Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  That is one of my two minds. The other readily recognises the imperative of feeding not just a lone hunter but an entire family, of earning enough money to buy essentials. It readily recognises how disgusting moral stances are when taken by outsiders like myself who, no matter that they choose to submit to the rigours of that life, still do not have to. It also recognises the skill of Sabay’s dynamiters, for theirs is no indiscriminate bombing. They discovered years ago that if their charges were too large or set to go off too deep they damaged the corals and that stocks of inshore fish depended entirely on healthy reefs. Furthermore they generally aim for one particular species at a time, most often dalagang bukid, and select their target with care. It is astonishing after that horrendous concussion to see the bottom strewn with dead dalagang bukid but with the other species swimming around above them apparently unharmed. This is not because dalagang bukid are particularly susceptible but because they have been so skilfully hunted.

  The modus operandi is that a boat drifts, one man wearing goggles lying across it with his face in the water looking for a shoal large enough to merit one of the precious bombs. He signals directions by waving a free hand behind him in dumb semaphore while a companion with a paddle steers accordingly. In the prow stands the bomber poised for the throw, armed with a light (if they are using a conventional fuse) or wires and battery if not. This drifting and signalling under the blazing sun can go on for hours, the patient watching informed by a good deal of knowledge about fish behaviour, for all these men are spear-fishermen too and theirs is the craftiness of long experience. Often they will go home without dropping a single bomb, occasionally they will strike lucky within minutes.

  When a suitable shoal is found the tension goes up for this is the moment of greatest danger. This is because dalagang bukid often move quite close to the surface. The bomber must control the depth at which his charge explodes mainly by judging how long to delay his throw after lighting the fuse, sending the gin bottle glinting over and over in a high arc into the sky or holding it while it sputters in his hand.

  The moment is dangerous not just for the waiters and watchers in the little boats gathered around, all of whom hope for a share in the catch. It is so for any nearby swimmers or divers who may have gone unobserved or who may themselves have been too preoccupied to notice the sudden activity on board the quietly drifting craft. I was once down at fifteen or twenty feet behind a coral outcrop when a revolting noise went off in my head followed at once by a shock-wave I felt over the entire surface of my body. I came to the surface in a daze, my head ringing, not knowing where to look, for the noise and the impact had been completely directionless, afflicting my body simultaneously inside and out. When I crawled shakily onto the rocks expecting to find blood pouring from my ears and nose I saw a knot of boats at least a hundred metres away. To this day I cannot imagine how it is that fish survive a matter of yards away from the point of the explosion but I know that they do. The noise is excruciating. Sound travels oddly in water: I have often been deep beneath the surface when bombs have exploded a long way away, half a mile, a mile, even. The first thing one hears is a sharp hiss like a sudden release of soda water and only then the great bang of sound. If one comes up quickly enough one may often hear the same bang again, conducted more slowly through air.

  So just before the bomb is thrown cries of ‘matera!’ or ‘hagis!’ (‘throwing’) go up, warning even those merely staring over the sides of their own boats to take their faces out of the water. There follow the glittering arc, the splash, the breathless wait. Then from the sea twenty metres away a short white spurt of fume and spray leaps up and the wood of the boat slams into footsoles and the backs of thighs. Scarcely has the foam fallen back than the boatman of the bombing crew starts his engine, now driving the compressor. The retrievers bite their air-hoses, snatch up hand nets and jump overboard.

