Ghosts of Manila

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘Too much democracy, Lee Kuan Yew said the other day.’

  ‘All right for him. An island state the size of one of our smallest provinces with a tiny population. We’ve got more than seven thousand islands here.’

  ‘One of which I own,’ broke in Vicente. ‘I insist that you join me and my family there for a weekend very soon. I really insist. It’s quiet, simple, beautiful. No formality, no loud social whirling. Seen from the land it reminds one of Mont St. Michel, I find.’

  ‘He’s rather ghastly on the face of it,’ Ysabella said to Sharon later, recounting travellers’ tales from the land beyond the ceiling. They were dusting the Archaeology Department, bringing to light uncatalogued lumps of this and that.

  ‘And underneath?’

  ‘Probably quite nice. A Europhile. Just someone from my father’s diplomatic past my mother kept in touch with. I hardly knew of his existence until this trip came up. What’s his reputation?’

  ‘He tries, at least. He works. Corrupt, sure; but no worse than some and much less than most.’

  ‘He owns an island, he says.’

  ‘He would. They mostly do, people like that. I should go,’ said Sharon. ‘It’ll be a unique insight into senatorial provincial life. He’s already invited you?’

  They were standing at one of the trestle tables laden with dusty fragments and a stencilled notice saying ‘BICOL 0881’. This, Sharon explained, referred to an excavation there in 1981, of which these specimens ought to have been listed in the August catalogue.

  ‘A vacuum cleaner would help,’ said Ysabella. ‘All these whisks and brooms just shift the dust around instead of removing it. This table looks as though the ceiling had collapsed.’

  ‘It’s on the list, don’t worry. Maybe you already told me and I forgot, sorry, but what was your connection with Vicente? Your father knew him?’

  ‘Sort of. He was my father’s driver.’

  ‘Oh my.’

  ‘Until I told my mother I was coming here he was just a man in a story, a hero for a day. He was driving my father and the First Secretary in the ambassadorial Rolls-Royce when some terrorists threw a bomb or a grenade or it hit a land mine, nobody seemed very clear. I was three at the time, back in England with my mother. The Rolls wasn’t armoured. Nobody bothered much with that sort of thing then. Think of Kennedy only the year before, the President of America driving through the middle of a city in an open car. It must have been a different world. My father was hit in the head. Vicente drove like mad without tyres for half a mile, saw my father on the floor in the back covered in blood and the other fellow just sitting there paralysed. It was fear or drink or something, I forget now, except that he wasn’t a bit hurt. So Vicente stopped, got into the back and gave my father mouth-to-mouth until someone fetched an ambulance. It wasn’t any good because he died a couple of days later but my mother never forgot what Vicente did. He was only a driver, terribly young. And I don’t think anybody even knew about mouth-to-mouth in those days, did they?’

  ‘My God. No wonder you have mixed feelings about things here.’

  ‘Do I? Not really. I can barely remember him. Someone faint a long way away and a long time ago. Do you know what actually killed him? That I do remember. It was the glass stopper from one of the little decanters in the Rolls’s cocktail cabinet. It went straight into his brain.’

  ‘And your mother kept up with him all these years?’

  ‘I suppose she must have,’ said Ysabella. ‘All she said to me was, “Well, if you’re going there, darling, you’ll have to look up Daddy’s old driver. He’s a senator now.” So I did. But I can’t imagine Mummy keeping up with an embassy driver except sort of the annual Christmas card, even if he was the good Samaritan. She was a diplomatic wife.’

  ‘And diplomatic wives didn’t become friendly with drivers?’ Sharon’s tone was that of a New World democrat.

  ‘Well, of course not. As for how Vicente made it from the car pool to upstairs I’ve no idea. Only in the Philippines would one be unsurprised.’

  ‘Or in the United States,’ said Sharon acridly.

  ‘But I think he’s probably a bore, anyway. Not because he isn’t old money or anything but because, I don’t know. A bore’s manner, I suppose.’

  ‘He’s probably just nervous. You’re the daughter of the man who was blown up. And you do scare people, you know.’

  ‘I do? Oh nonsense, Sharon.’

  But she knew it was true and didn’t much care, was even secretly pleased. ‘He has this pet hobby-horse, doesn’t he?’

