Ghosts of Manila (10 page)

Where did bitterness reside, hidden away beneath weary amiability until no single incident remained, only a no-go area like a bruise which even lovers respect? And did it not transmute private failure into a noble blur, the righteousness of far-off times? After all, John Prideaux was vaguely known – if at all – as a bleeding heart from the Vietnam Era, back around that time. Didn’t he kill himself? Wait a bit, maybe that was James Mossman, someone else for whose fundamental decency the world’s grief had proved too much?

Where, come to that, did failure itself lie except in the ghost which Prideaux knew gibbered just off-screen in all his work, the spectre of inconclusiveness? The media wanted their stories cut and dried: narratives which began in mock puzzlement or affected ignorance, proceeded with the panache of revelation and closed with hard words and cell doors. A wrong righted. Or rights exposed as wronged. But the child sitting for ever in the burnt-out garage, twenty years dead, staring at his lap as if he knew it had betrayed him, was not a matter of injustice. He was a tiny event.
That
was
what
happened
when.
When wars broke out; when monsters became organised; when Prideaux went belatedly to Indochina. Like his unshown film, the child was yet another of its maker’s absences.

T
HE DIGGING
in San Clemente was progressing. The pit was now too deep for two men comfortably to work in at once so Eddie Tugos, Billy, Bats and Judge took turns with the spade while the others squatted around the edge taking nips of gin and offering advice. When they encountered a large stone or the corner of a seam of stiff clay they plugged away with one of the iron fencing posts they had stolen months earlier from the Tan mausoleum. Now and then Nanang Pipa took a few minutes away from her frenetic hemming and edging to come out and cast a foreman’s eye over her workers’ progress. Like many Filipinos Eddie referred to his wife – only half in jest – as
Si
Kumander.
Mrs Boss now looked down towards her husband’s bald spot.

‘It’s coming along,’ she conceded. ‘Slowly.’

‘How much deeper do you want the damn thing, anyway? All we’re digging is a hole to shit into, not a well.’

‘Remember the floods, Eddie. Even up here it gets bad. You want it all backing up into the kitchen? Just a bit further.’

‘You’re going to have to line it,’ pointed out Bats. ‘Otherwise the sides’ll start crumbling until one day when you’re comfortably engaged the whole lot’ll drop straight through with you on top.’

‘Really?’ said Nanang Pipa. ‘Is that true, Eddie?’

‘Well,’ said the hole.

‘Best thing’s hollow blocks. You’ll need about a hundred.’

‘A
hundred
?’ Nanang Pipa eyed the mound of spoil and tried to
imagine a pile of a hundred hollow blocks. It seemed to her their volume would greatly exceed that of the hole. ‘And how much would that cost?’

‘They’re, what, about four pesos each these days.’

‘Four hundred pesos just to line it?’

‘Excluding a couple of bags of cement and some sand. They’ll have to be properly laid and grouted. When I was in the DPWH we used to –’

‘Probably about seven hundred, then. Plus what, the bowl?’

‘No problem with the bowl. We can get that from the Chinese over the wall. Even their dead have bowel movements, you know. It makes you think.’

‘It’s still a lot of money. But if we’re going to do it at all we’re going to do it properly.’

‘We?’ queried the hole.

The sides of the pit now needed expanding to accommodate the lining of hollow blocks. Through the window Pipa covertly watched the men glumly chopping at the edges, effectively filling in again much of the depth they had already achieved. Behind her the sewing machines whirred. A boy was on his knees on the floor trying to fit a consignment of T-shirts into a cardboard carton a couple of sizes too small. Bolts of cloth lay in gaudy bolsters on every available ledge. The sewers worked without stopping, without resting. Beneath their hands the cloth flowed like sheets of factory dough, falling in flakes and roundels and tubes, ruffed and puckered and frilled, so that what emerged from the process seemed to be formed of a different substance.

Tucked away in one corner a youth was hunched over a tiny, ancient Yamato edging machine. Rey was the chop-chop boy, fitting together leftover flitches of cloth of different colours, patterns and quality and assembling the patchwork into children’s T-shirts and shorts. These were the cheapest garments of all, the very end of the range, and went for only nine or ten pesos. They sold well, and not just because of the low price. The chop-chop boy was inventive, artistic even. His little T-shirts were halved and quartered in different colours, lengthwise or horizontally. Their backs might be pink, their fronts blue. Diagonal stripes met patchwork hems. Arm cuffs were variegated scraps neatly joined. Rey giggled a lot and had a flair for smutty repartee. Early that morning Nanang Pipa had given him a heap of old material she had
unearthed. When shaken out it had been revealed as a dozen rectangles of coarse cloth: flour sacks which had been unpicked and laundered long ago. Rey was now incorporating these wittily into the kids’ clothing. The red and blue print would fade with washing, no doubt, but meanwhile it was merry to include among the other scraps of material the defunct Grains Authority’s stern warning
Huwag
mag-
aksaya,
‘Do Not Waste’; or the printed promise ‘Self Raising’, strategically positioned across the front of some child’s shorts.

