Ghosts of Manila

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  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.’

  ‘End of story?’

  ‘Well, no. Beginning of a small but respectable family fortune. Lots of copra, lots of hogs, good fishing. Buy a jeep to take the produce to markets with higher prices than the local ones. Eventually buy a house and a lot near UP.’

  ‘He was arrested, though?’ Ysabella addressed this to Crispa, who smiled.

  ‘On what charge?’ she asked. ‘Here there are only three or four crimes the police take seriously. Homicide, drugs, major robbery. You can expand those to include obvious things like terrorism against the state and kidnapping. Anyhow, rape’s nowhere on the list because it’s considered a private matter between individuals. It’s up to the victim to file charges. If there’s what they call an amicable settlement nobody can do anything about it. All charges dropped. Case closed. Did I do the wrong thing? I was fourteen.’

  ‘But what happened to him?’

  ‘He died a couple of years ago. Very old. A stroke, I think. We none of us went to the funeral.’

  ‘No, I mean… something must have happened. Somebody must have done something? Sacked from his post? Spat at in the street? I don’t know.’

  ‘I believe he filed for leave of absence for two months and a deputy captain took over. It was a terrific scandal in the village, of course. He had his cronies and supporters, some of whom no doubt thought he was no end of a stud. Sixty, hey? Not bad. The majority thought he’d brought shame on the village and that he ought to resign and leave the area. But he stuck it out, sitting in his house with the shutters closed, and when nothing happened re-filed for another two months’ extension of his leave of absence. Eventually it all blew over. A minor and commonplace event.’

  ‘Don’t misunderstand,’ Sharon said to Ysabella when they were eating mangoes buried in chipped ice. ‘People here may seem forgiving and unjudgmental to the point of moral lethargy, but they don’t forget.’

  ‘Exactly’, said Crispa. ‘So wasn’t I right? A vile five minutes, a miserable month, but it set us all up with capital. Surely in England they have the idea that justice involves redress as well as punishing the offender?’

  ‘They’re pretty hooked on punishment, actually. We’re Protestants, you know. Forget tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. We think things like confession and forgiveness are soft and Roman.’

  ‘But doesn’t the offender compensate his victim?’

  Ysabella had some vague idea that a recent British government had been keen to make criminals pay with more than their freedom. Perhaps that was drug barons, and their loot went to the government rather than to their victims? She felt whirled about by the edges of things not touching in their customary places, by shifting boundaries. ‘What about impoverished rapists, then?’

  ‘There’s always natural justice. It runs riot in the provinces. People put curses on them and they get hacked to death with bolos. Or someone sets fire to their house with or without their children inside… Why this sordid topic? Sharon tells me your work is excellent.’

  ‘That’s because I’ve yet to do any.’

&nb
sp; And indeed that was the problem: yet another thing whose shape was different here. When she had put archaeology into her bag in London it had been a neat package of known dimensions, of familiar colour, shape and heft. What she had taken out in Manila had become mysteriously misshapen in transit. Armed looters fought over sites. Museum directors went absent on field trips. Second-rate stuff was put on display while really interesting and valuable pieces were ‘re-assigned’ elsewhere and became suddenly unavailable for study.

  ‘Sharon tells me you’re not married?’

  ‘Not yet, anyway.’

  All three of them would be much the same age, she thought. Small talk that ought to lead somewhere, only I’m too weary. Or too grand. Or too lazy to work up emotional ties for a year only to have to ingest them all again when I pack up, like a spider eating its own web. Conservation of energy. An elderly disdain; and yet here we are, late twenties, early thirties. Prime time. Or maybe that, too, slotted differently here. Maybe here it was already over. Hugh would have said dourly: ‘Everything always is,’ as part of their conspiracy of nostalgia, of eheu fugaces which was supposed to make sex tender so long as the talisman stood in the corner making a noise like wingèd chariots or grim reapers. Actually (she could now think, safely eight thousand miles away from him) the great drawback to sacred rites was that the more solemn and special they were, the more one’s attention was distracted by the priest’s crumpetlike complexion, by the embarrassing way his eyelids fluttered like those of a school chaplain feigning prayer. Hugh was doubtless another explanation for her being in Manila. A good reason for being cross with herself, if so. I only want the experience, she thought, never mind the details.

  But details there were, as remorseless as an endless succession of small dishes which stubbornly refused to amount to a meal. Both her hosts were activists and let fall succulent morsels of this and that, appetisers from a banquet to which Ysabella didn’t quite want an invitation. Crispa was doing research on the ‘comfort women’ used as slaves-cum-prostitutes in World War II, groping about in the black sack of history hoping to pluck out a few reliable names, some grey-haired survivors whom the Japanese Government might be shamed or cajoled into compensating. Sharon was lobbying her senators and diplomats to force the Philippine Government to provide adequate protection for female overseas workers presently being used as prostitutes-cum-slaves.

  Ysabella was unnerved by the details, shamed by the righteousness of the girls’ involvement. She was pained, too, by her own hesitancy. It was as if she had heard a shattering explosion in her childhood whose reverberations ever since were warnings against commitment to just these sorts of detail. Holes in the ground were safe: one could take refuge in them as one poked about the fragments of the buried past. Even newspaper stories lacked menace as wild fables of a land existing a little apart from the one she trod and dug, such was a stranger’s queer immunity. These girls, though, lived in that other territory and gave off its details in a reek of authenticity.

