Ghosts of Manila

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  After all, then, justice had been done; but in being done had left behind this ghost, this lost soul of an expression which, like the Cheshire cat’s grin, hung in the air without even much of a face to go with it and lacking any sort of name. ‘We’ll meet again next time around,’ it said to Rio, not with the promise of vengeance but with the hopeful conviction that both would somehow have shaken themselves a little more free of sheer muddle and stupidity and waste. From it alone had sprung Rio’s certainty that in shooting the expression’s owner they had somehow missed the true villain who would carry on flitting before them, leaping free of each host seconds ahead of their bullets and leaving behind an innocent husk. And so the world went, trundling along on its wheels of pain, trailing behind it an exhausted wistfulness which did no good at all to ageing cops.

  That was a single rare instance of a Dingca ghost which had no business to be there. A far more public ghost haunted him as well as thousands of other Manileños. It was no single figure but a composite, boiling tirelessly up from the edge of the bay whenever he drove past the Yacht Club on Roxas and saw the Cultural Center of the Philippines, showpiece of the Marcoses’ New Society. That particular building merely exhaled the breath of the famous old cronies Imelda had wooed into performing, the Margot Fonteyns and Van Cliburns of the international concert hall. It was the other building tucked far away behind it on the edge of the tongue of reclaimed land where the ghosts hovered of those who had died in its construction. Dingca remembered the sequence of events indelibly since they were tangled up in his own police career.

  In those days there had effectively been two national police forces. One was the Philippine Constabulary (established earlier in the century by the Americans), the other the Integrated National Police, itself an amalgam of local police forces. The PC had always been closely tied to the Army. Its use against communist guerrillas and in enforcing the 1972 Martial Law decree had left it quasi-military in terms of training and orientation. By no stretch of anyone’s imagination could the PC have been described as a civilian force. From 1974 that role was filled by the INP, widely considered a poor cousin saddled with the dumb domestic cop jobs: tracing stolen vehicles, breaking dog-napping rings, directing traffic and tagging the bodies left by the PC after bank raids. It was as a humble PO2 in the INP that in the Seventies Rio Dingca had worked out of Station 5 in Ermita.

  By 1975 Martial Law’s promise of discipline and law enforcement was visibly crumbling beneath corruption of such size and weight it could only have proceeded at the bidding – or with the indulgence – of Malacañang Palace. Views differed as to which of the incumbent First Couple was more to blame. A bonanza of unsecured ‘behest’ loans to the Marcoses’ business friends was awarded by order and drawn on public funds. Prestige construction projects abounded in the better-heeled areas of Manila, were completed, were burnt down for the insurance money, were re-started. Meanwhile, the ordinary policing of Ermita became a serious cop’s private minefield. Merely stopping the wrong vehicle for a traffic violation might cost one’s badge, investigating the legality of a night club one’s life. So smile benignly at the foreign pedophiles as they waddled about town with rented children in tow. Wish other tourists luck as they gambled in illegal dens. Sell them the various substances they were looking for before someone else did. Pretend not to know that men with bulbous fraternity rings drove in from middle class suburbs to a particular bar on M.H. del Pilar in order to drink, but also at some lost point in the small hours to pay a large sum of money, troop down into a hidden basement and watch truly terrible things (In or Out?). Each day turn so many blind eyes one’s head became a single cataract bestowing the same milky opacity in every direction. The frustration of it compounded by guilt at what was constantly seen but denied vision, known but withheld from knowledge, and all for the sake of a bare living wage, had made it easy for Rio and his comrades to take the law into their own hands from time to time, just as the country’s rulers did lawlessness. Extra-judicial deaths were a way of fighting back. In those days by no means all the bodies lying in Rizal Park at night were fornicating or sleeping. In those days Intramuros was jammed solid with parked trucks laden with goods pilfered from the nearby Port area, some of them with corpses at the wheel. In those days Rio was a newly married man and Sita was pregnant with Eunice. It was no time to be changing his job. Be canny, he told himself. Coconut trees kept their heads by bending with the typhoon, and typhoons eventually blew themselves out. (He was, as has been observed, a man of banal precept.)

