Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Occasionally I have a bottle of anisado which I buy in town and which I now produce like a punctilious suburbanite his bottle of Cyprus sherry from a compartment in the radiogram. We drink and fan ourselves for the night is deep and sultry, a muddy lid of cloud closing off the stars and shutting the Earth in a cooking pot from beneath the edges of whose top flashes of lightning leak in from outside. This lightning below the horizon is constant, soundless and meaningless since it heralds no storm, no rain, no change, nothing but its own fitful discharge. We talk of the steady fall in copra prices, of their son’s success with his catapult (four of the Philippines’ national bird and a good solid hit on Kuyo’s dog which was chasing their chickens), of the rumours that half the supplies of medicine for the little provincial hospital ten miles away have been sold on the black market by one of the doctors.

  ‘Ay!’ they laugh, shaking their heads as at the immutability of human behaviour. Sometimes I find their lack of outrage infuriating, at other times deeply admirable. It is a phlegm they need, for the Malabayabas family are tenants of the Sorianos.

  I had heard about their landlords before I finally met them since shortly after Lolang Mating’s death I decided to make life easier for myself by installing a hand-pump at the foot of the hill, hence not having to go so far to fetch my water. It seemed obvious the best site was behind Sising’s house; in this way we could all benefit. I bought a Chinese pump, twenty feet of galvanised iron pipe, a couple of bags of cement, and after some strenuous digging which I avoided by being occupied elsewhere the pump was installed and within two weeks was drawing sweet clear water. So far so good; but I had forgotten about who owned the land on which it stood.

  Shortly afterwards I was introduced to old Judge Soriano who lived away in town. He was a moulting old boy who spent much of his time sitting in a chair reading through his bound collection of Jehovah’s Witness texts dating from the Thirties or looking at photograph albums with his cronies. He had married just after the war and his favourite pictures were those of his honeymoon spent in America. He handed me many albums of black and white photographs so that I should have plenty to occupy me while I sipped my calamansi juice and he described his grandiose plans for building a Kingdom Hall on what the province’s government had officially named Capitol Hill, a jungly mass of bananas and rooting goats behind the market which had been earmarked for better things. There they were, Attorney and Mrs Soriano, beaming happily beside their rented Ford V-8 (it must have been just before the single-piece windscreen came in) at Ausable Chasm, Golden Gate Bridge, Niagara Falls, at all sorts of concrete diners in the middle of nowhere. In their two months’ touring they seemed to have covered pretty much the entire continent but their smiles had never flagged, at least not when facing the camera.

  I recognised Mrs Soriano at once when returning one day from town and dropping in on Sising and Bini with some cough medicine for their youngest. A stout woman in a blue dress wearing a good deal of jewellery and shoes with heels (in a coconut grove!) she was standing outside their house holding a stick. Nearby was a jeep whose driver was chatting to Sising and which must have been driven among the trees and across the stream.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ she called as I approached. ‘You must be the famous Mr James.’ We went through the rituals. ‘Why are you living here?’ she asked abruptly, smiling.

  ‘Why not? It’s nice and quiet up there on the hill. Sea-breezes at night, no noise, no NPAs.’

  ‘Where do you get your bread? Americans eat bread.’

  ‘I’m not an American. Anyway, I like rice.’

  She looked around in expressive silence at Bini’s youngest children playing in the dirt beneath the house, at Bini’s torn T-shirt, at Sising’s threadbare shorts, at the wornout rubber flip-flops mended with wire lying about, at the two old torch batteries placed on a tree stump to catch the sun and squeeze the last microvolt out of their exhausted chemicals.

  ‘You mean you want to live here in the bundok?’ she asked. She pointed with her stick at the hand-pump. ‘You paid for that? For these people?’ She was incredulous. ‘Perhaps you are very kind.’

  I said I had put it there for my own convenience.

  ‘You should charge them for using it, you know. Are you with the Peace Corps?’

  Questions, questions. I repeated that I was not American and explained how only Americans could belong to the Peace Corps. I knew it was a waste of time, that to her all white foreigners were ‘kanos, that she too thought England was one of the States. She was as bored as I; her attention was distracted by a couple of the Malabayabas’ chickens. She pointed with her stick.

