Whatever
wind you might feel here on the street is laced with smoke, and that sort
of wind was blowing when I stepped out holding my styro cup in one hand
and half a donut in the other.The jeepney took me across the city of smoke
and to Anna’s apartment.
There are two ways to
go where you want in the city. Neither of them involve walking. |
Sometimes, the urban legend
I fantasize about comes back to haunt me: |
Anna’s apartment is a parapet
above the shadowed malignancy of Taft Avenue. The building proclaims itself
to be "Astral Towers" or some other foolishness. Some people who live here
actually believe it to be a condominium. Every place I know is an apartment.
We never really own the places we live.
To have identification is to exist; otherwise, no one will let you
in anywhere. After having presented mine to the guard I went to the seventeenth
floor and knocked on Anna’s door. She shares the apartment with two or
three others and they pay rent to a corporation that put up the building
to make money from students like Anna and her friends. Half of the building,
in fact, is rented or leased to her med schoolmates who cannot go home
from school.
She opened the door with
a warm welcome, and, as always, I was caught up in the past at the sight
of her. This could be because much of our friendship is based on the four
years of high school we shared. Nowadays the streets of the city keep us
apart and we never see each other more frequently than once every month
or so. Still, aside from this there is always something which reminds me
of yesterdays and past experiences whenever I see her. Anna is a shade
over five feet, something which I used to tease her relentlessly about
and which was the basic foundation of everything else, I think.
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that there really
is no city, that what exists is really a lacework of dirty streets and
oily avenues woven together at odd angles into the ground from which the
buildings spring, connected to the fabric of concrete and sewerage over
which our cars and bodies flow like ants. Of course the city exists, people
tell me when I say Listen to this, and tell them my story. Then they tell
me that other legend, that we are its builders.
No one has ever bent
down and put their ear on the sidewalk and listened for the murmur of the
street and its dark thoughts against us. I haven’t; I am afraid of it.
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She has a heart-shaped
face and deep black hair and eyes, and she is studying to be a doctor someday.
This last thing I hold in deep admiration and incomprehension, ten years
of a med student’s life being to me a rare and valuable tragedy.
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* * *
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| .. |
She welcomes me
in, and I am just in time to help her bring a potted flower to the roof
of the building for sunshine. It is a flower which her boyfriend Erwin
gave to her. I know nothing of flowers, only that this one was pale in
color and delicate in appearance and did look like it needed sun. We took
the elevator to the top floor and climbed some stairs to the roof.
The sun was out in force
and we placed the flower on a ledge. There was more wind and less smoke
on the rooftop, and there on a raised concrete platform was built a pool.
By the pool, on the railing, hung an "under repair" sign. We walked to
the side of Astral Towers facing Manila Bay, where the grayness of the
city gave way to the waters on which large dirt-colored tugs and ships
maneuvered in an oily dance. Anna explained to me how close her apartment
was, to her school and to the hospital where she now worked part-time in
rotation with other fifth year med students. She pointed downwards at the
hospital; I pretended to see where she was pointing and nodded acquiescence.
We were both in good moods, and I fell as close as I would to falling in
love with the idea of friendship and its ties of binding as I ever would.
Soon we took refuge under
the shadow of the raised pool platform and talked of our futures in the
way that people who live in the past do. I mentioned that I might get a
job soon, at one company or the other; she said that her work at the General
Hospital often involved going home late at night and working ungodly hours
teaching pregnant women the anatomy of the breast. Or something like that.
For some reason a small
sliver of water ran down the overhang of the pool and crept its way to
where we were leaning. It stopped just before meeting the wall and dripped
downwards next to my hand. We would later find out that someone disregarded
the sign and decided to test the fitness of the pool by doing several laps
back and forth. As it was, I edged closer to Anna, and having nowhere else
interesting to look I was soon engrossed in the pattern of her shorts as
we talked about Erwin her boyfriend, and the years in which we had done
nothing in particular to renew our ties. Many times before I would travel
the long and circuitous route to her house by jeepney; a house which faced
the sunset and was covered in perpetually growing and withering ivy.
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In our conversations someone
would inevitably mention that we were getting old. This time it was her,
and she looked at me with mockingly amused eyes as she said so.
One of the things
I cannot comprehend about living in the city is the faceless infinity of
people.They seem to move like air through one’s day, a gray mass of living
humanity that one never really sees or acknowledges. To try to know them
in the way I know Anna, sitting beside me in her slippers and shorts, her
black eyes crinkled in a smile set against the wind, inner laughter at
some unspoken happiness that somehow involves this visit, to do so is to
go utterly insane. No one mentions these risks very often.
* * *.
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About
a month later I am bringing home Anna from the Cyber Cafe in Makati, having
watched a concert at which she danced like a madwoman to the sound of a
new band, one of many new bands. The car is darkness itself; we speed through
the late night emptiness of the streets like silent bullets. Speed is a
luxury that we enjoy only at night. She sits with her legs half crossed
underneath her, and I remember the times she would sit cross-legged in
movie theaters beside me. Not many people are small enough for that. Tonight
we take a new route to her house, the one I know and memorize having been
closed for repairs. I think of the pool in the Astral Towers.
The back way turns out to
be a maze of left and right turns across a landscape I do not recognize,
weaving into and out of three different villages, probably more, before
coming to hers. I think of burrows, of endlessly layered labyrinths of
housing complexes and BF Homes that hide ever greater numbers of people,
who all pile out at dawn to constrict the arteries of Manila. Even the
newsmen call them arteries now. They, like I, wait for the heart attack.
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At
her house it is almost 2 am. I glance only briefly at the raised patio
where sunsets align themselves through the trees. Anna and her brothers
are drawing a map out for me, to guide me home. She leads me to the gate
where I can hear the night waiting, and the utter stillness of a sleeping
city. I kiss her cheek and hope that her hand is true and that tonight
will be no different from any other, that I will not be lost like so many
others are lost every day on streets that no one listens to.
This is what it is like,
sometimes. |