  In the late Seventies Imelda Marcos, rejoicing in her role as Governor of Manila, fell ever more deeply into the grip of her ‘edifice complex’, the earliest symptoms of which had resulted in the Cultural Center in 1969. Eighty percent of that building’s $8.5m cost had gone on kickbacks. People praised it for its architecture, her for her patriotic vision. By 1981, casting around for the international status symbols Manila might be thought to lack, she decided that Cannes had had it all its own way for too long and with far less impressive sunsets than Manila Bay’s. Thus the Manila International Film Festival was hastily conceived and even more hastily born in the shape of the Film Center, designed as MIFF’s screening complex. It was a rush job, like many of Imelda’s grand projects. The contractors were given a bare seven months to put up from scratch a seven-storey Parthenon-style building the size of a shopping mall. The project was given top priority and Imelda’s personal supervision.

  It was also given the services of PO2 Gregorio Dingca, ordered to keep the narrow foreshore road clear of unnecessary traffic so that dump trucks and delivery vehicles could come and go unhindered. Lighters of especially white sand stripped from a provincial beach appeared over the horizon. Projects all over Metro Manila came to a halt as cement was diverted to the Film Center. Over 5,000 labourers worked, ate and slept on the site in the traditional way of men who have come to the capital from afar and move from site to site, steadily building themselves out of a succession of temporary homes. They built by day and they built by night under arc lamps, sleeping in shifts on sheets of cardboard as hods and hoppers manoeuvred among them.

  Rio himself was on night shift when at 2.35 am on November 17th 1981, a day he was not going to forget, the top storey fell through. Work had proceeded so quickly that the concrete had not been allowed sufficient time to cure before the weight of another floor was added. This, together with skimpy bracing and underpinning, provoked a domino-like collapse of much of the structure into the main viewing theatre where a hundred day-shift workers were asleep. An immense tonnage of freshly poured cement, concrete and girders slammed down, together with workmen toppled from their collapsing scaffolds. A nightmarish rescue operation then began. As news of the disaster spread locally, people gathered to help. The new floor lay like a lumpy quilt over the ones below it with a series of jagged caverns beneath. The concrete was still so wet in places that workers had become embedded in it. Men dug frantically with shovels and hands to reach those trapped, uncovering here a leg, there the back of a head. Like them, Dingca was himself daubed with cement; his holster was caked with it, his boots weighed a ton. Even twenty-four hours after the collapse they were still pulling men alive out of air pockets and stairwells.

  Then came the orders from Malacañang: Leave it. Carry on building without delay. The rescuers decided there had been some mistake, a misunderstanding, and redoubled their efforts to claw their way through the now hardened slurry to reach their friends. It was here that, if Rio’s memories remained vivid, maybe events themselves became telescoped. He remembered clearly that no ambulance was allowed through for nine hours after the accident, that a complete security blanket enveloped the site. The next day a couple of newspapers had spoken of a minor accident which had killed two workers. Otherwise, total silence. It was not ambulances that arrived but staff cars and military vehicles: MetroCom and the dreaded NISA and MISA. It never occurred to him to wonder what Military Intelligence had to do with an accident on a construction site. Eve
ryone knew. Saloon cars with smoked windows arrived carrying aides with express orders. The building was going to be finished on time, cost what it might, and time had already been lost.

