Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  The sound-quality of anguish has nothing to do with its volume. This is as true in a Mozart opera as in an interrogation centre. Presumably these birds are yelling at the top of their lungs but the sound is not as loud in terms of decibels as their ordinary song at dawn. It is merely high, hopeless and unbroken. It reminds me at once of a morning when I had to call on an Italian farmer very early and found him in his kitchen brewing coffee and inspecting his mousetraps. These were not sprung traps but pieces of thick paper spread with birdlime. On this particular morning there was a mouse stuck to a sheet of paper on the floor outside his larder, its ineffectual scrabbles of the night clearly legible in the dense glue surrounding it. As the farmer chatted about what the hail had done to his vines the previous afternoon he scrumpled up the paper, glue, mouse and all, and tossed the ball onto the fire. I had not been paying much attention to what he was doing and from the mouse’s necessary immobility had assumed it dead. But then from the fireplace as the ball of paper caught there came a tiny appalling scream. I don’t believe the farmer noticed it at all: it was less than the momentary squeak of steam from a damp log, the breath of a lobster in a restaurant kitchen. That minute bellow of unhelped pain still rings in my inner ear, however, set off by the finches, a memorable commonplace which itself prompts other commonplaces: What casual fate is in store for you? and Do fish feel less for their silence?

  For indeed not all fish are silent when speared. Bujhong, the long-beaked eel fish go aww, aww, aww as if protesting a monstrous unfairness. Many species of trigger fish (such as boriri) produce a drumming sound. These are perhaps alarm noises rather than expressions of pain: I have occasionally heard these fish make them when threatened but unmolested. Most species merely flap silently, mouths working or fixed open in a rictus, O, in which the delicate chitinous plates of the mouth-parts and cheeks are fully extended and, because no longer overlapping, become translucent and project the fish’s lips spectrally in front of its head. I am clinical, I feel remorse, I eat. But one day I know I shall eat only vegetables. It is not precisely squeamishness (I have death on my hands and they are familiar with their task) but more a weariness with squatting on the imagination, with the dejection of causing pain. At some point killing to eat is a reason, not an explanation. An explanation was given by Rilke when he said ‘Killing is one of the forms of our wandering mourning.’

  *

  I have only been back in Kansulay for a few days before I discover my mountain retreat is no longer the isolate fastness it was. By night Lolang Mating’s ghostly familiars no doubt still exercise their guardianship, but with the daylight full on the hill’s abrupt spine children move from dense patch of shade to dense patch of shade with long-handled fishing nets. The duhat season has arrived.

  The shade is cast by venerable duhat or lumboy trees, each with its heavy crop of purple fruit. These fruit are about the size of a rose hip with a single stone inside, the flesh watery blue, sweet-astringent with a slightly resinous flavour. I quickly tire of them but they are highly prized by others. Now the children in bright fragmentary T-shirts and torn cotton shorts festoon the branches, calling out of great cumuli of leaves, cheerful parakeet-voices, while beneath them a rain of droppings patters to the ground as fresh-sucked duhat stones. My hut is built directly beneath one tree. The voices overhead come from bright blue mouths. The sound of stones plopping onto the sun-crisped thatch brings me out and looking up I see branchloads of children examining each other’s tongues competitively to see whose is bluest.

  But there is another current of village life which intersects here as I discover when several teenage boys, one of them Lolang Mating’s youngest grandson, come asking if I have an old tin they can borrow. Thinking of duhats I lend them an odd battered aluminium pot with a handle I once found on the seabed and which I now use for gathering wild beans. The boys thank me solemnly and disappear behind a tree. I go back to writing. Smoke drifts across the shade and up towards a palm whose head is backed by cloudless blue. The smoke is barred and sliced by the shadow of its leaves as it slips through and disappears beyond. Eventually I go to see what they are doing.

  They are cooking, somewhat earnestly, over an open fire. In the now blackened pot balanced on the flames, the contents dim behind smoke and steam, is a vegetable mess. They are making an infusion of guava leaves which is good for fresh wounds. Who, then, has been wounded? The answer is they all have. Their slightly strained manner and unnatural calm betokens pain, for just that morning they presented themselves at a hut down in the village to be circumcised.