  ‘Boks!’ she called to her driver. ‘I’ll have those unless you can see anything fatter. Everything’s so thin here.’ Her stick-point wandered with her attention, pointing now at little Lito beneath the hut. I dared not look at Bini whom I knew to be eaten up with shame about her own thinness, about that of her youngest child and about what it said of her and Sising’s failure to provide. Boks grabbed one chicken, Sising the other; they trussed their feet with stalks and tossed them into the jeep. Meanwhile Mrs Soriano’s stick-point had lighted on a hand broom which Bini had just finished making out of frond ribs. It was beautifully bound at the handle with a triple plait of nito. ‘That’s not bad,’ she said, her stick-point going from Boks to the broom. Bini surrendered the broom with a smile; it joined the chickens in the back of the jeep.

  I could not believe what I was seeing and I could not watch any more. What I wanted to say would have rebounded on Sising and Bini. I turned and walked off up the hill.

  ‘Goodbye,’ Mrs Soriano called out behind me. I knew she was bothered and uncertain. People acutely conscious of their own status are necessarily obsessed with that of others and she could not yet place me. Nominally I ranked high as a ‘kano (rich, white, maybe useful for contacts and help with getting visas for the family) but I had spoiled everything by going native, by failing to recognise her as a fellow member of the middle class and by not having the sort of job to which she could assign a notional salary.

  The real fact of the matter was that the Sorianos and I were separated less by a cultural or geographical gap than by a temporal one. They were still living in an era which was classically feudal and their relationships were those of feudalism. I thought back to school, to European history with its Jack Straws and Johnny Peasants confronting the tyranny of Lord and Lady Landowner, to sweet Auburn. I had never expected I might one day meet Lady Landowner and find her a fat Filipina with brown ringed fingers, a fake Dior handbag and a chauffeur-driven jeep with bald tyres. But then, neither had I expected I would be befriended by Johnny Peasant and brought palm wine and fried dog and the company of his family at night in case I was feeling lonely in my hut in the hills.

  Mrs Soriano may for a while have been wary of me and puzzled but within six months the self-assurance of her class had settled the matter. I had to go to Europe for some time; on my return I found the old Judge was dead and the Malabayabases embarrassed and despondent. They pointed to a grassless depression in the ground behind the house.

  ‘Where the hell’s your pump?’ I asked.

  ‘Mrs Soriano took it. She came one day and said that now her husband had died she would have financial problems and needed the pump herself. Boks came and he and Sising dug it up. But they’ve left the pipe going underground; it wouldn’t come up.’

  I was still recently enough arrived to have newly laundered shirts and trousers in my luggage. I broke them out and walked furiously back down to Kansulay. It was the wrong time of day for jeepneys. Eventually I caught a calesa with high wooden wheels and a bony horse which trudged us into town in a matter of hours. I went straight to the Soriano house and the first thing I saw was the pump lying on its side in the front yard among the chickens and litter. Mrs Soriano was called by a houseboy and emerged smiling gravely, as befitted a widow. I was in no mood for condolences.

  ‘That pump, Mrs Soriano. I want it back.’

&n
bsp; ‘Oh. I see. I understood you to say you had given it to the Malabayabas family?’

  ‘No. I said I had installed it for my own convenience. It just happens to be convenient for all of us, so I want it back.’

  ‘Let us go in, Mr James. I would like you to meet my eldest son.’

  Not having met Attorney ‘Cads’ (for Ricardo?) Soriano before, I felt able to commiserate perfunctorily with him on the recent death of his father. His mother was not in the mood for small talk.

  ‘Mr James has a legal difficulty regarding our pump,’ she prompted him. Cads looked unhappy; I suspected that like the old Judge he was more at ease drinking with his barkadas and indulging in congenial small-town malice. Indeed the law scene in Manila might well have been a bit too fast for him and it crossed my mind that his father’s death may not have been wholly unwelcome since it would entitle him to retire to this quiet provincial backwater while appearing selfless and dutiful. Certainly as he sucked his gold-and-ruby fraternity ring it was barely possible to imagine him plotting shrewd deals, still less successfully confronting their victims.

