A columnist once wrote, " in Jose Rizal's time, the Pasig River was both EDSA and SLEX". The Pasig river is a highway of sorts. Long before the streets were crowded with jeepneys and buses that belches rancid smoke, the mighty river was the passageway of colossal steamboats, dugout canoes and other spindly watercrafts that fed the chinese black market.
In Rizal's novel, El Filibusterismo ( The Filibuster ), begins with the steamship Tabo's "unsteady progress up the river, arduously sailing upstream through the winding course of the Pasig, carrying numerous passengers to the province of Laguna".
For those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Philippine history , Jose Rizal, one of the late 19th century's most infamous famous Filipino, is the country's national hero. He is an illustrado. A native who have friends in high places. He is fortunate enough to get himself educated in Europe, have high tea in cafe's in Florence and chat with intellectuals in Oxford. He is also well hung enough that legend says he had bedded thousands upon thousands of Europeans across the continent. From French schoolgirls to English ladies, from Irish farm lass to German housewives, he had a taste of them all. Legend says that he bedded so many German women that he fathered Adolf Hitler himself. Hitler as half-Filipino and half-German is quite plausible because der Fuhrer enjoys a speisewagen(buffet) of adobo and balut. How more Filipino can someone get?
Rizal is so great a man that he's the first Mr. A - Z, and not the musican of the same moniker. For (A) Rizal is an Architect, (B) a bingo player, (C) a circus acrobat and so on. The list is endless that I could write another book about his awesomeness.
He wrote El Filibusterismo, set in old Manila where once the legendary Pasig River was still in it's prime. He captured the beauty in his novel where he wrote, " a busy thoroughfare, a lively scene, a fertile fishing ground".
I'll quote more antique words here, "the steamship Tabo threatens everything in its path, now seeming about to crush the salambaw", a scraggy fishing contaption which in their movements are not unlike skeletons " saluting an antedeluvian turtle now running straight against the bamboo brushes and against the floating..." - and so on.
Picture the Pasig in Spanish days. It looked like a cross between the Amazon, the Everglades, Venetian Canals and the French Riviera, snaking it's way across the old city of Spanish occupied Manila.
The water is so clean and serene, you can see the riverbed twenty feet below from the highest level of the steamship.
But today, anyone who makes his or her way by night or by day up the Pasig would be satarized, not lyricized. The Pasig today is only a shadow of it's once glorious existence. It is now a black, muddy, murky current, something one crosses over to get from one place to another.
No fish can live here anymore. You can only see rows upon rows of shanties lining its shores. Garbage is everywhere, floating just like lilies on a a crowded lilypond, floating like millions of man-o-wars in the Carribean.
I wonder if Jose Rizal has got something to do with it. In a popular parable about Rizal when he was a young boy, he rode a canoe with his father down the Pasig River. Once there, one of his slippers fell from his feet and on to the river. He could not reach it, so what little Pepe did was he threw the other slipper into the river too. Asked why he threw his other slipper, he replied that if someone saw one slipper, then it would be useless. But if he threw the other slipper, some person might see the other half and can still use it.
Scholars and historians thought the mentality and reasoning for a young boy is brilliant and just plain genius. Many young kids did as Rizal did and thought as Rizal would have thought.
It is only last last week that I realized the full extent of his slipper throwing legacy.
The entire world saw the onslaught of two tropical supertyphoons named "Ondoy" and "Pepeng" who apparenty had a simultaneous and preplanned attack on our islands. Heavy rains was followed by heavy floodings that left thousands of people stripped naked and without homes.
In the aftermath, they found the culprit, among the obvious was garbage that got stuck on man holes, sewers, canals and dams.
And majority of these garbage were slippers. Yes, millions of slippers of all shapes and sizes.
Havaianas, birckenstock, nike, dragon, islander, bakya, adidas, tsinelas, simagol.
And I strongly think that, that one sunny Sunday afternoon, that one simple slipper throwing episode, that one brilliant and genius thinking triggered it all. It all gave us a reason to condone throwing slippers on the river. And slippers are just one of them.