  Empathic anguish shoots through me which I conceal by offhanded cheerful concern. These are not children: the eldest is sixteen. I recommend that if the guava leaves don’t work they should come back and I will give them sulphanilamide powder. They are pleased by this idea of medical back-up and borrow a pair of nail scissors to cut up a cleanish T-shirt they have brought with them. They make a quantity of circular patches and, with much mutual joshing about diameter, cut a hole in the centre. They take their pot of brew and withdraw, laughing.

  I thought at first this was some peculiar hang-over from the days of the Americans, a petty-bourgeois puritan obsession with hygiene or guilt which required the mutilation of male children regardless of medical indications. It is not, however. In this province at least circumcision is a real rite, an entry into manhood. So much so, in fact, that while they remain uncircumcised boys are often referred to as baklâ, a word which translates approximately as an effeminate homosexual. There is an accepted social place for the genuine baklâ and whatever mockery he may attract it is far more tolerant amusement – even affection – than the merciless hounding which certain other cultures afford. Yet however inoffensive, it is still a taunt although one which can apparently be rendered without substance merely by recourse to a razor blade, and the reason turns out to be very simple. It is not that the boys of Kansulay really feel their sexual orientation is dependent upon submitting to an operation without anaesthetic in their early teens. There is a straightforward belief that an uncircumcised man cannot make a woman conceive. That they know this to be false is, of course, no bar to their belief any more than any other kind of knowledge has the least reference to faith. So perhaps after all it is merely an ordeal many feel attracted to and they choose the long school vacation (which happens to coincide with the duhat season) so they may recover at leisure.

  The boys return to the mountain daily to brew up fresh leaves and anoint their wounded members. I ask slightly gruffly how they are: the truth is they are quite unembarrassed and I am extremely so. I refuse to look at anything; I keep insisting I am not a doctor. I am appalled at the thought of my hut being turned into a sinister clinic of the woods. Already I see it in English Sunday-tabloid terms. Who is this mysterious foreigner posing as a doctor at whose isolated house a constant stream of adolescent boys submits to intimate examinations? After several days when it is clear from the boys’ remarks that guava leaves cure but slowly (not surprising when one sees the dark brown liquid with its flimsy silvery scum like a pot of cold tea) I give them orange paper sachets of sulphanilamide powder, instructing them to use it sparingly on clean dry dressings. No infusions, no washing, no wet for a couple of days at least and then come back for some more if the wound still isn’t drying. I am a school matron dealing with the rugger team’s tinea cruris.

  They all return for a second sachet and naturally it occurs to me they may be selling them back to the chemist where I bought them and relying on time-honoured guava leaves with which, after all, everybody else seems to recover. On the other hand the chemist is a long way off in town and after a couple of weeks the boys greet me in the village, calling from their houses that they have recovered now.

  ‘You’re still baklâ though,’ retorts a mischievous sister. Laughter on all sides from among the bananas and coconuts, laughter in which the boy himself joins. Good-natured whoops startle the chickens and the pigs.

  *

  At night, however, m
y place on the hill is still as deserted of humans as I wish it to be. Lolang Mating keeps all casual visitors at bay, the glowing timbers of her collapsed shack a demarcation beyond which none dare set foot unescorted. Not even Sising would come up alone. Instead my hut is the nexus for non-human visitors of a kind which would reinforce the worst fears of the superstitious. The lumboy trees become thick with big fruit-eating bats fighting and squabbling, the air loud with their leather wings. Some have bodies the size of cats with wings of well over a metre span. At dusk a cloud of lesser bats fumes up from the forest into the purple sky, but only with the coming of real darkness do these fruit bats unfold themselves and row across from the forest top, pulling up at the tree above my hut with a noise like wet mackintosh being shaken. All night they clatter in the branches while twigs and lumboy stones rain on the thatch. Now and again one of the smaller bats may fly straight through the hut from one open window to the other, passing only a foot or so above where I lie on a mat on the floor, naked body fanned by their whirring passage.

