Nanang Pipa wondered if she herself could manage such stoical resignation if men with hammers methodically tore down San Clemente, this house, as she and her neighbours stood outside in, maybe, pouring rain, surrounded by their sewing machines and ruined stock. She supposed she would, if only because the alternative was to be shot as squatters sometimes were, the landlord settling old scores by pointing out to the police the ‘ringleaders’, the ‘troublemakers’ who would have to be eliminated if law and order were to prevail. Still, a short row of shanties in Sta. Cruz was one thing; the demolition of an entire barrio was another matter and in the past such mass evictions had caused noting which went on for days. Even children had died as frightened and ill-trained police opened fire in panic with their M-16s.
Nanang Pipa sometimes thought she was the only one of San Clemente’s residents to have these uneasy thoughts about the future. The others all seemed to live from day to day, meal to meal, drinking session to drinking session. Their each day was separate, pursed, ready to spill out its small troubles and few coins. Only for her, perhaps, did time stretch itself out into a history of difficulties like a long accountancy of debt, a future of limited but definite hope in which likely setbacks flitted along the horizon like rogue gunmen on rooftops. Whether planned by men, predestined by God or fated by nature, eligible evils went about springily on silent paws, awaiting their summons. She believed this most fervently. One could ward them off or deflect them in a variety of ways but there were no guarantees. She had once read a quotation whose cynicism had made her draw a sharp breath, so extraordinary was it to see it actually printed; but it had stuck in her mind nonetheless. It was: ‘If praying did any good, they’d hire men to do it.’ She remembered it because not long before she had put a personal notice in the Philippine Daily Inquirer at a moment when everything had fallen apart at once and she was at her wits’ end. Edsel was in City Jail on suspicion of car-napping (a case of mistaken identity); their eldest daughter Gaylin had admitted she was pregnant without a plausible husband in sight; that evil harridan Ligaya Rosales had walked off with a brand new edging machine and her family pretended not to know where she was; and Pipa’s eldest son Boyong was shortlisted for a job as an electrician at Plastic City, out in Valenzuela. ‘Make a vow,’ Doding Perez had urged her. ‘Remember when Maricel was trying for that job in Saudi? She got it. And Bats was elected tanod in the barangay elections. It was because I took a St. Jude out. Do a St. Jude, Pipa. It always seems to work better than a Holy Spirit. Everyone I know says so.’
Privately, Pipa had been dubious about St. Jude, of whom she knew nothing except that he sounded faintly tarnished by the similarity of his name to that of Judas. Scanning the personal column in the newspaper she saw this:
Make 3 wishes, 1 bus. & 2 impossible. Pray 9 Hail Marys for 9 days & on the 9th day put out this ad & your wishes will come true. TY Mama Mary.
This was clear and straightforward and definitely religious, a proper novena, not like those witchcraft gayumas involving flies and dead meat. After some thought she decided to ask for Boyong’s appointment as the business favour; she ranked the restoration of the stolen sewing machine as one of the impossibles, the other being Eddie’s release from jail. She said her prayers and booked her ad. Three weeks later things were pretty much the same, except that Boyong had failed to get the job. Certainly Gaylin was still pregnant.
‘What did I tell you?’ said Doding. ‘St. Jude.’
The other reason why Pipa had held out against St. Jude was because invoking him – or, rather, thanking him when one had received the favours – took three column inches as opposed to one. Scanning the prayer, she found there was another quid pro quo, a promise to spread the word about him. Poor man, she thought, struck suddenly by the idea of a heavenful of saints most of whom were struggling against their own obscurity to make their powers felt and appreciated. The other thing about St. Jude was that he specified when he would answer prayers and operated a No Results – No Fee scheme, unlike Mama Mary. On the eighth day of Pipa’s asking St. Jude for favours Eddie walked in, thinner and with a swollen lip, freed for lack of evidence. That same day Boyong appeared for lunch, due to start work on Monday with the electricity company Meralco. And towards sunset Gaylin, who had been unwell all day, finally confirmed that she was no longer pregnant thanks to some herbs she had bought at one of the stalls outside Quiapo Church. This was the clincher. Pipa now saw how unlikely it was that Mama Mary would ever have been sympathetic to that particular prayer. It was all too much. A few days later her heartfelt, if standard, tribute appeared in the newspaper.
