Ghosts of Manila

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  On and on went the grunted remarks down below. Even though they were in English she could understand little. One of the girls spoke excellent Tagalog but her companion none at all. There was a foreign man, too, much older, who occasionally dropped by and asked peculiar questions. John something-or-other. He was courteous and touched her by once bringing her a bunch of flowers, but because he was foreign she couldn’t tell what they meant. They weren’t to do with Eddie because they were the wrong kind for death, and they weren’t for her because it wasn’t her birthday, and they weren’t for either of her daughters because they were the wrong flowers for courting, too. She remained baffled and slightly uneasy, though a little more gossip among the neighbours could hardly make much difference now. In any case he seemed well-meaning and just for a moment she wondered if he mightn’t take an interest in Gaylin now that her little problem had been solved. A rich foreign husband … But no; no more dreams, no more self-deception. Time to begin winding up her part in the cooperative, sell up and go, though she had no idea where. And who would want to buy a house in San Clemente now it was widely known that the landlord was the Prince of Darkness himself?

  It was on one of these sad reflective mornings that Nanang Pipa remembered an additional source of help which she had been overlooking. She thought very carefully before making her second novena to St. Jude and decided not to dilute the fervour of her appeal by making requests for material things. Instead she asked most humbly for one thing and one thing only, seeing that the Saint would have known her original crime had not been committed out of greed or ill-will. She asked for Justice, and waited for the eighth day.

  23

  THE DIG HAD PROGRESSED slowly at first. It had proved difficult to recruit local labour to remove the first few feet of topsoil, an unexpected result of the fear gripping San Clemente. Perfectly able-bodied young men had smiled politely and nodded and taken a step backwards when Philippine Heritage Museum staff had offered them spades.

  ‘There’s an excellent English word which the Victorians used a good deal about people like these,’ Ysabella observed to Sharon in frustration. ‘Unfortunately it’s rather out of fashion nowadays. The word is “feckless”. These guys show a distinct lack of feck. Don’t tell me they don’t need the work.’

  ‘They’re scared,’ Sharon said. ‘Crispa came up after you left yesterday and it took her about five minutes to suss it out. She’s from Marinduque and so are half these people here. They opened up to a fellow-Marinduqueña. They don’t like burial sites being excavated right in the middle of where they’re living. Plus there’s all sorts of other things brewing beneath the surface.’

  Ysabella looked around at the huts and the slime and the toddlers dressed in rice sacking who stood solemnly watching at a safe distance. There was a smell of fresh shit. It was hard to see what surface could possibly exist for things to brew under. It seemed less like a community than an encampment. The Museum had been obliged to hire its own labourers and between them they had now cleared a patch of ground maybe a quarter the size of a tennis court. Little as this was, it still brought them hard up against the surrounding shanties’ walls.

  ‘We’ll get rid of these,’ said Senator Vicente with a wave of his hand. With the publicity accorded his presence he had become the site’s de facto champion, protector and spokesman.

  ‘Early days yet, Senator,’ Sharon said restrainingly. ‘We don’t yet know how big it is. No point in moving people unnecessarily.’

  ‘I’m convinced it’s extensive,’ he replied. ‘It’s going to be bigger than Sta. Ana.’

  In his mind’s eye, Ysabella thought, he was seeing an excavation the size of Pompeii. So far they had uncovered six little skeletons and forty-three articles of porcelain and stoneware, only five of which were broken. This corner of the site appeared to be a burial ground used exclusively for children. They had been tucked into the salient beneath the grasses and the wild deers’ hooves with what must have been a pretty view of the bay and the trading settlement to the south-west. She found it easy to understand his excitement and impatience to lay bare whatever was there to be laid bare. She was equally gripped by the fascination which had infected everyone in the Museum’s team. What did it mean that they had so far found only infants’ and children’s graves? She knew that although it wasn’t common practice in these islands to bury children separately it was certainly not unknown. Indeed, she gathered that some of the mountain peoples in the interior of Panay still did so. The most celebrated previous example was at Sta. Ana itself, and it was this which brought them eagerly to San Clemente day after day, from dawn to dusk, in acute anticipation. For at Sta. Ana the children’s graveyard had been attached to one for adults, and the whole area had at length been revealed as a settlement. Expectations were running high that any day now San Clemente, too, would be found to have been the site of a pre-Hispanic village. Here and there makeshift awnings had been rigged, plastic sheeting strung between nearby hovels and a single palm tree which functioned as a support for a basketball ring as well as for several TV aerials. In this vinyl-scented shade Ysabella worked away with her trowel, hoping with each peck at the earth that she would be the one to find the first fragment of charcoal, an oyster shell, a cooked deer’s bone or other signs of a midden.