  ‘You mean the OCWs? That’s the large point in his favour. It’s high time somebody in the government here took some notice of what’s going on. The cynicism’s unbelievable. They published some statistics the other week. Every year an average of eight hundred and nineteen Filipino overseas contract workers die of maltreatment abroad. Can you imagine? Eight hundred a year? It’s worst in the Middle East and Africa. Between six and seven hundred thousand Filipinos work there. Crispa went to the Department of Foreign Affairs and found out that between 1987 and 1990 alone more than three thousand of them died in, quote, ‘mysterious circumstances’, unquote. Does the government here demand stricter law enforcement in the host countries, better criminal and legal enquiries, proper explanations and indemnity for the families? It sure doesn’t. Between them, the OCWs worldwide are pulling three billion pesos a year into this collapsing economy and it’s not about to annoy any of the geese laying all these golden eggs. Score several belated points for your senator.’

  an

  ‘It certainly does seem pretty feeble,’ agreed Ysabella, blithely dusting. ‘Good for him, then. He said Filipinos were the Jews of Asia.’

  ‘He often does.’ But Sharon’s quieter remark and her sudden abandoning of the BICOL table left her companion irritated by the passion this implied. It was all very well playing naive and righteous, but what the hell did she expect? Migrant workers were by definition exploited, always had been, always would be. Having nothing to sell but their sweat they were expendable in a buyer’s market. She glanced across at Sharon’s back and decided not to mention slavery in the US, or John Steinbeck, or grape-pickers, or that she had once read a book of harrowing details about Castle Garden and Ellis Island where – if she remembered aright – some three thousand potential immigrants to the US had committed suicide while in detention awaiting deportation for having various ailments imaginary or otherwise, or the wrong papers, or not enough money to bribe the officials who made fortunes out of penury and despair. Not that Britain’s present-day record on immigrants was anything to write home about. She had recently read that until he was deported to Hong Kong in December 1992 the UK had an unconvicted detainee who had been held in jail for seven years, scarcely a matter for national pride.

  They smouldered at each other for a day or two beneath heatless professional exchanges. It was not completely clear to either why there was this smell of burning in the air. But Ysabella’s casualness, with which she might have lit an airy cigarette, had evidently ignited an obscure fuse. Not even Vicente’s record on OCWs was proof against Sharon’s anger when his familiar bon mot recurred yet again in print. In this mood, once more was once too often.

  ‘Listen, Ysabella, the next time you see your friend kindly tell him from me not to use that comparison ever again. It’s damned inaccurate. Also damned offensive.’

  ‘I’m not quite sure –’

  ‘Then I’ll tell you, just so’s you get it straight before you pass it on to Benigno-baby. In no sense whatever are the Filipinos the Jews of Asia. The Jews, alone among humanity, have survived damn near three thousand years of nonstop persecution. The Filipinos haven’t been a unified people for three hundred at the longest, most would say barely since Independence in 1946, some would claim they’re not a unified people yet. What unique force kept the notion of Jewishness intact for three millennia? Scholarship. Literacy. Not even merely religion but learning, enquiry, solid and unceasing mental effort.
The text. Banished, exiled, pogromed, scattered, they were left with nothing but the pursuit of reason, reflection, the crazed certainty that justice had to prevail eventually according to humanity’s own laws which it had written but periodically pretended it hadn’t. I’m not a religious Jew, I’m an atheist Jew. I’m also pretty much of a pessimist. But when I get really low I cheer myself up by remembering that, incredibly, the Jews are the living proof that the pen really is mightier than the sword. Constantly banned from all sorts of jobs in all sorts of societies, instead of giving up and going to seed they took refuge in simple trades by day and the intellect by night. Not even the filthiest, poorest shtetl in Eastern Europe ever lost its awe of learning, of argument, of cynical debate. All their ancient persecutors, where are they? Babylonians, Egyptians, Romans, Crusaders? The Spanish Inquisitors, the Tsarists, the Stalinists, the Third Reich? The best you can say is that one or two have left new inheritors of their old names, and the worst that there are always fresh candidates to step into the shoes of dead persecutors. But we Jews, we’ve survived and even prospered, held together by tradition, by Torah and Talmud and sheer, stubborn intellectual resourcefulness.

