Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  These fantasies are at once cut short by tearing gripes which drive me out among the rocks of the hillside. It is raining hard. Grey curtains hang drifting across the strait, opening and closing on blurred views of Sabay. Around the unseen peaks of the cordillera behind it purplish lightnings blaze. In the inadequate shade of a madrekakaw sapling I squat and think that I have indeed become rather thin. My rich diet of imagined cuisines seems unable to sustain my body and it certainly bores the mind. I wonder vaguely what, then, is being fed that keeps the interest going.

  Later that day Intoy comes over with a bottle of ESQ from Arman to warm me up. The rain makes him merry, as it does many Filipinos, since it has a cultural significance quite different to that in England. His hair is stuck flat, his clothes plastered to his body. It is a kind thought and indeed the rum does seem to glow and settle in my stomach.

  ‘I bet you’ve got bulate,’ he says when I describe my symptoms.

  ‘Worms?’ I know they are endemic but I feel I should be exempt, being a foreigner, maybe immune.

  ‘I’ll bring you pills from the shop tomorrow. They really work.’ Intoy goes to inspect the arrangement I have made with polythene sheeting and a plastic dustbin to catch the rainwater. ‘No more problems with water now,’ he says and paddles cheerfully off into the downpour. His boat disappears behind a shroud of falling water. The sea around him is flat calm, only its surface being lashed into froth by the rain’s intensity.

  The next morning he returns with a screw of paper containing two pinkish pills.

  “‘Combantrin”,’ he says.

  ‘How can you tell?’ I ask, thinking of the pharmaceutical grab-bag on the shelf in the village shop. These have ‘Pfizer’ written on them; beyond that, nothing. But that familiar nausea rinses through me and I don’t much care. The conviction comes that I shall soon be cured whatever I take so I swallow them both with a gulp or two of ESQ. Intoy eyes the bottle with glee.

  ‘Ha, you’ve drunk all that since yesterday. Wow, you must have been pretty lasing last night.’

  ‘I was no such thing,’ I tell him sternly. ‘This is medicine. You can’t get drunk on medicine.’

  ‘My father can. He swallows enough of it and he never seems to get any better.’

  These simple pleasantries cheer me up. Intoy, who is supposed to be helping his father at this very moment in the fields, has to leave and once more I see him off into the downpour. Then in the early afternoon I am driven out onto the hillside. The rain has redoubled its force and I am soaked at once. My jaw shivers of its own accord and cannot be stopped as I lower myself weakly into a squat and deliver myself of what looks like a foot-long earthworm. I stare at it in amazement. Surely this can’t be right? I remember all the animals I have wormed and none of their tapeworms or pinworms or roundworms looked like this. It is a pinkish grey and apparently not yet quite dead for it makes a slight, stiff movement.

  Suddenly I begin to laugh helplessly at the streaming ground. I laugh like a fool, in celebration of this fool crouched in the rain on a sullen isle. Consider his childish determination to defy and invert all the values to which he was heir. It cannot be an accident which brings a middle-class Englishman from a family of doctors to be squatting on an uninhabited island and watching his own intestinal parasites flop out around his ankles while the tropical rain drums upon his back. I consider this, still laughing. No, it isn’t defiance which has brought him to this absurd state. It is writing. Writing, that fatuous pis aller which has so little to do with making marks on paper and even less to do with being read by casual strangers. What but such a pointless pursuit could so effectively have stood this fool’s life on its head, could have caused whole years to vanish, could have imagined the worst and deftly magicked it into nasty reality? In short what else on this sketch of an island could have written the worm out of this fool’s rectum and now be unable to write it back in again? There it lies, as large as life, craning blindly in a broth of mucus for the warmth it misses. It is all too real and the fool is held in his squat over it by gripes and giggles. Shaking with laughter he castigates himself for all the normal life he has written off. Fool: the years gone. Fool: the friend, the companion of days. Fool: the man of moderate success. Fool: the comfortable citizen. What else could they think but fool in Sabay and Kansulay?

  The mud squidges up between my toes. It is pleasant. The gripes are over. That is sweet. The worm is out and now seems dead. That is good. The rain will make the cogon grow again and cover the burnt baldness of The Field of Crabs. Already the char is pouring past me in a black slurry. The promise of bright new grass is infinitely cheering. I stand up, wipe the water from my face and drop a large rock on top of the worm. Then I walk down to the sea to swim. One has these low spots.

