Ghosts of Manila

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  But The Rotting Man only repeated his gay military wave and moved off among the tombs, olive drab rags and camouflage net bobbing in and out of visibility, traversing light and shade and then remaining fixed until Prideaux caught up and found only a shrub with tiny scarlet flowers like wounds. Then, looking about him in frustration and dread he would see again the distant club of a hand in its private semaphore. As they progressed he was aware of two things. The first was that if the streets they crossed were vaguely concentric then they were headed deep into the cemetery. The other, that this was no chase. He realised he could easily catch the hobbling figure ahead. Despite its visual elusiveness and spritelike gestures it was, in fact, moving quite slowly, even painfully. He found himself hanging back, almost out of respect, as if acknowledging that something which had eluded him for so long had always been within easy grasp, a seizable moment.

  Through the trees to the right was some sort of church. On its porch steps four men were sitting around a trestle table playing cards. A bottle winked in the sun. Prideaux remembered Vic Agusan having said something about a detachment of cemetery police. Well, detached they certainly were, as unseen through the bushes nearby a middleaged foreigner pursued at walking pace a decaying fugitive from the armed forces. Beside the church a few huts stood beneath acacia trees, selling refreshments to those visitors who came to tend the plots and tombs. A boy lay asleep along a bench in a puddle of shade, hat over eyes, a kitten dozing on his stomach.

  If this was the centre, the cemetery couldn’t be anything like circular. Not much further on the tombs’ condition worsened considerably and, emerging between walls set with niches for coffins, Prideaux came on what was clearly a boundary. There were gaps, as over on the San Clemente side; but instead of a view of shanty roofs here was only a wasteland of tall grasses and low trees. However improbable it seemed in the middle of Manila, his ravaged Pied Piper had led him to the threshold of a savannah. He assumed they must be somewhere near the point where La Loma, North and Chinese cemeteries all touched, the point furthest from the roads which served them, most distant from the expensive and fashionable plots. Here, in the tangle of undergrowth, graves lay opened and empty, their inscriptions leached off by tropical rains. Of their occupants there was no trace. The dead had been raised by robbers, ghouls, dogs. There were the remains of small bonfires, charred patches littered with heat-shrivelled lengths of puce and lime ribbon, a wired bundle of twigs that had been a sheaf of flowers, black meshes into which wreaths had been woven. The sun was strong, the light rebounded from cracked cement surfaces, burned against a forehead already pink from his recent trips into the provinces.

  As his eyes adjusted to a nearby patch of shade they resolved a mossy reclining angel into a recumbent figure with its spongy head resting between the pages of an open marble book.

  ‘Five minutes,’ said the figure. ‘You’ve never been a soldier.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It took you five minutes to see me. You died four minutes fifty-nine seconds ago. You were point man. You led your whole platoon into the killing box. Give the man a medal.’

  Absurd though it was, Prideaux felt shame rise to his face.

  ‘Okay,’ said the figure. ‘You were looking for me and I found you. Big deal. I’m Captain Melchior. You’re John Something.’

  ‘Father Herrera told you.’

  ‘Father’s good.’

  ‘Yes, he is.’

  ‘Not what I meant,’ said Melchior, ‘but what the hell. You want to know about stress in this country?’

  ‘It sounds stupider put like that.’

  ‘Yeah. Why don’t you move out of the sun? Us baldies gotta watch the sun. You think I might know something?’

  ‘Maybe. It’s up to you. Perhaps another piece of the puzzle. I don’t expect a definitive revelation as the reward for having pursued the extremest person to the extremest place.’

  ‘Excuse me? You’re British, right? The accent. Makes it harder.’

  Prideaux, nettled by disadvantages he hadn’t considered, asked bluntly, ‘What are you wanted for?’

  ‘Murder. Theft. Desertion. Things like that. Why, you scared?’

  ‘No,’ he said, surprised to find it true. ‘The worst you can do is kill me, steal my money and abandon my corpse.’

  ‘No it’s not,’ said Captain Melchior. ‘Not by a long way. But I’m sick of dying and I’m sick of death.’

  ‘Funny place to choose if you’re sick of death,’ Prideaux said with an attempt at flippancy. ‘A graveyard.’

