Shopping at the “Botica Inglesa”—The Chit System—Celebrating New Year’s Eve—Manila Cooking Arrangements—Floors and Windows—Peculiarities of the Tram-car Service—Roosters Everywhere—Italian Opera—Philippine Music—The Mercury at 74° and an Epidemic of “Grippe”—Fight Between a Bull and a Tiger—A Sorry Fiasco—Carnival Sunday.
January 7th.
My third Sunday in Manila is a cool breezy day, with fresh winds blowing down from the mountains. The weather has lately been as temperate as one could wish, and has corresponded to some of our soft spring conditions. From noon until three o’clock has usually seemed warm, but the mornings have made walking pleasant, the afternoons have given opportunities for tennis, and the evenings have hinted that an overcoat would not be amiss. One could hardly ask for any more comfortable place to live in than Manila as it stands to-day, and although sanitary appliances are most primitive, the city seems to be healthy and without noisome pestilence.
During the holiday season, just over, foreign business has been suspended and everyone socially inclined. Shopping has been in vogue, and on one of my expeditions for photographic materials I was introduced to the “Botica Inglesa,” or English chemist’s shop, which seems to be the largest variety-store in town. Here it is possible to buy anything from a glass of soda to a full-fledged lawn-mower, including all the intermediates that reach from tooth-brushes to photographic cameras.
And speaking of shopping brings mo to the “chit” system, which has been such a curse to the Far East. In making purchases, no one pays cash for anything, since the heavy Mexican dollars—which are the only currency of the islands—are too heavy to lug around in the thin suits made of white sheeting. One simply signs an “I.O.U.” for the amount of the bill in any shop that he may choose to patronize, and thinks no more about it till at the end of the month all the “chits” which bear his name are sent around for collection.
Result: one never feels as if he were spending anything until the first day of the incoming month ushers in a host of these big or little reminders. If your chits at one single shop run into large amounts, the collector generally brings along with him a coolie or a wheelbarrow with which to lug away the weight of dollars that you pour into his hands, and when two or three collectors come in together the office reminds one of a “money-’changer’s. Counterfeit money is so prevalent that one after the other of your callers bites the silver or drops it on the floor to detect lead, and to listen to the resulting sound is not to feel complimented by their opinion of your integrity. So it goes, many of the shop-keepers being swindled out of their dues by debtors who choose to skip off rather than to pay, and waking up at the end of the month to find their supposed profits existing only in the chits whose signers have skedaddled to Hong Kong or Singapore.
New Year’s Eve was celebrated with due hilarity and elaborate provisions. The club bill of fare was remarkable, and when it is realized there are no stoves in Manila, the wonder is that the cooking is so complex. A Manila stove is no more nor less than a good-sized earthen jar, shaped something like an old shoe. The vamp of the shoe represents the hearth; the opening in front, the place for putting in the small sticks of wood; and the enclosing upper, the rim on which rests the single big pot or kettle. In a well-regulated kitchen, there may be a dozen of these stoves, one for each course, and their cost being only a peseta, it is a simple matter to keep a few extra ones on hand in the bread-closet. And so, as one goes through the streets where native huts predominate, he sees a family meal being cooked in sections, and is forced to admire the complexity of the greasy dishes that are evolved from so simple a contrivance.
As the Manila cooking arrangements are rude, so I suspect are the pantry’s dish-washing opportunities. I really should hesitate to enter even our club-kitchen, for certain dim suggestions which are conveyed to the senses from spoons and forks, and certain plate surfaces that would calm troubled waters if hung from a ship’s side, all hint at unappetizing sights. All in all, the less one sees of native cooking, in transitu, the greater will one’s appetite be.
I had expected an early introduction to earthquakes, but none have occurred so far, and I am almost tempted to get reckless. Soon after my arrival I was inclined to put my chemical bottles in a box of sawdust, empty part of the water out of my pitcher, and pack my watch in cotton-wool in anticipation of some nocturnal disturbance. For the old stagers who saw the city fall to pieces back in the ’80’s deem it their duty to alarm the new arrival, and almost turn pale when a heavy dray rolls by over the cobblestones in the street near the club, or make ready to fly out-of-doors at the first suspicion of vibration.
A word or two more about the floors in Manila houses. I don’t suppose there is a soft-wood tree in the islands, and as a result one sees some very interesting hard-wood productions. The floors come under this category. Rough-hewn as they are—out of huge hand-sawed hard-wood planks—they are models. By certain processes of polishing with banana leaves and greasy rags, they are made to shine like genius itself, and give such a clean, cool air to the houses that one is compelled to regard them with admiration. In fact, there is a certain charm in Manila about many specimens of hand-work that one encounters everywhere. The stilted regularities—as our good professor used to say—of machine-made articles are frequently conspicuous by their absence, and instead one sees the inequalities, the lack of exact repetition, the informality of lines that are not just perpendicular or horizontal, all of which make up the charm of work that is handmade, that reflects the movements of a living arm and mind rather than those of a wheel or a lever.