Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘What on earth are they, Janding?’

  ‘Fungi.’

  ‘You mean, you eat these?’

  ‘Of course not, silly. They’re for your hair. They cure baldness.’ He explained how they were full of a colourless, odourless jelly which had to be massaged into the scalp each night. ‘I’ll show you. Look.’

  Unable to refuse I let him break open a snout and rub in its surprisingly chill contents, leaving my scalp covered with candlewicks of hair plus a certain amount of earth and twig fragments.

  ‘If it works,’ I told him, ‘you’ll make your fortune, I hope you realise.’

  ‘I will?’

  ‘Of course. The whole world will come to the Philippines looking for you and your pigs’ snouts. I’m not joking, Janding; you’ll be a millionaire. You won’t know what to do with all your money.’ I caught sight of myself in my shaving mirror. It didn’t look like the beginning of anybody’s fortune but one never could tell.

  ‘I know already. I shall go to Hollywood.’

  I was touched by the thought of Janding grubbing about in the forest in the hopes of repairing a defect presumably already present in my father’s genes. And now, sitting in the Captain’s house, I am as hard put as anyone else in the room to imagine him with his highly polished pink nails and tight white trousers wielding a pick and shovel.

  I watch Cads covertly. He has plumped up in the last two years but in a way he looks rather younger than when I first met him. Obviously in those days the strain of life in Manila had kept him careworn, plus of course his father had recently died. Now there is something piggy and placid about him, not disagreeable but he is after all his mother’s son as well as his father’s and I badly want to know what is going on. What is that monster Mrs Soriano up to? How can buying his way into a non-profitmaking scheme help her? And suddenly I think I know. He could have the spring box legally declared a co-operative venture and with a fifty-fifty stake in it later demand consumers pay for their water after all, once I am safely out of the way. Surely he can’t do that? But perhaps he can if he claimed it was rent for the land on which the spring box stands. Who the hell can I ask? I decide to have it out with the Captain as soon as possible. Meanwhile the morning proceeds. The bodyguard/factotum goes off to fetch my engineer friend who recommends polythene rather than GI pipe not just because it won’t rust but because he has contacts in Fortune Enterprises and may be able to get us a good reduction on a bulk order.

  Slowly – some of us rather drunkenly – we set off on foot for the woods to look at the spring box. On the way I aggrievedly tax my friend with not having told me the thing had been built but he has no idea I did not know. I have been away so much, he explains, and this is true enough for it not to be worth pursuing. I should have gone and looked for myself and there it is. When we reach the spring box we all gaze at it as proudly as if we had built it with our own hands. It stands in a trodden-down mush of undergrowth at the foot of the hill, gleaming in its grey newness like a freshly consecrated shrine. My friend thumps the top as if to demonstrate the stoutness of its construction; Cads proprietorially straightens a meaningless sapling nearby and bounces his weight on the ground at its root. I cannot think what I am doing here nor why I had a major hand in bringing into existence this small but ugly concrete tank in the middle of the woods. I am not at all convinced anybody in Kansulay really cares very much about water, it is merely one of the appropriate things for a barangay captain to make noises about. Over the centuries the villagers have learned to accommodate sickness and death; why upset the pattern? It is a social order which works. I am filled with remorse for my unclear motives, for an amateurish health-improvement notion which is all that is left of the pure medical zeal of my grandfather in China. That gene, too, is weak and defective. I am further depressed by how little I really understand about how things are here.

  I excuse myself from the alcoholic conviviality now breaking out around the offending structure, which more and more looks like a monument to an outsider’s folly. My engineering friend walks back with me along the track. I ask him what he thinks Cads is really up to.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replies neutrally in that way which Filipinos often have of appearing genuinely not to know something while at the same time being incredibly discreet and diplomatic. ‘Should I go ahead and order the pipe?’

  I can’t think what to do. I know so many people but all of a sudden none feels like a possible adviser. My friend is looking expectantly at me.

  ‘Well, I suppose … But why did he suddenly decide to fork up twenty-five hundred pesos? Cads? Why should he? That’s quite a lot of money.’

