Ghosts of Manila

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘The Aussies’ were a professional team of archaeological divers the Museum often employed to beef up its own over-stretched resources. Bonifacio Liwag had a real liking for fieldwork, to the extent that his desk in the office down the passage was nearly always empty. He had, Sharon had observed over the years, a real interest in Chinese ceramics and Australian divers. He was rumoured to be a member of Opus Dei, too, an organisation with a shadowy reputation for being a cross between Masonry and the Mafia. She wondered what he would make of Ysabella.

  5

  IT WAS NOT UNTIL late morning, after Vic Agusan had said ‘John, it’s a chance’ for the umpteenth time, that the two watchers saw the Tamaraw van approach down the track, lurching in the potholes. They were crouched in weeds, hot and shadeless behind the burnt-out remains of a Fuso truck caught months ago in the crossfire of hardscrabble living. It was an overcast December day but the sunlight was still intense enough for objects to throw faint shadows. In front of them stretched the marshy fringes of northern Manila Bay. They were well off the map, up in the wilds of Navotas, Prideaux thought. He had become lost once Vic had turned off Honorio Lopez after crossing the estuary. Beyond the last housing project – which he noticed was called Singalong Subdivision – was a grey rim of shantytown, and beyond that these tidal flats sculpted into eccentric lots as fishpans. It was hard to see where land ended and water began. Much of Manila was low-lying and subject to floods, parts of Tondo being virtually tidal. (The highway authorities there planned roadworks around the phases of the moon.) Here, too, were clear signs of flooding. A line of salt ran at mid-door level around the rusted cab of the hulk they squatted behind. Everything was festooned with rags of plastic, tatters of bags snagged on tussocks, lengths of timber and tangles of wire. So flat was this terrain that, three miles to the south across the estuary, Smoky Mountain reared up like a volcano, flanks steaming, its fallout of effluent and litter spreading far beyond these marshes.

  ‘There,’ said Vic in triumph. ‘I told you my guy was reliable. These police don’t even bother to hide it now. Broad daylight.’ He took a reading from the light meter hanging on its cord and raised the Nikon, resting the long snout of the lens on the truck chassis. He shot the van bumping down the boggy track towards them, the windscreen’s intermittent glare. ‘That’ll do. Right there, please. That’s far enough. You might get stuck.’

  As if the driver agreed, the vehicle swung to a halt a hundred yards off, angled slightly away from the watchers. Prideaux was tense with fear. He had been hoping the Tamaraw would not come so close. He wished the camera’s shutter was quieter. It sounded like machine-gunning.

  ‘’Yon…’ Vic was breathing. The doors had opened and the driver had turned his face. ‘Sergeant Cruz! I love you, baby.’ Flack-flack-flack-flack-flack.

  A third man in jeans and T-shirt became visible as he stood up in the rear of the van, tugging at the yellow tarpaulin. The three blue drums emerged and gleamed dully. Cruz’s assistant climbed up and helped the man tilt and roll one of the drums on its rim, at the last moment heaving it off the end so that it cleared the dangling tailgate. It fell with the weight of a dud bomb, embedding itself with a wet thud which reached the watchers a half second later. Sergeant Cruz appeared with a mallet and long chisel. The T-shirts huddled over the drum. The hammer rose and fell.

  ‘Move your ass! C’mon, c’mon, move. I can’t see a – ’yon! Ayos!’ as Cruz straightened up. The last of the clips was whacked loose. The lid burst open and liquid gushed out. The two men upended the drum as Cruz watched. When it was empty they set it aside and the other two were dealt with in the same way. Prideaux wondered what Vic was getting. They were crouched so low the intervening tussocks hid nearly everything at ground level. He hoped he wouldn’t get carried away and stand up, though Vic of all people knew the risks they were running. In a matter of minutes the drums were empty, loosely re-lidded and stowed back in the van beneath the tarpaulin. Cruz retrieved the hammer and chisel and, holding them like a picnicker collecting firewood, swung suddenly around and stared in their direction. He had put on a pair of mirrored sunglasses, megashit bent cop or maybe family man setting about a barbecue in his mail order shades. Then he gazed out to sea in the direction of Corregidor Island, preparing to bore the kids with the usual yawny stuff about General MacArthur and the Japanese. No, actually, the man was taking a leak. Flack-flack-flack. Blow that one up for the Press Club notice board. The Tamaraw slammed its doors, coughed black fumes, turned slowly so Vic got its rear plate flack-flack and drove off, noticeably bouncier over the bumps.

