Growing Up In Maria Cristina

Most of my youth has been spent in the city of Manila.

We lived in Maria Cristina Street in the district of Sampaloc. It was one of those narrow but long streets which passed through Sta. Mesa Blvd. through Espana, crossing all the way to past Dapitan Street. Espana, a broad street, was our main avenue. It starts off where Quezon Boulevard, from Quiapo, bends to the corner of Morayta stretching all the way to the welcome sign of Quezon City. The next street to ours is Trabajo, now called de la Fuente named after one of the earlier mayors of Manila. However, Trabajo is better known for its big wet Market which was actually a fusion of two public markets stretching from Espana all the way to Lealtad while Maria Cristina seemed as innocuous as an anatomical appendix in the maze of passages in the digestive system.

The movie house Mercury on Espana straddled both the corners of Trabajo and Maria Cristina. On the other side of the broad street was the North General Hospital, a government hospital which served the medical needs of the Sampaloc district. The younger children in our family, myself included, were born in this hospital. The family had lived here even before the Japanese occupation and we just resettled at war’s end after taking refuge in a safe haven in Wawa, a barrio in Rosario Cavite during the war years.

It would have been a typical and nondescript post war Manila neighborhood if it were not for the fact that the Maria Cristina we lived in was made unique by it being a cul de sac. Our little neighborhood cluster stretched from Espana up to about 300 meters ending up in an estero. Our street was the only one which did not have a bridge to span the fetid estero waters. The streets de la Fuente, Don Quixote and Dos Castillas had bridges either a vehicular or a pedestrian one. Because of this isolation our neighborhood had residents enjoying close ties despite it being a neighborhood of mixed demographics.

Our house was a typical antebellum two story one with concrete base and wooden walls with fancy iron grills wrapped around the second floor of the house. The grills extended from the balcony to the bottom part of the window sills of the living room and the bedrooms. It had an azotea at the back. The balcony on the second floor was a favorite place where we would while away the time looking out into the street watching passersby. Most pedestrians would be familiar faces since very few people who are not from the neighborhood could be seen passing through. Sometimes a car would make a wrong turn only to find out that the street ended abruptly at the estero. With a bit of meanness I found it hilarious to see the car back up the whole 300 meters’ length to Espana.

It was not exactly the best of places to grow up in. It was a mixed neighborhood where families of the upper middle and the lowliest class where all thrown in together in a situation where each one found it difficult to avoid each other because of the smallness of the place. My family was middle class and my Mom found it necessary to be strict with my sisters so that they may not mingle with the Maria Cristina boys whom by her standards she considered undesirable little realizing that her own boys were of the same ilk. She tried to do the same strictness with us boys in the family but without much success. Early in our boyhood my brothers and I have mastered the art of escape and deception just so we could be spend more time with the boys in the neighborhood. What has stayed on in my mind was the unique whistled call my mother use to make whenever she summoned us for Angelus, to do errand or for some other urgent call. It was a wonder how we were able to hear its shrill and sibilant sound even from as far as the estero or even at the lobby of Mercury theater which was a turn away from the corner of Maria Cristina. It must have been a whistle sound that was at a special frequency which would be audible only to us Roa boys.

My mother didn’t know about the sawed of bars of our window in the ground floor bedroom which four of us boys shared. An older brother said that the window bars were not really sawed off. It corroded due to the repeated peeing of us boys from the window because we didn’t have a toilet at that level of the house. Each night we laid out our pillows lengthwise with a round thing at the upper end and covered it with bed sheet to fake our presence in bed. With the mosquito net as additional camouflage the deception was complete.

My two older brothers were much more daring. When they needed a car in the evening they would quietly open the iron gates and push out my father’s 1947 Plymouth sedan. The car had a humongous body that looked like and was as heavy as a Sherman tank. Upon reaching the corner of Espana they would start the car with my parents oblivious of the great escape. They would wake up in the morning none the wiser except for my father’s wondering about the level of the gas gauge. My mother was happy with the thought that her boys were always home at the right hours, prayed the Angelus, were no truants and did not mingle with the riff raff made up of boys whose fathers were jeepney drivers, laborers, postmen, small time clerks and others of low and sometimes scurrilous trades. There were a few families whom she considered “like us”, whose pater familias were of a high stature in the companies they worked in, university professors and those who have distinguished themselves in small enterprises as well as in the socio-civic and church organizations. It was only the older folks who made social demarcation lines. The young ones were not aware of these differences. With the boys in the neighborhood every one was treated as an equal and there was genuine fellowship all around.

Sharing was a virtue that was expansively practiced. Drinks, food, party clothes, shoes, guitars and other shareable things would be generously lent, sometimes given to another if with good reason. My older brother whose command of the English language was better than most would write love letters for the love struck but inarticulate guys, my other brother would share his expertise in mahjong by pooling capital with the other boys when he played and invariably won against the neighborhood “quorum” of matrons. Windfalls would be celebrated by sponsoring drinking bashes, buying and sharing Chinese food from the corner Chinaman’s store or buying a new net for the basketball goal. At times my brothers would ask permission from the jeepney owners to do a late hour rota to raise money for some needs of the group. These late hour rotas would be without the usual “boundary” due to the owner so all the proceeds from the fare, albeit small, would go to the common fund. I don’t remember having contributed anything to the gang. At my age then, there was nothing of worth coming from me that could be appreciated by the group except for the occasional sharing of fruits that our grandfather sent from Davao.

The attractions that compel an adolescent to be out in the nooks and recesses of Maria Cristina were varied.

Despite my being less adventurous than my brothers, I, too, have been drawn by the beckoning of the adventures and iniquitous enjoyments to be had the moment you tread outside our secure but boring house.

