Ghosts of Manila

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  A boy with a sack on his head bumped Prideaux from behind, jolting him to one side and out of the clutches of the dream into which he had fallen. He became aware of pairs of eyes watching him from behind the chicken wire covering the little storefronts, peering out between the dangling strips of sachets containing detergent powder, shampoo and toothpaste. Dim hands covered shadowy mouths. Soft giggles leaked out. He turned and tried to retrace his steps, haunted by the vision of the scarecrow creature standing as though on a skyline, so powerfully had it erased the shantytown setting. Just at the instant when Fr. Herrera himself turned out of a doorway and right into his path Prideaux thought he recognised the gesture The Rotting Man had made. It was an infantryman’s arm signal: Close Up or Follow Me, he couldn’t quite remember.

  ‘Ah,’ Fr. Herrera greeted him. ‘Yes, they said there was a foreigner here today. I knew it was you from the description. Came up with the Press, didn’t you? The vampires of San Clemente exercising their fascination.’

  ‘Never mind that. I’ve just seen the most extraordinary person.’ Prideaux described the figure which had stood and stared at him, it seemed from nowhere earthly.

  ‘Oh, him,’ said the priest. ‘Sounds like you saw poor Melchior.’

  ‘Who is he? How on earth did he get like that?’

  But Fr. Herrera’s mood today was unaccommodating, as if his mind were on other things and was not to be deflected. ‘Who is anyone?’ he asked unhelpfully. ‘How did any of us get like this? He looks like that because he’s sick. Dying, no doubt. He lives rough up there in the cemeteries because he’s on the run. It’s his choice. He won’t let anyone help him.’

  ‘Is he mad?’

  ‘Mad? Not a bit. Very interesting guy, you ought to meet him. Used to be in the military down south. I’m sure he could help with your researches into stress. He, too, is atoning. He, too, yearns for clean hands.’

  ‘The man I saw was probably yearning for any hands at all.’

  ‘The hardest thing to accept,’ said Fr. Herrera, ignoring him, ‘is the absence of the Day of Judgement.’

  Prideaux now thought the priest himself was exhibiting signs of stress. The expansive debater of their lunch together seemed to have been replaced by someone more driven, more oracular, as though he were preoccupied with putting together a definitive sermon which had to be delivered shortly and might make or break his career. Before Prideaux could explain that he must be getting back to Vic, and ask directions, Fr. Herrera was off again.

  ‘Only yesterday somebody told me that Judgement Day was an absurd and cruel piece of mythology. Wrong! It’s not absurd at all. People have to believe what they do has consequences, whether roasting for ever in hell or condemned to suffer a thousand more lifetimes locked into the cycle of grasping and loss which Buddhism calls the samsara of this earthly life.’

  Passers-by were stopping to listen. Prideaux was gripped by an old, familiar rage at yet again finding himself the object of an impromptu public lecture. Was there something about his face? Some quality of laxity or undecidedness which made people feel obliged to hector him back onto the solid ground of moral debate?

  ‘Even in a barrio like this,’ Herrera indicated his parishioners, ‘where you’d expect to find belief less spoiled by sophisticated cynicism, I don’t find much apprehensiveness about eventually being brought to book. This has a real consequence. I don’t think it makes us behave worse. As I keep saying, I tell these people they’re perfectly free to murder and cheat and steal if they like, but not many take me up on my offer. No, the real consequence is we become depressed and demoralised. Each day we get wind of appalling crimes, not just in this country but all over the world. Slaughters, starvings, rapes, beatings, tortures, bombings. Huge sums of money pilfered which could have saved people’s lives. Even huger sums spent on hateful and ingenious weapons. Utterly ruthless men in this or that uniform ordering whole villages to be gassed or starved out as part of some private political strategy. And we look on impotently, knowing that virtually none of them will ever be made to account for it here on earth, let alone in heaven. The suspicion gradually grows…’

  (It does indeed, Prideaux told himself)

  ‘… that the Courts of God are also full of hoodlums in robes. Why not? Doesn’t the allegedly Loving Father himself stand by as his innocent children are ground up like fish meal? A few years will pass and memory will shift, and the men who did the grinding will have changed into politicians’ suits and be addressing the UN to much applause. Statesmen now. And those who ran drug cartels will have children who know very little about how the family acquired its fortune, and their children will know nothing. They’ll be at private schools and colleges in the States and Europe. By then they’ll be old money. Time, the great launderer. Why blame them? According to Horace, though innocent, they must expiate their fathers’ sins; but the modern world doesn’t work like that. The golden word ‘amnesty’ is spoken and tainted money becomes instantly clean. Torturers go free. The hunt for absconding dictators is called off.