  ‘We’ll get rid of these,’ Ben Vicente kept repeating to Sharon. ‘Don’t worry.’ He thumped the wooden wall on the other side of which the cigar-chomping bulldogs played their endless game of cards. He spoke to the Museum staff who said ‘Yes, sir’ softly, ‘Opo.’ He came back and added ‘Really, it’s a godsend. If we’re to make any social progress at all here in Manila we’ve simply got to redevelop slum areas like these. Apart from the fact that it’s an eyesore and a health hazard this place is a prime piece of real estate. A major discovery like ours is a perfect reason for clearing and redeveloping the area once and for all.’ He caught Sharon’s unenchanted eye. ‘You surely can’t tell me you think people should live like this in a late Twentieth-century capital city?’ His gesture encompassed the little pairs of bare feet standing in the slime, the patchwork shanties, the pools of raw sewage crossed by duckboards. At her back she could feel the barrio’s flimsy, creaking weight heaped on the hillside as if it only needed someone to knock a few wedges and props loose for the whole thing to collapse into noisome scree and glissade down into the culvert below.

  ‘He’s right, you know,’ Ysabella said after he’d glanced at his watch, motioned to his driver and gone. ‘It’s no way to live.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Sharon.

  ‘You don’t agree.’

  ‘I said “Fine”. That’s what I’m saying, right? Fine. Can you imagine how many times over the last six years I’ve been through these sorts of argument? Like daily? Us rich folks are compromised the moment we land in these countries. There’s no high moral ground, Yzzy, believe me. Just unending lists of pros and cons. They want to trash San Clemente, they’ll trash it. Fine.’

  ‘Surely they’ll at least have to give people notice to quit and settle them somewhere better?’

  ‘Squatters? Sure, as there are reporters and foreigners around they’ll maybe give them a statutory month or so and talk about a rehousing scheme way out in Marikina. If it wasn’t for us they’d have them out this morning if they felt like it.’

  ‘“They” being us, too, ultimately?’

  ‘Only indirectly. As your Senator says, it’s a godsend. There’ll be all sorts of land deals and crap going on behind the scenes. There always are. It’s someone’s luck that an archaeological find’s the perfect excuse to evict. If they want to back it up they’ll get a tame heavy from the Department of Health to declare the place a major sanitation hazard. Or someone from the police will say the barrio’s a notorious hotbed of crime.’

  ‘Shabu addicts and that sort of thing?’ Ysabella had at last begun to feel her daily dose of the newspapers was giving her a certain familiarity with the domestic scene. This confidence was soon dashed.

&n
bsp; ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ said Sharon. ‘Shabu? For chrissake, what do you think all those movieland stars are high on? It’s the preferred drug of the leisure set. The Triads used to import it direct from Hong Kong and they’ve now got local labs producing it but even so it’s way beyond the means of people like these. Corex cough syrup with beer chaser’s about the level of San Clemente. The kids’ll be sniffing Rugby rubber cement. Shabu? Oh boy.’

  ‘Whatever the hell,’ said Ysabella crossly, ‘crime, sanitation, the nation’s heritage – in whatever name it’s done they’re still only words, aren’t they? The bottom line’s eviction. People being moved away and dumped somewhere out of the public eye. It’s a kind of airline-speak to lull fare-paying citizens.’

  ‘The Yzzy Bastiaan theory of social infantilism.’

  Ysabella hacked away at San Clemente’s foundations with her trowel. I notice these things – she thought – but I’m damned if I’m going to take them to heart. Nobody at the age of twenty-nine wanted to be revealed as naive, especially when they were notoriously sophisticated. That was what happened when one came to a godawful place like Manila in defiance of friends and common sense. One could only survive with equanimity so long as social derelicts remained faceless. They belonged to a very alien culture and assuredly had their own ways of dealing with whatever injustices that culture meted out. What was the point of investing them with the sensibility of a Briton? Different strokes for different folks, and all that. The trip she and Hugh had made last year to India had proved her point to the hilt. People there blinded their own children with red-hot needles, smashed their infants’ limbs, rubbed filth into their sores. When children were as much a beggar’s tools as spanners were a mechanic’s why bother to give them names at all? Well, it hadn’t been a happy trip for all sorts of reasons, including Hugh and the ashrams. She had left India with an acute attack of xenophobia. Something white and blue was glittering from a crumble of soil by her trowel’s point. Very carefully she began brushing the earth away. People grew out of each other, she thought in the moment’s abandon, her excitement increasing as she made out the lines of a ching pai boat. And if they didn’t, they ought to. She had its full length revealed now, the starboard side still embedded, the pillars of its little cabin gleaming white. Working with the camel hair brush she exposed more and more. The spots of cobalt blue had the brilliance of gems. For a moment everything in the world seemed to concentrate itself in that fragile six-inch sliver of porcelain at the bottom of a hole in the tropics. She wished only that the unknown Chinese who had wielded his brush at a kiln a thousand miles away and seven centuries ago could have known the intensity of pleasure he would one day give as his colour blazed out in the light of an alien day. That was the great attraction of this sort of dig, without a doubt. It all came down to aesthetic pleasure and neutral information. The archaeology of preliterate societies was necessarily value-free. Without written records there were no injustices, no villains, no heroes. Only skeletons, the nameless dead. No moral judgements could be made, only estimates of mortality rates, trading links, the incidence of dental caries, customs of skull-and foot-binding. Whatever appalling wrongs might have accompanied these children to their graves had long been swallowed up by the mass forgiveness of extinction.

