I have been spending time, both literally and vicariously, in Malacañ Palace. The book of that title, authored by Manuel L. Quezon III, Paolo Alcazaren, and Jeremy Barns, provides a hugely enjoyable slant on the last 250 years of Philippine history through the windows of a house originally built as a riverside home by a wealthy Spanish merchant in the 1750s. (It also explains why a "g" is often attached to the name.)
As you would expect (and deserve for the hefty price tag) Malacañ Palace is stylishly written and sumptuously illustrated with prints, photographs (old and modern), and plans. Of the prints, I particularly liked those showing the dynamic Pasig in its pomp as a main thoroughfare for the city (and we have EDSA) and some of the sepia prints and coloured postcards from the American era.
The book is crammed with fascinating anecdotes. Here is Josephine Bracken, shortly after the execution of José Rizal, giving the representative of the King of Spain a piece of her mind:
The Governor-General requested her to leave Manila and in the event doing he would pay her passage and all she wanted. He stamped his foot and said it was very ridiculous that a woman should engage in war, that the English were very wrong in allowing her to do so. The English of course liked war instead of peace. She replied by stamping her foot and saying that she didn’t care: she was not afraid of him. She did not respect him as Governor-General. When she bade him goodbye he was on very friendly terms with her. She told him that if he was offended with her he could take her out and shoot her as her husband had been shot. She said “My husband died innocent, and his family is willing to die as he has done. “ If it was too much trouble for him to take her out to the place of public execution he could shoot her where she stood …
All right, Josephine! What a woman she was.
Fast forward 60 years or so and who does this remind you of?
[T]he mark left during the Garcia administration was nothing short of disgraceful. Most of the Palace grounds were open to the public, who had been allowed to become a rabble and turn the lawns into something resembling Coney Island fairground. Cars were parked indiscriminately and the grass had been turned into brown dust, there were soft drinks stalls, hamburger stands and a kind of restaurant, not even a first class restaurant, as Mrs Macapagal said with feeling.
Yup, that is the president’s mum giving us a clue where she got that famous mataray spirit from.
Even the footnotes are full of historical nuggets (I particularly liked the potted history of the Kraut family, of “Kraut Compound” fame).
OK I have a couple of quibbles, but they are minor.
First, as the book points out, President Estrada was the fourth president to have to leave the Palace for reasons of war or revolution (the others being Quezon [escaping from the Japanese], Laurel [from the Americans], and Marcos). Estrada's departure is described as being “by the back door” but I wonder why the authors did not make it clear that he actually left, as visitors always used to come and go, by the river. The Estradas’ sad boat journey to San Juan, waving at imaginary crowds of supporters, was a curious, bathetic, end to such a tumultuous fortnight.
Second, no index. Grrr.
Malacañ Palace can be read in Sunday, but it will stay with you for longer than that. Anyone with the slightest interest in Philippine history will enjoy this lovely book.
As for my recent experience of Malacañ, about 10 days ago Frayed, some of her family, and I visited friends of her parents in a house inside the Palace grounds. The evening was elegant in the extreme, and I saw some works of art that I never, ever, would have imagined seeing in a private sala. In fact as we sipped on our delicious French wines, I couldn’t help thinking that we were probably a lot more comfortable than many inhabitants of the rambling palace, with its “cramped quarters, mosquito-infested halls, dank air, crumbling fabric and the perpetual foul smelling floods”.
Thank you for the generously kind review. We had to perform drastic surgery on the book, as we'd exceeded the page allocation by 40 or so pages. One of the things that had to be excised was the index.
Re: Estrada fleeing by boat, as you'll notice, the configuration of the Palace since the 1880s has been the private and state entrances, with the riverfront, at most, the embarcation point for venturing to the park or the presidential landing to board the presidential yacht.
Posted by: mlq3 | January 17, 2006 at 07:10 AM