Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Of course it is aggressive of me too. By not answering I am rocking his cultural boat. I am a ‘kano who won’t conform to his stereotype, who apparently doesn’t like drinking much and ‘chicks’ at all. Nor does he seem interested in beach resorts and disco clubs, in tourist sites and duty-free hardware. That is unsettling. But my not being married and expressing neither contrition nor belated intent, that is a threat. It throws one of the eternal verities of Filipino life into doubt. Good.

  Eventually he stops. He is getting nowhere. Even the staff of the restaurant are giggling with embarrassment while my acquaintance cannot find anything comfortable on which to rest his gaze. Sadly he leans it on the sloping shoulders of the beer bottle but time and again it slips off and drops to the formica table top. My interrogator shrugs and goes off, slapping a handful of peanuts into his open mouth, thinking it is maybe a language problem and little guessing how right he is.

  *

  Once in another province I was introduced to a venerable old man, the grandfather of a friend, ninety-two and eminently coherent. He was famous throughout the region for having fathered a quite unbelievable number of children (his last son was then rising five) and for being a stubborn Filipino patriot and nationalist. His family had emigrated to the United States before the Second World War, he alone refusing to join them. He had resisted the Americans, the Japanese, the Americans again, had mocked Quirino, welcomed Magsaysay, had fervently embraced Marcos. With the respect due to his age and querulous intransigence a silence fell whenever he spoke but I never heard him say anything at all interesting except once when he listed the cigarette brands available in Manila in the 1920s. If there was still heat and clarity in his old brain it came from the flame of a monumental ego still burning away in that hairless skull. It banished all the shadows, the flickers and half-lights of observation which might have been engaging, leaving only itself illuminating itself like a candle in a pumpkin.

  People (all relatives of one sort or another, I judged) came and went in the room, ministering to the old tyrant in various ways and with a variety of honorifics as he sat in a high-backed chair whose motheaten velour seat was covered in plastic, calling for cold drinks, hot tea, authorising a chicken’s death and a fresh sack of charcoal for the kitchen.

  I came by to see my friend a couple of days later and found his grandfather de-throned and transformed in a very Eastern manner into a little bent old twig in tattered underwear squatting under the pump in the back yard and soaping himself with a bar of Camay.

  ‘Pump!’ he was roaring in his monkey-voice which scarcely carried above the squeak of iron and rhythmic gush of water as a teenage girl moved the handle up and down, up and down, while her eyes watched the to and fro of heads in the street beyond the top of the wall. ‘Pump! Putang ina …!’ as the soap got in his eyes.

  I can’t think why this ordinary domestic scene entranced me but when the old man got up and began trundling the soap around beneath his underpants I was glad it had. The gaunt, veined shanks and hanging flesh of his ancient body were scarcely a surprise, but the tattooes were something else. I had not expected a ninety-two-year-old local sage to have deep blue - almost black - etchings of naked girls on both arms and extending beyond his withered biceps out across his rib-cage as if with time the ink had bled along the fibres of his skin. Yet they were not at all the fading, spidery traces of a former youth scrawled across a parchment whose own message was loud and clear. They were more like the lines marking out an ice-hockey pitch, thick, ineradicable and of indeterminate depth.

  Bizarre, gross - the adjectives suggested themselves but lapsed. Once again what was being expressed was that old announcement of an extraordinary hubris. But why, when the human ego decided to advertise itself, did it choose something about as subtle as cockcrow which told of anything but individuality? Such tribal markings the world over, the nude women, were they to remind the wearer of his own sexual preference in case of a moment of beery amnesia? Or to convince others? Or were they simply a ploy, a charm against ageing just because it was so unimaginable that the array of a sappy twenty-year-old should still be clearly legible seventy years later?

  This bedraggled creature now rootling round his crotch with Camay suds under the broad leaves of a talisay was not at all sad for those particular slants on mortality. In fact there was nothing sad about him. There was only an echo of that awful old cockcrow, that perpetual cry of the human male from its dunghill as it proclaims its uniqueness in the sparkling light of a new day while merely sounding indistinguishable from all other cocks that have ever crowed, a facile metaphor for self-betrayal.

