Jessie B. Garcia’s “In Hog Heaven” 1 is a peek into people’s crushing poverty in 1970s Quiapo. The characters’ dismal existence is ironically bathed with cheery neon lights--cruelly highlighting their misery and delightfully taunting them.
The narrator, a young poet who ran away from home, describes his dilapidated living quarters. He has a room with a makeshift bed at the topmost floor of a “four-story building in Quiapo that overlooked Quezon Bridge from one angle and the murky Pasig River from another” (Garcia 253). The abandoned building reflected the sorry state of his life –which he brought upon himself. He says,
At the time I’m talking about, the building was just awaiting the wrecker’s ball. And in a sense, it had already arrived. But still the building stood there for quite some time in all its tarnished decrepitude, ghostly and rat-infested, dwarfing the posh though squat one- and two-story establishments nearby. From the rooftop—located just a few giddy meters above my window and which once served as promenade for drunks and cheap ladies of the night—one could catch a grand vista of corrugated iron roofs and electrical wirings, television antennas and clotheslines all tangled up in a frenzied fishworm snarl and looking like witches’ broomsticks going thisway and thatway against a smog-yellow sky. The building was hemmed in from behind by a tenement structure a story taller than itself and equally just as dilapidated so that it had long been converted into a warehouse, all its windows shut up and boarded except for the one directly overlooking mine which was occupied by the caretaker of the place, a big burly policeman and his pretty frail-looking wife who gave out moaning bird-like coos when he made love to her every night. (253)
The building has no electricity, and the only source of water was a dripping faucet. It had been used by “third-rate dentists and abortionists and fledgling lawyers and fortune-tellers” (253), and the ground floor was once used by enterprising Chinese restaurant owners. There are still signs left, such as Leong’s Bakery, Ng Wah’s Remnants, and Lim Beng Restaurant. The sty-like edifice, “…overlooking downtown Quiapo in all its frenetic pace and bustling energy” (254), along with an equally towering warehouse behind it, dwarfs other structures in this part of Quiapo.
A MASS OF TANGLED WIRES can be seen outside buildings in Quiapo. As with the story, the ground floor of commercial structures are not without traffic from shoppers and diners, but the upper levels of old establishments are converted into living quarters.
The description reveals the narrator’s outlook and foreshadows his choices in the story. His lodging is the result of the generosity of the building’s caretaker – a security guard with a blind daughter named Melissa.
Because the security guard was often away at work (and passed-out drunk when he is home), the narrator has made it part of his routine to look after Melissa. He talks to her and teaches her simple tasks, such as preparing coffee. He leaves for work in the morning – at Wa Nam’s Panciteria which is “located a few stalls away from the underpass in an opposite building fronting Quezon Bridge” (258). Melissa spends the day making fancy bead products until the narrator returns at night, bringing with him leftovers from the restaurant.
They regularly find their way to a nocturnal promenade in order to reach the rooftop, where they would see the expanse of nighttime Quiapo, their tiny figures “bathed under the swirling and constantly eddying phosphorescence of red and blue and green lights that the giant neon billboards lining the rooftop luridly cast down” (259).
The narrator would describe things in detail for Melissa:
…the vehicles that were endlessly streaming up and down the bridge, the small vessels plying the murky Pasig River, the tugboats moored alongside Arcache Market … the moviehouses and the Chinaman’s shops right across the street, the giant billboards too on top of the nearby buildings … the Chinese pagoda that loomed like a ghostly spectre amidst the neon wilderness a little distance away (260).
BILLBOARDS are mounted strategically on top of buildings in Quiapo.
A BOAT is moored along the banks of the Pasig River. Photos were taken in October 2017.
They became intimate too, after he recited some poems and Melissa had revealed to him how a man had once touched her intimately inside a moviehouse, and she did not protest because she did not want her father to know that someone was pestering her. The narrator kissed her, and when Melissa responded with a shy kiss, his passion broke after “weeks and months of suppressed longing.” He took her on the hard floor of the rooftop and Melissa “bore the onslaughts of [his] every inexperienced thrusts [sic], of a desire too much in a hurry.” She had bled, revealing “for sure that she had never been loved before” (261).
Sometimes, their friend Toti (Teotimo Dimaculangan), a gay beautician from Romblon who works at the D’Wave Beauty Salon in Misericordia, would come visit them and bring grocery items. It is Toti who provides Melissa with the beads and makes arrangements for the sale of the finished products in a store under the Quezon Bridge. Toti is also an avid fan of Susan Roces–the president, in fact, of the Ever-Loyal Susan Roces Fans Club of Quiapo. When he is not busy with customers in the salon, he would be all over the city scrounging around for ballots to cast in Susan’s favor to boost the movie star’s popularity poll in a magazine.
Quiapo as a Wretched Vision of Neon in Jessie B. Garcia’s “In Hog Heaven”
Eric Gerard H. Nebran | October 29, 2017
BEAD products such as necklaces, bracelets, rosaries, and charms continue to be sold in shops and stalls around Quiapo.
THERE is still constant traffic in the underpass and vendors continue to sell their goods to passersby.
The narrator got fired from his job on his birthday and decides to wander around. He jostles his way through a huge throng of spectators lining the sidewalks. The crowd was there to watch a motorcade of the first Filipina to win a world beauty crown. He went to watch a movie in the old Metro Theater near the underpass, and before falling asleep through the double feature, observed that a number of women, “some of them old enough to be anyone’s grandmother” were going from one male patron to another, “offering some despicable sexual favors for a fee of fifty centavos” (264).
