Ghosts of Manila

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘You said you fragged your CO?’ Prideaux prompted.

  There was a pause. Captain Melchior was draining the last of the Coke. He shuddered. ‘My taste’s all screwed up, you know. This stuff’s sweet, right? But just recently it’s been getting bitter. It’s not the Coke, it’s the disease, the nervous system. I smell disgusting smells that aren’t there. Herrera comes up, hears my confession, says it isn’t nerves, it’s conscience. Makes everything bitter and foul. He’s just the sort of guy to have around when you’re dying. Be right back.’

  He swung himself off the tombstone with slow-motion urgency and moved like a scarecrow behind the wall which hid the improbable savannah. Faint sounds of retching reached Prideaux. It was getting on for noon. The sunlight beyond the shade in which he sat was a drench of energy so rich that things no longer looked as clear as they had, blurred by thermals and his own wincing retinas. When he returned, Melchior was moving more easily. He was carrying a green rag which, as he folded and bunched it to cover the Book of Job, was revealed as a military T-shirt. ‘Damn marble,’ he said as he stretched out and gingerly lowered his puffy head.

  ‘You don’t mind talking?’

  ‘Got nothing else to do. You reckon I’m the sort of person does things he doesn’t want? Where was I? Yeah. Colonel Half. Colonel Saturnino Calajate. And I never said I fragged him. I said I arranged for him to die. Doesn’t matter how. What matters is why. He was the one had the logging deal going. Once for forty-eight hours we couldn’t stop rebels consolidating an area we weren’t defending because our vehicles couldn’t get out on patrol. The whole base was out of gas. How come, since we remembered seeing the Petron truck come in from Cotabato City? The SAO had signed for it and certified it only contained 500 litres. That took care of the Colonel’s jeeps okay. The truck turned around and went off and sold the rest of the 30,000 litres cut price to a private gas station. After the driver had got his percentage the Colonel and the Supply Accounting Officer split the rest. Took us some time to work it out but before we lowered his flag for him the Colonel confirmed it. Cost us eleven men to re-take that territory. That kinda thing pisses you off.

  ‘But it wasn’t that. He acted improperly towards our dead, and let me tell you no-one, no-one messes with any man of mine killed in action. We do it by the book, down to the last comma and period. SOP – and this is the Army minimum – specifies that everyone gets a standard coffin and a fifteen day embalming, right? The body’s properly washed, completely dipped in formalin, and the veinous system’s infiltrated with formalin. Then you open it up and remove the guts, because that’s your prime source of decomposition. You pack it with offcuts of sewing material and bunot. You know bunot?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Coconut fibre. The husk, right? But very refined and combed out till it’s fluffy like brown wool. Okay. That two weeks gives time for the deceased’s relatives to get to the funeral, do the whole thing with decorum. Now, if the relatives are abroad, in the States, wherever, they get a thirty day embalming. Automatic. It’s right there in the regulations. That’s a more thorough job, more soaking in formalin plus the main veins and arteries are stripped out. You better believe all this costs: refrigeration, mortician’s fees, enbalming fluid. The Colonel couldn’t figure a way to work a scam, not with me standing there over my men making sure it all went by the book, so he’d say “Get him into the ground, Captain, that’s an order. That guy’s a GI sheet job. This is a fighting unit. We’ve got a war on. There isn’t time to putz around. We’ll tell his relatives, sorry, we had to get him into the ground.” Shit.’

  Looking up at Melchior’s change of tone Prideaux saw he was wiping bright blood from his upper lip.

  ‘Nosebleed again,’ said the Captain, holding the T-shirt to his face. ‘Happens all the time these days. Don’t know why. It’s all packing up.’

  ‘Shall I get you some ice?’

  ‘I could handle another Coke.’

  This time the boy was eating a plate of rice, the kitten on the plastic tablecloth beside him chewing fishbones with its head on one side. He must have had other customers in the interim since he now had some change and the second bottle cost Prideaux rather less than the first. His teeth were as white as the cat’s.

  ‘You won’t see this story I’m telling you,’ the Captain said when he’d drunk. He dabbed gently at his crusted nose. ‘If you’ve never been in the army you won’t understand. That guy on the table having his intestines taken out’s your buddy. There’s just nobody in the world, I don’t care if it’s the President himself, comes telling you What the hell, it’s too much trouble, get him into the ground. Sure, sometimes you have to. If you can’t retrieve a KIA for a couple of days decomposition’s well set in and there’s nothing to do. Embalming’s useless. The blood’s clotted so you can’t pump the formalin through the veins. The whole system’s solid. You can push it in, but it all seeps back out again and the coffin drips. You gotta seal ’em in GI sheet and that’s it. Yeah.’ The bottle tilted once more. ‘Colonel Saturnino Calajate. Colonel Half.’ A smile crossed his face which seemed so ridiculously small, as if the tumours were slowly squeezing his features together at the centre. ‘Nobody ever stood around his coffin, that’s for sure.’

