Ghosts of Manila

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘Nothing to say that isn’t lame,’ Prideaux said. ‘I mean, all those witnesses. Automatic weapons right there in public.’

  ‘Surely you’ve got the message by now, John?’ There was shortness, even impatience in Vic’s voice. ‘We’re dealing with airhead boys brought up on a diet of Rambo films who’re given lethal firepower and official protection. They know that no matter what they do, however many people they kill, they’ll disappear safely behind a smokescreen of enquiries. A month later it’s all forgotten because something worse has happened. A year afterwards the same people turn up again, but now they’re chiefs of police in the provinces. Give you a much better example. There was a great series of pictures in the Inquirer eighteen months ago of a stakeout at the Civil Aeronautics Administration compound in Las Piñas. They showed a tricycle driver walking out of a garage with his hands up and being shot to death by police in front of a crowd of literally hundreds of spectators. You’d be pushed to imagine a clearer case of murder, but since then nothing. Zippo. A case hasn’t even been filed before the regional trial court. A strange oversight, you may be thinking, until you dig around and listen to the gossip which explains all. Rumour says it was an episode in a protracted war between two rival police gangs involved in running drugs. In any case the victim’s family sort of lost interest in pursuing the matter after what they called a “top local official” had a word with them. Two words, really: Money and Threat. Stuff someone’s mouth with sufficient money and you can’t hear a word they say, have you noticed? So, no case.’

  ‘But surely you don’t need an aggrieved party to bring a private prosecution? From what you say it was a cold-blooded act committed in front of witnesses including a photographer who has it all on film.’

  ‘Now you’re getting the message.’

  It was the child sitting strangled in the burnt-out garage all over again: injustice so outrageous that something had to happen. Yet nothing did. People said, well, there you go, just as the Marines had said There it is. Who was going to risk certain death by bringing charges? But when the social contract was so flagrantly and publicly torn up by a country’s authorities, what was it that made people go on perversely trying to keep their side of the bargain? Why didn’t everyone break out in an orgy of killing and raping and looting? Father Herrera might come up with some absurd hypothesis about the innate good in people trying to live intelligently, he supposed. Or there again maybe the species was bright enough to perceive that its own best interests lay in order: that brigandage and piracy were dandy for the odd individual but not so good if one wanted to bring up children and take real pleasure in the rite of family shopping.

  This only plunged Prideaux into a mess of private unclarity, like someone gazing into a well and seeing his own image shattered and dancing in the hail of grit he himself has dislodged. For he, too, had wanted and begot a family but, it turned out, with a secret reservation. This was that the hidden buccaneer in him might one day wake and spy the moment like a particular blue day with a scuddy wind and seize it, to vanish over the horizon full of yearnings for action and comradeship and lands of awesome difference. And that reservation, concealed equally from Jessie and himself, had at last found him out. The blue day had never quite dawned; but the flawed commitment, for so long disguised as a gentlemanly tentativeness, had at last driven Jessie out of the house and out of his life, taking with her their daughter Ruth who, Prideaux believed, was the only person he had ever truly loved. Despite their closeness and the letters they wrote each other he sometimes caught himself grieving for Ruth as if she were dead instead of reading Music at Durham University.

