20/20 Vision

CITY UNSEEN

I have always wished my birthplace is just around the corner so that I can return to it as I wish. But Manila is far from being a turn around the bend. There are no easy trips, no Amtrak rides and Greyhound buses. A trip there is a lifetime of planning to make. I hardly remember Manila. My own subconscious can’t find this city, not in my dreams where the house I grew up in always makes an appearance. The house takes so many shapes, goes through so many violent transformations, but it takes the whole space in my dream, the whole screen. There is no city in which to place it. There is no Manila. Almost as if the background has been erased.

All this time—until I returned—Manila was a blur.
Attending a literary conference recently, the Chicano poet Rigoberto González mentioned during his reading that he started wearing glasses at the age of fourteen. Until then, he was walking around like a blind boy, and accepted it because his family never realized that he couldn’t see very well. I knew what he meant. I started wearing glasses at the age of eight. But they were so huge, so uncomfortable, I only wore them in the classroom. For the most part, I walked from school to home, and back, not seeing what was around me. The world was a blur, the lines of the houses were as imperfect as the cloudy images of the narrow streets on which they stood. I was also extremely insecure as a boy. Not seeing the world around me was an escape from the eyes that watched every movement in our street. I thought, if I didn’t see anyone, then they must not be seeing me.

Instead, I resorted to the world of my imagination. In my own self-imposed withdrawal, I read books, memorized words from the dictionary, and drew. I drew the world far from what was around me. I told stories and talked to myself through the characters I drew, not realizing how much these private moments would impact my adult life. I didn’t know poverty then: I had none to compare it against. It was a quiet childhood, a struggling one, but certainly sheltered from an outside world that only made sense when I squinted.

CITY RECREATED

There is a Manila in all the countries I have traveled in. The Manila in my novel was the world of my travels, my drawings, monochromatic photographs taken from childhood, copied in memory. It was the cities in Latin America, a continent I frequented as a student and a young adult, places carefully transformed into a world that will be the home of Pipo and Gringo in my novel.
It was a city that was easy to draw in a book. Easy, because Manila is a city that is so much about the inside: the smells, the sounds, the heartbeats of the people who survive in it. It is a city I didn’t need to see with 20/20 vision. I only had to live inside it to understand how to draw a clear outline of its meandering streets without seeing how it looked from above.

So I began the book with the same house that continues to haunt my dreams. I started with the gutters that were falling apart. I imagined the flood that was so both gleefully and violently a part of my childhood, the big windows of these two-story conjoined apartments, the life-size antennae on the rooftops, the unfinished concrete block fences, asphalt streets.

In Rio de Janeiro, while looking for a certain club, I found myself lost in the intestine of an unfamiliar city. The sounds were different. The people were different. But what I found was Manila, the same heartbeats, the same energy, houses with huge windows about to fall apart but desperately being saved for there was no other choice. If I covered my ears and did not listen to the music, I would think I had gone back home. I was nineteen. Already wearing contact lenses.

When I drew the street in The Umbrella Country, I thought about that moment in Brazil. I thought about how everyone was looking at me, watching me, wondering where I was going, but choosing to ignore me as well, thinking perhaps I was one lost dark teenager from Ipanema.

For the first time, with eyes seeing, I had managed to look back, stare back and watch what was around me, something I never did as a child. I saw what I had missed: a city.

CITY FOUND

For so many years, I have dreamt of seeing my birth city again. Not really so much to see it with clear eyesight, but simply from the pair I have now: eyes that have grown and matured, and have found a way to abandon the awkward little boy of the Manila years. The year 2000 was the appropriate time. There was a family reunion and my novel had just come out a year before. Manila, I heard, was abuzzed about the book. An art exhibit of major artists was named after the novel. So much to look forward to.

My family was staying in a hotel in Malate, an area completely unknown to me until then. Much of Manila’s geography is unfamiliar in fact, and I have never made any attempt to understand the crisscrossing scars of its face. It was frustrating to realize that we arrived on a possible beginning of a typhoon. Rain in the city is not lovely, no trees on which the drips slides, no chirping birds, no lakes. Rain made Manila look like a fistfight of street boys we witnessed outside the hotel, desperate and angry.

