Ghosts of Manila (24 page)

Spoke, and could hardly have been more mistaken. Three days later it was not the story which was dead but Eddie Tugos.

I
N THE PIT
of her own making Sharon had dug on for many months, for what seemed a lifetime, the shadow of San Agostin church falling across the canvas awning overhead. So often had she straightened up to blink the sweat from her eyes and stretch her neck muscles that she could now tell the time accurately by this shadow. Working inside a sundial while digging backwards through time afforded ample opportunity to relect on her own mortal progress, especially since late one afternoon she had decided there was no point in digging down further. She had reached the end. Below her feet lay nothing but alluvial gravel which the Pasig had deposited in one of its prehistoric meanderings. Beneath that was the vast compacted history of a planet without people.

The next day she had been waylaid in her office by a vacationing American and his family who had wanted a list of fieldwork projects in which his children might participate unpaid for a couple of weeks. Why? she had asked. Once all the pieties about broadening young minds had been rehearsed what remained, though largely unexpressed, was the answer to her question: getting ahead. It was all about school projects and grades and CVs. They were amazed to find a fellow-American actually working in this department (looking about them at the dust and brown paint). Only a visiting professor, Sharon had told them. ‘Then you’ll understand,’ they said with relief. ‘We’ve not been in the country long, but they do things sort of differently here, don’t they? Relaxed, right? For people like us with only a summer vacation to spare…’

Later, she had thought about the effects of living abroad with a settled lover and a shared home. At some point in the last six years, though she couldn’t have said exactly when, she had stopped thinking of Manila as temporary, of her presence there as a stay which could be cut short at whim for a return to the ‘real’ world. This must have coincided with the dilution or actual shedding of certain aspects of what it meant to be American. What she had lost was all too obvious to her once the ambitious parents and their two porky adolescents had filed out of the room clutching a sheet of her departmental writing paper (‘Dear Bernie, This is to introduce Mr & Mrs’.) What had gone was all sense of a career. If coming to Manila had once been a shrewd move, staying on had been dumb. Fieldwork was essential; experience abroad looked even better. But not indefinitely. To have stayed abroad implied a paradox: fieldwork that was both obsessive and academically unserious.

From time to time she flew back to California to see her parents, stayed a few weeks, became restless after an initial three days spent in a whirl of pleasure visiting friends, revelling in half-forgotten tastes, marvelling at how clean and easy everything was. On a couple of occasions Crispa had come too, but they had not been wholly successful. To spare her Orthodox father’s sensibilities they had had separate rooms and behaved with the ghastly decorum of pals. Sharon had also been obscurely ashamed that her home town was not on the fabled coast but forty miles inland on a road which ran up the valley of the Santa Clara river, heading for the Mojave Desert. There again, the area whose principal towns were Ravenna and Acton was close enough to San Fernando to make an outsider wonder whether it wouldn’t have been better simply to have moved down into Los Angeles proper or out of the region entirely. L.A.’s proximity, with its huge Filipino population, had made Crispa uneasy. She hadn’t wanted to be taken for a misplaced member of that community, as an economic refugee, as yet another scrambling Asian in the grip of The Dream. She was, in fact, one of that probably large (but seemingly tiny) number of her compatriots who didn’t want to emigrate, not even to the States; who were never less than courteously impressed by the deal offered but who remained unenticed.

So there they were, Sharon supposed: two people who according to conventional wisdom had blown their respective career chances. She
by a fatal flaw in her national character had turned down ambition and was foreseeably doomed to remain a visiting professor (some visit!) on a salary ludicrous by American standards and only made livable by the supplement she received from her university in California. Likewise Crispa had not availed herself of the opportunity offered by Sharon’s nationality. This single factor had probably done more than anything else to cement their friendship by neutralising any corrosive suspicion of ulterior motives. In any case there was a price to be paid for all this wilful behaviour.
Do
it.
Be
it.
Go
for
it.
These were the mottoes for living, by disobeying which Sharon knew herself to be no longer as American as she had been. They were not false, precisely, nor even discredited; simply irrelevant. They presupposed a curious creature, a unique individual never to be satisfied by anything short of a determined act of self-sculpture, hacking itself free of an amorphous block of common clay until it stood perfect and realised and a little breathless with success. If this notion underwrote a Western idealism, then maybe Sharon was becoming Eastern. She knew too much about instability and contingency to believe any longer in personal destinies manifest from the egg. To hell with genes. Nothing but compromise and the awareness of compromise made anybody anything. All else was role playing, the futile trying on of masks.

