Ghosts of Manila

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Her bedroom was above the room with the billiard table in it. The family apparently slept over on the other side of the octagon, or whatever it was. Although she knew the house to be quite small, its design and the way it was lived in made it seem palatial, full of inexplicable distances. She lay awake while one of those anarchic thoughts drifted up as from an inner conversation which had been taking place in her mind’s absence. Supposing Ben and my father had also been lovers? No, it was ridiculous, an idle idea which cost nothing because she’d never known her father and seemed not out of place in a country where anything was possible. Yet one did have to explain why the man was still so attached to the memory of a foreign diplomat whose driver he’d been for less than a year back in 1965. How kind could her father possibly have been to a mere driver who was then –what? twenty, twenty-one? Since coming to this country she had found his somewhat null parental figure taking on the genuine mysteriousness of a ghost. The land of his death was fleshing him out.

  At some point in the night she emerged from sleep like a diver surfacing, found herself beached in a room dappled by moonlight filtered through leaves and broken cloud. Not far off the sea was mulling things over with small sighs. A lizard rattled the glottal prelude to its familiar series of croaking brays. In the silence which followed she heard it echoed, far away and muffled as if beneath blankets, by inarticulate howls. Then a thudding silence fell again from which she finally relaxed back into sleep.

  In the morning she found the family breakfasting on fish, rice and bibingka, a flat and flabby round cake of rice flour and coconut.

  ‘Eat, eat,’ cried Ben brightly, in Jewish mother mode at the head of the table. ‘Try a bibingka. They’re imported.’

  ‘From?’

  ‘From the other side,’ he said in delight. ‘Freshly made this morning. An essential ingredient in a true provincial start to the day. You taste one. They don’t use baking powder and all those chemicals. They put tuba in instead, our palm toddy, which is full of natural yeasts.’

  After breakfast she found it was still only seven o’clock on a Sunday morning. During her early swim a memory returned to her. She found Ben on the terrace reading a folder, an open attaché case beside him.

  ‘I thought I heard a strange noise in the night. Like yowling.’

  He put down the folder. ‘I’m sorry you were woken. I hope you weren’t frightened? It was only Herman. He sometimes has fits at night. A specialist says they’re triggered by nightmares, but to tell you the truth we’ve rather lost confidence in specialists. We’ve listened to dozens of explanations in dozens of clinics. It was always an ordeal because he hates travelling. He really is only happy here.’ He looked through Ysabella with a little frown obviously intended for another place and other company. ‘If you make a digest of everything the experts say, if you roll together all their conflicting theories of cretinism and hyperthyroidism and Down’s syndrome and autism and epilepsy and schizophrenia and I don’t know what, we’re left with a diagnosis which is really no more useful than that of our psychic healers who say he was possessed by a devil in infancy. We have indeed been through exorcism with him.’ Again he glanced at her, this time very much in the present as if to catch an incredulous smile.

  ‘I’m sure anyone would have done the same,’ she said. ‘I know I would. When sufficiently at one’s wits’ end one will try anything.’

  ‘That was it,’ he agreed. ‘Herman was our firstborn. He was like that from the beginning. But I was poor in those days. My God, we were poor. We had nothing. Maybe… He’s twenty-eight, did you know that?’

  This seemed to have a significance she couldn’t grasp, one which went beyond pointing out the obvious fact that his son looked like a boy half his age. ‘It was years before Liezel and I had the confidence to try again. Imagine our joy when Danny was normal. And not just normal but bright. Woops, too, who may turn out even brighter than Danny.’

  Slowly, she worked it out. Nothing perverse, after all; nothing sinister. Just an ordinary – though in the circumstances extraordinary – kindness.

  ‘My father gave you money. To get treatment for him.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the senator gratefully, and picked up the folder.

