We entered a narrow street, half submerged in slime, more children playing, screaming, fighting around us, past tables with cooked food and swarms of flies, and more tables with wilted vegetables and dried fish, more men talking, and still more packing-crate houses, sorrier-looking than the ones in Antipolo.
We were in the Barrio.
I had read somewhere that to get into it was to enter a demented world where perspectives changed, as if one saw through cracked lenses or glass smeared with mud.
Years ago, shortly after the war, this whole area was a putrefied expanse of mudflats, the bay foreshore. In one of those rare, foresighted moves of government, this was filled up, and for some seasons weeds and other green things sprouted here, bearing plumes of white. Then the hordes from the provinces came and built shanties from packing crates, bamboo, cardboard, burnt tin, construction debris, anything that would shield them from the rain and the sun.
Not all the Barrio people were poor or from the lowest castes. There were politicians who enriched themselves with their pickings in the slums, and they built houses of stone with high walls, incongruous structures surrounded by dismal shapes and dismal lives. Policemen also built houses, which they rented out, promising protection to their tenants and their neighbors, for here the policeman was not just a man in uniform or a figure of authority, he was also the arbiter of justice.
There were no sewers; if government were more humane, sewerage would be the first thing it would have provided for the Barrio. And because there were no sewers, around us was the pervasive smell of rot, heavy and powerful in the rainy season and much more so when the sun shone. In spots, the waters never drained and planks were laid where the water was deep; otherwise, we would have to take off our shoes and walk in blackish mud.
They came from all over the country—farmers running from the Huk rebellion in Central Luzon, the ravages of typhoons in Samar, the poverty of Bicol, the laziness and inertia of the Visayas. They lived together because they were relatives or because they came from the same benighted place, and it was here in the Barrio where relationships became stronger as, perhaps, they had never been elsewhere. Relationships were a bulwark against disease, unemployment, hunger, and, in some instances, a safe haven from the gangs that preyed on people in the dark and convoluted recesses of the Barrio.
There was religion, too; the folksy kind with its symbols and rituals. Religion was their last hope, and I was not going to deny it to them. With Toto, I was their pusher.
The chapel Father Jess built was at one end of an alley, close to the man-made creek that flowed to the sea. It was fronted by a small, multipurpose plaza, no bigger than the basketball court into which it was often transformed. The plaza was covered with gravel and was actually a street that was not yet filled up and opened.
The chapel was no different from the tawdry shapes that surrounded it. Its uneven sidings were made of salvaged construction materials. A kumbento just as decrepit as the church itself was an extension of the church rear. It was divided into quarters, for Father Jess on the second floor and for the two of us as well as Tia Nena, who was the cook and lavandera,† on the ground. Apart from the church was another building, also made of the same castaway material, and it served as a kindergarten and meeting place for the parish.
Father Jess was in the multipurpose center when we arrived; he was talking before a huddle of young people, most of them with rubber slippers and T-shirts. He himself was in blue T-shirt, sandals, and blue denims, looking more like an overaged bum than a priest. His big hands were gesturing and when he saw us, he beckoned to me: “Children,” he said, “this is Pepe; he will stay with us so that he will be out of harm. Now, remember, he is a provinciano, so you should not immediately convert him to your spoiled city ways.”
They responded with that self-conscious, shy laughter of young village people.
Father Jess ate by himself and Toto and I served him. Between mouthfuls of Tia Nena’s excellent ox tongue at lunch he asked, “Did you notice how those kids this morning seemed so distant? And I have been here seven years! Do you know what that means? I knew most of them when they had bare bottoms, and yet they still cannot feel at ease with me. Is it because I am a priest? Is it because I really do not belong here?”
I could have told him a few truths, but I was going to live with him for some time, share his food, laugh at his jokes, so I said, “I do not know, Father. Honestly, I do not know. But I do know priests are not poor.”
“I know what you mean,” he said sadly. “It had occurred to me many times, and it is true, I was not poor. Even now, I am not poor. I eat better than they and I have choices. I do not have to be here.”
