Ghosts of Manila (5 page)

‘I work, I pay,’ she retorted. ‘You dig. Get together those layabouts you spend your time playing
pusoy
with. Judge, Billy, Petring. All that lot. Bats, too. It shouldn’t take you long.
Bayanihan,
of course: they can do it for free in a spirit of neighbourliness. Starting tomorrow. We’ll supply you with
merienda
and cigarettes.’

‘We haven’t any spades.’

‘Yes, you have. When Bats left the Department of Public Works and Highways he brought some souvenirs with him. I know about six DPWH shovels, an air compressor and twenty bags of cement because the cement went into our floors, the compressor was lost at cards and Virgie told me only the other day she’s sick of having those dirty spades under the bed.’

‘Read all about it,’ muttered Edsel in a bitter allusion to his wife’s unofficial nickname ‘Diyano’, she being a veritable news-sheet of information about San Clemente and its folk.

‘Just dig, Eddie. Please. Think how nice it’ll be when it’s finished and we’ve got a decent CR.’

And eventually the men had mustered, armed with shovels and a crowbar made from an iron fencing post. They primed themselves with strengthening tots from a bottle or San Miguel gin on whose label the Archangel, an effeminate creature in yellow Renaissance hose and slashed pantaloons, brandished his sword above a vampiric black figure with ribbed wings cowering beneath Michael’s scarlet buskins on spikes of flame. Soon they were past the noisome top layer and were throwing up clods of the earth which had once nourished those far-off grasses, the long-dead deer.

Y
SABELLA
HAD ABANDONED
her hotel for a rented apartment on Roxas overlooking the bay. It was not cheap. It also smelt of fuel oil, which was explained by her encountering a member of the Ku Klux Klan wearing over his head a T-shirt with eye holes punched through. He was on hands and knees with a spraygun, its nozzle in the gap between the corridor’s floor and wall where it roared hollowly. Oily mist hung about the passage. The maniac holes swivelled and looked up at her glisteningly as she passed, furtive and triumphant as befitted all who dealt in plague.

When she had first unpacked she spent a good deal of time faintly homesick, sitting on the bed removing labels from the clothes she had bought in a last-minute shopping spree in London’s West End. This was her habit, the act without which nothing new could be worn. A small heap of names, trademarks, logos and flashes would build up beside her, victims of scissors and razor. In order to wear one’s clothes as if they belonged – a prerequisite for anybody with pretensions to taste – all traces of previous affiliation had to be removed. Ysabella would marvel at people’s indifference to walking around covered in slogans, signatures, bogus armorial devices or a menagerie of little crocodiles, ladybirds, pandas and turtles. ‘Who wants to look as if they’d been dressed by their local airport?’ she wanted to know. ‘More to the point, why should I buy the clothes I want
and
be obliged to provide these shysters with free advertising?’ She had spent real money on having craftsmen remove the name from the face of her Audemars
Piguet watch and make trainers in single plain colours (three black pairs, three brown). Somewhere in Belsize Park in a lock-up garage was her futuristic Japanese sports car from which she herself had removed an embarrassing name and assorted chrome letters and numerals from its rear.

The result was to give everything she wore or drove an exclusive, one-off aura. When she and Hugh had gone skiing everyone on the slopes immediately noticed her difference without as easily identifying its source. Blonde hair and striking figures were no particular rarity in Klosters; in fact they were common, and looked it. Ysabella stood out for reasons of absence, because of what she didn’t have, wasn’t wearing. Her absurdly expensive carbon fibre Head skis had been resprayed matt white, obliterating all the semiotics of skiing. Her suit was a uniform severe smoke grey. Her knitted hat was tawny, the colour of an old harrow abandoned in the corner of a field. Her exclusiveness was terrific as she sped deftly, clad in her powerful lack, among the anonymous day-glo throng. Their march was stolen. They launched counter-attacks under the ‘for your own good’ flag. ‘Break a leg up there and you’d be only too glad to be wearing something visible to a helicopter.’ ‘No I shouldn’t,’ she retorted. ‘I’d be downright ashamed.’ In a closely zippered pocket she carried a large square of hideous material. ‘What kind of wet goes out
dressed
for
rescue?
Always the safety net? A third parachute?’

But a few weeks of living by herself in Manila in something called an ‘apartelle’ (a word she couldn’t bring herself to say) was producing its own subtle erosions, as if it had begun to unpick the nametape from the identity she treasured. There were the capering children who besieged her whenever she left the block, faces bright with snot and eyes, who she discovered were displaced victims of the Mt. Pinatubo eruption. They lived in boxes and packing cases on a scrap of wasteland behind the building, running out barefoot among the traffic temporarily halted at the lights along thundering Roxas, flitting like little ghosts with outstretched hands through the fog of exhaust fumes, begging from drivers and passengers. A part of her began to unravel slightly, leaving her both anxious and listless. It was as if a small haemorrhage had opened up which she had yet to find and staunch, a desultory tropic bleeding which did something to the will.