  ‘Wrong. It’s the only place left in this city a guy can hear himself think. Gotta hear yourself think when you’re dying. Might overhear something useful.’

  Now that he was standing by him, Prideaux found himself able to look down at The Rotting Man without dread and with very little disgust. It helped knowing his name and rank. Now he was Captain Melchior, clearly waiting for the celestial medevac chopper and the Great Corpsman. ‘You’re a mess,’ he said.

  ‘Affirmative.’

  Prideaux judged that the worst of his cranial distortion was hidden by the camouflage netting, for the lumps and bulges visible beside his eyes seemed to be part of a mass which had its roots elsewhere. The unnatural width thus given his face made the eyes too close and concentrated their force. All the fingers were missing from his right hand, which ended in a flap of skin like a pasty’s crimped edge. The thumb was intact, as was his left hand. Both wrists were covered with open sores which also blotched the long sleeves of the army shirt he wore. The rest of his body gave the impression of being similarly afflicted. Phrases like ‘neurofibromatosis’ and ‘Elephant Man’s Disease’ went through Prideaux’s mind as he confronted this suffering creature, who exuded a bitter pollen smell like pear blossom.

  The Captain watched this pitying inventory and clearly hoped to forestall further conversation on the subject by saying ‘Incurable.’

  ‘What, all of it?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘I’m sure somewhere like Makati Medical Center –’

  ‘Ay! came the interruption. ‘The Kano’s going to throw money at me! I’m not a squatter, John Something. I’m an ex-Ranger on the run. There’s a difference. I’d get to spend a morning in my two-hundred-bucks-a-day bed covered in electrodes before I had a foul dream, woke up in Camp Crame stockade medical centre and found the electrodes now clipped to my balls.’

  ‘Ah, you mean incurable in that sense, then. Daren’t be cured rather than can’t?’

  ‘No. Either way I’m a dead man. I prefer to do my dying here.’

  ‘Why can’t they find you here?’

  ‘Have you any idea how many AFP men are on the run with prices on their heads for bank robberies, kidnappings and God knows what? Thousands. Half the country’s gangs are AWOL military and police. There aren’t the men available to comb acres of cemeteries just for one miserable Ranger who isn’t even armed and who only arranged the death of a commanding officer that deserved far worse. If I’m going to talk,’ the swollen head sunk in the Book of Job eased itself tenderly, ‘I need something to drink.’ Passages of chiselled Latin could be seen surrounding the halo of camouflage netting. ‘Soft drinks.’

  ‘I’ll get some. What about food?’

  ‘No food. Just Coke.’

  Prideaux woke the boy with the kitten on his stomach and thirstily drank two bottles of Sprite. Then he bought a family size Coke, overpaying the boy who was already a little petulant at being woken and now was inclined to be querulous about the deposit and his own lack of change. The bottle emerged from a chest of watery ice and sawdust like a log from a swamp.

  ‘Good and cold,’ said Captain Melchior when he took it from Prideaux. He tucked it beneath his right arm, screwed off the cap and drank deeply. ‘Oh wow.’ He belched. ‘You’ve drunk, haven’t you? John Something did some thinking as well as drinking.’

  ‘It would have looked odd, wouldn’t it, a foreigner coming out of nowhere and disappearing into the b
ushes with more than one drink? It’s not an obvious place for a picnic.’

  ‘Sure. Wise precaution. Wouldn’t have mattered, though. They all know I’m around. How else can I eat? I get my food from them.’

  ‘What about the police in the church?’

  ‘They’re okay. They’re Catholics. Also they’re Chinese. And they’re not military. They’re not about to help the AFP clean up its shit. I know them all. We’ve done a lot of talking, specially at night. Don’t sleep much nowadays, so we talk. Stories. Politics. The time passes. What they call the graveyard shift, right?’

  ‘And they keep you.’

  ‘Negative. Nobody keeps Captain Melchior. Captain Melchior tells stories and eats rice. We’re all Christians, aren’t we? Who’s counting? They want to hear. They’re just city kids, mostly. Never been out of Manila, let alone Luzon. But I was down south for years, all the Visayas but specially Mindanao. Fighting the Moslems. They love to hear about fighting the Moslems in Mindanao.’

  ‘Why that, particularly?’