For a young lad barely into his teens the astonishment of having so many opportunities for adventure was staggering. This was an urban barrio were the self appointed elders (actually the older boys from eighteen to early twenties) took it as their responsibility the welfare of the young boys in the neighborhood. They were serious in facilitating rites of passage to the young lads as they transition into manhood. They would act as “godfathers” to the boys as they undergo their “baptism” of having their first sexual encounter, their first sip of alcohol, their first time to go to a nightclub and dance with taxi dancers, their first cigarette, circumcision and other things one is expected to do to affirm manhood. Of course, not everyone could be herded into these, but, the shame and the jeering from those who have participated were very compelling pressures. The stigma of not having taken part of the group’s initiation was so harsh that some of those who were able to evade were obliged to go to the other streets like de la Fuente, Don Quixote, Dos Castillas or in Maria Cristina across Espana for their belongingness needs. But this sort of exiles you away from your home, expatriated as it were.

I have experienced all that were in the menu of the “elders” but not all were necessarily through their ministrations. I had older brothers who on occasion would take it upon themselves to assist me through my awkward stepping into manhood. My father was not one whom you could expect to assist his sons in these things. He believes that boys will discover these for themselves and that these would happen as a matter of course. His boys will, on their own come to manhood, with or without his help.

This was Maria Cristina of my youth. With all the wrong influences surrounding my formative years I could have turned bad but with God’s grace I didn’t. There must have been something about that kind of milieu that had positive effects in me. My having two sets of behavior, one for the house and the other for the street could be a possible explanation. My Mom was a stern disciplinarian and Dad was a non-smoking, non gambling, non-drinking and non-womanizing role model of a father. Between these two environmental influences, the home and street, the virtues inculcated at home won out. Also, the positive aspects of street life such as being non-judgmental about people, sharing, good insight on character and a keen survival instinct honed by a coping life whether my own or a vicarious one played their part. I turned out to be a god fearing person, an exemplary family man with strong moral convictions and with a fairly successful career.

Maria Cristina Neighbors - The Gerozagas

The Gerozagas

It was seven thirty in the morning and Mang Kiko walked about the veranda which was almost filled up with wooden racks used in drying up the silk screened posters of the night before. He touched the black print of one and felt for any sign of moistness. He then touched it once more this time with more pressure to see if it smudged. Contented with his inspection he began to take the posters from their drying racks and piled them neatly on top of each other.

In a few minutes the kids in the neighborhood will come knocking and bring their colored posters done the day before and collect their measly fifty to eighty centavos worth of coloring job which Mang Kiko paid. Once paid they would get a few more posters to color for the day.

Mang Kiko was into the silk screening of posters used as learning aids in classrooms. He would silk screen the line drawings of Philippine flowers, insects, local fruits, animals and sometimes maps of the various Philippine islands. Once the black and white drawings have been rendered the figures were colored by a water based paint. The finished products were delivered to schools and school supply stores.

On the side of the veranda was a small clearing reserved for the mahjong table. It was a moveable location that depended on the wind direction of the day and at the time of day. His house was beside the estero and wind that wafted coming from the open sewer can sometimes be so bad smelling, enough to suspend play for a few minutes to transfer to another location in the veranda. It was a question of staying beside the estero where most of the time it was breezy and the stench bearable or go to the farther end of the veranda and go through rearranging some of the drying racks to give space for the mahjong table.

There won’t be any need to move the mahjong table he thought as he surveyed the estero surface. It rained the night before and the debris and the flotsam that usually dotted the surface of the estero were not there. The estero was flowing strongly and it promised to be a fine day, a day with out much stench and without the sordid sight of accumulated garbage.

Mrs. Godinez will soon be there for the mahjong. She was very prompt as she timed her leaving her sari sari store five minutes after Mr. Godinez had left for work. After a few minutes from the time her husband had made the turn towards Espana she would proceed to the Gerozagas to secure a seat for herself in the quorum. Her husband was against her playing and the last time he caught her a scandalous confrontation that spilled out in the street happened. From then on Mrs. Godinez would post an early warning boy towards late afternoon to alert her should Mr. Godinez be home from work early. She would compensate the boy with a bottle of softdrinks and a "mamon" for his trouble.

The house of the Gerozagas was one of the two houses at the end of Maria Cristina. The other one is the Roman residence. Both houses are by the estero which marked the end of the eskinita.

Before the Gerozagas, two other families used to occupy the house. The first one were the Concepcions and before the Gerozagas, the Ahorros. I have not ascertained which family owned the house because it was possible that one or two of them were just renting it.

Mang Kiko was the head of the family. I have a vague memory of Mrs. Gerozaga. All I can remember was that she was always at the mahjong table in the veranda of their house playing with a regular group of housewives and sometimes with some of the younger guys in the neighborhood. Pete, my brother, would play with them at times. We used to invest part of our weekly allowance on Pete who excelled in the game and invariably won whenever he played with this group.

The oldest of Mang Kiko’s children was Nena who was married to Fred Fernando, a young lawyer and the son of the owner of a botica in Trabajo St. The two other children were Mario and Julia.

Mang Kiko provided employment to most of the kids in Maria Cristina. He would pay us on a piece meal basis for every poster that we have colored. For the more adept, carving the silk screen was a higher paid chore. The prices he paid depended on the complexity of the drawings and the number of colors to be used. The prices would range from twenty centavos for the simplest poster up to fifty centavos for the more intricate designs such as flowers and the Philippine map.

Almost every kid in the neighborhood would have painted one of the posters of Mang Kiko. It kept us out of mischief and helped augment the meager allowance we had for school. You could say that it was a blatant and opportunistic use of child labor but on the other hand for kids with nothing much to do during weekends it was a veritable source of money for a movie in the Mercury theater and cool treats in the Sison ice drop factory farther down Trabajo St. It might even have helped some of the kids in the neighborhood to develop an appreciation of colors in the art of painting as well as hone their technical skills in drawing. There is no way of confirming this. I haven’t heard of anyone coming from Maria Cristina who made a name for himself in the art world. But then one never knows.

Maria Cristina Neighbors - The Garchitorenas

The Garchitorenas

The Mercury theater occupied a whole block from Trabajo St. to Maria Cristina and its side fronted Espana Boulevard. This movie-house was an integral part of my development when I was growing up in the Sampaloc district of Manila.