  And it was all he would say on the subject, leaving Prideaux to wonder for long afterwards whether by a brilliant sleight some ignorant gathering had wound up tucking into roast colonel, down there in the dark jungles of Mindanao. When it was clear Melchior had lost interest in the topic he asked: ‘What happened to them? Your buddies? The unit?’

  ‘Ah.’ A long sigh. ‘Broken up. Gone. Dispersed. Some dead, some re-assigned, some plain vanished. Back to their families, AWOL, unemployed. I tried to keep in touch with a couple but then this –’ the stump of his right hand made a blunt gesture which might have been referring to itself or the body it was attached to. ‘Know what? I found it doesn’t really matter. They’re still there inside, sa loob, where the debt is. It’ll be the same for all of us. Somewhere all the old teams are still together. You think this is crap? Sentimentality?’ This time the Captain’s right hand went up behind the Book of Job where it sketched a limp circling motion in air. ‘Before I die they’ll be here. Converge On Me. They’ll come.’

  For the first time in this recital the literal had failed. The ruined man and his discourse fell out of the suspended noonday heat into somewhere more shadowed. Prideaux recognised the moment; it occasionally happened during interviews for documentaries. Just when you’d convinced yourself that the whole of life was nothing but hearsay, wandering narratives of what happened to whom, you discovered that a complete dream was walking about inside. Did they know it was there? he always wondered. Beneath what they thought was a plain account of events another text showed through in an entirely different register. It was like suddenly recognising that lines of vernacular hid a poem.

  ‘They may come. But will they recognise you?’

  This time the smile stayed a little. ‘Well, good for you, John Something. You’re older than me, I was forgetting. Yeah, perhaps they won’t.’

  ‘Did you ever think of killing yourself?’ Prideaux was astounded by his own ruthlessness. It was an art he thought he’d forgotten.

  ‘Sure I did. Tried it. Didn’t work.’ Once again he held up the maimed club of hand. ‘That’s like asking why I didn’t go amok. I’ve known several amoks. The military’s a good place to see them, what with all that stress and weaponry and all. I watched them very carefully, how they’d go quiet before. It’s a special way of going quiet, not like a guy who just wants to be let alone because he’s got one of those letters from his chick. More broody, heavy, like he was hearing all his life come clumping down the stairs. Then suddenly he gets this look, his hair starts to come up and he goes for a gun, knife, whatever’s handy. But he’s not setting out to kill people, that’s the point. Not like some crazy bastard planning a series of murders in cold blood. The amok’s enemies are all inside. All he knows is it’s his
last chance to go in there and rescue his soul. It’s been tortured and squeezed every which way and it’s the only thing left on earth which is his, and he’s gotta hack it free. He’s running inwards, right? That’s why he doesn’t see the guys he’s chopping and shooting, his own friends, his buddies even. They’re not real. They’re just part of the dream. Only the soul is real.’ He paused. ‘Do you believe that?’

  ‘About the soul?’

  ‘Only the soul is real. That’s why I don’t kill myself. Like going amok with myself as victim? This –’ his left hand pointed the Coke bottle’s empty muzzle from swollen legs to upper chest, leaving a dark line of spots on the filthy fatigues, ‘this is a dream. We’re religious people, us Filipinos, know that? Don’t let anyone tell you different. You shouldn’t take your own life. You should find a way of walking out on it, carrying your soul. To die not in possession of your own soul is the worst damn thing there is.’

  ‘La vida es sueño? Life is a dream?’

  ‘Castilian, right?’

  ‘Title of a play. In one place it says “Now I’m asleep I can see that when I’m awake I’m dreaming”.’

  ‘Yeah? That’s good. That’s it. You look at people in the street, people everywhere, any of us. Know what? We’re all out on patrol. The whole world’s out on patrol. We’ve been given this mission, right? Target briefing. One: Get to the end of life richer than you started. Two: Have a good time along the way. Three: Breed up a family to carry it all on. Everything we do to carry out our orders is okay, sensible, rational, sane, purposeful, whatever. Then flick-flick, you’re cursing a stranger for driving funny, shouting at the wife, hitting the kids, kicking the pooch. Flick-flick we wake up and find we’re hunkered down around a camp fire eating some sorry bastard. People commit murder all the time but they don’t know it. Specially those crazy politicians. Just that their victims are a long way away. Look at San Clemente. Look at this country. Look at the world. Is this a sane way to run things? That’s how it is. Nothing people do is strange. Flick-flick.’

  Far from having wearied himself with talking Captain Melchior now seemed more animated, if a little hectic about the eyes. A lizard croaked and rattled nearby and then fell silent, leaving a hush in which the faint hiss of intense sunlight on stone was clearly audible. Far away behind it lay directionless urban sound like a steady ocean gnawing at a coastline.

  ‘Know what a gook is?’ the Captain asked unexpectedly.

  ‘Well, in Vietnam –’ Prideaux began.

