Playing with Water (32 page)

Arman drops me off on the shingle and heads back home to cook up fertiliser. Even though I have irrevocably misspent my life, even though I have wasted my chances of
doing something really well, I climb up to my hut full of self-pleasure. It is deeply satisfying for love to be found out.

But it is nothing to carry back to England. A passion for the blue glinting flakes of micro-organisms borne along in the tropical drift, a passion for insignificant molluscs, for the colour of a weed, for the single eye in a crevice, is rendered dumb in London’s uproar. It sounds silly, too, when expressed over a dinner-table sandwiched between gossip from Academe and scandals in Bohemia. All of a sudden a love which has sustained me for isolate months is unconvincing, jejune. If one had wanted to study a fish’s eye one should have been a marine biologist. Had one intended to talk about the Philippines one ought at least to have read the right books. Instead I make the mistake of trying to describe what it is to be a hunter. It is disastrous, the very word has the wrong sound: Hemingwayesque, fading-macho, anti-conservationist. Mine is a world away from such stuff, from trophies, record tarpon and barracuda, from high-powered boats with ‘fighting chairs’ bolted to the deck. But once the images have been set loose they are beyond recalling. When I crossly demolish the aura of Caribbean playgrounds I am left with that of native chic or – far worse – of a pelagic Richard Jefferies. Having explained myself badly I become ratty, withdrawn. I scowl from a sofa and sip coffee. I myself begin to wonder whether I might not just have returned from a choppy passage through a ‘mid-life crisis’, a concept which was aired over dinner.

Yet all the time the sea moves in me. It inhabits me like a massive angel in this landlocked city. Only, I cannot say it aloud. As if it were an eccentric belief, an embarrassing perversion, I hide my secret although not so well it could never be inferred. There are many things worse than being thought perverted and one is to be pitied for having no love of any kind.

Thus the irony of having made an exhilarating discovery is that one must fall silent on a sofa in a city. The discovery itself is simple enough but is such an insult to the twentieth century it does appear perverse: the wish to keep the sun’s
time, to listen to the wind. I like to watch day break and night fall although I still have little interest in sunrises or sunsets. But unless I live with an eye, an ear and a nose to that slow, complex cycle I am cut off from a source of intelligence. This being said I readily acknowledge how badly I would fare without work, without writing, without something to counteract the tendency towards rural idiocy. Maybe only mystics can live in caves, eating mist and drinking rain and excreting holy laughter. Others like myself are much too amused by doing things in the sun, brief as it is.

I only wish there were a way of transmitting a message back through time to my former self as he sat whiling away a French lesson in June 1953, although I am not sure what that message would be. How could I reply to the one he sent me, dense child, ignorant of what he was doing and yet getting it right? Disdainfully rejecting his father’s demand that he should admire sunsets and views he drew his answer, saying plainly:
There is no such thing as landscape: write your own.
Probably the only message I could send him is:
Keep this exercise book; one day it’ll surprise you.
So maybe I have sent it after all and maybe he did receive it. I can’t imagine how else I could successfully have kept the book’s existence a secret from myself for thirty years unless I was acting on my own instructions.

From its cap of wild forest to its coral roots Tiwarik is entire. But on certain cloudless days it can be that each of its extremities dissolves into blue, its bounds become endless. Instead of remaining a cartographer’s outline the island expands like a drop of intense colour let fall on a sheet of wet paper. It is as though I might walk or swim indefinitely without crossing my own track and without ever leaving the place. Its air draws memories out, absolves them, opens wide on all sorts of happy possibilities.

We might not imagine a more re-creational task than drawing our lands, like certain Filipinos wistfully mapping Manila to themselves, as having the largesse of desire and with the spaciousness of the future. Beneath each map are visible the traces of previous sketches, outgrown essays. The re-drawings, imagination itself, are endless. Protocities, proto-islands, they accrete upon their predecessors’
foundations, become our own patina. Only after an unknown length of time there is no desire left and expectation ceases. Then a new strange wind blows up and like the echoes of clouds on a glassy sea the many outlines tremble and waver, erase themselves, are blown away. The space they leave is filled at once with energy and playfulness.