  ‘Why not? Moslems everywhere are news these days. Here we’ve got this little old war been going on for years and years, not over in Saudi or somewhere but right here in-country. These kids know nothing. They’re boys. Boys like war stories.’

  ‘Men like telling them.’

  Captain Melchior focused a brief glare on Prideaux seated on an adjacent grave. Then he uncapped the Coke and took another pull at it. Tawny suds bustled behind the glass. ‘Do you enjoy going to confession?’ he asked with another belch.

  ‘I don’t go.’

  ‘Your funeral. But if you did you wouldn’t enjoy it. You’re not meant to. When I talk about my life in the Rangers it’s confession, gotta be said before it’s too late. Not what I did, except a few things, but what we saw, what we knew, how things are. We’re weird creatures, know that? Truly weird. One moment dead normal, the next completely out of our gourds. Then back again. Flick-flick. Over and over.’

  ‘Ah. You’re going to tell me the story of the good doctor. He’s the rock-solid family man who leaves his suburban home at eight every morning, drives to a clinic behind high walls, changes out of his suit, puts on a long white rubber apron and spends the day skilfully eliciting just the right quality of scream for the men with the tape recorder. There’s a sound system in this surgery of his which plays Mozart continuously. The good doctor hums along, occasionally stopping what he’s doing to point out the beauty of a particular passage and asking the patient’s own opinion. Then back to work. At five o’clock the surgery is sluiced down, the good doctor showers, changes back into his suit and drives home in his unassuming little car. He greets the family, helps the kids with their homework, walks the dog, watches a bit of TV and so to bed. I’ve heard that story, Captain, don’t worry. We’ve been telling it in Europe for most of this century.’

  ‘Sure you have. I didn’t exactly mean that. Now your guy, your doctor, he’s pretty much split clean down the middle. Day and night, on duty and off duty, black and white. Compartments, right? I’m talking about the whole time, flick-flick, never one thing or the other. Know anything about electricity? Like AC current, always changing direction. But it happens so fast the light looks steady to us. Normal. Whatever we do kind of smooths out so we think it all hangs together. If you ever stopped, though, bang, right there in the middle of something and looked again you wouldn’t hardly believe what you were doing. Me? I’m just sitting here round the fire eating with my good buddies. Tsibog-tsibog, chow down. I’m a what? I’m a cannibal? Don’t give me that shit, man. Cannibals are African, right? Big-game hunters tied up in an iron pot, guys in grass skirts dancing around waving spears. Hell, this ain’t but ordinary Moslem stew.’

  ‘Moslem stew.’

  ‘Right, right. Not the whole kit, usually. Just bits. Specially ears. You mix ’em in with pork and whatever else. It’s the insult. Pork and Islam don’t mix, right? They do in Mindanao, though. Point is, it’s no grand occasion. Nobody giggles and whispers. Into the pot they go with the chopped onions. Know why?’

  ‘Comradeship.’

  For the first time Melchior looked up at Prideaux with something like serious consideration. ‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘Epoxy. Sticks us together so’s nothing can get us apart. Nothing. All for one, one for all, like the fella said.’

  ‘The Three Musketeers.’

  ‘Right. Great movie. You ever had that? The buddy system where you’d do anything, and I mean anything, for the guys you’re with because you know they’d do the same for you?’

  ‘I can imagine it,’ Prideaux said cautiously. ‘I’ve always been able to imagine it.’ He could feel himself physically skirt a pit of longing.

  ‘Ah, man, this isn’t imagination. You’re out there in the boonies with those guys, I mean sleeping rough, eating rough, that’s one hundred percent enemy terrain. Punji stakes smeared with shit, ambush, all that. You never know when. Bad enough dealing with the raggies and the locals betraying your ass but you’ve got your own side to watch out for, too. You’ve got commanding officers selling off your equipment to the black market and cutting themselves illegal logging deals in the areas you’ve bust your balls to win. You’ve got air-support snafus because the fly-boys are all grounded suddenly. Shortage of fuel. Turns out it’s been sold, to hell and gone in unmarked drums. And you’ve got the pols. New initiatives, light at the end of the tunnel, hearts and minds. Suddenly you discover you’re no longer in the Philippines, you’re stranded in some chunk of territory they’ve signed away behind your back called ARMM. Autonomous Region of Moslem Mindanao. Jesus Christ, what’s this shit? Retreat! Retreat! And watch your ass before some raggie sticks a Kalashnikov up it and our President tells him no sweat, pull the trigger, that Ranger’s got no business in your homeland. So yeah, in those circumstances the world kinda shrinks down to you and your buddies.’

