Ghosts of Manila

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  But the cabs worked, and Gringo worked. The engine was hardly ever switched off. Just as ‘bedspacers’ slept in shifts in a single rented bed, so Melody drivers began their stint at the wheel in a driver’s seat still damp with a colleague’s sweat. He would touch the luminous crucifix which dangled beneath the ‘Bless Our Trip’ motto, drape a clean towel behind his neck and edge out into what seemed to be the world’s biggest traffic jam. It was from Gringo’s tours of duty, his pasadas, that the news, the gossip, the stories came to enliven and inform his brother’s drinking sessions with Eddie and the others tucked away behind the walls of San Clemente. The fare who fell silent in Mandaluyong because his lady escort was sitting on his face. The off-duty policeman unconscious with drink whom his riotous colleagues handcuffed to a seatbelt bracket on the floor with his own cuffs before tossing the key out of the window (‘Don’t worry, he’ll pay,’ they said as they climbed out in Balik-Balik and disappeared.) And the Canadian nun whose luggage had exploded on the way to the airport.

  That had been a near thing, actually, though hilarious retrospectively. There had been two of them sitting side by side, Sisters of the Rosy Pillar or something, chatting away as they bowled along Roxas. Suddenly there was this tremendous fizzing and popping noise and immediately afterwards a muffled thump. In his mirror Gringo could see white smoke jetting from every crack of the suitcase, bursting even from the keyholes of the locks. In an instant, and despite the open windows, the cab filled with choking chemical clouds. Screams and a red glow were coming from the rear as he swung across two lanes of traffic into the providentially handy entrance to Navy HQ and leaped out. The rear windows had both lost their handles and were jammed down so it was easy to get a door open, grab the suitcase and hurl it out. By now flames had melted a hole in the lid but luckily seemed not yet to have spread downwards. The blackened Sisters emerged pretty much intact except for streaming red eyes behind their rimless spectacles. They leaned on each other, coughing into handkerchiefs, and watched their luggage burn. The Navy guards deserted their posts and joined the curious onlookers straggling over from squatter shanties pitched against the sea wall.

  ‘What the hell have you got in there?’ demanded Gringo, who was nervous of fire. ‘Who are you, anyway? Terrorists? NPA?’

  This accusation brought a swift change in the atmosphere. The Navy men unslung their M-16s; people could be heard murmuring ‘Rebel nuns’ and ‘Sparrow Unit’, no longer merely looking at the interesting sight of two religious and a blazing suitcase but seeing disguised urban terrorists, either of whom might suddenly produce an Uzi.

  ‘We’re not terrorists,’ protested one of the nuns in Tagalog. ‘Absolutely not. It’s an accident.’

  ‘That’s what I’d say if I were Commander Mubarak,’ agreed Gringo.

  ‘Commander Mubarak?’ said a Navy man, noisily cocking his weapon. The crowd moved back.

  ‘Oh, don’t be so silly!’ cried the other nun with equal fluency. ‘Do we look like Commander Mubarak?’

  ‘The Marines thought he looked like an unarmed duck farmer,’ said Gringo relentlessly, ‘so why not an unarmed nun? He’s a master of disguise. That’s what the papers say.’ This was a reference to a recent news story that the leader of Mindanao’s most notorious kidnap gang had been surprised asleep by soldiers and summarily shot. Pictures of a body appeared on all the front pages but doubts lingered about its true identity, an issue made still more opaque since there was scarcely a photograph of him on file with the authorities, let alone fingerprints or dental records. Nevertheless, the military maintained that identification was beyond question. Overlooking the implausibility of Mindanao’s most wanted gangster sleeping unarmed and unguarded in a duck house, the military pointed out that not only was the dead man’s amulet – the dried foetuses of of his seven-month twins – unmistakable, but so powerful that had they allowed him to wake and set foot to ground he would immediately have become invisible. President Ramos himself had said ‘This closes another chapter.’ Barely a month later an NBI report said that Commander Mubarak was alive and well and setting up operations in Manila, to few people’s surprise and least of all to those who had personally known the wretched duck-raiser, now buried.

  Still, Scarlet Pimpernel though the real Mubarak no doubt was, it was hard to see him lurking beneath the smoke-stained habits of either of these two foreign Sisters standing by their luggage burning itself out at the main gates of Navy HQ.

  ‘So what did you have in there?’ asked a guard. He, too, was nervous of fire ever since being caught some years ago in a blaze which had gutted much of the building he was now guarding, allegedly started during a dispute over a mess bill.

