Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  It is Quijano rather than any guide book who can set a traveller down on a nondescript corner of this howling city and help him put out a few tentative roots. It is precisely not the guide book places which touch one: not the old Spanish inner-city fortress of Intramuros, nor the hotel where General MacArthur occupied a suite, nor even the national shrine on the spot where Dr José Rizal was executed by the Spanish in 1896. Above all the sunsets in Manila Bay are clearly fakes achieved by some vulgarian with the aid of Technicolor. Since there is little left in Manila which a European would consider at all old he turns to Quijano to glimpse the palimpsest beneath. In default of buildings and monuments he must rely for re-making the city on such things as the courses of certain streets. By some fluke the principal commercial and fashionable street of the late Spanish period – Escolta – still exists, and under its own name. It is now on the edge of Chinatown and is a desultory place of watch-shops and restaurants. But for nearly everywhere else Quijano is needed to make sense of streets whose names have changed and whose present undifferentiated squalor conceals a historic individuality. Calle Azcárraga, for example, which only some twenty-five years ago was renamed Claro M. Recto after the late nationalist intellectual. Writing of this street’s Tondo end Quijano observes:

  Today, the Divisoria, Tutuban station and the various bus depots have turned this part of Azcárraga into Babel town and its uproar, stinks and turmoil are, for provincial newcomers, their first taste of Manila life.

  Around Tutuban used to be a nipa village. Here, Bonifacio was born; here, the Katipuneros [nationalist revolutionaries] held their first meetings. Just past Tutuban, near the corner of Reina Regente, was a bibingka stall that was the most famous in the city during the 1920s. Renaults and Studebakers succeeded each other at night in front of that humble shop, where a couple of old women took what seemed hours to cook one perfect bibingka.

  A pleasurable sense of history is hard won in Manila and one doubts that even for a committed Manileño like Quijano the bibingkas were quite what madeleines were for Proust. Perhaps the pleasurable is out of place, even irrelevant. Certainly one pauses on a bridge near the Post Office above the deep khaki Pasig River, feeling the concrete vibrate uneasily to the immense stream of traffic for which it was doubtless never designed. The substance below is scarcely water at all even though it bears on its swarming and iridescent surface bunches of foliage as a reminder of its far-off inland provenance. To be plunged into it would surely be to die instantly. Certainly one pauses there, if only to reflect that this poisoned sump is the very river from which some etymologists derive Tagalog, the name, the tribe, its language (taga + ilog: inhabitants of the river). At this point it has just flowed past the gardens of Malacañang Palace.3

  I explained at the beginning of this book that I originally came to the Philippines because it was one of the places in South-East Asia I had not visited at the time of the Vietnam War and which was to some degree involved in that war. Consequently Manila has for me a powerful ability to invoke a time nearly twenty years ago, not least because it is in some ways so old-fashioned. The awful concrete architecture, the scabby trusses of overhead wiring, the jeepneys which look like (but which mostly no longer are) re-bodied Second World War jeeps, the beer-houses and nite-spots and go-go bars and the rest are all reminiscent of an Asian re-creation of an American garrison town. It is largely post-South Pacific, although some of it by not much. It may be a modern international city as the guide books and handouts say; it may exhibit all the newest wrinkles of contemporary urban drift and crisis as the sociological studies assert; but for me Manila exudes the smell and the feel of another era. When I am in Manila I am also, however slightly, in the past in Saigon or Bangkok, an illusion strengthened by the US-style uniforms worn by the military. The shoeshine boys, the squalor, the violence, the shootings, the beggars, child prostitutes, ‘hostesses’, pick-pockets are the same; the occasional crew-cut Asian heads are suggestive; the burnt-out bars and hotels and massage parlours only too similar.