  Meanwhile, workers with jackhammers were still trying to free their colleagues even as the concrete hardened around their limbs. Men died fully conscious, up to their waists in setting cement. After three days the stench of unreachable bodies was dreadful. Even so, there was still life in the very walls of the tangled canyons deep inside the building. Pneumatic drill bits pierced the concrete and released gouts of blood. But orders were given and obeyed. Bulldozers arrived and began pushing everything in a rubble of flesh and stone and metal out of the building and down to the sea where the gulls swooped and dived. Back inside, men with chainsaws went about lopping off flush the limbs and still-clothed bulges which protruded from the concrete. As a policeman, Dingca had been ordered to draw his gun and prevent further rescue work on pain of death. He and his INP colleagues stood there trembling with fatigue, their drawn weapons hanging heavy with cement by their sides. Each pretended not to notice those who silently wept. Outside, Army trucks kept drawing up with fresh PC men in military uniform who leaped out, saw only what they had been told they would see – a scene of sabotage and a communist-inspired labour dispute – and cocked their weapons. Within a week work was once again in full swing. Fresh concrete was poured over the remains; the smell grew fainter.

  It never was determined how many died nor how many still lay entombed in the Film Center. There were no official figures. Those on-site who could list by name their missing friends and colleagues thought over 200, but it was anyone’s guess how many of their bodies had ever been removed. For all that 7,000 labourers were still working on the day before the first Manila International Film Festival opened, the building was finished on time and Imelda, who was after all the chief exhibit, had her day. Satyajit Ray chaired the panel which awarded a Golden Eagle to 36 Chowringhee Lane. But MIFF never took off and in 1983 had to show upmarket pornography in order to break even. It was doubtful whether anyone in Cannes lost even a wink of sleep over its potential threat.

  MIFF was dead but the Film Center still stood. Now and again Rio caught sight of it from one of the new flyovers on Roxas, a vast, pillared cube in the distance. For him, as for the thousands who hadn’t been there that appalling week in 1981, it had gone on sending up a thick plume of ghosts which hovered over the whole spit of land. They were regularly seen and heard, and just as regularly there were attempts to exorcise them. Many times the Church had sent its shamans and, when they failed, priests from the Ifugao and Igorot hill tribes tried their own expertise. Nothing worked for long and most people believed firmly that nothing ever would as long as the building remained standing. It was now an abandoned warehouse, empty, cracked and subsiding, reeking of Babylon after a mere dozen years. No earthly power would ever make Rio set foot inside it again. He knew that as soon as he did the structure would immediately become transparent and, looking up, he would see against the fabled sunset of Manila Bay the tumbled figures of the dead sitting, lying, upside down, spreadeagled, headless, shirtless, missing a leg or a hand or half a torso, their mouths full of cement and with the early stars coming out among their bones.

  Such were Dingca’s ghosts. They lived on in a lesser way in the subsequent history of the police force, being reawakened each time something else happened to remind him of the essential difference between the civilian force he served and the Philippine Constabulary. They were both described as the police; but while his training at the Police Academy had been ‘service oriented’, in the official phrase, the PC trained with the military and were ‘mission oriented’. The two forces frankly despised each other, on occasion being reduced to public firefights. Then in 1991 they were officially merged, creating the Philippine National Police. The intention was to form a truly national civilian police entirely separate from the armed forces. Dingca and his INP colleagues glumly predicted what would happen and were glumly proved right. Almost without exception the ex-PC men took over the top jobs and gave their old comrades the plum assignments while the ex-INP men carried on trying to be ordinary cops. The venerable Police Academy, which in the postwar years had turned out the spruce ranks of Manila’s Finest, was abolished. In its place was the National Capital Training Command in – of all ominous places for a civilian force – Camp Crame, the Army HQ.