  ‘So you can tell Senator Vicente that when he and his people have made that effort for three thousand years he can call them the Jews of Asia. But not until. Never until. I’ve been here long enough to be extremely fond of this country, and I love Crispa very much indeed. But this place’s tragedy is not that of the Jews, and it only muddles and conceals the problem to pretend it is. The real tragedy of the Philippines, and plenty of other countries as well, is precisely that it doesn’t have three thousand years of literacy and identity to draw on as remedy. What text can unify the barely literate? What scholarship shore up those with little tradition? These last two days I’ve thought of nothing but this. Things I’d never organised as thoughts before, certainly not in connection with my life here. So I can thank you for that, at least indirectly. This morning I worked out something grim which I know is true: the impossibility of being anything without knowing something. Without knowledge people have no identity. I’m afraid that applies just as much to nations as to individuals.’

  Sharon vanished for two days after this highly partial outburst. Ysabella thought of ringing her at home, decided against it. When she reappeared she was back to the self Ysabella believed she had first met. Together they walked to Intramuros where some students were digging at her site under the supervision of an ethnology professor from UP. It was a pleasure and relief to get back to trowels and camel hair brushes, squatting beneath the greenish heat of a canvas awning. Suddenly and with tenderness Sharon put a muddy hand on Ysabella’s arm, leaving a sweaty print.

  ‘You know I told you I was an atheist Jew? Afterwards, I remembered that joke, only it’s not quite a joke. A young Jew bumps into his local rabbi and feels obliged to say “Listen, Rebbe. It’s time I made it clear that I’m an atheist.” The rabbi looks him up and down and says in amazement, “You don’t know Torah, then?” “Hardly.” “Not even the Wisdom of the Fathers, Pirke Abot?” “That least of all.” “In that case I have news for you, boychik” the rabbi tells him disgustedly. “You’re not an atheist, you’re an ignoramus.”’

  ‘But you’re not an ignoramus in that sense.’

  ‘How could I be? My parents are Orthodox. I learned what I was taught and I’m glad I did. You don’t have to believe it. Just doing the work changes you. The joke’s correct: you have to earn the right to call yourself an atheist.’

  ‘I’ll tell the senator.’

  ‘The joke?’

  ‘How else do I tell him he’s got to earn the right to call himself a Jew?’

  Under strain, these days, as seasonal clouds bottled up the heat or shed warm, unrefreshing rain tasting like perspiration. Ysabella saw the strain in Sharon, began at last to see it in the faces of people doubling up to wedge themselves on and off the ever-crowded jeepneys, in the sidewalk vendors, in the drenched boys tottering beneath smoking blocks of ice, in the fabric of the city itself as its overloaded beams and girders and transoms and bridges juddered continually. England suddenly began heaving itself up behind her conversations and reflections, unaccountably, as if its very irrelevance made it uniquely apposite. After Sharon’s tirade its solid presence for Ysabella, eight thousand miles over the horizon of Manila Bay, thinned uncertainly. It, too, had little which could stand beside a literate nationhood of three thousand years. Its culture was surely too much of a class and not of a people.

  Daily she read the newspapers, coming to rely on her regular dose of the baroque. Yet with each turn of the page it was as though she learned, by some insinuating alchemy, the odd news of her own country’s essential frailty. Here, anarchic feudalism had been built to last; there (Quiet shires! Unarmed policemen! House of Windsor!) a papery fragility suddenly hung about things as if at any moment the patient claws of lex talionis might at last unsheathe themselves and rend the scenery from behind. Or again (and she thought of childhood model-making with her cousin Jeremy) a Montgolfier balloon made of tissue paper would triumphantly rise trailing fumes of methylated spirits – Technology! – and turn into a brief ball of flame before descending as flakes of ash. Such an image might pop into her mind on reading something as seemingly unrelated as a newspaper account of two Manila policemen shooting each other – one fatally – in a quarrel over a corpse each had pre-sold to a rival funeral parlour. What on earth was the connection? One more in the list of uneasy mysteries which the city posed its well-heeled visitors from orderly lands.

  At 4.15 a.m. in the TriTran bus terminal at Lawton she saw a wooden board nailed to a tree, half concealed by leaves. In letters of runny paint it offered circumcision, virginity restoration, bust/nose lift and a phone number. This is dawn, she said to herself as the bus didn’t start and a man lay curled up on a table beneath the tree. Be stoical. Keep silent about our fate. We have to be careful of not waking whatever sleeps inside us. Sometimes it turns over, muttering of the emptiness we have embraced. We catch a few words and grow cold, knowing that soon or late and relieved its long hibernation is over, it will awake and embrace us in turn.

