Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  *

  One afternoon Totoy Matias paddles over in a small bangka to fish. Arman has gone to Malubog to buy supplies, Danding is taking the Jhon-Jhon’s carburettor down, so today it is up to Totoy Matias to get his family’s meals solo. He always strikes me as a gloomy young man: he has a heavy presence as if life had done him a personal injury and he were still awaiting compensation. But as well as his nets he brings a copy of Magix Komix which he and Intoy read together on the floor of the hut with exclamations of surprise and pleasure, fingers poking at details in the pictures. Getting food can wait.

  Totoy Matias’s life and reputation were transformed the day the morning jeep bumped into Sabay with a packet for him containing the new issue of Magix Komix, but they had to wait for their transformation until he had read through the story which took up the first half of the comic. This concerned a girl who had thirteen fingers, each with its own identity. At moments of crisis (i.e. every issue) her fingertips blossomed with monstrous heads, some multi-eyed, some snouted, some blank but for a single tuft of hair and a mouth. In this particular issue the girl was raped by an ill-advised fellow who discovered too late that what he thought were her defenceless hands clutching at his back were really transfigured digits grinning at each other in glee before their fangs ripped and tore the living meat from his rib-cage. On page four he expired messily and Totoy turned to the heading ‘I Love You Corner’. The first letter he read ran thus:

  To: Sandy Mariano

  027 Batisan St

  Batangas City

  ‘From nothing we were born, and soon again we shall be nothing as at first …’ Happy, happy birthday on March 6.

  Gary Piswig

  581 Merchan St

  Lucena City

  The second was electrifying:

  To my one and only,

  Totoy Matias

  Sabay

  Hi! Hello! my love! I hope you’re in a good condition. Dito ko lang masasabi sa iyo na you’re my inspiration. Take care ’coz I care!

  Still Loving You

  Vangie

  Mary Immaculate Academy

  San José

  The first time one sees one’s name in print it produces a glow unlike any other. The indifferent and illimitable world has suddenly given back one’s image. Totoy was overwhelmed with pride and pleasure and carried the issue of Magix Komix around with him for days, showing it to everyone he met which in turn created pleasure for since the previous issue people were longing to know what new adventures would befall the girl with the thirteen fingers. It was impossible not to feel pleased for him, even for Vangie since seeing her printed name had reified her existence for Totoy in a way which no mere posted letter from her could have done. I was disinclined to question him but not two days beforehand I had overheard him being chaffed by his friends about a girl in Malubog, the next sizeable town up the coast. It was a smart move of Vangie’s to have immortalised herself and Totoy; it left the competition in Malubog with a lot of catching up to do.

  At length the excitement wore off. A new issue of Magix Komix arrived without a single mention of his name. The girl with the thirteen fingers savaged an old woman who was really a witch trying to put a spell on her. The finger with the pig’s snout burrowed its way into her ancient ear and ate into her brain. I wondered what happened if the girl absent-mindedly picked her own nose, or worse.

  Totoy became his old disconsolate self again. ‘No money no honey,’ he would say, his one English phrase, when I asked him how he was.

  ‘Never mind. Let’s go fishing tonight. Maybe you will catch a big shark and sell it in Malubog market for lots of money.’

  ‘Ay … Maybe the shark will catch me.’

  ‘There’s always that.’

  Now many issues of Magix Komix have gone by but still Totoy Matias reads it much as a retired general pores over the latest number of the gazette which long ago listed his promotions and awards for gallantry. After a short sleep, quite worn out with reading, Intoy and Totoy Matias go fishing together. Their voices drift over the water in the evening quiet. Intoy is still slightly too young to do anything but inhabit the present which he does with sparkle and largeness. Totoy, though, is as if waiting for something which may never happen. Wherever he goes he induces an atmosphere of instability, of impermanence which people find infectious because all of a sudden they begin to talk of their own plans to go to Manila, get jobs as merchant seamen or radio operators, break up, go away, fly apart. Wives and families sometimes join in these discussions, the ones who will be left behind with children and infrequent remittances and with not much to say in the face of such unquestionable priorities: work, money, a future. Thus throughout the Philippines a million families connive sadly, excitedly, at a collective dream of their own fragmentation.

