Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  *

  When I think of Sising and Bini or of my friends at Sabay, I come up against ordinary affection, the urge to do them justice. I finally think the way to do it is not to describe their lives as they see them, in terms of a daily struggle against poverty, though I am no stranger to the details. How well I know Sising’s income from his eleven rented karitan or tuba-yielding palms, his entire pay for three days’ copra-making of 84p, the average monthly sum from all sources coming into his household of about £12.2 I know exactly what his cigarettes cost, the soap, the matches, the little bags of brown sugar, the essential rice. I know the price of kerosene which fuels the decrepit Coleman lantern he uses for finding crabs in the stream at night, which is why when I visit him after dark I often find their house lit with the smoky orange flames of tangan-tangan beans from the castor oil bush, ‘Nature’s candles’ as Bini blithely describes them. I also know why even the most selfless mother thinks twice before spending fifty centavos on a small Band-Aid dressing to put on her child’s wounded foot: even less than 2p is a recognisable portion of the family’s daily budget of 35p.

  This is how they themselves describe their lives to an outsider. With the utmost trepidation I will not do the same. There is always a gap between how people portray their lives to differing audiences and how they actually live them. Poverty is all; and yet it isn’t. It grinds away daily but doesn’t explain the hours spent gossiping, laughing, yearning, being utterly diverted by a hunt for a wood-wasp’s nest. It is just as sentimental to misrepresent the poor as obsessed all their conscious hours by poverty as it is to depict them as always singing. Nevertheless it is an inescapable convention of the times that rich and poor should confront one another on territory bare of nearly everything but bleak economic factors. It can take a long while before that terrain fades and is replaced by something else, by affection and shared experience. That I have to deal with my own useless guilt as well as love where my friends here are concerned is my private misfortune and not their responsibility. It is something anybody from a developed country living in an undeveloped must face. The important thing for me is that Sising and Bini no longer talk about themselves as they once did, as representative poor confronting representative rich. We now allow ourselves the latitude of humour, of gentle mockery even.

  ‘H’m,’ says Bini one afternoon, peering closely at the side of my head where the sunlight strikes it, ‘grey hairs. Time marches on and still no wife.’

  We are knocking back ESQ at the table outside her house.

  ‘Steady on,’ says Sising, but his wife is not to be steadied.

  ‘No, but really. Half the girls in the village would give their teeth to make him a wife.’

  I observe that half the girls in the village seem already to have done so: their extreme beauty is often marred by endemic tooth decay. This makes Sising laugh and he says something encouraging about being unlucky in love.

  ‘Unlucky can sometimes hide Unwilling,’ says Bini. This old saw gives a glimpse of how she will be at sixty if she lives that long: too knowing to be really sententious but probably rather implacable all the same.

  ‘God save me from peasant wisdom,’ I say defensively.

  ‘He has,’ says Bini in triumph.

  This exchange breaks us all up and our laughter scares the piglets and brings the children running to hear the joke. When they see the rum they go back to what they were doing. The afternoon wears into evening; night falls and our improvised party stretches on into supper. Sising gets out his home-made ukelele and our songs rise in the clearing, lurching and ungainly like the hens trying to get into the trees. Events become a bit blurred. I vaguely recall a dearth of matches and one of the children whispering to me the suggestion that he raid the door-post. (This was a reference to the bamboo hinge-post of the house door. It is a custom, now dying out, of the older people in this province to put small coins through the slots for the door’s cross-members to bring luck to the house. Bini’s old father always did this when he visited. To the children, though, this secret hoard building up in one of the internodes represented a piggy-bank rather than a fund of good fortune. They were always trying to winkle the coins out with knife-blades when Sising and Bini weren’t looking. It was a conspiracy I shared with them not to tell their parents.)

  Next morning I wake headachy but early – so early that the valley below remains full of inky pools where the chickens are no doubt still coming down out of the trees. There is unexpected whistling from the path; visitors or passers-by at any hour are rare. I wait in the dew, barefoot, holding a half-eaten banana. It is Sising.

  ‘I think last night you didn’t believe me.’

  My brains are drowsy. They can remember nothing of last night. Sising opens the old plastic bag he is carrying and shows me two lengths of bamboo, the halves of a single tube about two inches in diameter split lengthwise. One has a long slice taken out of its rounded upper surface so that the internal wall is very thin. There are many scorched holes in this wall. At once I remember: I had expressed scepticism when he told me he was not worried to be caught without matches because he could always make fire. I thought of fire-making as an aboriginal accomplishment, maybe still practised in remote areas of the world almost out of perversity rather than from necessity. I associated fire-sticks with ethnology museums and rubbing pieces of wood together with jokes about Scouts.

  Sising produces a handful of dry tinder which looks like (and probably is) kapok and within two minutes has a small flame dancing on the earth floor of my cooking area. He smiles up at me. His look is neither triumphant nor smug but merely suggests, ‘There, that’s how it’s done.’ Politely refusing a cup of coffee he gathers his tinder and sticks into the plastic bag, accepts a banana and goes. I hear his whistling descend the hill, become swallowed up in the rising chorus of birds in the waking groves, dissolve into the distant bleating of his own nanny-goat and his own children’s cries.

