Playing with Water
Page 31
(p. 73)
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.
I have already alluded to the belief in Sabay that cigarette-smoking can help keep a fisherman warm. Levels of ignorance in health matters are such that few people seem to think smoking is harmful, and this in the face of daily personal evidence of its effects on diving performance and respiratory impairment. I presume the great exertion and expansion of lung capacity – surely the ultimate in aerobics – which this life-style requires tend to counteract the immediate effects of smoking which would be so much more in evidence were the Sabayans more sedentary.
All the same, it is a lowering business to come from the West, where at long last a real awareness of the dangers of tobacco is becoming widespread, to a country where the sway of the tobacco companies is still virtually unchallenged. It is like going back twenty years to start all over again. In the West the international tobacco companies have been more or less forced to acknowledge the scientific evidence of the injurious nature of their product. That they should continue to promote smoking by the most unscrupulous and unregulated advertising and sales gimmicks in the less aware underdeveloped countries of the world where they can still get away with it is, to say the least, unedifying.
8. (p. 199) There are still many societies in the world where fatness is considered desirable to the extent that it is seen as physical evidence of a decent standard of living. It is thus taken to be the polar opposite of the thin-ness of malnourishment. In more sophisticated urban circles of the Philippines slimming and weight control are gradually being accepted as part of the modern aesthetic of good looks and good health. But in the remoter provinces the gauntness of sheer want is still prevalent enough for its opposite to be uncritically welcomed. There the phrase ‘mataba na!’ (‘you’ve become fat’), which would send many a Westerner into a downward spiral of mortification, is undoubtedly a compliment.
References
The following are the books and authors I have quoted or to which I have referred.
The epigraphs at the beginning are:
Charles R. C. Sheppard, A Natural History of the Coral Reef, Blandford Books, 1983
Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams, Macmillan, 1986
Chiang Yee, The Silent Traveller, Country Life Ltd, London, 1937
(p. 3) John Clare, ‘Salters Tree’
(p. 44) Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford University Press, 1979
(p. 45) Oliver Goldsmith, ‘The Deserted Village’
(p. 75) Wilfred Owen, ‘Miners’
(p. 93) Michael Herr, Dispatches, Pan, 1978, p. 168
(p. 102) Henry Ward Beecher, Eyes and Ears, New York, 1862
(p. 129) Nick Joaquin, ‘Calle Azcárraga’, Language of the Street, National Book Store, Manila, 1980, p. 97
(p. 168) Geoffrey Winthrop Young, ‘I have not lost the magic of long days’, Collected Poems, Methuen, 1936
(p. 174) Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962
(p. 177) Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus
(p. 183) ‘O time too swift …’ is from the sixteenth-century lyric ‘His golden locks time hath to silver turned’ by George Peele. Gerald Finzi set this poem in ‘Farewell to Arms’
(p. 185) Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone, trans. David Hawkes, Penguin Classics, 1978, vol. 1, p. 167
(p. 224) Oliver Lyttelton, From Peace to War, p. 152 Max Plowman, A Subaltern on the Somme, p. 36
Both the above are quoted in Fussell, op. cit., p. 327
(p. 236) Ray Bradbury, ‘Kaleidoscope’, Thrilling Wonder Stories, © 1949 Standard Magazines
(p. 241) William Burroughs. I cannot trace this exact quotation. Presumably it is my intoxicated version of a more tentative epigram which appears in Friends – 1970: ‘A paranoid is a man who knows a little of what’s going on.’
De Chirico’s observations were quoted in Walter Hess, Dokumente zum Verständnis der modernen Malerei, Hamburg, 1958, p. 122
(p. 250) Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Binsey Poplars’
(p. 257) Lopez, op. cit., p. 413
(p. 273) Francis Huxley, The Raven and the Writing Desk, Thames & Hudson, 1976, pp. 105–6
(p. 276) Nick Joaquin, ‘Art in the Palace’, Doveglion and Other Cameos, National Book Store, Manila, 1977, p. 11
(p. 277) David Joel Steinberg, The Philippines, Westview Press, Colorado, 1982, p. 73
(p. 278) Benedict Anderson, New Left Review 158, July/August 1986
Acknowledgements
My debt to the people of barangays Kansulay and Sabay is boundless. This book stands as only a small piece of evidence of their affection and disclosure over the last seven years, their generosity of spirit which to a large extent has reshaped my life.
The convention holds that in such circumstances it would be invidious to single out individuals for special mention. Of course this is true. Of course, also, there have been certain people with whom I have spent
appreciably more time, people who have withstood for far longer the foreign habits and linguistic fumblings of an alien who is also a writer. I should like to think that if ever I had adopted an interrogative mode with any of them I had not done so for anything so unmannerly and banal as mere information.
This being said I would like to extend all love and thanks to Noel Historillo and his family, to Siyo and Josefina Mabato and their family, to ‘Ding’ Pampola and his family. For their help at barangay council level as well as for their friendship I thank Clodualdo and Julie Lauresta and also Nick Malvar. Finally I owe an especial debt of gratitude to Maria Historillo whose late husband Embing I, too, affectionately mourn.
A word of warning to them all: ‘Kansulay’ and ‘Sabay’ are real places only in the sense that Ronald Blythe’s ‘Akenfield’ was real. Neither they nor the people in them are imaginary, but all have been passed through an imagination. Locations, characters and events are often composites. The originals of the ‘Sorianos’, for example, live in another province altogether and have no connection with Kansulay. So those who think they infallibly recognise people, places or even the author in this book will be mistaken. On the other hand there is nothing in these pages which is not as true as I am able to make it.
About the Author
James Hamilton-Paterson is the author of the bestselling Empire of the Clouds, which was hailed as a classic account of the golden age of British aviation. He won a Whitbread Prize for his first novel, Gerontius, and among his many other celebrated works are Seven-Tenths, one of the finest books written in recent times about the oceans, and the satirical trilogy that began with Cooking with Fernet Branca. Born and educated in England, he has lived in the Philippines and Italy and now makes his home in Austria.
By the Same Author
FICTION
Loving Monsters
The View from Mount Dog
Gerontius
The Bell-Boy
Griefwork
Ghosts of Manila
The Music
Cooking with Fernet Branca
Amazing Disgrace
Rancid Pansies
CHILDREN’S FICTION
Flight Underground
The House in the Waves
Hostage!
NON-FICTION
A Very Personal War: The Story of Cornelius Hawkridge
(also published as The Greedy War)
Mummies: Death and Life in Ancient Egypt
Seven-Tenths
America’s Boy
Three Miles Down
Empire of the Clouds: How Britain’s Aircraft Ruled the World
POETRY
Option Three
Dutch Alps
Copyright
First published by Granta Books in 1988
First published in 2014
by Faber and Faber Ltd
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This ebook edition first published in 2014
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© James Hamilton-Paterson, 1987
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The right of James Hamilton-Paterson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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ISBN 978–0–571–31400–3