  ‘Not exactly your pump,’ I said in case leaving his mother’s adjective uncorrected constituted a legal admission of ownership.

  ‘I think my mother wishes to say, er, please sit down. Will you have coffee, a soft drink, calamansi juice? I am so sorry, you must be hot after your journey. Kansulay is very far. I used to go there a lot as a boy. We went to pick the duhats when the season came.’

  ‘Cads,’ said Mrs Soriano.

  ‘Don’t rush me, Mom. Mr James is our visitor and we haven’t met before although I have heard so much about him … Er, I think my mother wishes to say that the pump, having been installed on our family’s land, was with effect from that moment our pump. This is Filipino law. It is unfortunate that at the moment my mother had urgent need of it you were out of the country.’

  ‘Urgent need? It’s outside the window there, rusting on the ground. What was it urgently needed for, a chicken perch?’

  ‘Ha, a chicken perch,’ laughed Cads. ‘That’s a good joke.’

  ‘Plans change,’ said Mrs Soriano.

  Perhaps emboldened by so recently having been in Europe that I still felt a sophisticated globe-trotter ’s immunity, perhaps thinking of Sising being made to remove with his own hands the pump he had helped install, but most likely not wanting to go all the way to the river once again to fetch my own water, I abandoned caution and took the line I thought most likely to succeed.

  ‘Mrs Soriano, I don’t know whether you are aware of it but for many years I was a journalist and I still have a great many friends in the European and American Press.’ This was completely untrue. ‘If that pump is not back, installed and working at Kansulay by tomorrow evening I shall make it my business to ensure this story gets printed in the newspapers and that the name of Mrs Soriano is given global publicity as that of a wealthy Filipina who finds it necessary to steal a hand-pump from the penniless peasants who work her own estates. Believe me,’ I lied, ‘Associated Press and Reuters will leap at a story like this, especially now that the Marcos regime is starting to get a bad press.’

  Mrs Soriano blinked. Cads was sucking his ring hard.

  ‘That’s the world-wide angle,’ I went on. ‘Now as regards the local scene: I happen to be quite good friends with an ex-Minister’ and I named an old member of Macapagal’s government which the Marcos dynasty replaced. He was truly a has-been but still respected in many quarters as a serious man of culture and integrity who had survived the Martial Law persecutions with his honour intact. I noticed from her expression that Mrs Soriano knew exactly whom I meant. ‘Also, I believed the Governor of this province when he told me personally over dinner about his concern for land reform.’ This was outrageous. The man in question had indeed expressed concern, but I suspected it was lest land reform should ever be implemented. Nor did I point out something which Mrs Soriano would later work out for herself: that owing to my recent absence I had to be referring to the previous Governor, not the one who had just been installed in an attempt to redress some of my host’s flagrant misdeeds and repair the ruling KBL party’s public image.

  But it appeared my shameless and mendacious name-dropping had had its effect. Mrs Soriano was now all smiles.

  ‘But don’t you see, Mr James, it has all been nothing but a misunderstanding. I think I didn’t explain myself well. Thank goodness you came here so we could clear the matter up.’

  ‘I came here to get the pump back.’

  ‘Of course. But what I have been trying to explain, only I am so bad at it, is that it’s fine now. Ayos na. It’s okay. Good as new.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I think,’ said Cads, ‘my mother is saying she had the pump dismantled to carry out maintenance. It was broken.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Soriano. ‘Broken. No water would come. I said at the time they dug it wrong, they did not put a filter so sand gets in and wears out the balat … Cads, what is balat?’

  ‘Washer,’ I said wearily. ‘I understand perfectly, Mrs Soriano. That was very thoughtful.’