Now as regards role playing: what was this Ysabella Bastiaan person up to? What image was this temporary assistant of hers hacking her way towards? Manila was changing her, too. A certain haughtiness always would remain but whole lumps of affectation had fallen away from her. To take a single example, she no longer bothered to remove the labels from the clothes she bought. ‘What’s the point?’ she’d said, returning from a shopping trip down Rizal Avenue with stonewashed Levis and Lacoste sports shirts for herself and a Slazenger basketball for some street kids living behind her block on Roxas. ‘They’re all fake anyway, the whole lot. It’s a much better idea. Manila’s
full
of better ideas. Nobody I know would be seen dead with anything genuinely by Pierre Cardin or Nina Ricci, so strutting around with the bogus article’s actually quite chic as well as being liberating. Who cares? Down in Santa Cruz you can buy great rolls of jeans labels, have you seen? All the brands, brilliant imitations. They look absolutely genuine to me. I presume the rag trade buys them in bulk and sews them on their own stuff. Oh, and those wonderful hangdog
men flashing counterfeit Rolexes at you. Everyone assumes it’s a pathetic yearning on the part of poor folk dazzled by the all-important tokens of successful living. Just at the moment I’m taking it as more than fifty percent deliberate mockery. It’s fabulous.’

Well, perhaps Ysabella hadn’t changed that much. But in the intervals between shopping sprees and often during work her face could be glimpsed wearing the thoughtful expression of somebody forced to do serious stocktaking. ‘A place like this makes you re-think home,’ she said once. And it did, of course. Not only the private angle for both of them (foreign lover, assassinated father) but for Sharon especially there was also the business of being American in an ex-American protectorate, ex-colony by any other name. Impossible to see in action an entire administrative system – Flag, Constitution, Senate, Congress, judiciary, everything down to the lowest levels of grade school – without being made conscious of its model. Equally impossible to see the instances in which that model had been travestied without wondering if the original hadn’t itself become something of a travesty even in the United States. What the Founding Fathers would have thought of plea-bargaining was one thing; but would they really have maintained that a people’s freedom still lay in the right to fill their houses with high-powered firearms, a citizens’ militia bearing Saturday night specials? And notions of democracy itself, supposedly the United States’ most valuable export, had surely lost something at home when mass votes were regularly swayed by the advertising muscle of commercial and other interests. When transplanted to a former colony they lost a good deal more when citizens were as free as air to vote for the candidate who handed out the most cash from the back of a jeep and who had the most terrifying goons outside the polling booth. There was nothing exclusively Filipino in this democracy. It was merely a faithful reproduction, on a national scale, of the version once purveyed by Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party’s own organisation in distant Manhattan.

Sharon supposed the final sign of her shedding crude aspects of her cradle nationality was that the instinct with which she had once risen to defend it had gone, transferred to a weary combativeness when faced with the grosser Western misreadings of the East. Had she herself once shared them? She presumed she must have, just as Ysabella still did: that amused, urbane way of making parallels, often
beginning with the phrase ‘What this place is, is –’ and going on after thought, ‘The Weimar Republic! That’s it! Bit far-fetched, but you know what I mean. Wild moral laxity hand-in-hand with economic instability and political decadence. Partying on the rim of a volcano.’ (Always that damned volcano.) These days this struck Sharon as the quintessential outsider’s view; an exploiter’s view, above all, eyes gleefully open for the main chance with zero accountability. From inside the society, though, her own view was one of codes of behaviour still surprisingly traditional, still demanding, even relentless, but which had a habit of effacing themselves when they brushed up against Western mores. A meekness, a passivity, a declining to confront, a withdrawal. She liked this now. It had come to seem like a sign of strength; but she was still perfectly American enough to know how it struck the foreigners themselves. For many of them the Philippines was simply a place where people from the developed nations came to empty out their seminal vesicles, much as their governments looked at poor countries generally as good places in which to dump their toxic wastes. Out of this grew the image of a Weimarian moral anarchy they half expected and more than half desired: of mothers implacably spreading their own children’s legs that the rich might more easily enter. The needle’s eye.