  The voices of Intoy and Totoy Matias die away as their boat rounds a headland. They do not return. Night falls and I make my evening meal alone, expecting to hear their chatter from the beach at any moment. It is one of the pleasures of Tiwarik, how sounds arrive from outside. Explosions and piano tunes from the past may reach the listener’s ears at any point on the island but there are otherwise two aspects to the place in that on the seaward side one may imagine oneself alone in the universe – or at least cut off from the main body of mankind – while on the side facing Sabay when the air is still and the sea calm the sounds drift across with a strange poignancy, remote yet clear, coming from another world. The crowing of cocks on the mainland has woken me at dawn in my hut a mile away. In late afternoon I have heard the sounds of basketball being played on the improvised court near the school where the headboard and ring are nailed to a palm tree. At night I have lain awake in the dark and listened to the skirmishing of Sabay’s dogs. I have speculated that in the nearly five seconds their yaps and howls take to reach me the outcome of the particular fight I am hearing is already known and that over in the village an uneasy temporary silence has fallen even as on Tiwarik the audible savagery reaches its peak.

  This night I remember belatedly that I have not yet brought in my bislad and the dew must already be falling on the drier. I go out and collect up the fish by starlight: they are practically dry anyway. As I do this there come faint sounds from the strait: voices, paddles. Out of the darkness three small bangkas arrive bearing Intoy and friends. It turns out they have already eaten with their families in Sabay. Of Totoy Matias there is no sign; he has long since gone back with his catch. Instead a party of six teenagers (two of them not even that, probably) wants shelter for the night so they can start fishing at dawn. They have brought tuba (a present from Arman’s wife), several packets of fried salted corn called ‘Chikinini’ (from Captain Sanso) and a pack of pornographic playing-cards. These, so worn the pictures on their faces are barely discernible, were brought back a year ago by Danding’s nephew who went to Olongapo where he won them from a US sailor.

  We unroll the mats and play cards on the floor by lamplight, somewhat jammed together with a glass of drink doing the rounds. One or two of the younger ones become mildly tipsy and frown as they concentrate on a game which seems not much more than a sort of Tagalog ‘snap’. The winners punish the losers, totting up their forfeits and administering pitik, flicks of the nail on the backs of the finger-joints of proffered hands. Intoy rolls on the floor in mock agony while the others gleefully accuse him of being baklâ. From time to time I wish they would all go away so I can stretch out and go to sleep. Then I feel churlish and think that without their visits I should become dreary and crazed with introspection.

  Eventually the lamp goes out and in the darkness we lie almost indiscriminately on the floor, fitting together into the available space with a good deal of jocularity and simulated complaint. A silence falls in which a dog over in Sabay can faintly but clearly be heard. ‘Si Biloy,’ someone says. ‘Bokbok’s cat always sets him off.’ There is a short discussion about the village cats and dogs. A ghost story is begun but it is too unfrightening and has obviously been lifted half-digested
from a comic. They subside in giggles. Softly from the walls comes a lizard’s chuk-chuk-chuk.

  In the black hours there are abrupt turnings and murmurs, re-arrangings of limbs as from the depths of sleep, stealthy shiftings of unknown direction. In the greyish light of cockcrow we get up between quite different neighbours and go about lighting fires and boiling rice with a certain gleeful elasticity of movement. The sun is up, declaring everything erased. We are starting afresh in fresh day.

  *

  Shortly after this Totoy Matias comes and announces he is going to Manila to look for work. He says vaguely that a cousin there will help him but he has no companion for the journey and is too unconfident to travel alone. He supposes I am not planning on going to Manila soon?

