Photo courtesy of Emmie Abadilla, FB
July 25, 2024: Because of Typhoon Gaeimi (or Carina in the Philippines), Manila is flooded. It is one of the worst floods, with several major roads chest-high with floodwaters.
FLOODED
Rogelio Cruz
Manila was strange. It yielded not the usual parallel city streets and consecutively-numbered blocks, but triangles, circles, and other haphazard spaces that brushed at the ends of one’s nerves pleasantly. Fritz suspected that the original plan, a century ago, was affluence: sparse black-and-gray vehicles trudging narrow roads on a damp and drowsy Sunday morning, open-air orchestras, an aviary, the Sky Room. The skeleton of it was still there; but its once white and pastel flesh was now bloated with the sweet-rotten color and smell of poverty, of phlegm and urine in the open gutters. The dainty roads now proved to be traffic hell; the corner statues and whores were curses to each other — because of one, the other had too little space. Worst of all, when the rain struck it blind and flushed all the filth the cavities of its dying buildings never ran out of, the city drowned in a sick fluid the color of coffee and milk.
Fritz and Jan were caught in the flashflood. When they left Rizal Memorial after watching the basketball tournament, it was sunny and humid; then the sun died like a lighted match thrown into a ditch, and the slick, damp, rueful silver of rain clouds drained everything of all their color. The view from their windshield shifted quick as the next slide on a carousel, with a blinding white sheet of rain the intermediate frame: the next thing Jan knew, he was keeping his foot on the gas so the water wouldn’t get into the muffler as they trudged Rizal Avenue. Along its deepest portion they even saw a yellow kayak speeding past them. The chaos of the city and the chaos of the weather were one. It signified the nearing of the end, they thought, when God just might opt to destroy this pathetic place, and start all over again.
They ended up at Gov. Forbes. It was strangled with cars, and they didn’t move for an hour and a half. Jan decided to create a counterflow. He wedged his car out sharply from the gridlock and sped down the opposite lane, but to no avail: the intersection was impossible to pass, and he had nowhere else to go. He retreated.
This lane of Gov. Forbes was empty. It was the only road that was passable at all; and though it led away from Jan’s and Fritz’s destination, and to unlit, stranger parts of the city, it gave, especially if one did not stare out too far, the illusion that it was the way home. For a moment, Jan seemed to have given in to this illusion: he sped down the lane, until he reached the end of the paved part. Then he hesitated as he realized they were about to enter a colony of shanties, that seemed to be slowly sinking into mud, lighted only by whatever threads of blue moonlight could escape from the dense sky.
