Ghosts of Manila (18 page)

‘Well, such things pain us all. We can’t really understand them even as we recognise that cynicism and selfishness offer a kind of protection, and that nations as well as individuals can suffer from the chronic depression which produces moral lassitude. We’re all in pain over this because we all know it’s wrong. It isn’t how we want to be, or how we really are inside. It hits Father Herrera very hard indeed. Despite his manner he’s still very much an idealist, which is to be admired since it gives us all hope. But as I said, sooner or later one has to acquire the knack of bending instead of breaking. Of being flexible without compromising oneself.’

Last of all he remembered Jessie’s rages, seemingly unpredictable, when she reverted with awful poignancy to a nursery stereotype of female impotence, literally tearing her own hair and stamping her foot. After the paroxysm was over and she had slammed the door of her study, or the blare of her exhaust had died away down the street outside, he had gone around in one of those silences in which still, small voices never speak, actually sweeping some longish auburn hairs into a pan and dumping them in a plastic bin liner. Only Ruth had grown unperturbed by such scenes, appearing in the kitchen with a wan smile and ‘Want some coffee, Jaypee?’ while he remained at the stage she had long left behind when her small white face might be spied between banisters.

‘Do you think women will ever be crucified?’ he asked abruptly.

Bernabe looked at him in puzzlement and Prideaux noticed there was fluff on his cheeks near the earlobes. The man didn’t shave. ‘I assume you mean voluntarily?’

‘Yes, you know, these Holy Week rituals. I was thinking the other day that with all this stuff about women priests and how God was just as much woman as man, women might feel they should have equal
opportunities for extremism. After all, various women have identified with Christ strongly enough to develop the stigmata, so why shouldn’t they be crucified for real?’

‘My Church,’ said Bernabe bleakly, ‘puts me in no position to be jocular about women as priests, let alone a female God or a female Saviour. It all strikes me as on the very verge of blasphemy.’

‘Very well. Then here’s a secular question I really do need an answer to. Father Herrera ducked it. Is it open to women to go amok here, or only to men?’

‘Women amoks? I believe I
have
heard of such a thing,’ the priest said cautiously, ‘but it must be quite rare. Women aren’t supposed to be as frustrated as men, are they? They’re supposed to be more easily fulfilled by bearing children and looking after the home. It’s mainly men who have to contend with being unable to find work, the constant worry of bringing home money and food, the disgrace of failure. Of course, things aren’t always like that. Many of the women in our barrios go out to work and a good few of their husbands sit around drinking. It’s often the women who are the rice-winners, as well as doing everything else. Yet it’s generally men who commit suicide and not women. So maybe one could argue that, in their way, they are the more stressed.’

‘Suicide? Is that common?’ Strangely, Prideaux hadn’t considered it before.

‘We don’t like to talk about it since apart from anything else it’s such a terrifying admission of failure, isn’t it? Both theirs and ours. Surely we priests could have done something? Said the right word at the right time? Prayed the right prayer? But yes, Mr Prideaux, it’s unfortunately not at all uncommon nowadays. We had a tragic case only last week. A young man of twenty-five, a shoe repairer, who left a heartrending and completely literate note to say he was sick of the shame his poverty brought him, that he could not even afford shoes for all his family. He left six children. He used to write poems on scraps of paper and pin them to the walls of their hut. His wife’s kept them all. Other than the children they’re the only things left of that man of twenty-five. An immortal soul, yes, but still gone like a shadow. It was a sin, but I can’t believe the Almighty will judge him harshly. With nothing but boundless compassion, I trust.’

A week passed until a morning came when the early headlines read
quixotically: ‘10,000 Cops Face Purge’. This figure included the immediate dismissal of 6,000, half of whom were already AWOL together with their firearms, and the rest ‘ghost cops’ who had left the force years ago or had never existed at all but to whose names a salary was still being paid monthly. The telephone rang.

‘John, do your researches include vampires?’

‘Bats?’

‘No, you know – Dracula and all that good stuff. We’ve got one going at the moment.’

Vic Agusan’s voice brought back vividly the drowned bodies hogtied thumb and toe in Navotas marshes. Prideaux was not at all sure if the despair he felt for his own researches could survive another, extraneous angle. It was only when he became this lost that he indulged in philosophical overviews of a Carlylean nature. Maybe Vic divined this because he added:

‘Light relief, John. Oughtn’t an anthropologist to know about the natives’ quaint superstitions? After all, the thing might turn out to be genuine.’