Oh, Holy St. Jude, Apostle and Martyr, great in virtue, rich in miracle, near kinsman of Jesus Christ, faithful intercessor of all who invoke your special patronage in time of need. To you I have recoursed from the depth of my heart. And humbly beg great power to come to my assistance. Help me in my present and most urgent petition. In return, I promise to make your name known and cause you to be invoked. St. Jude pray for us & all who invoke thy aid. Pray for this nine times a day, for 9 consecutive days. On the 8th day your prayers will be answered. Please don’t forget to publish this once your wish is granted.
‘What did I tell you?’ Doding said again, this time with the irritation of someone whose free advice has proved a little too rewarding. ‘St. Jude.’ Ever since, Pipa kept St. Jude in venerated reserve, not wishing to abuse his evident good nature by bothering him with trivia. Yet she remained, by unexpected whirlings-about of her intelligence like a peeled stick, highly resistant to sentimental categories. She was not after all to be patronised as a humble creature of simple faith. She was tough and difficult, a complex rational being adrift in a casual universe of monstrous flukes and chance, and simply retained blurry areas common to so many as to disgrace no-one. If it works, do it. St. Jude had worked.
Which was more than Eddie had, once back from jail. He appeared to think the injustice he had suffered exonerated him from all further attempts to earn a living. He had been maliciously fingered by one of the car-napping gang. Dog-napping, now: had it been dog-napping there would have been some justice in the charge since he occasionally went out on pooch patrol with Bats’s brother Gringo, who drove a taxi. When Gringo came on shift they’d drive around likely areas looking for strays. Eddie would leap out with gloves and noose and have the beast in the back before the dog itself knew what was happening. Then out came the chloroform bottle and the rags. A decent dog would net three or four hundred on the hoof. One had made them seven-fifty: a daring daylight snatch in Makati which Eddie and Gringo still recounted over drinks. It was a monster Doberman or German Shepherd or something – the boys were none too clear about breeds – being walked at the end of a long rope by a queen in a toupée. As they drove slowly past, Eddie in the back had whipped open the door, grabbed the rope and held on as Gringo floored the accelerator. Soon they were doing a good speed, the dog bowling along behind, skittling cyclists and an ice-cream cart on bicycle wheels. The damned animal weighed a ton; Eddie had a hell of a job holding the door with one hand and hauling in with the other like some demented shark fisherman.
‘Slow down, for Chrissake,’ he had pleaded. His arm was popping from its socket. They rounded a corner and the dog bonged off the side of a dawdling bus. ‘Slow down, Gringo. My goddam arm’s coming off.’ Unquestionably the animal was stoutly built. Even after whacking into the bus it was still more or less on its feet at a woozy canter. Gringo trod on the brakes and the dog, now on only a foot or two of rope, crunched into the taxi’s rear. Gringo began laughing crazily, his forehead resting on the steering wheel as Eddie hopped out and tried to manhandle the dazed animal into the back. There were shops here, and crowds. People collected on the pavement and watched with at-a-loss giggles as Eddie took a grip on the rope with one hand and groped for the beast’s tail with the other. The tail had been docked, the stump was too short. Finally he grasped a leg instead and with a convulsive heave stuffed the animal through the door and fell on top. The
crowd loved it. His T-shirt was rucked up to his armpits and he was smeared with blood. Panting amid the tangle of massive brown hocks and hams he indeed looked as if he were screwing a pony, an observation voiced loudly by a peanut boy. At that moment the queen came limping around the corner, wig askew, and let out a bleat of mixed relief and horror. Gringo pulled himself together, let in the clutch with a bang and, driving erratically through shifting lenses of tears, whizzed into a slot in the traffic. The door slammed shut. ‘I think my hand’s gone,’ said Eddie. He had taken several turns of the rope around it. From the tightened coils a bunch of pale twigs protruded. He gingerly unwrapped the rope and found the twigs still attached to a hand deeply indented, skinned and burnt.