  ‘Maybe you could ask Ate Bibyan.’

  Who is this Vivian? I’ve never heard of her. I say so, gruffly.

  ‘The sister of the kapitana.’

  ‘Why her?’

  ‘Because she is married to the younger brother of Soriano.’

  I halt in the middle of the track. ‘Let me get this straight. The sister of the Captain’s wife is married to Cads’s brother? You mean the Captain is related by marriage to the Sorianos?’

  ‘Of course, James. You did not know?’

  ‘Certainly I didn’t know. I don’t go round asking for a complete list of everybody’s relatives.’

  And as soon as I hear myself say it I perceive my own naivety, yet further compounded by pretending a thing as straightforward as installing a simple water supply need have nothing to do with family ties or messy intrigues or anything else. You want it? Here’s the money. Do it. What kind of foolishness was that? Why couldn’t I stick to killing fish? Stuff my ears with the sea and listen only to the aww, aww, aww of some other creature’s desolate complaint? Overtaken by weariness I tell my friends of course to go ahead and order the pipe. I shall do my bit and keep my word. If then some fast trick is pulled which forces the villagers to pay for their water they will just have to fight it out among themselves while I go through my silly ritual of pretending I can expose Cads and his family to the contempt of the civilised world.

  Back on my hill-top it occurs to me to re-phrase that old Western determinant of social forces with its bleak verticality Who-whom? into an Eastern, horizontal Who-whose? Whose man is he? Whose family interests is he upholding or threatening? I become prey to jejune reflections on administrations which depend on intrigue; on systems of government where a president can install his own men so that with each new dynasty the entire management of a country has to collapse and be once more built up with a fresh set of yes-men. For the first time I begin to admire the theoretical value of the British system which has civil servants, policemen and the armed forces pledging allegiance to the Crown – that mystical entity which is higher even than the family of lumpen-monarchs currently wearing it. Independent judiciary … impartial bureaucracy … rogue-proof administration … I stride up and down for quite half an hour discharging my self-annoyance, like a Sixth-former full of ab initio insights. Then I lose interest (very like a Sixth-former) and slump over my lectern which I notice is getting mossy in the shade of the lumboy, staring seawards towards where Tiwarik lies, immensely full of gloom. Not even the sight of young Kado and friends crossing the clearing with their catapults on another hunting expedition cheers me up. I merely incline my head sombrely like a bishop with a spasm of gas. LBM of the soul. So much for my lofty notion of the simple village mechanism. The hubris of it.

  *

  Daily now I crave Tiwarik and the sea. I carry my lectern over to the shade of a neighbouring tree from where I can see the blue funnel of water framed by a valley of palms. I look up and gaze at it between sentences, at the far catspaws and the skeins of shadow crossing its surface. The wind has swung, the current has changed. I think the moon is weakening. I have become a landlubber, estranged. My skin aches to be in live water, my soles to tread on fathoms. This amusing life of fruit trees and circumcision and water projects and scribbling is all very well but I am a hunter, a lover. I fear for my skills and my passion, I
fear rust and inertia.

  All at once the great sea sends me a message. For weeks its distant roar has carried up the valley, through the treelined megaphone, telling me of its preoccupation, its busyness with other things. I have listened to it from the darkness of my hut, jilted and forced to overhear a beloved voice in animated conversation with a stranger. Tonight, however, there is nothing to hear. By means of its silence the sea tells me I may return.

  I pack a canvas bag, nail up the door and go back to Tiwarik.

