Ghosts of Manila (11 page)

‘Slow down, for Chrissake,’ he had pleaded. His arm was popping from its socket. They rounded a corner and the dog bonged off the side of a dawdling bus. ‘Slow
down,
Gringo. My goddam arm’s coming off.’ Unquestionably the animal was stoutly built. Even after whacking into the bus it was still more or less on its feet at a woozy canter.
Gringo trod on the brakes and the dog, now on only a foot or two of rope, crunched into the taxi’s rear. Gringo began laughing crazily, his forehead resting on the steering wheel as Eddie hopped out and tried to manhandle the dazed animal into the back. There were shops here, and crowds. People collected on the pavement and watched with at-a-loss giggles as Eddie took a grip on the rope with one hand and groped for the beast’s tail with the other. The tail had been docked, the stump was too short. Finally he grasped a leg instead and with a convulsive heave stuffed the animal through the door and fell on top. The crowd loved it. His T-shirt was rucked up to his armpits and he was smeared with blood. Panting amid the tangle of massive brown hocks and hams he indeed looked as if he were screwing a pony, an observation voiced loudly by a peanut boy. At that moment the queen came limping around the corner, wig askew, and let out a bleat of mixed relief and horror. Gringo pulled himself together, let in the clutch with a bang and, driving erratically through shifting lenses of tears, whizzed into a slot in the traffic. The door slammed shut. ‘I think my hand’s gone,’ said Eddie. He had taken several turns of the rope around it. From the tightened coils a bunch of pale twigs protruded. He gingerly unwrapped the rope and found the twigs still attached to a hand deeply indented, skinned and burnt.

‘Quick, give it the chloroform,’ called Gringo between hoots of laughter.

Eddie tore his attention away from his own injuries to survey those of the dog. Its eyes bulged, its purple tongue lolled. The noose around its neck had sunk deep into the fur. He managed to find the slip knot and feed rope through it. The noose eased. The dog sucked a rattling gulp of air.

‘I’m very much afraid, sir,’ said Eddie in his Forbes Park vet’s voice, ‘your dear pet will have to be put down. It is beyond repair.’

This sent Gringo off again. His driving became truly terrible and it remained a mystery to both men how they ever made it to San Andres without hitting something or being stopped. It amazed them even more once they had swung into the yard behind the restaurant and climbed weakly out. The car’s nearside rear quarter was dented and all too plainly smeared with fresh blood. The chef came out to inspect the goods.

‘You’re sure that’s a dog?’ he asked, looking at the moaning brute
stretched the full width of the back seat. ‘Eddie-boy, you bought this off a
calesa
driver.’

‘This is no nag,’ Eddie told him scornfully. ‘Are those nag’s balls? We got it off a queen in Makati. Look at the meat on it,’ he said, slapping a bloody flank. ‘That’s pedigree dog meat, tons of it. Actually, we’ve been thinking it’s probably too good for your customers, seeing how they’re used to the starving mongrels you normally serve. All ribs and skin. They must think they’re eating stewed umbrellas.’ This phrase,
adobong
payong,
made Gringo lean helplessly against the taxi, head on forearm. ‘You’re not going to have to fatten
this
dog up for a month, no sir.’

‘Has it been dead long?’

‘What do you mean, dead? Can’t you hear it? It’s resting. We had quite a fight,’ Eddie said proudly, ‘It didn’t want to come. All you have to do is put it out of its misery and into the pot.’

Eventually the deal was struck, the animal hauled away by two men, the rear of the taxi sluiced out and Eddie’s hand bandaged. His wife had heard the tale many times. ‘Your dear pet’ll have to be put down’ had become something of a catch-phrase, quoted whenever the story was alluded to. Nanang Pipa could indeed have seen a certain justice had her husband been jailed for dog-napping, but the joke about the car-napping rap was that Eddie couldn’t drive. Even if the halfwits who arrested him hadn’t known it, St. Jude had and, moving in a mysterious way, organised the release. His agent had turned out to be Insp. Dingca.

‘You mean our Dingca? Rio?’

