by Pico Iyer
V
Whenever I got carried away by the thrill-a-minute frenzy of the political scene, however, the friends I made in Manila brought me back to the simple realities of a system that had reduced its men to rags and driven its women to brothels.
I first met Sarah, a waitress at Calle Cinquo, on my second night in town. A pious, stately girl from the countryside—both her sisters had joined a convent, and Sarah seemed to belong in their company—she had come to Manila, she told me, to study nursing. It was not easy to finance her studies, she went on, and many of her classmates took the easy way out. But she was determined, absolutely determined, to pay her way through college without compromising herself. “I have to work hard,” she explained, “but I will do it. Step by step, Pico: that is how to live. If I am honest, I know God will help me.”
Sarah’s adamantine strength of will was sorely tested by her current job. Working in Calle Cinquo nine hours a day, seven days a week, she earned exactly $16 in the course of a month. Even that, however, was never guaranteed. Every now and then, the restaurant staged a variety show, and gave each of its waitresses three tickets to sell at $4.50 each—a small fortune for the average Filipino. If any of the tickets went unsold, the entire amount was deducted from the waitress’s salary. Sarah lived in absolute terror of not finding takers for her tickets. Yet all the while, with her hacienda beauty and her dazzling smile, she also found herself constantly besieged by solicitations from foreigners who assumed, not without reason, that the waitresses themselves were on sale here. Every tourist, Sarah noted sadly, was interested in only one thing. “I do not blame them,” she told me, with a soft smile. “But I still prefer my co-Filipinos.”
Quite taken with Sarah’s sweet-spirited warmth and innocence, I soon took to stopping off each night at Calle Cinquo for a Coke and a chat. Sarah always greeted me with a smile, and, though three years younger than I, she always lavished on me the benefit of her counsel. “You must always remember, Pico,” she often told me, “that if you are good, God will reward you. You must always go step by step.” At this she would flash me an earnest smile. “And one day I hope you will find a good wife, a lady who will always be faithful and true, a good lady who will always wait for you.”
Before leaving Manila, I asked Sarah if I could send her something from the States. Just a picture of your parents, she replied.
THE OTHER OPTION open to most Filipinas was explained to me by Minnie, the best friend of the security guard’s roommate, Lulu. The eldest of seven children in tough Pasay City, she had always been keenly aware of her obligation to help her parents support her siblings; her father, after a lifetime of working for the government, brought home only $55 a month. When she was seventeen, therefore, Minnie announced to her parents that she was going to start working in a bar. That way, she said, she could earn five times as much as her father, and put her younger brothers and sisters through school. Still, she warned her relatives sternly, “One bar girl in the family is enough!”
Ten years later, chirpy and long-haired Minnie, less than five feet tall and with the huge eyes of a teenage ingenue, was completely at home in every corner of the Manila demimonde. She smoked, she told me brightly, she drank, she did drugs. She played pool, she knew blackjack and she had two cupboards filled with clothes. She had been virtually addicted to gambling until, she said, at the age of twenty-five she had decided to take a “more responsible attitude.” But still she could not resist playing bingo. And still she spent $2 every night having herself made up by one of the gay “billyboys” who set up shop at the back of the girlie bars. She was, she announced happily, a “one-day millionaire.”
As a teenager, Minnie told me, she had once had an abortion. She had also once got married to a British executive from Papua New Guinea, who had given her, when he left Manila, a girlie bar of her own to operate. Unfortunately, she continued with characteristic nonchalance, the French International bar had sunk within a year (“No good girls”), leaving her with nothing but a series of abusive letters from the Englishman’s Australian wife back home.
Throughout the bouncy melodrama, however, Minnie had always made good on her commitment to her family. She told me with pride, and told me again, that she had single-handedly paid for all the schooling of her youngest brother and sister. When her second sister had been saddled with a pregnancy out of wedlock, Minnie had paid for the delivery, the hospital stay and every aspect of the little boy’s upbringing. No sooner had she come to know two Saudi Arabians in the bar than Minnie had managed to fix up a job in the Gulf for one of her cousins. And then, because the cousin had a police record, she had gone herself to the National Bureau of Investigations and taken care of all the paperwork for him. “I use my coconut” was Minnie’s favorite dictum.