  But already the hangers-on are in the water, swimming down to see how many bodies they can gather before the boys with the air-tubes and nets arrive to make their methodical sweeps of the sea floor. Everything depends on the depth of the water. Very few of Sabay’s fishermen will swim down to more than thirty feet to retrieve a few dalagang bukid since the energy they expend is hardly worth a handful of small fish especially if there is a current running. Once down, the freebooter finds the fish hard to hold: they slip easily out of his fists, wriggling feebly as some still are. And always at his back is a swift-moving boy with twin plywood flippers, bulging net trailing behind him like a park-keeper’s litter sack, the gallons of exhaled air gushing in fine prodigality from between his grinning teeth. Generally the bombing crew will allow hangers-on to keep what they can scavenge provided it is no more than half a dozen reasonably sized fish and provided that their own haul is good. In the old days I used to get away with a couple of dozen fish until they discovered I was a non-smoker and my lungs would happily take me down to forty feet in a succession of dives. Now I am a notorious vulture and they laughingly but rigorously search my boat. Mostly, though, I watch impotently as the compressor takes them down to sixty, eighty feet for as long as they want. Instead I scour the coral ledges for minor fry while below me, his hair streaming in the currents and lifted by gouts of air like any Pre-Raphaelite Lady of Shalott’s, a boy with his net turns and sweeps and gathers from the steep hillsides and rocky gorges.

  Sometimes a single bomb will net no more than fifty fish. If the bomber has no motor in his boat and hence no compressor and has miscalculated so that his victims lie in deep water, retrieval is such an effort he can virtually make the same claim as the hand-to-hand hunter: that each fish was earned the hard way. If anyone doubts this they should try swimming down to fifty feet in order (if they are lucky) to come back up holding two small herrings, and then repeating it nine times. By the end they may also be in the second of my two minds over the issue of dynamiting fish as it is practised here at Sabay. In any case it has long since become a vital part of the place’s economy. If it were suddenly stopped an already poor community would be practically ruined, for while conventional fishing methods could probably keep them alive they would offer no hope of advance, allow of no improvement, pay for nobody’s medicine, no child’s education, buy no petrol for a single fishing boat.

  This being said there is, of course, a conservationist case. To say the catches of the bombers of Sabay are paltry compared with those of the Japanese ships crammed with high-tech, fishing devices which infest the archipelago is both true and irrelevant: this I know. I know that neither technique is desirable, that both will have future consequences. It is safe to predict that the consequences will unfairly be worse for the villagers than for the Japanese, who can always trawl elsewhere. Meanwhile, listening to the right-minded gentlefolk of Europe I do occasionally find myself wondering if because their supermarket fish fingers and cod pieces come deep-frozen in neat geometrical shapes boxed with pictures of peaceful marine scenery they think the fish have been gently farmed and humanely killed. Presumably they must think vast factory ships don’t trawl swathes across the ocean, sweeping paths clean of practically all living creatures and leaving long empty corridors. Likewise they must assume those creatures are not suffocated or frozen to death and then pulped, mangled and processed into acceptable products ranging from fish-meal to fillets.

  *

  Meanwhile I keep the company of dynamiters while wandering my island like a Balkan king made uneasy by the sound of Anarchists growing ever closer. Intoy, in his way the purest little anarch of them all, is a devoted jester. He springs out from behind a rock, his head breaks what I took for empty water, his laughter floats from trees.

  By now the reader will have the impression that life here is indeed rather chappish, unrelievedly masculine. But there is little alternative for the unattached male who does not wish to do anything as blunt as importing a girl from another region as if she were one more of the essential stores for island-dwelling. In this respect the Philippine provinces are not at all what a foreign
er familiar only with Manila might imagine, being in general passionate but proper. All sorts of wild flirtations abound but they are taken account of down to the last detail. Pious Catholic parents and inlaws still value virginity on the wedding-day but they value honour and financial understandings more. I have twice attended weddings nominated as ninong to the child the bride was visibly carrying. There was never the least hint that things were less than ideal: everyone was far too pleased the right thing had been done, that a romance had been blessed in the sight of heaven and the offspring would be legitimate. Many foreigners who stray into the provinces with ideas of dalliance discover quite soon that all but the most innocent of flirtations are taken quite seriously, not least because on various counts foreigners tend to be valued (not to say costed) as potential husbands. Girls after the age of puberty are usually chaperoned by their friends on any occasion which involves calling on a single male. Even Marisil Malabayabas, whom I have known since she was ten or so, has only very rarely brought me something at my hut in Kansulay unaccompanied by a little sister or two, although this may quite possibly be due to no more than the Filipino dislike of doing anything on one’s own.

