If my hometown would be a woman, it would be a spinster. A forty-something spinster who was once wrapped in a crocheted shawl, letting her afternoon pass by reading paperback Tagalog romance prose. But this lady has started to hang her shawl in her aparador, and has settled for a blouse and skirt ensemble which she ordered from a Natasha lady. She has also gone beyond her capiz windows and attended parties with her friends. She is Marilao, my hometown.
Stroll through Baranggay Poblacion and one could see that the Spanish colonial pueblo structure of community has not faded yet. Surrounded by the parish church, two schools, and the palengke, is the town plaza. It serves as no more than a generous car parking space every Sunday and a basketball court for the young trabahadors in the palengke every afternoon. It is only during miting de avances and the town fiesta in May when the town plaza is given the chance to veer away, for a while, from its drab, everyday purpose.
It has been this way since I was six, when I went to the nearby school and still went to church. My kindergarten graduation rites were even held in it. But the St. Michael School of Marilao has moved to another baranggay; Mother Therese Kindergarten Learning Center and the Little Angels Academy, which now occupies St. Michael’s building, have been holding their graduation rites in fancy swimming resorts.
Dried acacia leaves would be forever dragged by the wind on the town plaza’s white ground, as Jesus’ statue, his paint chipping off, would sorrowfully look on.
Just a few strides from the town plaza area the mansions – monuments of wealth of the illustrious clans in Marilao, the Gonzales and the Villaricas.
The Gonzales’ mansion is sort of a mystery to me. Erected in the middle of a vast green lawn is a pearl-colored American colonial two-storey building. It has large windows framed in Baroque curlicues. White curtains limit the outsiders’ vision to its façade only – separating the Gonzales from the rest of the town.
I have been passing by this mansion for about my entire life but I have never seen anyone moving around the house. The statue of the mother deer and her foal has never moved, the mother always feeding her young with her mouth. But the vastness of the yard is ever maintained by an unseen gardener, without any sign of grass overgrowth. The cobbled path that cuts through the greenery and leads to the building itself is also ever clean and distinct.
Of all mansions that I’ve seen, the Gonzales’ mansion has the smallest gate, standing just up to my chest. Maybe no chests of gold bars are hidden somewhere in the house; thus, nothing to put up a great gate for. Or a smaller gate could be a sort of a deception, a ploy to divert would-be thieves’ interest away. Hmm…
The Villarica’s mansion, located on the street opposite the Gonzales’, always smells of fresh paint. But the Old World charm is never overwhelmed by the smell. The perfect-triangle attic, the ornate awnings, the capiz windows look untouched by carpenters. I am not sure which between the two mansion is the bigger one, but the Villarica’s mansion seem to loom over the whole block. Instead of an agora of a green lawn, a cement garage separates the road, the nearness providing an illusion of size. Shiny Pajeros are parked in the garage day and night, their surfaces reflecting the glow of Christmas lights that hang eternally from the acacia trees.
My family used to live in another old house on the same side of the street (Our house, unlike the Viallarica’s, which is Old World, was Old, Old, Old World – the termites that thrived everywhere would make one think that the posts were all already hollow inside.). The year I went to kindergarten, the Villaricas opened a sari-sari store beside their wrought-iron gate. It might be generally classified as a sari-sari store but it was no the typical one where the some goodies hang from the cobwebbed ceiling, the candies are in glass jars with rusty lids, and tended by white-haired crone (‘Aling Nena’?). Behind transparent fiberglass cabinets, locally-made goods were displayed together with imported ones – Hershey’s chocolate bars, Japanese instant noodles, coffee, preserved fruits – which names barely pronounceable by the naitve tongue hint their prices.
The store did not only sell Halls and Cloud-9, but also gummi bears, jelly worms, and lollipops that fit entirely inside one’s mouth. The red, yellow, and candy earthworms were snugly coiled around each other’s bodies in the transparent fiberglass boxes. It was the time when the gummi candies were still new in the market. I had my first taste of a gummi candy (a gummi bear, because Mama irked at the sight of gummi worms) from the Villarica’s store.
Some Billiken-big, red-faced men tended the store. I didn’t know how many those men really were, because one looked similarly like the others. One man would be flocked around by children as he scoops gummi candies. I would know later that they were the Villarica brothers, who are all lawyers.
The Villarica mansion could be more inviting than the Gonzales mansion, but still, both are mansions. No matter how big or small and how often opened those gates are, they only let in the affluent, commonly snobbish members of their clans. Passersby headed to the church and to the palengke could only stare with amazement, envy, horror, delight, or whatever emotion these Marileño aristocracy, just made tangible in wood and stone, invoke.
But not the SM City mall. It only invokes delight, delight, and delight. The fluid, blue-and-white emblem of Henry Sy’s empire smiles and beckons to everyone as he or she nears Baranggay Lias. Everybody is welcome inside the magnificent box of a thousand and one delights – people from Marilao and even the neighboring towns, the palengke boys, the Villaricas, and even the Gonzales.
When the mall first opened in November 2003, not only the town of Marilao but the whole province of Bulacan as well, seemed to rejoice, as if the Lord had come even before the His official birthday next month. The SM mall had just opened for a couple of hours when some of my classmates and I arrived, but the beige tiled floor had been black with a countless number of muddy footprints.
For the first time in my life as a Marileño, I witnessed how my hometown became all agog of something at once. Everyone was in a phenomenal commotion, as if freed from the chains of the town’s colonial past that dragged it behind for so long. As fireworks spidered their way across the sky on the night of SM City Marilao’s grand opening, under the Marileño’s chin-up admiration, changes also hinted to come, like more jobs for the people, and even increased revenues.
SM City Marilao has just been in operation for barely a couple of years but this edifice of consumerism has become, to Marileños, what the Angkor Wat is to Cambodians. The mall as the reference of point of direction for the locals reveals that this building has claimed a niche in the Marileño psyche. Jeepney drivers have posted “SM Marilao” signboards in addition to the ones for Meycauayan. When someone asks, “Saan ba ‘yung (insert name of establishment here)?”, another would answer, “Ay, doon sa ano, malapit lang ‘yun sa SM.”
Entering the Marilao mall is like passing through Alice’s looking glass to another dimension. One’s worries are and other sorts of uncertain feelings instantly vanish, drowned by the space and height of the structure, air-conditioned atmosphere, soft light from floodlit glass displays and neon signs, pop music from hidden loud speakers, and mouth watering scents from the bakery and food court. No wonder, youth crowd the mall every Friday, still clad in their uniforms, attracted to the celebration of the elements within. Am I in a mall, or in a school building, one silently wonders on a Friday afternoon.
After a night of partying with friends, Lady Marilao goes home, happy, but her body aching from all those dancing and; dizzy because of all the lights, sounds, and drinks. She immediately stretches her back on her rocking chair by the window. The wind has become cold so she fetches her crocheted shawl from her antique aparador. Shawl over her Natasha blouse, she lulls herself to sleep by continuing her reading of the paperback Tagalog romance prose.
She is home at last.
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