  ‘Watusi,’ admitted the Sister whose suitcase it was.

  ‘Watusi!’ echoed Gringo, by now starting to enjoy himself. ‘There must have been a kilo of them.’ Watusi were little maroon fireworks looking like fragments of dried string or Dora rat poison granules which had recently become popular among children. When struck like a match against the pavement they leaped and popped among passers-by, causing a good deal of smoke and the dance steps which may have accounted for their name. A spate of deaths over the last Christmas and New Year season had revealed that it was the red phosphorus they contained which had done no good to the toddlers who had eaten them.

  ‘We’d never seen them before,’ said the Sister. ‘We thought the orphans back home would like them. We never imagined… Oh, oh, how dreadful.’ The image had evidently struck her of what might have happened had her bag done its exploding in their aircraft’s baggage hold.

  ‘And what about my taxi?’ Gringo asked tragically. He was inspecting the cab and, apart from a lingering smell and some spatter burns in the plastic roof liner, found it sadly unharmed. ‘Look at these burns! Renovation of entire panel of upholstery, colour match’ll never be the same, oh, five hundred at least. We’ll say five hundred.’

  ‘Five hundred pesos?’ demanded the Sister whose luggage was now a bubbling heap of fibreglass. ‘Not a earthly, young man.’

  ‘Definitely four.’

  ‘One, if you’re lucky. On top of your already illegal fare. I notice you never started the meter. But you acted promptly and saved us all from a dangerous situation. Meanwhile, the loss is all ours, and we take full responsibility for it. Since it’s no use crying over burnt baggage we may as well continue our journey. Kindly take us to the airport. Come along, Sister,’ she added in English to her companion, ‘otherwise we shall miss the Calgary connection. I’ve still got our passports and tickets, which is what counts.’

  Gringo had at once recognised that these two with their Tagalog and briskness were old hands, no matter how ignorant about fireworks, and drove them on to NAIA without further demur.

  ‘I’d have given a lot to see Sister Watusi when her luggage blew up,’ said Bats, spearing the last of the liver spread with the communal fork.

  ‘Me too,’ agreed Eddie blearily. ‘You can still see the mark on the concrete even after all these months. Gringo and I passed it the other day. ‘Course, they were really Navy nuns.’ His head kept dropping so that he found himself staring for hours at a stretch at the plastic tablecloth. This was gridded into squares, each of which contained a hideous grinning face which swam in and out of little lakes of spilled beer. A more sober man than he would have called them roses.

  ‘Wha’ you mean, Navy nuns?’ asked Billy. ‘Isn’t such a thing. Couldn’t be.’

  ‘Everyone knows Navy nuns, you cretin. Special underwater. Top secret. They’re trained in Olongapo. American training. Top secret.’ He got suddenly to his feet and blundered out of the house. Outside, he peed without stopping for fully half an hour, his forehead braced against the trunk of the coconut tree which held the iron basketball ring. His eyes closed. He was perfectly happy. If only he could stop peeing.

  And thus Nanang Pipa found him on her return, his trouser cuffs sodden.

  ‘You’re disgusting,’ she cried. ‘Night after night, you and
your barkadas. Well, tonight you can stay out. I’m not having you in the house like that.’ She disappeared and Eddie closed his eyes again in relief. In the distance he could hear the sounds of eviction, then a door slam and bolts being shot. He thought it might be better to sit down and lo! when he next opened his eyes he found himself sitting. That was all there was to it. All you had to do was think something and there you were. There Bats was too, he discovered.

  ‘Where’re the others?’ he asked.

  ‘Gone home. We’ve been abandoned, Eddie.’

  This struck both of them as terribly sad. When next he looked up Eddie thought at first the moon had fallen but then he saw it wasn’t the moon at all. Perched on the roof of his own house was an appalling face. At once he felt completely sober.

  ‘Holy Mary,’ he said. ‘Bats, Bats, for God’s sake, look!’ He kept nudging his companion until Bats fell over sideways and then sat up crossly. ‘Look, Bats, on the roof. There’s a demon on my roof.’

  ‘Oh Jesus Christ and all the Saints, you’re right. I – I think I know what it is, Eddie.’

  ‘So do I. It’s the Guardian of the Treasure. The one Ming Piedragoso was telling us about. God, look at those fangs. What shall we do?’