  10

  However, I am wrong. The sea has not deluded me so much as that in my eagerness I have misread it. It has not yet returned to its former clear condition and my pleasure at being back on Tiwarik is soon undercut a little by its uneasy state. This leaves my days with a certain hanging feeling when it no longer seems quite obvious how the time might be filled. This is of course also partly due to having spent just long enough in Kansulay to have adopted a dry-land routine. For a day or two, therefore, I mope about rather and allow myself to be dragged down. Embedded in the back of my mind is a fresh lump which I bump up against when thinking of other things, a bulk I would rather not consider and which in consequence insists on reminding me of its presence. If I can bring myself to look squarely at it I can see what I already know, that it is labelled ‘Water Project’. I am full of remorse at the foolishness of having allowed an officious public self to get away from me and start living a bossy sort of life on its own. I can’t imagine what I thought was wrong with living as I always had, giving and receiving small favours, none of them amounting to much but in time building into friendships such as that with Sising and Bini. Small acts of mutual regard were one thing. But projects, the expression of a diffuse and self-regarding concern – how could they lead to anything but trouble?

  I become restless in a search for something comforting. I carry my bangka down to the water, retrieve the paddle from the roof of the hut and go across to Sabay to see if there is anything nice to be had in the village shop. I know the answer but making the journey is an occupation.

  The shop in Sabay is really no more than a counter set into the side of somebody’s house. When it is fully stocked one might be able to find ESQ rum, soap, shampoo with an anti-lice ingredient, Birch Tree evaporated milk, fish-hooks, soy sauce, kerosene, cooking oil, nylon line, sugar, things of that sort. Cigarettes come singly: as in any sari-sari store in the country there is always an opened pack behind the counter and often a courtesy box of matches dangling on a string. (Even in Manila cigarette sellers weave in and out of the traffic offering individual smokes or sticks of gum to drivers, just as pavement vendors peddle single sweets to passers-by. In England before the Second World War it was similarly possible to buy cigarettes individually, as well as Woodbines in little packets of five.)

  Also on the counter at Sabay is a cardboard box of assorted medicines, a jumble of old pills and capsules. Here can be found the tail-end of somebody’s course of antibiotics, pain-killers, home-made remedies, steroids, antacid pills, some saccharine tablets which have got in by mistake. It is a grab-bag of wrapped and unwrapped, named and anonymous, white and multicoloured from which people select what they feel looks most inimical to their symptoms. This system of self-medication appears to be quite successful and the notion that the patient plays the leading rôle in deciding his own fate is an excellent piece of psychology. Pharmaceutical roulette is an idea I should very much like to see introduced into the high-street chemists of Britain. A large drum like a bran tub inside the door with a cordial invitation to take a real gamble on getting better would suffice. Here at Sabay people buying pills fall into two categories: those who want proprietary brands for colds and ‘flu, and the rest. (Colds are very common, maybe because fishing is the main occupation.)7

  This morning I meet Intoy at the shop. He has been sent by his mother with an empty lapad which she wants half filled with coconut oil. He is clearly pleased to see me back again, but remarks that I have become thinner and that I must have been leading an unhappy and unhealthy life at Kansulay.

  ‘It’s better here at Sabay,’ he says. ‘Here you will become happy and fat.’8 He is not familiar with the concept of comfort-eating under which regimen millions of unhappy people become very fat indeed and stay unhappy. Looking around the shelves of the village shop I cannot truthfully see much likelihood of that here. I send him back to his mother with several additional small things and he tells me he will start sleeping on Tiwarik again even though the sea is wrong for fishing.

  But when I return to the island with my few basic purchases it still seems very unmagical. While I have been over in Sabay some fisherman has baled out his bilges offshore and a film of diesel fuel coats the wavelets, blunting their sparkle. Before dispersing it wafts its stench to my hut. It is a perfectly reasonable thing to have done but all of a sudden I feel prey to a kind of crudity. I long for uneasier people.

  A couple of dull days later I decide to go to Bulangan, still in search of a comfort, a pleasure, something nice. Anything nice: it may be a tin of food or a drug, I shall know it when I see it. I am made of glass, deep black and very frangible. The jeep gets as far as Malubog when, too full of inertia to go any further, I get out to see what the smaller town can offer. Then, just before it is too late, I get back in again. Nobody finds this odd but it is exactly the sort of dithering which gets me down further.