  It was the first time she had caught a flash of vulnerability. She left him with it and went swimming again. She was losing track of time, as she had lost the horizon the previous night. She now remembered that someone at the air force base – Ben? Liezel? – had warned her they wouldn’t be returning until Monday and was that all right with her? Something about it being a government holiday or National Heroes’ Day or similar caper. One of those Thirdy-Worldy affairs. She had never had the sort of job which needed to take notice of such things. Now, why had she never learned the trick of clearing her eustachian tubes? There were all sorts of things she wanted to examine underwater but her ears hurt if she went more than a couple of feet below the surface. Maybe she would do a PADI course for divers on the quiet. It would be fun to wave a certificate under Hugh’s nose. This view of fish among corals was genuinely timeless. In archaeology one looked at fragments of the recent past and had to suppose almost everything. Here, one was surely seeing the identical sight of five million years ago. Such a perspective did strange things to the present. True, her father had been rich. Yet the impropriety of personal gifts of money from an ambassador to his driver was most peculiar. She lay looking wistfully through her mask at a mazy cloud of tiny blue fish hanging about a head of coral below her. They blazed in the water like fragments of congealed electricity. She didn’t want to know any more about her family. It was all too long ago and had no real connection with her. Just ghosts. What was one finally to suppose, then? That the underpaid, recently married provinciano Benigno Vicente hadn’t after all spent this majestic windfall on his damaged infant? Had instead used most of it to lay down the beginnings of his fortune, just as Sharon’s friend Crispa’s family had her silence-money? Turning misfortune to advantage? That the price was the hulk who now collected shells, vaguely supervised in what was described as a happy idyll in a private sanctuary?

  The day passed gently, interspersed with campfire cuisine. Ysabella dipped into a paperback, into the sea, into the edge of the tangled forest beyond the generator hut before being repulsed by thorns and fear of snakes. The evening meal was lit by flashes of silent lightning which intermittently revealed outlines of sea and land and clouds slightly to one side of where they had last been. She calculated that in London people would just be leaving midday offices under a sky whose exact weather she would never know but most likely grey, sifting down a penetrating moisture. She thought of Hugh with his earnest, Buddhist fancies and family title. He seemed to belong with England in a land of fable, a land of the past which she might one day (should the whimsy of her career persist) excavate like Ur or Silbury.

  That night, too, she was woken, but not by howling. This time it was a soft, stylised weeping sound, the boo-hoo of English nurseries, the hu-hu-bu of women in Filipino comics. For all its quietness it seemed close. Ysabella knew that whoever it was, it was none of her business. House guests, despite being told to treat the place as their own, enjoyed the luxury of being able to choose not to. But as the noise persisted and no sound of slippered feet and voices came to intervene she also knew she would never sleep for the contagion of this unknown distress. She clicked the light switch uselessly, remembered the generator, found the torch, opened her door as silently as she could. It came from downstairs, from the billiard room below. Without turning on the torch she glided halfway down the curving stairs and squatted. From between the ornate banisters she could see down into the room, which was lit by moonlight filtered through yet another layer of the trees which hemmed the rear of the house. The effect was an unearthly monochrome as of a chamber found on the bed of a forgotten sea, a cell for ever hidden from colour and sunlight. On the black baize of the table lay a large unmoving mass, face down, two paws clasped over the edge.

  Ysabella had imagi
ned that Herman was safely confined to his miniature beach house at night, which would have explained how distant his previous howling had sounded. It had somehow never occurred to her that he might have the run of the place after dark. Why not, of course. He was evidently a part of this family in ways she couldn’t guess. Still, she hadn’t thought it. As she watched with a voyeur’s fear of discovery and greed to know, she was invaded by the scene’s utter despair and felt her own eyes fill involuntarily. This was no child’s crying, for all its stylisation. Its very quietness showed how far removed it was from infantile complaint or demand. She didn’t believe this wordless statement of profound unhappiness was meant to be overheard. She assumed he had forgotten her temporary presence in the bedroom upstairs. An urge seized her to stand up, turn on the torch, go downstairs and put a consoling arm about those huge quaking shoulders, raise the moonface with its drool of snot from the baize, make soft verbal gestures to the top of his head. But she overcame it; a failure of heart when confronted by the impossibly complex. I am not my father, she said back in her room. Leave it be. How can a stranger intervene in misery like that, in an unknowable mind whose damage might make well-meaning itself damaging? She now thought that after all Herman had been saying something, repeating over and over again, each syllable a sob, his own nickname ‘Boyboy’. She covered her head with the pillow as an empty space within her echoed, but after a long spell of no-time the heat drove her back to the surface where all was silent once again.

