by Gavin Young
The last building to fade from view as the Jhuvel steams away toward Cebu is Silliman University on the seafront. A magazine article (‘From Football Player to Millionaire’) in Frank Manching’s office had told me that William Chiongbian, the shipping magnate, founder and chairman of the board of William Lines, had spent eight poverty-stricken years at Silliman as a football star. Mr Chiongbian’s kicking prowess and agility were the mainstay of his team and the envy of their opponents. William Chiongbian’s brothers, George and Peter, own the Jhuvel.
On the Jhuvel I can’t pretend I didn’t feel a letdown. She was a magnificent ship, but she wasn’t a kumpit. I didn’t like to be so high above the water, so cut off from the crew, and I was still unused to being so free from anxiety. I had only one worry at the back of my mind – that I might miss the Swire vessel from Manila to Hong Kong – but that was some way ahead. Oddly enough, the absence of immediate problems made me uneasy, as if I’d overlooked something of great importance.
We arrived at Cebu at five thirty in the evening, and at the offices of William Lines I found that most of the staff had gone home. A girl said, ‘Victor Chiongbian? He’s no longer working here.’
Had there been a coup d’état? Had the president of the company, the founder’s son, been abruptly fired since I spoke to him from Zamboanga? No; with a brisk clack of heels, a more authoritative secretary appeared, said, ‘I’m Gloria,’ and got to work on the telephone.
I found Victor Chiongbian and his wife at an antique show at the New Plaza Hotel, a modern hotel built above the port apparently from the plans of Hitler’s bunker. They were an attractive couple. Victor, a pleasant, friendly man with a fair skin and a decisive manner, drove me to the Magellan Hotel, quite grand and busy, with more plants and much less concrete than Hitler’s bunker. ‘You’ll stay two or three days?’ he asked. ‘Our flagship, the Doña Virginia, sails to Manila on Monday. My father is very proud of her; we all are. You will have a stateroom, that’s easy. We’ll see our farm tomorrow, and we’ll take you to where Magellan was killed in Lapu-Lapu. You might like to see a cockfight. You’ve never seen one? I will arrange it. And you’ll meet my father. He is well over sixty, but spends his evenings in nightclubs.’ He laughed and glanced at his wife. ‘I like early nights. He has the energy.’
The security and hospitality of the Chiongbians and a ship waiting: the contrast with the past month was complete. I soon found that the flamboyance of the tropical islands of the south, where you can so easily imagine that men are leopards in human skins, was muted here. Compared with Manila or at least the southern Philippines, Cebu is a quiet, unhurried place that pillows its cheek against the soft folds of a mountain range and seems to doze.
Victor said, ‘Anyone who says he’s busy in Cebu is a liar. People work harder in Luzon [the northernmost of the Philippine Islands where Manila is], where life is more insecure. It is harder to find work there, and they are frequently visited by typhoons that sweep away hillsides, bridges, even dams. Cebu is a city of the semi-retired.’
‘Yet from Cebu you and your father are running this great shipping line, which he built from nothing.’
‘Oh, well….’
I liked Victor’s gentle, firm style and modesty as much as I came to like his generous, hardfisted and boastful father, William. Victor’s house in the Cebu equivalent of Beverly Hills looked down from green lawns on Magellan’s landing place. Here the explorer’s three ships, Trinidad, Victoria and Conception, arrived in April 1521, flying the flag of Spain. (He had found a sponsor in King Carlos after suffering poverty and scorn in the service of Portugal.) Here the noble and diplomatic Portuguese limped ashore – he had been badly wounded in a battle with the Moors – and made friends with Rajah Humabon, impressing him with the roar of his cannon and the thickness of his men’s Spanish armour, receiving presents of gold, ginger, palm wine, fish and figs ‘more than a foot long’, according to his chronicler Antonio Pigafetta.
Victor could also look down on the little island of Mactan, where, three weeks later, Lapu-Lapu’s warriors killed Magellan and his landing party with rocks and bamboo spears.
