Playing with Water (11 page)

The impossibility of turning round added to the panic. Eventually we arrived back beneath the Archdeacon’s Morris, stood up gratefully one by one, drew summer air into our lungs, turned round and continued at a crawl which now felt expansive. Soon we were pushing up the manhole cover and emerging into the dazzle of a June afternoon. There, watching us curiously, stood Mr Sopwith, a vast old man who was the senior English master and much revered because he had written some books. He did not speak until we were all out, blinking and covered in mud, and the manhole cover had been replaced. Then he
said mildly: ‘But they will not dream of us poor lads Lost in the ground.’

Since this was neither comprehensible nor answerable someone said:

‘Er, school archaeological society, sir.’

But Mr Sopwith merely repeated his line. ‘Wilfred Owen,’ he added, ‘in case anybody’s interested. I don’t suppose anybody is.’ And he walked off. By the time I reached the Upper Sixth Mr Sopwith had effectively retired but I sometimes visited him in his rooms in Lardergate, not far at all from where the Archdeacon’s by now almost derelict Morris still squatted over its square of darkness.

It now seems hardly coincidental that the places which shaped my sense of landscape should also have confirmed my infantile sense that something always lay beneath. As quite a small child I knew the earth was not as solid as it looked, that trees for instance had been extruded from it leaving a hollow underground exactly corresponding to the bulk of wood above. Everywhere, I thought, was riddled and caved, the foundations of the hills bored through with secret fissures, unimaginable caverns. (I loved Verne’s
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
.) Seven years ago I found myself on a lava-field below a semiactive volcano in the southern Philippines and, jumping, made the ground chime. Part of the enjoyment came from not knowing how thin this crust was, whether one might break through and plunge into sulphurous caves or lakes of molten slag. That sense of walking on a thin skin was what I had always known; it was inevitable that I would come to wonder what lay beneath the abrupt peak of Tiwarik.

The undersea fissure I eventually found was quite wide enough to swim into but entirely filled with water. The three days it took me to nerve myself to hold my breath and go in were coloured with imaginings of an unknown breed of sea urchins or some species of stiff weed whose inwardly-inclined spines allowed access but no backing out again. On the fourth day I took a torch and a deep breath and
swam in ten feet. There at the end was a blank wall of rock. I turned and headed out again into the sunlight.

Now that I knew I could get in and out I swam in again more confidently. This time at the rock wall my torch was reflected from the underside of the water’s surface. I came up cautiously, not knowing if the roof came to within inches of it. But there was nothing, only a cool marine smell. I shone the torch about, hoping for a massive cavern but finding there was no more than a fathom of air above my head. On all sides the rock fell into the water almost at arm’s length. My secret cave system was no more than a sump ending in a pocket of ancient sea-breath. It was like coming up in the end of an inverted ice-cream cone. There were no peculiar sea urchins nor eyeless fish nor strange crystals glittering in the roof; nothing but a dunce’s cap of air trapped in rock.

Later I perceived how childish my hope had been. More, it was stupid, and not simply because Tiwarik was igneous rock and not limestone. Had I not yet understood the significance of its being an upside-down island? If there were any secrets here outside the reef itself they surely lay not in chthonic gloom, in subterranean darknesses, but in the upper air, in sounds and light-beams running through the grasses. Here on Tiwarik I could actually breathe the hidden and be dazzled by the concealed, for there was nothing more mysterious than the drench of light onto the island, especially in the early mornings. I had never experienced light like it. It seemed out of proportion to the sun’s low angle, out of keeping with what fell on the mainland when I crossed over first thing to fetch water.

Perhaps it is still the oddest thing about Tiwarik as I write this sentence in a dark room in some city or other, my head filled always with that astonishing light: that paradoxical quality it had of at once making surfaces more brilliant while producing transparence in everything. Uniquely on the island, as opposed to the reef around it, the world beneath the world is light and not dark. It is not a place of tunnels at all but of the invisible bright corridors rowed through by my pair of eagles as they return to their fastness high in the jungle, blood from the fish in their claws
pattering in a line across my roof as it did one morning. I once took some half-hearted photographs of the island but in none of them does this transparent quality appear. Maybe the camera cannot tell a lie but it sometimes cannot tell the truth, for it sees neither with the eye of affection nor with that of knowledge.