  ‘And Moslem stew.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘It’s like cops and salvage, isn’t it? There’s Us and there’s Them.’

  Captain Melchior was not paying attention. ‘Sometimes you get a laugh out of it, though. A while back we had these journalists down, choppered in, coupla guys from Manila and a coupla foreign correspondents. Italians? French? Can’t remember. They wanted the whole thing, burnt villages, atrocities, you name it. What they got was hearts and minds from the brass and not much action, just a lot of bumping along lousy trails in jeeps. We could see they were disappointed. What were they going to tell the folks back home? We tried to say it wasn’t all settled, not by a long way, they’d just hit a flat spot. What the hell, it wasn’t a stage show they’d paid to see, some nonstop performance they could drop in on when they fancied and quit when they got bored. So we gave them an evening of jungle living. We made arrangements and served up this ace dinner, not just ears but an entire guy. Butcher it Chinese-style and you can’t tell. We had ourselves a real cook-out, villagers, sing-song, the works. The journalists loved it. Wild deer and baboy damu, boar we’d shot on patrol, we said. How do you like it? Swell, great. Next morning they all choppered out again. No-one ever told them. To this day they don’t know they ate an MNLF rebel. Laugh? We couldn’t stop for days.’

  ‘And that wasn’t cannibalism?’

  ‘Hell no. Like I said, that’s what Africans do. You’re a cannibal if you don’t know any better. This was eating a man. You eat a man when you’ve got good reason. Remember Manero? Don’t tell me he wasn’t making a point, even if the guy was a missionary.’

  It was in connection with this celebrated case not long after Prideaux’s arrival that someone had coined the phrase about the notorious porosity of Muntinlupa State Penitentiary. Norberto Manero had been sentenced to life imprisonment for killing an Italian priest, Tullio Favali, in April 1985. Immediately after committing the crime he was witnessed by passers-by laughing uproariously with his fellow-assassins before scooping out the missionary’s brains and eating them raw in handfuls. This had made a national impression. It emerged
that he had accused the priest of being a communist sympathiser, but in the Cotabato region of Mindanao where he came from it meant he considered Favali had sided with the Moslem Moros. Manero himself was a Christian who had long been engaged in local militia activities against Islamic radicals who wanted independence. Back in the Sixties he had been a member of a dreaded vigilante group called the Ilaga whose vicious skirmishing with the Moslem Blackshirts had directly led to the Moro secessionist war which was declared in earnest in 1973 and still rumbled on. Manero was also an active member of a Christian cult called Tadtad, whose name meant something like ‘The Choppers’, which specialised in hacking their victims with bolos and quickly eating their entrails in front of their eyes before they could die as an act of ultimate dishonouring. One way and another he was better behind bars. After serving a mere two years in Muntinlupa Manero was transferred without proper authorisation back down to Mindanao, to a small penal colony in Davao from which, averaged out, there had been a jailbreak every thirty-eight hours over the last five years. In his turn Manero duly absented himself, a fact which only came to official notice when he was seen standing a few feet from President Ramos himself at a welcome rally in Cotabato City. The ensuing outcry provoked reluctant enquiries which exposed an entire chain of complicities and negligence. Police and military involvement in Manero’s escape was assumed from the start, and was scarcely at odds with the discovery that in the months before being recaptured he had been working in Central Mindanao as a police ‘asset’ while being groomed by the military to hunt down the elusive Pimpernel himself, Commander Mubarak, the man with the foetal talisman. Manero had recently been returned, laden with irons and smiling broadly, to Muntinlupa where he was placed under a 24-hour armed guard, less to prevent his re-escaping than to protect him from the senior PNP and military officials he might decide to bear witness against should they ever come to trial for having facilitated his lengthy holiday from jail. This last part of the Manero story was where everybody felt they’d come in. It was the warm, slithery handfuls of brains they remembered.