8
8
This would be one of my routes homeward bound. From Dapitan, I ride a jeep. I alight at Isetann, Quiapo. I then endure the pain of calluses as I walk towards the Recto Train Station. While walking, I would realize that the traffic is spoiling my beauty powder, so I enter Isetann, enjoy some airconditioning, and get out of it just in front of the train station. Inside the pauper’s mall, I was the ambassador of the upper middle class, encountering all walks of poverty-stricken life. This was the mall of the jeepney drivers, the tambays, the male hookers, and other men in their teens or twenties who had some eyeball-ing to do with their textmates. These men stiffened their hair with gel to look like Dragon Ball Z, wear loose shirts with a skull or a WWF Wrestler imprinted on them, loose jeans to boot. Ah! I exclaimed to myself, the poor’s idea of fashion… so passé, so 1990’s, when the "Suck It!" statement was rampant in the heterosexist world, thanks to World Wrestling Federation.
Unfortunately, Isetann was never going to be SM.
When I was younger, I thought SM meant Shopping Mall, because that was it. Unfortunately, I was wrong. It was ShoeMart, where Constante Oandasan used to take me as a child.
"SM ditoyen, Papá?" I was chubby and walking with my chubby feet, my hand held by a man four feet taller and twenty-eight years older than me, who replied:
"Oo sa SM. May malaking TV doon. D’un manonood ‘yung audience."
I hesitated to ask. "Audience?"
Then his perfunctory enlightenment, "Tao."
We were in the foodcourt where there were posters of the movie that we were about to watch. Lots of these were posted on the white walls in iron frames and shielded by glass. Constante Oandasan showed one of the posters to me, "‘Yan ang panonoorin natin.” He pointed at a picture of an ordinary brunette with straight hair, clad in a blue dress, white sleeves white collar: she didn’t look like the Beauty I saw in the storybooks-a blooming gown, wild, thick, curly and red hair. Her feet sprang apart with those unattractive schoolshoes, and her hands up in a gesture that would remind you of, "Voila!" In the background was a tall castle, a consolation for me since it really resembled the storybook castles. The castle’s towers were surrounded by clouds. On the clouds was a transparent figure of a villain. No, wait. The Beast. He didn’t look like a lion, just a mixture of whatever mammal the artist might have seen fit for the role. So much for my fairy tale expectations.
I thought Constante Oandasan was talking about a big television the size of our own TV in the sala back in Magsíngal. Then I only imagined a big television above everybody’s head and the tao would just stand and watch the program... in the department store, because my family frequented the Department Store. I didn’t expect a cave full of countless seats. I didn’t know it smelled like Coca Cola, or that the floor was sticky as it rubbed by shoe, or a screen whose size didn’t fit my childhood’s connotation of big. More so, even a kid would scratch his head and make an annoyed, tsk, when a tall audience would suddenly stand up and block the view.
But I liked the movie. In fact, I didn’t call it movie back then, it was kartuns. For me, a cartoon was one thing, and a movie was another. The latter was the one with the real tao-tao.
Ever since Beauty and the Beast I looked forward to every Disney animation I could ever imagine. And they always changed my impression of the characters.
In SM, all I could see where white walls and glass windows. The windows were aligned like portraits hanging on a museum’s white walls. Each portrait had different stuff to show, different women with hairstyles pointing to the ceiling, different from those in Magsíngal. One portrait had clothes. The next had books on it. The other had, well, clothes. And so on. Then I was curious enough to ask what these portraits were and the answer was: shops, and the frustration of a father raising your hopes to buy that very thing you wanted, then when the moment arrives for you to buy it, he suddenly refuses…-my memory, everybody’s memory of SM. Such had made me an angry child, an angry teenager. As far as this was concerned, SM is a collection of desires and dreams, both intact and shattered.