“Squalor is a slow killer but is sometimes an amok.”  

 

            So begins Nick Joaquin’s account of a fire on Calle Castillejos in Quiapo that killed twenty-one people in twenty-seven minutes. By the day’s standards, Joaquin writes, this fire “killed more people than any fire in Manila’s recent history.”  

 

            It turns out that the fire was not an accident. The arsonist, Gavino Dorado, was to surrender later to Mayor Gutierrez “who turned him over to a Manila detective.” After about nine hours of questioning, Dorado finally admitted his deed and signed a confession. From the report, one learns that Dorado tried to eke out a living as a photographer, transferring from one studio to another, across several provinces. The loneliness he felt after he went through a series of depressing events—the death of his wife, his financial loss, his imprisonment—was aggravated by his eviction from his favorite spot in the apartment. The final straw was when he saw what remained of his tiny room: a dismantled wall, medicine vials, and a traveling bag, “with the P70 he kept in a bankbook gone.”  

 

            Unlike most crime reportage that simply glosses over the facts, this story delves into the root of the problem: “The tides of commerce, the torrents of the displaced, had reached Quiapo; and before that advancing flood, the old Quiapenses fled, abandoning their mansions on Azcarraga, Legarda, and R. Hidalgo. From Arlegui and Castillejos vanished the mestizaje; and what had been merely shabby-genteel became frankly shabby, then dingy, then squalid.” Earlier in the essay, Joaquin rhapsodizes on the Quiapo of old, “when a Quiapo address was grand,” taking time to name the prominent families that lived there: the Ocampos on Mendoza, the Nakpils on Barbosa, and the Hidalgos in Plaza del Carmen.  

 

            He maps Quiapo into four sections: a commercial segment peopled by goldsmiths, textile marts, and Spanish goods stores; an enclave of the rich where the Aranetas, Paternos, and Legardas reside; a poor folk district with nipa huts “clustered around a tiny chapel of St. Roch”; and a portion where the mestizo class of the “shabby-genteel” type lives. The love and care of place is easy to note in the tone in which he paints a Quiapo kept in glorious order. Such love is only matched by the depth of his lament: “That fire on Calle Castillejos blazed forth the city’s ills: the influx from the provinces, the rise of rentals, the greed of the propertied, the deterioration of living standards, and the flight of the Manileño. By abandoning his old home, he doomed it to slum. By yielding his city to people with no roots in it, he suffered it to become what it is now: a city of squatters, a city of lodgers.”  

 

            For Joaquin, what will put a stop to crimes like that of Dorado is a return to rootedness: “What the city badly needs is people with roots in it, people who care about it, people who look on it as home, not a lodging house.” 

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Preview/Header Photo: BOOK COVER of Reportage on Crime, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9832018-reportage-on-crime