  It is this crudity the traveller remarks, surprised at finding the world so full of it. Not the crudity of imagery (what do they matter, the outline drawings of genitalia, the graffiti scribbled on skin?) but the sheer relentless uniformity of it. He is always meeting myrmidons, usually when feeling at his least defended, of the unending army of those who sit down opposite and grab him by the arm and ask questions, the hordes upon hordes who rise over his skyline like the eponymous heroes in Zulu! roaring ‘Chicks! Chicks! Chicks!’ or stencilling it in crimson letters on the jeeps he rides in: Chix, Chix, Chix. There are times when the most amused and phlegmatic traveller in the Philippines (and elsewhere) yearns for a country of deep reserve and formality where everyone calls each other ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam’ and wishes to know no personal fact of any kind. This country, it is true, sounds like a cross between Claridges and Ladakh. In such a place, he feels, he might encounter that silence alone in which things may be learned. Perhaps it does exist after all, somewhere near Thailand or Burma … Tibet? Or deep in Amazonia? Or maybe the crotchety traveller is once more blaming a country for not being his imagined land, his own egoic mirror.

  *

  I leave the cafe in Bulangan and wander down to the aromatic sheds which form the market by the shore. And there, at last, two things catch my eye. First a young girl walks past selling necklaces of strung sampagita flowers whose scent, though a little unelusive, is wonderfully fresh and cheering. I buy one, gladly overpaying her, and amble with it threaded loosely round the fingers of one hand like Islamic prayer beads, sniffing it from time to time. Next I come to a stall of caged birds manned by someone who could be Nilo in thirty years’ time, a retired bird-catcher who has finally hung up his komokon-perch and birdlime and instead buys and sells the birds which other people catch. He has the air of somebody who has spent a lot of time staring at the sky, a little vacant, sometimes pursing his lips absently to send a warble to cheer the spirits of his drooping wares. From him I buy a small cage made of fine cane containing two greenish finches which seem not yet completely got down by their captivity.

  Leaving the market with my still-unread newspaper draped over the cage to protect the birds from the sun I am hailed from across the street by Arman. It is a pleasure and surprise to see him: running into people away from their home territory often makes me feel how lucky I am to know them at all and my recent ordeal in the cafe only increases this feeling. He promptly offers me a lift home in the Jhon-Jhon, for today he has come by boat. I accept with gratitude and for the next hour sit in the prow well forward of the unsilenced exhaust, my finches at my feet, sniffing at the sampagita flowers as we skim over the water and the low shoreline unrolls to our left. Soon from around a headland Tiwarik appears in the distance, its strangely unstable appearance increased by our angle of approach from the sea so that for a moment, forgetting all the other possible reasons, I decide this must be the real origin of its name. I feel a sudden burst of affection for its singularity.

  Arman very kindly drops me off at the island and says he will tell Intoy to bring my bangka back from Sabay when he comes. I wave him off from the shore and watch the boat head across the strait carving its evanescent threefold wake. When I am sure it is far enough away I open the cage and release the finches. They fly a bit stiffly, unbelievingly, into the nearest tree. Then simultaneously, as of one mind, they go looping steep
ly upwards, whirring flitches of green, towards the invisible top of the island. My spirits lift with them.

  *

  I do not know what has happened to the weather. The sea clears for a day or two, then clouds up again. The rains are overdue, the heat intense. I seem to have no appetite for food and often do not bother to take my spear gun into the water with me. Off and on I catch Intoy looking at me with concern and he comes over from Sabay with suman his mother has made, with niyubak and bukayo to fatten me up. I send him back with fish.

  The soil of Tiwarik is baked, the grassfield is stiff and harsh against my bare legs as I wade up into the sky each day to look at the trees. From the way this expanse of cogon is divided by rocky outcrops as it ascends towards the miniature forest I have come to think of it more as three separate fields and named according to the plants growing there. These are: The Field of Chillies, The Field of Guavas and The Field of Pineapples - for quite recently I discovered two of the small ‘native’ pineapples which have somehow seeded themselves. They are like little green hand-grenades: proportionally slenderer than the usual Hawaiian variety, their flavour is to those great yellow bombs of juice and sugar as that of wild strawberries is to the contents of glass dishes at Ascot and Wimbledon. Although I do not know it at this moment I am about to re-name The Field of Chillies.

