Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  I gave Captain Sanso money, he gave orders. Soon bangkas laden with helpers landed on Tiwarik’s strand and the cliffs echoed to the sound of bamboos being split. Several sorties to the top of the island were organised and various stout timbers borne back from the forest, dripping with sap which dangled snot-like from their cut ends. Apart from nails, tools and nylon line little had to be brought from the mainland. The one exception was palm fronds for weaving the panels of sulirap with which to cover the bare bones of roof and walls. The lack of a single palm tree on Tiwarik was fairly conclusive proof that the island had never been inhabited. There was not even a wild papaya tree, which surprised me for I had already noticed the steady traffic of birds across the strait and would have imagined they had long since brought in their gut the seeds of this ubiquitous tree. The papaya, like the dragonfly, is unchanged from its fossil predecessors: a survivor which seems to suggest it is perfect in some way not immediately apparent (certainly not in the boringly-flavoured, cheesy-textured fruit it bears like skin tags around its bole).

  At the end of three days I have a simple house and several new friends. Arman, perhaps by virtue of being the Captain’s brother, has about him an ease and openness which makes him accessible. He is immediately recognisable as a fisherman for instead of the uniform Asian black his hair is a strange layered thatch of brown with auburn tints and streaks of authentic dark blond. Only the fisher-boys’ hair goes this colour, and only if their fishing is full-time and involves diving. Ordinary fishermen – generally the older ones – who sit in boats for hours with a hook and line remain largely unaffected. Arman also has a diver’s physique: deep chest and shoulders, slender waist, powerful thighs. At twenty-seven he must be past his physical peak but is still probably the fittest of all Sabay’s fishermen because – as I discover later – he alone does not smoke.

  Arman has brought with him his young cousin Intoy, a boy in his earliest teens whose hair is also tawny. Intoy is unabashed by my foreignness, is openly curious about the whim which has brought me here, wants to know if I have any komiks with me. He laughs a good deal and leaps about like a sprite. Once he discovers I am a spear-fisherman we have an earnest discussion about techniques and trigger design which brings Arman and the others over. This of all subjects seems to be the great ice-breaker. We might have had one of those knowing, raunchy conversations about sex which occasionally serve but I would not have been treated as seriously as I now am when I describe my own method of waterproofing a cheap Chinese flashlight for night diving. Intoy asks about the commonest species of fish ‘where you come from’. He means Kansulay and makes it sound as remote and vague as England (which everyone in the provinces here thinks is one of the states of the Union).

  When finally my house is complete Intoy walks all round it appraisingly and announces he will live here. Arman promotes this idea.

  ‘You can’t live without a companion,’ he says.

  I tell him I am quite used to it. Everyone is aghast so it is clear they had none of them believed me at the drinking session that first afternoon.

  ‘At least you must have a bantay,’ somebody suggests.

  I don’t think I will need a guard, there being no-one else on Tiwarik.

  ‘Ruffians come here,’ says Arman darkly. ‘All sorts of criminals from the Visayas. They may land one night, creep up and cut your throat.’

  I say I think I am more likely to die several fathoms down than have my throat cut.

  ‘Well then, you must have a servant. Intoy here will keep you in firewood and bring your water across each day. He’s a good boy, quite strong.’

  ‘About as strong as boiled seaweed,’ agrees another boy whose job has been to cook rice for the construction team. Amid laughter he and Intoy tussle and roll down the shingle spit into the shallows where they thrash like porpoises. I know why Arman is insisting. It is partly that my payment of his cousin for houseboy duties would bring some money into the child’s family but also it is a matter of propriety. That a visitor – especially a ‘kano – should live nearby unaided is not correct. I recognise this; it has taken me several years to establish my independence at Kansulay in a way which merely makes people rueful and indulgent rather than giving offence.

  I explain I am a writer who needs time and space to himself. Intoy comes up and dumps himself down, dripping and panting, and says I can send him away whenever I wish. And in fact at that moment I want them all to go away and leave me alone with my new house.