Often when I pad past the Malabayabas’ house in the groves at Kansulay Bini is singing somewhere inside. It is a cliché, a sentimentalism that people who have nothing should sing. Her voice rises above the hollow rasping of the
kayuran
on which she is squatting while chickens squabble over the tatters of white coconut meat spilling out of the bowl. Sometimes when I am up there in my hut on the ridge the wind freakishly lifts sounds from below through the fretted ceiling of fronds. Then I can hear the children playing outside Bini’s house, can even distinguish the words of their songs. In the Philippine provinces children still play chanting games. Even girls of eighteen join in with the little ones, playing with equal absorption, concentric rings of children skipping in contrary directions, couples bowing to each other with odd decorum. The songs they sing are old Spanish nursery songs, Filipino folk-songs, snatches from pop songs and American musicals, all of them with the macaronic air of being in several languages at once, none of which is wholly understood. The games also give the impression of being at once firmly choreographed by tradition and utterly improvised.

One day I can hear them enacting a dashing Spanish courtship game where a row of eight-year-old girls ritually flinches and giggles at the statuesque advances of eight-year-old
caballeros
. Above their chanting can be heard an entirely Filipino descant of obscene advice offered by the girls to the boys, ribald suggestions by the boys to the girls, shouts of laughter from everyone. On another day a song in parallel text rises up through the leaves. It must have been written for use in schools but has now acquired something of the status of a genuine folk-song with its elemental storyline and innocent tune:

Over the years I have become deeply attached to the Malabayabas family. For a start I like their name, eminently ethnic as opposed to Spanish. Just as
bato
means ‘stone’ and
mabato
or
malabato
mean ‘stony’, so
bayabas
means ‘guava’ and hence ‘Malabayabas’ is whatever adjective you could derive from that fruit: ‘guavery’, perhaps. It is particularly pleasing that their little house is surrounded by wild guava bushes. Sising (from Cezar) is exactly the same age as I am, born in late 1941 not long before the Japanese Occupation. His wife Bini (from Divina, pronounced ‘Dibina’) is two years younger, exactly the same age as my sister Jane. We spend hours at each other’s houses drinking
tuba
and eating puppy, crocodile, fruit-bat or merely shellfish from the stream, whatever is available. Some night I may be on my hill-top when suddenly from over its curve a flacking orange glow will appear as if a volcanic seizure were sending sporadic flame shooting from fissures in the path below. Then their voices, ascending beneath the blazing torches of
lagi
, dried palm-fronds artfully bound into flambeaux with their own leaves. Sising, already a little drunk, brings a long bamboo tube of palm wine, Bini a covered plastic bowl full of boiled chicken bits. Nobody drinks without
pulutan
.

‘Good evening, James. Are we disturbing you?’

‘Not at all. I was just beginning to feel lonely.’

‘No wonder, living up here without a wife to keep you warm.’

‘It’s quite warm enough without.’ And we all laugh at our by now ritual exchange; they are fanning themselves after their climb, the sweat on their faces glinting in the dying flames of the torches discarded on the ground.

Occasionally I have a bottle of
anisado
which I buy in town and which I now produce like a punctilious suburbanite his bottle of Cyprus sherry from a compartment in the radiogram. We drink and fan ourselves for the night is deep and sultry, a muddy lid of cloud closing off the stars and shutting the Earth in a cooking pot from beneath the edges of whose top flashes of lightning leak in from outside. This lightning below the horizon is constant, soundless and meaningless since it heralds no storm, no rain, no change, nothing but its own fitful discharge. We talk of the steady fall in copra prices, of their son’s success with his catapult (four of the Philippines’ national bird and a good solid hit on Kuyo’s dog which was chasing their chickens), of the rumours that half the supplies of medicine for the little provincial hospital ten miles away have been sold on the black market by one of the doctors.