  In the distance the van was lost among the shanties. Prideaux began to stand up, sweat pouring down his back. Vic pulled him down again with a suddenly thrown-out hand. He was following the van through the telephoto lens, finger off the shutter release. ‘Crafty Cruz, they call him. We wait.’ They remained crouched. Prideaux’s knee joints burned; his feet had gone to sleep. After a long ten minutes Vic said, ‘Don’t move. Just turn your head. You see that heap of sand?’ It was by the road, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. ‘Go left to the sari-sari store with the white sign. The corner of the block.’ A vehicle was parked in the shadow, just its nose visible and the windscreen’s flat stare.

  ‘Shit and derision.’

  ‘Told you he was foxy. He doesn’t suspect us. He’s curious to know if anyone noticed enough to come trotting over for a look. I don’t think they’ve got binoculars. I’ve never seen a cop with binoculars.’

  Prideaux had followed Vic’s instruction to wear dull colours. His army green T-shirt was black with sweat. A drip formed at the end of his nose and fell onto a slab of charred upholstery in the grass. The pain in his knees became a clock he began to watch with narrowed attention. When he next looked up the Tamaraw was gone and the world empty in a general glare.

  ‘Okay now.’ Vic stood up. ‘I’ll even tell you where they’ve gone. There’s a Savory’s on Del Rosario down in Tondo. They’ll be ordering half a fried chicken each and probably drink five beers apiece. Then back to the station. Another day, another dollar.’

  Prideaux was not listening to this breezy lore. The blood was getting back to feet that were stumps of cement with hot wires running through them. His knees felt arthritic. Middle age.

  ‘So what did we see?’ Vic asked. ‘Could be what? Illegal dumping of toxic waste? “Fishpans seen contaminated for fifty years. Judge raps cops turned moonlighting waste disposal experts”.’ He had begun walking towards where the Tamaraw had unloaded, limber as a child in his trainers, pouching the big lens and fitting something shorter. ‘Yeah. What they do, you see, is economise.’

  They had reached the three bodies which had already started to bloat during their long hours in the drums. All had their thumbs tied behind their backs with plastic twine which ran down between the buttocks to both big toes, drawing them into a semi-squat. Their eyes were open but slitted with puffiness, their hair was beginning to dry. Vic shot them carefully, moving from face to face. ‘Don’t recognise any of them.’ Flack-flack-flack. All three shirts were rucked up, revealing the scarred, scrawny torsos of marginal living. ‘Get the tattooes? BCJ here, Sigue-Sigue Commando here. Jailbirds. Don’t know about this one. Could be he’s kuwerna, unmarked. He’d have had a bad time inside. No protection.’

  The face of a boy, thought Prideaux, even a subnormal boy, now staring at a flattened Magnolia ice cream carton caught in the grasses as if trying to make sense of the letters on its side. Children with flying pigtails played with a beachball in fading print in a cloud of summery words: Fun! Yum! He gazed at the bare feet. Twenty-five years younger than his own, he thought, and feeling would never return to them.

  ‘Come on, we’ve got enough. Someone else can find them.’ They began the long walk back to where they had left the Hersheymobile a good mile and a half away. ‘No expense, you see. Sometimes they don’t even like to waste bullets on street trash. Those guys weren’t heavies, just losers. In and out of jail and then one day, bingo, s
taring up at the sun in a marsh in Navotas. They do it at night, out behind the station. The cops fill the drums with water and shove their man in, which takes a few of them because even if the guy’s all tied up he doesn’t want to go. By the time they get the lid fixed on he’s probably got an inch or two of air up under the lid, what with all the water that’s slopped out. So they load them on the van upside down.’

  Why was dying upside down worse? Was it worse? One of the drowned men had been grinning. ‘“Where Asia wears a smile”,’ he said, quoting the Tourist Board slogan. His voice sounded strange to himself.

  ‘There it is,’ said Vic. He had done a journalism course at Columbia or somewhere where all the teachers must have been Vietnam vets. ‘Okay, John?’ He was looking up into Prideaux’s face with interest as much as concern. ‘Skip lunch? Pass on the fried chicken?’

