5. Fabulous & Fearless
Gina Apostol, F.H. Batacan, Jose Dalisay, Lourd de Veyra, Eric Gamalinda, Angelo R. Lacuesta, R. Zamora Linmark, Rosario Cruz-Lucero, Sabina Murray, Marianne Villanueva, Jonas Vitman, Lysley Tenorio, and the graphic noir team of Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo serve up a real taste of life in one of the wildest cities on the planet. The characters and locations are all over the map in the best possible way. There are transvestites and transsexuals in Chinatown and Tondo, shabuheads in Quezon City, feral street kids in Makati, lovelorn professors in Diliman, and even a Jesuit forensic anthropologist investigating a murder in Lagro. The surprise centerpiece of this anthology is Tan & Baldisimo’s “Thirteen Stations,” a graphic noir set in public transit stations where ghastly crimes are taking place. Cool, otherworldly detective Alexandra Trese, the heroine of Tan & Baldisimo’s hugely popular Trese series, is summoned to deal with these crimes. It made perfect sense to include a graphic noir, since one of the many ways I learned to become a writer was through the Filipino horror komiks of my childhood. Consider it my homage. All the fabulous and fearless writers gathered here, whether they are living in Manila, the US, or elsewhere in the ever-growing Philippine diaspora, have a deep connection and abiding love for this crazy-making, intoxicating city. There’s nothing like it in the world, and they know it.
Jessica Hagedorn
March 2013
Part I
US Against Them
Aviary
by Lysley Tenorio
Greenbelt Mall, Makati
When we learn about the sign, we must see it for ourselves. So from our shanties we cross the railway tracks and charge toward the home of Alejandro, the only kid we know with a computer, the only kid we know with electricity, so that he can show us a picture of the sign on the Internet. He lives with his mother in the Financial District now, in a big-shot, high-rise condominium which, he has said, overlooks the world. But it’s not so high that we can’t reach it: Alejandro calls the front desk to give us clearance, despite the security guard’s suspicions, so we file into the elevator, rising and rising to the uppermost floors. When we reach his door, it’s already open, and he stands there waiting. “I’ll show you on my computer,” he says, “but don’t touch the keyboard. Don’t touch anything.” He inspects our hands to make sure they’re clean, then herds us into his bedroom. He flips open his laptop, types and clicks and types and clicks, until an image downloads, a picture of a sign posted on a shopping mall door. It says:
“So the story is true,” says Alejandro, closing his laptop, “they really don’t want you there.” He half-smiles at us and shrugs, a funny story to him but an injustice to us, so we curse its name and unleash all the profanity we know: Fuck you Greenbelt Mall, you asshole Greenbelt Mall, shit bitch motherfucker go to hell Greenbelt Mall.
Greenbelt Mall is mere kilometers from our part of Makati City. From certain vantage points and heights, we have witnessed its nighttime glow of green and red during past Christmas seasons, and we have heard the blare of marching bands that celebrate every grand opening and ribbon-cutting ceremony. But have we been inside? No way! We have no use for Tokyoinspired fur and leather winter coats. We don’t want imported and indigestible cheeses. Our lives are made no better by facial cleansers made from organic jackfruit and nuts. And say we did go there one day, say we purchased even the smallest trinket like a souvenir Greenbelt key chain or a stylish Greenbelt visor. We would be called arrogant big-shots who think we’re hot shit. People trying to be other people.
But we will not be prohibited from entering. We will not allow ourselves to be banned. We decide then and there to act, to right this terrible wrong.
“And do what? Get revenge?” Alejandro laughs, but we don’t.
The front door rattles open. “My mom’s home,” Alejandro says. “Leave.” He scoots us from his room, and on our way out we see his mother staring out a wall of windows at a view of skyscrapers, palm trees, a grid of streets that from here look orderly and clean. She is wearing a dress as black and tight as a silhouette, holds a long brown cigarette in one hand and an ambercolored drink with clinking ice in the other. She is the blondest Filipina we have ever seen, and her face is half-gone behind dark glasses, huge and round like two black moons.
With a long red fingernail, she lowers her sunglasses, looks us up and down with recognition and suspicion, as though we remind her of what she comes from.
We look around her, at this roomful of things we will never have — a white leather sofa and a rug of white fur, a dining table with elephant tusk legs, a strong ceiling free of cracks and leaks, and an equally sturdy floor. But our envy is tempered by our pity. We know the things she does to live this life. We have seen her strolling down the street on the arms of businessmen — Japanese, Indian, Saudi Arabian, American — and we know there are nights when Alejandro must find somewhere else to sleep, and on those nights he comes to us.
“Get out,” she says.
We exit, enter the elevator, feel our descent.
It’s dusk by the time we’re home, and Auntie Fritzie is already scolding us as we come into view. In her yellow poncho and pink rubber boots, she has been scavenging through the dumps and trash heaps, and has lined up her findings in messy piles along the railway track. She tells us to hurry our lazy asses and get to work, says that if our mothers and fathers were alive, they would smack our faces for our laziness. So we sort through tattered shoes, sticky soda bottles, chipped plates, flicking away the things that cling to them. Toiling through muck and stench, we keep on cursing Greenbelt Mall, daydreaming of the revenge Alejandro spoke of, and the many ways to get it.
This morning, we don black. Polo shirts and corduroys, our only good clothes, the outfits we wear to baptisms and funerals. We grab backpacks and slip on dark glasses, intact pairs collected from the years of Auntie Fritzie’s scavenging, and as we make our way to the center of Makati City, they turn the gray day grayer.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5: Greenbelt Mall is made of five interconnected buildings, 4 and 5 the most elite, the ones that aim to keep us out. We walk toward the main entrance of Greenbelt 4, a fortress of a structure surrounded by colossal palm trees and twisty moatlike fountains, with glass awnings jutting toward the sky.