  The heat is solid. On all sides the ocean slumps in its bed, the fish are sluggish. Only at dusk a light breeze may come wafting off this immensity of water with a summery smell of ozone and send a cooling drift of air through the walls of my hut. This heat intensifies the smells of sea and land. Sometimes the wind comes across from the mainland bringing with it the steamy rot of forest, exotic resins leached in their fractions from different layers of vegetation and boiled away by the heat. This same mysterious perfume may often be smelt far out to sea with no view in any direction but of water, from smacking bamboo outriggers to the furthest horizon. Then suddenly this olfactory mirage born who knows how long before and on what brooding shore: oils of pepper, boxes of cigars, compost heaps, damp bath-towels. Strange quays come to mind with barrelled produce standing in the sun, salted fish, coconut oil, sacks of copra, tarred rope. Behind the quays rise the hills of the interior brewing their monstrous chlorophylls, their stagnant muds and dappled glades where pods crack and strew the earth beneath with yet more seeds. This unknown shore breathes out its rancid soul into the hearts of its lovers so that for a moment in mid-ocean their back hair lifts in pleasure and they stare at the bilges around their feet with blurring eyes. Countless voyagers from colder climates have been intoxicated by this scent. The most prosaic of men have dreamed under its influence, the sternest or dullest have felt the stirrings of unformed desire. Conrad sniffed it and was lost. And now this same tropic opiate fills my lungs and heart and awakens memories of things which have never happened and foretelling things which will never be.

  Often the nights are lit with prodigious lightning but over Tiwarik at least no sound yet shakes down from the sky, nor the least drop of rain. Up the coast on the mainland it is a different matter. Far away a storm is in progress; its lightnings are very slow. Thirty miles off, electricity crawls low in the sky above Kansulay. In every corner are flickerings, pinkish blazes dying slowly in distant cloud banks, but the night above Tiwarik remains clear and still.

  Then one night I am violently woken by a huge explosion and with the memory of a searing flash across some internal retina. Even as I sit up to look through the open door the echoes of a great clap of thunder are rolling back from the rocks, from the far side of the strait, from the low underside of the cloud layer. Perhaps two hundred yards away a flame is dancing in The Field of Chillies. It swells, grows rapidly taller. In alarm I suddenly appreciate how vulnerable the island is. Unhindered, a fire might sweep it practically bare. While I am indulging visions of a cindery rock where once was a miniature land the fire spreads rapidly. I shuffle into a pair of rubber sandals, grab the bolo as much for comfort as for utility and hurry up the path. In doing so I glare at the sky. Why for Christ’s sake won’t it rain? For only heavy rain could now control the grass-fire I shortly come upon: a ragged orange wall advancing with horrid speed up towards the forest. A local wind tugs at it, the fire’s own need for oxygen whipping momentum from the air.

  In despair I make impotent sallies into areas which are already no more than bare char wormed with dying red, whacking at the sparking earth with the flat of my blade. I shout. I curse. I blaspheme with abnormal inventiveness. Clearly this is most efficacious for almost immediately the rain, as if it had been holding itself in until the last most pleasurable and exasperating moment, drops in raw tonnage from the sky. The fire still burns, however. It has run the length and breadth of The Field of Chillies, has somehow crossed a promontory of rocks and is - as near as I can judge - a third of the way through The Field of Pineapples. It has even spawned an offshoot, a tentacle which reaches way up beyond The Field of Chillies into the fringes of the forest itself.

  But the rain is immense. It is not, as I discover the following day, rain at all but finally, at long last, The Rains. Within ten minutes I can stare upwards at the bulk of Tiwarik and see not a speck of light anywhere. The fire is drowned. Already water is beginning to run down the path, as yet unable to penetrate the baked surface. I return to the hut drenched, rinsing off the charcoal smears from arms and legs in the smiting downpour. My roof is leaking but I do not care. I roll up the sodden mat and lie naked instead upon the bare slats, panting. Sweat or rain runs from my hair as I listen, enclosed within this ecstatic sound. Everything is all right now. The fire is out, the monsoon surely has arrived. Tomorrow over at Sabay everybody will desert the sea and go to work the softening land: planting rice, planting cassava, planting vegetables. Their huge delicate buffaloes which for so long have stood comparatively idle, grazing in the shade, will be harnessed once more, glistening with grey mud, then resting in baths of slime in their newly reconstituted wallows. Even I might plant something.

