Ghosts of Manila

by James Hamilton-Paterson

Rio Dingca took her hand. ‘That didn’t kill him,’ he told her. ‘We don’t know what did, yet, but it wasn’t that.’ For it was as if the news of Eddie’s death had made Dingca privy also to Nanang Pipa’s lightning flash, leaving him with a cop’s conviction that a complicated hinterland lay beyond these rickety houses, a hinterland in which powerful forces were moving with cold deliberation under cover of darkness. ‘Where did he go last night? When did you last see him?’

  ‘I don’t know. He was around for supper and went off at about eight or nine. I don’t know where or with whom. Out with his barkadas as usual, I thought. You’d better ask Bats and Judge and that lot.’

  ‘Was he drunk?’

  ‘No. Not at supper, anyway. Actually, he said after that day you were here with those newspaper people he wasn’t ever going to drink again.’ Her eyes filled at the thought of his good intentions and their unexpected fulfilment.

  ‘Anything odd or strange you’ve noticed recently?’ It was a dumb policeman’s question ineptly put and as soon as it flew out of his mouth Dingca wished he could retrieve it, cancel it, try another tack.

  ‘Odd? Strange?’ She looked straight at him with brimming eyes. ‘Diosko. Everything’s a disaster, Rio. Don’t you see he was right? He said it was all my fault. If I hadn’t made him dig that hole none of this would ever have happened. From the moment I opened my stupid mouth it all began going wrong. Oh, if only I could go back –’ and she wept again in earnest for a while, finally shuddering and dabbing at her eyes. ‘Strange?’ she said at last with a deep sigh. ‘Have you ever taken out a St. Jude?’

  ‘A novena? No, can’t say I have.’

  ‘I did some months ago. I asked for several things including that Eddie would get out of jail and he did. It was you who got him out.’

  ‘I didn’t know you’d made a special novena, though.’

  ‘I never told anyone except my friend Doding Perez. She said St. Jude was the best and she was right. But there was one thing I didn’t ask for. Someone I know stole one of our edging machines. Brand new, it was. Just walked off with it and disappeared. I tried asking Mama Mary but that didn’t work and I thought no, it’s too mercenary to ask St. Jude to bring a sewing machine back, and I saved my special requests for Eddie and Gaylin and Boyong. Here’s the strange part, though. A week ago this woman turns up again, bold as brass, says she’s sorry she took the machine but it was a family crisis, she just had to have the money, the usual. Lots of tears and begging my forgiveness. “Oh yes?” I says. “Brought it back, then, have you?” I mean, she’d been gone months. Well, no, she hadn’t brought it back but she wanted me to have 350 which was all she could afford right now. “Three hundred and fifty?” I says. “Have you any idea how much that machine cost?” “I ought to,” she says, “I’m a member of the cooperative that bought it.” “Not now, you’re not,” I told her. “Passed unanimously, don’t you worry. It’s there in the minutes, nem. con.” So she starts crying again and I tell her to get out and take her money with her. “Walang hiya talaga,” I told her. Shameless bitch. You’d think she wouldn’t have the nerve to come back to a place like this where everybody knows her, wouldn’t you? But she’s around, all right. The strange thing I wanted to tell you is that it’s her been going about this last week spreading rumours about dogs giving birth to cockroaches and how there’s a curse on San Clemente and that the dead I’ve disturbed are going to rise and take a terrible revenge on us all. She’s got a lot of people scared, too. Some are even talking of moving out, apparently. She tells them the end has started and right now,’ Nanang Pipa said bleakly, ‘I’m beginning to wonder myself.’

  ‘You never told me about this theft,’ said Dingca.

  ‘You’re right, I never did,’ agreed Pipa, and in her answer could be read an entire history of the relationship between squatters and police irrespective of trusted individuals.

  ‘But you’re going to tell me now who she is,’ he said persuasively. ‘Somewhere there’s a connection, Pipa. Don’t ask me how I know, but I do.’

  ‘What, you mean she… she killed Eddie?’

  ‘No, no, no, not that direct a connection. But she’s part of it.’

  Nanang Pipa only shook her head and squeezed her handkerchief tighter. ‘I start shopping people to the police and I’m done for in San Clemente,’ she said simply. ‘I’m probably done for anyway. It was our hole. They’ll probably force us out for bringing ruin. It won’t be enough that my husband’s dead, it’ll just be proof of how evil I am.’ Tears ran down her cheeks.

