Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  We meet each other with that characteristic Tagalog greeting which so irritates certain foreigners when they discover what it means: ‘Where are you going?’ I was once told of an Australian who had actually bothered to learn the phrase for ‘Mind your own business’ expressly to reply to this greeting. This was seemingly the only Tagalog he knew and he was probably unaware of the effect it had. Had he been at all reflective it might have struck him that seen from neutral territory it was no more intrusive to ask someone where they were going than to ask how they were feeling, as in ‘How you doing, sport?’, especially as both conventions require only the most noncommittal answers. ‘Fine.’ ‘Okay.’ ‘Not bad.’ are merely the Western equivalents of the replies I now give to those who greet me on the road to Kansulay: ‘There’. ‘Down’. Sometimes in response to my own greeting the people I know offer a bit of explanation: ‘To the forest’. ‘To feed the pigs’. – hefting an old plastic container half full of swill. Or they may with equal courtesy not reply verbally at all but make a gesture I thought in my ignorance peculiarly Filipino until I came upon this passage in an eighteenth-century Chinese novel, Cao Xueqin’s classic The Story of the Stone:

  Golden realised that Zhou Rui’s wife must have come with a message for Lady Wang and indicated that her mistress was inside by turning her chin towards the house and shooting out her lips.

  That is it exactly – pointing with the pursed mouth rather than with a finger. To gesture with the organ of speech instead of speaking with it strikes me as oddly expressive.

  Who else is coming along the path towards me? Several children going to their family’s huts with provisions or merely carrying large knives. Boys are seldom without their catapults. Soon I encounter the carpenter’s son Nilo and his friend Yor (whose nickname derives laboriously, by inversion, from the word for ‘Ouch!’ dating from the day he found a bees’ nest). Nilo is carrying a pole with a crossbar on top. On one of the limbs sits a disgruntled-looking dove tethered by its leg to a little bamboo drinking cup; the other limb is wound about with what looks like browning chewing-gum, an extremely sticky birdlime made of various resins. As they walk Yor is practising his komokon calls: the dove’s characteristic hollow coo on one note repeated accelerando. He does this with cupped hands as any European country child imitates an owl. All three of them face a long morning sitting up in the hills trying to induce another komokon to perch beside the decoy.

  Nilo himself is a born woodsman with an amazing repertoire of bird and animal cries, whistles, grunts and screams. I have watched him call golden orioles to a palm tree, standing invisibly in the dappled shade with odd pieces of brown skin showing through his tattered shorts and T-shirt. He is a true Filipino Papageno with no need to dress up in feathers to make the point. But something awful is happening to this gifted bird-catcher: his voice is breaking and he can no longer do some of his best calls. Either he will have to re-learn everything using falsetto or employ mechanical assistance. (Perhaps that was why Papageno had a flute, to make up for the real magic he lost at puberty.) Nilo is resigned to becoming a less good bird-catcher, however temporarily. But no matter how pleased to be growing up he is quite sad to be losing his undisputed position as Kansulay’s number one bird-boy. It is amusing to imagine him in a quite different milieu dressed in white linen amid cool grey Gothic, suffering the erotic melancholy of being unable ever again to sing the treble solo in ‘O for the wings of a dove’.

  As I approach Kansulay the huts scattered among the vegetation on either side grow more numerous. Everywhere people are busy scattering yamas for the chickens, going to the stream with bowls of dirty washing, hawking vegetables or last night’s catch. Nilo’s father the carpenter is outside his house splitting fat green bamboos into inch-wide laths for flooring or rafters or maybe to make somebody a couch.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he calls.

  ‘To buy rice.’

  He smiles. (The implication that one has no more rice has delicate overtones of misfortune. The smile is also an acknowledgement that my life is governed by the same laws as his.) ‘What is your food?’

  ‘Dried fish. I’ll have to go fishing tonight, maybe. If the weather’s right.’

  ‘Ah. No work, no food,’ he says sententiously. He doesn’t consider writing to be proper work at all, of course, but I have often given him fish and he takes me perfectly seriously as a fisherman. He gives a cheerful wave and goes back to his splitting. On the other side of the path almost opposite his house is a small clearing in which two sawyers have set up their cradles bearing a bright pink de-barked palm trunk. They have just twanged a charcoaled cord against its flank to mark the first cut and are tightening up their saw before beginning the laborious task whose steady rhythm will send a regular chuffing through the groves like an old-fashioned steam locomotive at a gentle pace heard from afar.

  I suddenly understand something about this community and others like it. There is nothing hidden in the way it works; one can see its mechanism. The literal redundancy of people’s greetings is that everybody knows exactly where everyone else is going and more or less how they will spend each hour of the day. I might for instance have encountered old Toly in the forest who en passant said he wasn’t going to bother coming all the way back for lunch. This news would be greeted with real interest by his cousin a kilometre away down in Kansulay.

  ‘Not coming back? Did he have rice?’

  ‘I didn’t ask.’

  ‘Was he carrying his rush bag or the cement-bag one?’

  ‘I honestly can’t remember.’

