Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Tiwarik lies little more than a mile off the coast, immediately opposite the fishing village of Sabay which from the seaward side appears as a straggle of huts on stilts half lost among the coconut groves. In front of them on the stony beach boats are drawn up, each of which in time becomes identifiable so it is possible on any particular day to read the beach and know who is doing what. The island is uninhabited (uninhabitable, practically, since there is no water) and tiny, being about a quarter of a mile across. But its size on a map – and I have never seen a map large-scale enough to mark it – would be deceptive, for it rises to a peak off in one corner which cannot be less than four hundred feet above the sea. There are no beaches, merely that one shifting coral strand on which we camped, maybe a hundred yards long and facing the mainland. The rest of Tiwarik rises from gurgling boulders more or less vertically up volcanic cliffs of black rock. From one quarter there is a steep sweep of coarse tall cogon* grass up to the forest which caps the peak. Seen from the strait on a breezy day the sunlight goes running up and up through this wild grassfield. It is the same effect as with young hair and similarly afflicts me with deepest melancholy, affection and pleasure.

  The island is normally used by fishermen in transit. The locals from Sabay and from Sirao and Malubog a few miles up the coast stop there and cook their lunch over driftwood fires lit between lumps of coral. They sit and repair their spear guns and lie up under the thin shade of the thorn bushes to snooze away the noon. Some of Tiwarik’s transients are from much farther afield, coming from provinces and islands in the south, Visayans speaking motley dialects and burnt black by the sun, journeying for weeks on end through the archipelago and selling their catches as they go. These are nomads whose boats have a subtly different cut and the left-over scraps of whose food are red with chili. They may sit out a storm on Tiwarik or appear at dusk to drape their nets among the corals. By dawn they have gone, leaving only the long scars of their keels.

  At any time a pair of dots might appear in the middle of the empty glitter, insectival as the minute twitch of paddles becomes visible. They land for a while then depart leaving blackened stones and several fish-spines. It comes to seem less volitional on their part than that the sea which sweeps through the strait has carried them here and borne them off again; that Tiwarik stands like a rock in a stream past which the water scurries, depositing small flotsams which eddy momentarily in freak pockets of calm before being carried away. This is not entirely fanciful; it is tempting to gaze across at Sabay only a mile or so away and think how swimmable it looks. In fact it is, but you must choose the moment. The current becomes very fast when the tide is going out. It is one of the place’s minor deceptions. When the sea is flat calm and the sun seems to hold everything in slow motion you can identify the distant figures on the beach opposite – Arman’s red T-shirt as he carries a pail from water’s edge to his beached boat Jhon-Jhon – and the sense of being able to talk to him is so strong it suggests that a mere few minutes’ pleasurable exertion could annul that small gap which separates you. As you were swept off down the coast for the thirty-hour drift through the archipelago to Luzon or – missing that – the rather longer trip to Taiwan you would have ample time to reflect on the un-novel idea that calm tropical surfaces can conceal fatal business.

  As I prepared to become a resident of this beautiful and significant rock, this divider of a current, a sense of austerity and impermanence exhilarated me. I knew I had reached somewhere, while of course reserving the right at a later date to deny ever having felt anything so portentous. After all I was already accustomed to the living conditions I would find there: I could hardly expect to learn anything new about leaky grass roofs and driftwood fires, the mildew and charcoal which bit by bit give all one’s few possessions a familiar and uniform colour. But to live alone in the middle of the sea would be something different. Hitherto I had always had a great bulk of interior at my back, mountains and forest patched with the orange scars of primitive agriculture receding into hazy distances with the sea comfortably confined behind a ruled margin of coastline. From now on the terms of living were to be drawn by water.

  That first sunlit morning of my return to Tiwarik, instead of doing the useful and practical things I had intended I simply climbed up above the beach to the grassfield and lay there looking down at the map of my new world the corals drew beneath the blue water. In the drowse, the half-shut eyes against the glare, the mind deceives itself. It sets itself adrift and feels the island move. The current coursing past Sabay towards Malubog and far Kansulay is no current but a wake. The sea is still; it is the island bearing the mind off on a voyage of its own with its sole inhabitant, its Crusoe.

  *

  Because I have never seen Tiwarik on a map I do not know if the island has an official name. Presumably it must, for the American Navy charted these waters most thoroughly when they supplanted the Spanish in 1898 as the Philippines’ occupying colonial power. Then in 1942 the Japanese took over forcibly, occasioning General MacArthur’s famous promise to return which he made as he stepped off Corregidor Island in Manila Bay into the light surface craft which carried him away to another theatre of war. Maybe the Japanese forces gave Tiwarik a name of their own during the three years of their occupation. Yet it seems unlikely they would have bothered with so insignificant a blob of land: there was much else to do besides work out Japanese name-equivalents for all seven thousand one hundred-odd islands in the archipelago. In fact I do not wish to know the official name of this place. I am afraid that discovering it would damage its identity. It would be like trying to adjust to an old friend who had suddenly changed his name by Deed Poll.