  ‘Listen, Pipa, I’m not just the police, I’m someone you’ve known for two years. We’re friends. At least I hope we are because you’re shortly going to need all the friends you can get. Have you any idea what’s going to happen when the newspapers get hold of poor Eddie’s death? They’ll be back here before the morning’s out. Plus we’ve now got a real live senator taking a personal interest in your comfort room that was. Listen,’ he said earnestly, reaching forward and taking her hand again, ‘if it turns out Eddie was murdered, and it certainly looks that way, you’re going to be involved with the police whether you like it or not. I can pull enough strings to make sure I get assigned the case but I can’t do a thing unless you help me. There’s something going on here that’s much bigger than a hole in the ground with seven-hundred-year-old bones at the bottom, and I’m going to dig it out. Trust me, Pipa. Who is she?’

  ‘Ligaya Rosales,’ came the small reply at length. Looking up at the way he repeated the name she saw him staring with a faraway expression at the tapestry of the dogs playing cards. She’d never liked that thing, she realised irrelevantly. Eddie had arrived home with it one day saying it had fallen off a stall in Divisoria. True, it covered the stencils which betrayed the plywood behind it as having come from dismantled tea chests, but still she’d never liked it. Everyone said it was cute, but bulldogs in eyeshades didn’t look cute to her. Oh Eddie, she thought, her eyes filling once more, what was it all for? All of it? She tried to imagine him now, sitting for ever in glory, happy that it was over, happy to be happy. Could he see her now? she wondered. Fr. Bernabe had said that he could, but she wasn’t sure.

  ‘That name, Rosales, I know it. Yes, got it. By God, Pipa, I think that’s it.’

  ‘What?’ she asked again, but he wouldn’t say.

  He’d been right about the newspapers coming back, which the same old tabloids did well before lunch. And when the terrible news leaked out about the cause of Eddie’s death they all came, worse than ghouls themselves, to ask her what it felt like to be the wife of a man who’d been well and truly vampirised. For according to Rio Dingca when they’d opened the body at the autopsy they’d found precisely nothing. Nothing whatever. Eddie’s entire internal organs were missing from tongue to rectum. Nobody had ever seen anything like it.

  ‘How…?’ she had begun, faltering. ‘Who…?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I shall,’ Dingca had promised her, and added a merciful fiction of his own. ‘The surgeon said death was instantaneous. He couldn’t have suffered.’

  ‘Oh my God, how can he know?’

  ‘Haemorrhage patterns,’ Dingca improvised sagely. ‘There’s not so much blood lost if the heart stops at once.’ Eddie’s heart, of course, had vanished entirely. The truth was, Rio wanted to believe it as much as he wanted her to believe it, as much as he himself had once chosen to believe the surgeon who said Babs was dead before his body was mutilated. In fact Edsel Tugos’s remains had been exhaustively autopsied and photographed while his case was being written up for the annals. From the direction of the tears and ruptures in the remaining tatters of his diaphragm, taken in conjunction with the severe damage to the oral cavity, the experts determined he had been put to death in an entirely novel way. Some sort of high power vacuum pump, such as might normally be used for aspirating sewage out of a blocked drain, had been employed to suck the innards from his body. It had been done with disgusting cold science as well as with the brute force neede
d to ram an overlarge metal nozzle into his mouth hard enough to have dislocated the jaw.

  Nanang Pipa valiantly contrived to block out these details even though they were soon retailed in large print by all the tabloids. Meanwhile something like a genuine hysteria was beginning to build up in the barrio. People said… People said no human agent could have done such a thing. Who’d ever heard of an entire body being sucked hollow before? People said it was unquestionably a manananggal. They said poor Eddie hadn’t been seeing things after all. They said they’d heard of cases like this before in Iloilo, in Bohol, in Camarines, in Negros… People said it was a demon the Chinese had placed to stand guard over the dead in their cemetery, come to take revenge on Eddie and anyone else in San Clemente who’d messed with the tombs and stolen water and electricity. People said Eddie’s accomplices, especially Bats and Judge, would be the next to go. And indeed Bats and Judge were nowadays seldom seen outside their houses where they were holed up, white-faced and clinking with crucifixes. People said.

  And the more people said, the more Nanang Pipa managed somehow to keep a clear head, asking them where they’d first heard it. In a few days her suspicions were confirmed and she had passed them on to Rio Dingca. The grossest rumours, the direst predictions eagerly taken up by the tabloid reporters had come from Ligaya Rosales. Dingca kept missing this woman whom he was now very anxious to interview and suspected she was lying low somewhere outside the barrio. Then one day he and Benhur Daldal caught her in a sari-sari store down by the Kapilang, thanks to an informer. He recognised her at once, arrested her on the spot, took her down to Station 14 handcuffed to the grab handle of his jeep, booked her and threw her into a cell. Later, he went back up and told Nanang Pipa that Ligaya was already wanted for jumping a 5,000 bail some months back while awaiting trial for trying to abduct a child in Harrison Plaza.