Magellan’s peaceful wooing of the friendly rajahs lasted barely a month. Less than three weeks before the landing at Cebu, he and his dying crew had made their landfall at the uninhabited island of Homonhon at the mouth of the Leyte Gulf in the eastern Philippines. His men were sick and had been terribly weakened by the crossing of the Pacific. Pigafetta recounted:
We [were] three months and twenty days without taking on board provisions or any other refreshment, and we ate only old biscuit turned to powder, all full of worms and stinking of the urine that the rats had made on it, having eaten the food. And we drank water impure and yellow. We ate ox hides, which were very hard because of the sun, rain and wind.
On Homonhon, Magellan’s polyglot crew – Spaniards, Greeks, Germans, Italians, French, Flemings and Malays – found freshwater springs, and the coconut milk refreshed them. They wooed the Tagalog-speaking islanders like suitors and brought ashore presents – ‘red caps, mirrors, combs, bells and other things’. Magellan himself gave the local rajah, Calambu, a robe of yellow and red cloth and a fine red cap, and then, to the rajah’s delight, suggested that they become blood brothers. They embraced and cut their wrists, letting their blood mingle according to the Malay custom of casicasi.
A few days later, on Easter Sunday, Magellan invited the rajah and his brother to attend mass ashore. Kneeling in the sun, the rajahs copied the actions of the Portuguese captain and his crewmen, ‘going on their knees with raised hands at the elevation of the Host’. As they did so, a salute from the guns of the three ships rolled across the bay.
Magellan had already refused to accept a ‘bar of massy [heavy] gold’ and, in other ways, had shown the Filipinos that he was not there to plunder or harm them. As the result of such modest behaviour, the rajah volunteered to guide the three ships to the larger islands to the west, only asking Magellan to wait two days while his people took in their rice harvest. Thus it was that the King of Spain’s little fleet came to Cebu and astonished the eyes of Rajah Humabon. Introduced by the friendly rajah from the Gulf of Leyte, Magellan made a Christian of Humabon almost at once, christening him ‘Don Carlos’ after the Spanish king. Within ten days Cebu was a Christian island.
But the end of the idyll was not long in coming. A chief, a vassal of Humabon, arrived from the little island of Mactan, pleading for help against a rival chief named Lapu-Lapu. Magellan moved his ships across the narrow strait and disembarked a landing party in the shallow water of Mactan, Lapu-Lapu’s capital. Tragedy followed because the guns of the ships were too distant to cover the landing. Lapu-Lapu’s fifteen hundred warriors charged down to the shore hurling rocks, spears and arrows at Magellan’s forty-nine men. Later, Pigafetta told the King of Spain that the captain ‘ordered us to withdraw slowly, but the men fled while six or eight of us remained with him. As a good captain and a knight he still stood fast, fighting for more than an hour.’ The end came when an islander jabbed at his face and Magellan thrust him through with his lance, leaving it in his body. He struggled to draw his sword, but a spear took him in the left leg and he fell face down. In the clear shallows, over sand as white as sugar, like the shallows I had waded through on the Sulu island, Lapu-Lapu’s warriors finished him off. In crystal water Magellan died – ‘Our mirror, our light, our comfort and our true guide.’
Standing beside Victor and looking down on the narrow strait between Mactan and Cebu and the modern steel bridge arching over it, Jalah’s wobbly chant came back to me from the Allimpaya’s wheelhouse:
‘Rajah Humabon make them veree happee,
All people will baptize under the church of Christ…
But Lapu-Lapu is veree bad.
To drive Magellan to go back home …
O, Mother, Mother,
I am seek,
Call the doctor veree queek….’
My notes continue:
Victor i
s dynamic and restless. Perhaps he alone is a busy man in Cebu. On his farm on the western side of the island, he walks fast and determinedly through the acres of trees and cultivation. He has a ranch in Mindanao, he says, but doesn’t go there now because of the violent deeds of the Moros. Instead, to get away from it all he goes fishing and shooting on Palawan Island. Here he has knobbly green hills to stride over that are cultivated with coconuts, mangoes, bananas and rice. Plans fill his head: for pigs and pig manure, the marketing of sweet lemons, a distillery.