‘Quick, give it the chloroform,’ called Gringo between hoots of laughter.
Eddie tore his attention away from his own injuries to survey those of the dog. Its eyes bulged, its purple tongue lolled. The noose around its neck had sunk deep into the fur. He managed to find the slip knot and feed rope through it. The noose eased. The dog sucked a rattling gulp of air.
‘I’m very much afraid, sir,’ said Eddie in his Forbes Park vet’s voice, ‘your dear pet will have to be put down. It is beyond repair.’
This sent Gringo off again. His driving became truly terrible and it remained a mystery to both men how they ever made it to San Andres without hitting something or being stopped. It amazed them even more once they had swung into the yard behind the restaurant and climbed weakly out. The car’s nearside rear quarter was dented and all too plainly smeared with fresh blood. The chef came out to inspect the goods.
‘You’re sure that’s a dog?’ he asked, looking at the moaning brute stretched the full width of the back seat. ‘Eddie-boy, you bought this off a calesa driver.’
‘This is no nag,’ Eddie told him scornfully. ‘Are those nag’s balls? We got it off a queen in Makati. Look at the meat on it,’ he said, slapping a bloody flank. ‘That’s pedigree dog meat, tons of it. Actually, we’ve been thinking it’s probably too good for your customers, seeing how they’re used to the starving mongrels you normally serve. All ribs and skin. They must think they’re eating stewed umbrellas.’ This phrase, adobong payong, made Gringo lean helplessly against the taxi, head on forearm. ‘You’re not going to have to fatten this dog up for a month, no sir.’
‘Has it been dead long?’
‘What do you mean, dead? Can’t you hear it? It’s resting. We had quite a fight,’ Eddie said proudly, ‘It didn’t want to come. All you have to do is put it out of its misery and into the pot.’
Eventually the deal was struck, the animal hauled away by two men, the rear of the taxi sluiced out and Eddie’s hand bandaged. His wife had heard the tale many times. ‘Your dear pet’ll have to be put down’ had become something of a catch-phrase, quoted whenever the story was alluded to. Nanang Pipa could indeed have seen a certain justice had her husband been jailed for dog-napping, but the joke about the car-napping rap was that Eddie couldn’t drive. Even if the halfwits who arrested him hadn’t known it, St. Jude had and, moving in a mysterious way, organised the release. His agent had turned out to be Insp. Dingca.
‘You mean our Dingca? Rio?’
‘How many other Dingcas do you know?’ Eddie asked her. ‘A real piece of luck. He was over at the jail looking for someone, a completely different case, and he saw me and said ‘Hi, Eddie. What’ve they got you for?’ So I told him it was a mistake, especially as I can’t drive, and they took me down to the yard and gave me a test. We all got into a jeep and they told me to drive to where the leader of the gang lived and just park outside the house. They’d do the rest. If I did that, they said, I’d be released on the spot. I really think they were serious. I even tried a bit but it wasn’t any good and after a while they told me to get out anyway, just walk, out the gate, go. “But we’ve got your number, Buster”, that sort of stuff. It was Dingca did that. I owe him.’
Since then Eddie hadn’t worked and now owed many people besides the Inspector, mainly for gin and cigarettes. It was a mercy the sewing business was going well, Pipa thought, otherwise they’d be on their beam ends. Just then Eddie himself stuck his head through the door, leaning on the posts with muddy hands.
