Ghosts of Manila (34 page)

Prideaux heard this from Ysabella Bastiaan, with whom in his last month a certain familiarity did develop, if not quite actual friendship. She turned out to be considerably less defensive than he, not to say merrily indiscreet.

‘I don’t care,’ she told him. ‘Go and write it all up, I should. Even the stuff about my father. What are you waiting for?’

*

It is take-off that Prideaux, finally embarked, is waiting for, leafing through a scrawled notebook, restless with departure. He finds something he hardly remembers having jotted down after an evening with the Agusans. When Imelda Marcos first returned from US exile in November 1991 (he reads) she stayed in a S2000-a-day suite in one of her own ‘edifices’, the Philippine Plaza Hotel. It stands by the sea on the same spit of reclaimed land as another of her projects, the infamous Manila Film Center. Like that building, and for the same reasons of over-rapid construction skimped to meet a whimsical deadline, the Plaza was born amid a rubble of collapsed scaffolding and a half-dry ballroom ceiling which fell on sleeping workmen. As with the Film Center a strict security blackout was imposed so that even today it remains unknown how many died there. As they go about their daily tasks, it is said, the hotel’s electricians and maintenance men are always finding inside mouldings and ductings, behind panels and false ceilings, little pencilled crosses, a name and a date written by workmen to commemorate a lost friend.

The aircraft shudders as it trundles backwards across the concrete apron.

Before his death the fake priest Herrera had lamented the demise of Judgement Day when (in the John Prideaux version) everyone who had ever lived would be forcibly shown the definitive documentary which God had shot of their lives. ‘Here,’ the divine Five-in-One (researcher, scriptwriter, producer, director and cameraman) would say, ‘these are my allegations, this the evidence. Your confession? Thank you.’ Another cell door slams. But because it was all so unerring, so predictable and repetitive, such justice was tainted by the stench of a show trial. What, the whole of humanity, every last one of us? Until guilt loses all moral meaning and becomes simply another attribute like warm-blooded, mammalian, air-breathing, bipedal?

The aircraft turns heavily at the runway’s end. It is carrying Prideaux and Prideaux’s fieldwork notes to see his daughter in a grey climate half the earth away. A tornado of burnt kerosene roars off across the scorched perimeter, over huts and smallholdings and plots where people raise ducks, dismantle batteries and bodies. Soon he is able to look down and see the plane’s scudding ghost beneath, diminishing by the second, its flaps withdrawing and profile tilting.

Somewhere on the long journey westwards as they flee the dawn he ignores the imperious stewardess who insists the window blind be pulled down for the comfort and convenience of passengers who may wish to watch the in-flight movie. He opens it surreptitiously. The cold silver wing is polished by the moon and he is drawn into the invisible planet’s majestic emptiness, into lame thoughts confronting stars and the calm rush of altitude. Time is erased until he becomes aware that hours have passed and the moon has gone and a wing as dark as Ulysses’ sail is afloat on a milky bath. From the window’s extreme rearward edge he sees the first pale strip of day fall across earth’s sill as if a vast door were slowly opening in Asia. The planet is round, there is no day or night; we cannot say where we have been or when.

It should break open, he thinks. On the day when the sun is peremptorily stopped and the clouds freeze where they stand and the winds hold their breath and the great voice or trumpet or whatever it is rings around the troposphere, it should all break open. Down to the last bank vault of armoured steel buried in the heart of a Swiss mountain it should break open, and what would be listed with especial
care would be the millions upon millions of secret inscriptions everywhere brought to light, fallen down the cracks and scribbled behind the world’s wainscoting: the hurried memorials of those given names by anonymous friends. And then the sun should be released and the clouds given a push and the winds told to blow again among the silent ruins. These inscriptions would join the rest already incised in bronze and marble and cement. Beneath this weather they would stand for a while: the scattered fragments of an immense collective love which once sparkled and gleamed and never quite focused itself.