A Street in Cebu City

by Roger B Rueda

It’s been almost ten years since I ended up in Colon Street—recognised as the oldest street in the Philippines and named for Cristobal Colon (Christopher Columbus). It is the heart of downtown Cebu, a glitzy area by night lined with cinemas, restaurants, department stores, and other business establishments. Chance directed me there—or to some extent, not so much chance as intemperance. The intemperance of the streets that always seizes me in Cebu City. At the time I came upon the street, I was spending two weeks wholly alone in Cebu and would amble for several hours each day through the quarters. It was an enthralment that I couldn’t repudiate to go along with. Its control is best attested by the reality that I felt it to be duplicity if I once remained in my hotel room during waking hours or let go nightfall to the theatre. Even the occasional meetings with blokes seemed to me like a negligence of duty, an imprudent disturbance from the streets, which claimed me far more impressively than did any individual blokes. I enjoyed them blindly and let them devour me, and though I always returned home spent from the gluts, nothing kept me from yielding to my fervour the next day. On the contrary: in the rear the vapour spread round me by increasing overtiredness, the streets gestured me all the more entrancingly.

There are streets in all cities. But while to an unusual place they consist of sidewalks, rows of houses, and to some extent bowed tar macadam surfaces, in Cebu they flout breakdown into distinct elements. Whatever they may be—tapered ravines that run into the sky, the dried-out courses of rivers and blooming valleys of stone—their components are interconnected like the limbs of living things. A lot the side walls and cobblestones gush unnoticeably together, and before he knows what’s happening the fantasist moves, as if on level ground, up vertical walls to the rooftops and farther, ever farther into the thicket of chimneys. I roamed about on these routes and must have awakened in every onlooker the impression of an aimless stroller. And yet, rigorously speaking, I was not aimless. I believed that I had a purpose, but to my hard luck I’d forgotten it. I felt like someone who searches his recollection for a word that burns on his lips, but he cannot find it. Filled with the longing to finally reach the place where what I’d forgotten would come back to me, I could not pass the smallest side street without entering it and turning the corner at its end.

The street that I want to portray is in a grassroots quarter. Here I must add that, though I proceeded on my walks without any option, I even so randomly favoured the poorer districts. Not that the areas where glamour, wealth, and pleasure reside lack the charms that pull towards me. They too are elaborate like archaic things of use that have become beyond my understanding; they are nested one within another and, bordering on an unfamiliar script, scarcely intelligible. But there where low officials, tradesmen, and numerous old people dwell, the houses crowd together more messily, repulsively, and thickly, smells and fumes venture forth and their corporeal outlines overlay the visible forms. All these streets are about to rouse into stroke; disordered hoi polloi that will soon either disband or rally together. And at times it’s as if a drum roll were sounding in the expanse.

I discovered the street on an early afternoon when I’d thought I was approaching the dead end of an alley that was bordered on one side by a tall, unshapely suburban theatre. The theatre was closed and looked abandoned, as if plays were no longer put on there. Even before I squeezed my way to the end of the alley, I noticed that it wasn’t a dead end at all, but rather met another little alley, which passed behind the theatre. The street ran directly into the middle of the theatre’s whitewashed, windowless back wall. It was dead straight, only a few minutes long and relatively wide. As I only then became aware, I had in a way ambushed it from behind; for at its end opposite the theatre, it opened without any games of hide-and-seek onto a lively through street.

I wanted to cross forthwith the narrow stretch that separated me from the through street. But then it happened: just as I peeled myself away from the excessively high wall of the theatre, I found it difficult to go on, and I sensed that unseen nets were holding me. The street on which I found myself did not leave me go of. At a slight distance buses rattled by, they emerged translucent and then vanished as if on a far shoreline that I could not get to. I tried to realise my situation. It was still before three o’clock, and only infrequent passersby traversed the street.

Though paralysed in my autonomy of movement, I approached a hotel. Its door, a commonplace hush-hush way in, was cordoned; its windows, behind which there were for the most part no curtains, resembled toothless orifices. Next to the bell pull hung an honouring inscription on which blurred letters indicated that the hotel was not accessible from here but rather from the through street round the corner. Palpably no one had taken notice of the sign for a long time, for the full house gave an isolated, indeed ramshackle inkling. As my eyes glided from its frontage to the others, I abruptly became sentient that I was being observed. From the top-floor windows of several houses young blokes in shirtsleeves looked down at me. They didn’t say a word, just kept staring at me. An appalling power emanated from their mere presence, and I regarded it almost as a certainty that it was they who fettered me. The way they stood there like a ghost and insensibly, they seemed to have been hatched from the houses themselves. At any moment they could have stretched their tentacles toward me and pulled me into their rooms.

I strained with desperate effort toward the end of the street. The blokes must be men on the make; I consoled myself, and persuaded myself that one of them had nodded to me. Calmed a bit, I wanted to stride onward—then I was commanded to cut short. Not directly by the young blokes and not in words at all, but rather through a living image. As if in punishment for my lack of care, it stood in my way. I saw: a young bloke sits on a chair in the middle of a room. The room is a hotel room with open windows. It contains a bed that has been used, a washstand, and a wardrobe. The objects stand as if rooted to the spot, and stare at me insistently, as if they were painted over clearly. At the young blokes’ feet crouches an open, half-packed travel case, into which laundry must have been hurriedly stuffed.

Surrounded by fittings, the sitter rests his head in his hands. The floor of the room cannot be higher than the asphalt road. I stand before the window, which has long since disappeared, but the young bloke with the uncombed hair pays me no more heed than he does his suitcase. For him nothing is there, he sits completely alone on his small chair in emptiness. He is fretful; it is fright that paralyses him….

How I managed to break out into the thoroughfare, I no longer know. It’s enough that I found myself on it; amongst butchers’ stalls, clothing displays, and cheap household effects in front of mirrors. To the right a street opened up that shot away like an arrow and curved like a hotel sign. I had to get to know it at all costs. As I sank into the familiar tumult, the image of the young bloke in the hotel room continued to accompany me. In hindsight I thought it probable that the young bloke was a criminal who sought refuge from his pursuers in that cramped room. The hotel is a lair, I said to myself. But then how could the pane remain open? A car tyre exploded nearby me, and I felt myself becoming all the time more confused. Amidst the noise it struck me that perhaps the whole street served as a hidey-hole. Only its ease of access testified against this. Or did it in due course not subsist at all, and the young blokes up above as well as the bowels of the hotel were apparitions that could be explained by my own state? The arrow street sucked me in and I followed its curve. It twisted and turned, vehicles thundered by, facades and gates conveyed me along. All of a sudden—more than an hour might have elapsed—I stood back at the way in to the street.

Now I saw it from the reverse direction. The street was the wonderful locality to visit. Punters clogged it up as they rummaged round for good worth for their cash. It was a one-stop shopping boulevard where people could splash out on everything they felt like and had to. It was a place where relaxation and merchandise were collective: fashion jewellery, ready-to-wear, shoes, bags, amongst others.

As often as I’ve been in Cebu since, I have never again ventured near the street. By the by, there are in all the diverse city districts many other streets with which I connect finicky memories. Every distinct one of them has its own odour and its own past. And that past is not times of yore, but lives on, as if it were of the present. Perhaps this arises from the fact that, in opposition, in Cebu, the best apple in the Philippines, the present has the flicker of the past. Even as one strolls through the material streets, they are already outlying like memories in which realism mingles with the multistoried vision of it, and garbage and stars congregate.