  I discover later that retaining this skill is not by any means purely a generational thing: plenty of youngsters in the woods of this province can still make fire. Once more I am reminded of the irrelevance of the distant capital, of the complete independence of people who can survive typhoons, the rise and fall of governments, all sorts of disruptions and calamities and go on living in circumstances which for many would not be noticeably worse than usual. In Western countries with their dangerously centralised economies where the standards of living even in rural areas are little different from those of the cities, each citizen is indissolubly a part of the body politic. If the system ever collapsed beyond a quick retrieval people would begin dying. At the very least it would once again become a commonplace – as it must have been in England until the nineteenth century and as it is here in Kansulay any day of the year – to see people go to each other’s houses to borrow fire, to meet a woman hurrying past with a single stick whose end is a glowing ember, trailing a wavering line of smoke.

  My admiration for these survival skills, this independence, is considerable. But I know also that it is sentimental yet again to represent it as being born of anything other than necessity. It is a virtue for that reason alone and for none other. Likewise it is not thrift which sends Sising’s child to the village shop at evening to buy a quarter-lapad of cooking oil or a few spoonfuls of soy sauce in a knotted plastic bag; half a kilo of rice in an old biscuit tin; a single small onion or one cigarette.

  If the gap between the lives of Sising and Bini and their landlords the Sorianos is vast, that between theirs and my own is unimaginable. Time and again, despite friendship, despite the intimacies of five years, I am brought face to face with it. That I have chosen to live so much in their world ought to make them deeply suspicious or at least to resent bitterly the ease with which I can buy their children Band-Aids.

  As I contemplate this unpalatable fact I remember occasions when circumstances – an injury, a week’s torrential rain, sickness – have magnified the ordinary hardships of living to the point where the
y seemed overwhelming for a day or two. The last time it happened I had sprained my ankle so badly I could not go up and down the hill. Sising lugged my water for me, the children brought me vegetables and guavas, Bini came with plates of dabs and leaf compresses. Once I imagined I caught the vestige of a look on her face which brought to mind a passage in Michael Herr’s Dispatches where he deals with the incomprehension of the GIs in Vietnam when they learn that he and other correspondents are over there to cover the war voluntarily, that they are running the same dangers and living in the same conditions but that they could be on a plane home that very afternoon if they chose. Sometimes Herr intercepted a look from a wounded soldier or from a man who had just lost a friend, ‘the look that made you look away, and in its hateful way it was the purest single thing I’d ever known …’

  At first, I got it all mixed up, I didn’t understand and I felt sorry for myself, misjudged. ‘Well fuck you too,’ I’d think. ‘It could have been me just as easily, I take chances too, can’t you see that?’ And then I realised that that was exactly what it was all about, it explained itself as easily as that, another of the war’s dark revelations. They weren’t judging me, they weren’t reproaching me, they didn’t even mind me, not in any personal way. They only hated me, hated me the way you’d hate any hopeless fool who would put himself through this thing when he had choices, any fool who had no more need of his life than to play with it in this way.

  It was probably the first time that precise phenomenon had been so accurately recorded. Correspondents in previous wars no doubt felt occasional guilt at making a living from others’ deaths, as any journalist might at the scene of a disaster. But that was before electronic newsgathering and satellite links, before the whole world became a voyeur, before any image viewed on a television screen had attained the same inconsequential level of fiction. Just as air travel changed for ever the world which was flown to, so electronic newsgathering has changed for ever the world which is reported. Coming from the world of the voyeur it is no longer possible to take a step backwards and become a mere observer again. The rôle of the describing writer is different now despite all he might like to believe. It was still possible for Christopher Isherwood to play at being a camera amid Weimar decadence just as it was for Graham Greene to lie in hospital with a novelist’s chip of ice in his heart recording the behaviour of parents around the bed of their dying child. But now we are video-cameras: our subjects know what it is like to be part of the audience, the actors are themselves viewers. They understand what happens to the pictures swallowed up by the lens, they perceive a world in its armchairs whose insatiable need for images has put forth tentacles in the form of cameras and cameramen, journalists with their tape recorders, writers with their deadlines. Above all they know that briefly to be the centre of someone else’s attention, even the world’s, does not necessarily presuppose either interest or concern but finally has more to do with good programming, selling products, entertaining.

  So it is fine to note how people sing, their cheerful resourcefulness. It is all very well to remark on their dignity in the face of suffering. It is inspiring to watch them (on television) sitting down like Manileños in 1986 in the path of tanks and APCs, just as it is to observe (in actuality) their delicious improvisings in the face of disaster. But a disaster it remains, the life of the people of Kansulay and Sabay and all those like them the world over. That it is a slow, unclimactic disaster goes on being true independently of the lives which may be lived happily, contentedly, sadly or miserably in its shadow. I chat to Bini while she is washing the clothes; I follow her eyes as they rest in resignation on the too-thin body of Lito. When her singing drifts up to me I no longer think about the indomitable human spirit, I think of a national health service and that there are certain basic things the human spirit should no longer have to contend with at the fag-end of the twentieth century.