  Once in Bulangan I wander about, unable to find in any shop a single thing I wish to own or eat. Even the bakery, whose smell is normally enticing, nauseates me. The Filipinos put sugar in their bread, American-style, which as far as I am concerned makes it all but inedible. Even the pandesal has had its Spanishness vitiated. I buy a two-day-old newspaper and sit down in a cafe where it seems they have run out of everything but warm soft drinks and beer. My resistance is low; I call for a Coca-Cola although I detest the stuff.

  I have no sooner opened the newspaper than somebody kicks back the metal chair on the other side of the table and bawls ‘Hi Joe!’, sitting down. I freeze and look at him over the top of the paper like an elderly Tory disturbed in his club. I know it is a waste of time. The ones that come on like that are unstoppable in every culture.

  ‘You know how to speaking Tagalog?’ he says. ‘I hear you talk to the girl. You are with the Peace Corps? What is your name? How old are you? Where are you living?’

  This morning I put down the newspaper and say in Tagalog, ‘Kindly go away.’

  ‘We will make happy-happy.’ He ignores me completely, calling for two grande of San Miguel beer.

  I am under no obligation to pass the time of day with this boor, still less to have a drink with him - or at least I wasn’t until by sheer misfortune someone I know slightly comes into the cafe at that moment and greets me. Worse, it turns out he is related to my persecutor so there is no easy way of simply getting up and going out without being rude to him. Besides, I have been meaning to ask him a question about bacteria in well-water. I slump back with not the best grace and stare at my drink while they get down to the beer and the questioning.

  The questions. Where is your wife? Why are you not married? Where is your companion? Why are you alone …? Since these are the very questions one was brought up to regard as the depths of intimacy, hence otherwise the height of rudeness, how could they fail to provoke? Childhood training can be overlooked in the cause of social expediency, it may even be flouted completely in the pursuit of pleasure, but it can never be forgotten. Nowadays I have no difficulty in telling a stranger my age, how much I earn, how many brothers and sisters I have; it is of no consequence to me. On the other hand I have little incentive to ask the same questions back, which is not playing the game. Maybe this explains why the Filipino way with foreigners can sometimes be of belligerent curiosity. What is in your bag? How much did your watch cost? Such a person may think nothing of walking into your house, sitting down and going through your books, fiddling with your radio, a penknife, anything which catches his eye. With stoicism I sit i
t out, with good grace and a fixed smile. I owe that much to the millions of other Filipinos who behave with the ordinary courtesy which crosses all cultural boundaries. The international bad manners of this uninvited creature now swilling beer at my table are compounded by his shouting his questions with any interrogator’s lack of charm. This unfortunately is a Filipino characteristic, that of addressing somebody two feet away as if he were a buffalo on the other side of a paddy-field. Lord how I loathe extroverts, especially this morning.

  Now I match his aggression by answering all his questions with perfect candour except the one about why I am unmarried. Finally, of course, this is the only thing he really wants to know. Very likely it is the only thing anybody ever wants to know about someone else in a cafe: Who or what do you screw? Once this is clear the stranger has acquired a handle and all else can become part of the larger narrative. All those details about his age and salary can join up a few more dots but already the broad outline of the beast has been discerned, already that tedious Latin polarity is clear: very well hung or very long ears. Well, boyo, stud or cuckold?

  I sit not looking at my questioner, my hands folded on my unread newspaper, far-off and waiting for him only to stop as the interrogation goes on and on, sometimes emphasised by an insistent nudging of the back of my hand. Where is your companion? Har-har what about chicks?

  This last word brings down upon me such a pall of blank misery I come close to standing up and saying very firmly and quietly: ‘Sir, I am quite twenty-five years your senior. I consider you grossly impertinent and do not wish to hear another word. Good day to you.’ Instead of which, drained of all energy, I merely hunch down and wait for it all to go away. That one word, heard so often here, lowers me and my surroundings so that suddenly the whole of the Philippines and I are sitting in something like a truckers’ cafe in Tulsa about thirty years ago. While still maintaining my thousand-yard stare I shoot it through this appalling little oik who I now notice is wearing a fraternity ring. The worst ones always seem to. Why on earth is he speaking sub-working-class American slang far older than he is? It will be dolls and dames next.