The bland proprietor will greet you with a smile, and offer you the customary cigarette. And if the prices quoted are unsatisfactory, they are at least elastic and are easily adjusted for a personal friend. Along the shelf the opium-scented line of drygoods is available, while portraits of the saints and Neustra Señorita del Rosario, whose conical skirt conceals the little children of the Church, hang from the wall. Suspended from the ceiling are innumerable hanging lamps with green tin shades. A line of fancy handkerchiefs, with Dewey’s portrait and the Stars and Stripes embroidered in the corners, is displayed on wires stretched overhead across the store. Bolo blades, chocolate-boilers, rice-pots, water-jars, and crazy looking-glasses are disposed around, while in the glass case almost anything from a bone collar-button to a musical clock is likely to be found. Santiago would be glad to have you open an account here and, unlike the Filipino, he will never trouble you about your bill.
The market street is lined with nipa booths, where señoritas play at keeping shop, presiding over the army of unattractive articles exposed for sale. Upon a rack the cans of salmon are drawn up in a battalion, a detachment of ex-whisky bottles filled with kerosene or tanduay, bringing up the rear. Certain stock articles may be invariably found at these tiendas,—boxes of matches, balls of cotton thread, bananas, buya, eggs and cigarettes, and the inevitable brimming glass of tuba, stained a dark-red color from the frequent applications of the betel-chewing mouth.
Although the stream of commerce flows in a small way where the almighty ’suca duco is the medium of exchange, gossip is circulated freely; for without the telegraph or telephone, news travels fast in Filipinia. The withered hag, her scanty raiment scarcely covering her bony limbs, squatting upon the counter in the midst of guinimos, bananas, and dried fish, and spitting a red pool of betel-juice, will chatter the day long with the señora in the booth across the street. The purchaser should not feel delicate at seeing her bare feet in contact with the spiced bread that he means to buy, nor at the swarms of flies around the reeking mound of guinimos scraped up in dirty wooden bowls, and left in the direct rays of the sun.
Dogs, pigs, chickens, and children tumble in the dust. Dejected Filipino ponies, tethered to the shacks, are waiting for their masters to exhaust the tuba market. Down the lane a panting carabao, with a whole family clinging to its back, is slowly coming into town. Another, covered with the dust of travel, laden with bananas, hemp, and copra from a distant barrio, is being driven by a fellow in a nipa hat, straddling the heavy load. A mountain girl, bareheaded, carrying a parasol, comes loping in to the mercado on a skinny pony saddled with a red, upholstered silla, with a rattan back and foot-rest, cinched with twisted hemp.
At night the market-place is lighted up by tiny rush lights, burning cocoanut-oil or petrolia. Here, on a pleasant evening, to the lazy strumming of guitars, the village population promenades, young men in white holding each other’s hands, and blowing out a cloud of cigarette smoke; señoritas, in their cheap red dresses, shuffling hopelessly along the road. One of the local characters is entertaining a street-corner audience with a droll song, while the town-crier, with his escort of municipal police, announces by the beating of a drum that a bandilla from the presidente is about to be pronounced.
Here you will find the Filipino in his natural and most playful mood, as easily delighted as a child. A crowd was always gathered round the tuba depot at the head of the mercado, where the agile climbers brought the beverage in wooden buckets from the tops of copra-trees. A comical old fellow, Pedro Pocpotoc (a name derived from chicken language), used to live here, and on moonlight nights, planting his fat feet on the window-sill, like a droll caricature of Nero, he would sing Visayan songs to the accompaniment of a cheap violin. A talkative old baker lived a short way down the street with his three daughters. They were always busy pounding rice in wooden mortars with long poles, thus making rice-flour, which they baked in clean banana-leaves and sweetened with brown sugar molded in the shells of cocoanuts.
Sometimes a Moro boat would drop into the bay, and the strange-looking savages in their tight-fitting, gaudy clothes would file through town with spices, bark, and cloth for sale. From Bohol came the curious thatched bancas, with their grass sails and bamboo outriggers, with cargoes of pottery, woven hats, bohoka, and rattan. On the fiesta days, Subanos from the mountains brought in strips of dried tobacco, ready to be rolled up into long cigars, camotes, coffee-berries, chocolate, and eggs, and squatted at the entrance to the cockpit in an improvised mercado with the people from the shore, who offered clams and guinimos for sale.
And once a month the town would be awakened by the siren whistle of the little hemp-boat from Cebu. This whistle was the signal for the small boys to extract the reluctant carabao from the cool, sticky wallow, and yoke him to the creaking bamboo cart. Then from the storehouses the fragrant picos of hemp would be piled on, and the longsuffering beast of burden, aided and abetted by a rope run through his nose, would haul the load down to the beach. While naked laborers were toiling with the cargo, carrying it upon their shoulders through the surf, the Spanish captain and the mate, with rakishly-tilted Tam o’Shanter caps, would light their cigarettes, stroll over to Ramon’s warehouse where the hemp was being weighed, and, seated on sour-smelling sacks of copra, chat with old Ramon, partaking later of a dinner of balenciona, chicken and red-peppers, cheese and guava.
Much of the village life centers around the river. Here in the early morning come the girls and women wrapped in robes of red and yellow stripes, and with their hair unbound. In family parties the whole village takes a morning bath, the young men poising their athletic bodies on an overhanging bank and plunging down into the cool depths below, the children splashing in the shallow water, and the women breast-deep in the stream, washing their long hair.