Being the bigger street, Trabajo, was where the lobby of theater was situated. Alongside Espana were four wide fire exit gates and on the Maria Cristina end were the exit doors of the toilets which were opened only during emergencies. As a young boy I would sneak in with the help of Ising, the “takilyera” who was a friend of my older sisters. There were times that I would be able to get in for free in what was referred to as “a la berde”, a free for all that happens when somebody shouts “fire!!!” causing movie goers to stream out of the emergency exits then back again when the furor died down. This happened at least once a week.

The movie-house was three houses away from our Maria Cristina residence. I remember as a child I could hear the sound track of all the movies that were being shown from my bed. There was gunfire as good guys and the bad guys get into a confrontation, the William Tell overture as the blue coats save the day for the westward settlers who have formed a circle of Conestoga wagons staving off Apache marauders. What was memorable was the music from Broadway shows like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Carousel, Oklahoma and other popular Broadway musicals.

The owner of the movie-house was Mr. Garchitorena, a Spaniard married to a Filipina. I have long forgotten how they look like. What has remained in my mind was they were a corporeal pair. They have three children the oldest was Henry, followed by Serafin and their youngest was Rose.

Henry was into designing lamps and had a shop in Ermita named Henry’s Art. Ermita was not yet the hell hole that it is now. The neighborhood boasted of some of the elegant houses with small but well manicured front lawns. You could still see vestiges of its past glory with well kept old houses in the Remedios circle and in the immediate environs. It’s proximity to Dewey Blvd. (now Roxaz Blvd.) made it popular to tourists and through the years of catering to all sorts of foreigners it deteriorated to become the red light district of Manila.

Henry had a beautiful daughter, Helen, who was popular with the younger set of Manila society. She graced the covers of magazines and would appear on television talk shows whenever Manila’s debutantes were featured. My last recollection of her was in my wife’s fashion house in the David Gan building in Shaw Blvd.

Mike Gan, a son of the owner of the building is married to Rose the youngest among the Garchitorenas. We were quite close and we used to go out for social occasions and for black jack sessions which Mike organized with his other friends. Mike was a likeable fellow. He was easy going and would sometimes get into naughty capers. My friend Bobby Kraut was his professor in de Lasalle in Marketing and Advertising referred to him good naturedly as a “son of a Gan”. Rose and my wife Alma got along famously and for a while stayed as close friends until she had to give up her businesses in the David Gan Bldg. after failing to recover from a fire that gutted her shop.

Serafin, nicknamed Egie was the middle child. He was my classmate in Instituto de Mujeres supposedly a school for girls but allowed young boys in kindergarten. Taking after his parents, Egie was big and tall. What was memorable about him was his mellifluous boy soprano voice. Even as a young child he would sing with much confidence and gusto the songs Amapola and Amor. Later on Egie would turn professional. The last I saw of him was when he performed on television as a guest of Pilita Corrales.

Their house was right beside ours. We were separated by a low concrete wall and a Macopa tree. They sold their Maria Cristina house and were among the first to leave the neighborhood. It has been a long while since I have seen any of the Garchitorenas.

Once Upon A Walk

I remember ages ago I was walking with my Mom in Maria Cristina, the street where we lived after the war. During summer the people living in the neighborhood would come out of their houses and take short walks near sundown taking advantage of the breeze which has started to cool down the asphalt surface of the street. It was a fine time to chat a while with the neighbors in a close community of no more than twenty five families. The street was hemmed in by rows of detached houses, a few two door apartments and about three empty lots and a dead end at the banks of the estero. These walks usually lasted ten to fifteen minutes but may extend to twenty when my mom would stop a while for a chat. It will never go beyond twenty minutes because we would proceed to the Angelus immediately after the walk.

It was dusk and the figures up ahead were just blurry images moving towards us. I rushed towards this oncoming figure thinking that it was my aunt from Cagayan de Oro coming home from her frequent shopping trips. At about two meters away I realized that the person that I was about to give a big hug to was a complete stranger. At the point of almost making contact, I veered away and accelerated like a runaway car not daring to look back to avoid embarrassment.

I continued to run on and on, past the corner, turning towards the corner of the Mercury Theater and upon reaching the corner of Trabajo Street where I felt I was already away from sight, I stopped, heart pounding and trying to catch my breath. I saw my Mom making the bend and I ran back to her arms.

Maria Cristina neighbors - The Dominguez Family

The Dominguezes

Dona Paz was the matriarch of the Dominguez family. She lived in a compound with four of her sons who built houses within a large enough lot to accommodate all of them. “Lola Booger” was what one of her grandsons called her. Perhaps Binggoy, the grandson had little love for his grandmother because she was always at his back, watching his every move and was quick to chastise him for the many awful things that a boy of seven was wont to do. “Binggoy!!! Come up here immediately. How many times do I have to tell you that touching canal water will make you sick!” Binggoy did not pay heed to the shrill admonition that reverberated in the narrow eskinita that was heard from the sari-sari store of Mrs. Godines near the dead end of the street up to the Chinaman’s store at the corner of Espana. He just kept on scrounging with his fingers the bottom of the small canal which served as the conduit of the effluent coming from the septic tanks of the houses that flowed towards the estero, the main sewerage artery, at the end of the street. He would often grope for coins, playing marbles and other small items of little value whose owners did not care to retrieve once dirtied by canal water. Despite the infrastructure improvements done in the city in the last half century, to this day there are parts of the city that still have these open canals as a part of the sewerage system. When his Lola threatened to come down and wring his ears he would just stand up and walk toward the next lot where his uncle lived and disappear closing the gate behind him.

Binggoy is the fourth among a brood of six of Benito and Pilaring Dominguez. Both of them worked and most of the time the kids were left by themselves and watched over by an ineffectual Lola who could only shout from her perch by the window in front of an old guava tree. There were times when the kids will be left as wards of Benito’s distant cousin, Teresa, a woman in her mid thirties, whom he hired to stay in the house until he or his wife came home from work.