A long gap of silence. “What can I do to be accepted by them?” he asked.
“I just don’t know, Father,” I said.
In another week, I still did not know. There are many things I will never know, and a lifetime in the Barrio would not suffice. There is no ready script I could follow in my relationships with people, in my journey through Tondo. All that I sought was to survive, and to find no difficult answers to the questions that I dared to ask.
The Barrio was not easy to know—this is what all those researchers and scholars believed; they came with their tired questions, their long-winded interviews. I soon realized we were overstudied, with all that fancy data stored in libraries and in computers. Still, nothing changed.
They came—those do-gooder sociologists, those slumming foreigners—maybe because they wanted their troubled consciences salved a bit, that by “studying” us, they would be able to unlock the gates of our hell and welcome us to their paradise.
But they never reached the pith, the core, the heart—it is beyond their perception because they don’t live here, because they are not poor, because there is always a way out for them. Look at this artist, Malang, how prettily, how daintily he pictures our homes. If only he had lived here, even just for a week—I wonder how all his pictures would turn out then!
All they will know will be gathered, concluded from comfortable positions they would not lose no matter how sincere or close they will be to us. Not us; we could not say the many things that strained to be said, that were coiled and seething within.
But not all of us in the Barrio were the flotsam of the country, nor were our houses of lowly shape and material. There were also those whose tables were laden, whose roofs did not leak, and even among the riffraff, some had power and influence that were real, though subterranean, because here were enclaves ruled by terror, by laws that applied only to us.
And among these men was Roger, Toto’s friend, although that did not seem possible at the time, considering how Roger teased and ridiculed him. Roger, Toto explained, was the leader of the Tayo-Tayo gang, one of the biggest and most powerful of the slum gangs. He was always around with his young toughs, most of them half-naked in the morning heat, their tattoos neatly etched on their gleaming brown bodies. He was fat and short and, that first morning, as we passed him on the way to Bangkusay for our jeepney, he stopped us.
“He will live with me in the kumbento, Roger,” Toto said in his usual halting manner.
Roger appraised me, then shook my hand in a viselike grip he thought would hurt. “You must bring us Father Jess’s wine one evening, and we will have a drinking party,” he said.
But though he did not warm up to me, he was not taciturn or menacing. And not once did he milk me for anything the way he did the strangers—the researchers, the journalists, the assorted do-gooders. He always extracted from them gin money, cigarettes, pens—anything that could be considered as tax for their working or just passing through his well-defined territory. I could very well get to like Roger, to understand him better than Toto, although Toto and I by then were like brothers. With Roger, it was easy to find out what he wanted, and what he wanted was not, in a sense, different from what I also desired.
It was Toto who confounded me—his seriousness of purpose, his narrow compass that was disturbing becau
se of its rigidity.
At night, before we went to sleep, he would muse about his vision of the future. It evolved out of the Tondo that we knew, the Tondo that bothered him so much, not because we lived here but because it seemed so permanent and unchangeable.
And so, once bored by his quiet musings, I said that perhaps it was best if we just let people be, that we should just eat and run. This was what everyone was doing, and look at how comfortable and obese those who were good at it had become.
He raised his voice then. “We will bother,” he said, “because we are people, because we believe there is a just and merciful God.”
“Don’t bring religion into this,” I told him. “The God that you speak of is not merciful but cruel. And He is vengeful, too.”
I had read the Bible that Mother kept, a thick book with colored illustrations of bearded prophets, of Moses smashing the tablets, Jesus on a donkey, the Resurrection. I had loved the Old Testament because it was so tantalizing with all its gore and sex. I could look at Jesus as a historical man, a guerrilla leader who threatened the Roman empire and, when caught, must necessarily be executed by the Romans, not for his messianic preaching but for his subversive activities. But how could I explain this to Toto who was weaned on holy water and had breakfasted so long on communion wafers? How can I tell him that the God he worshiped admonished men to sell their garments to buy swords? Toto would need them, of course, to destroy the money changers at the temple, if not the temple itself; he would need them to tear down the shacks that were all around us so that this Tondo, this ugly scab upon the face of the land, would be banished forever.