‘
Ay!
’ they laugh, shaking their heads as at the immutability of human behaviour. Sometimes I find their lack of outrage infuriating, at other times deeply admirable. It is a phlegm they need, for the Malabayabas family are tenants of the Sorianos.

I had heard about their landlords before I finally met them since shortly after Lolang Mating’s death I decided to make life easier for myself by installing a hand-pump at the foot of the hill, hence not having to go so far to fetch my water. It seemed obvious the best site was behind Sising’s house; in this way we could all benefit. I bought a Chinese pump, twenty feet of galvanised iron pipe, a couple of bags of cement, and after some strenuous digging which I avoided by being occupied elsewhere the pump was installed and within two weeks was drawing sweet clear water. So far so good; but I had forgotten about who owned the land on which it stood.

Shortly afterwards I was introduced to old Judge Soriano who lived away in town. He was a moulting old boy who spent much of his time sitting in a chair reading through his bound collection of Jehovah’s Witness texts dating from the Thirties or looking at photograph albums with his cronies. He had married just after the war and his favourite pictures were those of his honeymoon spent in America. He
handed me many albums of black and white photographs so that I should have plenty to occupy me while I sipped my
calamansi
juice and he described his grandiose plans for building a Kingdom Hall on what the province’s government had officially named Capitol Hill, a jungly mass of bananas and rooting goats behind the market which had been earmarked for better things. There they were, Attorney and Mrs Soriano, beaming happily beside their rented Ford V-8 (it must have been just before the single-piece windscreen came in) at Ausable Chasm, Golden Gate Bridge, Niagara Falls, at all sorts of concrete diners in the middle of nowhere. In their two months’ touring they seemed to have covered pretty much the entire continent but their smiles had never flagged, at least not when facing the camera.

I recognised Mrs Soriano at once when returning one day from town and dropping in on Sising and Bini with some cough medicine for their youngest. A stout woman in a blue dress wearing a good deal of jewellery and shoes with heels (in a coconut grove!) she was standing outside their house holding a stick. Nearby was a jeep whose driver was chatting to Sising and which must have been driven among the trees and across the stream.

‘Good afternoon,’ she called as I approached. ‘You must be the famous Mr James.’ We went through the rituals. ‘Why are you living here?’ she asked abruptly, smiling.

‘Why not? It’s nice and quiet up there on the hill. Sea-breezes at night, no noise, no NPAs.’

‘Where do you get your bread? Americans eat bread.’

‘I’m not an American. Anyway, I like rice.’

She looked around in expressive silence at Bini’s youngest children playing in the dirt beneath the house, at Bini’s torn T-shirt, at Sising’s threadbare shorts, at the wornout rubber flip-flops mended with wire lying about, at the two old torch batteries placed on a tree stump to catch the sun and squeeze the last microvolt out of their exhausted chemicals.

‘You mean you
want
to live here in the
bundok
?’ she asked. She pointed with her stick at the hand-pump. ‘You paid for that? For these people?’ She was incredulous. ‘Perhaps you are very kind.’

I said I had put it there for my own convenience.

‘You should charge them for using it, you know. Are you with the Peace Corps?’

Questions, questions. I repeated that I was not American and explained how only Americans could belong to the Peace Corps. I knew it was a waste of time, that to her all white foreigners were ‘
kanos
, that she too thought England was one of the States. She was as bored as I; her attention was distracted by a couple of the Malabayabas’ chickens. She pointed with her stick.

‘Boks!’ she called to her driver. ‘I’ll have those unless you can see anything fatter. Everything’s so thin here.’ Her stick-point wandered with her attention, pointing now at little Lito beneath the hut. I dared not look at Bini whom I knew to be eaten up with shame about her own thinness, about that of her youngest child and about what it said of her and Sising’s failure to provide. Boks grabbed one chicken, Sising the other; they trussed their feet with stalks and tossed them into the jeep. Meanwhile Mrs Soriano’s stick-point had lighted on a hand broom which Bini had just finished making out of frond ribs. It was beautifully bound at the handle with a triple plait of
nito
. ‘That’s not bad,’ she said, her stick-point going from Boks to the broom. Bini surrendered the broom with a smile; it joined the chickens in the back of the jeep.