Early one afternoon Sharon was called to the phone, returning with a puzzled expression to where she and Ysabella were planning a permanent Intramuros exhibit for the museum.

‘I’m afraid I’ve got to go out for an hour. It seems I have to see a cop.’

‘Trouble?’

‘I sure hope not. He’s someone I met here about three years ago. I needed reminding but I do vaguely remember him. We had a scandal here: stuff was disappearing a bit too fast and a VIP visitor noticed. They sent some cops over and this guy was one of them. This isn’t about that, though. He says he’s got a pot he wants to show me.’

‘Why can’t he come here, then?’

‘I asked him that. Says he doesn’t want to make it too official.’

‘Flimsy. Where are you meeting him?’

‘Paco Park.’

‘Why don’t I come too?’

‘I didn’t like to ask,’ Sharon admitted. ‘But thanks. It’d be a lot less risky. In this city you can never tell, can you? A voice on the phone
turns out to be a dingaling, a rapist or a perfectly normal cop black-marketing antiques.’

Ysabella had never visited Paco Park before and was not expecting it to be less a park than a cemetery. It was a perfect circle of high Spanish stone walls built thick enough to accommodate the long niches for coffins, each sealed with a square plaque. Together the inscriptions commemorated countless colonials who had mostly fallen victim to the various plagues and epidemics which had periodically ravaged Manila in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries. At one point on the circle a small church grew out of the wall. Old trees spread their shade over stone benches on which students sat in twos and threes, doing each other’s homework and flirting decorously.

‘That’s him,’ Sharon said at once, spotting a middleaged man with greying hair sitting by himself. ‘Yes, I do remember him.’

‘Looks a tough customer to me.’

‘I remember that look. He’s okay, for a cop. Or he was then. Anything might have happened to him in three years.’

‘It must be a very small pot,’ Ysabella observed as they approached, for the figure was sitting empty-handed with no bag in sight. ‘Be careful.’

The man stood up. ‘Miss Polick?’ he said, offering his hand to Sharon. ‘I remember you exactly. You haven’t changed at all.’

‘Neither have you, er, Lieutenant.’

‘Inspector. That’s changed, anyway. Inspector Dingca.’ Ysabella took the offered hand which felt like a piece of board. A good face, she thought; an impossible face, really, being both tough and sorrowful, depending on how one read it. ‘I apologise for this, Miss Polick,’ he said. ‘It looks shady, I know, not coming to the museum. But I’ve promised someone I’d be as discreet as possible and you know how it is. You turn up in one office and tell your tale, then they say they’re not really the right people to be talking to and off you go and do it all over again further down the corridor. By the time you’ve finished everyone in the building knows.’

Sharon had to concede this and was reassured. ‘So what’s the story?’

The policeman sat down again and from his pocket pulled a small cotton bundle. Beneath the lightweight windbreaker, Ysabella noticed with a thrill, the butt of a gun showed, tucked into the waistband of his trousers. It seemed an authentic touch. The man undid the bundle
which was a knotted handkerchief containing shards of pottery and a few pencil-thin fragments of bone. ‘These,’ he said. ‘They’ve just been dug up. Go on,’ he added as Sharon’s hand went out to pick up a shard.

‘Not in the city?’

‘Right here in Manila. About three miles away, I’d guess. Not more. I’m sorry if you’re disappointed. I should’ve explained the pot wasn’t in one piece.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Her fingers were fitting it roughly together with the practised topological skill of a jigsaw puzzle addict. ‘It’s all one pot, anyway.’ She showed it to Ysabella, a blue and white porcelain bowl as thin as a sea urchin’s shell. ‘A beauty. When was this found?’