So here I was, surrounded by the debris of the city. I had often thought how trivial was my life and the lives of those around me, how transitory this station. But Toto’s despair, this Tondo, had been here for years, for generations. My history book says so. It was here where Bonifacio started his Katipunan, that ill-fated secret society that he hoped would wrench from the Spaniards the freedom they had taken from us. Here, too, was where the organized labor movement began, only to be subverted and exploited by future generations of rapacious labor leaders. What had happened to those men, those professed paragons of righteousness who came from Tondo? Some reached the highest niches of government, and when they had gotten what they wanted, they fled Tondo to wallow in the perfumed precincts of Makati.
Still, a limbo like Tondo has its uses—it is a cause, a symbol people can cling to. It is a sordid reality that Father Jess and all those stodgy missionaries with big, fat cigars, those salivating messiahs oozing with human kindness, want to change. It is the wellspring for all those politicians who want to proclaim that their beginnings are lowly, who want some vestigial identity with the masses. It is the essence of which dreams are made, particularly by those who want to grow rich writing about the poor. No place in the country has been as religiously studied, surveyed, plotted, and discussed in seminars. How many doctoral dissertations have been written on its problems without those problems ever being attended to?
So we delight in saying that those who don’t look back to where they came from cannot go far, but some have gone far indeed while the rest stayed to rot where they are, to be visited again and again by the sins of their fathers.
Could anything be done? I have always looked with some envy at those romantics, Father Jess and Toto, for instance, who think that the human cussedness of which Tondo seems to have a surfeit can be tempered with good deeds and lofty thoughts. But I knew that the way was not through the pulpit, nor could it be lighted up by such slogans as those the Brotherhood had made.
I could take a kindlier view toward people like Father Jess, maybe, because I got to know the difficulties he had to live with, the condemnation of family, the sneering of friends, and the skepticism of most, including myself. There are so many imitators of Christ and some of them come in jeans, with long hair, but they refuse to raise the sword, to fire the armalite when the moment comes. Still, I must work with them, live with them, for they are allies and protectors at the moment. Would I protect them, too, if and when they need us?
There was one creature in Tondo who, I felt, needed me: Tia Nena. She could have been seventy or more, but after a time, age does not matter when it demands nothing but affection and respect. Though she was Father Jess’s servant, she was much more than that to Toto and me; she was a godmother from whom blessings flowed, for there was, in her silences and in her sweet forbearance, that quality of ageless compassion. Her face was lined, but her eyes were alert. There was something, in the way she was often bent at her chores, in how she spoke, that told me she had borne well and with fortitude a tragic burden. She spoke a little English and, I later found out, better Spanish. She had welcomed me quickly and took to washing my clothes as she did Toto’s and, on occasion, cooked especially for Toto and me. She smoked long black cigarettes sparingly, the lighted end in her mouth, and I always bought her a pack afterward. She knew almost everyone in the parish and even Roger, the gang leader, respected her. Toto and I were not spared an occasional sermon on punctuality, on thrift, the way she said she had lectured her two sons whose names came up again and again, as if she were measuring us against their images. Tia Nena opened up the neighborhood for me, saying to the people that the new sacristan was an Ilocano who could be trusted, unlike some Ilocano leaders.
It was not difficult getting to know the neighbors, particularly those close to the church, for, as in a village, we jostled one another like relatives and a secret did not seem possible among us.
Just across from our window was Lily and her mother and brothers and sisters. They lived in a two-story shanty; on the ground-floor living room-kitchen were her brothers. She stayed in the room upstairs with her mother, who was suffering from TB. Lily had a baby who died, whose father was a Peace Corps volunteer. He had worked in the village school as a teacher’s aide.