  Do I unconsciously look for it and therefore see what I look for? Worse, am I myself in the grip of some squalid nostalgia? I do not think so. Certainly I am astonished at how it all goes on, noisily, vividly. I am less astonished by what overseas visitors do not want to know. Reading what lies beneath the surface argues not knowledge so much as that glum lack of personal investment which permits knowledge. It is both pleasanter and easier to spend money than ask questions. It is still too soon after the self-styled ‘People’s Revolution’ of February 1986 to know whether Manila itself will change out of its hackneyed role as whorehouse of the East as if it were still ministering to troops on R&R who magically remain invisible. Very probably an era has indeed passed. But it is harder to see how the economic imperatives will themselves change at all quickly. The thought occurs to someone like myself for whom this city remains so strangely dated that it is not after all caught in some cultural time-warp but quite simply stagnating from lack of the right kind of spending. It is as unmysterious as that.

  In the late Seventies and early Eighties – that is to say in the declining years of the Marcos dynasty – the country appeared superficially to be in a state of stable anarchy brought about jointly by the rigours of Martial Law and the untrammelled freedom of public officials to do pretty much what they liked. In this strange political half-life Manila had some of the high, wild, fin-de-saison qualities ascribed to other famous cities under regimes in their lapsarian heydays: Batista’s Havana, Faroukh’s Cairo, even Mussolini’s Salò. ‘Ah, I remember Manila then,’ old hands will reminisce in thirty years’ time, the semi-scandalised tone of their original narratives long having given over to a sundappled worldliness. ‘My God the place was wide open. Anything went and I do mean anything. Provided you had the money, of course. But you hardly needed very much of that. Oh well, it couldn’t last, and quite right too’ (the token responsible citizen); ‘the poverty and abuses were sickening’ (the obligatory humanitarian). ‘But …’ (The wistfulness, the wistfulness).

  What a city, what a whole country turns into at such moments is Fantasyland, a far-off place on which the rest of the world can superimpose its unbridled dreams. There in the distance beckon baroque structures of vice, Disneyesque set-pieces of outlandish appetites gloriously catered for, a shimmering vista of carnality. It would have been a venereal Las Vegas except that even Las Vegas has laws; this country, this city had none for the paying foreigner. If his activities were shameless it was precisely in the way that fantasies are without shame since without consequences. Neither the country nor its capital were real for those who flew in, got drunk, were massaged back to consciousness, unloaded their seminal vesicles into an ‘escort’ and flew out again. Later they shook their heads in rueful male complicity in the less hectic bars of Hong Kong, saying only ‘Whew!’ as they belatedly discovered the loss of a gold tiepin or the acquisition of gonorrhoea.

  Neither were Manila or Manileños real to the huge pale pederasts – the German, the English, the American, the Swedish, Dutch, Australian, French pederasts – who sat about the air-conditioned shopping malls while small girls and boys in very new jeans and training shoes gathered at their tables packing in as much food as they could before the bill was called for and their beaming host lumbered off, towing one or two or three according to fancy to the seclusion of his room in the Hilton, the Hyatt, or a rented apartment in Dakota Mansions. The most notorious of these shopping malls was Harrison Plaza which later ‘burned down’ (Manileños supply their own inverted commas for this phrase whenever referring to a place razed to the ground for the insurance money or as part of a vendetta). A new Harrison Plaza has since arisen from the ashes on the same site and with many of the same stores but it is a very sanitised and gelded phoenix. For all that the Marcoses were to linger on for two or three years interested parties will maintain that to all intents and purposes the old Manila (their old Manila) died with the first Harrison Plaza. Apart from anything else an innocence has gone.
A new breed of kid has arisen, they say, tough, streetwise, dangerous, maybe even with AIDS. Sayang. It could not last.

  A correct perception, this. Part of the pleasure of a fantasy lies in knowing it is time off, untime in an unworld bought against ever-encroaching reality. There was a certain haste about those visitors like that of the metaphorical child on the loose in a sweet-shop. If there was a certain innocence, too, about their public behaviour it was because there was quite evidently no sense of guilt. Of course they were not monsters: they were helping the child economically … In any case the child had no real existence of its own since it was part of a fantasy already older than itself. So while straight tourists strolled with their handbags and cameras through Harrison Plaza evincing outrage or a painstaking sophistication at the sight of men who were probably their own countrymen fondling and lolling and flirting with children who often looked (and often were) no older than ten, the fantasists seemed not even to have to affect unselfconsciousness. That had all been left behind as they passed beyond the last of the police at Schiphol, Heathrow and Frankfurt. The KLM, BA and Lufthansa storks had borne them safely beyond all legal clutches and delivered them babe-new into the sunny land of their wilder dreams. To all else they were oblivious. It was only the earnest, het couples from Iowa and Darwin who were so conspicuously un-born again, eyeing them aghast and sniffy with their sun-tan oil, righteousness and Hong Kong Nikons.