It is shortly after sunrise. Pallid day is coming on behind marbling clouds. The boat, its paint weathered away, rocks with its nose on the shore, ashy beneath callow flukes of light. Intoy and I are cleaning our night’s catch on the coral shingle. He seems disinclined to go home, which given our catch he certainly should: six large blue and green parrotfish, a decent squid and several small octopus, surgeon-fish and much else besides including a
kamansi
. This last is a porcupine fish, one of the
Diodontidae
. It is still alive. Its sad, ugly face is tacked ridiculously onto one side of its inflated football-sized body. At the opposite end a minute tail wiggles as an absurd appendage. Far out on either edge tiny fins whir spasmodically.

As we clean the other fish the
kamansi
lolls impotently on the edge of the violet sea to which it will never return. Its defensive hydraulic system is leaking water slowly through my spear holes but periodically and with pathetic wet pantings it tries to pump itself up to its original iron hardness. It sounds like what it is: a sucking chest wound. Its bulging black expressionless eyes suddenly catch a ray of the strengthening light and I glimpse the shadowed gold of its retinas. I am filled with pity for the creature, with the utmost remorse for what I have done to it. Whatever the respect of the hunter for his prey, whatever access the hunt may give him to a hidden and accurate world, however much he kills only to eat, there are times when he feels the force with which he jars up against that dilemma which everybody alike faces, even if they think their hands are spotlessly clean of blood. It is the same dilemma of which Barry Lopez wrote after the Eskimos he knew had hunted
whale and walrus, ‘how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s own culture but within oneself.’ This is not a religious darkness, not the soul’s night, nothing as mere as depression. It is the great rage, the value-free savagery every mortal carries within him, even the gentlest and most reflective of men. Denying it is useless: it declares itself obliquely in dreams, in patterns of speech, in unconscious acts. Too studied a gentleness comes to look like ignorance; later it is its own form of aggression.

I kill the
kamansi
with difficulty, needing to lean on my knife to get its point to penetrate the creature’s hide and then its skull. Sawing away at its skin eventually releases the water and the whole fish deflates into a flaccid thorny sac with pop-eyes and a toad’s mouth. As I do this and as Intoy busily guts and de-scales beside me the sun rises above the horizon and the clouds begin to disperse. The sea changes from a featureless waste into a luminous landscape whose shallow hills are tinged with reds and greens and among whose slopes a small school of dolphins now frolics. Their polished backs rise over and over, dorsal sails flashing in the light as if they were parts of mysterious wheels trundling beneath the surface. The entire scene is of the profoundest tranquillity and sentience, the grazing flock moving calmly off to other pastures far out in what men are pleased to call featureless wastes. For all I know these magnificent animals are following submarine ley lines as plain and familiar to them as are the paths through water-meadows to any herd of Jerseys.

Intoy glances up at them with interest. ‘
Lumba
,’ he says. ‘
Masarap ‘yon.
’ I disagree: they are not in the least delicious. Their dark, oily meat reminds any English war-baby of the whale steaks which used to be sold as a substitute for ordinary meat in the late Forties and early Fifties and which ended up as dogs’ meat before being banned altogether. (The exact opposite, in fact, of coley: a fish I still think of as cheap catfood but which has now become a quite expensive human dish.) In any case I won’t eat dolphin and regret it when the fishermen of Sabay catch one
and redden the sea with its thick mammalian blood.

The place where we have been cleaning the catch now looks like the scene of some mass interrogation: dark smears and splashes and, littering the shingle, great blue and green scales like wrenched-out toenails. From the nearby trees the birds begin their songs. Arcadia.

‘Why not take this lot over so it will catch the jeep?’ I ask. There must be seven or eight kilos of fish, more than enough to make worthwhile sending it to the market in Malubog.

But he seems strangely reluctant and I suddenly realise I do not understand the pattern of Intoy’s life at all. I have been looking at it – as at those of his friends and colleagues – as a simple sequence of economic propositions:
fishing
,
fish, selling, money, fishing
and so on while attributing to myself rich complexities of motivation. Of the life below his life I know next to nothing. There is no reason to suspect it resembles its surface aspect to the least degree.