‘How many other Dingcas do you know?’ Eddie asked her. ‘A real piece of luck. He was over at the jail looking for someone, a completely different case, and he saw me and said ‘Hi, Eddie. What’ve they got you for?’ So I told him it was a mistake, especially as I can’t drive, and they took me down to the yard and gave me a test. We all got into a jeep and they told me to drive to where the leader of the gang lived and just park outside the house. They’d do the rest. If I did that, they said, I’d be released on the spot. I really think they were serious. I even tried a bit but it wasn’t any good and after a while they told me to get out anyway, just walk, out the gate, go. “But we’ve got your number, Buster”, that sort of stuff. It was Dingca did that. I owe him.’

Since then Eddie hadn’t worked and now owed many people besides the Inspector, mainly for gin and cigarettes. It was a mercy the sewing business was going well, Pipa thought, otherwise they’d be on their beam ends. Just then Eddie himself stuck his head through the door, leaning on the posts with muddy hands.

‘God knows what you’ve let us in for now, woman,’ he said. The sewers stopped work and looked up. ‘Never can leave well alone, can you? It’s always “Just a little bit deeper, Eddie”, or “Another day should do it”.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ asked Pipa crossly.

Something in the way his head disappeared made everyone troop outside, or at least crowd around the back door, since the hole took up most of the space between the wall of the house and that of the neighbours. Here the reeking, rubbish-strewn declivity was now interrupted by a sizeable pit whose depth was exaggerated by the heaps of soil packed down by bare feet around its edge. There was nobody in it. Nanang Pipa peered down, impressed despite herself by its neatly vertical sides and the evidence of labour. At the bottom was a small, roundish white boulder.

‘Now that,’ Eddie told her with truculent triumph, ‘is a human skull.’

Y
SABELLA BASTIAAN’
S
pet senator had pressed her to meet him again in the Senate lounge. Once more she had walked up a single flight of gritty cement stairs from the Department of Archaeology and emerged in the corridors of power. This time they had sat at one of the long tables set in a hollow rectangle and a cold collation was brought. Other senators were there, some of whom she now recognised from her daily newspaper reading. Of these, half looked like the ex-showbiz folk they actually were. Benigno Vicente was not one of them. He was expansive, confident enough of her now to introduce her across the table. With every gesture he shed a strong whiff of ‘L’Egoiste’. Ysabella was tentatively wondering whether these powerful men and women could be subdivided into old and new money, or maybe according to their cultural leanings. The showbiz people tended to be home-grown in the populist manner, given to answering Channel 5 news reporters in Tagalog. The others answered more or less automatically in English. It seemed to her that most of them looked eastwards towards America, where they had likely been to college or had sons and daughters with law practices there. The remaining few – her own Senator Vicente among them – looked westwards towards London and Paris and Rome and Madrid.

‘Miss Bastiaan’s father was ambassador here in 1965.’

‘
Chris
Bastiaan?’ A senator two down from her host leaned forward and smiled at her across the intervening meat loaf and kiwi fruit. ‘I knew him, miss. It’s an honour.’ This was said with great courtesy but
as if caught on the hop, still searching for the right tone. ‘I was nobody at the time, of course,’ he explained to his neighbour. ‘Just a lawyer. But we were introduced and we met often. We used to play golf. A most admirable man, a good friend and a true British gentleman in the old sense.’ This came as a shock to Ysabella, who had never heard that her father had had the least interest in sports. ‘Then that terrible incident. I believe he was the youngest ambassador ever to be appointed here. My God, it seems a long time ago, the Quirino Avenue bomb thing.’

‘But of course you were at Oxford,’ Vicente said to her with nifty irrelevance.

‘Not at the time, Ben. I was three.’

‘Ah. Obviously I meant
later.’

Off in a corner of the room cameras flashed and whirred among the sofas in one of whose corners a tiny senator was slipping down into a crack in the upholstery like a peanut. Her face wore a look of severe intelligence.