  In consequence, needing to stay unencumbered by such things I elect when I am here to live a life which is the butt of fairly gentle jokes and gossip: I am monastic, I am virtuous, I am a gentleman, I am self-controlled, I am cold and sexless, I am baklâ: one takes one’s pick. Of course the more knowing people are, the less they like enigmas. Where sexuality is concerned the Filipinos are very knowing indeed and from the earliest age. Thus my friends are irritated and intrigued that in my case they seem unable to settle the matter and I have heard that many a discussion on this inconsequential topic has raged around the drinks-table. Apparently kapitan Sanso’s old father once snorted and said ‘Why does he have to be anything? Why mightn’t he just be sensible?’ For that I salute him, or rather his memory since he died not long ago.

  Meanwhile on Tiwarik I go on living a life whose company – when there is any – is necessarily male, except when wives and sisters come over for visits or I go to their houses on the mainland. Many days go by when I see no-one of either sex. I might be dreaming on the uplands or fishing when somebody lands on the beach for an hour or two. I arrive back to find only a keel-mark and footprints, a cigarette end by my hut or the gift of a plastic pitcher of tuba left inside. However insecure my position in the marriage-market of Sabay I cannot doubt that I do occupy a place of my own in the economy of its affection. Reciprocated fondness does not, after all, seem such bad terms on which to live a life even if everybody is left faintly puzzled.

  On other days Intoy might well come across in the early morning with my water. Since I have now acquired four jerrycans this no longer need be a daily routine. He really has rather taken me up and if I did not discourage him gently from time to time I think he would come and live on Tiwarik. This despite my having made it clear that I am not about to pay him extra for further duties simply because there is nothing more I need beyond his bringing water and running the odd errand to the village shop. But I do not think it is purely a matter of money for him. Maybe it is status or just pleasure at the oddness of observing a foreigner at close range. Whatever the reason his permanent presence would not suit me. Apart from anything else he ought to be at school most days, for his schooling has been of the skimpiest. Now and again when his parents could spare him and could afford to buy the odd pencil and exercise book he has attended the village school in Sabay. Over the years he has picked up smatterings of this and that but where schoolwork is concerned he has never learned how to learn.

  Surprisingly, nearly two hundred children of primary school age to twelve or thirteen attend this school, many walking several kilometres each day in all weathers along the paths leading from outlying hamlets hidden among the groves and forests on the lower slopes of the cordillera. It is at this level of village life that one encounters a deep yearning for administrative stability, for official encouragement, for progress. There is a profound respect for the idea of education; there seems not to be the least degree of cynicism about it to the extent that questioning the existence of God would hardly be thought more subversive than questioning the value of education.

  The school at Sabay is a long bungalow with a verandah running its length whose roof is patched with cogon where the corrugated iron has rusted or blown away. Around it runs a border where flowers have been planted by the pupils: some are in bloom, others have been rooted up by the pigs and chickens and goats which scavenge the village between school and seashore. There is a flagpole in front of the bungalow with a few whitewashed stones around its base. Inside the school it is cool and dusty with bright shafts piercing from structural chinks. The classrooms are bare: there are not enough desks or chairs or tables, there is never enough chalk, the text books are few, tattered, out of date or just plain bad, as in the case of several books about Philippine history and culture which are thinly disguised hagiographies of the Marcoses. For some reason these rooms remind me of Clock House in my second school: perhaps they are the same size as the converted coach-houses. Certainly the contrast could hardly be greater. The classrooms in Clock House were efficiently-appointed little educational factories for producing the quality product parents were buying: entrance to public school, to university, to the gravy train of life. Here in Sabay, though, nobody would ever mistake these classrooms for factories. Rather, they are outposts of literate civilisation with their children’s paintings around the walls done with the beautiful pale colours leached from the hearts of expired felt-tip pens on the insides of multi-pack cigarette cartons. There are also exemplars of handwriting and sums as well as some charts left over from the last BHWs’ (barangay health workers’) meeting listing the incidence of TB, worms and gastroenteritis in nearby barrios.