  The unhappy amalgam which was the PNP had been given two years to shake down and to date showed not the slightest sign that it ever would. Under its provisions a policeman could now be reassigned anywhere in the country, which meant there were now Manila policemen who knew nothing about the city, while men like Rio Dingca kept their heads down for fear of being posted to some godforsaken provincial oubliette. He knew perfectly well that most of the ex-Constabulary men whose orders he now took were unqualified to be policemen, as were plenty of officers who had been recruited in the old Martial Law days and who had simply bought a fake High School education certificate in order to join the force. Nowadays one had to be a College graduate, an excellent notion fatally undercut in a force already full of men unqualified to wear any but a janitor’s uniform. Demoralised by politics, Dingca and his friends were unhopeful for their future. Morale was terrible, behaviour worse. Policemen rampaged like delinquents, firing off their guns at whim, organising kidnapping syndicates, drug rings, car thefts, protection rackets, the fencing of stolen goods. Almost daily they shot each other, in and out of uniform. They held each other up, busted each other’s scams to take control of them, stole each other’s loot. When lumped together with the armed forces one could say, as Rio Dingca often did to Sita, that the law enforcement authorities constituted the country’s single biggest source of crime.

  All of a sudden, out of the blue, he had been struck by the sadness, by a furious sense of waste of which Babs was only the most poignant recent example. Not long ago he had had to deal with a halfwitted squatter who had been set up for a carnapping rap which Rio was sure he hadn’t merited since he knew the policemen who were running the ring. Their usual trick was to spot a car they fancied, arrest the owner and impound the vehicle, which would then vanish without trace from police custody. He had recognised the jailed squatter and had sprung him by showing that he couldn’t even drive. There was a pathos to this. It was the squatter’s wife he liked, an admirable and hardworking soul from whom he regularly bought his girls’ T-shirts at rock-bottom prices. Shortly after restoring her worthless husband to San Clemente Rio had bumped into the parish’s rogue priest, Fr. Herrera. Generally speaking, Dingca hadn’t much time for priests or, indeed, for churchgoing, which he felt was all right for women. Unlike Fr. Bernabe, the parish’s other priest, Herrera was unconventional, cynical, sour and knowledgeable about the most surprising things, including fighting cocks. Rio had persuaded him without much difficulty to have a cold glass of something. At the back of his mind he had an idea that he might tentatively sound the man out on the subject of ghosts, which were beginning to disquiet him more than he liked. With old Bryan Macawili retired from the force Rio knew nobody else he wished to confide in.

  As a matter of fact there were several things he quite wanted to put to Fr. Herrera but couldn’t work out how to turn them into questions. Once after seeing Babs in ‘The Topless Pit’ he had had the most extraordinary vision of Judgement Day while driving morosely back to San Pedro, Laguna. Summoned to appear before the Almighty and explain how she had spent her time on earth, Iron Pussy would say, ‘Sir, I used to open Coke bottles with my cunt for tourists… er, my vagina, Sir,’ while cherubim and seraphim cracked up behind discreetly held wings. Dingca further fantasised that there really was justice in heaven because God would then thunder ‘BRING ME THOSE TOURISTS!’ instead of dumping on poor Iron Pussy, who had only been putting to use the peculiar talent He himself had given her. Such metaphysical extravaganzas were not easily translated into questions one could pose a parish priest, Rio decided.

  In
the event it scarcely mattered because Fr. Herrera, by then on his third bottle of Red Horse, drifted into his own strange monologue which now and then seemed to inhabit the sort of territory Dingca found interesting.

  ‘Listen, Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘The sadness and cruelty of this world are overwhelming and without remedy. They leave no survivors, of course. Folk deal with this as best they may. They have recourse to their gods and their devils; their drugs like tobacco and alcohol and money; their cynicism as much as their wishful thoughts and quiet retreats snatched between blows; their lovers and families. I say without remedy because I’ve come to know that’s true. I’ve also heard it said that living well is the best revenge. For years I assumed that meant wealthy living, the so-called “good life” which I must say has always struck me as a creed of dim greed. Strangely, though, I discovered that the best revenge really is to be good, to be moral, to live well in that sense. What’s more, I know there’s no alternative. It has nothing to do with pleasing a god or satisfying a social convention. It actually is the most logical and intelligent way to live. To all those not yet old or scarred enough to recognise the truth of this it sounds like bullshit, and always will. It can’t be taught, only learned.’