In front of Rolex, we gather in a circle. We have a moment of silence, then one of us takes out a razor blade, gives a quick slash to his palm, lets blood drip onto the mall’s marble floor.
A samurai raises his sword over two lovers slurping thick, wormy noodles from a steaming white bowl. We half wish it was real, that the samurai could come to life and lop off the heads of these diners. But the samurai is just a character in a movie projected on the wall of a restaurant called johnandyoko, a name as strange as the food they serve — slivers of raw fish that look like tongues, piled high on top of each other, and surrounded with leaves and dots of orange and magenta sauce, on dinner plates so large they’re mostly empty. We cannot fathom becoming full off such small food, but as we stand here, lined up along the window and staring in, the diners seem to delight in the tininess of their meals.
We lick our fingers and draw X’s on the window glass, over the diners’ faces. We do the same at other elegant restaurants in Greenbelt 5 — The Terrace, Chateau 1771, Chili’s — watching up close the people inside, crossing them out. Strange as their food is, we can’t deny the fact that we had no breakfast, but we fend off hunger by telling ourselves that we aren’t wanted here, and even if they offered us a sample, just a small quick taste, we would never eat it.
We’ve breathed enough of the Greenbelt air. We exit through one of the many entrances, find ourselves in a cool and breezy courtyard, where parents lounge on blankets laid out on the grass, as their giggling children run circles around them. We stop to stare at some of them, and move on.
Then we see it, there in the distance: a domelike structure resembling the top half of a UFO. We move toward it slowly, cautiously, as if it might take flight at any moment. And then we discover that the building is the Greenbelt Chapel. A place for worship between shopping; we are not impressed. Still, there are no signs prohibiting our entry.
We enter with no intentions. Then we are amazed.
We have never seen anything so wondrous, such unearthly beauty. Every wall and panel curves around, swoops up from the ground and meets at the top, where a stained-glass Jesus Christ surrounded by golden light gazes down upon us. At the other end of the chapel, choir members gather, practicing the first notes of some holy song. So humbled are we by this magnificence that we remove our dark glasses, file into a pew, and drop to our knees. Terrible storms leveled off our church long ago; for years we have worshipped alongside the empty railway tracks, in the heat and in the cold, which, we realize now, has made it difficult to pray. But in this mostly empty church, we fall easily into prayer. Our heads bowed, we are so silent we can hear the sound of our own breathing, somehow in rhythm with the choir’s song.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
We raise our heads, and then we see it, a shock of blond hair at the end of the pew of the very first row. Alejandro’s mother. She crosses herself then stands up, still in her black dress and dark glasses. She picks up a pair of shopping bags by her feet, walks slowly up the aisle. We bow our heads again, hoping to remain unseen.
She stops at the end of our row, lowers her sunglasses, revealing a bruised black eye. She looks us over, one face at a time. “You don’t belong here,” she whispers, in a tone that sounds like wisdom. Then she looks away at something behind us. We turn and see what she sees: family after family arriving for Mass, whole generations, all in flawless clothing, perfectly shined shoes. Alejandro’s mother moves on, and then we notice a man in a navy-blue suit with gold buttons, the father of what looks to be a prominent family, staring at us from across the aisle, whispering to a woman who may be his wife, and our good clothes now look meager, the holes and frays of our shirts more noticeable than before.
We don our dark glasses. It’s time for us to leave.
But first, we decide that this is the spot, the place we will leave our final mark. From one of our satchels we remove — carefully, delicately — a segment of metal pipe wrapped with blue and red wire, with a cell phone duct-taped to it. We place it under the pew before us, right in the middle, where someone whose head is bowed in prayer but not truly praying might notice it, if he or she looks closely enough.
We stand and walk out of the Greenbelt Chapel, make our way home.
It will not detonate. Fake things never do. Instead of explosions there will be mass panic and hysteria, which we will read about in discarded newspapers, or on the Internet, if Alejandro will let us onto his computer again. The Greenbelt Mall authorities will call it a hoax, a false alarm; they will promise the people there is nothing to fear. Still, the damage will be done. We will have created unease here, severe emotional distress, a disturbance they will not soon forget. And when they do, we will strike again, in ways we ourselves have yet to know.
A Human Right
by Rosario Cruz-Lucero
Intramuros
“Casa Manila,” the docent announces, pushing the massive double doors twice before they give way. His memorized spiels are in impeccable, if textbook English. “Notice the furniture and appurtenances.” The nervous young thing is obviously new to this job, though Isabel would guess, by his robotic accent and tone, that he’s had a stint as a call center agent. But the quaintness of his jargon keeps with the whole design of Intramuros, the walled “city within the city.”
Isabel smiles at him encouragingly and he smiles back.
“This replica of a nineteenth-century Hispanic house was actually built in 1979.”
Ah, Isabel thinks, another of Imelda Marcos’s “cultural projects,” meaning the epitome of kitsch.
“... Spanish-Filipino baroque,” he continues. “The antique furniture and trappings that fill up these capacious rooms are authentic and collected from other houses.”
“Confiscated, you mean,” says a pudgy, dark-skinned little man. He looks every inch Filipino, but speaks with a drawl from the American South that seems to hang between Liverpool and Boracay. One of those who’d fled the country, Isabel concludes, at the height of the Marcos dictatorship. And still bitter about it.
Isabel detaches herself from the group and walks ahead to the next room. It’s enormous, and she is delighted to see that there is an open window taking up the whole length of the space. In broad daylight, this would be the cheeriest room in the house, but the late-afternoon sun has cast shadows on the pillars and walls.
Isabel gazes out the window and discovers that she is actually facing out the back of the house. With all the large doors, the room partitions, the mirrors, she hadn’t realized till now that she’d lost her bearings. From this window, she sees, across the gray roofs, Intramuros’s ramparts, with a watchtower at one end and a sentry box at the other. Across the faux-cobblestone road is the mass of shanties known as Barrio Santa Lucia.
Informal settlers. Slum dwellers have their own euphemism too, Isabel thinks in amusement. One more exhibit for the tourists of Intramuros, who can see the cross-section of Manila life without the muck and stench and, most of all, the dangers.
A man stands at the entrance to the shantytown. Isabel leans forward to take a closer look — the man’s profile is distinctive: the high forehead, the sharp cheekbones, the corner of the mouth sloping downward so that it gives him a perpetually somber look, the curly black hair growing close to the scalp.