As eyes accustomed themselves to dimmer light they would perceive that Rey was not after all the lowliest member of the co-operative. At his feet on the red floor-waxed concrete sat a ten-year-old girl with a withered leg. She was cutting into tiny rectangles the scraps which even Rey couldn’t use and sewing them into patchwork mats. Sometimes she made circular potholders instead. The whole room hummed with work and proximity.

The sight and sound of the digging outside suddenly affected Nanang Pipa with a melancholy unease. It had to do with precariousness, a reminder that any improvement, any embellishment, any expense was in the long run wasted. This was not her land. It was her house only to the extent that she had scavenged the posts and boards of which it was built. Things were going well: out of nothing they had made work and out of work they made a living, something which eluded plenty of people in San Clemente. But where was the feeling of security this ought to be bringing? It was a dangerous illusion to think of this place as a village. In reality it was a collection of shacks on a skiddy hill. Any pretence that it had the permanence implied by words like ‘village’ or even ‘settlement’ was nothing but self-deception. Only a couple of days ago she had been down in Sta. Cruz (on Dasmariñas, to be exact) scouring Chinese hardware shops for an acetylene lamp to use during brownouts. Seeing a crowd on the bridge she had joined it. On the west side of the
estero
all the squatters between Dasmariñas and Escolta were being evicted. Their shanties, which staggered out on dogleg pilings over the miasmic water, were being demolished. The most impressive thing was the silence in which onlookers and evicted alike watched the destruction of their homes, and which cut the scene out of the surrounding city’s din. As if they, too, were affected by it (for probably half of them lived in similar shacks) the gang of municipal workers were not even talking or calling out among themselves. The
only sounds were the clatter of their hammers and crowbars, the groan of tin roofing, the pop and snap of boards. A rusty sheet of metal which everyone could recognise as an oil drum opened out and beaten flat slid into the treacly water and vanished. Huge belches of gas from the disturbed mud roiled up. The workers were watched by an overseer sitting atop the cab of a truck; a dozen armed police stood nearby. Meanwhile, the evicted waited in a silent line with their possessions piled around them: trussed fowls, a piglet tied to a table leg, rolled mats, the whole shabby interior of scratch living exposed to the sun and the onlookers’ gaze. Why did they stand and watch? she wondered. But there again, how could they not? Someone had to bear witness, as at an execution, even though the end was foregone.

Nanang Pipa wondered if she herself could manage such stoical resignation if men with hammers methodically tore down San Clemente,
this
house,
as she and her neighbours stood outside in, maybe, pouring rain, surrounded by their sewing machines and ruined stock. She supposed she would, if only because the alternative was to be shot as squatters sometimes were, the landlord settling old scores by pointing out to the police the ‘ringleaders’, the ‘troublemakers’ who would have to be eliminated if law and order were to prevail. Still, a short row of shanties in Sta. Cruz was one thing; the demolition of an entire barrio was another matter and in the past such mass evictions had caused noting which went on for days. Even children had died as frightened and ill-trained police opened fire in panic with their M-16s.