  Many times Filipinos have asked me: ‘Are you writing a book about the Philippines?’ In the past I have truthfully replied, ‘No, I don’t know enough,’ and glimpsed a passing look of relief before the conventional expression of disappointment, that surely the place is significant enough to interest someone out there? That look of relief is the first acknowledgement that the new era which Michael Herr so eloquently heralded has dawned here too, a growing suspicion that a writer might do something as cynical and prudent as to invest a good deal of discomfort in a book which may later make him money.

  This is the crux: the eavesdropped world now wants to know who is listening and why. Anyone could have come to Kansulay with a journalist’s writ (‘Get the background, the real grass-roots feel’) or as a doctor, a worker with an international charity, an adviser on some construction project. But to have come as none of these, neither intentionally to write about the scene nor yet completely as a voyeur but simply to live: this reduces everybody, myself included, to incomprehension.

  Yet I now know that I did imagine that look I thought to see cross Bini’s face as she brought me food up my hill. What Michael Herr saw I have still to see in the faces of my friends here in Kansulay and Sabay although it would be incredible had the idea of resentment not crossed their minds in private. If so, and they still allow no evidence of it to show, then all I can say is that it betokens an astounding generosity of spirit which characterises my entire experience of their country. This generosity of spirit is indeed the most angelic of the Filipinos’ qualities. In terms of their own ruthlessly exploited history it is probably their greatest flaw.

  *

  But there again maybe that, too, is a sentimental construct. The more one tries to make sense of one culture in the terms of another the more the whole issue disintegrates into polemic. The fundamental oddness and unknowableness of human beings, their sheer otherness, is what remains. I think of the (to me) mysterious private world of Sising and Bini and their children living amid the coconuts, nowhere, anywhere, dancing their dances and singing their songs. That part of them which I can put a price on – their few commodities, their labour, their aspirations to have at least one of their children working in Manila or married abroad – that I know. But there is another side, far more alien, which has only a little to do with nono and the whole range of peasant beliefs. It has rather more to do with confronting death and typhoons and landlords, with living uninsured in a world of disasters for which there is no redress. It has to do with ancient cultural norms which once, not so long ago, existed in Europe but which now are forgotten or out of fashion.

  One day another song makes its way up through the trees, sung by the children to a tune which for me has become wistful. Among the young voices I can identify that of Marisil, Bini’s fifteen-year-old daughter. She produces angular sounds which are entirely Eastern; in their scraped quality the words carry intact through the leaves:

  Ali, ali, namamangka,

  pasakayin yaring bata;

  pagdating sa Maynila

  ipagpalit ng manika.

  Ali, ali, namamayong,

  pasukubin yaring sanggol;

  pagdating sa Malabon

  ipagpalit ng bagoong.

  Suddenly the words are no longer those I know by rote. They become immensely sinister. Just as underneath certain of Grimm’s fairy-tales lurks the true savagery of the human psyche so this artless song strikes me for the first time with its terrifying threat of the stranger to whom bad children might be handed over, the unknown to which anyone might be consigned for summary metamorphosis:

  Old woman, old woman, paddling

  your boat,

  Give this child a ride;

  When you reach Manila

  Change it into a doll.

  Old woman, old woman, beneath your

  umbrella,

  Shelter this child;

  When you reach Malabon

  Change it into fish sauce.

  The obliqueness haunts me, the children singing of ‘this child’ but not meaning themselves, singing as if they were already parents conjuring a bogeyman with
which to threaten their own offspring. I look towards the invisible singing, across the valley with its canopy of fronds beating back the sun in green and gold spears and concealing all sorts of primal rawness. Having glimpsed an elemental and unchanging world and in the temporary grip of afternoon melancholy I ask myself what on earth I think I am doing messing about with water projects, what kind of parental ghost I am myself appeasing by this idiotic way of life.

  6

  Back on Tiwarik I have been spending a domestic morning making a fish-drier: four lengths of wood from the forest supporting a chest-high top of woven rattans. It is a few metres from my hut, angled to catch the sun and near enough to deter the sea-eagles as well as the crows which now and then flap across from the mainland on the scrounge.

  Keeping food edible in the tropics without refrigeration is an art. After a bout of night fishing it is possible to hang the catch up in a tree for the rest of that night without gutting, scaling or salting it and still find it fresh in the morning. But the moment the sun rises it must be cleaned or cooked. If after a greedy breakfast there is still fish left over the best thing is to dry it.

  I have become very fond of sun-dried fish although much can depend on how it is marinaded beforehand. First though, the individual fish must be properly cut. Small or flattish fish are opened down the spine so that they hinge apart at the belly. This ensures the thickest meat along the back is fully exposed to the sun. Thicker fish such as eels are cut twice so the fish may be opened out into three flaps with two thin hinges of flesh. The fishermen of Sabay can do this with great dispatch and dexterity while scarcely watching what their hands are doing.