Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  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.

  We go back to the hut where I have some good rope. Intoy finds a hardwood thwart in his bangka. He carves notches in it as we walk back up. Once at the tree he climbs gracefully, walks along the branch above that fearful drop, secures two ropes with double knots. The ropes dangle down. I tie on the seat, adjust the height, check it all, lose courage. The swing hangs on the edge of space.

  Intoy is consumed with pleasure, utterly distracted. The dream of Manila is in abeyance. Intrepid country boy, he slides down the ropes onto the seat. For someone accustomed to shinning up fifty feet of slippery palm trunk in the rain to fetch down a few pints of tuba this is playing. It is all playing. Directly beneath the seat is a surface of flat rock but a yard in front it slopes straight off into the drop. Intoy pushes off. Within a few swings his trajectory takes him out over the chasm, far above the skies of Drune. At last he makes me take my turn. It is stomach-lurching, exhilarating, the highest swing in the world. It is a masterpiece of our joint imagination. The world beneath the world tilts and drifts between my legs. I stare up at the bough instead as I swing, expecting to see a knot unravelling, a rope’s end parting from the branch. There is no such thing. The knots stand out black and bunched against the sky bu
t the sky itself wheels crazily and I lose my sense of up and down. I cling to the ropes; the swing slows.

  Intoy leaps back on. There on the edge of the world he soars off and comes back with a rush. His hair streams and changes direction at the tops of his arc. His yellow T-shirt flutters, is pressed close to his slender back, flattened across his chest and stomach. He cries like a bird, like an oriole in its swoopings. Flashing brown and gold he stares excitedly into the middle nowhere which comes and goes, comes and goes.

  I watch the flying boy.

  *

  For a while after Intoy left I had neither heart nor stomach for our swing. News reached me that he and his brother were delivering ice in Caloocan. One empty afternoon I walked The Field of Crabs through whose growing mane a wind ran. Suddenly I was reminded of the South Downs, of grasses bending their sheened blades under a bald sky. I should not really have been surprised to come upon myself, a nine-year-old stooping among the tufts, scowling privately in his search for cartridges. He might straighten up on catching sight of me, the pockets of his shorts lumpy with grenade fins, a smear of mud on one cheek, not a becoming child. Seeing only some boring man in middle age he would move away and return to his hunt while I smile nervously and carry on up towards the crown of the island.

  I stand beneath the tree. Somebody in the intervening time has been up and cut down the swing; it was good stout rope. One of the severed knots is still lying trapped in a crevice. Of the seat there is no sign. I am neither surprised nor unsurprised. It seems not to matter very much. I lie on the edge of the cliff with my chin in my fists and gaze out over the middle nowhere which, if I have one, I suppose must be my home.

  The huge chasm at my face is full of light. There is nothing which is not suffused with it. It is a downpour from the sky, an upwelling from the sea. Far out on the ocean’s surface are the tiny pencil marks of fishing boats. I will know many of the invisible figures who wait there wearing straw hats against the sun, their faces wound with cloths against the glare. Many I will not know; they will be from away up the coast. Others, where a minute tatter of white sail shows among the dancing glitter, are probably from the dim bulks on the horizon, far islands, other worlds. We are connected by water, made inseparable by light.

  It is at the last a motionless place on the very edge of motion, where the watcher himself dissolves into the movement and clarity. It is in just such a place Filipino archaeologists have sometimes come upon a single skull in a niche overlooking the sea, resting in a delicate Celadon-ware bowl of pale green cloudy glaze.

  And so with his half-relationships in half-lived-in places the footloose citizen of no abiding city wanders and wonders his days away. His life is bereft, satisfactory, privileged. Nothing very much comes of it, but of what might very much have come? It seems like no alternative, but how else could it otherwise have been? The sun burnishes a bamboo hut into a gold pavilion. Its wickers creak. It is a basket slung beneath some radiant balloon where a dreamer might look down and gaze between the slats of its floor at brilliant strips of passing lands. At each dawn it is set down afresh, jarring new blond dust from termite holes, pale cones of powder on its ledges telling of inner depredations. In early afternoon when the sun lifts its blazing foot from the thatch and leans instead its dazzle against the upper walls, brilliances sift down to fall upon the dreamer’s face. I do not really know him. He is not the friend. He may wish to kill me with his love of deeps and inchoate things. It is the face of a man beginning to grow old though sometimes he reminds me of a distant child. Once he looked for cellars and now he has walked a field of freshly baked crabs. He will not live for ever.

  But what is this love of his? Why this romping with the elements, the frisking with light, the bathing in fire, the scuffing up of earth? The playing with water? Will he not tire of it? Might he not weary even of the place beyond place? I sit outside my hut and watch the massive wrinkles crawl across the straits as night falls. A dog barks in Sabay; the moon slides up one side of the sky. It is The Moon: round, perfect, immemorial. It tells the hunter that tonight his task will be in vain. It awakes the dreamer to set about the proper business of dreaming his land.

