Ghosts of Manila

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘And religion?’

  ‘Are you familiar with the concept of balimbing? That’s what we call the star fruit, which has twelve sides. Only this morning I was hearing about a perfect balimbing, the eldest daughter of one of my parishioners. She was born a Catholic in the provinces. She falls in love with this boy, who is Aglipayan, our home-grown Church which broke with the Vatican early this century. So she becomes Aglipayan but then her family moves to Manila where she meets another boy whose people are Seventh Day Adventists. She becomes an Adventist while he gets engaged to someone else. Poor girl. Off she goes to Olongapo, hangs around the bars until the golden dream comes true. She meets an American sailor. Love as deep as the ocean. Together forever. He even suggests they get married here before he’s posted home to San Diego. So what he’s a Mormon? If he can be, so can she. Eventually she does get to the States. They have children. He beats her up. She files for divorce and falls in love with one of his friends. He’s a Jehovah’s Witness. No problem… You get the idea? That’s a true story. I knew the girl. She was like any other of her age: silly, passionate, faithful, faithless. She lived in a world of True Love Confessions and screen romance. Perfectly normal. A nice, regular, lost kid. Balimbing. The only reason why she’ll never be a Moslem is because she’ll be too old. They like their brides very young.’

  ‘I thought hard cases made bad law?’

  ‘She’s exceptional, I grant. But her opportunism isn’t. Very well. If I dare to say, in the face of all expert assertion, that my countrymen are not essentially religious, I suppose I have to say they’re deeply something else. Spiritual? Or maybe hysterical? Mightn’t that have the right quasi-diagnostic ring to it to convince a man of social science like yourself?’

  ‘I only wanted your opinion, Father,’ said Prideaux. By now they were drinking green tea and from time to time he drifted away into intense little fugues of mental arithmetic, trying to prepare himself for the bill which he suspected was going to be quite a shock. ‘What about crucifixions, then?’

  For the first time a look of exasperation appeared on the otherwise equable face. ‘It’s bad enough my having to admit that the Church is losing ground to all these weird American sects without being forced to deal with a tin can mischievously tied to its tail. I often feel some of my Spanish predecessors must have been almost malevolent to allow the Christian message to become so distorted. You mean the Holy Week celebrations in places like Pampanga? The bleeding flagellants? The people dragging home-made crosses to which they are then nailed? I’ve seen it and it’s grotesque. Nothing to do with religion, nothing at all. It’s one of the sadder parts of our Hispanic legacy that we should have inherited their dark, pathological tomfooleries.’

  Passion rather became him, Prideaux thought. The greedy urbanity had vanished, making his face thinner in some way, like that of a runner blown to an edge by his own swiftness. The energy of a combative intellect kicked out of its doze.

  ‘If I could outlaw it, I would,’ said Herrera. ‘Do you know what having yourself crucified in public really is? Showing off. Pure, self-indulgent vanity. Machismo. It’s a test of rival machismos to see who lasts the longest with the least sign of suffering. They have great local prestige, you know. They take loud public vows and build up to it for a year in advance. Everyone knows. Next year it’ll be him. Will he go through with it? Will he chicken out? It’s spectacle, a real crowd-puller. Better than television by far. One of the things that gives me hope for my people is that they stubbornly go on making jokes. They sniff out the bogus in things that pass for sacred. A few years ago one of the penitensiyas was called Nobo… you have to remember that we pronounce v’s as b’s… and he became known as Nobocaine. It was rumoured he’d injected his hands and feet. Who knows? Perhaps you should go to San Fernando and see for yourself. The atmosphere’s more like a carnival than a religious ceremony. If I get angry about it it’s because I can see it’s a genuine expression of something I’d prefer not to be true about us. It’s all show.’

  ‘What else?’

  Herrera said, as the bill arrived, ‘You’re not religious, I know that,’ although at this very moment Prideaux, reading, inwardly uttered a sacred name. ‘But I ask you, can you imagine Christ approving of such behaviour? He underwent crucifixion because he had to, in order that nobody else might have to. He was an incisive man, even quite merciless on occasion. He would say that volunteering for the same fate in the late Twentieth century was sheer useless indulgence, mere showbiz. He would ask the man if he’d do it in private, without telling anyone, without the crowds of admirers. He’d observe tartly that being crucified was easy – far easier than actually living a Christian life. It’s a short cut to the stigmata, no more than that, and I’m none too happy about those, either. High time the Church came out unequivocally against these theatricals. The whole of humanity’s already locked into the theatre of cruelty. The really hard thing is to learn to be kind. If you’re dead to kindness, to the poetry of compassion, then all the Masses and Hail Marys and flagellation in the world won’t save you. It’s empty show. Now,’ he eyed the plastic plate the waiter brought bearing a little change, ‘you’ve been very kind indeed. Has it been worth it?’