  *

  Months go by. The rains stop. The conventional calendar has long since become a redundant fiction. Time passes in new ways. The phases of the moon control my hunting, dominate the one-man economic system of Tiwarik. My life enters and leaves its own phases according to a never-ending succession of wounds and their healing: the fortnight when I could not wear a plywood flipper on my left foot because of the open sore, the coral-grazed knee which turned septic and stuck to the mat when I lay on my left side. They slowly healed and were replaced by others, by a recurrently aching ear, by sinus trouble, by minor infirmities of the soul. Overriding everything is the constant working for daily food and the constant watching of the island in its detail. In such elemental ways a life could be, is being, spent.

  Sometimes the straits appear to have widened so that walking up to my hut at dusk or in the morning’s heavy heat I might be surprised by how far away Sabay has receded, its own huts invisible and its fissured mountain a numb bulk such as appears on the horizon at the end of a long sea voyage. I wonder whether Tiwarik might not stealthily have detached itself and even now be drifting out to sea. Even the mainland’s occasional sounds fall fainter, the cocks remote, the dogs heard from another world. At such moments I can be overwhelmed by exhilaration and sadness: the confidence of recognising all there is, the melancholy of acknowledging all it is.

  Christmas approaches, is in progress, passes. Daily the sea-eagles soar from their jungle top and drift above the ocean surface watching for shoals of dalagang bukid, for the unwary dallier with upper brightness, then unleashing their clawed bombs in a flurry of spray and climbing back up with crimson and silver in their feet. It is a villainous isle full of watchers without mercy who care nothing for a year’s decline, unknown tomorrows.

  But one night the sound of feet and cheerful voices from the shore:

  ‘Happy New Year!’

  ‘Happy New Year!’

  Captain Sanso and Arman between them staggering with the weight of an iron torpedo. Wives and girls with baskets, boys with mysterious bundles, youths with lengths of thick bamboo on their shoulders. Taken by surprise I am bemused, wander dazedly in their wake, now following the women as they invade my lean-to kitchen and kindle a fire, now Intoy and Arman as they begin disposing the bamboo tubes among the rocks, muzzles pointing out across the straits to lightless Sabay.

  ‘Kanyon,’ explains Arman. ‘This place needs livening up. You can’t let an old year pass in silence as if you’re ashamed of it and you can’t welcome a new year in as if you’re afraid of it. You’re malungkot. Why do you always want to be so malungkot, James?’

  I don’t think I do.

  ‘Of course you do. Why else would you cut yourself off in a place like this without a wife, without a companion, without even so much as a cat? Always fishing and fishing as if you had no other way of staying alive and always writing and writing as if you had nothing else to fill up the time. Always alone. Always miserable. Ay, kawawa!’

  He is a little drunk. Everyone laughs and applauds since they are, too. Because there is no way of replying to such undeniable charges I pour myself a glass of tuba from a Clorox container and resolve to join them. I crouch beside Arman’s brother as he heaps boul
ders over one end of a bamboo.

  ‘What’s that horrible smell?’

  ‘Kalburo.’ He hefts a carrier bag full of what seems to be chips of greyish rock. I suddenly recognise the stench of acetylene and deduce kalburo to be carbide. I have some vague memory they use it for speeding up the ripening process of fruit, in particular bananas and mangoes. The artificer in me surfaces once more.

  ‘Cannons!’ I cry. ‘Of course. You’ve knocked the bamboos through.’

  ‘All except the last two compartments this end. See? We’ve made a touch-hole just before the joint.’

  And now all over the hillside the bamboos are deployed. It is evident that the pyrotechnicians of Sabay are as studious as Howard and I had ever been and that years of experiment have gone into producing known effects. Some tubes are fat and long, others thinner and shorter. Some have their muzzles bound with rope or rattan, others are smooth and unadorned. Excitement drifts over the scene with the evaporating acetylene. A fire has now been lit outside my hut and woks are sizzling over it. Yet another is lit beside it and a great fish laid over a griddle of green sticks. Children pour up from the beach, eddying among the rocks and whooping as one by one newcomers’ boats ground on the shore below. If there were moon or stars tonight the strait would seem a silver pond bearing a flotilla of tiny sticks slowly across to Tiwarik with phosphorescent pocks of paddle-strokes.