Benito Dominguez was a contractor who did construction jobs for government agencies while Pilaring worked in the commissary of the US military’s supply depot, a remnant of the large agency before the war that serviced the needs of the US military bases in the entire Philippines. After the war, with liberation forces have all but left, this has been reduced to just a small warehouse near the port area of the city of Manila servicing the few US military personnel who were left behind.

A hyperactive kid, Binggoy would get himself into the most ridiculous of situations. One time he inserted his head in the square of a wooden lattice that served as the protective grill in the front window of their house. It took more than two hours before he could be extricated from this wooden vise. For a while it was a bit touchy because he was getting tired and if he relaxed the full weight of his body could bear down on his neck and possibly break it. An uncle who was home from work early that day came to his succor and sawed off the wooden grill to free his sore and bruised neck. What happened to him in the construction site of the expansion of his uncle Berting’s house was almost tragic. He got hold of one of the carpenter’s chisel and was smoothening a block of wood which was held in between his legs. As was bound to happen the chisel blade slipped and nicked the top part of his pecker. It needed stitching and so he was brought to the hospital for the emergency restoration. It didn’t heal well and it left him with a slightly crooked tip. The young boys in the neighborhood teased him for being “sungaw”, a term for a slight deformity resulting from a bad circumcision job.

Alonzo or Alon as we called him was the eldest child in the family. Aon, being the most senior was the undisputed arbiter in squabbles between siblings and exercised judgment that was not always fair and just for he occasionally would rule in favor of the prettiest of the sisters, Bunting. He actually didn’t feel obligated to be fair. Often times he would rule out of self interest and would not brook any opposition to his despotic behavior. He was a pompous and flamboyant lad who ruled over not only his siblings but also the many cousins in their compound. This was to the consternation of Buchoy, the second to the eldest who felt that it was his duty to defend the other siblings from the tyranny of their eldest brother. Buchoy was the serious one, sometimes be a bit self righteous but this was alright because he acted as a counterbalance to the excesses of Alon.

Benito’s success was at a hold. He had just completed a government project but collecting from the government was a tricky one. Even immediately after the war the corrupt institutions in the government agencies were already operating with rapacious efficiency. He stood to collect close to twenty million pesos as payment for the restoration of the water system in the city which was left in ruins by the fire bombing of Manila. What would be coming to him would be less than ten million pesos after paying off the personalities at almost all levels of the bureaucracy. A big part of the grease money was to be paid to a senator and three congressmen. Still, ten million at that time was a fabulous fortune and once collected he need not work for the rest of his natural life. He had to have a sustained effort at pressing for payments. This he did by being present at all times in the office of the waterworks authority and taking to lunch all the influential persons almost everyday and occasionally some nights out to make these bureau satraps attend to the processing of the payments. All of his brothers knew of his impending coming into money and treated him and his family with special care bordering on solicitousness.
Pilaring on the other hand was the one responsible for bringing food to the table while the waiting game was on. Her job at the commissary did not pay well but it had some advantages which chiefly had to do with being able to bring home goodies from the commissary. She was able to buy at special prices stateside goods such as Hormel ham, Spam, Hershey bars, powdered milk, K-rations (a complete soldiers meal packed in fatigue green plastic) and other items made available through the US government’s largesse.
The Dominguez’ house was just in front of ours. The narrow street made conversation between us, from our balcony to their front window at the second floor, seem like a face to face chat. All the Dominguez boys attended San Beda College while me and my brothers were in the Ateneo de Manila. The rivalry of the two schools was at its height that time. In the collegiate basketball league, the NCAA, Ateneo and San Beda were alternatingly champions in the senior division for more than six years. Their heroes were Caloy Loyzaga, the Big Difference, Loreto Carbonell, whom we swore was the dirtiest player that ever played ball. The Ateneo cage idols then were “Moro” Lorenzo in the seniors and “Chole” Gaston in the juniors league. After a ballgame between the two schools there would be jeering and taunting from our vantage perches until one party succeeded in exasperating the other, ending the ruckus by them slamming their window, or in our case, retreating into the house.

There were other Dominguez families that one could write about but the family of Benito and Pilaring stood out as one that provided more worthwhile memories because the couple typified the struggle of families during the early fifties and the picaresque nature of their sons could inspire development of interesting fictional characters.

Maria Cristina Neighbors - The Romans

The Romans

Attorney Angel Roman, Sr, was a tall and patrician looking gentleman who liked to dress up in a white suit. He was a professor in the College of Law in the Far Eastern University and was considered one of the best sartorialists not only in our neighborhood but in the whole faculty group of the university. Florentina, his wife taught in the high school department of the same university. She, herself, was definitely no slouch when it came to fashion. Wearing a pair of shoes with three and a half inch heels, called platform shoes at that time, she shortened the more than a foot height difference between the two of them. Wearing a fashionable shoulder-padded dress, Florentina was eye-catching. She was well groomed and had make-up which seemed overly done by that time’s conventions.

They were a handsome looking pair, though a hint comical because of the marked tallness of the man who at first glance looked like he was walking with his little daughter astride. They had a car, a Pontiac if I am not mistaken. It was seldom that you would see them walking to and from work but whenever this happened it was a pleasure to see the distinguished looking pair walk down the whole length of the eskinita, Maria Cristina, to their house at the end of the narrow splotchy asphalt stretch. It was a bit incongruous that their house, a well built concrete structure, would be alongside a redolent and almost stagnant open sewer canal, hardly fitting the image of an eskinita nobility.

There were five children the eldest of which was Angel, Jr. Though not a lawyer, nor as fastidious a dresser as his father was. Angel, Jr. inherited the dignified and serious mien of the older Angel. He excelled in his studies and went on to become a bank executive in one of the bigger banks in the city. In contrast, Roger, the second eldest was a regular guy who spent most of his time sitting around the corner of Maria Cristina and Espana to hang around with the other boys. It was as if he was accident spotting or waiting for something interesting to happen, something funny or something tragic together with two or three other boys from the eskinita. When tired of this non-activity they would walk to the end of the eskinita where the makeshift basketball goal was. If the other kids were there they would play “tatluhan”, a three to a team game or if not play “twenty one” a foul shot and layup game. These ball games invariably were played with wagers. They would play for twenty five centavos per player and the losses of the losing team would partly be given back to them because the winners would pay for the ten centavo bottle of soft drinks which they drank at the end of the game.