  ‘Five thousand?’ Pipa said. ‘Who on this earth would spend five thousand pesos on Ligaya Rosales?’

  ‘When we know that I expect we’ll know a lot more,’ Dingca told her cagily. She thought he probably already knew but her interest in such technicalities was fast diminishing. Her life was gripped by a sense of radical destruction and finality. With the help of Fr. Herrera they’d managed to find a plot for Eddie way up behind the Chinese cemetery in what looked to her like a derelict no-man’s-land, and there they’d buried him. Fr. Herrera had told her not to worry, this part of the cemetery was shortly due for rehabilitation and Eddie’s grave would soon find itself in much-improved surroundings. In any case the ground was still consecrated and the space offered too valuable to be ignored. ‘It’s the right moment,’ he said. ‘In five years’ time they’ll probably make cremation compulsory.’ To her this prospect of terrifying impiety simply added its tithe to the rest of the menace massing all around. At night now she thought of Eddie lying up there under his simple cement inscription in a tamarind’s shade. Not far away, she had noticed, was a rather grand grave which had a huge open marble book at its head as well as a marble cross and she was aware that Eddie’s unpretentious resting place could hardly compete with that sort of thing. On the other hand there were also several graves in the vicinity which were empty, their slabs skewed to one side or missing entirely. Everything was insecure; not even the ground in which the dead were laid was safe. ‘My poor Eddie,’ she said softly in the dark. ‘My poor, poor man.’ She cried herself to sleep.

  And now her perception of insecurity infected everything she looked at: house, family, business, future. Apart from her own children, who were being as supportive as they knew how (Boyong in particular making touching efforts to justify inheriting his father’s title of family head), there were two people to whom Nanang Pipa felt especial gratitude. One was Rio Dingca, who came daily with little pieces of information which went a long way to counteract the wild rumours of supernatural vengeance which had broken out on all sides. The other was, of all people, Gringo Lapad. Pipa never considered that she’d known him particularly well, certainly nothing like as well as she knew his indolent brother Bats. To her he was just one of Eddie’s wilder barkadas who drove the taxi in which so many of their no doubt apocryphal adventures had taken place. Yet one evening Gringo had turned up, very sober, his eyes flashing with hurt and anger and tears, and had given her an envelope containing two thousand pesos.

  ‘But Gringo,’ she’d begun.

  ‘Expenses,’ he interrupted dismissively. ‘Contributions from my passengers. I’ve got Eddie’s photo right up there on the dashboard with a rosary around it and sampagita flowers and they all ask me “Who’s that?” and I tell them it’s my best friend they’ve been reading about in the newspapers. They make contributions. A few pesos here, a few there. It mounts up, you know.’

  ‘Yes, but two thousands.’

  ‘Well, some of them give a lot. I had a Kano yesterday, a tourist, who just handed over his watch.’

  Nanang Pipa didn’t want to know the precise circumstances in which a tourist had parted with his no doubt expensive watch and didn’t press the point. It was the thought that counted, and Gringo’s practical steps to alleviate hers and his own distress touched her deeply. The money would indeed come in useful. The funeral expenses had been high, and while Rio Dingca had insisted that she start charging the newspapers for interviews they were remarkably stingy. The reporters were fine at buying drinks for their male informants because they promptly helped to drink them. Handing over hard cash to women went against the grain, however, and in any case there were plenty of Clementeños only too happy to give sensational and lying interviews for free just to see their names in print. A particularly loathsome young man called Mozart Narciso had as good as told her she was yesterday’s widow, played out in terms of newsworthiness.

  ‘Let me just quote you something someone just told me,’ he’d said, flipping over the pages of his notebook. ‘Here we are. Get this: “A spirit messenger came to me last night to give me a warning. He was right there, standing by that door as we were eating, not six feet away. He had these big white wings and a long robe and his eyes were like hot coals. You can ask anyone in the family. We knew at once he was a messenger from God because he had a fiery cross on his chest and there was this bluish light around his head. He said: ‘Beware, beware, my children. This barrio has fallen on evil times. There are among you thieves who rob the dead and disturb the rest of souls who are in Paradise with me. By their acts they have called forth demons from the Great Pit. We are sending the Archangel Michael to deal with them but before Good can triumph the evil generation will be swept away. On this very ground the spirit armies are drawn up. Woe unto them whose shadow falls on this land when the day of battle dawns”.’ The reporter closed his book with a snap.