Ka Lucio, an ex-Huk commander, and his nieces lived next to Lily’s house. Farther down the alley was the house of Roger, the leader of the Tayo-Tayo gang.
Tia Nena was disgusted with Roger. “So young, so capable—and what does he do all day? Just sits in that tienda,‡ drinking gin and seeing to it that no one ever crosses his path.”
Tia Nena moved about the kumbento quietly. When I arrived, she acknowledged my presence with a mere nod, and I felt that I had to win her approval. It was Roger’s gang, she said, that blocked the organization of the young people in the Barrio. At Father Jess’s suggestion, the youth had organized to keep away from trouble and to find out how they could be trained for work outside of the village.
Once, because Toto and I had to pass the tienda every day whenever we went to the city, Roger, who was there with his usual coterie, asked us to drink with them. Toto had always excused himself. Given his eyeglasses and weak eyes, they did not consider it manly to tangle with him. But here I was. I said, “Thank you, Roger, but please, not more than one small sip. Father Jess would not want me drunk.”
They laughed and Roger gave me his glass. He did not have a shirt on; he was pimply, fat, and on his chest a tattoo of a cobra with bared fangs, and on his arm a red heart impaled with a blue dagger.
Toto tried to drag me away, but it was better to know them, and this was an opportunity through which I could get closer to them. I raised the glass and downed the gin in one gulp. The boys looked at me in amazement, then they all broke into laughter. Even Roger laughed, his small eyes disappearing into narrow slits, his mouth studded with buckteeth yellow with nicotine.
“Next time,” I said, “it will be my turn to invite you.”
We hurried to the kumbento, Toto behind me, and when we got there, I rushed to our room. I never drank gin, and now I was drunk.
Then the rains stopped, but mud puddles scarred the alleys; nothing changed in Tondo except at night, when darkness brought a little quiet. But the darkness did not eclipse the life—the radios, the babble of children. Then the morning would drift in, heightening the putrefaction, the s
mell of feces that was thrown in the pathways at night, in the knee-deep waters between the houses, along the canals. The voices of children all around, the laughter of mothers who had no milk in their breasts, no rice in their kitchens. The day came brilliant and harsh, bouncing off the rooftops like silver.
Toward Christmas the sky was often cloudless and blue. At times the winds were rough. They churned the sea and brought to us the rancid smell of the bay. The clouds would boil, then darken, and waves would batter the sea wall. The fishermen could not sail out of the channel and they sat in the tiendas instead, drinking gin and wishing for the sea to calm. But even on days when they had a good catch of crabs and fish, it was never enough and they would always return to this island as poor as before.
It was better at night not only because there were dreams. I had read once that there was this man in a concentration camp having a nightmare, but his fellow inmates did not wake him because they knew no nightmare could be more horrible than the reality to which he would wake up.
Now I went to school in the afternoons and on toward evening. I was in the church the whole morning, and Father Jess had more time to go around, looking for jobs for the young people in the Barrio who had finished college. He was also trying to set up a vocational school. In the afternoons, he was at the archbishopric, where he assisted in the work of Catholic Charities. Sometimes he would return with a sack of powdered milk, which we then transferred into smaller plastic packets and distributed to nursing mothers. I always slipped a few to Lily across the alley; she needed them for her mother and brothers and sisters, and it pleased me to give her whatever I could.
Father Jess permitted me to work with the youth group and the first thing I did was to call a meeting. I asked them individually and they all agreed we could do a lot. But Roger’s gang stood in the way. His boys called me and Toto homosexuals. Still, we had to be together. I asked Roger and his boys if they wanted to affiliate with the Brotherhood, which was rapidly growing in the city and all over the country. They said they did not oppose it, but there was no hearty approval, either. In the end, I simply assumed that they would not object to our first project—to cement the basketball court so that we could play there even during the rainy season or use it for dances. I also planned for us to raise money for paint so we could beautify the multipurpose building and grade school, and transform the rusty brown sidings into something colorful.
The Samsons: Two Novels; (Modern Library) Page 40