  Looking into the well, he could acknowledge that his own wobbly outline was a consistent and accurate reflection. That final escape route, the longing for his day, was all of a piece with the ghost of inconclusiveness which had haunted his better films and given them their distinctive tone. Even after more than twenty years he still occasionally yearned to have the Bangkok film shown on television, now that the public had at last caught up with certain social realities. He no longer imagined he could thereby still right a wrong, nor even (how could he have been so sentimental?) memorialise a dead child. Quite simply, he now thought it his best work, the most characteristic, the true John Prideaux lit hectically by flickers of fear and loathing. It didn’t pretend to fulfil the rituals of a documentary. There was no balanced voice in the middle, no expert on international law, no spokesman from the Thai Government, no promise of retribution, no jail door clanging shut. It was just a slash of light thrown suddenly across a dark place in a dark time. He saw its very inconclusiveness as its chief merit instead of its main drawback as claimed at the time by the timid and – yes – the jealous. Prideaux disliked the self these reflections made but knew it to be truthful. Somewhere his vanity lay unappeased, as did his regret. He was sad that he had failed as a father and a husband just as he lamented that he had failed as a potential comrade in an adventure from which he had always been absent. Now Vietnam was history and the times had turned and here he was in Manila doing a self-imposed mid-life crisis degree course which an unwelcome insight was making him question as a possibly pathetic attempt to keep Ruth company or shed unsheddable years. Still, no more relationships. That at least. The relief really did clear the air.

  All the same, it was not easy to be springy and untrammelled while delving beneath the surface of this city. It slid past like the Pasig River itself, pocked and dimpled by gases released constantly from below, mantled by oil and scum and the occasional great blossom torn with swags of greenery from some upland bank. In no sense was Manila lush as Bangkok had been in the old days with its network of busy klongs full of boats bearing brilliant heaps of vegetables and fruit, the temples’ golden stupas lying shattered in the khaki water as they passed. Manila was not like that; had never been like that, to judge from the sepia photographs of Spanish colonial days. Then Intramuros, looking gloomier and crueller than ever, had frowned out across a mercantile scene of moored barges and schooners with Conradian figures on their decks, sitting on coils of rope puffing at pipes. It was unmistakably the East, but an East long moulded by European designs. One could well believe the country’s interior concealed in its creeks and jungles all manner of head-hunting tribes and despotic little sultanates. But sultans, head hunters and jungles alike were not so much exotic as anomalous, waiting only for the bullet, the Bible or the axe. Here were no tigers, no elephants, few monkey species. There was no elaborate classical music, nor sophisticated native cuisine unspoilt by foreign influence. There was no monarchy, so there was no court full of monstrous splendour and antique protocol. There was no body of classical literature stretching back to the Eighth century or even to the Eighteenth.

  The country’s true claim to the exotic, he had decided, lay in its public and political life, and in this it was supreme. It was high baroque in its magnificent daring. It glittered in its gamy inventiveness. And if after a while it seemed a trifle repetitious, then what pageantry didn’t? The whole point about traditions and customs was that they were time-honoured and hence grandly predictable. There was something gripping about seeing a system in operation which he had only ever read about, half comprehendingly, in school history books. ‘The oligarchy’, ‘the peasantry’, ‘despotism’, ‘feudal overlords’, ‘the rule of the knout’, ‘private armies’, ‘mediaeval superstitions’ – here they all were, in daily action, as in a museum-land preserved as a living exhibition to remind other nations soberingly of their own pasts, or to warn them of their futures.

  Mostly, though, it was the present which pressed intimately against Prideaux like an anonymous someone in a crowd whose intentions, whether erotic or larcenous, are never made clear, nor even their identity. He received a phone call from San Clemente’s other priest, Father Bernabe, requesting audience, practically insisting Prideaux should see him. Why ever not? he thought, and gave his address. Fr. Bernabe was prompt; a short, dainty man in T-shirt and dove slacks who glanced incu
riously around the rented room before extending his hand and introducing himself while saying it was very kind, very kind at such short notice. ‘I didn’t want you to get the wrong impression the other day.’

  ‘From Father Herrera, you mean?’

  ‘He’s inclined to shock people and I thought that you, with all your newspaper connections he mentioned, might relay a certain radical note that wouldn’t be fully justified or fair.’

  He’s scared, Prideaux thought. He’s scared in case I attract attention from some military hard cases with an obsession about counter-insurgency. Due Thanh Vinh. We’ve been here before, interviewing a nervous Catholic priest who fears that anything he says, even quotations from the Bible, will be ruthlessly misconstrued by each faction. He’s here for damage limitation, to sweep up after a risqué acolyte has shot his mouth off.