  ‘Fuck Vietnam. Forget Vietnam. The original gooks were us Filipinos. It was what the Americans called our nationalist guerrillas who fought them for independence at the end of last century. They say it comes from Bicolano or something, gugurang or gugu. I don’t speak the damn language. What it means is a kind of spirit. You know, like you have a guardian angel? This is a guardian demon. Hell, John Something, you’re in a land of spirits, didn’t you know? Every last snot-nosed kid of us. You expect spirits to behave like everyone else? Like the British, maybe? Forget it. Never happen.’

  Certainly the diseased Captain refused Prideaux’s offers of further refreshment, food, clothing, money and medicine with all the detachment of a spirit. He seemed happy to lie on his tombstone and talk. He spoke of the time he’d first met the cemetery police when they passed on patrol, stumbling through the weeds with a weak flashlight, all four of them ‘bunched together like schoolgirls’. He was lying up in one of the disused niches in the wall, a long cool pigeonhole, and gave a stage groan, followed by ghoulish laughter which pursued their panicky retreat. He’d gone and found them huddled in the church, their card game abandoned. He managed to convince them he wasn’t a ghost, that the apparently un-Filipino habit of sleeping in a graveyard was explained by having been a Ranger in Mindanao. After that, there was nothing left to be scared of.

  ‘What’s going on in San Clemente?’ Prideaux asked as he was about to leave. It was early afternoon and Melchior suddenly wanted to sleep. He himself was dazed with words and the stench of pear pollen. ‘Vampires and stuff?’

  ‘You don’t believe that kidshit? It’s a Chinese offensive.’

  ‘I don’t follow you.’

  But the Captain slithered flippantly away. ‘You did this morning. Couldn’t stop yourself. It’s the stories.’ He sounded content and once again sketched his melancholy gesture in the air summoning ghosts, buddies, Chinese policemen, British anthropologists or anyone else who would listen. ‘Gets ’em every time.’

  22

  THE INSTANT they carried Eddie’s body in at five-thirty one morning Nanang Pipa experienced the effect that a sudden lightning flash has on a nightbound traveller. It was a shock too quick for detail but it left her with the general revelation of a large and menacing landscape stretching to all horizons in which her own figure was tiny and without the slightest significance. They laid him on the table and she lit a candle with shaking hands and had somebody go and fetch Fr. Bernabe. It was so brutal and unexpected that at first she was beyond emotion and could only stand, stroking his forehead and saying, ‘Oh Eddie. My poor Eddie. What have they done to you?’ where ‘they’ meant nothing more than life itself personified by its faceless agents who were never in short supply. Whatever they had done had left his face caked with blood around the mouth and with all his front teeth knocked out. He had been found up the hill, just inside the wall by the shanties as if tossed over already dead like a piece of refuse, falling in an attitude no natural death could assume. While her eldest daughter Gaylin and the youngest Jinky hurriedly rolled up their sleeping mats on the floor she fetched a bowl of water and sponged Eddie’s face clean, dried it and laid a crucifix on his chest. He suddenly looked shrunken and depleted as if what had filled him in life had been the largesse of his gestures, the weight of his passion, the force of his laughter. Only when she realised that never as long as she lived would she hear that laugh again did Pipa begin her weeping, a desolate crying that penetrated the nearby shanties’ slat walls.

  The family rallied around. Fr. Bernabe arrived still sleepy and they held a vigil around the body for an hour or so before the first neighbours came to pay their respects. Most of the members of the sewing cooperative came, as of course did all the old friends: Bats, Judge, Billy and Petring. From all over San Clemente they came, many in tears, to see the body. The barangay captain, Monching Jandusay, arrived smelling of yesterday’s drink and urine. With that divorced observation which often strikes people who ought to be otherwise preoccupied Nanang Pipa noticed that in the morning light his skin was papery and translucent, as if the more he poured gin into his body the more he was turning into a mere container, a fragile and unsteady kind of bottle. Still, what mattered was that he had come and been seen to come, as duty and etiquette required. Yet although this was all proper and consoling, it was as if Pipa were still waiting for someone secure and fatherly into whose hands she could yield the whole sorry mess. And at nine o’clock Rio Dingca appeared in the doorway smelling of Dial soap, having been alerted on arrival by PO1 Benhur Daldal who had deserted his post by the priceless pit outside in order to leave the message at Station 14. After the body had been taken away for the cause of death to be ascertained Pipa tearfully confided to Dingca that Eddie had made a confession only yesterday.

  ‘It was all his own idea,’ she said. ‘The vampire. That’s what he told me. I’m so ashamed.’

  ‘But he was drunk all the same?’

  ‘Oh, he was drunk all right. He really did think he’d seen something, too, except it was probably the moon or a cloud, you know. But he said he’d had it at the back of his mind to invent a story which would frighten people off investigating our hole too closely. He’d already found the skull, you see, and those bits of china, and we’d decided to keep it a secret. Then Ming Piedragoso told us about the spirit guardians Chinese pirates used to put over hidden treasure and Eddie said that gave him the idea. But it backfired, like so many of his brilliant ideas, and now he’s dead,’ she ended in disbe
lief that something as trivial as one of Eddie’s stories, no more substantial than a fume of gin, could have had such a lethal outcome.