Nanang Pipa sometimes thought she was the only one of San Clemente’s residents to have these uneasy thoughts about the future. The others all seemed to live from day to day, meal to meal, drinking session to drinking session. Their each day was separate, pursed, ready to spill out its small troubles and few coins. Only for her, perhaps, did time stretch itself out into a history of difficulties like a long accountancy of debt, a future of limited but definite hope in which likely setbacks flitted along the horizon like rogue gunmen on rooftops. Whether planned by men, predestined by God or fated by nature, eligible evils went about springily on silent paws, awaiting their summons. She believed this most fervently. One could ward them off or deflect them in a variety of ways but there were no guarantees. She had once read a quotation whose cynicism had made her draw a sharp breath, so extraordinary was it to see it actually printed; but it
had stuck in her mind nonetheless. It was: ‘If praying did any good, they’d hire men to do it.’ She remembered it because not long before she had put a personal notice in the
Philippine
Daily
Inquirer
at a moment when everything had fallen apart at once and she was at her wits’ end. Edsel was in City Jail on suspicion of car-napping (a case of mistaken identity); their eldest daughter Gaylin had admitted she was pregnant without a plausible husband in sight; that evil harridan Ligaya Rosales had walked off with a brand new edging machine and her family pretended not to know where she was; and Pipa’s eldest son Boyong was shortlisted for a job as an electrician at Plastic City, out in Valenzuela. ‘Make a vow,’ Doding Perez had urged her. ‘Remember when Maricel was trying for that job in Saudi? She got it. And Bats was elected
tanod
in the barangay elections. It was because I took a St. Jude out. Do a St. Jude, Pipa. It always seems to work better than a Holy Spirit. Everyone I know says so.’

Privately, Pipa had been dubious about St. Jude, of whom she knew nothing except that he sounded faintly tarnished by the similarity of his name to that of Judas. Scanning the personal column in the newspaper she saw this:

This was clear and straightforward and definitely religious, a proper novena, not like those witchcraft
gayumas
involving flies and dead meat. After some thought she decided to ask for Boyong’s appointment as the business favour; she ranked the restoration of the stolen sewing machine as one of the impossibles, the other being Eddie’s release from jail. She said her prayers and booked her ad. Three weeks later things were pretty much the same, except that Boyong had failed to get the job. Certainly Gaylin was still pregnant.

‘What did I tell you?’ said Doding. ‘St. Jude.’

The other reason why Pipa had held out against St. Jude was because invoking him – or, rather, thanking him when one had received the favours – took three column inches as opposed to one.
Scanning the prayer, she found there was another quid pro quo, a promise to spread the word about him. Poor man, she thought, struck suddenly by the idea of a heavenful of saints most of whom were struggling against their own obscurity to make their powers felt and appreciated. The other thing about St. Jude was that he specified when he would answer prayers and operated a No Results – No Fee scheme, unlike Mama Mary. On the eighth day of Pipa’s asking St. Jude for favours Eddie walked in, thinner and with a swollen lip, freed for lack of evidence. That same day Boyong appeared for lunch, due to start work on Monday with the electricity company Meralco. And towards sunset Gaylin, who had been unwell all day, finally confirmed that she was no longer pregnant thanks to some herbs she had bought at one of the stalls outside Quiapo Church. This was the clincher. Pipa now saw how unlikely it was that Mama Mary would ever have been sympathetic to that particular prayer. It was all too much. A few days later her heartfelt, if standard, tribute appeared in the newspaper.

‘What did I tell you?’ Doding said again, this time with the irritation of someone whose free advice has proved a little too rewarding. ‘St. Jude.’ Ever since, Pipa kept St. Jude in venerated reserve, not wishing to abuse his evident good nature by bothering him with trivia. Yet she remained, by unexpected whirlings-about of her intelligence like a peeled stick, highly resistant to sentimental categories. She was not after all to be patronised as a humble creature of simple faith. She was tough and difficult, a complex rational being adrift in a casual universe of monstrous flukes and chance, and simply retained blurry areas common to so many as to disgrace no-one.
If
it
works,
do
it.
St. Jude had worked.

Which was more than Eddie had, once back from jail. He appeared to think the injustice he had suffered exonerated him from all further attempts to earn a living. He had been maliciously fingered by one of the car-napping gang.
Dog
-napping, now: had it been dog-napping there would have been some justice in the charge since he occasionally went out on pooch patrol with Bats’s brother Gringo, who drove a taxi. When Gringo came on shift they’d drive around likely areas looking for strays. Eddie would leap out with gloves and noose and have the beast in the back before the dog itself knew what was happening. Then out came the chloroform bottle and the rags. A decent dog would net three or four hundred on the hoof. One had made them seven-fifty: a daring daylight snatch in Makati which Eddie and Gringo still recounted over drinks. It was a monster Doberman or German Shepherd or something – the boys were none too clear about breeds – being walked at the end of a long rope by a queen in a toupée. As they drove slowly past, Eddie in the back had whipped open the door, grabbed the rope and held on as Gringo floored the accelerator. Soon they were doing a good speed, the dog bowling along behind, skittling cyclists and an ice-cream cart on bicycle wheels. The damned animal weighed a ton; Eddie had a hell of a job holding the door with one hand and hauling in with the other like some demented shark fisherman.