  ‘He talked about the Jews,’ Prideaux remembered. ‘And people having themselves crucified in Holy Week. And girls changing their religion with their men. Oh, and Islam and Mindanao.’

  ‘I didn’t know he had views on that?’ Father Bernabe went over to the window where his fingernails flashed in the sun with lacquer, like those of many police and army officials. Mindanao was the political hot potato.

  ‘He struck me as not being at a loss for views on anything much. A man of passion and intelligence, I thought. And appetite.’

  ‘Look,’ said Bernabe, ‘I wanted you to know that Father Herrera is a wonderful man. Passion and intelligence, certainly. But he’s also a remarkable priest in his unconventional way. Even if I say all the Masses in our large parish there are many people who go to him and not to me for advice. Spiritual or secular, it’s all the same. They get a man completely familiar with the kind of lives our squatters have to lead. But, and this is the point,’ Bernabe accepted a glass of pineapple juice, ‘he is – and I know he’d forgive me for saying this – he’s a man in crisis. His experiences here in Manila have been very hard, very disillusioning for a young man. He’s only twenty-eight, you know, and immensely strong in his way. But no-one can go on for ever without learning to bend a little, to sway before the wind, as I’m sure you’ve discovered for yourself. What should we call it? The art of maturity? He told me you were rather older than he’d expected.’

  Given the apparent aimlessness of my presence here, Prideaux filled in savagely. Given a cub reporter’s questions and receding hair.

  ‘He’s a country man, a provincial,’ Bernabe went on. ‘He comes from Nueva Ecija, which is New People’s Army territory. Maybe he has more of a country man’s thinking patterns. A touch simplistic, shall we say? A little too straightforward over issues for a city as sophisticated and political as this. That’s no criticism, by the way. It’s an attempt to identify his difference, to see how it helps him and how it might hinder him.’

  It was odd hearing a priest dissect another with a care and in a tone which was surely affectionate, yet all done for a complete stranger.

  ‘I don’t really feel you’re a stranger,’ Bernabe said uncannily, though perhaps it hadn’t been difficult to imagine his thoughts. ‘Father Herrera told me about your interest in the Filipino character, your search for breaking points. Something like that. It’s very difficult to be accurate when making generalisations about a race or a nation or a culture, isn’t it? Many people – but not anthropologists, I assume – think it’s a complete waste of time, a red herring at best, if not downright offensive. Still, like it or not, different countries do have different flavours, different systems. Preferred crimes, one might say. The Philippines is not like the States, nor like Spain, nor like China. Nor is it like anywhere else. What can a mere priest usefully say about his own country, though?

  ‘I’ll try and tell you what I think,’ he went on without offering any hiatus for a little speculative exchange. ‘God gave all races the same range of virtues and vices, but in different proportions. Consequently, some nations appear more dignified than others, some lazier. Some are warmer and more spontaneous, others reserved and a little ungiving. Still others have a tendency to be coldly efficient about the science of life but strangely ignorant of the art of living…’

  Prideaux watched the fingertips twinkle in the sunlight at the window and braced himself for yet another sermon. Maybe this little lacquered man with the milk chocolate sneakers would throw in his tithe about the darkness of the Spanish soul, of a culture half in love with painful death.

  ‘We Filipinos are warm, all right,’ he was saying, ‘but maybe sometimes it doesn’t go very far. It’s in this respect that poor Father Herrera’s faith has been severely tested. I’ll give you an example. He had a project to install hand pumps for the people over in one of our barrios. He solicited funds from every possible source so they wouldn’t have to fetch water from distant faucets and drink from unclean containers and contaminated supplies. Dysentery’s a constant problem here, especially for infants. He even used his own savings for this – against my advice, I should add. That’s typical Herrera: the good Filipino, principled and selfless. So the pumps are bought and he has them installed bayanihan. You know, that’s our word for neighbourliness. Everybody helps dig the hole and lay the cement surround. The people say how grateful they are. At last they have clean water for their children, for washing up and cooking. “Fine,” says Father Herrera. “In return, your only responsibility is for simple maintenance and repair. Grease the pumps every so often, replace the washers when they’re worn so you don’t score the stainless sleeve inside.” “Well, of course,” everyone says.’

