Metro Manila. Fifteen cities grown and merged together, more than fifteen million people. City of global banks, thousand-euro-a-night hotels, but also the city of cheap sex, cheap drugs, cheap labor. City of suffocating streets and deafening shopping malls. City of cemeteries inhabited by the dead and also by the living. For example, the Catholic cemetery in Makati. Half of the people living there have not reached the age of twelve. Half of them are orphans. They chase each other across rooftops, jumping from one to another. The tombstones stand thickly side by side, and if you fall into the gap it is difficult to fly to the ground because of how narrow it is. Luckily, because the tiered catacombs can reach up to four meters.
There, where the tombs have gone to join each other even for adults it is comfortable to walk on them. Especially for pregnant women, who are always many here. In the strong sun, under the pale moon. The tombstones are old, saturated with rain, scorched by heat, brittle. Jumping you can fall between them and break your bones; it is safer to run on tin roofs. The lowest graves are often covered with corrugated sheet metal, surrounded by an ornate grid and locked with a padlock. Such a padlock can be cut off, and in this kind of “gazebo” one can live.