‘In this place, Vic, nothing would surprise me any longer. But what’s your interest in it? It doesn’t sound to me like a police reporter’s business. Or are there hidden depths?’

‘I agreed to do it as a favour to an editor who thinks there may be. He’s probably right. Here, there are hidden depths in everything. Trace any story back far enough and you’ll uncover a crime of sorts, if not an actual corpse.’

This was vintage Agusan cynicism, even if corpses went perfectly naturally with vampires. Prideaux arranged that Vic should pick him up within the hour. He wondered if this would turn out to be a light story he could happily pass on to Ruth or whether it would have to be censored.

Y
SABELLA HAD UNDERTAKEN
her dawn bus journey at her own insistence and not for lack of proffered limousines. The senator had nodded with affected admiration, remarking that she was obviously her father’s daughter. In due course she found herself rattling in pre-dawn darkness south past the back of Ninoy Aquino International Airport. The highway was lined with factories bearing the neon names of domestic appliances and the sort of food that came in packets. In Alabang they stopped and vendors forced their way aboard with heavy trays of freshly cooked
hopia,
newspapers and peanuts. She bought newspapers. She was unique: as far as anyone could tell, an unescorted American girl. Even more unique than you know, she thought as she returned or deflected the smiles of surprise. Assuredly she was the only person on this bus who was off to spend the weekend with a senator.

The boy beside her, who looked as though he were heading for a provincial college with a concrete statue of its founder outside it, interpreted the captions for her. She had deliberately chosen tabloids for what looked like sensational pictures on their front pages, something with which to complement the half light and glimpses of pavement life outside. The concrete underpass pillar by which they were waiting bore tattered fragments of names in red, the torn faces of hopeful politicians. Also the stencilled injunction COUPLE FOR CHRIST. Anything was possible here, where a religious sect called Good Wisdom for All Nations was on the rampage, slashing the tyres
of cars caught in traffic jams and still further immobilising the congealing city. At the pillar’s foot, she now noticed, a man lay with his head on a deep cushion of carbon which had collected like a drift of snow.

The picture in one tabloid showed a barrel being winched from the mud of an
estero
somewhere in Manila, its open end jammed with suggestive contours like meat and rags mixed. ‘They identified him from his watch,’ her neighbour translated. The bus started again, the lights went off and they drove out of their concrete nest into early morning light which came as a surprise. Had she known to look, she could have glimpsed in the distance the arched entrance to the famously porous State Penitentiary in Muntinlupa as they passed. Instead, the boy had angled a second tabloid to the window. This photo was of the interior of a burned-out car. Half-melted strips of trim and a steering wheel reduced to a wire ring confused things until she understood what she was looking at. The driver’s seat tilt mechanism had collapsed until the metalwork of its headrest lay back on the frame of the rear seat. On bars and springs, in a posture of extreme reclining comfort, was a calcined skeleton.
‘Dedbol
na
.”
Of the dead ball in question, the student explained, nothing was left but his bones and a Rolex watch. This was one up on all those dreary golfers and opera singers and mountaineers, Ysabella thought, and idly began planning a new advertising campaign for Rolex to be shot largely in mortuaries. ‘Police suspect foul play.’ Outside the window the factories had long since yielded to flat fields, coconut groves and wayside shanties in front of which families were heaping their produce on mats. How wrong Philip Larkm had been. What would survive of us was not love but wristwatches.

She was dropped with curious stares at the entrance to a provincial air base. In the guardhouse the senator’s name produced a smartly turned-out escort who ushered her through. On a circular plot inside the gates stood a World War II American fighter of the variety she associated with old movies about the South Pacific. She remembered these films as generally including a scene where a young smoke-stained actor jumps up with a hand cupped to his ear and shouts ‘Can it, fellas! That’s no Zero!’ (an aero engine loud in a cloud). ‘That’s a Hellcat! The Hellcats are here!’ Fifty years on, the aircraft stood on mushy tyres with concrete blocks under its oleo legs taking most of the weight. The plexiglas cockpit canopy was tanned to a crazed amber.

Benigno and Liezel made quite a pair as they stepped from their Mitsubishi Pajero van only a few minutes later. The senator was dressed for a country weekend in slacks and a golfing shirt; his wife looked like Imelda Marcos newly arrived from a shopping spree in Zurich. Neither carried anything. Two or three helpers or bodyguards or even slaves lugged bags and what seemed to be crates of groceries from the van to a twin-engined Cessna parked in the shade of a flamboyant. A grizzled man appeared in a pair of aviator shades and a T-shirt whose slogan read ‘This time it’s love. Next time it’s $50’.