  ‘So if I lament the loss of people’s faith – and I do,’ said Fr. Herrera, ‘I lament the loss of Judgement Day even more. If you lose your faith in all forms of accountability, whether here or after death, the heart goes out of you. The truly good couldn’t care less about being rewarded because living well is the best revenge, but they wouldn’t mind seeing the truly bad paid back. Why? Not for their own self-righteous pleasure, but because if they aren’t the word ‘justice’ loses all meaning and we may as well all go back to the jungle and stop pretending to be civilised creatures with souls.’

  Most of the crowd which had gathered to listen to their priest’s satanic advocacy would surely have missed most of it, Prideaux thought, for his English made no concessions. The speech was aimed unequivocally at him, the foreigner in their midst (but why, though?). However, its general tenor – apparently an impassioned plea for justice – was applauded on all sides. There was even the odd fervent ‘Amen!’ and ‘Siya nawa!’, for all that their priest’s brand of liberation theology sounded radical to the point where Prideaux almost expected to catch a sudden stench of brimstone or see troops burst from the shanties and arrest him. He quite wished they would; it would save him having to listen to any more diatribes. He began to move sheepishly away, a sidling which finally took him to the edge of the little throng undetected, as he thought. He was wrong.

  ‘Think about justice, John!’ the priest called after him. ‘You’ll see it’s the only consideration. Think about justice before you write your dissertation on stress. Or was it our distress? I can’t remember now.’

  He found he had only to turn a single corner to glimpse the lone palm’s crown among the rooftops. From there it was a short walk down to where, with relief, he could see Vic Agusan standing near the rickety table in conversation with a tough-looking middleaged man in a vaguely authoritarian pair of fawn slacks.

  As they walked back to the Hersheymobile Prideaux said, ‘I got trapped by a rogue priest and bawled out in public. Half this barrio now thinks I’m a criminal.’

  ‘That’s unusual,’ said Vic, who was thinking about his new alliance with Inspector Dingca.

  ‘Weird. He was the one I gave lunch to some weeks ago. I may have told you. But even weirder, I saw this really extraordinary guy, all lumps and wounds. Just rotting where he stood. Gave me this crazy wave.’

  ‘More denizens of squattertown.’ Vic was clearly preoccupied.

  ‘Who was that you were talking with just now?’

  ‘That,’ said Vic, ‘was Inspector Dingca, a colleague of your friend and mine, Sergeant Cruz. You remember Sergeant Cruz? Well, they’re both on at Station 14 and this is in their patch.’ As they passed the guard standing by the barrier at the entrance to the cemetery he gave the man some coins. ‘Old Hershey’s still there, see? Even kept its hubcaps. You bothered? Priests and derelicts ganging up on you and now here’s a mean-looking bastard who’s a colleague of the man we filmed tipping bodies o
ut of barrels? That makes you some sort of accessory. Getting a bit near the edge for an academic anthro?’

  ‘It’s not understanding that’s the hard part.’

  ‘So relax. Dingca’s okay. He and I may have a deal going.’

  ‘About Cruz?’

  ‘He doesn’t know I’m interested in Cruz. Forget Cruz. He’s unfinished business. He’ll keep… How about that buffoon, then, what’s his name? Tugos. The vampire man who drove into the wall before tossing his cookies? There’s your ghost story. What a waste of time! In three days San Clem’ll be back off the map and the story’ll be dead. A veteran reporter speaks.’

  Spoke, and could hardly have been more mistaken. Three days later it was not the story which was dead but Eddie Tugos.

