Video Night in Kathmandu (27 page)

Just one month before arriving in the Philippines, I had gone to California to cover a convention of high school cheerleaders, and there had found both walls and hearts decorated with Smiley faces and valentine symbols. After a while, I realized that the teen-queen gathering had, in fact, been an ideal preparation for the Philippines. For the entire country seemed to resonate to the high-spirited flightiness of a high school world, where tomorrow is another lifetime and hearts are made for breaking. The walls of Manila were plastered with red hearts, and the bumper stickers on jeepneys wailed: “It Hurts to Say Goodbye.” Chatty sexism filled the media (“Sex in Space?” was the headline above an article on the possible return of martial law) and a kind of leopardskin looseness informed the TV listings (one typical show was called “Chicks to Chicks”). Local menus were tyrannized by cute tags (My Father’s Mustache offered “Butch Cassidy and the Sandwitch Kid” and “Wild Beef Hickcock,” while the Hard Rock Café had dishes called “GI Blues,” “Star-Spangled Banner” and “Army-Navy,” to go along with “Loving Spoonfuls” and “Johnny’s B. Goode”). And the costume jewels
of wisdom printed on T-shirts sounded like nothing so much as the catchy titles of pop songs—“Don’t Let a Fool Kiss You or a Kiss Fool You.”

All these, however, were contexts in which a kind of bubble-gum bumptiousness might be expected; what amazed me more as I looked more closely at the country was to see this poppy lingo applied to everything. Nothing was sacred. When first I saw the bumper sticker that said “I
God,” I took it to be a joke. But though it certainly reflected the happy-go-lucky exuberance of the nation, it was not, I gathered, meant to be funny. Nor was the jeepney sign that said “God is my co-driver.” Nor was the huge billboard above the Aristocrat Restaurant (“the King of Fried Chicken”) that announced: “Greetings to No. 1 Mother of the World on the 2000th Anniversary of Her Birth.” The entire city was indeed planning to throw a super party on September 4, 1985, to wish the Virgin Mary a merry 2000th.

After a while, I was ready for anything. When I saw a sticker saying “Mother Dearest” on the fender of a jeepney, I assumed that it had a religious rather than a domestic significance. But who could tell whether Madonna Lingerie was named in honor of the Virgin or the Whore—especially in a country where both types were so ubiquitous? And as I rode the bus to Baguio, a lovely seven-year-old girl behind me sang along quietly with every determined word of “We Are the World,” and a middle-aged lady next to me filled out one-word answers to a Bible Study quiz (“Can you describe the Holy Spirit?”) while, in front of us all, a soft-core British spy movie flickered on a video screen.

Some of this was doubtless more glaring in the Philippines than elsewhere in Asia because the medium of mass culture here was American, its excesses neither dignified nor disguised by the exoticism of a foreign tongue. And some of it might have been a kind of Spanish trait—I had found an equally lush sentimentality in Cuba. But even in other English-language areas of the world, and even in other Spanish-American provinces like Honduras or Puerto Rico, I had never felt myself so relentlessly bombarded by what seemed to be broad satires, in somewhat shaky taste, of a nickel-and-dime culture—the products, one might have guessed, of a
Harvard Lampoon
parody of
Seventeen.
Every nugget of kitsch, moreover, was delivered quite without irony. “Come and see
Jenina
, a play on Child Prostitution,” ran
the breezy invitation in the anti-Marcos paper
Mr. and Ms.
The Family Club Theater in Dagupa City offered uncensored pornography. And one day, Manila’s most respectable paper, the Marcos-run
Bulletin Today
, blandly reported: “Some films submitted for showing at the Manila Film Center were disapproved because they weren’t bold enough. The producers had no alternative but to add more sexy footage.” One of these movies, I read, “directed by a multi-awardee,” showed its lead actress “making love to a lesbian, to the son of a semi-retired character actor and to a still very active character actor, probably the Kissing King in Show Biz.” Another had a “lead actor sodomizing a bit player and ejaculating on the face of another bit player.” Yet both, it seemed, were still too mild to satisfy the stern strictures of the Film Center (which charged four times the regular rate for its officially sponsored porn and denied admission to women in housedresses and men in sleeveless shirts). The Center’s overseers, Mr. and Mrs. Marcos, were notoriously difficult to please.

Indeed, the jazzed-up jukebox sensibility that was so incongruous throughout much of the country was loudest of all where it was most incongruous: in government. Every political party so insistently used show biz that politics itself had come to seem nothing more than a party. And after a while in Manila, I could no longer distinguish between local show-biz characters, with names like Coy, Pepsi, Zsa Zsa and Bimbo, and local political figures, who were known as Joker, Teddy-Boy and Ting-Ting (the Chief Justice of the Philippine Supreme Court was called Ding Dong). Often, in any case, the two performed together on a single stage. The opposition to Marcos famously commemorated the assassination of its beloved leader by singing out the cheery pop tune “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree.” The guerrillas of the Communist National People’s Army had taken over a Manila studio to record an album of stirring guitar-and-flute folk ballads (to be played, no doubt, at 45 revolutions per minute). And the Marcoses’ Foreign Minister was famous for his boogie-woogie piano.