The prim and proper Mrs. Roman did not look too kindly on Roger’s mingling with what she considered riff raff in the tiny realm. How she wished that he would turn out to be something like his older brother who in her mind had all the politesse that is indicative of their stature in the community, a real blood heir of a Roman. There was no way this could happen. Roger was a stubborn kid who would ignore his parent’s admonitions even under threat of discontinuing his schooling or reducing drastically his daily allowance. He would even flaunt his rebelliousness by rebuking his parent’s in front of any body who was around at the time of the confrontation. This was a scene which I suspect was enjoyed by the neighborhood wags… something similar to what the readers of British tabloids get a kick out of when members of their royalty are in the news for some bourgeoisie indiscretion.

The third child in the family was Carol. She was a pretty looking thing. She had the good looks of what was as a result of the combination of the best features of her parents. She had a creamy porcelain like complexion which complimented her raven black hair. Her finely chiseled nose and slightly pouted crimson lips framed by shimmering black tresses seemed like a portrait masterpiece conjured by a renaissance master. Best of all, she took after her father’s height. Her tallness gave her an awesome regal bearing.

I was among the horde of young lads in the neighborhood who were spellbound by this magnificent creature. But, alas, Florentina guarded her with the ferocity and vigilance of the Beefeaters who guard the Crown Jewels. We were content just to see her perched and framed by the window fronting the basketball goal, looking wistfully beyond us, looking straight ahead the full length of Maria Cristina, all the way to Espana.

I wondered as to what went on in her mind. How could anyone look through a rowdy game of streetball oblivious of the frenetic movements of young plebeian sweaty bodies jostling amidst the noise of the rabble. Was she being held against her will and being held captive in a tower where she has been doomed to wither her life away in hopeless dismay. What dragons were there waiting for my sword to eviscerate to free this lady in distress? Or like in the fairy tale will she ever cast down her tresses (though not blonde) to me so that I can scale the perilous walls that separate us? What fantasies are we given to in our youth!!

The other two children were too young to have made an impression on me and so I am left without any thing to write about them.

The Romans will always be in my mind as a family who stood out with a touch of royalty in their looks and demeanor in a place where you would least expect it. Maria Cristina was not only a place of mixed demographics but also a small fiefdom whose nobility did not really rule but were given a regard befitting the rank.

Maria Cristina Neighbors - The Oasan family

The Oasans

The Oasan family house was near the end of an eskinita. It was beside a makeshift basketball goal where neighborhood kids played street ball from morning up to the time when there was still enough light to see the ring. In front of their house was the only sari-sari store in the whole length of our narrow street. The sari-sari store was where we hanged out for refreshments after a “tatluhan” (three to a team) game of basketball. Towards the evening, when it was too dark to play “21” (foul shot and layup game) we would settle on the wooden benches in front of the store and pass the hat around to buy a flat bottle of Tanduay or Manila rum and a bottle of Coke to make our favorite “rum coke” cocktail. The organizer of these post basketball drink sessions was Peng, one of the Oasan brothers. We would drink without fear of being confronted by the police because the store was isolated, almost at the end of the eskinita. A stray police on his beat would be easily seen as he turned into the street and we would have ample time to disperse. An estero that flowed through the Trabajo Market up to Dos Castillas St. abbreviated our place into a nice and tight community, an urban cluster made up of mixed demographics.

I have never met their parents. I think the older Oasans died before the Japanese war. There were six of them, a sister and five brothers. They lived in a wooden house with a design that was typical of the peacetime period. The house had a concrete base but the upper section of the house was made of wooden boards. Windows were framed capiz shells that slid on grooves on the upper and lower portions of the sill. The ground floor had wrought iron bars as a security measure. It was a two door affair with both units at the ground floor being rented out. The second floor was where the four brothers stayed. We had the luck of having our house and all the other houses in the eskinita, untouched by the holocaust that the American liberation forces' strafing and bombing of the city of Manila created during the retreat of the Japanese soldiers. The Japanese, who were ordered to raze the buildings they occupied during the hurried troop pullout, as the Americans neared, did not do so in our Sampaloc neighborhood. My father told me that our house was occupied by a Japanese Officer who at the time of commandeering the house talked to him and in a very civilized manner asked permission to occupy the house. He did the courtesy of asking permission even when he knew that this was not necessary at all. I think we all owe it to the civility of this man that our neighborhood looked exactly the way it was at peacetime.

In this wooden house lived four brothers. Their married sister no longer stayed with them and a brother had employment outside of the city.

The eldest in the Oasan family was a lady medical doctor whose name I can no longer recall. She was married to an engineer whose practice was in Pangasinan, a town in north Luzon.

The eldest boy is George. George was already an adolescent during the Japanese time and was conscripted by the Philippine Army at the start of the war.. He was one of the survivors of the infamous Death March where the Japanese soldiers forced the prisoners of war to trek the distance from Bataan to Capas, Tarlac. I presumed that he was severely mistreated, as all of them were, and that this wartime ordeal left him with dilapidated looks and lacerated emotions. He was an exaggerated caricature of someone who had experienced extreme hunger, exhaustion, deprivation and excruciating pain. He was a reticent fellow and had a pitiful demeanor that had all the indications of being shell-shocked.

After him was Felipe also known as Peng. Peng was the most colorful of the brothers and bandied himself as a self styled toughie. Many saw through his rough exterior and just tolerated his stance which at times was more comic than menacing. He had a resemblance to the actor Richard Widmark and was thrilled when anyone mentioned the similarity. Maybe he was just aping Widmark”s movie portrayals of being a tough detective or as a heavy in some films as he tried to intimidate some of the younger people in the neighborhood. Peng was also known for his being the resident Lothario who preyed on all of the household maids in the neighborhood. His predation turf was the balcony section of the Mercury Theater, a cinema house that was just at the corner of our eskinita.