  ‘Is being. But I suppose you have to get on?’ The priest had eaten with haste and dexterity.

  ‘We could certainly have some more tea. Any further pots are free. I liked your point about cultures changing. To take it at face value, I understand you’re saying that a hundred, two hundred years ago Europe was the same as here, living in huts, believing in vampires and penance. You’re implying that the essential difference between us is merely that of economic development. The upwardly-mobile peasant evolves into the neatly-suited banker, no longer stressed by swine fever and the weather but by exchange rates and brownouts?’

  ‘More complicated, though.’

  ‘Naturally. If it weren’t, you’d be out of a job… That was a joke.’

  Beyond the greenish tinted glass in the door and windows the traffic was inching past as if along a seabed. Periodically it halted. In and out of its currents moved minnowlike youths with shallow rectangular wooden boxes whose compartments held varieties of cigarettes, gum, matches, mentholated candy, a can of lighter fuel. Others dashed about with sheaves of newspapers, calling up to the jeepney passengers, thin arms locked into a muscular crook.

  ‘You’re surprised that I was vehement about such a minor thing, an annual pageant,’ said Herrera. ‘The point I was trying to make, try to make all the time, is that things like that are a distraction. The real issue is that the people of this country undergo crucifixion daily, nailed flat by poverty, corruption, shameless swindlers and brutal authorities. And still they make jokes. One of our senators recently called us Asia’s Jews, forced to flee pogroms and vileness, going to any lengths to get away, to go abroad. Even becoming part of an exploited diaspora doesn’t deter us. We still go by the thousand knowing we’re going to be screwed, going illegally even if it means running and hiding from police and immigration authorities. Like the Jews we’re condemned for slyness and duplicity, grudgingly praised for our skills and slave-like qualities, disliked for being truly foreign after all despite having names like Maria and Joseph. The Jews were accused of eating Christian babies; we’re despised for eating dogs. But anything’s worth it if only for the chance of making enough money for a proper life, enough money to send home to husbands and wives and children still caught in the trap. Should we stay where we are, be loyal to some imaginary global status quo, when everyone knows the world’s just a rich man’s free-for-all? But we’ve not yet reached that point when we all cry as one: “Enough! No more! Never again! Next year in Manila!” Let’s hope it doesn’t take the equivalent of the Holocaust. Maybe your own researches will provide us with a cool little answer to the question. What exactly does it take to make the Filipino people run amok?’

  ‘That’s not –’

  ‘You were saying to yourself “Aha! A joke priest! A fat glutto
n who allows himself to be treated to an expensive and over-nourishing lunch while his parishioners eat boiled rice with their fingers.” Of course you were and I don’t condemn it. You’re quite right. I am greedy. I like my food. It’s a fault, undoubtedly. I used to confess it all the time. But my having yielded to your generosity has denied my parishioners nothing. Not only has it given me and my stomach great pleasure but it’s providing me with an opportunity to beg you to remember only one thing. That laugh as we do, farce as it appears, what’s happening in this place is deadly serious. How can you write about amoks without knowing how, when and why laughter suddenly stops?’

  It was chastening, it was intended to be chastening. The beginning of self-righteous resentment made Prideaux guess that the priest was his junior by probably ten years. At the same time he felt justified in his increasing belief that there was a deep flaw in an academic discipline which believed it was possible to drift about the world getting to grips with the alien, erecting theories over lunch, dressing them up in scholarly rhetoric and calling them fieldwork. Did Prideaux really feel he even understood his own countrymen? They were a constant bafflement. How then could he travel eight thousand miles and presume to grasp an utterly foreign people, especially those who took shelter behind English as fluent as this priest’s? What was patronage if not this? White man with tape-recorder solves kinship problem among the Fuzzies. Papuan humour cracked by Oxford don… He let Father Herrera ramble through a third pot of tea. The Church under threat. Condoms and Aids. Charismatics. Missionaries from Idaho and Utah wearing white short-sleeved shirts and boyish smiles and bearing a lot of nonsense about Joseph Smith into the credulous provinces. And Islam, of course. Green tea and dialectics had loosened Herrera’s tongue.