  In order not to waste a moment of their fortnight or three weeks these men used to bring with them copies of type-script pamphlets with titles like The Boy-Lover’s Guide to Asia, typically published in Amsterdam. These booklets were part of the fantasy too, the injunctions and advice in them entirely un-ironised. Much could be read between their faintly printed lines. In their way they did their level best to fix a single-minded gulf between the cultures, to preserve the fantasy intact, to make sure an object never became a subject:

  The Filipino boy is full of smiles and affection. Simple, warm-hearted and eager to please you, you will find he is intensely loyal. But do not fear you will break his heart if next time you will prefer his friend. He will be happy too.

  Nothing about the common Asian convention by which smiling and laughing may hide embarrassment or anxiety, simply the engaging amorality of the sweet-shop. Not much, either, to suggest that intense loyalty might not be unconnected with economic necessity, with a dependent family. Mark Cousins once posited an imaginary, wittier and more ironic Bosie by proposing ‘the love that dare not name its price.’ The Boy-Lover’s Guide was less reticent:

  The going rate for a boy since before time in memorial is twenty-five pesos [then roughly US$3] and only we would beg you not to exceed this. To the boy it is a great money even if not so much to you. Also, by increasing money the price will rise and you will spoil the market for those who come after you. If you become especial fondness for a boy it is better to buy him a new jeans or a shoes. A T-shirt will be a big thing for him.

  Is there something special about the position occupied by shoes in the imagery of racial contempt? One was suddenly reminded of the immortal remark by US Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, forced to resign in 1976 for observing ‘the only thing the coloureds are looking for in life are tight pussy, loose shoes and a warm place to shit’. In any case the gentle reader sipping his calamansi juice in VIP’s and eyeing the passing trade was not told about the men, often armed, who took their cut from the boys’ P25. Nor did he learn about the street gangs which effectively controlled (and still control) Manila, even Harrison Plaza, and whose tattooes on the boy’s shoulder or buttock he might later stroke with a jocular remark, provoking the child to pretend it was done as a joke by his brother. The Boy-Lover would still be unable to read the blue letters SSC or the cougar’s head as signifying the Sigue-Sigue Commando; nor the UFO sign as that of the Sputnik gang; nor the tartar’s head with horns and beard as belonging to the Bahala Na gang, famed as the ‘suicide’ gang whose street fights could leave half a dozen dead. Nor could he read OXO as a gang sign, nor BCJ as identifying the Batang City Jail where any child on the streets who was not obviously middle-class was (and still is) in danger of being hauled at any time of day or night by a policeman needing cash. Once in jail the child is free – indeed urged – to send a note to any next-of-kin, friend or remote acquaintance to beg them to stump up P50 or P100 to buy his release. Those unable to write find a jailer or gang member to act as amanuensis (for a cut, naturally). Many boys and girls are able to buy themselves out in a day or two. Others are not so fortunate and have to contend for rather longer with the cockroaches, slops, violence, to say nothing of the theft of their new T-shirt, jeans or shoes.

  The deadly loyalties of members to their gangs, the deadly rivalries between the gangs themselves as between them and the police, the slum as village and battleground governed by obscure oaths, codes of honour and debts of obligation – such things are, of course, a part of the city which underlies the Manila the tourists see. In just such a way are the old streets Nick Joaquin celebrates disguised beneath new names and contemporary concrete, now so lost as practically to constitute a world of the imagination like Drune. The Manila which represents Fantasyland for rural Filipinos seeking their fortunes is a different city from the one which is Fantasyland for tourists, but occasionally the two overlap and are glimpsed by both sides as a battlefield. Fantasylands and battlefields have a good deal in common apart from the commingling of blood and passion, Eros and Thanatos, the Enemy and the Beloved and all those other celebrated couplings. Above all, they must depersonalise or the whole thing becomes impossible. Thus, Gook gets killed and Boy gets paid while somewhere in the middle, on that shady grey ground which both separates and mediates such economies, obscure mafiosi wheel and deal. To certain classes of outsiders it is vital for a country and its people to remain figments, real only in the rôles cast for them: hostess, call-boy, bar-tender, bell-hop, waitress, peasant. It is, after all, the essence of tourism.

