Zamboanga The Southbound City of Iceberg Part I

I went to the barbershop and had my third son’s hair cut. For a two-year old kid, he seem to be fairly behaved unlike his two older brothers whom I had wrestle towards the nearby neighborhood barbershop every other time, not unlike pulling hands of kids towards the dentist’s clinic. Yuri cried a little but that was near the end of his grooming session, and so it wasnt that bad at all.

After the hair event, I took Yuri for a round of the city in our chugging but ever-reliable Willy’s vehicle. My kids love this drive around town even if we do not have any particular destination in mind.

The streets were clear and it was a little grand to swoop down the half-empty streets of downtown Zamboanga. Driving on Sundays gives you a feeling of some invincibility that at certain points, you would believe you alone possess the city roads. In normal days, I would cringe seeing vehicles of all sort honky-tonkying with their horns as smog are spurted all over. The traffic in our city is sometimes monstrous that you wonder if the city government could afford to put up overpasses and skyways from one end of the land to another.

In Sundays, one becomes the king of the road and you wish the streets of Zamboanga would remain that way for a long, long time.

I had described Zamboanga as “The Southbound City of Iceberg” once before in a lost and unpublished short story. I did not really know what prod me to coin that term. If memory serves me, I reckoned then that a beast was living beneath the city streets, creeping amidst the canals and waterways, urging to take in victims once the proper time is at hand. Like the ill-famed ship Titanic, the city would someday be like a huge ship that would collide with its own iceberg, and downward it goes towards its own perdition. People are like ships that whomsoever collides with a huge floating ice; he or she would make a shipwreck of his or her own life.

No such thing actually occurs. The beast is never there and Zamboanga is safe from any iceberg. I use to be a dead fanatic for Stephen King’s thrillers that I almost never spared this city from being doomed by some stupid monster living underneath the terrain---if only in my mind.

Zamboanga has grown by leaps and bounds through the recent decade. Ten years ago or so, there were only about two public markets in this town; one is the Main Public Market near the Plaza Pershing, the main public park where a lot of the city inhabitants go for a stroll, and one in Sta. Cruz, a more modern edifice when it was first constructed but had somehow deteoriated through the past years (not that it became so bad but for one it is not as good and clean as it had been before). Since then, flea markets sprouted here, there and everywhere that for every barangay is a flourishing wet market with all sorts of fresh commodities available from highly-price lapu-lapus to pork meat. It left me wondering how in the past, the Main Public Market catered to almost all the inhabitants of the city. When I used to go there in the past, people would bump unto each other so often as they do their marketing each afternoon because there were just a lot of them buying their daily food all at the same place. It was what we say, the real “market scene” with children selling plastic bags hollering and bugging every person intending to buy as fish vendors hawk their goods by using booming voices that you could think they were using the aid of megaphones instead of their pure human voices. These days, that kind of overcrowding is a thing of the past—for good it seems.

I used to accompany my grandfather to the Main Public Market when I was a little kid. Each week, he buys sweepstake tickets from the same store every time that the Chinese storeowner knew him almost personally. That was the first and only Chinese man that I ever knew who could talk the “samal” dialect, the language of our tribe. The store owner seem to be so good to my grandpa but even at that very early age (I was about eight or nine years old then) I had reckoned then that storeowners are always good to those who patronizes them.

From the Chinese store, we would take some refreshment---he with steaming brewed coffee while I wallowed with all-too-milky halo-halo. The smell of brewed coffee now would always remind me of the old public market and such aroma is often therapeutic that at times I drink brewed coffee just for the smell of it. The building where the coffee was served is still standing now (I had gone by there about a couple months ago), but it is now deserted and empty like an old warehouse. No, rather the building is not as deserted and empty but its use has been greatly modified now. The second floor is entirely abandoned but the ground floor is where the dried fish vendors store and display their goods. Whenever I enter that building in the past, some images races through my mind, especially every time grandpa and me would climb the wide concrete stairways to the second floor. They are images of temples and high-ceilinged ancient buildings. I could not forget these things for the images are etched in my mind so well. One of these days, I may visit the old public market if only to reaffirm these “lasting” images. Perhaps, some occurrences of déjà vu are more than what they are.