Coming of Age in Ermita [ESSAY]

By: Jessica Bonifacio

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At 17, I dreamt of walking the streets of Manila, the capital of the Philippines. I vowed to make it mine. What better place to start my journey than the country's kilometer zero, the marble monolith in the midst of Luneta?

It was just one jeepney ride, two train rides, and two brisk walks away. I was alone except for a purse too cramped to contain my burgeoning feeling of newfound independence. Defiant, starry-eyed, and sweating out of my shirt, I satiated my need for rebellion by sandwiching myself in rush-hour train crowds and breathing in the smoke and lust of the capital - then the farthest place I've been to by myself.

Middle-aged men hurled yells as I walked the streets. On their hands were laminated posters, their mouths wide agape as they screamed, "NBI clearance!" to anybody passing by. These men would assist you with government documents for a small fee, though for how much exactly, I could only guess. I slithered swiftly out of their way.

To my right, black smoke drifted out of an apartment building, invading the air with the slightest hint of burnt wood. A small crowd gathered below, their eyes transfixed upward. It wasn't a big fire. Even so, I was surprised at the lack of morbid enthusiasm. It seemed a daily occurrence, what with the jeepneys zooming by and the men with tattered clothes pushing brown carts along, what with the sari-sari store workers holding out plastic sachets of morning coffee as if the burning apartment wasn't burning at all.

That was how the city greeted me.

Soon, I found Luneta. I greeted the monolith. Then, the museums. Oh, the museums.

Juan Luna's Spoliarium, the great oil painting of colonization, swallowed up a room in the museum and in my mind. It was my first time seeing a painting of that magnitude, but far from the last. I would keep visiting it, and all the other paintings in Manila's museums, and in fact keep hearing the NBI clearance men and the rumble of jeepneys as I took the same route over and over in a span of five years.

This is a review of sorts. A report of my coming-of-age. A lot has happened since I was 17.

First, I had my first kiss, my first rally, my first cigarette, my first job. Then, I had lasts. My last high school class, my last childhood pet, my last look at the pre-2013 peso banknotes. A pandemic took over the world. I felt love, romantic love, which held me and inspired me and tore me once it was over. Through it all, Manila was unchanged. No matter how many times I saw it, Spoliarium always stole my breath.

It was, like the city, limitless in size and yet humbly framed; secretive and in-your-face. 

I've heard it said time and again that the problems in painter Juan Luna's time are prevalent to this day. While Spoliarium depicted the oppression of 19th-century conquistadors, now exploitation is between countrymen and countrymen, the rich and the poor.

Growing up meant learning about the machinery of the world, calibrating my moral compass, and finding ways to anchor my idealism with the practicality of the everyday. I slurped up books on society and integrated myself in mass work, but was anguished to conclude that worldly issues were not solved with mere youthful passion.

You have to be somebody first. You have to have resources. That's how the world works. It's how Spoliarium inspired revolutions - and in the modern world, lost teenagers - by being skillfully, earnestly made.

The other day, I looked at the painting for the nth time. I felt directionless. I don't know where my life will go. In a way, I am one of the apathetic bystanders below the apartment fire, eyes fixed on the smoke, wondering if it will spread or die.

I pray to reclaim that sense of wonder and defiance that I had at 17, seeing Manila for the first time.

I know that I will always come back to Ermita. Sometimes wiser, other times less certain of myself. While I find my way in life, the jeepneys will keep on rolling, the museums standing still, and Juan Luna's Spoliarium, hanging in dignified silence while observers come and go.