  The cousin looks knowingly at her companion. ‘He’ll boil some bananas to eat, then,’ she says. ‘That’s what he’ll do,’ agrees the companion. ‘He always does.’

  To urbanites this inquisitiveness of a world privy as by right to one’s least doing would be intolerable, suffocating. They invoke the blessed anonymity of the city, the great freedom to disappear unobserved into a life of one’s own contriving. On the other hand the life of a village like Kansulay does at least make a visible, coherent sense day after day. The cause is work, the effect is food. Anybody can see the system functioning out there in the open, there is no mystery to it.

  Well, the world’s increasing urbanisation is not going to be reversed and very likely that precise advantage of living a comprehensible life cannot be appreciated until the displaced villager finds himself for the first time having to cope with real anxiety, for that seems to be the price of his progress. I am a spectator of this crazed whirligig: watching the young men and women of Kansulay yearn to go to Manila to be subjected to squalor and over-work such as they have never known, each nurturing that ultimate dream of a passport and a work visa abroad – anywhere, anything. Meanwhile here am I, a refugee from that developed world, not rejecting its values so much as at a loss and bored by so many of them, equally incomprehensible to the villagers I live among.

  I am a primitive, I think. For me living and writing are not separable but at some level I do share the view of Nilo’s father that writing isn’t proper work even though it is a perfectly proper way to spend a life. It has been a revelation to me that in my forties I can earn a real living with my spear gun. This belated discovery has afforded me extreme pleasure, even an unsuspected self-confidence. Day after day I can feed myself, could feed a family if I had one. And because so few people in Kansulay like fishing at all, and still fewer are particularly good at it, this strangely enough gives me a place in the village – a place in its economy clearly recognised and understood even as they ask me every time they see me:

  ‘Where are you going?’

  *

  Where I am going, a week or so later, is to a meeting of the barangay Water Committee which I have requested ostensibly to find out how everyone thinks the project is going but actually to ginger them up a bit. Since I went to live on Tiwarik the whole thing seems to have become as stagnant as the water it is designed to replace. Already an indomitable spirit has shown itself, that lethargic deter
mination to make do with things as they are. Secretly I am on the verge of applauding this but I am resolved to be brisk. I am not a meliorist. The idea of Progress strikes me as one of humanity’s drearier self-deceptions, but I still think it ought to be possible to save Kansulay’s infants a certain amount of death and a great deal of gastroenteritis without much effort. Besides, I tell myself as I walk down the track, nobody in Kansulay will have to pay a single penny. There will be no charge for the water, unlike in barangay Balimbing where after five years’ efforts they finally got a water system constructed by provincial government contractors with central government funds only to discover that the grant for the project was really a long-term loan which the people of the barrio were obliged to pay back at the monthly rate of P7.00 per household tap. At least the Kansulay project was not going to saddle the already impoverished with either an endless debt or an invidious choice between free dirty creek water and clean expensive tapwater.

  Having worked myself into the appropriate mood I march into the Captain’s house. And there among the familiar faces of the village officials is one I certainly had not expected to see, the old Judge’s son Cads Soriano. What on earth is he doing here? He is no more a barangay official than I am.

  After the greetings I enquire very amiably about Cads’ presence. Cads smiles at the table and sucks his fraternity ring while the Captain explains he thought it better if all interested parties were present at the meeting, and since the water source is on Soriano land the Soriano family clearly have an interest. A certain foreboding settles on me at this news. Something is going on but what it is and how many other people in the room know about it is anybody’s guess. The self-righteousness I have brought with me begins to intensify. The last thing I wish to be is a philanthropist but I see no reason to be a dupe instead. Why should this perfectly straightforward project become bogged down so quickly? Is it not possible to do anything in this country without endless intrigues? (And more in the same vein.)

  Clearly Cads is not going to explain his presence any more fully for the moment. He makes a great fuss about pouring me a glass of ESQ rum (at eight in the morning) which I refuse on the fictitious grounds of ‘LBM’. Everyone laughs hugely at this, the very idea of loose bowel movements being pretty uproarious really, except that of course the laughter is sympathy or something I can’t be too bothered about since I am not suffering. The Captain then reminds everybody that it is I who have requested this meeting and courteously gives me the floor.

  I briefly review the agreement we reached several months ago about Kansulay’s water problem, its solution, the test well we have dug and my friend’s professional assessment that there is water enough only for drinking purposes. None of this is news but everybody smokes hard and looks grave. I then change gear slightly and say I am becoming a little Concerned about the Time Factor. Could it be, perhaps, that the Captain is experiencing difficulty in organising teams of men prepared to give their labour free? In case this gives the wrong impression I add that I realise how difficult it is to expect people to do anything bayanihan now that the rains are due when villagers will shortly be preoccupied with planting rice and vegetables, a critical agricultural moment.

  ‘Well of course James is quite right,’ the Captain looks at his committee. Everyone nods. A bottle clinks on a glass. ‘It will be a very busy time for all of us.’ His wife comes in with a plate of little white riceflour cakes as pulutan. ‘I believe when we discussed this we agreed it might be necessary to provide the workers with merienda, tuba, cigarettes and things like that to keep their spirits up. Oh, James, have a puto.’ He pushes the plate towards me. ‘Very good for LBM.’ More laughter. ‘Well, I have to tell you the money you so kindly gave me for that purpose is now exhausted.’

