Checking In

Dear E,

Hey. It has been awhile since we last talked. How are you? I’ve just been thinking of you, and I thought I’d check in and write you a letter. There was a news item on TV awhile ago about Qantas – ha! – and I kind of took that as a sign that yes, maybe it’s time I ask you how you are, how everything’s going. Not rough, I do hope.

I’m doing well. Or at least I think I’m doing well. Here in Manila – and I don’t know if it’s the summer heat keeping the aristocrats at bay – there has been an unusual demand for starving writers who’d be willing to take on cheap side jobs. I consider myself one of those writers, but before I learned to write professionally, before I learned to fill the folds of a brochure with corporate cant and rehash press releases using synonyms, I’d always been of the starving kind. Ha! (You do remember me as always biting my fingernails, don’t you?) Seriously, though, I’m kind of happy with these assignments, not just for their meager financial rewards, but also for helping me keep busy. I mean, I’d take poverty over anxiety any day of the week. “Nothing like it for taking my mind off nasty subjects,” so said Paul Pennyfeather’s guardian.

Okay now. I don’t mean to pry, and I ask this question on the condition that you will answer it only to the extent that you are comfortable (and I will totally understand if you’re not comfortable): how’s that part of your life? You know what I’m talking about. Are you seeing someone these days?

If you are, then I hope he’s good to you and that he makes you happy, because you deserve a good man and a happy life. I hope, too, that he liked The Royal Tenenbaums, or has at least seen it and not walked out from it, and that he smokes cigarettes, or, at the very least, doesn’t care if you do. I mean, I just can’t imagine you without the Dunhill! Your beautiful mouth was always gently furnished with a burning stick whenever we talked at the sixth-floor balcony, and our conversations were always happily enveloped by a cloud of cigarette smoke. Conversations about what? Anything, usually: Coldplay, U2, Thai food, Mardi Gras, David Sedaris, Li Cunxin, the Roman Catholic Church, microeconomics, New York, Los Angeles, how much I hated my job, how you were able to collect "a menagerie of toiletries" from hotels in the countries you had been to the last five years. Anything. When we, you and I, when we first talked about anything (and in the manner, too, that’s most proper for talking about anything, which is alcoholically), you had a way about you, a quiet charm, made more powerful by those eyes as clear and tantalizing as emeralds and by an embarrassed smile that rather melted me like cheese. Knowing you, having experienced you, I’m sure that the next man in your life will be mozzarella in a microwave.

If you aren’t seeing anybody at the moment, I am still wishing you happiness.

I have seen about a dozen pictures of B’s new baby, posted on the Internet. (I’m relieved the parents didn’t name him Dmitri! I regretted the name as soon as I suggested it.) And G and J keep me updated with the infinite number of Facebook quizzes that they take. But it’s you I miss, E. I refuse to let my memory of you be reduced to red Calvin Kleins or your memory of me to ridiculous phone bills. “Let’s watch movies, go to fun fairs,” you had suggested to me when we first met. “Take me to a steakhouse. I want to be your good friend first.” But we never did go to a steakhouse - just the fish market, Macapagal Boulevard's dampa, where transvestites begged us to consider their salmon.

So I figured, if I were going to keep abreast of what’s been happening in your life, something more than checking status updates and smiling at pictures of you and your son at the shooting range was in order.

Something like this letter,
which I send with love,
and happy thoughts of you
from our Landing.

My very best,
Migs

Dennis the Tricycle Driver

There is a man named Dennis who, for a living, drives a very red tricycle in the island of Guimaras. We first met him when we rather clumsily disembarked at Jordan Wharf. There, a crowd of barking drivers – of tricycles and “multi-cabs” (public utility jeeps, really, each of which can fit a maximum of fourteen people) – cordially harassed us pump boat passengers; they roared in Ilonggo, announcing ridiculous rates, and pointed their greasy index fingers at their luxury tin vehicles. They must have seen us as prospects right from the start of our eleven-peso ride, which, if you board at any of the ports on the southeastern edge of Iloilo City, takes ten to fifteen minutes, depending on the weather. Most things depend on the weather, it seems like.