  Four chickens die protestingly, their still-flapping bodies dunked in the woks of boiling water so their feathers will come out in easy, sodden handfuls. An enamel bowl full of the thick slops of their lifeblood is carried off to the kitchen. The women slaughterers exchange their knives for glasses of ESQ and fizzy orange which has been mixed in the plastic bowl I use for marinading fish. The children are tipsy with excitement and in the case of one or two twelve-year-olds with rum and cigarettes as well. And suddenly in the middle of all this the first kanyon fires with a deep explosive chug! which reminds me uncomfortably of a mortar round being launched into its high parabola. Outgoing.

  ‘Not quite right.’ Arman is in an exalted frenzy, tuning his thunder machine. ‘It hasn’t got hot yet.’ A wisp of sap-steam floats from its muzzle. He pours a trickle of water down through the touch-hole onto the grains of carbide, leans forward and gives a light puff to the hole, wafting the acetylene vapours the length of the barrel, then puts a taper to the hole. This time the blast is ear-splitting. An exclamation of flame spurts from the muzzle which in turn leaps from its bed of rock. The explosion crosses the dark strait, whacks the side of the distant mountain and twenty seconds later its echo comes back to Tiwarik where it is welcomed like a returning traveller. Arman smiles proudly but critically, head on one side. He drops a small nugget of carbide into the breech, adds water, blows, ignites. Again the noise batters our ears and slams away across the sea, this time being joined almost immediately by a tenor crack from one of the smaller bamboos in its emplacement up by the rocks and undergrowth behind the hut. Soon all six bamboos are in use, the barrage continuous, the night lit by stabs of flame and cooking fires. For once the sea beneath us is empty of human hunters. Tonight the fish can prey on each other uninterruptedly as the bombers deploy their explosions on a higher plane.

  ‘Why don’t you fire stones from the kanyon?’ I ask. ‘They must easily be powerful enough.’

  ‘They are. But if you do that the bamboo won’t last. I think if you block up the muzzle with something, however loosely, it increases the pressure in the barrel and sooner or later it splits. That’s why we’ve bound it with abaka. Sometimes when it splits - ay, very dangerous.’ Arman is delighted and puts half a coconut shell over the muzzle of his own mortar. It vanishes like the lid of a skull into the night sky.

  ‘When is it midnight?’ But no-one is wearing a watch; almost no-one has a watch to wear. I look for mine, having some vague memory of leaving it in one of my shoes which are tucked up into the roof. I wear them only for infrequent trips to Manila when after months of barefoot living they cause an anguish of pinching and rubbing. In the lamplight they are now seen to be blue with delicate moulds. In one of them is a jewelled spider holding its eggs in a silk disc beneath its body, in the other the white pearl of a house-lizard’s egg and my watch. Despite my having ignored it, it has a life of its own and has ticked on unconsulted. Now it tells me the month has twice changed since last I looked, that today is Monday and that it is eleven forty at night.

  ‘Time to get the labintador ready.’

  ‘You mean you’ve brought fireworks as well?’

  ‘Home-made only.’ Arman searches around in the dark until he trips over the torpedo. In the light of a lapad of paraffin with a rag wick I can see it is not a torpedo at all but a large gas cylinder from an oxy-acetylene welding set. Generally it lies half buried in rubbish just above the tide-line on the beach at Sabay, so rusty its colour coding has long vanished.

  ‘Oksiheno.’

  I had always supposed the cylinder empty. Now willing hands drag it to a convenient spot, a decrepit spanner is found down below in someone’s boat, a length of firewood whacks the spanner. There is a sharp hiss and everyone exclaims in delight. Two boys are dispatched to the beach to siphon off a few cupfuls of petrol from a boat engine. The teenage pyrotechnician within me has his ears pricked: the proceedings are new to him.’

  I remember we did this ten, twelve years ago,’ says Arman. ‘I was a boy then but I can remember it very clearly. We had a party on the beach over at Sirao.’ He gestures with his chin, pursing his lips towards the invisible headland a mile up the coast from Sabay. ‘After an hour of our labintador there is a noise like an aeroplane coming from the sea. A searchlight comes on. Soldiers with M-16s are suddenly running all over us. Ha, we were only kids: we’d forgotten that Martial Law had been declared’ (this must have been shortly after 1972) ‘and they could hear the explosions all the way from Malubog and even Bulangan.’