Juancho was his twin brother. He did not stay in their house anymore but occasionally would pop up in the neighborhood to visit his brothers. He worked as pesticide sprayer in the agricultural fields in the province. The exposure to unsafe agricultural chemicals affected his health and died from an undiagnosed illness. There wasn’t much care or warning about the toxic effects of the agricultural chemicals during that time.

Nonching was the brightest among the brothers, he was majoring in chemistry at that time but I don’t recall him ever getting his degree. He invented a depilatory cream which my brother Pete became a willing guinea pig to test its efficacy. Dado, my other brother, swore that the reason for Pete’s hairless armpits was as a result of this experiment. He also had other inventions but most of them had dubious beneficial applications. One of his inventions was responsible for curtailing the proliferation of stray cats in the neighborhood. A concocted potion was injected on stray cats which caused the immediate annihilation of all nine lives of the unfortunate feline. Another application was the dipping of BB pellets in the concoction and using this as a long range toxic artillery. Chemical Ali, the notorious Iraqi chemical warfare expert, would have loved to recruit him in his pool of mad scientists.

The last one was Isidro. He worked as a mailman and everyday he would ride his trusty bike to deliver the mails all over the city. We called him El Manisero because of his peanut shaped head and his penchant for Latin music, notably Perez Prado’s band music. He loved to mimic Perez Prado’s guttural shout to punctuate every refrain…”aaahh, uh! A really funny guy he could create jokes out of any situation. He was a big fan of my brother Dado who was in DZMB then. Isidro had a short stint as a radio announcer in a relatively unknown station in Pangasinan. The signature sound he established during his board work was the distinctive Perez Prado bellow at the end of the refrains.

An extended family member was a dog named Baron. Baron imbibed the same beverage that his masters drank during the frequent drinking bashes that they had at home. Baron got drunk ahead of his drinking masters. When inebriated Baron would seem like he had a heavy leaden head and would drag this on the floor to all corners in the room. When it seemed like he found a comfortable nook he would curl up and plop his deadweight at this favorite corner. Despite what seemed an effort to search for a comfortable site he would end up in the same spot every time after making the rounds of all four corners of the room. It was a droll but pathetic sight.

These characters have their uniqueness, an inimitability that ranges from the charming to the sordid. They would be rich material for character development in fiction. Maria Cristina of my youth was full of these incredible denizens with quasi aboriginal qualities native to an isolated neighborhood in the middle of an urban environment.

Floodwaters of Sampaloc

I have seen health advisories on television that warned about wading through city floodwaters. The murky waters, according to the ad, is home to billions of germs that could cause one to have ailments ranging from the common cold to more serious ones such as bubonic plague from the urine and feces of rats, snail fever, and a variety of nasty skin afflictions.

City floodwaters is thick primal soup, a brew that brims with malevolent things more noxious than the concoctions that any of the hags from Endor can put together.

Growing up in Maria Cristina, a narrow eskinita in Sampaloc, a district in the city of Manila, one looked forward to typhoons that brought about flooding of the streets, an occasion to enjoy the long wet walks just wearing a pair of worn out rubber sandals. We would slosh from one street to another, my cousin Ric with a wooden toy boat in tow to carry interesting flotsam fished out from the muddy water, finding out which street had the highest waterline and just having a splashing and refreshing romp in the flood. Suspension of classes was a bonus and this gave us almost unlimited time to enjoy the watery pleasures from the aftermath of a typhoon.

Maria Cristina was a dead end street. The eskinita was cut off by an estero that flowed along a course parallel to Lealtad Street. The eskinita’s declivity was towards the estero so every time it flooded the water current flowed towards it.

The young men in the neighborhood hanging out in the Chinaman’s sari-sari store in the corner of Espana and Maria Cristina would float paper boats with large sails. On the sails they scribble the names of some of the girls in the eskinita and all sorts of amorous messages to the delight of the young ladies who were along the path of the armada of floating paper and at the end of the street, downstream.

During the floods the estero would have stronger currents than usual because of the elevated water line. The boys in the neighborhood would stand by the edge of the estero to witness a parade of all sorts of trash, dead animals and interesting debris coming from the public market.

One of the boys in the neighborhood was audacious enough to dive into the raging waters and swim with the current in the midst of the flotsam until reaching the pedestrian bridge in Dos Castillas Street. He would come running back through Espana and repeat the same feat for about three to four times. That boy never got sick and neither did we suffer any disease coming from our wading in the dirty waters of a city flood.

Despite the happy childhood memories I never allowed my children to wade into the city floods and much more vehemently my precious grandchildren. This is one pleasure they could forego.

The Macopa Tree

In the whole neighborhood there was only one tree, the Macopa tree that we had at the side of our house. Actually, there were two within the neighborhood, the second one was the Aratiles tree that grew beside the open sewer canal at the end of the eskinita that was Maria Cristina. I suppose the Aratiles did not count as a tree as it was inaccessible to most of us kids and besides it lacked the stature of a real tree being a small and scraggly outgrowth in the banks of a filthy and fetid open sewer canal.

My tree, the Macopa, was the tallest natural living structure in my little world. The highest perch I could manage atop the tree was at about roof level of our house where I would have a good view of the apartment across our house. From my perch I could go to the roof of the adjacent house. I sometimes do this during kite season but always without my mom’s knowledge as she would never allow me to go out on a limb literally. It was fun doing and it always added to the pleasure when done surreptitiously.

Ownership of the Macopa tree gave me privileges that other kids didn’t have. Trees were a special treat to children especially in Sampaloc.. The other kids would curry my favor so that I would allow them to play in its shade, climb the lower branches and when in season, with my consent, pick a plump and bright red ripe Macopa fruit from a low lying branch.

There was one boy in the neighborhood, a real difficult kid, a wild one who did what he wanted with out any regard nor respect for other peoples’ property. While he seemed intractable, the things that he did seemed so natural coming from the innocence that his mien exuded. He would be the kid whom you will find in somebody else’s kitchen helping himself with the cookie jar or a taking a bite of a fruit that was left on the kitchen counter. He was also the one kid who would climb the Macopa tree at any time it pleased him.

