I wonder if the priests ever counted the mushrooming motels in their backyard and if they ever minded at all. Did they perhaps look up at heaven with resignation? Did they say, oh, Lord, forgive the Pinoy who is as horny as he is religious, he would go to church with his girlfriend and afterwards patronize the motel? On the way out, would the couples pick out a bottle of "pampa-regla" to be sure no accidents happen and perhaps utter a prayer for forgiveness in the shadow of the church?

Right across the church along Quezon Boulevard, a disco-bar has entertained generations of menfolk with the acrobatic numbers and flesh exposure of its go-go girls. At nighttime, the little restaurants along the boulevard turn to girlie karaoke joints filled with the laboring classes. Police sub-stations may be found in front and at the back of this row.

And, ah, the odor of Quiapo is unchanging. Its backstreets reek of varied flavors of rot and garbage and as one nears the church, this mingles with the distinct smell of decaying flowers.  In the heat and rain, the miasma blooms.

Quiapo remains a waystation of the teeming masses in the metropolis, much more than Cubao or Ayala. We are lured by the ecclesiastical appeal, the bargains of flowers, de latas and fruits cheaper by the dozen, the photo supplies at Ylaya and the electronic stuff of Raon, the cardreaders and voodoo thingies, the commuter rides going everywhere. We come from work, school, bus and rail stations from elsewhere, and navigate through the maze of sellers and buyers. It is, of course, a place where visual stereotypes of the C-D-E market segments abound and it would not be farfteched to say it is unabashedly so.

The current mayor spruced up the plaza in front of the church, the historic Plaza Miranda, and cleared its vendor-crammed underpass, much to the delight of middle-class sensibilities who seem to remember a halcyon Quiapo of genteel splendor. Seems a stretch for the twenty-first century imagination. On the day of my last visit, the tiled plaza was muddy and vendors ringed the perimeter, as if waiting for a sudden opportunity to set up their stalls in the middle.

The sheer persistence of Quiapo's noise and smells, the monstrous piling heaps of the day's discards of commerce beside the profusion of voodoo, the pragamtic manner by which hucksters commingle with the devout, the gadgets and knickknacks and antics of vendors, the masses of commuters, all form a powerful energy, seemingly indomitable in the face of time and its brooms of change.

October 2000 © Ferdi Bolislis