  It was real, all right; as if a dozen stories had been squeezed together to yield a numbing ichor filling parts of him which were not the stomach. Freshly killed men. Earlier in their friendship Vic had told him of being a rookie police reporter back in 1986. The Marcoses had fled ten months earlier. Tyranny was officially dead. He was newly returned from the States, confident, full of the Woodward-and-Bernstein ethic, keen to get good contacts in what in those days was still the Philippine Constabulary. One night a lieutenant he trusted had rung the office and said, ‘We’re having a party, police-style. We’re betting you won’t come.’ Vic had taken the challenge in the invitation as a warning: In or Out, it’s up to you now, hotshot. How could he refuse? He had sat up front in a closed van with wire mesh over the cab’s rear window. ‘Jail transfer,’ his contact said, lighting a cigarette from the driver’s. ‘We get to keep the vehicle for some drinking afterwards.’ Something in the air made Vic disinclined to ask which jail lay out past Quezon City towards the hills of Marikina. The van had swung into a field, the rear had been unlocked and four handcuffed prisoners in leg irons were pulled out followed by three police officers in street clothes. The scene was lit by the van’s rear lights, an eerie red.

  ‘Nice ride, fellas?’ asked Vic’s contact. ‘Now, we’re sporting guys and we’ve decided you’ve earned a chance not to go back to jail, even though you’re scumbags. You see? It’s the humane face of People Power. Christmas is coming, season of forgiveness, time to be with the wife and kids – or one of the wives, anyway, ha-ha. So what we thought is, you’d respond to a challenge. Specially you, Banjo.’ The tail lights shone as red dots in the eyes of the stocky prisoner with the shaven skull; the face of a jovial killer. ‘This is a nice big field and it’s good and dark. We’re going to take off your irons and you’re going to run. We’ll give you a count of ten. You’d better hope you’ll be out of sight, ‘kay?’ By now Vic had caught on and was expecting some jocular pistol practice. From the van the three cops took M-16s and slapped in magazines while Vic watched his man undo first the leg irons and then the prisoners’ handcuffs. He noticed how even when freed the men remained huddled together as if still bound, until the shout of ‘Go!’ Three took off at desperate speed in different directions. They were not allowed to get more than a dozen feet before the Armalites on full auto. blew them into darkness. Only Banjo had not run, the red sweat twinkling on his scalp. ‘Maybe you got some brains after all, Banjo. Next time, huh?’ Banjo was put back in irons and they all drove off again. The marksmen’s excited voices could be heard from the grilled compartment behind the cab, each describing how, when, who, punctuated with high laughter. The three dead men had hijacked a bus going to Batangas and shot a passenger while Banjo had cut the driver’s throat in exemplary fashion, turning the spraying man this way and that to douse any remaining sparks of resistance. Such was Vic’s mentor’s account as they had driven back to Q.C. Later, there had been a lot of drinking and some girls. At some point the lieutenant had carried out a bucket of deep fried chicken and a grande of San Miguel beer for Banjo to manage with his manacled hands. Vic had vomited a lot that night back in 1986. He was off campus for good. In the bleak blur of 4 a.m. Manila he realised he was In and not Out any more, but it no longer seemed enviable.

  He recounted the episode well, something of the original horror still about his eyes. Prideaux thought he had told it to very few people. The contamination of knowledge; contagion’s yearning shame. The very informality of salvaging-and-drinking sprees was chilling and opaque. Behind its inscrutable smoked lenses were rogue cops and fond fathers who might be one and the same. Without chiding Vic had made it clear from the start that what Prideaux might fancy as fieldwork (‘The Philippine Press: Freedom and Licence in a Developing Democracy’, or was it ‘The Category of Amok: the Breaking-point and its Cultural Determinants’?) involved real fields in Marikina, real marshes in Navotas, real lives without number lived untouched by the least hint of freedom or democracy. So get your comfortable academic ass in gear… In or Out, hotshot?