  This was impressive for Bulangan is many miles away, far closer to Kansulay than to Tiwarik. It is an odd possibility that in special circumstances Tiwarik and Kansulay might just be audible to each other.

  ‘The Mayor of Bulangan thought there was a civil war in Malubog and called out the garrison. The komandante there thought the NPA had at last set up heavy artillery in the mountains here and were shelling the town as a prelude to an all-out attack. Ay!’ Everybody is laughing helplessly, those who can remember the incident and those who can’t. The children who are now as old as Arman was then are in fits with drink and mischief. The delicious chaos! Turning out one lot of troops to fight supposed rebels who themselves believed they were under bombardment despite a complete absence of falling shells! And all because of a lot of boys on a beach playing with labintador.

  ‘Ay, ‘sus, Mandoy, we were lucky.’ Silo had also been there. ‘Those troops were scared. They might easily have shot up the beach first as they usually do. But nobody got worse than a thick ear that night. I still think what saved us was the fire we had going. They must have been able to see us from their patrol boat.’

  Fresh laughter at the thought of a tense commander surveying through his binoculars a beach party of cavorting children in the middle of what he assumed to be a war zone. By now the boys are back with a lapad full of petrol. There is some rummaging in bundles and several of the large plastic sacks normally used for transporting similya are found.

  ‘Come on, hurry up. It must be nearly twelve.’ Arman impatiently seizes a bag and into it pours about a table-spoonful of petrol. Then he gathers up its neck loosely and, holding it to the rust-corroded valve of the oxygen cylinder, inflates it. He knots the neck and shakes the taut bag, coating the inside of the membrane with petrol until it must largely have evaporated for there is soon only the faintest patter of drops from within. He hands the bag to his younger brother. ‘Not yet,’ he enjoins sternly and makes five more plastic balloons in quick succession. I am a little sceptical: a polythene bag hardly offers much resistance to an explosion and I expect no more than a pleasin
g fireball blooming momentarily in the night. What I am leaving out of the equation is pure oxygen. ‘Well?’ asks Arman, tapping his wrist and looking up from where he squats.

  ‘It’s twelve.’

  ‘Ay. Maligayang Bagong Taon sa inyong lahat. Happy New Year everyone.’ He plucks one of the balloons from his brother’s hands, goes to the nearest fire and from a couple of paces tosses it towards the flames while backing smartly away. For an instant the plastic bladder hesitates between falling and ascending in the column of heat and then there is a stupendous blast which sends live firebrands whirling like tracer through the air. Everyone has been too close for comfort, everyone screams with delight. How the noise can exceed that of the bamboo cannons I have no idea but it does. In the confusion somebody sneaks off with a balloon and finds an ember in the scrub behind the hut. Another chrysanthemum of flame, another prodigious detonation as much felt in the intestines as heard. I jump involuntarily. Incoming.

  Now the making of balloons becomes a feverish activity. The cannonaders are running out of carbide but their bamboos – several now splitting around the muzzles – are so hot that ordinary paraffin can be substituted with practically no loss of power so well does it vaporise. Pour, puff, ignite. Pour, puff, ignite. The ballooners are introducing granules of fertiliser into their petrol/oxygen mixture. Tiwarik leaps in the dark, tilts in flashes of flame, thumps our feet. Its percussive breezes box the ears. I am drunk. I am drunk with explosions, too. I am no longer a hunter being deafened and blinded. I do not care. To hell with the sea. I go and squat beside Intoy as he deftly purses the plastic bags and fills them with a tearing screech of gas. In the firelight, the oil lamps, the intermittent flashes, it is not his hands I watch but the shadows of his cheek, the outline of an ear, a burnished shoulder. I am amazed by the slenderness of his elbows, the fineness of his wrists, at the delicacy of his chest as he turns to pass the filled balloons back to eager hands which knot and shake them. Petrol fumes hang about his hair. How can anything so fragile be as accomplished under water as he is, so competent in the face of the sea’s brutal energies? It is a miracle of sorts.