‘If somebody comes,’ he says. It is clear he does not want to go over to Sabay or that he wishes to stay on Tiwarik or both. We pull his
bangka
out of the tide’s reach and carry our cleaned haul up to the hut. Some of it we pack with salt, some of it we marinade for drying later, much of it we cook and eat for we are both ravenously hungry. Then Intoy falls asleep on the floor, on his back with his knees drawn up and sagging apart like a baby. I clean our tackle, sharpen a knife, eventually drowse off in the shade of the fish-dryer which is ill advised since within minutes I am covered in ants.

Later that morning another boat arrives so we send back much of our catch for relatives and friends. Intoy is restless like a bored urban teenager wanting diversion. He tells me of his plans to go to Manila, stay with distant cousins and get a job. It is of no significance to him that he is only fourteen.

‘I can’t stay here all my life. I don’t want to be just a fisherman. I want to see things, do things.’

The sadness with which his words fill me is so familiar it leaves me with nothing to say but raise practical objections.

‘Who will your companion be?’

His elder brother, of course. He also wants to go.

‘What work will you do?’

Oh, anything …

What to me is a desperate gangland of pavement vendors, beggars, prostitutes, scullions, grease-monkeys, casual labourers, exploited labour, loiterers in cardboard shacks, endless victims, is to him a fabled city, a whirligig of opportunities. I see him as a dishwasher in a Chinese-run eating house, on his feet sixteen hours a day, paid a pittance, sleeping up under the stifling roof according to a rota system, his hunter’s reflexes dulling. I see his body marked with the tattooed letters and devices of the gangs, the eye and hand once so marvellously attuned growing into disharmony, becoming separate.

Could I loan him the fare to Manila? he asks as we walk slowly up through The Field of Crabs. The new
cogon
is shooting from the burnt clumps: the land is predominantly green again, the volcanic soil visible only here and there. In another month or two the remains of the fire, like those of the crabs themselves, will be buried beneath a fresh meadow. I tell him not to be disingenuous. As there is no question of his going alone and equally no possibility of his brother’s having the money, he actually needs two fares not one. Well yes, he sort of does. I say it’s a lot of money and promise to think about it, which is me being disingenuous: their combined fare will be rather under six pounds, not a sum which needs much deliberating over even in a life as ill run as my own. The truth is, of course, I don’t want to lose him. I don’t want the break-up of the familiar gang, the loss of mates, the vanishing of companions. Only I am permitted to go away. He is as cheered by my vague reply as if I had pressed the notes into his hand so maybe this has been yet another opportunity for me to mis-read him. Anyone might prefer re-assurance to a loan.

We have walked high up to the far side of the island, squeezing between the clifftop and an edge of the forest where it has run down lopsidedly like ill-applied icing on a little cake. And here I set eyes on a tree as for the first time. I must have seen it before yet I have never noticed it. It is a mature tree of a species I do not recognise with a thick
gnarled trunk, growing right on the edge of a precipice which drops sheer two hundred feet to the sea beneath. The water at the bottom is shades of azure, light in the shallows with the clumps of coral as clear as the whorls and crenellations buried in the depths of a paperweight. From this height the other world cannot conceal itself. Drune is there with its mountains and forests, its peasants and predators.

‘
Pakoy
,’ says Intoy, pointing, all at once the hunter rather than the would-be migrant. The portly fish makes its way slowly across the face of Drune like a stately dirigible and heads for the deep where it grows hazy and disappears.

What is unusual about this tree is that it has a stout branch about twelve feet up forming a precise right-angle to the trunk and running exactly parallel to the cliff edge. The rest of the tree is somewhat haywire and ill defined. It is as if all its design and energy were expressed by the one perfect branch, the remainder having been left to grow as best it could.

Both Intoy and I stare speculatively at the branch. Down below in Drune the peasants lower their mattocks and stare up with open mouths. It is clear what we are going to do.