  After a bit they do and I lie on my stomach on the floor and watch from the open doorway their little flotilla nearing Sabay. The bamboo strips beneath me smell sweetly of sap, their curved surfaces still green. It will be some weeks before they turn to blond and the nail heads to black.

  Later that same evening after eating fish and rice by firelight I go back down to the shore to clean the dishes in the lapsing wavelets, scrubbing them with handfuls of gravel. They remain coated with a film of cooking oil which will stay constant day after day. The moon is dazzling, awesome, full this very night. A drift of silver molecules washes away from the dishes; it will be broken down by marine organisms within the hour.

  First nights in strange places can determine how one sees them for ever after. This is my second first night on Tiwarik and it is determined not to efface itself into just another tropic nocturnal. The puddled mercury which is the sea, the wheeling galaxies above and the island at my back full of the metallic sheen of leaves give off the strangest light. It is as if everything generated its own luminescence which the moon then gathers into its brilliant lens. Tonight the moon stimulates the secretion of light from things much as the regular use of a well encourages the flow of its own waters. The whole of Tiwarik, that irregular bulk of rock and soil jutting from the ocean, must be veined with capillaries along which this light leaks and gathers and overflows from cliff face and grass blade and forest canopy. The serenity and clearness seem a good omen and I go back up to my hut with the dishes, content to be here.

  But the omens are not yet finished. I blow out the lamp and lie on the floor listening to the slow breathing of the sea below, the crickets in the grass around the house. From nearby a gnarled rattling prefaces a tree-lizard’s loud repeated call as it names itself in Tagalog: tu-ko, tu-ko, tu-ko … American troops in Vietnam knew it as the fuck-you lizard but the sound of these syllables is less close, maybe saying more about the namer than about the named. As I lie pleasurably adrift I become aware of change. The noises are fewer, the chirpings and chitterings are stilled, the harsher cries from up in the island’s cap of jungle die away. Even the sea sounds muffled. I open my eyes. Instead of brilliant chinks of moonlight in walls and roof there is nothing but dark. I get up, open the door and fumble down the bamboo steps into a weird landscape.

  The moon is still there but it has nearly gone out. Its flawless disc is still flawless but now dulled to a deep amber as if seen through a piece of broken beer bottle. A primaeval shiver runs over me, a sense of having been transported a million years forward to the Earth’s end. It would be more bearable if the insect noises were still confidently asserting independence of such cosmic trivia. But nothing moves. It is as if all living creatures together with the sea and the wind were silenced by the desolation of total eclipse.

  As the minutes go by and the Earth is held motionless I recover sufficiently to reflect on my amazing good fortune. At school there had occasionally been announcements that everyone could skip the class immediately following Break in order to watch a partial eclipse of the sun, and we had dutifully gathered outside with pieces of smoked glass. But it had always been cloudy, that grey overcast which conspires to shield Britain from the universe. After half an hour we all trooped in again, not even particularly disappointed and with our faces smeared with lamp-black. Yet here, my second first night on Tiwarik, there is a total eclipse of a full moon in a cloudless sky which lasts for nearly two hours. It is astounding.

  Certainly it is easy to understand people’s terror of
eclipses, even of the moon. When on my ninth birthday I was given an Army signal lamp I was enraptured by it and its accessories but became wary of one particular piece of equipment. This was a pair of rubber goggles with deep red lenses for use when a red glass cap was fitted over the lamp, enabling the signaller to send without the beam giving away his position. The first time I went out into the garden on a sunny day wearing them I was seized with a complete terror of the apocalypse. The world had turned to blood. The tennis lawn and the cherry trees were an alien landscape, as it were Mars at war. Above it flamed a terrifying sky, raging with billows of incandescent gases. I was suddenly the last person alive anywhere, my parents and sister and dog a million years dead on another world and I condemned to witness the destruction by fire of the universe before myself being consumed. I tore the goggles from my face and surfaced into warm June sunlight. Beneath its reassuring lambency the lawn was now a luscious green while in the sky overhead the boiling smoke had changed to mild heaps of drifting cumulus. Thereafter whenever I wished to frighten myself I would walk about wearing the goggles, sweat pooling in the rubber eyecups, partially emboldened by the spicules of white light leaking in at the side of the lenses through ventilation holes.