The day was hot and humid and the sparkling waters were almost blinding. We were thus disposed to not have much patience for swindlers. Dennis, who must be in his early thirties, stood out because he had dutifully directed us to the tourism information desk where two young ladies both wearing yellow Survivor t-shirts and denim jeans made sure we were given a warm welcome, and that no one overpriced fares. They had a price list. “You’re going to Enrico Beach, right?” one of them said. She was scanning the pages of her notebook. “Let’s see. If you take a multi-cab, a one-way trip should cost you no more than four hundred pesos.”

Needing less space, we opted instead for the tricycle and hired Dennis: five hundred pesos for five hours, to the beach and back, covering a total of not more than sixty kilometers, but with likely side tours, too, to any one of Guimaras’ caves, or any one of Guimaras’ waterfalls, or any one spot where we could take pictures and notes and admire the unspoiled economy of one of smallest islands in Western Visayas.

I first heard about Guimaras in 2006 when the Manila newspapers reported the worst oil spill in Philippine history. To me, the story had the impact of a footnote – evidence of my urban snobbishness. But the mess of that has since been cleaned up; its last ugly ripple has ebbed. Now, when the island province is brought up in conversation, the beaches are praised as being better than that of Boracay. The sand and soil have been ascribed adjectives in the superlative form, such as “purest” and “most fertile,” respectively. The sweet mangoes are raved about, too, with Bill Clinton and the present Pope alleged to be two of its most famous eaters. “Plant a mango tree and send your child to college,” so went the motto of former Guimaras Governor Emily Relucio-Lopez had been quoted as saying, and I wonder if there’s any other place in the world where tuition is appraised in the currency of tropical fruits – and beachfront hospitality, in US dollars.

“You’re heading the wrong direction,” Dennis told us coolly. He was sporting a childish moustache and the great laughable Asian goatee. “Alubihod is where the tourists go. I’m happy to take you to Enrico, but I haven’t even been there since high school.”

Three years ago, during which time Dennis was working in a bakeshop in Libis, Quezon City, his father died. So he left Manila and went back home. After the funeral, Dennis’ wife insisted that he stay on the island, or at least in Iloilo City. He did. He effectively put Manila behind by buying the tricycle, which he now rides to go wherever in Guimaras he wishes to go, be it to a passenger’s destination, an odd boredom-conceived adventure, or his house in the municipality of Buenavista.

At the start of our Guimaras tour, Dennis filled his vehicle up with four 1.5-liter Coke bottles of reddish unleaded gas; then he drove us to Daliran Cave. We descended a long autumnal staircase before landing on what looked like a set location for the next Indiana Jones movie, if there is going to be a next Indiana Jones movie. I hasten to add, however, that it was King Kong whom I half-expected to emerge furiously from the deep black shadows of the cave.

This piece would not have been about Dennis, but I lacked the material to talk at length about the pump boat captain, whose name is Ariel. He had enough quips, mind, but the best thing I could remember from my sea-breeze conversation with him was that he had worked for Quezon City’s First District Representative Bingbong Crisologo. Ariel had helped build the congressman’s house. Unfortunately, I found it impossible to put a fashionable The Talk of the Town spin on Ariel’s cement-slapping endeavors from the yesteryears.

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 with Evelyn, a white man (bless all white men and women in the Philippines; unofficial additional taxes are invariably imposed upon them), 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. In his eyes, I must not have looked older than a recent college graduate. 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.” Evelyn, quiet all this time, listened helplessly. But he must have detected a bit of profanity in the crunchy exchange between the driver and me, a two-dialect exchange which, if transcribed exactly as it were, would have been filled with asterisks. One was speaking in Ilonggo and another in Tagalog. “Shame on you,” I told the driver. “It’s my first time here and you’re the first person I encounter.” At that, he resumed his song of grievances, which would have gone on and on had Evelyn not cut him off. “Stop!” Evelyn roared. He’s British, by the way. “Turn on the meter or else we’ll get off and report you to the transportation office.” There was silence, and in the middle of that silence the meter finally was turned on. “Thank you, sir,” Evelyn said. His accent sounded vicious, but I’ll have you know that he is far from being prone to seething.

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.