Ramirez is a chapter from the novel The Sign of Jonah.

by Charlie Canning

Generally speaking, Ramirez did not think much of people who tried to make a lot of money overnight. There was no substitute for hard work. If you wanted the good things in life – a home and a family – you had to be prepared to work for them. Nobody was going to give you anything.

     Ramirez’s own life story had been a textbook example of this. The oldest of seven children, he had dropped out of school after the sixth grade to help his parents send his younger brothers and sisters to school. He began working as a “runner” in the Divisoria Market when he was twelve years old.

     A runner was basically an errand boy. You raced around the market stalls delivering messages and orders, food and drinks; you picked up boxes, helped load and unload trucks. You did anything you were asked to do. For most errands, the going rate was a peso but Ramirez was often paid more than that. On a good day, he made a hundred pesos when the daily wage for a laborer on the street was sixty pesos.

     Of course, Ramirez worked longer hours than most laborers. On most days, he started work at 5 a.m. so that he could deliver hot pan de sol to the stall owners. He’d stop by the bakery on the way to the market and hurriedly drink the cup of hot cocoa and eat the bread that the baker had set out for him. Ramirez would pick up his order – ten two-peso bags of bread that he paid eighteen pesos for – and head to the market. He sold the bread for two-fifty a bag. By 5:30 a.m., Ramirez had already made his first seven pesos.

     Ramirez worked until 7:00 p.m. On Fridays, he seldom got home before 9 o’clock at night. In the beginning, his mother used to go down to Divisoria to drag him out of the market but she soon stopped doing that. It was clear that Ramirez belonged there. To Ramirez, the market was workplace, school, and playground and he was its best student.

     By the time that he was fourteen, Ramirez was the most sought-after runner in the market. He was courteous, honest, and dependable and no one – except for the pickpockets and the touts – had a bad word to say about him. If he found something that didn’t belong to him, he returned it at once. Ramirez never overcharged anyone and never called anyone cheap.

     His biggest test had come when one of the Chinese traders had asked him to do a number of errands without offering him a single centavo. Ramirez’s friends had told him he was a fool to let the Chinese use him like that. After a week, Ramirez had been about to break. The man told him to stop by his hardware store in Binondo on Saturday morning.

     “A boy gets paid by the job,” Chan had said. “But a man gets paid by the week.” He opened the top drawer of his desk and gave Ramirez a hundred peso note. That day felt like graduation. When Ramirez went home to give his mother the hundred peso note, she started crying.

     “No,” she’d said, handing him back the note,  “I want you to spend this on yourself.” Ramirez took the girl from Roxas City to the cinema that night. She’d been making eyes at him for a month. The older girls who worked with her in the dry goods store had told Ramirez that if he didn’t do something quick the girl was either going to melt or spontaneously combust.

     By the time that Ramirez was seventeen, he had learned enough for a lifetime. He no longer did errands for people. Instead, he subbed out jobs and bought and sold for his own account. He had his own market stall in Divisoria registered in his mother’s name and warehouse space in a Tondo bodega in the name of his father. Then it happened. Looking back on it, Ramirez could see that it was his mistake. But at the time it had been so unexpected that it had caught him completely by surprise.

     One of the youths that Ramirez had worked with since he was twelve was a runner named Bong. When they were young, they were close friends and had often helped each other. But instead of moving up the ladder as Ramirez had done, Bong had stopped at deliveryman. He’d bought himself a hand truck when he was fifteen and made most of his money delivering boxes and crates. Since there were many other teenagers who did this job, there was a queue of sorts just like there was for taxicabs. You had to wait your turn. On slow days the deliverymen would sit around on overturned crates drinking gin and playing cards. While waiting his turn, Bong sometimes did the kind of errands that he used to do with Ramirez when they were boys. Bong knew this kind of work was beneath him now but he did it anyway. “For cigarettes,” he’d say.

     Ramirez was especially busy one day when Bong passed by. He stopped Bong and asked him if he would buy a couple of bowls of lugao (a thick rice gruel with pieces of chicken in it flavored with calamansi and garlic) and two soft drinks from the vendor at the north end of the market. When Ramirez gave Bong the twenty pesos, he thought that he was doing him a favor. In fact, the second bowl of lugao and the other soft drink had been for Bong. Ramirez was hoping to grab a quick lunch with him and trade stories as they had in the past.

     But Bong did not see the errand as a sign of friendship. He’d been drinking and it looked to him that Ramirez was trying to humiliate him in the cruelest possible way. If Ramirez had entrusted him with one of his deliveries it would have been one thing, but a food order was the lowest of the low.

     It took a long time for Bong to return with the tray. He had been prepared to throw the change in Ramirez’s face but Ramirez had surprised him by saying, “Kaiin na tayo” or “Let’s eat.” Bong hadn’t understood that Ramirez meant to treat him to lunch. But it was too late: he’d already put the rat poison in the bowl he’d set in front of Ramirez.

     While they were eating the lugao, Bong tried to rationalize what he had done. If Ramirez was really his friend, he would have invited him to sit down and sent somebody else to buy the food. It was still an insult. Anyway, Bong hadn’t put in that much poison. Ramirez would get sick, no doubt, but he would be fine in a couple of days. The lugao vendor would be blamed for poor sanitation and that would be the end of it.

     When Bong heard the sound of the ambulance, he was at the south end of the market delivering fishing supplies. He left his hand truck by the front gate and kept on going. That night, Bong left Manila on a ship bound for Cagayan de Oro and was never heard of again.

     It took Ramirez three weeks to recover. He very nearly died. But what Ramirez learned that day would serve him well for the rest of his life: a man’s pride is his most important possession. Take that away from him and he will kill you or kill himself.

Note:

Ramirez is an excerpt from the unpublished novel The Sign of Jonah by Charlie Canning. A previous excerpt The Cebuanos was published in Eastlit in May 2013.