‘Hi, Major,’ Vicente called affably. ‘How’re they hanging?’

All part of the Great Web, Ysabella told herself. Observe. It’s all going to be new. Spectate your way through this weekend. She was introduced all round by Benigno, now joined by a daughter who must have been hiding in the back of the van. ‘This is Woopsy, our youngest.’ Woopsy was sweetly pretty with a brace on her teeth and a dreamy manner which made her name seem born of affection and not mockery. Ysabella remembered that one of Cory Aquino’s daughters was called Ballsy. Liezel offered a heavily ringed hand, a gust of ‘Jicky’ and an intelligent and friendly smile. ‘I know all about your father’s death,’ she said in place of platitude, ‘and we’re so glad you still feel able to come here. Ben’s like a schoolboy, he’s so happy. You must forgive him any wild behaviour. He was genuinely devoted to your father all those years ago.’

‘This is strange for me,’ Ysabella told her as they walked to the little blue aircraft. ‘Everyone I meet seems to have known my father better than I did.’

‘Not I, I’m afraid. I never met him, alas. Quirino Avenue! Oh, it sounds like history. You know you’re getting old when things which happened in your own lifetime start to be historic. Like Vietnam. That was all over before Woopsy was even born. Vietnam, Woops,’ she told her daughter’s alerted face. ‘The war.’ Her child smiled blankly.

They took off and the major flew them up into a bumpy panorama of old green volcanoes and a coastline she hadn’t realised was so close. The sea was of no known colour; that of secret ink which became invisible when dried on a page, perhaps, in which it was languidly drawing and redrawing an ever-vanishing white margin around the land. The sudden exaltation of adventure seized her, dispelling all remnants of her predawn vision of emptiness in the deserted Manila
bus terminal. It was simply a matter of going on being twenty-nine for ever and flying around in private aircraft. Her host was skimming the day’s newspapers which it had presumably been too dark to read in the van. He read with the professional politician’s alert casualness. These were the heavies which her ghoulish preference had led her to miss earlier. ‘Bongbong has no idea of father’s wealth.’ ‘National Power Corp.’s Cebu thermal plant to be exorcised.’ It sounded like any normal day. ‘Cops among kidnappers of shot Chinese schoolgirl.’

‘Bongbong?’ she asked above the motors’ drumming.

‘Marcos’s only son,’ said Ben, putting down the paper. ‘Ferdinand Junior.’

‘I thought he was in exile, too.’

‘Good Lord no. He’s a Congressman. Represents Ilocos Norte, his father’s old province. He used to be its Governor when FM was President. He’s now pretending he has no idea about his father’s assets, despite being an executor of the Marcos estate. Nobody believes him, of course. It says here that even lawyers are referring to “evasive, untruthful and inherently incredible statements under oath”.’ He passed the paper across.

‘According to this, Bongbong’s a product of Oxford and Wharton universities,’ said Ysabella in surprise. ‘I didn’t know he’d been in England.’

‘Sure he was. I was hoping you could throw some light on a persistent rumour about the time he was there. It’s surprising how it keeps on coming up here. Gossip has it that he shot a member of your Royal Family during a drunken party in London. Not fatally, of course. It was efficiently hushed up with, presumably, a discreet donation from his father’s mystery-shrouded assets. Sheer rumour, as I say. Yet on and on it goes. I wonder what its origin was? No doubt we shall never know. But since we’re talking about the Marcos
père
et
fils
and the latter’s taste for riotous living, and since we’re also flying off for the weekend, I can tell you a much better researched piece of inside information. The setting,’ said the senator expansively, ‘is the mid-Seventies, at a time when Martial Law was in full swing and his father began to be seriously worried about the company Bongbong was keeping. Druggy, hippy, middle-class wastrels. Showbiz starlets, that sort. FM was very conscious that this was his only boy and all the good-time living might turn him into a drug addict. After various stern
warnings Marcos learned that Bongbong was flying off for an especially merry weekend in a private planeload of his cronies. Just as the plane was about to take off the pilot was ordered to return to the ramp. There, aides came running out to tell Bongbong there’d been an urgent message from his father recalling him briefly on a pressing family matter. His friends were to go without him; he could follow in an hour or two in another aircraft… Do I need to go on?’