  20

  IN THE PIT of her own making Sharon had dug on for many months, for what seemed a lifetime, the shadow of San Agostin church falling across the canvas awning overhead. So often had she straightened up to blink the sweat from her eyes and stretch her neck muscles that she could now tell the time accurately by this shadow. Working inside a sundial while digging backwards through time afforded ample opportunity to relect on her own mortal progress, especially since late one afternoon she had decided there was no point in digging down further. She had reached the end. Below her feet lay nothing but alluvial gravel which the Pasig had deposited in one of its prehistoric meanderings. Beneath that was the vast compacted history of a planet without people.

  The next day she had been waylaid in her office by a vacationing American and his family who had wanted a list of fieldwork projects in which his children might participate unpaid for a couple of weeks. Why? she had asked. Once all the pieties about broadening young minds had been rehearsed what remained, though largely unexpressed, was the answer to her question: getting ahead. It was all about school projects and grades and CVs. They were amazed to find a fellow-American actually working in this department (looking about them at the dust and brown paint). Only a visiting professor, Sharon had told them. ‘Then you’ll understand,’ they said with relief. ‘We’ve not been in the country long, but they do things sort of differently here, don’t they? Relaxed, right? For people like us with only a summer vacation to spare…’

  Later, she had thought about the effects of living abroad with a settled lover and a shared home. At some point in the last six years, though she couldn’t have said exactly when, she had stopped thinking of Manila as temporary, of her presence there as a stay which could be cut short at whim for a return to the ‘real’ world. This must have coincided with the dilution or actual shedding of certain aspects of what it meant to be American. What she had lost was all too obvious to her once the ambitious parents and their two porky adolescents had filed out of the room clutching a sheet of her departmental writing paper (‘Dear Bernie, This is to introduce Mr & Mrs’.) What had gone was all sense of a career. If coming to Manila had once been a shrewd move, staying on had been dumb. Fieldwork was essential; experience abroad looked even better. But not indefinitely. To have stayed abroad implied a paradox: fieldwork that was both obsessive and academically unserious.

  From time to time she flew back to California to see her parents, stayed a few weeks, became restless after an initial three days spent in a whirl of pleasure visiting friends, revelling in half-forgotten tastes, marvelling at how clean and easy everything was. On a couple of occasions Crispa had come too, but they had not been wholly successful. To spare her Orthodox father’s sensibilities they had had separate rooms and behaved with the ghastly decorum of pals. Sharon had also been obscurely ashamed that her home town was not on the fabled coast but forty miles inland on a road which ran up the valley of the Santa Clara river, heading for the Mojave Desert. There again, the area whose principal towns were Ravenna and Acton was close enough to San Fernando to make an outsider wonder whether it wouldn’t have been better simply to have moved down into Los Angeles proper or out of the region entirely. L.A.’s proximity, with its huge Filipino population, had made Crispa uneasy. She hadn’t wanted to be taken for a misplaced member of that community, as an economic refugee, as yet another scrambling Asian in the grip of The Dream. She was, in fact, one of that probably large (but seemingly tiny) number of her compatriots who didn’t want to emigrate, not even to the States; who were never less than courteously impressed by the deal offered but who remained unenticed.

  So there they were, Sharon supposed: two people who according to conventional wisdom had blown their respective career chances. She by a fatal flaw in her national character had turned down ambition and was foreseeably doomed to remain a visiting professor (some visit!) on a salary ludicrous by American standards and only made livable by the supplement she received from her university in California. Likewise Crispa had not availed herself of the opportunity offered by Sharon’s nationality. This single factor had probably done more than anything else to cement their friendship by neutralising any corrosive suspicion of ulterior motives. In any case there was a price to be paid for all this wilful behaviour. Do it. Be it. Go for it. These were the mottoes for living, by disobeying which Sharon knew herself to be no longer as American as she had been. They were not false, precisely, nor even discredited; simply irrelevant. They presupposed a curious creature, a unique individual never to be satisfied by anything short of a determined act of self-sculpture, hacking itself free of an amorphous block of common clay until it stood perfect and realised and a little breathless with success. If this notion underwrote a Western idealism, then maybe Sharon was becoming Eastern. She knew too much about instability and contingency to believe any longer in personal destinies manifest from the egg. To hell with genes. Nothing but compromise and the awareness of compromise made anybody anything. All else was role playing, the futile trying on of masks.