  6

  IN AD 1100 the area now occupied by Metro Manila was low, swampy grassland full of deer. It flooded readily in the monsoon rains, during typhoons or at seasonal high tides. Shellfish were plentiful and so were mosquitoes. As in all flatlands the least undulation was pronounced; there were definite areas of rising ground amid the general marsh, even a lump or two which might qualify as hillocks. However, there was nothing high enough to obstruct an inland view of real hills – almost mountains – to the east. It was not an ideal place to live compared to the nearby foothills where fruits and timber were abundant and the terrain well suited to the indigenous people’s slash-and-burn agriculture. Yet at some time in the early Twelfth century people began moving down into the marshes surrounding the bay to take advantage of trade offered by southern Chinese who sailed up in their junks bringing ceramics and cloth and metalwares. The pre-Filipinos, who had long been using their own pottery for ritual and burial purposes, must have been overwhelmed by the sophistication and beauty of the Chinese ceramics, for the archaeological record shows they began adopting them more and more extensively. The boggy settlements grouped around the Pasig’s estuary cohered in time into a small port. The Tagalogs who lived there (taga + ilog, ‘inhabitants of the river’) had unwittingly founded Manila. Such, at least, was the received wisdom.

  It was precisely the small undulations in a landscape that a modern city so effectively obscured, just as its lights did the stars at night. Nowadays it was nearly impossible to detect amid the traffic and concrete the hillocks where deer had once raced through shining grasses. They had to be deduced by the way floodwaters ran, tumbling with them the yellow worms of noodles beside the kerb. Moreover, except from the top of the very tallest blocks downtown one could no longer see the foothills of Laguna and Marikina, not least because of the brown smog rising in the foreground like urban halitosis. Yet the bumps and lumps were still there, mainly identifiable as places which scarcely ever flooded. The great necropolitan triangle up past the San Lazaro racetrack (La Loma cemetery, the Chinese cemetery and North cemetery) was on somewhat raised terrain from where it was actually possible to look down on a few roofs. In one particular place at the foot of a cemetery wall the ground rose again, forming a small valley through which a black estero called the Kapilang ran in its shattered culvert. This rise of ground, whose topmost point remained for ever ill defined, was the San Clemente squatter area.

  By squatter standards San Clemente was old. A whole generation had grown up not thinking of it as makeshift or temporary. Many of the lower shanties had concrete block foundations to withstand the sudden rises of the Kapilang, which acted as a storm drain in monsoon weather. This generation was now giving birth to its own children who would be even less aware that at the stroke of a pen bulldozers could raze the village without so much as a day’s notice in the name of the city or of a private individual who had suddenly dusted off his title to the land. Village? But in all important ways that was what it was. Back in January 1981 the Minister for Human Settlements had hastily dressed her stage for the visit of Pope John Paul II. She had gi
ven orders for high cinderblock walls to go up along the inner angle formed by the junction of two major thoroughfares. They had been painted white, of a shade popularly referred to as ‘sepulchre’, against which a few remaining prewar trees offered a plausibly verdant prospect. Thus screened from sight, San Clemente effectively vanished as far as the pelt of roaring traffic was concerned. Even today’s sandwiched commuters on the elevated LRT trains glimpsed little between the foliage; just another faint swelling of tin roofs among so many. Imelda Marcos’s action had intensified the village effect by demarcating San Clemente’s outer boundary. And not just in San Clemente, either. Even the foreign back-packers and good-timers of the tourist belt daily walked unknowingly past entire shanty villages, tucked away behind their walls, now no longer white. (And even after all Imelda’s beautifying zeal, the papal visit had turned out less than a total triumph. The man had struck her as obtuse and lacking in class, breaking with the divine tradition of neutrality by making impertinent remarks about poverty, human rights and even elections. At least, that was how the Press had interpreted them. The whole thing had culminated in a monstrous public snub during an open air Mass when His Holiness, faced with a front row of concupiscent oligarchs with their eyes closed and their tongues out, had turned down the obvious and glamorous first choice and instead called up some scruffy unknown brat who, she hoped, had choked on the wafer.)

  To strengthen the village analogy still further, many of San Clemente’s inhabitants had originally come from the same area of a single province in the northern Visayas and had largely preserved their dialect, customs and outlook. If one closed one’s eyes it was sometimes possible to believe oneself back in a distant barrio, for on two sides the high walls shut out much of the traffic noise and on the third lay the comparative peace of the cemeteries. The sparrows which lived among the Chinese tombs became audible between LRT trains as they flittered and scrabbled on the tin roofs. For human inhabitants, meanwhile, there were two ways in and out of San Clemente. One was across a rickety board spanning the estero and leading to a muddy passage between shops which faced the roaring canyon beneath the light railway. The other was a breach in the cemetery wall most frequently used by people fetching water, for the Chinese dead were well supplied, some of the mausoleums being plumbed.