  Now on Tiwarik I note the reddish tinge of the eclipsed moon and understand the biblical references to its turning to blood. At the same time, of course, I am captivated by the oddness of the phenomenon. It is so rare and completely unexpected I do not know quite what to do with it, so after walking about experimentally for some time I come back and sit on the top step and watch the first splinter of silver as the untrammelled disc begins at last to slide clear of the shadow. No doubt about it, this heavenly body has nothing whatever to do with the bleak satellite on which men landed nearly twenty years ago. That was merely the Earth’s moon. But the brilliant mandala whose last segment of tarnish is wiped clear as I watch, this is The Moon. The Moon is an act of the imagination and will remain forever unmarked by the cleated boot-prints of interlopers. And from all around crickets burst back into song, the tuko calls, the sea breathes again. Now I can go to sleep.

  * See Glossary, p. 267.

  2

  When living in Kansulay I commute between the forest and the village by the shore, a distance of only a mile or so but quite enough to tinge things with the remoteness of the interior, the bundok.

  The path from Kansulay takes me up a valley whose floor was long ago planted with coconuts. Eventually the path forks off, crosses a stream and climbs steeply up one side among wilder vegetation until it comes out on top of the bare ridge where my hut stands. From here I can look down into the valley without at any point being able to see its floor, only the dense crowns of the palms, infinite sprays of tail-feathers and the coconuts’ amber gleam. Invisible beneath them are two huts several hundred yards apart. One is the house of my nearest neighbours, the Malabayabas family, whom I see almost daily. The other is a ruin and stands by the stream amid the pink-grey pillars of the coconuts. There with several pigs once lived Lolang Mating.

  Lolang Mating was undoubtedly an exceptional person by rural Filipino standards in that although she was a grandmother (as the honorific implies) she chose to live alone, away from her family who were down in the village. She was visited daily by her son and her grandchildren who are now muscular teenagers with feet calloused from climbing trees. They came as much to feed the pigs as to see Granny but to all appearances relations between them were reasonably cordial. However, the old woman refused absolutely to go down and live with them. Probably nobody had actually pointed out that it was unseemly for a woman in her seventies to live on her own in the semi-wilderness: it would have been superfluous in a culture where the principle of family proximity is supreme and where the question Who is your companion? is habitually asked whenever any activity such as eating or sleeping or merely walking home is proposed. In a land where nobody does anything alone from choice, where a bamboo floor densely packed with sleeping bodies is considered far preferable to luxurious solitude, where superstition as much as a lack of torch batteries keeps people indoors after dark, Lolang Mating chose to live alone in her hut.

  In time I became friendly with her as I went to and from the village for necessities such as rice and cooking oil. When I fetched water from the stream nearby in the mornings I would see her, patched skirts tucked up around bowed mahogany legs and with her grey hair done up in a bun skewered with a bamboo sliver, standing in the current washing her wrinkled chest. With instinctive decorum we would pretend not to have seen each other as I suddenly found something to interest me a little way off. Then she would call out a greeting and I knew I could come and lay my plastic jerrycan on its side in the stream and chat. By now she would have changed her blouse and be washing yesterday’s with an end of bright blue detergent soap.