  Now as regards role playing: what was this Ysabella Bastiaan person up to? What image was this temporary assistant of hers hacking her way towards? Manila was changing her, too. A certain haughtiness always would remain but whole lumps of affectation had fallen away from her. To take a single example, she no longer bothered to remove the labels from the clothes she bought. ‘What’s the point?’ she’d said, returning from a shopping trip down Rizal Avenue with stonewashed Levis and Lacoste sports shirts for herself and a Slazenger basketball for some street kids living behind her block on Roxas. ‘They’re all fake anyway, the whole lot. It’s a much better idea. Manila’s full of better ideas. Nobody I know would be seen dead with anything genuinely by Pierre Cardin or Nina Ricci, so strutting around with the bogus article’s actually quite chic as well as being liberating. Who cares? Down in Santa Cruz you can buy great rolls of jeans labels, have you seen? All the brands, brilliant imitations. They look absolutely genuine to me. I presume the rag trade buys them in bulk and sews them on their own stuff. Oh, and those wonderful hangdog men flashing counterfeit Rolexes at you. Everyone assumes it’s a pathetic yearning on the part of poor folk dazzled by the all-important tokens of successful living. Just at the moment I’m taking it as more than fifty percent deliberate mockery. It’s fabulous.’

  Well, perhaps Ysabella hadn’t changed that much. But in the intervals between shopping sprees and often during work her face could be glimpsed wearing the thoughtful expression of somebody forced to do serious stocktaking. ‘A place like this makes you re-think home,’ she said once. And it did, of course. Not only the private angle for both of them (foreign lover, assassinated father) but for Sharon especially there was also the business of being American in an ex-American protectorate, ex-colony by any other name. Impossible to see in action an entire administrative system – Flag, Constitution, Senate, Congress, judiciary, everything down to the lowest levels of grade school – without being made conscious of its model. Equally impossible to see the instances in which that model had been travestied without wondering if the original hadn’t itself become something of a travesty even in the United States. What the Founding Fathers would have thought of plea-bargaining was one thing; but would
they really have maintained that a people’s freedom still lay in the right to fill their houses with high-powered firearms, a citizens’ militia bearing Saturday night specials? And notions of democracy itself, supposedly the United States’ most valuable export, had surely lost something at home when mass votes were regularly swayed by the advertising muscle of commercial and other interests. When transplanted to a former colony they lost a good deal more when citizens were as free as air to vote for the candidate who handed out the most cash from the back of a jeep and who had the most terrifying goons outside the polling booth. There was nothing exclusively Filipino in this democracy. It was merely a faithful reproduction, on a national scale, of the version once purveyed by Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party’s own organisation in distant Manhattan.

  Sharon supposed the final sign of her shedding crude aspects of her cradle nationality was that the instinct with which she had once risen to defend it had gone, transferred to a weary combativeness when faced with the grosser Western misreadings of the East. Had she herself once shared them? She presumed she must have, just as Ysabella still did: that amused, urbane way of making parallels, often beginning with the phrase ‘What this place is, is –’ and going on after thought, ‘The Weimar Republic! That’s it! Bit far-fetched, but you know what I mean. Wild moral laxity hand-in-hand with economic instability and political decadence. Partying on the rim of a volcano.’ (Always that damned volcano.) These days this struck Sharon as the quintessential outsider’s view; an exploiter’s view, above all, eyes gleefully open for the main chance with zero accountability. From inside the society, though, her own view was one of codes of behaviour still surprisingly traditional, still demanding, even relentless, but which had a habit of effacing themselves when they brushed up against Western mores. A meekness, a passivity, a declining to confront, a withdrawal. She liked this now. It had come to seem like a sign of strength; but she was still perfectly American enough to know how it struck the foreigners themselves. For many of them the Philippines was simply a place where people from the developed nations came to empty out their seminal vesicles, much as their governments looked at poor countries generally as good places in which to dump their toxic wastes. Out of this grew the image of a Weimarian moral anarchy they half expected and more than half desired: of mothers implacably spreading their own children’s legs that the rich might more easily enter. The needle’s eye.