I insisted on our first night that we visit our old house. My cousin willingly took me there, and I completely put my faith in him. Half an hour later, I had no idea where we were. I knew where we were going, or at least I knew how it looked. But getting there was less than exciting. Cars swerved from nowhere, almost hitting us, mostly cars because passenger Jeepneys as I learned think twice about going out in this weather. There were no lampposts in the avenues. No traffic lights. I was told the lights had to be turned off to conserve energy. But it only made the trip a dangerous one, at least from my perspective. I thought, this was the capital city, and here we were in its dark pit. All I could see were vehicular lights in red and green, and water splashing from above and under. We moved into the streets. The houses were dark on both sides of the avenues. At nine in the evening, it was extremely quiet outside. That rain was a symphony of loud voices difficult to compete with. Unlike the dreams I used to have, unlike the pictures I had kept, everything had become dark, a world that had lost color. I kept my eyes open to see the street signs that would indicate where we were going. Garbage piled up in the streets, being desperately dug by stray dogs. There were a few men with bulging stomachs standing outside their homes. The streets were empty, except for a few people who were heading home, crowned with umbrellas. When we finally saw my street, I had wondered if the van could fit in it. I didn’t remember it being that narrow. In the dark, it looked like an alleyway in the back of tenements. Even the houses looked much smaller. But we managed to go through. They were cars parked outside some homes, making it more difficult for us. I asked my cousin to slow down. I was counting houses in my imagination, the houses in which my childhood friends lived, but none was familiar. I remembered a friend writing to me about how the streets were raised and paved. This might explain why the front windows were all so low. It didn’t fit the architecture of my memory. The houses I saw in Latin America that inspired much of my writing more closely resembled the images I kept since I left. Because it was dark outside, it was easy to see the interior of the lit houses. I saw our old house, with someone who looked familiar standing outside, using a cell phone. There were clotheslines in front of the house. It looked even smaller up close. The whole passage through the street, though we were driving slowly, took about two minutes. I imagined this street to be very, very long, like the many years I have dreamt of it, since I left Manila, a never-ending street, that changes in color, texture and smell. The house that was in my dream wasn’t the house I saw that night. There was nothing romantic about reality.

That evening of our first day, I spoke with my brother who was still in the States. I told him where we went that evening, and warned him about his expectations. Our family came back for a reunion, although I wanted to also revisit my childhood. There is something about reality that doesn’t calm one’s already ruined expectations. While on the phone, I stood on the hotel terrace, overlooking signs of a fallen city: construction that never finished, street urchins in the rain, a long stretch of slums and rain, rain that feared nothing and no one and too much of it I had not seen in a long, long time.

CITY, MEMORY

Oh, how memory is flawed. Seeing our house, even in daylight didn’t make sense, didn’t match the template in my dreams. The house, up to this time, appears in my dreams. Someone suggested to me once that perhaps the house I continue to see in my dreams is really not the house of my childhood, that perhaps, it represents something more recent, more “now,” perhaps the house is me. The transformations, the life I’m leading now.
Two years passed, and I don’t talk much about my trip to the Philippines anymore. I have kept many newspaper clippings about my arrival as a “poet/novelist” that made my family proud during and after our short sojourn there. Manila, like many places I’ve visited, is a scrapbook of used tickets, brown leaves and stones I pocketed during long walks, and used table napkins with notes. A photo album to open if the desire is there. The Philippines, however, remains to be the landscape of my literary imagination. I write about it more than ever now, having a more “adult” perspective of the country. It’s a relationship that was only strengthened by my return.
There is one dream that I always wish will come back in my sleep. I am inside our Manila home, an adult this time, newly-awoken. The bedroom is brightly lit by the early morning sun, yellow and full. It is the same room of my childhood, overlooking houses with antennae on top, except this time there is better view of wide streets and avenues. Noises, celebratory, powerful. Huge masses of people, a parade, with placards, signs, and giant effigies and flags, red flags being waved. They are burning papier mâché effigies of politicians. The sun was dancing with the people. My emotions are in camaraderie, and I sense a revolution. The color is red, everything. I feel strong, standing at that second-story window. I feel proud. All is full, oh, so full of hope.

It’s the Manila I wished I had seen.

(originally published in Filipinas Magazine 2003?)

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