  Anthropologists were after all little more than academic journalists, Prideaux was thinking. Like reporters, they only ever heard opinions. They had numberless conversations with people they seldom wanted to talk to (but whom would they have preferred?) and had to invent a plausible summation. Both the stories and glosses were rigged so as to make sense, as though to conceal an underlying lack of narrative too fearful to be allowed. It was life as documentary. He wondered sadly if Jessie had felt that, sitting beside him on the bed or propped against the cooker in the kitchen, listening to his truthfully meant account of an inner life whose desperately searched nooks failed one by one to disclose her own presence. Their marriage had at last been revealed as containing yet another of John Prideaux’s absences.

  ‘Eight months later, of course, two of the pumps are broken. They’ve never been greased at all. The sleeve of one is cracked and sucks air and needs welding. “Who broke it?” Father Herrera asks. Everybody disappears, like cockroaches when you turn on the light. Without a murmur they go back to drinking the same old filthy water as before, as if it’s all the same to them, as though all the benefits of progress can be surrendered at any time without cost or regret. Finally some kind soul with a bit of money and effort to spare has the pumps unscrewed and mended. The next day everyone’s back again without a blush, pumping water merrily and complaining about how long it took to repair them. “They’re really very grateful. They’re just shy,” we have to explain to foreigners like yourself who until then hadn’t thought of shyness as a Filipino characteristic.

  ‘That’s only one small example, naturally. Both Father Herrera and I have seen similar things a hundred times. They’re very disillusioning to a youngster with faith in people’s essential goodness. Somewhere there’s a flaw, a failure in our national character. We’re quick enough to stick our hands out with every assurance of gratitude and good faith, which I still believe are truly meant at the time, as well as to sound off about our wonderful tradition of bayanihan as if nobody else on earth had ever helped his neighbour. But the smile soon fades. The modest request that each should contribute a few cents to change a pump washer so everyone can drink good water again is turned down flat. “Walang bakal”, they say. “Wala kong pera.” “No money.” Yet they won’t think twice before spending twelve pesos on a bottle of rum or even a hundred and eighty for a crate of beer, never mind that their children want clean water and rice.’

  ‘Unhappy that I
am, I cannot heave my heart into my mouth’, he remembered quoting to Jessie, not from pompousness or to dignify a bitter fact with borrowed finery, but because that was exactly how it felt. His heart was not there when he needed to summon it. Professional absentee, it had gone into hiding, leaving him with nothing but an Arts education to fall back on. Now and then he thought it genuinely might be that television had glared too long and too brightly into their respective careers. He’d been a star, there was no doubt. But with his disdain for the mouths sucking in meals and smoke while expelling decisions mixed with expletives, he was on the wane long before he realised it, certainly before Jessie needed to say admiring things about John Prideaux’s films which suddenly had a defensive ring to them. ‘Absolutely, Jess,’ they’d nod. ‘One of the greats. No question. We’d none of us be doing our sort of stuff now had he not shown us the way.’ And there it was: ‘had’/‘shown’. Past tense. By their tenses shall ye know them. The Moloch of the media prepares to consume its favourite son. ‘You couldn’t ask for better credentials, Jess, having been John Prideaux’s chief research assistant.’ And the day soon came when their pay cheques matched, then hers drew ahead, until finally it was she who handled his tax affairs, paid the mortgage, arranged for builders and finally proposed moving to a house she bought. The times did not permit men to feel emasculated, but the familiar sense of missing something took him by the chest and squeezed roguishly, ‘It’s me again!’ And, as for the first time in his career he was reduced to mail-watching, it was.