Pasong Tamo Ext., Makati

(Bashing soul-less places. This is for Urbano dlC. Hope he notices it.)

I was walking down the street the other morning when a spiffy, yellow-painted building shone like a gemstone under the 9AM sun. It’s a modest three-story affair located almost right across the Levi’s building. It is named the Singer building. (You know the old brand name of sewing machine, now even TV sets and other home appliances, etc.) I strode past it admiringly, noting how it exuded “squeaky-clean.” After a few paces, though, I reached the old concrete path in front of Macondray Bldg., and things suddenly felt strangely familiar. Wait, I thought to myself, this is a place I used to walk on daily. That new Singer building must be the old office building that we (my employer and officemates) occupied for years!

This experience encapsulates to me my feeling for most of Makati beyond Ayala Ave. and the Ayala malls. Makati has been my workplace for years, but you could vaporize it, nuke it even, and I wouldn’t care one bit. I suppose most office workers there would feel pretty much the same if the question of “pride of place” is pursued. We’re just not part of the place, so how can we possibly have pride in it? We’re merely living robots occupying space and who happen to have weight.

We are totally free of affection when describing Makati. That’s the fault of the place itself, not the individuals who have worked and work there. To Makati, we're all mere matters who don't matter.

Of course, my mind couldn't help but rant: "I don’t know what kind of policymakers we have or what things occupy their mind, but that’s how and what we deal with from day-to-day – lack of vision, lack of pride, lack of sense of identity, lack of sense of history, lack of culture, lack of class. What we are left to confront with is our leaders’ own concept of ugliness, their vision of unlivable places and spaces. It makes you want to kill for no reason, or wish to cease and desist from existing."

Okay, that was harsh, but why can't a little sense and sensibility reign? We’ll only live once; we might as well do it in style. In a civilized world, art and architecture are important. Things like design and carefully considered details matter; they’re not a luxury but a basic human need.

I had my first job right smack in the heart of this financial district – to be exact, Salcedo St., Legaspi Village. I don't know how it looks now, but the place used to be a row of banks occupying mid-rise, bland-looking buildings, holding companies, possibly even investment and insurance houses, and two or three embassies – a typical steel, concrete and glass mix, well-maintained by janitors and guards on weekdays and practically a ghost town by the weekend.

I'd transfer from office to office pretty soon, as I hopped from job to job, but always always within Makati. The second-to-the-last address I went to along Buendia Ave. is now a neat row of call-center offices. I can write one long essay just on that one, and you can expect it to be full of angsty, alienated sentiments too.

“Soul-less concrete jungle” may be such a cliché a description, but it is an apt phrase for this place, although "jungle" is in itself a lot unfair, for the word evokes the excitement of natural wonders just as it promises the inherent danger in nature and wildlife. The artlessness of it seems deliberate, as though to say indeed, “I mean business!” The lack of subtlety, the bare-bone vulgarity, seems intentional, although at least it can’t be faulted for dishonesty.

But the hate – I can sense the hate palpably emanating from every crack in the pavement, every click of the sole of each leather shoe pounding every concrete tile, all of them saying “You don’t belong here so you better behave. Or if you think you do belong, then prove it.” The cold, no-nonsense, and literally calculating mien of the whole thing speaks to me so well.

I never need confirm the veracity of my sentiments for I simply know it to be true. Never have I realized myself to be second-class citizen in my own land than in this place, where I came face to face with the fact, as I learned to hop into this city’s party places and rub snobbish elbows. Its fashionable, good-looking, goal-oriented, highly driven, highly motivated, interesting personalities in their night club fineries and voluptuous vehicles that are parked in their sparkling gated communities, as I started accessing their password-protected and sticker-happy selves, started to open my eyes to a gasping disparity as gaping as the wound I began to nurse inside of me. Is that wound envy? Perhaps. Is it hate? Maybe. How about a communist sense of justice?

I never before entertained changing my nationality someday until I felt how much deprivation I had in the face of other people’s cup brimming with the finer things in life and not seeing any hope of them spilling over into the rest of us. They are not my people, I realized stupendously, and I’m sure they regard me in the same manner, whether they care to admit or not.

Makati’s unstylish exclusivity taught me that I’m but a second-class citizen in my own country that I figured I’d probably be better off being a second-class citizen of a foreign country. It’s more natural that way.

This sentiment is even more puzzling when I consider my insistence of the need for national pride of place and a sense of heritage, of identity, of country – something which most Filipinos are being faulted not to have. I can therefore feel acutely the sentiments those characters share in that achingly sad Turkish movie Away from Home.

It’s only now that I begin to realize that second-class citizens will never have that pride of place or sense of country. It just doesn’t make sense when their basic sense of dignity as a human being is not being met in the first place. That’s basically what is wrong with a place like this place.

Because most of us feel like we don’t belong because we're left out, and ostensibly so, the place is hopelessly a non-heritage site.

This sentimental lack of sentiment for a place that figures so prominently in my personal life is puzzling especially in the face of personal firsts – first paycheck, first termination, first promotion, etc. And yet look - it’s a place I knew I could leave any moment without a tinge of regret. To me, the place is such a snob without being stylish enough. It is a place I should resent but couldn't because that would require so much energy, a luxury I couldn’t afford to expend.

Whenever a classmate comes over from the States for a vacation, I always wonder why my batchmates skip Makati in their roster of possible venues for a night of fun. I strongly suspect the mere mention of the place evokes for them a kind of unattainability that embarrasses, that deflates the ego somewhat. I hope I am wrong, and that I am just being a sorry, negativistic, overly critical blob that occupies space and has weight.