Victor is not a particularly big man, but he orders huge meals – I suspect only for my benefit – and gulps them down. We drink at least two sorts – one sweeter than the other – of home-made tuba, the fermented sap of the coconut palm, coloured and slightly embittered by powdered tanbark, the mangrove husk that the Allimpaya carried from Sandakan. It’s good the dry kind especially, and costs less than 25 pence a gallon.
In the market of Asturias there are slabs of dolphin meat, dark red like horse’s liver, and manta-ray steaks. The local villages are of wood, houses bright with coconut shells suspended by thin chains from their gables holding sprays of orchids. Their plaster-fronted, ornate Spanish churches remind me of the flamboyant birthday-cake churches of Tuticorin in southern India. To reach Asturias we have to pass the Atlas copper mine – ‘the biggest in all Asia,’ says Victor. It is like a huge quarry, an ugly dried-up wound in the landscape. Foliage for acres around is grey with dust from it. It is the biggest man-made wound in Asia.
Thirty Six
A small wicket gate leading to the cockpit announced that ringside seats cost twenty pesos and the balcony ten pesos, or rather more than fifty pence.
From the car park to the cockpit gate dozens of men and boys shifted from foot to foot, lovingly stroking the backs of roosters they held in the crooks of their arms like bagpipes. The bound legs of the roosters hung down, their long, glossy green-black or white tail feathers arching over their owners’ elbows, and they glared about, beadily eyeing their rivals. Defiant cock-a-doodle-doos filled the air.
Near the gate, food vendors were roasting chicken on spits; some of the turning naked bodies on the spits were birds killed earlier in the ring. The smell of the flesh of their brethren did not appear to worry the living roosters.
We ducked through a wooden tunnel into the small pyramid-shaped building with a corrugated roof that housed the cockpit. Victor Chiongbian’s brother led me to a tiny stall, like a box at a theatre, with three wooden seats in it. Metal rails separated us from the eight-sided ring. People stood ten deep in the balcony and around us, at the ringside, twelve to fifteen deep, shouting and sweating under overhead lamps.
Two handlers bring in their birds and squat with them between their knees, facing each other. Each handler grasps his bird’s longest tail feather, curbing it as it strains forward, beak to beak with its opponent. The shouting grows. Men in the audience leap up to flourish fingers at men in the arena, and exchange complicated hand signals like deaf and dumb language. The betting has begun.
A golden-maned bird is matched with a monster with a russet ruff. They are held up by their handlers, who thrust them forward so that each bird can get in a few pecks on its opponent’s neck or breast; thus they further madden each other. Then the handlers fix a spur like a small scimitar to each of the birds’ heels, unwind the threads that imprison their legs and then set them down, beady eye seeking beady eye, ruffs rising in a fury. Immediately they spring at each other, clash in mid-air with an explosion of feathers, drop, wings outspread, brushing the earth, fly up again, slashing, changing places as one cartwheels over the other. They teeter, recovering balance, then are up again, slashing. In a flash, one bird is capsized in the dust, tries to rise, sinks back twitching, dying and its handler snatches it up before it is pecked to pieces. Head down, inert, blood coming from its beak and nostrils, the dead bird is carried away, a lump with feathers, tonight’s meal, legs dangling, beak ajar; it is hard to recognize it as the monster with the russet ruff. The victor, still furious, is gathered up firmly and proudly by its owner. Its spur is carefully sheathed; and sheath and spur are untied. As it is borne out of the arena it shrieks one last triumphant crow to its applauding fans. The fight has taken ten or fifteen seconds. Now it is time for another, and without delay the next two birds are brought in.
Bout follows bout through the afternoon. White bird against red; greeny black against mottled white and black. Flutter, spring, roars from the crowd, flutter, spring, slash. The birds cartwheel about the ring like feathered squibs, and small feathers fly outwards, tickling nostrils at the ringside. Speed blurs the flurries, so that I find them impossible to follow. In next to no time, the winning birds are on tiptoe, crowing; the losers are tottering, falling, twitching, dying. The mayhem goes on and on in the heat of the overhead lamps and the noise of betting.
