Playing with Water (34 page)

1.
(p. 10) For a sidelight on the relation between poison and love I cannot resist quoting Francis Huxley’s brilliant and playful book about Alice in Wonderland,
The Raven and the
Writing Desk.
Speaking of
treacle
as deriving from
theriac,
an antidote against snake poison, he writes:

Ignoring the wholly illusory etymological similarity between the French words
poison
and
poisson
as a red herring, it is still interesting that I was once told of a cure for an unwanted
tiwarik
spell. This was that within nine days the true lovers should perform an act of copulation so brief it might last only a single stroke, followed by immediate withdrawal. This now seems to make sense for two reasons, the more pragmatic being that if the couple were not already married such an event should under all social convention result in marriage, which would presumably put the jealous spell-caster for ever on the wrong side of the pale of hope. But a further reason would be that it obeys the homeopathic principle,
viz
., that a small dose of fish can be counteracted by an even smaller (even though the species itself might be larger). Untreated, though,
tiwarik
’s venereal
poison becomes incurable after nine days. Why nine, though? This remains a mystery, but one quite easily elucidated if we bear in mind the importance of (ecclesiastical) Latin in Filipino superstitious beliefs and spells. Treated topsy-turvily, as befits anything to do with
tiwarik,
the word
novem
re-arranges itself comfortably as
venom.
It will be objected that Tagalog speakers of Spanish times would not have known the English word ‘venom’. This is too pedestrian a quibble to argue about. Instead the objector should go straight on and ponder the significance of nine as the product of the magical three multiplied by itself which appears in all sorts of Tagalog spells and incantations.

2.
(p. 89) Independent as people like Sising are, they still live within a money economy. Generally speaking, Sising’s income in hard cash comes from collecting and selling
tuba
, selling the occasional piglet or chicken he can keep from the clutches of the Widow Soriano, selling his labour for things such as
lokad
, or copra-making.

At the time of writing this (July 1986) the exchange rates, with rare convenience, are more or less US$ 1 = 20 pesos, £1 = 30 pesos. At these prices, then, his eleven
tuba
-producing palms cost him 17p each per month. Each must be climbed twice daily in all weathers and at all seasons. The amount of
tuba
a tree produces depends on the season as well as on the tree’s individual quality: July is a bad time whereas in February yields are higher. Sising is currently earning about 27p a day from his trees, which works out at a clear profit of some £6.25 a month.

Once a month, maybe even twice, he will work on making copra. This is an exhausting process which usually lasts three days, depending on the number and dispersion of the coco-palms. In recent years the price of copra – and hence the rate of pay of Sising’s labour, which is directly related – has been falling steadily. This is partly due to a weakening international market for commodities like coconut oil and partly to corruption under the Marcos administration of Cocofed, the Coconut Producers’ Federation, the net result of which is a situation of near-despair in a thousand places like Kansulay whose income, daily life and even
culture centre largely around the coco-palm. The buying price of copra here is now down to around 3p a kilo and scarcely a centavo appears to have been ploughed back into the industry by its monopolistic representative body to induce landowners like the Sorianos to plant new, higher-yielding stock or encourage more efficient production. This is not merely a cause for lament: it is a cause for bitter anger amongst those like Sising who understand perfectly what has happened and who understand also that their three days’ backbreaking labour will earn them a total of 84p. A few representative prices will indicate how far this sum will go. In this province a kilo of rice, the staple belly filler, now costs l9p. The price of fish fluctuates wildly according to season, to whether the market has been flooded by a bumper catch or starved by a typhoon or adverse current. Insofar as there is a ‘standard’ fish here it is the
tulingan
, a member of the tuna family about the size of a mackerel which is caught practically the year round. In the past month the price of
tulingan
has veered between a low of 10p per kilo to 75p. It at once becomes apparent that for the inland-dwellers or non-fishermen of Kansulay many days are fishless. Eggs, depending on size, sell for about 5p each. A
lapad
of coconut oil costs 12p, one of vegetable cooking oil 14p. A
lapad
of paraffin costs 9p, one of ESQ rum 29p. The cheapest cigarettes are sold in paper rolls of thirty with a charming blurred picture of a Twenties Spanish-style couple on the wrapper. They are called
Magkaibigan
(Friends) and cost 5p. Otherwise cigarettes range upwards to 20p for twenty by which price they are all in the Virginia-tobacco-and-menthol bracket. Above that are American brands made under licence. Here twenty Marlboro cost 25p, twenty Camels 26p.

A thin cake of detergent soap, which is one segment of a three-cake bar (‘Ajax’, ‘Mr Clean’, ‘Superwheel’ etc.) costs 9p. Bini, like most of the other inhabitants of Kansulay, does her washing in the stream. Her cake of soap might be stretched to last a week. A quarter-kilo of brown sugar costs her 5p, white 9p. Finally, a box of matches is 2p but the village shop quite frequently runs out of supplies and it is then one sees people with burning sticks hurrying along,
swinging them into curlicues and arabesques of aromatic smoke to keep them alive.