  ‘I’m sorry to say we had a death last night,’ said Liezel to her after breakfast, as if to explain a meal which was subdued in comparison with the previous morning’s. A dreadful guilt of complicity froze Ysabella until her hostess went on: ‘Our old dog. You may have seen her when we arrived on Saturday? She was terribly old. But Woopsy’s a bit upset, you know how children are. I suppose we were all attached to her.’

  ‘What about poor Herman?’

  ‘I’m afraid Boyboy doesn’t notice things like that.’ She was back in her Imelda travelling outfit, except for the trainers. There was a glint of something unfathomable in her eyes and voice down there among sharp corals, dark holes and fish like chips of costume jewellery. As far as Ysabella was concerned the long weekend finished on that enigmatic note. Glancing back at Bantol as the boat took them away she was reduced to banal reflections on the small mysteries and major private griefs which haunt pleasure domes no less than parliaments. Yet the weekend itself was not quite over. The province’s hayseed Governor, who had returned in the gubernatorial van to fetch brother Ben and guest, carried on a conversation with the senator in rapid Tagalog so that her attention wandered, still haunted by the dark heap on the billiard table, though at one point she heard the phrase ‘Philippine Heritage Museum’. Woopsy sat in the back with an electronic Bricks Game which warbled and squeaked. She seemed wholly engrossed. Once in the air, her father turned to Ysabella and said:

  ‘My brother was telling me about the Museum’s plans to open a branch there in Magubat. About time, too.’

  ‘I’m afraid I know nothing about this province’s archaeology.’

  ‘It’s the coastal waters that are interesting. The main Spanish galleon route from Mexico passed around its tip. Just off Bantol itself, as a matter of fact. I’m certain all the reefs of that southern part are littered with wrecks. There must be a mass of stuff out there. The odd Chinese trader or pirate junk, too, one would imagine. But it’s the same old story. Such richness of heritage here and such poverty in the official agencies charged with its protection. Doy and I are doing our best to make sure Magubat gets onto the agenda before unscrupulous rogues start muscling in.’

  ‘That sounds a good idea,’ she said in the way that people say things who would rather not talk, especially not above twin engines. Then, thinking she wasn’t making enough effort towards a host who had been generous and nearly charming, added: ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise your interest in archaeology was so active. I was thinking of you more as a private collector. It’s good to know someone in your position cares about what happens to this country’s treasures. Sometimes in the Museum it’s like working near the mouth of a huge funnel. We can’t see it but we can feel the current as it sucks stuff in which disappears and then turns up again in auction houses in London and Paris and Rome and New York.’

  ‘I know. It’s happening everywhere. All over Indochina, especially Cambodia. Russia, too, and the former Russian republics. South America. It’s global rape. Global rape,’ he repeated as though it were a phrase he had already used in a speech. ‘And many of these countries are signatories to the 1970 UNESCO Convention. I know.’

  Ysabella allowed herself to be reassured by this. At least somebody knew. But later, having dumped her overnight bag and showered in the oil-scented Roxas apartment she remembered his own collection in the beach house on Bantol. There had been nothing among his ‘little things picked up here and there’ later than the Fifteenth century, nothing which would have been out of place in a Ming or even Sung Dynasty trading junk. Or, for that matter, a pre-Colonial burial site. She wondered how he’d come by them. One of the oddities of that UNESCO Convention was how few of the signatory countries had ever asked the US – the major art-importing country – to impose an import ban. Why mightn’t they? Then she thought about who would be responsible for making the request for such a ban. This left her naively blazing with a sudden conviction that nothing in this country was ever quite free of stain.