No, actually; but he had all the same, his voice raised scratchily above the noise of his own light aircraft. The plane had gone down with the loss of everyone on board. There was great public lamentation. Marcos himself went to the airport and managed some crocodile tears. Bongbong presumably learned a lesson in the exercise of paternal and presidential authority. Staring out of the window at a nearing land mass Ysabella reflected on the importance of
bodies
in this country. To judge from press and TV pictures, funeral parlours were a social nexus. People were for ever being photographed bending over the contents of satin-padded boxes equipped with all sorts of elaborate flaps and lids. Ironies abounded. She recalled the ten-year-old boy playing in the street who suddenly fell dead at his mother’s feet with a bullet in his brain. Some drunken birthday reveller had fired his gun at random to make a noise, to celebrate, to show off his new toy. According to a ballistics report it had almost certainly been a policeman. The child’s family were pictured in a sorrowing group around his coffin, open down to the chest, on the rest of which they had piled his favourite playthings. Among them was a toy pistol. Guns and tears. What secret satisfaction did they bring with their dramatic rituals?

Corpses here were frequently exhumed to establish identity or to prove that justice had or hadn’t been done. Bodies were exhibited on pavements where they’d been shot; in police stations to which they’d been taken; on a runway where they’d been landed on by an incoming Jumbo jet (not a lot left of that one. It was claimed to have been a sleeping squatter, then a salvage victim, but on this occasion even the wristwatch was missing). The picture of the tousle-haired body variously identified as the notorious Commander Mubarak or else an unknown duck-raiser had been printed and reprinted a dozen times as the case was closed and then opened again. And chief of all, of course, were the Marcos bodies: first Ferdinand’s mother and then that of the
ex-President himself, which had lain for four years like a dud battery in a Hawaiian deep freezer, his veins full of icy chemicals but still managing to leak a musty political voltage. The whole thing was bizarre and seemed to belong to another era. Twenties gangsters, was that it? People called ‘Lips’ and ‘Muggsy’ lying in waxy state with satin up to their jowls to conceal the damage that meathooks, blowlamps and Thompson submachine guns had caused and which not even the best Italian morticians had been able to disguise.

The Cessna flared, crabbed sideways, straightened at the last moment, touched down faultlessly and ran up to a tiny terminal with a flagpole and a crowd of faces pressed against wire netting. The children who had chivvied the goats and dogs off the airstrip went back to playing on it. A languorous sea breeze puffed through the opened door.

‘Welcome to Magubat,’ said Benigno Vicente, and emerged to greet his
probinsyanos.

Another van, a Lite Ace with tinted windows and ‘Gov. Vicente’ stencilled on the doors. They climbed in. ‘My brother,’ Ben introduced Ysabella to a hayseed version of himself. ‘Doy’s the Governor of this province.’ Ysabella was reminded of Jimmy Carter’s brother Billy, hairy-gutted beer drinker, Ghadaffi crony and general embarrassment. The van yawed over an unmade track like a speedboat trailing an ochre plume of spray which blotted out wayside huts, fences draped with washing and narrowly-missed buffalo carts. They came to a jetty. The plume overtook them and thinned out over the water. There was a smell of drying fish baskets, of ozone and iodine and ultraviolet light bouncing off the sea’s live glitter. A few hundred yards away across the blue strait a green-heaped islet stood on white foundations of coral sand. A knifelike craft with bamboo outriggers took them across. The sea had the clarity of a paperweight in which rocks and corals and fish were embedded. When the engine was cut and the prow grated into the sand there was a fortuitous instant of complete stillness before anyone spoke or moved. The cove was a hundred yards wide narrowing to fifty deep, a V of rocks and trees enclosing a beach at the top of which stood a futuristic house, hexagonal, octagonal, Ysabella didn’t count, with tall narrow windows in each face. So skilfully contrived was this piece of modernism that until the moment of landfall she hadn’t even noticed it.

‘What a beautiful place,’ she said for the hundredth time in a social career which had seen many a pleasure dome, many a fake-humble country retreat, manor house, castle, penthouse overlooking a sweep of river and a Renaissance city.
‘What
a beautiful place,’ and for the first time really meaning it, suddenly pleased that gloomy Hugh and the rest would never see it.

‘Well, it’s just a beach house,’ Liezel said, ‘but we’re fond of it. The children love it here. Woopsy adores it and so does Danny. Danny’s our youngest. He’s at the Sorbonne right now, did Ben say? He’s always writing and asking about Bantol.’

‘Bantol?’

‘Oh, sorry, that’s the name of this island. It’s the locals’ name for a kind of fish which has a big head and a little tail. They say the place looks like one from the seaward side but I have to admit I can’t see any resemblance.’