One time, when I looked out of the window fronting the tree I was surprised to see him atop the highest branch, my private perch, and was munching Macopa some of which were still unripe. While it irked me that my tree, my precious private domain has been trespassed, I could not show that much anger with the interloper since he was hardly six years old, about four years younger than I was. Instead of a show of displeasure I shouted the caution that he might fall from the branches and hurt himself together with the threat to tell on him to his mom when she came home from work. Those threats did not stop him at all. He brazenly ignored all these and even defiantly made faces at me from my perch as I watched helplessly from the window. When he had his fill and his pockets full of the Macopa fruit he clambered down from the tree, scaled the wall and ran home. His interloping happens at least twice a month and more frequent when the fruit is in season.

A day in the month of April, the Macopa tree was radiant as it showed off its bright red fruits like Yule balls in a Christmas tree. Now this little boy who was named Binggoy was on the street beside the wall of our house and was looking at the marvelous display of the Macopa tree. You could almost guess what was going through the mind of this little brat. I knew that the moment I turn my back Binggoy would no sooner be clambering up the wall and scaling the branches of the Macopa tree and busy himself with harvesting the fruits taking as much as he could fill in his pockets and in his tucked in t-shirt. I was looking at him from our balcony. I had prepared for this event and was picturing in my mind how the grease that I dabbed on the barred gate would smear on his clothes and how his hands would find difficulty in grasping the bars made slippery by the grease. If the obstacles do not discourage him his greasy hands will be a challenge when climbing the tree. The day before I went to the jeepney parking lot at the end of the eskinita with an empty pomade bottle and paid twenty centavos for a pat of used grease to the mechanic. Binggoy knew that I was watching his every move and so he feigned disinterest on the tree and played with marbles at our cemented sidewalk. This went on for several minutes. He must have sensed that some thing was afoot. Normally he would just climb up the wall unmindful of my presence. He remained in the cemented sidewalk bouncing the marbles on the wall with monotonous cadence. Bounce and catch, bounce and catch, bounce and catch…in unerring rhythm at the countless times of bouncing and catching. My impatience was now getting into me. In my mind I was egging him to move on… “Let’s go kid…scale that wall…go, go, go!” Still he wouldn’t stop bouncing and catching as if saying “…no, I won’t give you the satisfaction of seeing me play along with whatever devilish scheme you have in store for me.”

It occurred to me that if I turned away he might just go and do what he has been meaning to do, but no, I wanted to see him fail. I wanted him to be frustrated by his futile effort at climbing up my tree. A whole half hour had elapsed and each one’s strong resolve has resulted into an unbreakable stalemate until I heard my Mom call from the kitchen. I reluctantly turned around to leave the balcony in response to Mom’s call. A few seconds after I left the balcony I thought I heard a faint clang of the gate. I knew then that he had made a dash for the tree. This was followed by a loud sickening thud. It was unmistakably a sound made by a high fall on the ground. There was commotion outside the gate. I could hear frantic shouts of the children in front of our house and the loud creaking of the iron gate as it was hurriedly opened.

Not daring to go back to the balcony I ran to my room and stayed there for a long time feeling sorry for what has happened and afraid of being blamed for the incident. It was only at the call for Angelus that made me leave the room. There wasn’t any news about what had happened. Nobody came at our door to tell us of the incident at the Macopa tree.

I saw Binggoy the following day with a swollen and bruised forearm but looking spritely and impish as before. He was again in front of the Macopa tree eying the low hanging red fruit with much interest. It was a relief seeing him that way. I had worst fears about his fall from the tree. To help assuage my guilt as well as being thankful for the relief, I went down and handed him four big luscious red Macopa fruits which I had asked our maid to pick early that morning. He seemed surprise at such generosity but hurriedly took the red bunch and ran home.

Kites

I cannot forget the time when Ric, my cousin, fell through the roof of Mr. Fernando’s house. Ric was the son of a rich uncle. The youngest of seven children and born more than ten years after the sixth child he was the apple of the eye of almost everybody in the family. His mother so doted on her “nino bonito” always made sure that when he goes to our house she would pack all his clothes, toothbrush, soap, his vitamins and an ample amount of snack foods even if he was only staying overnight. At home he didn’t have anybody his age to be around with and longed for the company of playmates. Every chance he got he would stay with us during weekends and for longer stretches during summer vacations.

One time he spent a few days with us and despite the usual admonitions from his mother to keep himself clean and to be sure to stay away from trouble by always heeding my mom’s caution about playing in the streets and god knows where else all these fell on deaf ears. I was sure that my aunt had a special word to my mom about how to look after my cousin.

As to be expected we found ourselves flying kites on the roof of the Fernando house. Mr. Fernando was the owner of a botica along Trabajo Street, right across the public market. It was October, a time when steady breezes flowed the whole afternoon. It was the season for kite flying.

The galvanized iron roof provided us with almost comfortable seats. It was late afternoon and the tin roof was no longer hot as it was a few hours ago. Both of us were flying the simplest of kites that was called “chape-chape”. This was a plainly designed kite with a long tail to steady its flight. One didn’t have to make this himself as they were sold quite cheaply in the public market. I think it was two for five centavos. The string, of course, was not included. We asked for or sometimes stole threads from my Mom’s sewing box and we would wound this up in milk cans so that we could easily let go of the string as the kite soared higher and higher in free flight.

We were really enjoying ourselves and were quite content that our kites were flying safely and steadily, avoiding the other kites that were closing in menacingly in search of a dogfight. A kite dogfight is not a head on confrontation of two kites but a series of skilful maneuvers to entangle the strings of another kite and quickly releasing it so that the string which has been barbed with finely ground glass can scrape against the opponent’s string creating a shearing motion ending up with the other kite’s string getting cut.

