|
On to BacolodSep 9, 2009
|
|
Street vendor in the market
Bananamazing
Tricycles await a fare
| Go for a walk around the market near my hotel, shopping for images. An old woman in rags just covering her chest and hips, like Raquel Welch after ten years of crack abuse stands at the end of one the streets, rambling at the world. Grab some pastries and wander down through streets so lined with trees and greenery it almost feels like the roads are going through forests, arriving at one of the ancestral homes which has been restored and opened as a museum. A pair of shallow steps lead up to the front door and into the vestibule, flanked by reception rooms, carved wooden furniture, coffee tables draped with fine petit point lace, and pianos. Fading sepia photographs of balls, street parades, families, tell of the glory days of Silay. Up the twin staircase into the sala is another more private receiving area, with bedrooms on either side, all with connecting doors topped with decorative air vents to allow air and conversation to flow. Wood and wicker furniture, one table supporting an old hand cranked gramophone fills this sala, while framed embroidery, pictures of Susan Magalona 'The Flower of the Visayas' and other less beautiful and long forgotten women sit in their frames on the light blue wooden walls. An oil portrait of Victor Leopold Gaston Y Fernandez, the patriarch and eldest son of the French founder of this dynasty, gazes benignly from over the staircase. Catch sight of myself in one of the mirrors in the roped off bedrooms, and feel a bit of a sweaty slob in my flip flops, shorts and hemp top amidst all this genteelness. The whole place is saturated with a sense of the Negronese belle époque, the only sound that of the handyman sweeping downstairs. Moving into the dining area and beyond that the kitchen, one can almost hear the bustle and the hum of the domestics as they cook, wash and clean for the well-to-do, the clink of wine glasses and laughter filtered by the thin white curtain hanging over the doorway that separates them from the dining table and sala. I get so carried away imagining the good old days in my head, that when one of the women who help keep this place in shape walks in, I almost jump out of my can. After looking over another ancestral house, which was pretty much the same save for a curious collection of Ken and Barbie dolls dressed up as various characters in Filipino history, catch a jeepney to Bacolod, the capital of this half of Negros. An old lady besides me starts to talk about an Irish priest who she thinks is having dialysis and over and over again asks if he will live, if he needs a transplant and where can he get one from, and I make the same reassuring replies over and over too (i.e. he's fucked) as she tightly grips my forearm with her bony hands. Check into the cheap and slightly cheerful Pension Bacolod and chill out before changing; meant to be meeting three of the girls from Driftwood in Sugar Beach tonight, but not too optimistic it'll happen; in any case, off to Guimaras Island tomorrow |
Advertisement 
|