  One night the bats seem particularly noisy: my sleep is broken by an insistent thin mewling, a lost and hopeless wail. When dawn comes I have forgotten it but soon afterwards another group of boys arrives and makes triumphant noises beneath an adjacent lumboy. I discover they have set a trap the previous day consisting of a single nylon thread high in the air from which dangle fish-hooks. One of the fruit bats is caught on two of these hooks, hopelessly entangled, and has been hanging there all night.

  A boy climbs up and a good deal of shouting ensues, instructions and cautions mainly for the bat is still very much alive and has a jaw the size of a small cat but narrower and with needle-sharp canines. After some wrestling up among the leaves during which the bat screams twice it comes thumping through the branches to the ground where it heaves impotently, for the boy has broken its wings halfway along thus immobilising them and its fine little hands. The splintered ends of bones now poke through the reddish fur of both forearms. Its head swivels to meet menace, eyes huge and black and perfectly spherical like beads of ink. I am shaken by its vulnerability which seems caused as much by its being caught out of its proper medium as by hooks and broken bones. It is a victim of daylight, a fish taken from water, deserted by all the skills which ordinarily make it so powerful. The boys tie its wings outstretched to a length of cane; crucified, the bat looks from one of us to the other.

  ‘Take it away and kill it quickly,’ I say brusquely. The boys are baffled by my anger; they do not know my hut has been violated by their casual brutality. I make them take down their fish-hooks and forbid them to put them up anywhere in the vicinity. At the same time my annoyance is increased by having to listen to myself giving these tetchy orders. Who am I to forbid people to trap their food? I am no campaigner for animal rights (how could I be without hypocrisy?) and still less do I own so much as a single square foot of their home territory. But life would become impossible, I try to explain; I would be unable to sleep for listening if I knew there were traps set nearby.

  They affect to understand and agree to set them far away, a compromise I accept. That is how Arcadia is. Later in the day I pass the house of one of them and find the bat still alive on its cross though now visibly weakened by injuries and thirst. My look attempts to convey something to the young man leaning out of the window above it but he just smiles. No electricity, no refrigerator, no quick and early death, he might have said. But he wouldn’t: it just means nothing to him.

  *

  Amid all this my hut is calm and expressionless. It lives as I do, as we all do, exposed to all sorts of animal and vegetable activity. In some senses the life is that of endless camping except that being able to stand beneath one’s own roof is a luxury whereas crawling into canvas makes me low-spirited. The gathering and drying of firewood, the daily fetching of water from the pump at Bini and Sising’s, such are ordinary enough chores which become noticeable only when the weather is bad. Things of this sort become mere habit. I had more difficulty adjusting to the persistent discomfort of a cushionless world: right-angled chairs made of bamboo, benches made of two poles lashed across trestles, seats of split logs. The body touches the ground at the soles of the feet; all the rest touches hard wood polished by thin bottoms and bony limbs. I look around for somewhere – anywhere – comfortable to sit. I dream about my study at school, about the JCR at university, about libraries and clubs. I come from a sitting culture where speculative conversations are conducted from deep armchairs in book-lined rooms. I am (I tell myself) a bachelor of the Victorian, Holmesian model. I crave a favourite dog-eared smoking jacket, chairs over whose plump buttoned arms I can swing my legs, a glass of good brandy ‘to aid lucubration’. There is no such thing in Filipino life as a three-pipe problem, as smoke-hazed chambers of conceptual thinking, as quiet rooms designed for the unhindered life of the mind …

  And on the brink of this port-stained nonsense something gives in another direction and I am through to the far side of discomfort. Suddenly the slat floor on which I sleep seems better designed for the body, the breeze filtering up through it delightfully cool. Life becomes not luxurious but eminently possible again, the craving for softness has gone. What better than that one write standing up, like so many Victorians? I have some idea Dodgson wrote much of Alice standing; Edward FitzGerald wrote the Rubaiyat on his feet; solid Anglican favourites like ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ and ‘Through the night of doubt and sorrow’ flowed from the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould’s pen as he stood thoughtfully at his desk. I buy nails, I borrow a saw, I cut some bamboo. Now outside my hut in the shade of the lumboy tree stands a makeshift bamboo lectern at which I write. The children are bewildered by such behaviour. Evernew standards for the bizarre are being set. Writing is weird but writing standing up on a mountain surrounded by forest and palm trees is beyond-weird fit to set a fashion.