Thus Minnie’s life careered crazily ahead, roller-coastering back and forth and back again between the bar scene and her family. One day I arranged to meet her for dinner, and she sauntered in an hour late. What had happened? Oh, nothing, she said carelessly, she had just been fixing up her sixteen-year-old cousin with a job. Where? At the Pussycat Lounge. And when was she due to begin? “Tonight,” said Minnie, without much interest. “She lost her virginity last week. She is already dancing on Stage One.”
On another occasion, I had arranged to go to a movie with her. Half an hour before it was due to begin, she breezed into my hotel and announced she couldn’t go. Why? “Because my cousin, last night, after a fiesta, was stabbed.” Was he hurt? “Yah!” she cried, eyes bright. “Dead.”
Her ebullience seemed scarcely dimmed at all. I assumed, I said, that she had not really known her cousin. “Yah,” she insisted, vehement. “He very close to me. He always bring me Mary Jane.” But she did not seem very sad, I remarked. “Sad, yah! But what can I do? He was stabbed three times before, but always he survived. He was not a troublemaker. But at fiestas, especially on Sundays, there is always much violence.”
Apart from her family, Minnie’s most devoted commitment was to her religion. But here again hers was a festive, carefree, jeepney kind of worship. One Sunday she invited me to come along to a baptism. The father of the child, she whispered upon arrival, was a disk jockey on Del Pilar. Most of the others in the congregation were go-go dancers from his bar. The man’s sister had to stand in for his wife, who had already left him. Yet all of them seemed pious in the extreme. I asked Minnie whether she ever had trouble squaring her lifestyle with her religion. “No,” she piped, as bright and quick as ever. “God knows me. He understands why I do what I do.”
Minnie had the Manila underworld entirely taped: wherever she went, she carried a Pro toothbrush and a lighter that said “Trust Me.” But she was also experienced enough to know that she was growing too old to work much longer in the bar. Ever practical, she had now started taking courses in accountancy and shorthand. Her plan was to go to Stockholm to live with a friend who had married a Swedish man, there to practice bookkeeping. “Yah, I know it will be boring,” she acknowledged. “But working in the bar, it is also boring.”
When I asked Minnie if there was anything I could send her from America, she responded without hesitation, “Yah! Plane ticket. Manila-New York round trip.” I assumed she was joking. “Why not?” she said, entirely serious. “You can say you hire me as maid. Tax deduction!”
MY THIRD LOCAL friend afforded me a glimpse into the other side of Manila life—the world of show-biz glitter and celebrity. I first ran into Mark one night at a typical Filipino affair: a ritzy PR gig in the glitzy Stargazer Disco, the city’s hottest night spot, organized by Pepsi-Cola to celebrate the flop of the new-style Coke. As absurdly glamorous waitresses cruised the room in beige off-the-shoulder dresses, gold purses hanging from their necks, an emcee talked excitedly about the “Cola Wars” and a succession of the country’s top pop stars stepped up to the mike and blasted out show-stopping numbers under swirling lasers and flashing lights.
While one of the routinely dazzling singers was strutting around the room, t
hrowing her hands into the air and expertly going through the emotions, I commented on her professionalism to a brawny young guy in his early twenties beside me. His face broke into a broad smile.
“You think she’s good?”
“Very good.”
“All riiiight!” he exclaimed in a frat-boy voice, all smiles. “She’s my wife.” With that, he warmly shook my hand. “How you doing? You from the States? All riiiight!”
“Oh, you see her?” He pointed to a beauty who had taken over the mike. “That’s Miss Beanie-Beanie. She’s eighteen and she’s not too bright, but she’s real pretty, wouldn’t you say? She won this kinda beauty-contest thing they have around here.”