  ‘No, no. Those poor people.’ She was relaxed now, her rings flashing in the light from the louvred windows. Both sides had been allowed to lie their way onto neutral ground; faces were saved but I had won. That would not be forgotten at some future date. What I really wanted to say to her was Ano ka na, suwerte?, now a slightly dated piece of kanto-boy slang but which could still mock and deflate. It might be translated unidiomatically as something like ‘What are you, lucky or something?’ meaning, ‘Did heaven shit gold on you?’ But stressed with just the right inflection it really asked the same thing as that English phrase, inflected with equal subtlety: Who the hell do you think you are?

  *

  But that had been two years ago. Now Kansulay’s water project was about to move on a stage, entering the sphere of local politics. The morning after we braved the nono in their lair my engineering friend and I go off to our test dig and find the hole full of dusky water, overflowing away towards the eroded gully of the stream. Actually I am impressed by the quantity of the water and the speed with which the pit has filled. Not wanting to make my enthusiasm the pretext for his assent, however, I opt for a restrained, judicious note.

  ‘Well,’ I want to know, ‘tell me again: is it worth spending real money on a proper spring box here? Plus of course, what? a good kilometre of two-inch PVC pipe? If we decide to go ahead we’ll be getting into real money even allowing for all the work being done bayanihan.’

  He looks up at the forested hill above the spring and thoughtfully produces a calculator from his hip pocket. I am easily impressed when people produce the tools of their trade on-site; it denotes seriousness of intent. My father, who after all was not a surgeon, used a scalpel to sharpen his pencils. (Even I, carrying my home-made spear gun down to the beach at evening, walk in a little glow of professionalism.) I now notice my friend’s calculator is a scientific one, covered with buttons labelled for arcane functions. I want to feel confident in him.

  ‘I think,’ he says at length, ‘I think there will be enough water. But only for drinking. People must still do their washing in the stream.’

  ‘It’s as marginal as that?’

  ‘Yes. Also another very important thing. You know who owns this land? The Sorianos. If they want to make a kaingin here, ay, no more water.’

  The air suddenly seems loud with the clapping wings of metaphorical pigeons coming home to roost. In those intervening two years I had only seen Mrs Soriano once or twice in the market, long enough for each to bare teeth judiciously at the other, to enquire after the other’s health in that way which makes solicitude seem like bad taste. Who the hell does she think she is? I had wanted to know; and now here am I hoping to see the village’s new water system installed on her land. I know who the hell she is, and she me. My friend has correctly spotted the weak link which could break the entire project. For if indeed the Sorianos
did decide to make a kaingin and grow cassava where before there was merely a tangle of vegetation dotted with wild bananas and papayas, then that was undoubtedly what would happen.

  Kaingin is the most basic form of cultivation: slash-and-burn. It offers short-term rewards and long-term disaster; naturally people opt for the rewards. It is an easy way to clear a patch of land and the natural fertility of fallow ground is supplemented for a while by the potash and nitrates left by the burning. But on the steep hillsides of this province the rain soon washes away the topsoil once its cover is gone, silting up the streams and even altering the offshore fishing. From the air much of the Philippines is visibly scarred by this primitive form of agriculture. Some provinces are nearly ruined by it, whole populations having been forced to move from the wastelands they have made. Here at Kansulay’s potential source of drinking water it is easy to imagine what would happen should at some future date one of the Sorianos look at this unproductive hill and spitefully decide to get a couple of years’ worth of cassava out of it before turning their attentions elsewhere. Shorn of its lush green vegetation the bare soil would parch in the sun and the water which at present percolated the earth would be drawn upwards to boil invisibly off into the tropic air. Similarly when it rained the water would run straight off since there would be nothing to retain it.

  ‘What I’ll do,’ I say, trying to sound measured and responsible although I am already, unworthily, becoming a bit bored by the whole business since it has so quickly led into potential feud-and-trouble territory, ‘I’ll tell the barangay Captain what you say about the water only being enough for drinking and also that I will agree to start spending money only when he has extracted a written undertaking from the Sorianos that they will not turn this hill over to the kaingineros.’ How decisive that sounds. How dubious I really am about ‘written undertakings’. An ‘accidental’ fire (‘I have of course punished the offender’) and Kansulay will go back to drinking contaminated stream water.