  Other adjustments, too, are necessary. One evening a speckle rain begins. Later that night I am woken by water falling on my ribs. Outside is a steady downpour which the roofing of last year’s fronds cannot entirely shed. Another repair in the morning, I think: cut some palm branches, weave some new sections of sulirap. It is early yet for the rainy season but nevertheless time to prepare for the arrival of real monsoon deluges. I roll on the floor in search of a dry patch. In that half-awake state when one’s eyes open onto black I wonder how many of my ex-classmates – now all in their forties – have to roll on the floor at night to avoid a leaking roof. What evidence of abject failure that would have seemed in those days had I known what the future held for me. I would have been at a complete loss to understand what kind of a calamity could have overtaken me to bring about the forfeiture of my birthright to become a respectable and affluent middle-class Englishman. I should probably have been forced to conclude that somewhere along the line I had fallen prey to missionary zeal: that from deep in my blood The Call had inexorably come, something genetic asserting itself and condemning me to good works in the outback.

  At that time a far simpler likelihood would never have occurred to me as I sat in class and considered a career, that I might instead have been overtaken by something far more voluntary, altogether more reasonable: an utter boredom with all I was supposed to become. For I never suspected then I would one day be foxed by that over-prosaic world we were earnestly envisaging for ourselves, or baffled by how so many people successfully ignore the fallings-away and blatant constructedness of such a world. My juvenile self never foresaw my astonishment at how huge numbers of individuals remain steadfastly immune to distraction, to effusions of light and scent and sound, to ravishing disorder, to the discreet pleasure of living chancily in the cracks of a universe so clearly and so sublimely never designed for human beings at all. How could I ever have contemplated sitting in a traffic jam morning and evening on the South Circular Road listening to the radio and cursing, still less have agreed to that as a reasonable price to pay? (O time too swift, O Swiftnesse never ceasing.) I am flawed in some way and it i
s incurable. The flaw does not make me yearn to have been Burton or Speke but it does require me to acknowledge that exploring always carries with it an element of the desire to become lost.

  And lost I am: eyes sightlessly open in a hut on a hill in a forest, hard to imagine on any particular map. It is scarcely a place, even, more a locus for sleepy speculation like that with which the fitfully dozing airline passenger looks out of the window at the dark earth below, sees a fragile cluster of lights and wonders idly where it is and what it is called, an unnamed island in an unknown sea. Then, headphones back on, he naps again and slips below the horizon. Many times I have looked up at night from among wave-tops, from a desert or a forest, have watched the winking lights of his passing and listened to his diminishing thunder.

  *

  I am walking down early from the forest to the village in order to meet a local government official from the regional water authority or something. He might be bossy because he has authority in such matters and I have none. On the other hand he might be deferential, obsequious even, because I have a rumoured access to money and he and his council certainly haven’t. (In the event he is charming and useless with a San Miguel beer pot pushing out his bogus Lacoste sports shirt like a tumour.)

  As I walk towards the village the first butterflies of the day float out of the shade into the sun as spangled membranes before lurching out of the light once more and turning back into large insects. I begin to meet the first villagers making their way into the forest to patches of ground they till or to the huts where they keep pigs, goats, chickens and which they often use as temporary bases during the day. If they have chicks not yet old enough to roost up a couple of members of the family might spend the nights there as well in order to chase off snakes, wildcats and crows. When copra-making takes place far from the village and especially when the landowner wants his workers to do overtime in order to catch a particular boat or a favourable market price these huts often become crammed dormitories and scenes of convivial labour by night. Then the light from the cooking fires supplements that of the tapahan fire smouldering in its pit beneath the stacked coconut halves and makes even more intense and threatening the blackness of the forest which surrounds them.