  Senator Ben Vicente came nearly every day to view progress for himself. Sometimes he brought Liezel and Woopsy, on one occasion turning up with hayseed brother Doy, Magubat’s Governor, keeper of its relics and its developmental conscience. The two men ambled about, one or other throwing out a proprietor’s hand over San Clemente’s sagging tin and leaning doorframes. To Ysabella’s slight unease Ben had intensified his mode with her. He was as proper and respectful as ever, but now assumed her agreement with all his views and even her inclusion in any schemes he might dream up. She was an honorary member of his family, he suggested, and she felt herself swept along in the opulence of his self-assurance. It didn’t at all hurt to have powerful friends, she thought. When in Rome, as Sharon had once not quite said, it helped to have an introduction to Caesar. Yet the memory of her visit to Caesar’s private island had about it a nimbus of disquiet as if by recalling only an atmosphere she were evading a piece of knowledge. It was contained in the hulking Boyboy’s piteous internment, perhaps, or in his local jailer’s polished calves with the curling fish-scales stuck to them as he went about his duties in the long shadow of his landlord’s ruthless graciousness. And, to however small a degree, the extreme edge of that shadow fell across herself, too, even as it made her own father’s shade still duskier, to say nothing of her mother’s past. The feeling was of having unwittingly been compromised well before she ever set foot on his domain and heard forlorn crying in the night. However (as she told herself briskly) she had her own life to be getting on with and couldn’t afford to waste time dwelling on things she could do nothing about. Ben remained the sort of ally one badly needed in a place like this and there was no question that from an archaeological point of view his patronage of the site had already proved invaluable. Security was good; nobody had looted anything or damaged the record by cowboy attempts at pot-hunting. The value of that sort of intercession could hardly be overestimated, and the Philippine Heritage Museum was counting itself unusually lucky.

  Amongst all the city dignitaries, local bigwigs and curious rubber-neckers who kept dropping by to see what was happening in Manila’s most newsworthy slum was a strange Englishman to whom Ysabella had instinctively not warmed. Tallish, baldish, forty-fiveish, he looked to her what she would imagine a Graham Greene character would look like: troubled, leached-out, pretty much on autopilot from now until the Great Touchdown.

  ‘I do believe that’s a countryman of yours,’ Sharon observed mischievously after hearing him trying to question Mrs Tugos as she stood by her back door sadly watching the dig. To Sharon’s great delight Ysabella had reacted exactly as she thought she might.

  ‘Wouldn’t surprise me,’ she’d said gruffly without looking up from her work. ‘We get all sorts here.’

  So Sharon had climbed out and introduced herself and pointed out the top of Ysabella’s sunhat as concealing a compatriot. He, too, hadn’t let her down.

  ‘Ah,’ he said incuriously before wandering off, not without some obscure flash as of annoyance.

  Sharon had never worked out why certain Britons so hated recognising each other abroad. Was it all part of their baffling class thing? It almost seemed as if they were threatened with unmasking or else losing an imagined exclusiveness. She even wondered whether they had left Britain in the first place simply to get away from each other. Still, this one had come back after a day or two, asking all sorts of questions about the barrio while expressing remarkably little interest in archaeology. At first Sharon had taken him for a journalist but he claimed to be working on some sort of thesis. He had been in the country about nine months or so and seemed to know quite a few people.

  ‘Huh,’ Ysabella said one day, ‘I know that type. Not socially,’ she added hastily, causing Sharon more private amusement, ‘but that sort of decayed child-of-the-Sixties. Ex-TV? John Prideaux? Very vaguely; it’s just a name. Famous once, you know? All those questions he was asking this morning about what you thought the locals understood by “corruption” and “fatalism” and stuff: he’s so rotted with understanding he can’t even call somebody corrupt and have done with it. My mother knows people like that. They can’t speak plain English. Everything’s so tentative. It’s all hedged about with endless problems of definition. I mean, who’s got the time? It’s very elderly of him. I can’t say it more charitably than that.’

  ‘He’s doing a thesis, Yzzy. He’s an anthro. He wants to know how this place works. He asked Crispa the same things the other day. I told him if ever he gets any answers please to let me know. Don’t think I don’t ask myself these questions too, I said.’