Condemonyo

A week after I moved in to a Manila condominium building, an earthquake rocked Luzon. I was terrified and felt helpless as the walls creaked and moaned for a few seconds and then it stopped; after I few more seconds it swayed again as the building's foundation shifted and settled back to its original position. The earthquake jolted back the images I saw on television in 1968-- a few days before my birthday, when an intensity 7 earthquake hit Manila and flattened Ruby Tower, a six-story apartment-building on Doroteo Jose and Teodora Alonzo streets in Sta. Cruz, in a rubble of twisted metal and hollow blocks. The street corner where Ruby Tower once stood is just a few blocks from my condominium building.
Almost 400 of Ruby Tower's more than 600 tenants lost their lives. I remember seeing in television the badly injured survivors being extricated from the rubble in rescue efforts that lasted for more than a week. Two hundred seventy survivors were rescued but twenty-seven among the injured later died. An undisclosed number of tenants, mostly Chinese-Filipinos, were never found.

Like the Ruby Tower, my condominium looked out of place. Manila is a city where the homeless and fringe dwellers congregate and somehow condominiums doesn't fit into the dire landscape-- a slap on the face of people who are down in their luck. The sprouting of condominium buildings even in the seedier parts of the metropolis is the main reason, I think, why nobody goes to the Manila zoo anymore. These condominiums had allowed people who had more in life to observe people who had less-- much like people watching animals in a zoo, while safely perched on a balcony beyond spitting distance of those wretched creatures called the urban poor-- the great unwashed.

The Manila Zoo offered a similar visual treat in reverse-- people could observe a solitary ape in a cage. When I was a boy the Manila Zoo was always one of the stops whenever our school would have a field trip. Everybody eventually gravitated to the famous ape in a cage. People who visited in the 60s and 70s will remember this ape (He’s probably dead by now; probably shot dead by one of his unsuspecting victims). You can’t miss him. He was some sort of a celebrity then-- the main attraction. Nobody could come close without being exposed to the hazard of being inflicted with the salivary excursions of the bored primate. One time, I remember going for a closer look and sure enough the damn ape was accurately spitting to his heart’s content. I later observed, and I could be wrong, but it seemed then that it wasn’t random spitting. He was only aiming for my better-dressed classmates. Boy, this ape had issues. Or, maybe he was making a statement; whatever, but he sure did it with the chutzpah of a rock star.

There was also an island where a bunch of monkeys were allowed to roam free within the small environ of the artificial island and there was a group of juvenile delinquent misfits who threw trash to onlookers; but, their accuracy paled in comparison with the spitting ape. Juvenile delinquents in the poorer sections of the metropolis would later copy the antics of these monkeys; calling themselves gangs they would terrorize neighborhoods at night; they would throw bottles and stones at each other; attacking and retreating throughout the night causing little damage to themselves but wrecking parked cars and the display windows of commercial establishments in the neighborhood. In my brief stay in a condominium in that part of Manila I have watched quite a few episodes of this senseless destruction of property. I have witnessed a few bag and cellular phone snatches, too; a hold-up and a knifing.

The morning after the earthquake, I fancied taking a walk to the site of the Ruby Tower. I found out that the 1,293-square-meter property where the Ruby Tower once stood was donated to the survivors; a two-story building now stands in the property that houses a shop selling industrial gaskets, lubricants and heat insulation materials, a hardware, an eatery and a cultural club. On the building’s top floor is the Ruby Tower Temple, built a couple of years after the tragedy by the survivors who formed the Ruby Tower Memorial Foundation. I climbed up the stairs to the temple; but the gate leading to the temple was padlocked. The grid iron gate is rusted, it needs a new coat of paint. Nobody seems to go there anymore. Maybe people have forgotten the tragedy that happened here. As I climbed down the stairs, I felt a slight tremor; it was an aftershock.