  18

  FOR A VARIETY of reasons, a few of them as purely technical as bad phones, communication between branches of the police force was often haphazard, which was why most officers of any rank bought several newspapers daily. It was one way of keeping up with the crime scene, and by no means the least reliable. Newspapers have to be read, however; and when Rio Dingca picked up a copy of the National Chronicle’s evening edition he merely glanced at the headline ‘Queen of Shabu Nabbed’ and thought ‘Which one?’ before folding and stuffing it up behind the jeep’s visor. He tugged pistol and holster from his waistband, checked the load, cocked it and put the safety on before laying it within easy reach in its customary place by the gearshift. Only then did he start the engine and swing the unplated vehicle out of Station 14’s compound and into rush hour.

  The long drag south. Smoke boiled at traffic lights as the queue panted like a gored bull, collecting strength for its charge towards the next red. As he waited he remembered the newspaper and took it down, but only had time to register that the lead article was one of Vic Agusan’s. Dingca had never met the journalist but he had read dozens of the man’s pieces and rated him as about the best; definitely above the level of the pack who clearly felt they had carte blanche to write any sort of lies and slander about the police. Neither did he launch egotistical crusades in his column to have police arrested on the spot for driving vehicles without number plates, complete with homilies about how lawlessness began in small things and the men in uniform needed to learn at the outset that they themselves were not above the law, yakety-yak. The grapevine had it that Agusan was okay, that he’d been blooded, that his sympathies were firmly with the old INP cops. He certainly seemed to have few good things to say about the military in police clothing who were now calling most of the shots. Then the bull gave another snort and wearily charged again for the lights a few hundred yards ahead and Dingca had to tuck the paper away.

  It was dusk when he reached San Pedro, dark by the time he let himself through the creepered palisades of wrought iron which made of the house an airy safe. Divina was doing her piano practice on the cigarette-scorched Baldwin he’d picked up from a military neighbour who had liberated it from an officers’ mess. Eunice was in her room; Teresita was cooking. Thank God for the sanity of family life. He showered, changed into shorts and slippers, found a beer in the fridge and kissed the back of Sita’s neck.

  ‘Eunice wants to be a dentist.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I just thought you ought to know. It’s
not going to be cheap, Rio. And it takes years and years. Tuition fees, equipment. Clothes, accommodation.’ Sita worked in the local Department of Health offices. Her salary was barely enough to keep them in food each month. Nevertheless she was glad of the work even though it still bothered her to come back to an empty house in the late afternoon. In her home province there was always someone around. For much of the day here one could find entire blocks of nothing but empty homes, each with its patrolling dog. It didn’t feel right. Sometimes in the office she would find herself thinking of this house, locked up by day, its waxed floors silent except for the occasional clicking of Butch’s nails as he wandered into the kitchen for a drink of water, the girls’ rooms empty with the white grins of movie pinups above the bed, the lounge walls gleaming dully with Rio’s laminated citations. And now Eunice would be going away for months at a stretch. Well, it was going to happen sooner or later.

  ‘I thought she wanted to be a teacher?’

  ‘Oh Dad, that was years ago.’ Eunice had come up behind her father. ‘Anyway, you probably wanted to be a fireman once. Most boys do.’

  ‘Yes, but a dentist.’

  ‘The money’s terrific.’

  ‘When you’ve qualified.’

  ‘Of course when you’ve qualified.’

  ‘But doesn’t it take six years?’

  ‘There’s lots to learn, Dad. But after that…’

  ‘Go on?’

  ‘Er, well, I’ll be able to afford to pay you back. Easily.’

  ‘Great. And just when you’ve finished getting me sprung from a bankrupt’s cell, up will pop Divina wanting to be a brain surgeon and back I’ll go.’

  ‘You do exaggerate, Dad. What’s for supper?’