since the business was really no more than a loose organisation of various families who had the requisite skill and access to a machine. It could never become a real cooperative, a legal entity with the minimum fifteen members and eligibility for bank loans, because it lacked a proper address. In all other respects, though, it was run very much as a business with outlets for its jeans, T-shirts and children’s underwear in Divisoria Market as well as with regular suppliers of material. There were links, too, with Nanang Pipa’s home province, where relatives of many of San Clemente’s inhabitants carried on the rag trade for their local markets. The people in her group had divided up their labour. Those without machines did the cutting or took the cartons of finished clothes down to the market. At almost any time one might meet a great bundle of bright material with a pair of polished brown legs beneath it threading its way adroitly through San Clemente’s mud lanes.
In the early days of this cottage industry harsh lessons had been learned by those living down near the creek. If one happened to be out at the time of a flash flood one might return to find the house partially demolished or, more likely, the ground floor room full of drowned rats and the sulphurous smell of drains, the walls black with mud up to the ceiling, the Singer sewing machine festooned with slime. The chief things the villagers feared most were floods and fire, followed by ghosts. (Much too far down their list came bulldozers.) Floods were quite bad enough, though, for those forced by lack of land to live within the danger zone. In the months of July to November someone tried to be always on hand, ready at the first sign of flooding to begin carrying everything upstairs or to safety in a house further up the hill. Often the first sign wasn’t mere heavy rain but the sudden appearance of cockroaches in unusual numbers. They, too, were headed upwards, swarming in the roof. In 1989 when Munding’s children were swept off by the Kapilang in spate the villagers remembered seeing two balls of beetles twirling away downstream: the children’s heads alive with cockroaches. (It was either a miracle or an iron grille at the entrance to the underground sewer which had saved them. Or maybe Bats Lapad, who had actually hauled them out.)
All these matters of low-lying terrain, floods and sewing came together in the issue of the Tugos family’s comfort room. Various crappers like thatched hen coops stood on stilts out over the Kapilang, which meant that in times of rising water worse things than cockroaches could appear in one’s living room. The Tugos crapper was a cupboard built over a trench leading down to the stream, up and down which rats and piglets ran and grew fat. But the time had come, Nanang Pipa said, when enough was enough. She and her workers sitting jammed all over the house at their machines could no longer endure the stench. It was time for Edsel to get off his bum and dig. They would have a deep pit soakaway with a cement bowl, a proper comfort room.
‘The money,’ her husband groaned, meaning the effort.
‘I work, I pay,’ she retorted. ‘You dig. Get together those layabouts you spend your time playing pusoy with. Judge, Billy, Petring. All that lot. Bats, too. It shouldn’t take you long. Bayanihan, of course: they can do it for free in a spirit of neighbourliness. Starting tomorrow. We’ll supply you with merienda and cigarettes.’
‘We haven’t any spades.’
‘Yes, you have. When Bats left the Department of Public Works and Highways he brought some souvenirs with him. I know about six DPWH shovels, an air compressor and twenty bags of cement because the cement went into our floors, the compressor was lost at cards and Virgie told me only the other day she’s sick of having those dirty spades under the bed.’
‘Read all about it,’ muttered Edsel in a bitter allusion to his wife’s unofficial nickname ‘Diyano’, she being a veritable news-sheet of information about San Clemente and its folk.
‘Just dig, Eddie. Please. Think how nice it’ll be when it’s finished and we’ve got a decent CR.’
And eventually the men had mustered, armed with shovels and a crowbar made from an iron fencing post. They primed themselves with strengthening tots from a bottle or San Miguel gin on whose label the Archangel, an effeminate creature in yellow Renaissance hose and slashed pantaloons, brandished his sword above a vampiric black figure with ribbed wings cowering beneath Michael’s scarlet buskins on spikes of flame. Soon they were past the noisome top layer and were throwing up clods of the earth which had once nourished those far-off grasses, the long-dead deer.