  I hadn’t been, but on investigation discover I should. My visa will shortly need renewing so I tell him we can travel together. He is very cheered by this. Two days later I hear he has told everyone I have offered to pay his fare. I can’t quite bring myself to feel aggrieved but it is a near thing since he is not someone to whom I feel especially close.

  In due course I walk up to the grassfield and tell the island I shall not be away longer than a week, less if humanly possible. Out in the strait I can see the Jhon-Jhon drifting and can barely make out the bronzemop of Arman’s hair as he hangs it in the water, his legs sticking out on the opposite side, motionless in his search for a shoal. It is a familiar scene. I paddle over to Sabay and wait with Totoy Matias for the jeep which arrives late in a rush of sand and coral gravel. Fishwives hurry forward with baskets of the night’s catch as well as the daing they have been drying on their roofs. They clamber aboard with much shoving, carrying rusty pairs of scales behind which they will preside for the morning in the market at Malubog.

  As I myself climb aboard I catch sight of Intoy hanging back in the shadow of a house. He looks anxious, I think, but maybe it is merely envy. From across the strait comes a flat report. Everybody reflexively looks towards the sea with a buzz of interest and speculation. How far away is the Jhon-Jhon? Is it worth trying to get there to scavenge the odd fish? The jeep pulls out of Sabay to waving hands on the first part of a long and uncomfortable journey involving many more jeeps, boats and buses which slowly bring us ever closer to the capital, a city I have never much liked.

  PART TWO

  Manila

  7

  The Manila which ex-President Ferdinand Marcos left in late February 1986 was, like the man himself, a notorious mixture of wealth and decay. His regime and family had become like the prestige projects they had from time to time dotted around the city to impress visiting popes, potentates, world bankers and suchlike. Their very prominence drew attention to flaking exteriors and gave off great wafts of savage dismay like the dank toadstool smell of air conditioners. On the reclaimed foreshore was Imelda Marcos’s pride and joy, her Cultural Centre of the Philippines to which the great and good of the world’s artists, opera singers and ballet companies came. Behind it on the inland side of Roxas Boulevard was the high-rise row of international hotels, gap-toothed here and there where a night-club or massage parlour had been burned to the ground. Several safe miles inland lay the upper- and middle-class enclaves, the opulent residential suburbs of Forbes Park, of Dasmariñas Village and Wack-Wack with its golf course, as well as the pocket Manhattan of the Makati Commercial Centre. In between, among the tumbled concrete breakwaters of the foreshore, in burnt-out ruins, even in trees and clumps of bushes, the squatters shrugged themselves into cardboard and plastic sheeting, their infants laid out asleep and black with flies on pavements amid passing feet. It was a city in which even the world’s bankers had lost faith.

  I arrive in this place with my head still full of silence and glittering air, of unconfined spaces, which are at once smothered and forcibly replaced by crowds and carbon monoxide. Manila has to be faced. It is impossible to write anything about the Philippines without at some stage dealing with this extraordinary city. This is not from any conventional courtesy whereby a visitor pays tribute to his host nation’s capital – far from it – but for two other reasons. One of these is that most of the knowledge the world has of the Philippines comes via Manila; to a large extent the city mediates the national image and the consequences bear looking at. The second reason is the almost mythic position Manila occupies in the minds of Filipinos themselves. Maybe this is a common phenomenon in any country where rural poverty drives people centripetally towards its chief city. Certainly wherever one goes in the provinces one begins to get the feeling that scarcely anybody wants to remain where he is but is merely counting the days until the right quirk of fate will pay his passage to Manila, give him board and lodging there, help him out with a bit of pakiusap, offer him a job.