  It is here, as in thousands of provincial schools like it throughout the Philippines, that monstrously underpaid men and women teach. Many of them are, as they themselves sadly recognise, barely educated. Trying to extract supplies, pay rises, even recognition from the bureaucracy in distant Manila is like beseeching the moon. Often they are forced to buy the chalk they need out of their own pockets. But they carry on, year in and year out, and a steady stream of children leaves their hands able at least to read and do sums. That is a triumph; the very existence of such people in the villages is a solid thing to set against the barbarianism which so often seems likely to engulf the country. It is at this level, of barangay officials, priests, teachers and BHWs, one can most often see the legacy of the more radical and enlightened of the Spaniards and Americans who colonised this land.

  From time to time Intoy has attended this school in Sabay but at thirteen or fourteen (nobody seems sure which) he cannot read or write at all well. Too often his father has needed him to help with fishing or planting rice, just as seventy years ago in England children were kept away from Dame school to help on the land or merely throw stones at crows. I want so much to help him, but offering to pay for him to go to the High School in Malubog would be pointless since he couldn’t keep up even if they could be persuaded to admit him. In any case he has nearly reached that stage of being a professional drop-out. Being educated is a habit and it is one Intoy has never acquired. Instead he is bulakbol. He lounges, he looks at comics, he climbs sixty-foot palm trees with laughter in high winds, he has all sorts of rural competences; he fishes with divine address. He will probably soon become a precocious drinker and smoker and maybe by the time he is eighteen he will have to marry. He often has fantasies of going to Manila, one more of the country migrants hoping for – what? Money, jobs, pleasures; whatever.

  Sometimes, thinking about it all and about Intoy in particular, I become depressed. It is so predictable, so intransigent. But there again I wonder if this is not yet another form of sentimentality, worrying overmuch about how other people live their lives. Meanwhile Intoy glitters in the sun like Ariel. He gives no hint that he may, like Howard all those years
ago, have had a sudden black insight, a vision of his own future. He runs and laughs and dives. He lies on his back in the hut and makes dozens of nito rings of varying sizes, plaited with amazing dexterity. He tells awful jokes. One day he turns up with a bomb-making kit for land rather than sea. His idea is to go after the large crabs which tuck themselves into the crevices of rocks just above the water line and he has brought several small bottles and some fertiliser. Do I have any sugar? String?

  In my bomb-making days I never tried using brown sugar but Intoy assures me it works. Simple fuses made of string soaked in kerosene complete a couple of these devices and we go off to dispose them experimentally in holes. The first makes a soft bang and a cloud of white smoke but evidently lacks blasting power: the rocks remain intact. The second does little better, leaving merely an enlarged crack smelling of burnt jam. We return to the hut to blend the sugar and fertiliser in different proportions. After an hour or so we have achieved a mix which produces a most satisfying blast but I am far from convinced Intoy is going to get many crabs with it. This particular morning I have been marinading last night’s catch; I now begin to lay the fish out on the drier while Intoy runs off with his bombs to try his luck.

  After a couple of bangs when he has not re-appeared I go to see what has happened, dreading to find his mutilated remains. Eventually – heart-stopping moment – I see him sprawled face downwards on the rocks above the water line, one brown foot washed by the wavelets. But he is only trying to spot crabs in their holes. A match flares, a thin smoke curls, fragments of rock leap in the air and spatter the sea. Intoy jumps out of cover and goes to peer into the crater. He reaches in and comes up with a huge fighting claw; the rest of the crab has been atomised or else has dropped beyond reach. But he is well pleased with his morning and, having roasted the claw, presents it to me with a proud and graceful gesture.