  Yet Ysabella had also been touched. She had left the house without feeling a burst of political solidarity with the sisterhood but liking Crispa for Sharon, whose world she now enviously saw went laterally as well as vertically. Abused overseas workers might easily be seen as having their roots in Intramuros, that colonial citadel. Her own world, on the other hand, felt ever more shapeless and hollow. It was surely without coordinates of any kind, as directionless as a view of empty ocean with dazzling chromatic glints being smacked from a coat of sulky oil.

  8

  FATHER HERRERA’s reputation was that of a radical without, however, his being accused of open sedition. It was difficult to imagine his fattish figure inserted into the gaunt jungle barrios of Mindanao, swapping Bible for Armalite, becoming a fully-accredited rebel priest with a price on his head and occasional laissez-passers to Malacañang. Prideaux had been given his name by a contact and offered him a workingman’s lunch somewhere on José Abad Santos, having formed an impression of a busy and unpretentious priest disinclined to waste either time or jeepney fares going too far from his parish for a mere meal.

  ‘The New Era,’ said the voice on the telephone. ‘The corner of Dumiguig.’

  The New Era was, predictably, Chinese and – less predictably – new. It was full of harsh fluorescent glare. In tanks along one wall mournful eels gulped and furious crustacea attacked each other in slow motion. The tables had circular holes cut in them; underneath each a gas cylinder was connected to a ring burner. Prideaux’s knees kept nudging the cylinder. ‘They call this shabu-shabu,’ said the priest delightedly. ‘Not to be confused with plain shabu, of course, which is a drug.’ What with the air conditioning and the bubbling wok between them the priest’s spectacles kept misting over. Every so often he removed and polished them on the T-shirt between his breasts. This had on it a shield which to Prideaux’s eye looked considerably like that of Oxford University, surrounded by comic-strip billows of steam. Below was the legend: “I graduated Sauna cum Laude”. ‘You’re an anthropologist?’

  ‘I’m writing this thesis,’ said Prideaux guardedly.

  ‘About Filipino religion, I think Bernabe said?’

  ‘I may have given Father Bernabe very slightly the wrong impression.’

  ‘I imagine one often has to’, said Herrera, crunchily spearing a crab from muzzle to rectum with a chopstick, ‘in order to get the interview one wants.’ He lifted the animal out of the wok, his eyes opaque behind twin grey panes.

  ‘My thesis is really about the concept of amok. Or, perhaps, breaking points.’

  ‘Guys going apeshit, you mean.’

  ‘Ah. Women don’t?’

  Father Herrera laid down his chopsticks and took a refreshing gulp of beer. ‘What a good point,’ he said. ‘You’re implying that going to pieces is culturally determined?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Obviously it would be pretty hard to predict the exact moment without knowing the individual, but the ways in which a person breaks are practically foreordained by their culture, don’t you think? True amoks are rare in Europe, for instance. Or so they say. Anyway, if one wanted to talk about breaking points one would need to know what counted as stressful. I mean, stress in one culture might be a reassuring norm in another, mightn’t it? I notice the people here seem able to tolerate a constant physical proximity which would drive the British crazy.’

  ‘Maybe because they have to?’

  ‘Whyever. Cultures change, too. No doubt our own merry swains used to cram together into their sod huts and couldn’t have borne sleeping alone. That was then. So what’s changed? Living standards, I suppose. Codes of inhibition, self control, general attitudes towards one’s lot, stuff like that. Religion, too.’

  ‘Now I see.’ Herrera had also wiped his spectacles again, it mightn’t have been easy to relay all that over the telephone via old Bernabe.’

  ‘No. So you shouldn’t feel you’re here under false pretences.’

  ‘My friend, no lunch is a false pretence. Don’t you think lychees would be nice afterwards? Kumquats? Mangoes? I’m afraid my countrymen are not very religious at all. This may come as a shock.’

  ‘It would to most travel writers, at any rate.’

  ‘Oh, that. Well, if you will try to give thumbnail descriptions of a people you’re bound to make a fool of yourself, obviously. Sure, the guidebook version says we’re all deeply and fervently religious, ninety-odd percent Catholic, the only Christian country in Asia. My version is different. My version says my parishioners are about as religious as anyone anywhere living in the shadow of the West. What they are is deeply and fervently superstitious. We’re Asians. China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Thailand… all riddled with spirits and ghosts and necromancers and soothsayers and magicians and geomancers and devils and charms and amulets and potions and curses and witchcraft and.’

  ‘And, indeed.’

  ‘And that’s us. Do you know, I think rambutan rather than lychees? They have them sent up from Quezon or Palawan,
according to season. This is Asia, this is the East. That’s what people forget. Westerners are too eager to join in our own conspiracy and pretend we’re practically as American as Hawaii, nearly as Spanish as the Azores. What’s that cliché? Three hundred years in a monastery followed by fifty years in Hollywood. But what about ten thousand years in Asia? We simply plundered our own invaders for fresh sources of myth and superstition. That might be an interesting research project for one of you people. He could collect superstitions which probably died out in Catholic Europe a hundred years ago. They’re still here in our provinces, pretty well intact, I should think. To rediscover vanished aspects of Europe you have to come all the way to the Philippines. Nicely ironic. Excellent rambutan.’ The scalp of soft red prickles split between the priest’s thumbnails to reveal the translucent scented brain.