In between filling me in on the high jinks onstage, Mark explained a little about what he was doing here. Just a couple of years ago, he said, he had still been back home, at the University of Indiana. One day he happened to pick up a book on the music business. It sounded like a good deal, he thought, so he decided to give it a try. He didn’t have much singing talent, he said, but he had managed to round up the backup band to John Cougar Mellencamp, and he had cut a demo. As soon as he heard the song, he knew there was no way he could make it at home. But he’d grown up a little in Asia while his dad was stationed over here, so he decided to come over and give it a whirl. First he tried Japan. No dice. Then he tried Singapore. No way. Then he came over to the Philippines, and someone here liked his sound and let him cut a record. One of his songs had made it to a Greatest Hits album and sold 27,000 copies, the local equivalent of a gold record. He must be rich, I said. “Nah,” he said. “I got no percentage. No royalties. Anyway, it was a lousy record…. Oh, you see that guy onstage? He’s the Lou Rawls of the Philippines. So anyway, one day I was at the studio and I found myself standing next to this incredibly beautiful nineteen-year-old singer. So I asked her out. I didn’t know that over here you’re supposed to court a girl. Hey, the only court I knew was a basketball court! Anyway, she agreed to be my girlfriend. So later I asked her to get married, and—wouldn’t you know it?—she said yes.”
Thus, nine months earlier, Mark had moved to the Philippines, married to one of its leading singers and jobless. Well, he figured, he had nothing to do with his time; he might as well try show biz. The next thing he knew, he had been signed up to play host on a popular TV show: he had everything he needed to make it big over here, he discovered—an American accent and a faintly Oriental look (his father had married a Korean). So now, at twenty-three, just a few months out of college and equipped with nothing but a cheery sense of his own lack of qualifications, he found himself a national heartthrob. “You should come and see the show sometime,” he told me happily. “It’s a lot different from at home. It’s real lousy.
“Oh, hey,” he cried, as a greased-down kid with cocktail-lounge manners left the stage, “I’d like you to meet one of the other stars on the show. This is Marco. He’s kind of the Julio Iglesias of the Philippines.”
Three mornings later, I made my way to Mark’s modest home in a quiet residential street in Makati. A maid admitted me to a modest ranch-style living room. Above the couch was a huge, black-lit portrait of a long-tressed nymph; next to the stairs was a painting of Jesus. A few minutes later, brushing his hair as he came and buttoning up his shirt, Mark raced downstairs, as happily flustered as if he were late for a final exam. We jumped into his Mitsubishi. His wife, he said proudly, had had to save up three years for this car.
As soon as we arrived at the studio, Mark led me past a mob of screaming girls and through a tiny back door marked “Strictly for Talents and Guests Only.” Inside the backstage area, five teenage girls in fishnet stockings and black leotards were penciling their eyes in front of a mirror and practicing their moves. Nearby was a bathroom—a cubicle with a rusted shower tap and a dirty toilet that had neither a lid nor a flush. Farther in was a small auditorium—perfect, I thought, for an off-off-Broadway production of Beckett. But the place was alive. Rows upon rows of teenage girls were sitting behind a wire fence, squealing and waving posters. Meanwhile, onstage, a group was racing through “Dancing in the Dark,” in preparation, I learned, for a Bruce Springsteen Sound-Alike Contest.
Mark stopped by a mirror for a couple of minutes while a woman dabbed some orange powder on him. Then he strolled over to his producer for a twenty-second briefing. “Hey,” said a man who could have been found around any pool in Beverly Hills. “Just remember to say we’re big. Everything’s big and getting bigger.” There were a few schoolboy giggles at this, and then the show began. Wasn’t there a script? I asked as we took our places at the side of the stage. “Nah,” said Mark, cheerful as ever. “We know the format by now. We just kinda improvise.” With that, he went off to join his co-hosts in front of the cameras.
Between scenes, Mark hurried back to explain the setup to me. “The only veteran, apart from me,” he said, under his breath, “is Frances. But she’s getting kinda old for this. She’s twenty-five, I think.” The other female co-host was a stunning beauty called Rachel. “Yeah,” said Mark, “she’s seventeen. Her mother was a big star.”
Rachel came over, and I asked her about high school. She left class at 10:30 every morning, she said, made it here for the 11:30 show and then got back in time for her 1:30 class. With that, Rachel wandered coolly back onstage. “She was gonna enter Miss Universe,” Mark whispered, “but it’s still a year too early.”