  13

  I’VE BEEN THINKING,’ said the tinny voice. ‘I think we ought to have a look at these vampires. Have you seen People’s this morning? It’s their lead story for the second day running. Why don’t you give it the once-over?’

  ‘Bong, I’m up to my eyes in salvaging and I’ve just been landed this “Queen of Shabu” case. A paper like ours oughtn’t even to mention vampires, much less send a reporter.’ Still less your senior crime reporter hot from the Navotas marshes, Vic hoped his tone implied.

  ‘People’s sent Narciso.’

  ‘Of course they did. It’s the perfect Mozzie story. Remember the election?’

  ‘Well, by God, that sold a lot more newspapers than full-page interviews with what we called “Presidentiables”. Everybody loves a vampire story.’

  Vic Agusan did have to concede that when the choice was between reading a political candidate’s forty-third repetition of their one speech and a ghost story, most sane people chose the latter. They certainly had back in March 1992, when in the Election campaign’s last couple of weeks a manananggal had been spotted flapping over the rooftops in Tondo. This was a peculiar and terrifying creature, half woman and half bat, which perched in the rafters of houses at night and let down a long tongue into the mouths of babies and the elderly, sucking out their livers. The Tondo manananggal had run for several days and totally eclipsed the serious newspapers’ election coverage. Besides, a half-woman half-bat was a cartoonist’s dream. The upper half appeared most felicitously as that of Miriam Santiago Defensor, a former judge who was even then being tipped by some as the next President. That she didn’t win, and later accused President Ramos of having rigged the election, was neither here nor there. What one remembered was this strange composite creature, superstition melted into political caricature, hovering above the late campaign. It was n
ot overlooked that the Philippines’ Transylvania, the home territory of such horrors, was generally believed to be Iloilo which curiously enough happened also to be the lady’s own province.

  ‘So send Bobby Aguilar.’

  ‘Bobby’s on the Padilla case. Anyway, he’s strictly showbiz.’

  ‘And I’m strictly crime, Bong.’

  ‘The Queen of Sheba doesn’t sound very criminal.’

  ‘Shabu, Bong, shabu. “Poor man’s crack”, if you remember. You’re acting like one of those dumb uniforms in American cop soaps whose role is to have everything spelt out to him. He represents the viewer.’

  ‘I still think it’s got a smell to it.’

  Vic Agusan leaned against the wall of the National Chronicle’s lobby and collapsed the antenna of his cellphone. A knot of people stood at the desk waiting for IDs. The doorway behind them was a rectangle of glare. Was this self-importance, or just getting older? Until recently he had revelled in the bizarre juxtapositions of newspaper work. Days were hectically slashed with stories. Grieving relatives/Leaked exam. papers?/Floods trap tots/Binondo’s oldest resident/. For a moment he could imagine what it felt like to be God, privy to simultaneous lives and events unrolling and intersecting in every direction. For one or two instants, in fact, he could glimpse the whole: the connections between virtually any narratives. These brief moments of insight occurred during heavy drinking sessions in whatever was the preferred after-hours watering hole. They were usually thrown as if by a film projector onto the cracked and crusty glaze of a urinal. Pilfering on increase in North Harbor/Man eats cellmate for Xmas dinner/Police vs. Police shootout/. No problem. They simply fused together. He could see exactly how each story was so dependent on the others that it was all really a single story after all. True, in the morning the mechanics of this perception had vanished and he was left with a headache and a vague understanding that each story was equally typical of this bizarre country. (That, too, was a sign of ageing. Increasingly he was looking at his own land with the eyes of an outsider preparing to board a flight out.) The Xmas dinner story had been a lulu, come to think of it. In the early hours of Christmas morning two guards in a municipal jail out in the provinces somewhere found an inmate sitting on the floor of his cell covered in blood and eating a chunk of raw liver. Next to him was the body of the cell’s other occupant whom he’d attacked and killed as he slept. The weapon, Vic remembered, had been the little tin stand for a mosquito coil. Security in the jail had to be tightened to protect the man from the irate relatives of his noche buena snack.