  ‘I always thought Christ was nothing like thorough enough in trying to distinguish between politics and religion. That stuff about Caesar’s head on the coin was more of a wisecrack than useful, don’t you think? Too evasive, too lightweight an answer. You can’t just say religion’s a private matter, not when you encourage the founding of a Church with revolutionary views, not when you get publicly executed for it by nervous governors. It’s a messy argument. Judaism’s worse: the religion is the people are the state. Islam too, but by golly they’re just as hypocritical as the rest of us when they want to be. One stupid Christian missionary shoots his mouth off down in Zamboanga and the faithful put down their bottles of beer and caper about with that rabble-rousing stuff about blood and holy war. What’s that got to do with spirituality?

  ‘Down there in Mindanao they’ve already got their autonomous Moslem region but they still go on massacring each other. You think pork and Islam don’t mix? They do in Mindanao, and a good many drink like fish, too. The mixture of alcohol and weapons there is half the problem. But that should concern nobody but them. It’s a private matter. Why can’t we all be humbler? Even the Prophet Mohammed made mistakes. He was admonished in the Qu’ran for paying too much attention to bigwigs and turning away from a poor blind man eager for knowledge of God. You’ll find it in the surah called “He frowned”. The Prophet’s deputy, the Second Caliph, was also humbled. He admitted he was wrong for having spied on a party where he suspected they were drinking wine, for climbing up a ladder and getting over the wall into a private garden. They were drinking wine, but he was forced to concede it was none of his business even if he was the Second Caliph. “Which of you is without fault?” asked Christ. The same, you see. But today our great religions are perverted by egomaniacs claiming to be fundamentalists, and fundamentalists wanting to be politicians, and everyone being public busybodies at the cost of their private souls. God save us all from the zealous. Thank you for a delicious meal.’

  Prideaux had the wilted sensation of a chef who from anxious curiosity has leaned too close to the oven when opening its door. Even emerging from the New Era’s fragrant chill into the roaring sauna of mid-afternoon traffic came as a lesser blast.

  ‘Give me a call,’ Herrera was saying. ‘The same number you used before.’ He took a visiting card from his plastic wallet. It was printed in blue, overinked, slightly at an angle. ‘I’ll show you my parish. Next time lunch is on me. Of course you’ve seen squatter areas before. I imagine anthropologists are like journalists in that respect. But come anyway, if you’ve got time. This traffic.’ He turned away with an upraised palm and was borne away on the general tide of T-shirts.

  ‘Too old for this sort of thing,’ Prideaux told himself. Could he be so demoralised as to have been on the point of offering the damned man a donation for his parish? He wondered how real academics managed to limit themselves to a carefully defined topic. How did you stop something unravelling at every edge? The vertiginous and disheartening pit combined with the beer he had drunk to make him fretfully hate these streets, this city. What was the point of these excoriating lectures? Stay at home. Babble of green fields.

  9

  BACK IN MARCH that year Insp. Dingca had attended his elder daughter’s High School Graduation. His best polyester slacks were growing tighter all the time, he had noted. Must watch that. Don’t want to start looking like Jun Santiago, the desk sergeant, who needed but snout and trotters. Part of the problem was having to shove a holstered pistol down his waistband. He had had a meeting first thing that morning with one of his ‘assets’, a transvestite informer named Babs, and had calculated things well enough to speed back to Laguna against the mid-morning traffic and sidle in at the back of the hall like a furtive schoolboy. Far away on a stage teenagers cut from sheet metal came and went, creased and ironed and shining with endeavour. Flags were saluted, anthems sung, stirring poems declaimed. Banners with golden fringes billowed gently to the delighted exhalations of hundreds of proud parents. Dingca stood and sweated and clapped with sudden force as Eunice stepped forward from the tin ranks, received her scroll with becomingly bowed head, moved away in a firestorm of flashbulbs with a demure swirl of knife-edged pleats. The collective virginity of it all was awesome and reassuring. These were good girls and boys, the hope for the future, the something or other… Babs had just fingered his club’s owner for kidnapping children and selling them in the provinces. The proprietor was a Chinese businesswoman with close connections in the Mayor’s office. It needed thought. Tangle with City Hall and the next thing you knew was you were posted to Davao or Nueva Ecija, or maybe no further than the bottom of Manila Bay.