I could not believe what I was seeing and I could not watch any more. What I wanted to say would have rebounded on Sising and Bini. I turned and walked off up the hill.

‘Goodbye,’ Mrs Soriano called out behind me. I knew she was bothered and uncertain. People acutely conscious of their own status are necessarily obsessed with that of others and she could not yet place me. Nominally I ranked high as a ‘
kano
(rich, white, maybe useful for contacts and help with getting visas for the family) but I had spoiled everything by going native, by failing to recognise her as a fellow member of the middle class and by not having the sort of job to which she could assign a notional salary.

The real fact of the matter was that the Sorianos and I were separated less by a cultural or geographical gap than
by a temporal one. They were still living in an era which was classically feudal and their relationships were those of feudalism. I thought back to school, to European history with its Jack Straws and Johnny Peasants confronting the tyranny of Lord and Lady Landowner, to sweet Auburn. I had never expected I might one day meet Lady Landowner and find her a fat Filipina with brown ringed fingers, a fake Dior handbag and a chauffeur-driven jeep with bald tyres. But then, neither had I expected I would be befriended by Johnny Peasant and brought palm wine and fried dog and the company of his family at night in case I was feeling lonely in my hut in the hills.

Mrs Soriano may for a while have been wary of me and puzzled but within six months the self-assurance of her class had settled the matter. I had to go to Europe for some time; on my return I found the old Judge was dead and the Malabayabases embarrassed and despondent. They pointed to a grassless depression in the ground behind the house.

‘Where the hell’s your pump?’ I asked.

‘Mrs Soriano took it. She came one day and said that now her husband had died she would have financial problems and needed the pump herself. Boks came and he and Sising dug it up. But they’ve left the pipe going underground; it wouldn’t come up.’

I was still recently enough arrived to have newly laundered shirts and trousers in my luggage. I broke them out and walked furiously back down to Kansulay. It was the wrong time of day for jeepneys. Eventually I caught a
calesa
with high wooden wheels and a bony horse which trudged us into town in a matter of hours. I went straight to the Soriano house and the first thing I saw was the pump lying on its side in the front yard among the chickens and litter. Mrs Soriano was called by a houseboy and emerged smiling gravely, as befitted a widow. I was in no mood for condolences.

‘That pump, Mrs Soriano. I want it back.’

‘Oh. I see. I understood you to say you had given it to the Malabayabas family?’

‘No. I said I had installed it for my own convenience. It just happens to be convenient for all of us, so I want it back.’

‘Let us go in, Mr James. I would like you to meet my eldest son.’

Not having met Attorney ‘Cads’ (for Ricardo?) Soriano before, I felt able to commiserate perfunctorily with him on the recent death of his father. His mother was not in the mood for small talk.

‘Mr James has a legal difficulty regarding our pump,’ she prompted him. Cads looked unhappy; I suspected that like the old Judge he was more at ease drinking with his
barkadas
and indulging in congenial small-town malice. Indeed the law scene in Manila might well have been a bit too fast for him and it crossed my mind that his father’s death may not have been wholly unwelcome since it would entitle him to retire to this quiet provincial backwater while appearing selfless and dutiful. Certainly as he sucked his gold-and-ruby fraternity ring it was barely possible to imagine him plotting shrewd deals, still less successfully confronting their victims.

‘Not exactly
your
pump,’ I said in case leaving his mother’s adjective uncorrected constituted a legal admission of ownership.

‘I think my mother wishes to say, er, please sit down. Will you have coffee, a soft drink,
calamansi
juice? I am so sorry, you must be hot after your journey. Kansulay is very far. I used to go there a lot as a boy. We went to pick the
duhats
when the season came.’

‘Cads,’ said Mrs Soriano.