After leaving the theatre, he resumes his walk in Quiapo and sees record bars with displays of LP jackets, barber shops, and movie houses showing stills of feature films in their lobbies. Unfortunately, he spills a tray of salted peanuts and angers the vendor. Since he cannot pay for the goods he wasted, he was taken by a traffic policeman to a police outpost beside the Main Theater. There, he is put behind bars. Though his eyes burned with “shameful tears,” he catches “a glimpse of a familiar figure in a bouffant orange wig coming up the steps of the underpass” (264). He cries out to Toti and the generous beautician bails him out of jail by settling the fee for the damages with the peanut vendor.
A PEANUT VENDOR stations himself outside Quiapo church and a Police Outpost is also found near the church. Photos were taken in October 2017.
On their way home, it rained hard and they discover that Melissa had climbed the rooftop on her own. The narrator found her feverish, drenched in the rain, with her beads scattered. He hugged her and helped her back to her room. He noticed a flash of anger in Toti’s eyes. When Melissa had been tucked in bed and given medicine, he returns to his room and undressed in the dark. Toti appears and starts showering him with kisses and pawing away at his crotch. After his initial resistance, he allows his benefactor to have his way with him, thinking that it was beneath his dignity and sense of gratitude to say no to the person who had just saved him from jail. The makeshift continued to thump with their every movement.
The narrator reveals that Melissa avoided him after that. He soon left their place without saying goodbye. His father found out where he had been staying and brought him back home. Years passed, and when the narrator went back to Manila to study, he returns to Quiapo. He sees that the abandoned building had already been demolished and in its place stood a “handsome edifice just as tall, with many glass windows that glinted in the sun” (266). The Metro Theatre had also been torn down and replaced with a drug store.
He reveals that each time he would pass Quezon Bridge, he would feel a catch in his throat and looking up, he would imagine Melissa high up in the window of the abandoned building, still stringing her beads.
In Garcia’s story, Quiapo becomes the vision – for one whose eyesight has been taken away, and for one who wallows in self-imposed exile. The former sees “everything” in “nothing”; the latter, seeing “nothing” in “everything.” The narrator is overwhelmed by his environment and gives up his agency. He passively stations himself in an edifice that symbolizes his perceived decrepitude. Melissa, on the other hand, starts of as a floundering character, handicapped by her blindness but soon finds her own way. Melissa thinks that the most difficult task she could do is making it all alone down the underpass and then to Quiapo church and back home again safely. This is the “dream of her life, her graduation piece sort of, after which she would consider herself completely independent” (259). Instead, she changes her resolve and sets her sights on climbing the rooftop as a birthday surprise for the man who had given her attention.
Like the narrator who ran away from expectations of his affluent father, most of the people in the story seek opportunities for escapism: the dour-faced security guard turns to the bottle to escape his parental duties to a handicapped daughter; the crowds and moviegoers, and the devoted Susan Roces fan Toti – all expectant and enthralled by popular figures offering a glamorous fantasy of a better life. 2
But the time for reckoning soon comes. People have to deal with their demons, and escapism withers in the face of harsh realities. The closure of Madame Xenia’s fortune telling shop, which used to be the narrator’s room, foreshadows this.
The narrator’s wanderings also give the reader a picture of Quiapo in the '70s. There is a palpable excitement in frenzied activities driven by commercial ventures and desire for progress, but the myriad of interesting personalities in the periphery, those in the seedier parts of the city, strive to remain afloat in a sea of misery.
Melissa’s abandonment by the poet could be seen as an act of betrayal or of kindness. The narrator mentions that as a poet, he tries to “create a semblance of truth and beauty from the sordidness of [his] surroundings, coaxing some order from out of chaos, meaning from the dregs and the swill and the gutless harshness of a city that was ready to betray … at every turn" (255). Both will hopefully learn to live with despair – be it circumstantial or voluntary. And it must start with their leaving their “hog heaven” in Quiapo.
NOTES
1. “In Hog Heaven” won First prize in the 1981 Palanca Awards for Short Stories. It was published in the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, An Anthology of Winning Works: Short Stories, 1980s by Anvil Publishing Inc. in 2000; Underground Spirit: Philippine Short Stories in English, 1973 to 1989, edited by Gemino H. Abad, published by the University of the Philippines Press in 2010; and Aura: The Gay Theme in Philippine Fiction in English, edited by J. Neil Garcia, published by Anvil Publishing Inc. in 2012. The excerpts in this article are taken from J. Neil Garcia’s anthology.
2. Garcia’s interest for the Philippine movie industry led to his publication of A Movie Album Quizbook, launched on 9 March 2005. He has researched and chronicled ten years of the industry and completed the collection of rare pictures of movie icons and stars, published anecdotes, unpublished reminiscences, historical facts and factoids, human interest sidelights, thumbnail biographies, random quizzes and assorted trivia (“A Movie Album”).
WORKS CITED
“A Movie Album Quizbook by Jessie B. Garcia.” Philippine ART & Literature Popular Bookstore, Blogspot, 7 Aug. 2010, www.pbsphilippineliterature.blogspot.com/2010/08/movie-album-quizbook-by-jessie-b-garcia.html. Accessed 7 Oct. 2017.
Garcia, Jessie B. “In Hog Heaven.” Aura: The Gay Theme in Philippine Fiction in English, edited by J. Neil Garcia, Anvil Publishing Inc., 2012. pp. 253–266.