  Afterwards there was an open-air buffet on the school parade ground. The glum, brownish smell of mudwater blew in from the lake, the incense of an industry in decline since Laguna’s once-flourishing fishpans were silting up or starved of oxygen or maybe just plain polluted. Dingca, who used to take a proprietorial interest in the lake he had decided to live near, was confused by the conflicting newspaper reports. Whatever they meant, Laguna de Bay had clearly become yet one more thing infected by scandal or impending disaster. For the present, the pondy smell brought an authentically rural whiff to these festivities. The capital city was spreading, true. Manila was not as far away as it had been, the cordon sanitaire of fields and creeks and paddies infiltrated now by ribbon development practically all the way from the back of the airport. But Eunice and her classmates were good girls, still thank God innocent of the tainted metropolis which yearly crept nearer. He beamed indulgently, circulating among friends and neighbours, greeting bowling cronies, Lions, Rotarians and local businessmen. They each held a plate of spaghetti in tomato sauce with sweetmeats of sticky rice, slices of white bread, and a wodge of violet gelatine all crammed together and eaten in no particular order. He came to rest beside his wife and daughters, patting little Divina on her ribboned hair.

  ‘You cut a very distinguished figure,’ he told Eunice. ‘Easily the best-dressed girl of 1992’ – a judicious piece of flattery since Teresita had made the clothes herself. ‘I felt like a Sixth Grader.’ This was true. The sight of all those seventeen-year-olds standing there with their black shoes and white ankle socks pressed together, their brown legs s
ealed, had given him an erotic jolt and he heard again an inward phrase he hadn’t spoken to himself since he was thirteen: Big Girls. It was uneasy and enticing, so that he now over-praised his own daughter for the shocking allure of the girl who had stood two down the line, her ugly plastic ID card imaginatively concealed by a little bunch of white blossoms, ‘It’s a terrible burden for a father to have such a sensationally beautiful daughter.’ He laid a fond fist around her shoulder, managing not to spill his glass of watery pineapple juice down her dress.

  ‘I thought I was going to faint it was so hot up there. We were all ready to drop.’

  ‘I know,’ said her father, who hadn’t noticed, ‘I was sort of impressed by your composure.’ He saw an opening. ‘Not like that poor girl standing near you. The tall one with the bunch of flowers?’

  ‘Oh, Patti. Patti Gonzales. Well,’ Eunice sniffed.

  ‘I thought she looked a bit under the weather.’

  ‘Not from the heat, I shouldn’t think,’ said Eunice darkly.

  Dingca was about to pounce on this remark but was forestalled by the insinuating passage of his daughter’s mathematics teacher, aglint with teeth and spectacles. The moment was lost, converted at once into tedious stuff about grades. His mind returned to Babs. This kidnapping young children racket was pretty small-time. Besides, it was nothing new. As long as there was a demand, kids would disappear. Babs had pointed a slender, manicured finger at Lettie Tan who owned the club he worked in on M.H. del Pilar. This was ‘The Topless Pit’, where the most beautiful hostesses were all male while authentic females were restricted to performing tricks like opening bottles of Coke with their vaginas, ‘drinking’ the contents and ejecting them in a tawny spray of froth into the delighted faces of drunken Australians. What had Iron Pussy and her colleagues to do with Dingca, whose precinct was now miles away on the other side of the Pasig? Maybe nothing. Having been posted off his old patch he was nowadays only too happy to leave the Ermita fleshpots to WPDC Station 5. None of Babs’s information (‘Hot news, Inspector. You’re going to love this’… Why did Babs, of all people, call him by his correct, new, demilitarised rank?) would have registered had it not been for two recent, minor, and previously unconnected events. The first was that a woman had been arrested in Harrison Plaza shopping centre pretending to be the mother of a toddler who was trotting happily at her side, licking an ice cream. By sheer chance the real mother, who had been scanning the crowds of shoppers in panic, happened to spot her own infant even though it was now wearing a little blue cap with mouse ears. The mall’s security guards had held all three, their task made no easier by the child’s reluctance to show the least preference for either woman until the ice cream was gone. Then it wailed, the fake mother tried to make a run for it, was arrested and hauled away. The odd thing was that Dingca turned out to know her vaguely because she was from San Clemente and he heard of the case back at the station. The other minor event was a formal complaint lodged with his station chief by a wealthy citizen who alleged that the police were turning a blind eye to the despoliation and looting of a family cenotaph in the nearby cemetery. The wealthy citizen, who hadn’t deigned to come in person but had sent a notarized letter via a young man who was either an action movie star or a goon and probably both, was Lettie Tan.