I am not in any way a Manileña. I was born in the Visayas region and raised in Subic. However, I spent my college years and a few more in Manila. It was an unforgettable experience.
My emotions and the place are deeply tied together because it evoked a myriad of feelings — excitement, disappointment, loathing, gratefulness, and relief. Those emotions become cyclical along with the seasons we had spent in that place. By now, I might have piqued your curiosity as to where exactly that place was. Let me not further your agony or curiosity any longer: I lived at the very heart of Paco Market. Yes, I am not kidding when I say my friend and I, or at least our moms, found a small room within Paco Market. Ah, how could I forget the place when most of our friends had to go to their sweet-smelling dormitories and walk along cleaner streets while we had to suffer the interesting potpourri smell of the market?
I was seventeen. It was March, 1990. I enrolled in the summer program of the Cathedral of Praise Music College. We excitedly hauled our bags and followed our mothers to introduce us to our new home. We even got a taxi, and I was imagining those exciting girl dormitories and the idea of living independently far from home, which was a good three-hour bus ride away. Suddenly, the taxi went inside Paco Market and stopped in front of a small old house with a vegetable stall. The front was filled with different vegetables from Baguio and the usual gulaman, sago, sugar, oil, and other tingi stuff packed in different sizes of plastic. When the taxi stopped I thought we were just buying some stuff to bring and cook in our new house. However, reality struck when we were ordered to get our bags out of the taxi trunk and an old lady, who was earlier chopping some vegetables, stood outside and welcomed us.
The house was dilapidated — made of wood that could burn easily if there’s fire. It was sandwiched in between similar houses which sell different stuff as well. We entered the house through a narrow hallway and we were shown our room. The wooden floor was dark as it had seen better days and covered with chipping linoleum. And to make matters worse, there were no windows. The bathroom was outside and, fortunately, the toilet bowl was not bad at all. We were told that we couldn’t cook and that we had to do our laundry outside — something we only did a few times because we brought our clothes back home on weekends. To make the room livable, we bought new linoleum and two folding beds.
Our lives as students in Manila started.
As much as I didn’t liked the place because of the smell and the little mice that will show up from time to time, I appreciated it for what it taught me. In order to miss the flurry of activities happening in the marketplace, we learned to wake up early in the morning and head for school, stay there most of the day or in the malls, and go home at around six, which by that time was not as busy.
If there’s one thing to be thankful, it was the fact that we didn’t live at the fish section of the market and the influx of people even in the evenings was what made the place safer. Although we didn’t really become chummy with the family who owned the house nor the people around it, they became a familiar sight and soon we didn’t notice at all. In fact we were thankful especially during the rainy season, because while a portion of Taft Avenue, specifically the small street in front of the Emilio Aguinaldo College, was filled with black water and different forms of human waste floating on it, our marketplace was safe and free. And because we were in the middle of the market, we just bought our food from the owner’s sari-sari store or of the many carinderia stalls nearby.
The trisikads were also a convenience, during hot or rainy days because they were very accessible, in fact they would go around the market hunting for passengers. And when I feel homesick, there was a red public phone booth at a nearby store a few steps from the house. And all I needed were “tatlong bente singko” to call home. Of course, I had to add more as the minutes grew longer but the red phone became one of my best friends during the first few months in that place.L
Living there also introduced Paco Park to me. You might be thinking what’s interesting about this old cemetery, but I do find it interesting. What’s more interesting are the free concerts we got to watch from time to time, which kept us entertained during our first few months. The shows provided a good diversion not to go back to the house yet and become prisoners of that windowless four-cornered room. That’s where I was first introduced to jazz as I watched Lynn Sherman and the Bourbon Street Big Band (now Ugoy Ugoy Band), perform jazz standards. And how can I also forget the other classical concerts that transformed the place into a romantic getaway at night? I even got to witness Dina Bonnevie and Gary Estrada shooting a movie there. Those moments were priceless, making it more bearable to live in Paco Market.
I am now in Iloilo City, in a much better house with a garden. But those memories, along with the house we lived in, are forever etched in my memory and something I fondly tell my kids. Sometimes, I show them the pictures on the Internet so they can get a visual idea of what I’m telling them. It’s not that I am prejudiced about the place, but I use those to tell them to be thankful as their lives are much better than mine more than 20 years ago.
Photos of Paco Market are from choosephilippines.com; above is the author, Gen Que.
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