  ‘You must wake Nanang Pipa,’ said Bats. ‘She’s in terrible danger. She’s sleeping just underneath it. Go on, take the horn by the bulls.’

  They were barely fifteen feet from the house and neither wanted to go a step closer. But they clung together and ran for the door, from where they could no longer see the apparition. They banged and shouted hard and long until at last Nanang Pipa came down, not overly welcoming until she consented to be led to the palm tree to see for herself, when she became positively insulting.

  ‘There’s absolutely nothing there! All we’ve got here are two layabouts drunk out of their skulls, shouting and hammering and disgracing us all. Think of the neighbours!’

  But at this moment a voice in the darkness came to the men’s aid. ‘I saw it too,’ said the woman who lived opposite. ‘From the window upstairs.’ She was carrying a Bible held before her as one holds up a fan or newspaper to shield one’s eyes from the sun’s glare. ‘Those terrible teeth! Fangs, fangs they were! It’s a vampire without a doubt.’ And as if this word, once pronounced, had the power to bring sleepers forth from their houses rubbing their eyes, a small crowd gathered. In its hands were palm frond crosses, rosaries, crucifixes, bottles of holy water and a good few charms and amulets. They bunched together, staring at the roof of the Tugos house, shaking with fear and thrill.

  16

  JOHN PRIDEAUX had recently become conscious of his skull and its bumps, which seemed to be getting closer to the surface. When writing up his notes he would lean his head on one turned fist and suddenly the thumb propping his brow ridge would skid, together with a fold of flesh, over an apparently increasing lump. The Neanderthal of the future. Perhaps this same bony ball, by some absurd series of flukes and chance, might one day be exhibited by a future Richard Leakey in silver shorts who would twirl it for the 3-D cameras and pronounce it the skull of ‘Mario’, someone who long ago crossed this wasteland looking for water, or love, or the fruit borne on plants once known as ‘trees’. In the meantime, never mind survival as a couple of skull plates; who cared about the archaeological future? On tropical mornings Prideaux thought it was enough simply to have lived beyond youth, when exclusive relationships were constantly in the air. These days nobody would ever want one with him, nor he with them. How the air cleared! How springy and untrammelled he probably felt, crossing this wasteland looking for whatever! (But how insistently the bones of his head were pushing up beneath the skinny tegument of scalp!)

  Only a few days ago he’d received a letter from his daughter Ruth, at university in far-off England. They exchanged news once a month or so when each tried to convey a lively fascination with what they were doing, Prideaux without paying too much attention to whatever effects his savage low moments might produce on her. ‘If you can imagine the Spanish Inquisition taking place in a Dunkin Donuts,’ he’d written soon after arriving, ‘you’ll have a faint idea of this country’s spiritual and cultural mise-en-scène. For its deadly and surreal law enforcement you need to be able to visualise the Khmer Rouge in Disneyland. The economic position might be summarised as that of a banana republic which imports its bananas. The whole thing’s encased in such beauty, such ruination, such brutality and affection and misery and zest as to stop the heart. The brain, though, goes wild.’

  Lately her replies were betraying concern barely disguised as loving exasperation. ‘What are you up to, Jaypee?’ and ‘You’ve been gone ages,’ and ‘If you knew what you were doing there you’d have done it by now.’ In her last she’d come clean. ‘Of course I’m worried. You’re my father, not some boy-adventurer seeing the world,’ this touching filiality swerving off in typically Ruth fashion into a denunciation of Max Bruch’s G minor Violin Concerto as ‘plagiaristic schlock’. ‘Whole passages cribbed from Beethoven, not just B’s own concerto but also the Benedictus of the Missa Solemnis, to say nothing of the Mendelssohn. It’s really ugghily sentimental and cringeworthy and it’s a set text!! I need your help with some rapierlike put-downs but you’re stuck a million miles away where I think it’s probably much more dangerous than you’re letting on.’ When he re-read this he found Ruth standing so vividly before him he at once began a letter calculated to calm both their fears. Fathers were not allowed to speak of uncertainty, still less of being lost. He spoke instead of the humour and warmth he met with constantly; of defiant high spirits; of sunsets over the city when, visibility permitting, one could look eastward past heavy bronze air and cognac clouds to mulberry-coloured mountains. Funny things, too. ‘My journalist friend I’ve mentioned before, the admirable Vic, calls this ‘The Land of the Inspired Coincidence’. We were driving through the tourist area called Ermita (not roo many hermits there nowadays) and he pointed out all the pubs and clubs and dubious dives with their entrances nailed up and notices saying ‘Closed By Order of Mayor Lim’. Good old Mayor Lim, is the instinctive reaction. Allow us to keep you in nails. (The impression one forms is of a purposeful and kindly gentleman twinkling away behind his spectacles, a good citizen through and through, a true civilian at last purging the Augean stables of sleaze.) Ah, says Vic, doing a bit of twinkling himself, this civilian of yours is actually an ex-policeman and until recently the Head of the NBI (the National Bureau of Investigation, the local FBI). Well, now, a couple of years ago there was this great scandal about the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes. All sorts of rumours were going around that the prizes were rigged, and since this was a national lottery the whole country was up in arms about it. So, late in 1991 the NBI was called in to do a thorough investigation. Lim arranged for the draw to be televised. Now everyone would be able to see for themselves there was no fix. A famously clean senator was appointed to draw the winning number. The nation held its breath. Five million pesos! In went the senator’s hand and out came the ticket. What an amazing thing! It belonged to Lim himself! The head of the NBI clapped an incredulous palm to his forehead, beaming with surprise and pleasure. It’s true, I’m an inveterate buyer of lottery tickets, I often buy whole booklets at once! But I never thought for a moment…! There were calls for him to return the money but he refused, saying why should he? Hadn’t everyone seen him win it honestly?