She was an early riser and could find nothing nearby which was
open and would serve her breakfast. Dunkin Donuts was out of the question. Instead she brought home a clutch of newspapers and made herself coffee in a kitchen which contained almost nothing except three butter knives with bamboo handles and a jar of black treacle which had been instant coffee until the humidity got to it. She would sit at a table overlooking the scatter of moored ships waiting to unload and read the Philippine English language press with diverted incredulity.

Day by day she read the papers and drank her coffee. At first the news entwined itself with the faces of friends back in England who, she thought, would particularly enjoy this irony, that outrage, those headlines. After a while, though, the stories just boiled up like a plume of oil from an abyss, spreading out into a uniform and iridescent stain, variable in local details but predictable overall. The incidents all had about them the air of having taken place at night, as if it was only the morning sun falling across the page which finally brought them to light. They covered Ysabella’s news-sheets in a bright slick. A few weeks’ assiduous study made of them something almost ritualistic. Yet if she thought this oily glint might be a society’s recognisable features, its personality and heart remained enigmatic and concealed. Day by day policemen shot it out with each other in public, an event scarcely comprehensible to a British reader who knew that the majority of police weren’t armed, or fake, or moonlighting as security guards, drug traffickers or professional kidnappers. If the papers here were to be believed, hardly a senator or member of Congress seemed not to have some taint or hidden skeleton. Suddenly, everything became interconnected. The same names kept circling like bluebottles around carrion. National heroes were accused of treason, became fugitives, lived openly in Quezon City, vanished, popped up again being invited to Malacañang Palace for talks, discussed running for the Senate next time around. Trusted generals suddenly went AWOL, turned up in Mindanao organising a blue seal cigarette smuggling racket, came back as mayor of somewhere or other, helped fix an election, were found in a supermarket freezer chest minus eyes and genitals buried beneath twenty kilos of frozen pizzas. Men who had fled with the Marcoses, accompanied by their families and as much cash as they could carry, were sniffing around for amnesty or were actually weaseling back into government. Even Imelda herself came
and went, trying to buy deals for herself with the money she had stolen.

It was baffling, too labile to be grasped. The nouns Ysabella had been brought up to take for granted, which with their immutable bricklike nature went to build the administrative edifice that
was
a country, were here slippery, deformed or infinitely plastic. Everything was thrown into question, yet no question could be properly answered. A word such as ‘corruption’ became puny or nannyish. This was too grandly shameless a way of life to be contained – still less threatened – by invocations of morality. Yet what else was there? Here (she shook her paper in the rising sunlight)
right
here
it said that the Air Force at last knew what had happened to one of its aircraft which went missing for six years. (Went missing? How did an entire aeroplane go ‘missing’ without talk of crashes, search parties, bad weather, grieving families and boards of inquiry?) It went missing because the colonel who used to fly it had condemned it as unfit for flying, thereby circumventing IRAN (Inspect – Repair As Necessary). He dismantled it on his own air base and sent the whole thing piece by piece, labelled as ‘spare parts’, to a private hangar inside Manila Domestic Airport where it was reassembled. The colonel then resprayed and used it for two years in his own transport business. (An air force colonel with a private business? Even that seemed not quite right.) After that he sold it to a company in the provinces. He had not yet been arrested because the police were still determining what charges to file.

Ysabella couldn’t decide if all this was the sign of an extremely backward society which had yet to fix the essential nouns of its being so that everyone understood the same thing by
law,
honesty,
public
service,
police,
elections
and so on, or whether it was actually a preview of a sophisticated futuristic state likely to hold sway everywhere sometime soon. At this distance England presented itself as an inert blob of greenish substance, quite cool and weathered like a chunk of onyx or other mineral from which the surrounding rock had been worn away by rain. On closer inspection and in a different light, however, it became very much less sharply defined, fuzzy at the edges like an aspirin dropped in water, hazy and commonplace. She resented that Manila’s effect on her was to blur the fond image she had of her own country. Indeed, never before had going abroad been like this.
From afar Manila had seemed exotic, and not with the Hollywood exoticism of Bali (lithe brown folk in native costumes doing highly formalised classical dances on a beach for the massed camcorders of drunken roundeye jet-setters). Manila’s aura had had something of Baudelaire’s corpse-light glowing about it: existentially exotic,
morally
exotic, its legs raised by the pressure of its own putrefaction
‘comme
une
femme
lubrique’.
Yet once here she found herself being ground down by the heat, the filth, the choking traffic, the Jollibees and Pizza Huts and Dunkin Donuts of it all. What national costume there was derived from Nineteenth century Spanish dress. What national cuisine there was merely played with Spanish and Chinese dishes. The handicrafts were not as good as those of Burma or Thailand and besides, who since the death of
chinoiserie
in Europe wanted creaky furniture made of rattan and bamboo? Or unspeakable Madonnas standing in grottoes made entirely of lacquered seashells? Nothing had prepared her for the sheer unrelieved ugliness of this city, much of which looked like a parody of the grimmer parts of Milwaukee. Yes, that was it: that the faint traces of Europe had been swamped by the worst of Pepsicolonisation.