The queen of them all, though, and the country’s leading vocalist, was Imelda Marcos. Just before I arrived, she had organized a rendition of the national anthem sung “We Are the World” style, with pop stars imitating the country’s favorite
video right down to the hands they clapped on their ears as they took their turns at the mike. A little later, tapes emerged showing the First Family itself belting out the song for Ethiopia’s starving in the midst of one of its abandoned bacchanals aboard a private yacht. And one day while I was in town, the
Bulletin Today
devoted much of its second page to printing, in its entirety, a song that Imelda, the former “Muse of Manila,” had written, apparently to her husband, on her way to the funeral of Yuri Andropov in Moscow:

Above and beyond such show-biz gimmicks, however, Philippine politicians conducted all their affairs, both public and private, with a noisy gossip-column brazenness, as if their only wish was to satisfy the cheering public. When B-movie actress Dovie Beams had released her kiss-and-tell story of life in bed with President Marcos, her beloved “Freddie” had retaliated, not by denying the rumors or protesting his innocence, or even by proffering excuses, but simply by splashing his own intimate photos of Lovie Dovie in the raw across the national newspapers. Here was Filipino openness and swagger, its fondness for the extravagant flourish, raised to the pitch of low art and high farce.

At the time I was in Manila, indeed, the Marcos Era was still rolling along with a boldness and broadness that could make a scriptwriter blush. The First Family itself featured a cast of characters stranger, or juicier at least, than any that fiction could conceive. There was the President, the Machiavellian macho villain who had put his monogram on every government institution and treated the national treasury as a personal checking account, and there was his First Lady, a former beauty queen with a scandalous past who proclaimed, “In the Philippines, we live in a Paradise. There are no poor people like there are in other
countries,” even as seven in every ten of her people, according to government statistics, were living under the poverty level. There was First Daughter Imee, whose boxer-playboy husband had been abducted by her parents because of his unfortunate first marriage to a former Miss International (now herself a leading opposition beauty—oops, politician), and there was the First Son, Ferdinand, Jr., now governor of Ilocos Norte, who was generally known as Bongbong.

The saddest aspect of the whole fiasco, however, was that these knockabout characters from
Dynasty
were stumbling their way through a tragedy by Sophocles. For swirling around the soap opera bouffe were all the darker ironies and justice-dispensing fates, the blood feuds and heaven-sent portents, of a larger-than-life morality play. By the time he was seventeen, Marcos had been charged with murder; while he was in jail, he had gained the highest bar exam scores in the country’s history. After becoming the country’s first reelected President, he had been challenged by an equally tough and resourceful Wunderkind, Ninoy Aquino—his fraternity brother, his close friend and, in a sense, his shadow self. After Aquino had been killed, Marcos had found himself hounded by the Electra-like figure of Aquino’s widow, Corazón, a soft-spoken grandmother whom the people wished to cast as an avenging angel. True to the parable form, her name meant “Heart,” her party was called Lakas ng Bayan (LABAN), or “People Power (FIGHT),” and her main supporter among the media was a Catholic magazine and broadcasting network entitled Veritas, or “Truth.” Meanwhile, stargazing Imelda had been told by a soothsayer that as soon as an earthquake rocked a church and a crowd crossed Mendiola Bridge, the House of Marcos would fall (it did, it did and, finally, it did). And in the midst of all the murders and the mistresses, the profligate spending and the lavish conniving, stood a lonely one-man chorus with the Wycherley-perfect name of Cardinal Sin.

The melodrama was kept constantly on the boil, moreover, and the audience constantly absorbed in the political song-and-dance routine, by the restless rumormongers of the Manila coffeehouses, who generated enough wild stories every few hours to ensure that the papers could run 40-point-bold headlines every day of the week. I was not in the Philippines long, but it
was long enough to hear the thunderbolt that there was a move to impeach Marcos, and then the sudden bulletin that the President was going to call snap elections, and then the banner headline that there would be no elections after all, and then the wild claim that Imelda was going to be made Veep, and then the shock news that Marcos had decided to settle the election issue with a referendum in the National Assembly and then the screaming announcement that the National Assembly had decided to leave the decision in Marcos’s hands. Every day, in fact, there came a new twist, a bizarre turn, a cliff-hanging invitation to the sequel. It was almost enough to make one forget that the plot was about a tyranny that had brought the country to its knees.

Whenever I got carried away by the thrill-a-minute frenzy of the political scene, however, the friends I made in Manila brought me back to the simple realities of a system that had reduced its men to rags and driven its women to brothels.

I first met Sarah, a waitress at Calle Cinquo, on my second night in town. A pious, stately girl from the countryside—both her sisters had joined a convent, and Sarah seemed to belong in their company—she had come to Manila, she told me, to study nursing. It was not easy to finance her studies, she went on, and many of her classmates took the easy way out. But she was determined, absolutely determined, to pay her way through college without compromising herself. “I have to work hard,” she explained, “but I will do it. Step by step, Pico: that is how to live. If I am honest, I know God will help me.”

Sarah’s adamantine strength of will was sorely tested by her current job. Working in Calle Cinquo nine hours a day, seven days a week, she earned exactly $16 in the course of a month. Even that, however, was never guaranteed. Every now and then, the restaurant staged a variety show, and gave each of its waitresses three tickets to sell at $4.50 each—a small fortune for the average Filipino. If any of the tickets went unsold, the entire amount was deducted from the waitress’s salary. Sarah lived in absolute terror of not finding takers for her tickets. Yet all the while, with her hacienda beauty and her dazzling smile, she also
found herself constantly besieged by solicitations from foreigners who assumed, not without reason, that the waitresses themselves were on sale here. Every tourist, Sarah noted sadly, was interested in only one thing. “I do not blame them,” she told me, with a soft smile. “But I still prefer my co-Filipinos.”

Quite taken with Sarah’s sweet-spirited warmth and innocence, I soon took to stopping off each night at Calle Cinquo for a Coke and a chat. Sarah always greeted me with a smile, and, though three years younger than I, she always lavished on me the benefit of her counsel. “You must always remember, Pico,” she often told me, “that if you are good, God will reward you. You must always go step by step.” At this she would flash me an earnest smile. “And one day I hope you will find a good wife, a lady who will always be faithful and true, a good lady who will always wait for you.”