  ‘At which point Vic referred to the Land of the Inspired Coincidence. I love it, don’t you? He also said that a lot of these nailed-up clubs manage to buy their un-nailing after a week or two, and really this hasn’t anything to do with a putsch on vice but with a complicated and ancient struggle for control of real estate in Ermita and Malate. Who knows? Never mind the subtext – it’s the sheer spectacle which grips here.’

  This was true enough. Yet the energies this shadow-play released were having uneasy effects on Prideaux which slowly amassed. His dreams, already full of loss, were increasingly of wars fought in jungle green. Somet
imes in the morning, still dazed, he thought such things might not after all be entirely private but part of a contemporary disquiet, something to do with people being set more and more adrift. Maybe if one dispensed with absences and put down proper roots the sundry angers of living would earth themselves, would be grounded and bleed harmlessly away. But moving constantly about built up a static charge which declared itself in painful shocks at unexpected moments, in bluish flashes in the dark and maybe even wild acts of empty violence.

  Yet of what use yearning for a native soil if that, too, was vagrant? The harder one looked at Britain from afar the mistier it became, neither quite where it had been nor what it should be. Drifting, shallow, insecure. A culture lost to itself, no longer valid. All the same it lurked remorselessly, showing through alien landscapes as the hazy lineaments of a homeland. One couldn’t help staring. He had noticed how people often looked at each other like that, too: gazing hopefully into every new face as if to catch sight of a father’s ghost, a mother’s shade, the precious phantom of a first and only love.

  His daughter’s queries about what he was doing did little to help. What on earth had made him choose such an emotional subject? Why couldn’t he have selected something neutral, something noncommittal and linguistic, for example? Perhaps instead he should do a thesis on theses: on what made people choose the subjects they chose, driven to pick at a topic like a scab. In his last letter to her he had deliberately not recounted the rest of that conversation with Vic in the traffic-locked streets of Ermita. The afternoon’s hot news item was public outrage over that morning’s botched attempt to rescue a kidnap victim. She was the fifteen-year-old daughter of a wealthy Chinese mestizo family, being driven to school when the van she was in was held up by twenty armed men and she was abducted. It was six-thirty in the morning. An hour later she and four of the kidnappers were in the lead car of a five-vehicle convoy, a white Nissan Sentra, when they were in turn ambushed by plain clothes soldiers from the military’s ‘Hammerhead’ task force backed up by North CapCom police. There, right on EDSA and Quezon Avenue amid the massed commuters at one of Metro Manila’s biggest road junctions, they riddled the Sentra with bullets, killing everyone on board. Then the assorted lawmen dragged the mutilated bodies out and laid them in a row on the pavement, making no distinction between those of the kidnappers and the bloody corpse of their young victim in her school uniform. An immediate inquiry had been announced. So far nobody had yet come even close to apologising. Instead, excuses had been offered, such as that the assault team couldn’t have known the girl was in the car because it had heavily tinted windows. At lunchtime a senator had said he was planning to file a bill banning all smoked glass in cars. Another excuse officially given was that the Chinese-Filipino community were no longer cooperating with the police and military to help stop the frequent kidnappings for ransom.