  Today in Manila there is indeed a strange crew, mostly foreign and left over from that old Manila, who are described in newspapers as the ‘Malate Mafia’, Malate being the particular area of the Ermita tourist belt which contains among other things Harrison Plaza. The Malate Mafia are characterised as people who have taken up residence and now largely control various rackets such as child prostitution and drugs and have become prime targets of post-Marcos reformist zeal. Catholic leaders and self-styled concerned citizens inveigh against them publicly, their power (Economic? Crony?) frequently alluded to as the reason why their disbanding seems so difficult to achieve. Whether or not they are protected, and by whom, is uncertain. More certain is that they could hardly be as immoral as the poverty which ensures their survival.

  *

  Manila remains the nipple from which the world takes most of its information about the Philippines. Maybe this is inevitable. It has certain results in terms of the accuracy with which the country is perceived. This was especially noticeable during the famous Snap Election of February 1986 which brought to an end the twenty years of Marcos dynasty.

  I was not in Manila at the time. I was not even in the Philippines but up a mountain in Tuscany, by turns apprehensive and relieved as news came in over the BBC’s World Service of crowds facing tanks and the tanks not firing. For a week or more every news bulletin was headed by the latest from Manila, the correspondents there filing dutifully and copiously, and by the end of that week I had the strange impression I was listening to descriptions of a country I had never visited, let alone lived in. The terms were familiar enough, of course: the Government, the People, the Opposition, the Armed Forces, the Police, the Church, the Authorities (how the British, in particular, love this phrase!). But the State they were describing was somehow unrecognisable, and the more one listened to journalists reifying their own descriptions the more one knew it would remain so.

  It was perhaps not the journalists’ fault. Being shunted about the world from one newsworthy crisis to the next is sca
rcely conducive to knowledge. It is not easy to be over-respectful of the opinion of a ‘South-East Asia correspondent’, on the same grounds that we would mistrust a South Korean newspaperman whose beat was ‘Europe’. Britain would be merely one of the many countries which fell within his bailiwick. No matter how many sedulous months he had spent in a library in Seoul we might well doubt he knew much about Britain if he had only ever lived a month or two there, including the obligatory couple of days in Northern Ireland with the Provisionals. We might be even more sceptical if he relied entirely on interpreters and guides. Had he lived with Yorkshire hill-farmers? Was he familiar with the preoccupations of commuters in pubs on Saturday evenings in Westerham or on the Hog’s Back? Did he really appreciate the subtleties of the various trade-offs made by a million families deep in the grip of deficit financing? Above all, did he actually understand the politics?

  Yet the Philippines was perhaps the one place in the Far East where many Western journalists evidently felt the pressure to do additional homework was not so acute. Enough to give it the old experienced eye for a week or two from – for the best of professional reasons – a large hotel; be urbane and amusing and readable while doing the couple of days’ up-country NPA bit and flashing the old humanist credentials over the slums in Tondo. They all did it. How else, to be fair? That is journalism. Was the place not a quasi-American satellite? Plenty of old hands to give them the run-down. Apart from anything else a familiar friend had already been identified, a polarity they recognised: the Corrupt Dictator vs the Downtrodden People. In fact their typewriters and modems were still warm from the same story only a matter of days before in Haiti.

  Among the reasons why journalists must have felt comparatively easy about this new assignment were religion and language. The Philippines declares itself officially to be 90 per cent Christian and 100 per cent English-speaking. As an ex-Spanish, ex-American colony, runs the assumption, the culture must be reasonably accessible. Like Hong Kong it is an honorary part of the West but unlike Hong Kong it does not have that aspect of a Chinese majority behind whose significant dragons and complex ideograms so much remains hidden to all but the most expert. The Philippines, by contrast, must be comprehensible.