‘God knows what you’ve let us in for now, woman,’ he said. The sewers stopped work and looked up. ‘Never can leave well alone, can you? It’s always “Just a little bit deeper, Eddie”, or “Another day should do it”.’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ asked Pipa crossly.
Something in the way his head disappeared made everyone troop outside, or at least crowd around the back door, since the hole took up most of the space between the wall of the house and that of the neighbours. Here the reeking, rubbish-strewn declivity was now interrupted by a sizeable pit whose depth was exaggerated by the heaps of soil packed down by bare feet around its edge. There was nobody in it. Nanang Pipa peered down, impressed despite herself by its neatly vertical sides and the evidence of labour. At the bottom was a small, roundish white boulder.
‘Now that,’ Eddie told her with truculent triumph, ‘is a human skull.’
12
YSABELLA BASTIAAN’S pet senator had pressed her to meet him again in the Senate lounge. Once more she had walked up a single flight of gritty cement stairs from the Department of Archaeology and emerged in the corridors of power. This time they had sat at one of the long tables set in a hollow rectangle and a cold collation was brought. Other senators were there, some of whom she now recognised from her daily newspaper reading. Of these, half looked like the ex-showbiz folk they actually were. Benigno Vicente was not one of them. He was expansive, confident enough of her now to introduce her across the table. With every gesture he shed a strong whiff of ‘L’Egoiste’. Ysabella was tentatively wondering whether these powerful men and women could be subdivided into old and new money, or maybe according to their cultural leanings. The showbiz people tended to be home-grown in the populist manner, given to answering Channel 5 news reporters in Tagalog. The others answered more or less automatically in English. It seemed to her that most of them looked eastwards towards America, where they had likely been to college or had sons and daughters with law practices there. The remaining few – her own Senator Vicente among them – looked westwards towards London and Paris and Rome and Madrid.
‘Miss Bastiaan’s father was ambassador here in 1965.’
‘Chris Bastiaan?’ A senator two down from her host leaned forward and smiled at her across the intervening meat loaf and kiwi fruit. ‘I knew him, miss. It’s an honour.’ This was said with great courtesy but as if caught on the hop, still searching for the right tone. ‘I was nobody at the time, of course,’ he explained to his neighbour. ‘Just a lawyer. But we were introduced and we met often. We used to play golf. A most admirable man, a good friend and a true British gentleman in the old sense.’ This came as a shock to Ysabella, who had never heard that her father had had the least interest in sports. ‘Then that terrible incident. I believe he was the youngest ambassador ever to be appointed here. My God, it seems a long time ago, the Quirino Avenue bomb thing.’
‘But of course you were at Oxford,’ Vicente said to her with nifty irrelevance.
‘Not at the time, Ben. I was three.’
‘Ah. Obviously I meant later.’
Off in a corner of the room cameras flashed and whirred among the sofas in one of whose corners a tiny senator was slipping down into a crack in the upholstery like a peanut. Her face wore a look of severe intelligence.
‘We worry about time-wasting,’ said a lady on Ysabella’s left who had not previously spoken. ‘Have you attended any debates yet? Then you’ll know. It’s very senatorial, very slow, very by-the-book. Properly dignified. But I can tell you, Ysabella, we’re on the edge of an abyss in this country. Or, to be more topical, on the edge of a volcano. “The Pinatubo premonition”, one of our newspapers called it. The Americans pulled out last week. Finally we’ve got what we wanted. Unfortunately
, total independence leaves us with no-one but ourselves to blame for whatever follows. Unless we can get peace and order we’re doomed. Peace and order is number one. No peace and order means no foreign investors. No foreign investors means stagnation and increasing poverty. And poverty means corruption and breakdown of peace and order. A vicious circle which we have to break before all else. And in the meantime economies which were years behind us a decade or two ago are overtaking. Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, and quite soon even Indonesia. It’s a disaster.’
Ghosts of Manila Page 11