  Sometimes from the way this desire is phrased it is possible to extrapolate a Manila which is no more than a necessary first step to emigration. If America remains the Promised Land for so many Filipinos the rest of the developed world still offers a worthwhile exile. The newspapers are full of advertisements for agencies and fixers who will wangle visas, see to the paperwork, back-handers and red tape involved with getting a passport, interview applicants for jobs abroad. Among the saddest of all recurrent tales in a nation of hard-luck stories is that of the young man in the provinces who applies for a labouring job with a construction company in Saudi Arabia. The agency in Manila handling the job calls him for interview with a letter full of hopeful signs. All the applicant has to do is present himself at an address on a date with some photographs of himself and an application fee of several hundred pesos to show he is in earnest and to pay for the processing of his papers. The young man is crestfallen: he can never lay hands on a sum like that. But he has a whip-round of his family, his friends, his parish priest, anybody. He beggars himself. He scrapes together his fare. Somehow he at last manages to turn up at an ad hoc office in Manila, is welcomed together with thirty or forty others like him. They all fill out forms, hand over their photographs, hand over their fees, are asked to call back at 3 p.m.

  It is not unusual to read laconic newspaper accounts of men like him found dead, leaving suicide notes (in one case of an illiterate, written by an amanuensis) saying there was no way they could return home to those families, those friends, that parish priest. No way, either, to describe the impotent rage and shame when at 3 p.m. they went back to find a locked door and nobody who had ever heard of ‘Gulfcon Recruitment Enterprises Co.’ Yet other than the relatives of those who die, how phlegmatic most Filipinos are when they hear of such things. ‘Ay …’ They cluck once or twice, the same noise the English make to gee up horses but which here signals distress, then laugh slightly. That’s what happens; that’s how the world is, full of swindlers and cheats; better watch out; trust neither policeman nor President unless they’re members of your own family, in which case be doubly careful.

  Such tales apart it is a melancholy enough business for any fond visitor to contemplate a country of great beauty and natural wealth most of whose inhabitants seem desperate only to leave and turn themselves into the world’s servants, its nursemaids, its amahs, cooks, chauffeurs, houseboys, labourers, bar-tenders, bell-hops and waitresses. It must signify something, this near-romantic dream which almost at times transcends matters of mere money. The southward urge to the land where the lemon-trees flower which the German romantics characterised as der Drang nach Süden has its counterpart in the modern Philippines as der Drang nach Ausland. ‘Abroad’ is good on any terms since it is better paid. But a mere skivvy’s wages in a London Wimpy Bar, magnificent though they are compared with what Sising earns in Kansulay, still hardly seem quite enough completely to explain how the mere act of being abroad is equated with success and status back home. There must be something else involved, some jackpot dream of treasures without limit for the myth to go on surviving the reality of merciless exploitation, the coldness both metaphorical and literal which pushes ordinary culture shock over the edge of the bearable and sends so many Filipinos in the
UK into mental institutions.

  Meanwhile Manila itself remains a goal for the unqualified, a halfway house for the more plausible, a positive clearing-house for those with degrees and qualifications. Of the emigrants few have no dreams of returning one day, typically and wistfully to the small pond of their rural origin in which their new wealth will make them very big frogs indeed (The envy! The adulation! The delicious settling of old scores!). Of the transients who harbour similar fantasies most seem to stay and after some time find they have crossed into the category of residents. This must be true since the city goes on growing.

  *

  It is conventional to make the point that Manila strikes most Europeans as disturbingly without a centre. The Second World War and the elements have destroyed much and the old vernacular architecture of wood and nipa thatch was by its nature impermanent. It appears to them a shapeless, confused and unrelievedly twentieth-century mess strung out along a reeking bay. Some visitors are better informed, in which case it becomes conventional to discern amid the sprawl distinct villages still organised into barangays exactly as they would be in the provinces from which many of the inhabitants have so recently arrived. These visitors might also have read a book or two by Nick Joaquin, one of the best known of contemporary Filipino writers. Amongst his collected journalism, much of it written under his anagrammatic nom-de-plume of ‘Quijano de Manila’, are scattered pieces in which, full of affection and nostalgia, he wanders around his city disinterring points of interest.