Manila’s many different faces: Take your pick

“Gates of hell.” Thus a character in Dan Brown’s latest fiction, “Inferno,” described Manila. Brown, as widely known, is the author of the bestselling novel “The Da Vinci Code,” which also became a box-office movie starring Tom Hanks. As in “The Da Vinci Code,” “Inferno” promises to be controversial, and judging by Manila’s reaction, it appears to be on its way to becoming another Brown bestseller. All because of that line, “I’ve run through the gates of hell,” which is supposed to be a conclusion reached after a series of unpleasant experiences through Manila’s worst.

Indeed, the “gates of hell” branding easily get one’s goat. “How dare he? Has he ever been to Manila?” That was my first reaction.

That is the thing with half-truths. They sound so believable because they are partly true. The traffic, the pollution, the poverty, etc., they do exist. As they exist in many other major cities in the world. Brown could have cited Bangkok or Bangladesh, and the description would sound as apt. But then, it is an exaggeration, and the insinuation that a whole city is precisely that, that is what makes it horrible.

Every picture tells at least two stories. Like the one showing two prisoners looking from behind the bars of their prison window. One was looking down, cursing the mud. The other was looking up, awed by the stars.

Brown chose to look down, to disdain the mud in the city, ignoring the beauty of its skies at sunset across the horizon from Roxas Boulevard. And the ready smiles of the ordinary Filipinos on the streets, in their work, everywhere. The city’s happier faces.

Well, Brown has the right to see what he wants to see. After all, his is a book of fiction. He does not disguise it as a documentary. Fiction is as fiction does. It would be well for Filipinos who will read the book to remember this.

Meantime, the fact that people are reacting to the book must be tickling the author no end. He is getting free publicity. This is one reason I did not want, at first, to comment on “Inferno”: Why promote the book? But on second thought, it feels good to be assured that freedom of press and speech is alive and well in this country—people are free to comment on and protest what they do not like, to express themselves. Metro Manila Development Authority Chair Francis Tolentino did exactly that, in a letter he wrote to Dan Brown. And in a TV interview, he said, “Literary freedom is not absolute.” Bravo!

—DETTE PASCUAL,

[email protected]