‘A good cock imported from the United States can cost four thousand pesos,’ a friend of Victor’s brother shouts in my ear. ‘Over five hundred dollars.’
‘A lot of money to lose for twenty seconds in the ring.’
‘Sure. A fight can take ten seconds, or it can last ten minutes with a good pair that last well. Ten minutes is the limit.’ He peels off a handful of banknotes and hands them to a man in a sports shirt in the ring who leans over the metal rail.
A seated group of fat, elderly women munch scarlet half-moons of dripping watermelon. Bottles of Pepsi-Cola are passed down the rows of spectators, and a vendor holds up, fanlike, five roasted chickens on skewers.
My friend says, ‘There are all walks of life here in the cockpit – hustlers, pickpockets. The important thing is to know and watch who you bet with; otherwise, if you win, you may find he’s disappeared.’
‘Would you like to see a slasher?’ asks Victor’s brother. ‘That’s what we call the spurs.’
He hands me a tiny scimitar two inches long, with a sheath to match. ‘Be very careful with the slasher, eh? It is very sharp.’ It was as keen as a razor blade.
‘Sometimes, when the bird starts struggling, the handlers get cut themselves. The sheaths we call holsters. The vulnerable part of a bird is under the armpit, near to the heart, or the spinal column at the back of the neck. Not the head; the head can withstand.’
‘It’s all luck, isn’t it?’ I ask.
‘Mostly luck, except that maybe a good imported chicken has better feeding and endurance to bear wounds and the heat. Of course, the slashers puncture the flesh going in and cut coming out, so they make a big wound. That’s why they can reduce endurance to nothing. One cut and you’re dead.’
As we watch it is explained to me that some fighting-cock owners keep stables of hundreds of birds. Win some, lose some. ‘Look, that white one has turned chicken,’ Victor’s brother says with unconscious humour when a contestant loses interest in the fight and tries to run out of the cockpit.
The cockfights are on every Sunday, and on fiesta days and legal holidays, and sometimes are held to raise funds for a charity. There are two cockpits in Cebu City, always full.
‘How long will the fights go on today?’
‘As long as there are chickens outside. If there are plenty of chickens, they’ll run until midnight. There’ll be plenty of chicken dinners in Cebu tonight and tomorrow.’
We stayed about two hours, through countless fights, none lasting more than a minute. I wasn’t sorry to leave the inferno of heat, noise, blood and feathers. When we left, men and boys were waiting outside in the sun, stroking the birds they held lovingly under their arms.
*
Sixty-six-year-old William Chiongbian, the multi-millionaire founder of the William Lines and the father of Victor, is a keen cockfighter like most Filipinos, and, from time to time, has kept expensive stables of fighting cocks. He told me a strange story.
Once, on his farm, a cobra swallowed a nestful of twelve hen’s eggs – twelve potential fighting cocks. Soon the snake was discovered by William Chiongbian’s cowboys, who killed it. The
eggs were rescued from the stomach of the cobra, but only one hatched. This chick grew up to be an amazing fighting cock, and, of course, it was named Cobra.
‘Yeah,’ said William, ‘Cobra survived eighteen fights. Imagine that. Eighteen. That’s somethin’. Then I put it out to stud, and finally it died in its bed. Its progeny, though, were terrible cowards – one scratch and they ran away. I was a laughing-stock, so I gave up. A cock that runs away shames his owner dreadfully.
‘You know, it’s a cruel business. You tend a chicken, right? Stroke it, feed it like a child, give it the best vitamins, talk to it, name it. All this for two years. Then you lovingly carry it into the cockpit like your own baby and – phwit! – in five seconds it’s a bundle of feathers, lifeless, gone. Pitiful.’ I was glad he had said that.
I met William at an evening reception Victor and his wife had taken me to. He was shortish, broad, his slicked-back hair black in spite of his age; his waist was slim and he looked quick on his feet like the boxer and footballer he’d been forty years before. He himself had the face of an ageing fighting cock, a lightweight-boxer face, with a square jaw and a pleasant grin.