  In the morning I rise late, something to do with the night’s exertions or with the incessant noise of heavy rain arousing memories of a time and a place of soft beds and winter storms, of bedclothes pulled a little higher. Improvidently I have let much of my firewood get wet; I am not an instinctive camper. Coffeeless I hurry off through the rain to inspect the damage.

  At first sight The Field of Chillies is desolating: hundreds of square metres of charred stubble, a sodden black desert tufted with black and dotted with white and pinkish stones. I walk up it with the pungency of quenched bonfire in my nose. I find to my relief that only a tiny inroad has been made into the fringes of the jungle: a couple of trees will have been killed, a couple more partially so, still others merely scorched. I cheer myself further by remembering that grass fires are usually too quick, too lightly fuelled to generate enough heat to kill roots. The cogon will sprout again. My elaborate blasphemies clearly struck the right note at exactly the right moment. Mere prayers and entreaties would have had no effect and had I relied on them I would undoubtedly now be surveying the cinders of a magic isle. But my invocation of the anatomical details of the Trinity’s constituent members obviously jolted the rain from the skies. Immoderately pleased I stand there, streaming, making facetious plans to circulate my efficacious spells to leading African churchmen, Baptist ministers in Wyoming, Marxist agronomists in Ethiopia, the FAO. I descend the mountain like Moses bearing revised laws.

  And now, re-crossing the ashes of The Field of Chillies, I make a discovery. The pink and white stones scattered among the blackened stubble are not stones at all. They are crabs. Nor are they hermit crabs, either, like those whose stealthy clinkings come at night from high up the beach as they scavenge the fish-hunters’ guttings and leavings. They are proper crabs with square bodies two or three inches across. Their fat fighting claws are sprawled unmoving amongst the char. They all seem to be facing uphill, more or less in the same direction, as if having found they could not grapple with this ene
my they had tried to outrun it. The white ones are calcined: their bodies are mere shells containing rattling shards and chitins. The pink ones are cooked, done to a turn. And so, unbreakfasted and now breakfasting, I slowly browse through The Field of Crabs, sucking at legs, scooping out meat, crunching claws. Their flavour is delicate with the faintest trace of the grasses in which they were broiled, the rain rinses off the dirt. Standing there surrounded by opacities of falling water it is not hard to imagine myself on an ocean bed with sparse clumps of black weed thrusting up in stiff bunches from the silt marine creatures scattered among them. It is yet another example of the way Tiwarik inverts the normal world.

  I ought not to be able to return elated and full to the hut I left empty and apprehensive, but I do. I am resolved to plant ampalayá, aubergines, calabashes. Who knows what may come up on an island where lightning can provide one with breakfast?

  *

  But I am now quite definitely out of sorts, I cannot go on pretending otherwise. The downhearted spells recur, everything grates. For what seems like weeks I have been nauseated by food. The very thought of my repetitive diet fish-and-rice, rice-and-fish is intolerable. On the other hand I find myself thinking obsessively about other kinds of food entertaining fantasies of the most refined cuisines. In my imagination I prepare dishes which in real life I have never cooked and would probably be scarcely able to except that my memories of leafing through other people’s cook-books now come back almost photographically. I start making mental oeufs en meurette, sautéeing button mushrooms in butter and oil, poaching eggs in the rich liquid from blanched bacon strips, onions, garlic and stock … But no, not eggs. Better would be the more ascetic subtleties of volaille du Roy Henry truffée au gros sel: the bird served with a bowl of rock salt and pickled gherkins, the fragments of truffle visible beneath its skin … Again I lose interest, am sidetracked by the agonisingly delicious promise of a Marmite sandwich, a cheese soufflé … No again. What I really want is bruschetta, that peasant delicacy they eat around the fire in Tuscany, up in the wintry mountains. Thick slices of tough Italian bread toasted on both sides and a piece of garlic rubbed in until worn down to tatters of aromatic skin between the fingertips. Then rich green olive oil poured on from a little slippery oil can and a sprinkling of salt. Probably the simplest and most delicious thing ever invented by man …