The Milky Way

It might as well have been as distant as Andromeda and as far back in the past as the faint light of the far away galaxies that take forever to reach us. Few might remember and fewer still might care. It belonged to a different time and a different place. When Manila had not yet decayed and the Malate district had still not degraded into the plutonic Hades of honky-tonks, sordid saloons and speakeasies that infest it today.

When the nearby Remedios Circle was surrounded, not by sentimental vestiges of the past confronting the squalid venom of the present, but by stately manors resplendent with understated dignity, grace and quiet charm. When entrepreneurs like Larry Cruz did not need to recreate that inextricably lost to the ravages of neglect and cloyed by the ceaseless encroachment of poverty and criminality. When the nation was a gentler place, its people kinder, less intolerant and more respectful of one another.

It was a soda fountain, nothing more. Even its name was anachronistic, a relic and a throwback to a time that evoked starlit serenity and misty fragility.

The Spanish-styled bungalow nestled quietly at the corner of Remedios and A. Mabini Streets in the residential enclave of Malate, in one of the quaintest sections of Manila. It stood obliquely behind the stone and rock cross-shaped Malate Church across a coin-operated Laundromat that was at that time a forerunner of a faster paced lifestyle that the old soda fountain had not yet known.

The white stucco colored walls and arched portals bespoke its pedigreed past and melded its present with a style that belonged to a lost era. An era before Manilenos would build their homes behind high walls and hide behind locked doors. An age before armed guards would stand outside family restaurants while criminality walked the streets in broad daylight and brazenly pounded the pavement at night.

It seemed like a house transplanted from a village in southern Spain were the sun never seemed to go down. Both on the A. Mabini Street side and on Remedios, its entrances were opened wide to let the light in. Its accordion wooden doors, with its slanted slats and shutters testified to the peace and tranquility of a neighborhood that knew nothing then of the sleaze that would later overwhelm it. Sleaze imported and accompanied by boundless bevies of Bohemian tourists and other exemplars of the superior bleached race that wallowed in raunchy pleasures and randy preferences.

During the American occupation, Malate evolved from a quiet suburb or arrabal of the old city (Afuera de Manila). Once a fashionable residential area populated by expatriate managers and local executives, Malate stretched eastward from an old Spanish garrison named Fort San Antonio Abad, and rose from a mission awarded to the Augustinians from an ancient village comprised of fisherfolk. From the salty brackish waters brought by the southwestern tide inland to the swampy foreshores came the name “Malate” corrupted from the Tagalog “Maalat.”

From the foreshores, past the northern flank of the Malate Church, eastward through the restaurant crossing A. Mabini and unto the circle, the street was named after the image of the Nuestra Senora de Remedios (Our Lady of Remedies) brought over by the Augustinian friar, Padre Juan Guevara in 1624.

There, the street stood defiant and never knew any other name even as the authorities named cris-crossing streets after American states without regard to geographic authenticity or logic.

Along A. Mabini, on the western flank of the restaurant, the street exemplified as much of its ancient mercantile past and projected it to its present form. It had once been named Camino Real and had stretched from Puerta Real, the royal entrance to the walled city of Intramuros in the north all the way to the ports in Cavite in the south where the galleons would unload their cargo of gold and grandeur.

Camino Real had been the main coastal trail leading up to the royal city. On it rode Spanish monarchy, viceroys and prelates as they disembarked from the galleons and made their way to Intramuros amidst the pomp and pageantry only royalty could muster. As the sea withdrew west and the trail became an urban road it was renamed Calle Nueva before finally being renamed A. Mabini in 1913.

Malate, before the fall, belonged to a different time where neighborliness was not a virtue but common practice. A time much slower where a Spanish siesta was an important part of the day and Sunday was still the most important day of the week.

It was on a Sunday that the Milky Way on A. Mabini Street and Remedios would come alive from its typical slow and almost leisurely weekday pace. On Sunday mornings, after the mass across the street, whole families would gather along the churchyard lost in conversation with friends and neighbors.

The crowd often entered through the quieter Remedios Street entrance and would settle at one of the steel and glass tables inside the sunlit soda fountain. Dining was al fresco as a southwestern wind from the bay swept in past the monument of Isabela II along a tree-lined plaza, across the churchyard and, finally, through to the Milky Way.

The fare was simple, honest and elegant in a charming way. There were no menu cards laminated in plastic or printed on glossy cardboard with colored photographs of what the fare might look like but never really does. Instead, slipped between glass tabletops in a pattern that defied logic or form were printed sheets of the menu. In itself, this evoked a quiet charm and a sense of comfort for a time now long gone.

The halo-halo was made from multi-colored beans and ice shaved from a block and smothered with sweetened milk. It was a specialty rivaled only by another served halfway across the world in another town and another place called Little Quiapo.

It was famous for its Milky Way dinuguan, a uniquely Filipino dish of blood and guts, vinegared, peppered and chillied, best savored and left undescribed.

But the most comfortable of its comfort food was a triple-decker, sliced and quartered and set on its side amidst a lush forest of lettuce and hills of potato salad and mayonnaise. The Milky Way chicken-asparagus sandwich, with its thick chunks of freshly cut white meat and the sweetest and softest spears of golden yellow asparagus had no rival then, across the relentless and unmerciful march of time and to this day.

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