Then I was reintroduced to Marco, the pint-size Julio Iglesias. “Marco got on the country charts last year,” said Mark. “You know Freddie Aguilar had a hit in thirteen European countries? Too bad he never made it in the States. But hey, did you know that Shirley Bassey once came to sing here? And Menudo and Air Supply too. Matt Munro once recorded a song written by a Filipino.” For everyone here, by the sound of it, the big time was just around the corner.
At that moment, a tremendous cry arose from the girls in the audience, and a pretty young boy in an unbuttoned white shirt sauntered onto the stage, crooning into a mike while a few lucky young ladies rushed aross the stage and planted kisses on his cheek. “He’s sixteen,” explained Mark, “the son of Pilita Corrales, the Asian Queen of Music and a member of the Hall of Fame. She once sang with Sammy Davis, Jr., in Vegas.” Off went the heartthrob and on came Herbert Bautista (“Yeah, he’s sixteen. Last year he won the Best Actor Award”). The next singing star was Pops Fernandez (“She’s seventeen. She’s the star of Penthouse Live”). Then Cheska Inigo did a number (“Cute, isn’t she? Only thirteen”). In between sketches, a few workers wheeled huge backdrops that looked like cinema billboards onto the stage, while other assistants handed the hosts handwritten messages on index cards to read offstage. Then Mark got up, told me he’d be right back and ran onto the stage, swinging his arms back and forth and lip-synching his way through Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.” As he raced off, people patted him on the back and gave him their congratulations. “Yeah,” he told me jauntily. “I’m no good at singing. But hey, that doesn’t matter. I’m the host!”
After the show, Mark stopped off, smiling over helplessly at me, to sign the photos and limbs of the girls who had gathered around his car, and then we got in. “Hey,” he said, “let me take you to lunch.”
A few minutes later, we took our places in a shopping-mall McDonald’s and Mark looked over at me with genuine affection. “You know,” he said, “it’s so great to have a conversation again. Most of my friends here, they’re in the entertainment business. Or else they want some kinda favor from me. I really oughta apologize for my lack of proficiency in English. I kinda feel my intelligence is declining over here. My computer training, all that kind of stuff, it’s getting real rusty.” He stopped for a minute, reflective. “You know, I really kinda miss the States?”
“But over here,” I said, looking at the girls who were giggling shyly as they stared at our table, “you’re a superstar.”
“Sure,” he said, taking a bite out of his burger, “but you gotta remember this isn’t t
he States. For the TV show, they give me thirty-five dollars a day. And my wife—she’s one of the top entertainers in the country—she still has to appear at high school proms, department-store openings, promotional events, all that kind of stuff. Like the Pepsi gig. Right now, we’re kinda excited: it looks like she might get a chance to attend a singing competition in East Germany. If she does well, she could become big in China, Russia even. But first she has to see if there’s going to be an election.”
“An election?”
“Sure. If there’s an election, she’ll do a few spots for the government.”
“She likes the government?”
“Nah. But the opposition doesn’t have enough money to pay her well. Anyway, she won’t campaign for the government; she’ll just do ads for them. No way you can afford to pass up job opportunities around here.”
VI
A few days later, just before I left Manila, I finally had my chance to see all the pieces fit together—the people in the streets and the revelers far above, the constant smiles and the famous protests: the anti-Marcos opposition had scheduled a full day of demonstrations to mark the second anniversary of the killing of Ninoy Aquino.
The program began early in the morning, in the stately aisles of Santo Domingo Church in Quezon City, where Cardinal Sin delivered a fierce sermon decrying the systematic devastation of his country. Then Cory Aquino, whom the people were still trying to persuade to enter politics, walked shyly up to the stage. In a soft, quavering voice, she gave the people her heartfelt thanks. Her husband, she said, would have been proud, deeply proud of them. Then, fists raised silently in the air, the entire congregation joined together in a slow and stirring rendition of “The Impossible Dream.” When it was over, a silence filled the church. Then, very slowly, the crowd went into a strong, subdued rendering of the banned national anthem, “Bayan Ko.” As I listened to the brave, solemn voices of the two little girls next to me, and as I heard them singing of redemption with all their hearts, I felt strange tears coming to my eyes. Theirs sounded to me like the voice of a nation struggling to find a dignity adequate to its sorrow.