  Exhausted? I can’t believe it. I gave him P5,000 to buy a carefully itemised list of materials for building the spring box up in the woods. My engineering friend and I also calculated a decent margin for providing the workers with food and drink. Surely he couldn’t have blown the entire five thousand with nothing to show for it and now be working up to demanding more?’

  ‘There is no money left at all?’

  ‘None, I’m afraid,’ the Captain says. ‘You calculated very well. Only the carpenter has still to be paid for making the kwan? porma. He worked very hard. Naldo’s a good man.’

  Belatedly, only just in time, I grasp what he is saying. They have probably already built the spring box. Having heard nothing I took it for granted nothing had happened. I had not thought to go up to look again at that slimy hip-bath we excavated in the territory of the demons so long ago. How could I have been so inefficient and lackadaisical? So accusing? I hastily say that I also requested this meeting so as to bring myself up to date with developments since I had recently spent a lot of time down at Sabay and had regrettably got out of touch with what was going on here. I assure them that the extra money will be no problem.

  ‘Well, I know we all appreciate that very much,’ says the Captain. ‘You have already visited the spring box? Are you satisfied with it?’

  Probably at any time up to my fortieth birthday I would have said yes, indeed, it’s a beautiful spring box and have trusted to luck that I had correctly read the thing’s existence. However in the last five years I seem to have been overtaken by a kind of reckless truthfulness.

  ‘No, I’m afraid I haven’t yet been there.’

  ‘Oh, never mind,’ says the Captain, and it is plain that indeed nobody minds at all.

  ‘I shall go and look at it just as soon as this meeting’s over,’ I tell them.

  ‘We’ll all go. We can take, you know, some refreshments along.’

  The price of my sloth is to be a drinking session in the woods. So be it.

  ‘Now, about Phase Two of the project,’ says the Captain. ‘Phase Two is of course the installation of the pipe leading from the spring box down to the village here. This is the most expensive part. The distance is, er,’ he looks for a sheet of paper, ‘one thousand eight hundred twenty metres. Now according to our canvass of prices …’

  A discussion ensues about the relative merits of polythene and galvanised iron, of the discounts offered by Sasco Trading, Tomas Tan, Rey Ong, Fortune Enterprises and other hardware dealers in the provincial capital.

  ‘… whatever our choice we must remember we still have P2,500 left over from Phase One,’ the Captain is saying at one point, jerking my attention back from his bodyguard/factotum who has just come in with fresh supplies of ESQ.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t quite get that?’ I interrupt. ‘I thought you said we needed more money for labour?’

  ‘Correct, James. You stipulated you wanted materials and labour itemised separately. As regards labour alone we are in deficit.’

  ‘But as regards materials we are in surplus of two thousand five hundred pesos?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘You mean to say you’ve built that spring box at a cost of only half our estimated price?’ Good God, what corners had they cut? Was it half size? Made of wattle and daub but with a cement lid? Why the hell had they built the thing while I was away? Why the hell had I been away when they built the thing?

  ‘Of course not. But with the generous contribution of Mr Soriano here we are in surplus as regards to your own generous funding.’

  I look at Cads. ‘I’m very sorry once again; I’m obviously badly out of touch. I hadn’t realised there was another source of money.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ the Captain explains. ‘I thought you were here then. We had just started building the spring box when Cads offered to match you for half the cost.’

  ‘Of the entire project?’

  ‘No, I fear I could not afford that,’ the lawyer says speaking for the first time. ‘Half the cost of the spring box. Two thousand five hundred pesos. Too little, I’m afraid, but I did want to contribute in my small way to such an important project. I hope you don’t mind, Mr James?’

  ‘Mind?’ How can I mind? I am unnerved, an
xious even, but how can I possibly mind? ‘Of course not. I think it’s most generous of you. Now we can afford to pay for labour when we install the pipe. If we opt for polythene we will have to bury it and digging a trench nearly two kilometres long is an enormous job even if we get every man, woman and child in the barrio to dig.’

  ‘And Janding.’ More laughter. Alejandro is the village baklâ who, in partnership with a friend, makes rather a decent living in a home-made beauty parlour among the coconuts where they cut hair and give manicures and pedicures to the women of the area, some of whom come many miles. Janding has often cut my hair for me and shortly after the last time appeared at my hut a bit breathless and dishevelled with a coconut shell piled full of truly awful objects. They looked like wrinkled black breasts amputated because of a fulminating growth which had broken through the skin and formed a flattish pink ulcer. They were clammy and cold to the touch and the exact consistency of a silicone implant.

  ‘Ungus baboy,’ Janding said. Pigs’ snouts? Now I came gingerly to turn them over they might perhaps have looked a bit snoutish. Re-orientated, the ulcer part became the flat end of the snout, the general contours less breast-than muzzle-shaped.