  Those early morning conversations with Lolang Mating became a feature of daily life at Kansulay. We would sit on the low boulders with our feet in the current while the palm fronds combed the sunbeams as they fell on the water and butterflies floated on the air. She would talk and unaccountably fall silent, absently raising and lowering the blouse into the water, sometimes beating it with a paddle hacked from the spine of a frond as if to emphasise an inward voice. She would talk to me of the Japanese Occupation, of the anti-Japanese guerrillas, the Hukbalahap, whom she had once sheltered. She would talk of pigs and murders and Mayor Pascual who had been born without an arsehole – she knew because as the midwife she had delivered him – and the doctor had had to make one with a pair of scissors. She talked about the days when you could shop for a family with a single piso and when almost anyone who wore a proper hat spoke Spanish. She knew a lot about the magicians who lived in the hills of the interior and grew whole fields of tintang luya, black ginger, that rarest of freak plants whose properties were immensely powerful. Black ginger would help you cast spells or defend you against manananggal, vampiric horrors which squat in the rafters of huts where there are babies or the sick and let down their tongues to suck out the sleepers’ livers.

  ‘So aren’t you frightened here at night?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said.

  ‘But believing in all those spirits and dwarves and ghosts and vampires?’

  ‘I believe in them of course, I often see them. But I’m not scared of them. They’ll never trouble me. They never have and I’m an old woman now. As long as I’m in my place they’ll leave me alone because they know it’s my place and not theirs.’

  ‘Like dogs.’

  ‘Like that.’

  She told me she was born here. I looked instinctively towards her hut, its legs and walls bleached silver with age. It was not the house she had been born in, of course, but it was on the same site, as she explained on another occasion. To Europeans accustomed to nostalgia about old things Filipinos can sometimes seem strangely matter-of-fact about impermanence. In an architecture of light wood structures and grass or palm thatch, termites and typhoons between them make a fifty-year-old house an antique. Houses are quickly built and newness is valued as a sign that the family fortunes are on the up-and-up. A patched or sagging house speaks of poverty and low spirits.

  Of the house in which Lolang Mating had been born not a trace remained but a blackened rectangular pit where she told me one of its four legs had stood. The original post-hole had been enlarged and was now used as a kiln for making charcoal from coconut shells.

  ‘When I was born there were no coconuts here,’ she said one day. ‘This was all forest like up there where you live. We had a clearing where my father kept pigs. We found bananas and papayas in the forest and grew kamoteng-kahoy which we carried down and sold in the village. Then our landlord bought the land and decided to cut it all down and plant coconuts. I remember how ugly it looked, the land burnt off and with tufts of coconut seedlings in rows. Now of course it’ll soon be time to cut them down and replant them. They should have been re-planting all the time, not waiting for them to become old at the same moment.’<
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  This spot by the bend in the stream had always been her place regardless of what vegetation came and went, and about it she was not a bit matter-of-fact. She spoke of Kansulay as of some alien city, not as a small collection of houses identical to her own a bare mile away by the sea and lived in almost exclusively by her own relatives of varying remoteness.

  ‘Too much noise there,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t live in that house of Dando’s’ (Dando was her son). ‘Children and cooking and drinking all the time, day and night. And I don’t like that electric light they want to put in. It hurts my eyes. Too much light at night is harmful: you can tell because it makes people look older, even the children. It does something to the skin. And when you go outside you can’t see anything for five minutes.’

  A genuine solitary, then, recognisable at any time and in any culture. The thought was not displeasing that I too might end my days standing in a dappled stream at dawn soaping my wrinkled chest and at night putting luminous fungi in a glass jar to cast a soft radiance inside my hut. One day Lolang Mating was found sprawled on the earth beside her kayuran, the low wood tripod with a serrated flange fixed to its beak used for grating coconuts. She was taken down the track to the village and put to bed in Dando’s house. I went to see her a day or two later. She was ambling about on her tough old legs but as if lacking a pig to feed or a blouse to wash she could no longer remember where she was going. There was talk in the family about ‘high blood’; I assumed a minor stroke. She seemed quite unimpaired but there was a remoteness in her eyes that was new.

  ‘They won’t let me go,’ she told me. ‘They say I can’t go on living there, I might die there all alone.’

  ‘I expect it’s for the best,’ I said ritually, but we both knew it wasn’t. She had been born there, why could she not die there among the fireflies and the frogs and the crickets? What was so special about having family faces stare down at you and pester you with medicines?