Our enjoyment went on for hours. The sky was a marvelous sight with multi-colored kites of different shapes and sizes dancing and fluttering in the steady breeze of an October afternoon. A dog fight was going on not too far from we were. The lofty duel was between a red kite with a star emblazoned on its body versus a kite with a wide wing span and tri-colored red white and green like the Italian flag. These designs were known as “tabo-tabo”. Unlike the “chape-chape” this kind of kite did not have a tail. It had a flat bottom making it look like a water dipper, hence the name “tabo-tabo”. Again, unlike the “chape-chape” the “tabo-tabo” does not remain at a stand still in flight. It keeps darting from left to right and soaring up and making sudden dives. It was an exciting kite to fly but it needed some expertise because it was in perpetual motion and one had to be vigilant to keep it from keeling over to the extreme. You could liken the “tabo-tabo” to a hawk and the “chape-chape” to a wimpy helpless dove.

The dogfight was quickly over. The kite with the star design won. With the string of the losing kite cut from its owner it hurtled uncontrollably while the winner, as if in a vainglorious gesture soared majestically announcing its moment of triumph.

The losing kite floated in the air for a while then plunged towards us. We watched interestedly as it settled at the far end of the roof where we were seated. Ric stood up and hurriedly went towards the fallen kite. As if in a struggle to free itself, the fallen kite fluttered wildly, pulling against its string that was snagged in the seams of the roof eaves.

There is some sort of a rule of the skies in kite flying. An “alagwa”, a kite that has lost its mooring becomes fair game to anybody who would be first to retrieve it. A finders’ keepers sort of thing.

Ric raced towards it. He was a hulk of a boy and as he lumbered towards the eaves where the kite was you could hear the grating crunch on the galvanized iron sheets each time his feet landed on the rusty and fragile thin metal. All of a sudden he was out of sight. The roof caved in and he fell through.

I cautiously walked towards hole in the roof where he disappeared. Although I was a lightweight I still had to be cautious treading on the thin galvanized iron sheets as most of them have been weakened by rust.

I could see Ric from the hole he made in the roof. He was lying unconscious on the cement floor beside a cement sink. I quickly backtracked and went down from where we climbed up earlier. It took me sometime to get down. With shaking knees, I held on to each rough cranny in the crudely cemented hollow block wall that led down to the overhanging branches of a guava tree. With a bit of daring, I pushed away from the wall and grabbed a branch. The branch bended from my weight and slowly laid me down to the ground.

It seemed that somebody had alerted the older folks in the neighborhood about the incident. Mr. Dominguez, our next door neighbor was already at the scene when I got down. Ric was sprawled on the floor hardly moving. He had on an ominous pallor, a slate gray dullness in his face. Mr. Dominguez lifted Ric and hurriedly brought him to the North General Hospital on Espana Street just right across from Carola Street, two eskinitas away from Maria Cristina. Mr. Dominguez was a slight fellow and it was a wonder how he was able to lift Ric and rush him to the hospital at a trot.

My mother followed them to the hospital. I was not allowed to go out of the house. I was really worried sick seeing how deathly pale Ric was and also afraid for myself. Ric’s mom and mine would surely blame me to no end for the mishap.

Pine Scented Memories

Cocoy's Christmas Tree in the Paco house.

Memories of Christmases past would be a nice thing to write about. I am trying to search my mind for past images of Christmas mornings as a young boy who still believed in Santa Claus. I remember during my childhood we always had a Christmas tree where we used to hang our socks filled with hopeful letters to Santa Claus, telling him how good we’ve been and what we would like for Christmas. I would hang my sock in a branch that was at eye level…the most conspicuous place in the tree.

Our tree was a Baguio Pine that one could buy only during the Yuletide season. They have long since stopped cutting down the trees because conservationists were afraid that after a while the cutters will make extinct this pine species because of indiscriminate cutting. Lately the threat of its extinction is posed, not by Christmas commerce but by the numerous squatters in Baguio City. They have cut down the trees in the hills near the city as clearings for their hovels. I hope something is done to stem this increasing urban blight.

The Baguio Pine has a scent which one associates with Christmas and the pine needles are so much greener and thicker than the foliage of the Agojo Pine, a species found in the lowlands.

The buying of the tree was an event that I looked forward to. I would tag along with my older brother, Tito, to go to a vacant lot in the corner of
Governor Forbes Street where a big open truck would be unloading cut branches of Baguio Pine to sell as fresh Christmas trees. We would select a medium sized one and one that would have the best conical shape. To get the best looking tree one had to go there early otherwise what would be left of the lot would be the scraggly ones and the ones whose branches were just nailed together. Bringing home the tree was also a pleasure. My brother would put on his shoulder the heavy lower part of the tree while I would hold on to the top part walking behind my brother to prevent the tree from swishing. I would proudly march in the tiny eskinita where we live and enjoying all the while the nice comments of our neighbors, especially the kids as we passed them on the way home.




Angge's Christmas tree



My older brothers would do a bit of carpentry work to put together the base for propping up the tree. The base would then be covered with

Christmas wrapping making it look like a big gift box.



Christmas with neighborhood kids. The Dullanos and Sevillas



My sisters would bring out the tree decorations from out of the storage, dust them and start hanging them on the branches. There was a wide assortment of decorative materials. Plastic Christmas balls colored metallic red, green and blue, angels grouped together as a choir, funny looking thin Santas made out of pipe stem cleaners, bells of different sizes, plastic reindeers and metallic ribbons wound around the tree. The last to be done were the Christmas lights. My elder brothers were in charge of checking all the light bulbs, the wiring, replacing burned out bulbs and connecting two sets of Christmas lights together before stringing them up in the branches.

Now what would Christmas be without snow? A final touch is added on the sagged branches, weighed down by reindeers, colored balls, thin Santas etc…lumpy wads of cotton sparsely spread on the pine needles looking like a collection of snow flurries precariously resting on heavily laden branches.

Capping the activity was topping the tree with a big tinsel star, a privilege given to the youngest sibling, Angge, who was four at that time.

My brother , Dado, would put on a new stylus in the RCA phonograph and play Bing Crosby’s White Christmas. We would all take a step backward for a full view of our creation and looking at each other with smiles of approval and feeling good about the familial handiwork.