  ‘What sacrilegious nonsense!’ Nanang Pipa had exclaimed stoutly. “We’re sending the Archangel Michael” – do you really think that’s how a messenger from God would speak, you halfwit? Like the Department of Health? “We’re sending rodent operatives”. Terrible rubbish! And I can make a pretty fair guess where you got it from, what’s more.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ prompted the journalist sarcastically, evidently stung by being dismissed as a credulous ninny when he no more believed a word of it than she did.

  ‘The actual individual I couldn’t say, but I imagine the family name’s Rosales.’

  ‘Well, you imagine wrong, Mrs,’ he said; and both knew he lied.

  ‘Some people will say anything if you pay them enough,’ she pursued angrily.

  ‘Like that they’ve seen a vampire, for instance?’ said Narciso brutally, leaving her in tears of rage and misery.

  If the tabloids now did their best to ignore her, it seemed out of petty revenge for her refusing to take them seriously or finally to see them at all, she felt herself becoming more and more the object of local attention, the butt of gossip and whispers. Her one real refuge was the sewing cooperative. That at least was a solid business concern providing an income and what little hope she might retain in the future.
Yet even here fractures were beginning to be discernible of the kind which her authority now seemed powerless to mend as it once had. It was not that she was openly challenged – how could she be since the group was democratic and she held no post which couldn’t be rescinded by a simple majority vote? But there were faint hints of new alliances, suggestions that unofficial meetings were being held without her in other homes. She had no proof but would have betted that all sorts of plotting and scheming were going on in the house of Danny’s mother, for instance. Danny, that smarmy little call-boy who instead of sitting on his bum in school and getting an honest education went around waggling it at tourists and came prancing home in trainers which cost more than the dress Pipa was married in.

  She hated herself for her bitterness; but it was as if all the apprehensions she’d always had and which nobody else ever seemed to share were remorselessly being proved valid. Everything stemmed from that one accursed moment a mere handful of weeks ago when she’d opened a new bolt of cloth and done what she always did, which was to smell it appreciatively. She not only liked the smell of new cloth, she could tell a lot about its quality from the scent it gave off, especially whether the wholesaler was trying to pull a fast one by lying about the percentage of acrylic in it. Acrylic had its own faint but unmistakable smell. That morning she’d been unable to smell it accurately because of the stench drifting in from the CR and was suddenly overcome with irritation. Business was being compromised by sanitation, so sanitation had to be improved at once. From that instant’s annoyance everything had followed: vampires, horrid publicity, husband’s death, social ostracism, everything. She was aghast at the unfairness of being punished so severely for what seemed such a trivial crime, if digging a new comfort room was a crime.

  You didn’t win in this world, she told herself as she gazed out of an upstairs window while listlessly making a work-shirt for Boyong. From down below outside came the sound of quiet English conversation as two foreign girls slowly laid bare the full extent of Eddie’s discovery. You didn’t win because a bit of time would go by in which it appeared you were winning and you would forget what you’d known all along, which was that ultimately things were stacked against you. You just chose to pretend they weren’t, to live in a dream world normally inhabited by just the sort of idiots you had no time for, the cockfighting bettors and the jueteng gamblers and the lottery addicts and the rest who blew good money in pursuit of bad. Underneath, things remained exactly as they’d always been: clear, mortal, unpitying. Her eyes unseeingly followed two kittens wrestling inside a motor tyre on the slope of a neighbour’s roof. How shallowly rooted things were! It was so easy to blink and imagine everything one thought of as permanent brushed away. From one day to the next people were swept off their feet and into their graves and that was that. All these houses here, what did they mean? They weren’t solid at all. There was just the sky and the earth, and between them a dreamworld in which flimsy dramas were acted out, of no more consequence than the clouds which came and went, shifted and re-formed, leaked rain and dissolved. What did it really matter who had killed Eddie? Eddie was dead of Fate; the identity of its agent was neither here nor there. Someone should be made to pay for the vile way in which he’d been done to death, certainly; but nobody would be, she knew. Well, and now what? They couldn’t stay here in San Clemente, not now. She and the family would have to move. Even those friendships and alliances which so recently had seemed solid were revealed as temporary after all, no proof against unChristian superstition and malicious gossip. All those true-to-death friends of Eddie’s, those Batses and Judges and Petrings and Billys – where were they now? Skulking at home in terror of supernatural vengeance and no doubt telling everyone they’d never really been close to Edsel Tugos, just occasional drinking companions. Judases, every last one of them, she thought, even as she knew she was judging them without any real evidence. Still, none of them had done what Gringo had, coming to see her and bringing a gift whose generosity spoke of real affection for Eddie. The thought filled her eyes once more.