  It is the locals who call the island ‘Tiwarik’, which in Tagalog is ‘upside down’. The reason for this is not clear unless it is that from its seaward aspect the lump of hill with its awry cap of jungle appears oddly top-heavy and might fancifully be imagined turning turtle one stormy night, trapping its undetermined load of snakes, insects, tree-lizards and single majestic pair of sea-eagles among brush and branch under tangled foam. This apart, ‘Tiwarik’ might have been some long-dead fisherman’s nickname or a corruption of a forgotten original word not necessarily even Tagalog, since the influence of Visayan dialects is everywhere in the language the locals speak.

  Tiwarik is, come to that, the name they give to the razor fish, Aeoliscus strigatus, which can be seen in small groups among the corals, its delicate snout pointing down and the three-inch blade of its translucent body with single dark streak switching and tilting in the drifts of current. The balletic precision with which all members of the group act as one is remarkable, as is their agility for fish holding their bodies vertically in the water. Only if really chased or threatened does their angle change, heads coming up a few degrees for short evasive bursts. This tiwarik is not eaten except in a special circumstance. Dried and then powdered it is slipped into someone’s drink and becomes a potion guaranteed to make the drinker fall in love. Everybody smiles but knows it works, so its potency is much feared and tiwarik is resorted to only by the most desperately unrequited: as with all spells one can never be absolutely sure that the fulfilment of a dream will in the long run turn out to have been wholly a good thing. Certainly it does seem to potentiate the effects of alcohol. I once saw a girl become stertorously drunk after (allegedly) only two small glasses of tuba. After a night’s vomiting she awoke next morning with a headache and said dolefully she had been magicked with tiwarik and that she knew who had done it. She was inconsolable: the man in question was not her fiancé, whom she would now have to renounce in favour of the lout who had long pursued her and had now won her by underhand means.

  Surely the upside-down fish is powerful. With a flimsy body quite possibly toxic and quite possibly not, maybe its posture invests it with a sympathetic magic to express a condition which crosses a large cultural barrier: that of being head over heels in love.1

  *

  For five years, on and off, I had been living up in the h
ills behind Kansulay, another tiny village some thirty miles along the coast from Sabay and Tiwarik Island. It is yet another oddity in my relationship with the island that I should have been living so near it for so long without suspecting its existence. But thirty miles is very far in a province which has yet to build a tarmac road around its coast.

  As is the way in the Philippine provinces, where everyone seems to know everybody else, I already had an introduction to the barangay Captain at Sabay. It turned out he had long known of me because until a year ago one of his daughters had taught at the elementary school in whose catchment area Kansulay lay. The presence of a strange ‘kano living on his own in the woods was much gossiped about and in consequence Sabay knew of me before I knew of it. One day I walked down to the village and caught the first of a series of battered jeepneys which took me along the rutted coastal road for hours past anonymous villages among the palms, barrios and barangays whose names I never learned, to ever-smaller provincial townships where I changed jeeps: Bulangan, Malubog, Sirao. After Sirao the road vanished into a track ridged with grey-black lava, on the left the slopes of the massif rising above the groves and bearing its rain-forests into cloud, on the right the mobile blue of water. And there suddenly Tiwarik, placed just so on the other side of its strait the better to be seen entire.

  I was received in Sabay with caution and some astonishment. The smaller children ran away and hid behind their mothers’ legs or under the huts. Everyone smiled with unease. This changed to warmth and interest as soon as I had named names, spoken the magic syllables and identified myself as one encompassed – no matter how peripherally – by the huge and complex circle of family, friends and acquaintances spreading outward from Sabay. So this was the ‘kano from Kansulay? And he wanted to live on Tiwarik? Well, why not? But on the other hand, why? There was nothing there, no hotels or discos, no white beach, not even fresh water. Captain Sanso was baffled, not unreasonably, since I could give no explanation he would find plausible, especially not when I told him of the miserable and involuntary two days I had already spent there. I just thought I’d go back for a bit, I said, and did he have any objection to my putting up a temporary hut in which to live?

  Captain Sanso did not own Tiwarik but he thought this a fine idea. Already, I knew, he was working out the spin-offs of my presence for his impoverished village. I in turn had decided how much in default of rent I should contribute to the local economy. For the equivalent of twenty pounds he would provide me with materials and labour with which to build my house. Until its completion I was, of course, to stay with him. I was deeply grateful and observed that the village pump needed renewing, something which I was sure would happen in the near future if things worked out well. So a deal was struck inside his own sitting-room on whose naked cement-block wall was nailed a Lions International plaque reminding the reader of the Captain’s subscription to the principle of mutual help. He sent his bodyguard/factotum off to the village shop for a bottle of ESQ rum with which to toast ourselves. Within an hour of arriving in Sabay I was in the middle of a drinking session.