  *

  Like The Moon, Tiwarik is an act of the imagination. It is not its grasses my feet have trodden nor its little coastline I have so lovingly followed, and neither does it retain any trace of me. There is another island locally known as Tiwarik but it is only an exact facsimile, a fly-spit on the map of the objective planet which we agree to inhabit. That particular Tiwarik is indeed pocked by the post-holes of my hut, the earth slope nearby where I stood and gazed seawards while cleaning my teeth splotched white as with the droppings of some exotic bird of passage until the next rains. On that Tiwarik, also, there is a hanging tree on top of a cliff with a bough whose bark will be faintly scarred by ropes, just as there is fresh grassland where recently there was a fire.

  Yet even though it is a facsimile this solid island still has magical properties. Somehow in its inverting lens it alternately conceals or reveals the other Tiwarik whose image was seen entire thirty years before and which then disappeared into the shadow-play of the mind, fragmented, mocking, celestial, naive, to emerge once more as from a prism at an unexpected angle but miraculously whole. Whatever weird instrument, whatever bent telescope connects that time with this, I am left amazed. The conviction I have of the appositeness, of the inevitability that once having been glimpsed Tiwarik was destined to re-appear is impossible to reconcile with the arbitrariness of existence. What if I had died in the meantime? It might so easily and unremarkably have happened. I was waiting for Tiwarik. The man of bones at the door with his black cowl and unrusting scythe has perhaps already concealed a yawn and nodded equably. This year, next year, some time; it is all the same. Nothing to him the desperate appointments of sublunary lovers.

  *

  Experiences of great intensity – an especial dream, a period of concentrated work, a sudden absorption, maybe a love-affair – have in common that they are unusually real while they last. Yet it is precisely this quality which so easily vanishes. Afterwards, how unreal it all suddenly seems! We lost ourselves in that dazzling fugue whose importance to us we do not doubt and yet which now is so imaginary. Time which seemed not measurable, so endless, suddenly lapses back into the diurnal and leaves behind it disquiet and longing for a lost intensity. We observe there is no rapture which will not later seem chimerical, no vision or intellectual fervour which will not come to feel more vaporous than that waking sleep, the dull discourse of ordinary days. It becomes a toss-up as to which is the more delusional, the higher reality or the lower. For everything shares a common insignificance in this vain pursuit, this hapless devoir of taking an accurate stock of how things are before they cease to be.

  Yet there does remain a knowledge, like the pleasurable stiffness in muscles after a previous day’s unaccustomed exercise, to prove that something occurred. Something did after all take place to tax the muscles of the mind. For an unmeasurable time one went somewhere extraordinary and loved extraordinary things. One has been a traveller; and it is not a traveller’s feet which ache.

  Glossary

  Author’s Note

  The inclusion of Tagalog and Pilipino words is largely of nouns for which there is no single or simple English equivalent and which would otherwise call for a laborious explanation in mid-paragraph. A good example is the word yamas, grated coconut from which two lots of coconut milk (and hence most of the oil) have been squeezed for use in cooking and which is then given to pigs and chickens.

  A few Tagalog words, cogon, for example, occur throughout the text spelled with a ‘c’. In Tagalog the letter ‘c’ does not exist and ‘k’ is used instead, taking its place in the alphabetical order. However, certain words are often spelled with a ‘c’ even in the Philippines and since they are commonly recognised by Westerners I leave them in this less authentic version. I have also left a few other words of Spanish origin such as ‘barrio’ in their or
iginal form.

  ABAKA: abaca, Manila hemp

  AMPALAYA: a bitter cucumber (Momordica balsamina). Like many other bitter foods (endive, dark chocolate, coffee, grapefruit) it is delicious. In this province it is also called ‘marigoso’ partly from the Filipino habit of reversing the order of letters and syllables – for the Spanish knew it as ‘amargoso’ – but no doubt also from some pious confusion

  ANISADO: an anise-flavoured spirit

  ANTING-ANTING: amulet, fetish, lucky charm

  BABOY DAMU: a quite useful timber tree, Artocarpus incisa

  BABOY DAMU: wild pig

  BAKL: an effeminate man, hence homosexual

  BAHALA NA: a nearly untranslatable phrase so frequently used it has claims to be the national motto. In the present context it expresses something like ‘with any luck’ or ‘trust in fate’ or ‘it’s in the lap of the gods’

  BANGKA: a long, narrow boat with outriggers. It is the basic boat design of the archipelago and comes in sizes ranging from single-seater to thirty-metre inter-island craft