Ysabella put down her paper, unnerved at finding herself impassioned. How could she have imagined that the archaeology here might be interesting? But she hadn’t, really. She had thought it would be interesting to come here because nobody else did, a decision made as much by haughtiness as by notions of advancing her career. With her family connections and agreement to waive a year’s salary it hadn’t been hard to arrange. And here she was, not quite slumming deliciously in the eastwardly-turned and envious gaze of far-off friends. On the contrary, she was lost and depressed in a grimy and anarchic monster of a city. She suddenly longed for flowers. Nothing lush or gross, but celandine and periwinkle, Star of Bethlehem and speedwell, simple wayside crap crap crap – and here she hurled her newspaper at her own sentimentality like an inkwell at the devil. Celadon, yes: that ass Liwag had arrived back from Panay looking like the cat that had swallowed the cream – Australian cream, one presumed – and with cartons of Fifteenth century Chinese ware. ‘Advance Happy Christmas,’ he had said, handing her a barnacled object. She and Sharon had spent hours at the sinks gently removing marine encrustations. Sharon’s turned out to be a fairly average little
Ming bowl. Her own was revealed as a Siamese import of much the same date, Sawankhalok or perhaps Sukhothai.

‘It doesn’t seem right,’ she said.

‘It isn’t, said Sharon cheerfully. ‘But when in Rome.’

‘Being Roman needn’t reduce one to being a common looter.’

‘So throw it back in his face. You’re a woman; he won’t mind.’

‘But you’re keeping yours.’

‘Sure am. It’s only mass-produced ware; the Museum’s got tons of it. It adds zilch to our knowledge of Chinese ceramics, the kilns at Fu Liung, trade routes or Fifteenth century pre-Filipino taste. It’s one of about half a million identical dishes. But I’m keeping it because I’m a vulgar American and I like that it’s nearly six hundred years old.’

‘Come to that, I’m a vulgar European with undue respect for institutions. So I’ll keep it. Thanks.’

‘There. See how easy it is to become Roman?’

‘You’ve been here too long. You’ve become a Manileña.’ And she had, Ysabella thought, thinking of the house not far from UP campus where the American and her lover had given her dinner. Or companion. At any rate there had been a double bed, but its plank base had been spread with mats, not with a mattress. And the bathroom had been a cement stall with a seatless Western-style lavatory pan and a plastic dustbin full of water in which floated a plastic scoop with a handle. Other people, too, seemed to inhabit the house. At any rate various women and girls had been involved in preparing the meal and referred to Crispa as ‘Mam’ while Ysabella had glimpsed a mournful boy in the yard holding a machete and the skull of a husked coconut like somebody in penitent mood after a massacre. There were two palm trees in the yard, which echoed to the trapped sound of evening commuter traffic. One could never judge the edges of things in foreign places. The demarcations of everything – of town and country, as of male and female – lay differently across the landscape. Of crime and punishment, too, come to that. Where she came from, ideas of punishment tended to blot out notions of redress. Wasn’t this also true of the United States?

‘Crispa’s home province is Marinduque,’ explained Sharon. They were eating rice and
torta
made of tiny fish fry flattened into a pancake, the black seeds of their eyes still visible. ‘Here’s a story. A girl from her home village goes to stay with her uncle outside Lucena City,
in Quezon Province. That’s on the mainland opposite. He was the captain of his
barangay
there, sort of a village headman. One morning he comes into her room. It’s about four-thirty and they’re alone in the house since the aunt’s gone off early to market, taking the servant. The uncle wakes his niece by punching her hard in the stomach so that she’s winded and can’t cry out. Then he rapes her. He’s a man of sixty, she’s a girl of fourteen. He’s the village boss. He’s her uncle. When he’s gone away she climbs out of the window and neighbours take her to some friends who own a private clinic in town. She’s bleeding badly. They find semen, do a smear, carefully list the damage, treat her and write up a report which certifies her as a rape victim. The police are called. “That’s a very vague charge,” says the policeman, who’s not only a drinking buddy of the uncle but buys his fighting cocks and helped buy his last election, too. “A serious allegation. Better think it over.” The neighbours and a percentage of the village support her to the extent that the uncle’s eventually obliged to come to her with an offer of fifty thousand pesos to drop the charges. In those days that was one hell of a lot of money, I don’t know – two, three thousand dollars? In a place like Marinduque someone with two or three thousand dollars was king. Hectares of coconuts, a fishing boat, a cement block house, you name it. You could run for Mayor on that. So this girl thinks of her wretched family back there and she thinks what the hell and she takes the money and goes home.’