  Filipino drinking habits have a strange, intense air to them. In Europe, even when the drinking is done by the round as in an English pub, people do it mostly at their own rate and from their own glass. In the Philippines a single glass circulates, refilled as each drinker downs it at a gulp. When a spirit like rum is drunk a glass of water is on hand to act as a ‘chaser’. To see a table of people knocking back slugs of spirit with a shudder and at once follow it with a slaking gulp of water makes one think of an ordeal rather than a convivial custom. The drinking takes on an insistent, almost brutal rhythm. It is as if people were drinking to become drunk, as they usually end by becoming. What makes the custom more bearable is the code which insists on a plate of pulutan on the table: any kind of food which people can pick at with a communal fork or spoon. This may be no more than salted peanuts or it may be a stew of chicken or dog, vegetables done in coconut milk, fried fish. There is also a formula with which a timid or queasy drinker may skip a round by nominating a sakop or proxy. I have frequent recourse to this system; remarkably few nominees ever decline the extra burden.

  Captain Sanso introduces me to his youngest brother Arman, to Totoy and Danding and Silo and Jhoby and Bokbok. The names, at once familiar and unmemorable, slide through my rum-fumed brain. I smile until my face aches answering question after question. How old am I? Where is my companion? Why am I not married? Why do I want to live on Tiwarik? Is there treasure there? Where did I learn Tagalog? I answer some of the questions, duck others. The affability is tangible but under it curiosity runs with a hard and knowing edge: nobody does anything or is anything without good reason. From long experience I am conscious that these strangers are likely to become daily colleagues and friends. I try to make a dignified impression but merely look stupid because I keep forgetting who is who. Occasionally when I glance up from the arena of the table, now covered in puddles of rum, water and stew at which flies are sipping, I notice faces pressing in at the doorway, children’s curious faces, an old man with a stick. A group of girls bursts into giggles behind me so I turn and to their embarrassment ask them what they are really laughing at. Eventually one of them covers her mouth with a hand, a girl of saintly beauty who asks nearly inaudibly if I am related to the actor George Hamilton. I tell her that I expect I am if one were to go back several centuries. For some reason this excites the girls still further.

  In the late afternoon I strike a drunken deal with Arman to hire a small bangka from him, something in which I can paddle back and forth between Tiwarik and Sabay and the next morning, clear-headed and seen off from the beach by children, I head towards the island with the early sun rushing down on all sides. I bound over the wavelets; my arms seem tireless with excitement and well-being. I am filled with the overwhelming desire to do something, there is no telling what.

  That was the day I never did do anything but climb up to the grassfield and daydream. It was not until the following day I made a serious effort to acquire Tiwarik’s geography. Until I knew what the island contained and how it lay I could not begin to build my house. Site is everything, of course; I had freedom of choice since I had no claim on the land and the hut I was going to put up would probably not outlive the first serious typhoon.

  A position at the foot of the cliffs near where my companion and I had taken shelter had always been a possibility but I now found that the coral strand had changed its shape and position. Before, there had been a steep bank of shingle with a declivity which filled with water at high tide and became a hot lagoon before draining away at low tide. This bank had now vanished and with it the recurrent lagoon. Instead there was a spit of shingle jutting from an altogether narrower beach like a miniature port with its jetty. I soon realised that the whole coral bank shifted constantly, changing its shape with nearly every tide and during severe storms practically disappearing for a while as violent currents swirled it away. Yet it always returned. Consequently landing on Tiwarik was seldom the same twice running. I took pleasure in this feature. No sooner had the blackened corals, clumped together as supports for fishermen’s cooking pots, become familiar in their disposition than the sea scoured the beach clean of all sites taking with it the carefully-collected piles of fish spines (otherwise a menace to bare feet), cigarette packets, frayed ends of nylon twine and crisp curls of abrasive skin torn off a species of trigger-fish known locally and mystifyingly as bagets or ‘teenager’. All in all, then, this strand was clearly no place for a house.

  The ideal site, of course, was somewhere on the uplands where with the sea-eagles I could command the bright gulfs to every horizon. However, my scrambles up the cliffs had made it clear that convenience would have to take priority over enchantment: the thought of carrying water daily up to the top of the island was too forbidding. It was going to be enough to fetch it from the mainland in the first place. Eventually I compromised and chose a spot above one end of the strand where a prehistoric fall
of Tiwarik’s black igneous rock had left a ledge, roughly level and some twenty feet deep, covered in shingle and a scatter of topsoil on which grew a succulent mat of vines. From here I could gaze across the strait to Sabay, watch the comings and goings on its beach or let my eyes travel up the great slopes of the cordillera behind it, past the tilted prairies of cogon to the gorges of scree and observe the veilings and vanishings of cloud about the peaks. Even the most unsatisfied eye might not grow restless at such an outlook.