The Eye Of The Fish. Luis H. Francia

official history lay another history—one that might have been shoved aside but that was nevertheless ineradicable. Still, the Baguio art movement was not about atavistic impulses. It was more of a reckoning, a reconfiguration, even reassessment, of the modern Filipino as she/he is situated: influenced (some would say, burdened) by a geography and a history that is like no other, and by the ambivalent baggage of a colonial past side by side

      with modernist sensibilities and a tribal, communal self.

      This collective of artists had embarked on rediscovering—and reinterpreting—home, one of the more rewarding if difficult voyages at the end of the millennium. But first they had to reclaim themselves from the anonymous stew into which history had flung them. This could be and often was a tedious process. In the works of the Baguio artists, however, the process metamorphosed into a voyage that doubled back onto itself: by moving back, it moved forward. A voyage, then, of delicious irony.

      IN VIGAN, A LOWLAND COASTAL CITY flanked by the South China Sea on the west and the Cordilleras on the east and less than two hours’ drive north of Baguio, the idea of history was palpably dif-ferent. Founded in the late sixteenth century by a twenty-two-year-old conquistador Juan de Salcedo, grandson of another conquistador, Miguel de Legazpi (who initiated the construction of Intramuros, the Walled City of Manila, from the ashes of the original Muslim settlement), Vigan quickly became an important entrepot; by the end of the eighteenth century, it was the ecclesiastical and political capital of Northern Luzon. With its plazas, cobblestoned streets, and Antillean homes, horse-drawn rigs, or calesas, still plying its streets, Vigan is even now the kind of place that has managed to keep its Spanish-era ghosts alive.

      The last time I was in Vigan, parts of the Mestizo Quarter, where wealthy merchants and artisans from another era had built their pied à terres, had been retouched to look like the dusty streets of some Mexican village for Born on the Fourth of July, Oliver Stone’s film. With our jeans, shades, and pony-tailed hair, the local merchants on Crisologo Street had mistaken a friend and me for members of the film crew. The odors of New York must still have been on us, lending us a gringo aura. Here was the obvious irony of one Third World country being made to look like another. But in this particular transformation, history was also being revisited, for Spain had administered Las Islas Filipinas through Mexico.

      There was no question that the homes in the quarter possessed a history. Constructed of hardwood, brick, stone, and plaster, they had a reassuring solidity and warmth. The family lived and entertained on the upper floor, and the kitchen usually opened up onto an azotea, a terrace at the rear that overlooked the garden. On the ground floor was space enough for a carriage and its horses to enter through wide portals, and where sacks of rice, sugar, flour, and salt were stored. A grand staircase connecting the two floors, the two worlds, had a mezzanine landing where visitors of inferior social status were made to wait before someone upstairs deigned to descend and talk to them.

      The homes also had the kind of windows I have always loved, sliding panels made of dark wood and small, square panes of motherof-pearl. Beneath the sill were smaller panels that could slide open, allowing children to view the street below, protected from falling by elaborate wooden grillwork. These two vantage points, the adult’s and the child’s, looked out on two different worlds, and were separated more by innocence than distance.

      It is easy to believe in ghosts, sitting by the window in the living room of Louis Acosta, a friend from university, whose ancestral home is a turn-of-the-century residence in the Mestizo Quarter. Across the road, an old woman, also by the window of her home, is reading a book. In her stillness, in her air of concentration, and especially in the old-fashioned garb she is wearing, she seems like a living daguerrotype, an archetype of the genteel, upper-class, stay-at-home Christian Filipina of a bygone era. In fact, according to Louie, she was a retired schoolteacher who sat by her window every morning to read. That we seemed to be intruding with our gaze didn’t seem to bother her. A note-perfect cameo, she was perfectly still, except when she occasionally turned the page of what I assumed was a serious work.

      She may very well have been reading pulp fiction, a dime-store romance, Danielle Steele or Judith Krantz, getting turned on by a bodice ripper. Or by a heavy postmodernist tome. Was that Lacan in hand? Or Foucault? It was all too easy to deny the inhabitants of the Mestizo Quarter any sign of modernity, and to frame them solely in the eye of a simplifying nostalgia. The visitor could take comfort from the sight of them. Here was proof of a past, of a history that was well-known and suggested heft. Comforted, the visitor could leave, return to a world where this history was routinely ignored and cheerfully assist in its conversion into a repository of uncritical assumptions.

      Most of the Mestizo Quarter, and Vigan, would have been razed to the ground by the Japanese during World War II once American forces advanced on the city had not the Japanese commander married a Filipina and fathered a daughter. Before the Japanese withdrew, the commander asked the parish priest to take care of the woman and their child. The priest replied that if Vigan were burned down, he couldn’t guarantee that the angry residents would not harm them. The threat worked, and the Japanese left without torching the city.

      As it is, these charming buildings face more implacable enemies: time and pollution. So many are crumbling; some attempts at restoration have been made, but this is a tricky business. Louie, who loves this town and knows as much about its past as any schooled historian, is disappointed by the ersatz nature of much of the restoration work, fueled largely by the desire to tap into a potentially lucrative tourist market, rather than any impulse towards a rediscovery or reinvigoration of the present through the past.

      Grand plans have been proposed that would require shopkeepers and their staffs working in the quarter to wear colonial-period clothing, prohibit vehicular traffic except for calesas, and use gas lamps instead of electric lights. The idea is to turn Vigan into a kind of colonial Williamsburg—a notion Louie finds counterproductive, false. He said the Mestizo Quarter is still very much alive, still very much in the present, with families still living there, many of whom are descendants of the quarter’s original inhabitants. Louie makes it clear that to view the quarter as a relic, as only a well of antiquated notions, would be a mistake. It would reduce its culture and history to an assemblage of artifacts, the past packaged for the outsider’s gaze, ignorant both of the ghosts that trod its streets and the flesh-and-blood residents they shadowed.

      But Louie and other like-minded residents may have been engaged in a losing battle against the impulse to commodify culture, a “distortion” of the past in a quest for profits. Part of the problem is the sluggish economy. Those without land to till, or a business, or a job in government or tourism, seek other kinds of livelihood. A few turn to one of Vigan’s shadowier businesses, the unlicensed manufacture of handguns. No one knows when this illicit trade began, only that it has been around for as long as anyone can remember. In the panday, or blacksmith, district not far from the Mestizo Quarter, I look in on someone’s cement backyard, one of many, not-so-clandestine workshops that manufacture handguns known as paltiks, low-priced weapons easily available to those who can’t afford imports. Three young men busy themselves with the tools of their trade: vises, files, hammers, a small furnace with a blower, copper wire. Carlos, a twenty-one-year-old paltik maker, started six months ago, learning how to make six-shot .38 caliber pistols with an effective range of 100 meters that sell for P1500, or about $80. Carlos can also craft a single-shot rifle, which goes for a cheap P700. He hopes to learn how to make a 12-gauge shotgun, priced at P4000. If asked to, the workshop can even turn out ersatz 9mm Uzi submachine guns—though anyone would be foolish to order, much less use, one of those. Currently, Carlos earns on the average P400 per week, not a great deal, but he hopes to make more as he gets better.

      Most of the buyers are young men, among them mercantile-minded cops who purchase by the bulk and then resell. As to where the buyers get their bullets, Carlos laughs. “You can buy them from the police or from soldiers.” Carlos’s boss and mentor is a short, pudgy cheerful thirty-three-year-old man. The maestro says paltik manufacture is a family tradition—his father and uncles were in the business. He gestures at the area. “We’ve been making guns around here for twenty-five years now.” Town officials and the military provincial commander know about the business “but they don’t