3.
(p. 130) Where Malacañang was concerned even Nick Joaquin, writing in August 1968 – i.e. some thirty months after the Marcoses moved in – was oddly unwary in his essay ‘Art in the Palace’ which described Imelda Marcos’s ever-growing collection of
objets
. Those were the early days of the Marcoses when it was perhaps easier to accept Imelda at her own valuation as a humble aesthete and patroness eager to support Filipino artists and preserve the nation’s cultural heritage. But it should not have been easier at all, not for a wily old bird like Joaquin, a travelled and sceptical journalist who is quite capable of philippics when on the subject of his own countrymen’s failings (as in his essay ‘A Heritage of Smallness’). He ought surely to have detected the country-girl made good, the small-town Cleopatra speaking in the voice of the First Lady. His ears heard her homiletic and he evidently believed them:

If this lyrical description of the House Beautiful full of good and cultured people is at variance with the final reality it ought to have surprised nobody, least of all Joaquin who maybe has a little more Carlyle in him than he would care to admit. Inasmuch as the world will ever remember Imelda Marcos it will recall the palace of Malacañang the Filipino crowds filed through eighteen years later: the video pornography, the three thousand pairs of shoes, the crates of scent.

And yet … Even as the Filipinos ascribe all their ills to those two decades of Marcos rule the unpalatable suspicion remains that the Marcoses were not alien monsters visited on their people by an uncaring fate but entirely typical of a certain aspect of the national character. Everything that ruthless dyad did and were in their guise as First Couple is to be seen on a smaller scale and scattered throughout their country. The vulgarity, the racketeering, the self-praise, the political chicanery, that special contempt for the law which only lawyers acquire and above all the endless clawingin of wealth and more wealth: all these are to be glimpsed in microcosm in the courts of certain provincial governors, mayors, landowners, judges, professionals and military men.

The only thing which need be added as a codicil to such an accusation is that nobody writing from the depths of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain – from that self-righteous slough of entropy, greed and anti-intellectualism – is in any position to score points about moral mediocrity and national character flaws. He can only observe that like any country, and for reasons of whatever sad permutation of culture and pathology, the Philippines and Britain have both had the governments they deserved. This being said, it of course remains true that it was American interference in their political system which effectively prevented the Filipino people from getting rid of their President earlier.

4.
(p. 138) A paragraph in David Joel Steinberg’s 1982 book
The Philippines
gives a certain perspective to this sort of event:

Mr Steinberg might have added that in the Philippines the credence commonly attached to such magic vastly exceeds that accorded official biographies.

5.
(p. 144) It is, of course, the job of tourist brochures to sell the countries they describe to potential customers. They are thus written entirely from the reader’s viewpoint. There is a kind of political journalism which, incredibly, tries to sell the
author
. It relies not on an intimate knowledge of a country but on the imagined purity of the literary eye. The argument seems to be that real knowledge hinders the imagination which alone can transmute the base metal of some scrubby, crisis-torn little country into nuggets of writerly gold. When this kind of journalist turns his attention to a country the reader happens to know and love his writing produces anguish and anger, not least among the politically literate and serious natives of that country who actually go through the nasty business of poverty and persecution and dying young so that the writer may bear off his holiday snaps in triumph. In the case of the Philippines such a writer has recently been demolished by Benedict Anderson in his savage and funny essay ‘James Fenton’s Slideshow’.

6.
(p. 154) The incomes of the people of Sabay tend to be somewhat higher than those in Kansulay. This reflects the fact that fishing is more lucrative than copra-making or, indeed, working the land in general. I estimate that in Kansulay 80 per cent of the villagers’ work-hours are spent in land-based activities and only 20 per cent either fishing or combing the foreshore at low tide for edible shells, crabs, small octopus etc. In Sabay it is the reverse, 70 per cent of
time being spent in fishing activities and only 30 per cent on the land.

Where ordinary fishing is concerned an average 35 per cent of a man’s catch goes to feed his family whether as immediate food or as
daing
. The other 65 per cent he sells at the fluctuating market rate.

A spear-fisherman of Arman’s skill with access to a compressor can earn an average of £2.60 each time he goes out, even after deducting a kilo of fish for family consumption. The family which has one or more skilled fishermen among its members can often make as much as £33 a month, depending on the season. Arman is thus a significantly higher earner than Sising, although his outlay is greater. Fishing equipment is generally more complicated, more expensive and demands far more maintenance. In addition there are considerable fuel costs for running both
bangka
and compressor.

Even higher incomes may be achieved by collecting aquarium fish. If a fisherman specialises in this form of
similya
and works at it full-time his earnings may average as much as £45 a month. On the other hand, a family man’s annual income of £540 is not, in today’s world, riches beyond the dreams of avarice.

7.
(p. 199) The commonest proprietary remedies are Cortal (aspirin), Biogesic and Neozep; at Sabay a glass sweet-jar holds these separate from the other pills. Spear-fishermen often have recourse to Sinutabs because of the pressure-induced congestion. Indeed, decongestants in general are much used all over the Philippines since TB and respiratory diseases are so prevalent. I have always assumed this accounted for the great popularity of mentholated cigarettes and sweets, which are everywhere on sale.