‘We worry about time-wasting,’ said a lady on Ysabella’s left who had not previously spoken. ‘Have you attended any debates yet? Then you’ll know. It’s very senatorial, very slow, very by-the-book. Properly dignified. But I can tell you, Ysabella, we’re on the edge of an abyss in this country. Or, to be more topical, on the edge of a volcano. “The Pinatubo premonition”, one of our newspapers called it. The Americans pulled out last week. Finally we’ve got what we wanted. Unfortunately, total independence leaves us with no-one but ourselves to blame for whatever follows. Unless we can get peace and order we’re doomed. Peace and order is number one. No peace and order means no foreign investors. No foreign investors means stagnation and increasing poverty. And poverty means corruption and breakdown of peace and order. A vicious circle which we have to break before all else. And in the meantime economies which were years behind us a decade or two ago are overtaking. Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, and quite soon even Indonesia. It’s a disaster.’

‘Too much democracy, Lee Kuan Yew said the other day.’

‘All right for him. An island state the size of one of our smallest provinces with a tiny population. We’ve got more than seven thousand islands here.’

‘One of which I own,’ broke in Vicente. ‘I insist that you join me and
my family there for a weekend very soon. I really insist. It’s quiet, simple, beautiful. No formality, no loud social whirling. Seen from the land it reminds one of Mont St. Michel, I find.’

‘He’s rather ghastly on the face of it,’ Ysabella said to Sharon later, recounting travellers’ tales from the land beyond the ceiling. They were dusting the Archaeology Department, bringing to light uncatalogued lumps of this and that.

‘And underneath?’

‘Probably quite nice. A Europhile. Just someone from my father’s diplomatic past my mother kept in touch with. I hardly knew of his existence until this trip came up. What’s his reputation?’

‘He tries, at least. He works. Corrupt, sure; but no worse than some and much less than most.’

‘He owns an island, he says.’

‘He would. They mostly do, people like that. I should go,’ said Sharon. ‘It’ll be a unique insight into senatorial provincial life. He’s already invited you?’

They were standing at one of the trestle tables laden with dusty fragments and a stencilled notice saying ‘BICOL 0881’. This, Sharon explained, referred to an excavation there in 1981, of which these specimens ought to have been listed in the August catalogue.

‘A vacuum cleaner would help,’ said Ysabella. ‘All these whisks and brooms just shift the dust around instead of removing it. This table looks as though the ceiling had collapsed.’

‘It’s on the list, don’t worry. Maybe you already told me and I forgot, sorry, but what was your connection with Vicente? Your father knew him?’

‘Sort of. He was my father’s driver.’

‘Oh my.’

‘Until I told my mother I was coming here he was just a man in a story, a hero for a day. He was driving my father and the First Secretary in the ambassadorial Rolls-Royce when some terrorists threw a bomb or a grenade or it hit a land mine, nobody seemed very clear. I was three at the time, back in England with my mother. The Rolls wasn’t armoured. Nobody bothered much with that sort of thing then. Think of Kennedy only the year before, the President of America driving through the middle of a city in an open car. It must have been a different world. My father was hit in the head. Vicente drove like mad
without tyres for half a mile, saw my father on the floor in the back covered in blood and the other fellow just sitting there paralysed. It was fear or drink or something, I forget now, except that he wasn’t a bit hurt. So Vicente stopped, got into the back and gave my father mouth-to-mouth until someone fetched an ambulance. It wasn’t any good because he died a couple of days later but my mother never forgot what Vicente did. He was only a driver, terribly young. And I don’t think anybody even
knew
about mouth-to-mouth in those days, did they?’

‘My God. No wonder you have mixed feelings about things here.’

‘Do I? Not really. I can barely remember him. Someone faint a long way away and a long time ago. Do you know what actually killed him?
That
I do remember. It was the glass stopper from one of the little decanters in the Rolls’s cocktail cabinet. It went straight into his brain.’

‘And your mother kept up with him all these years?’

‘I suppose she must have,’ said Ysabella. ‘All she said to me was, “Well, if you’re going
there,
darling, you’ll have to look up Daddy’s old driver. He’s a senator now.” So I did. But I can’t imagine Mummy keeping up with an embassy driver except sort of the annual Christmas card, even if he was the good Samaritan. She was a diplomatic wife.’

‘And diplomatic wives didn’t become friendly with drivers?’ Sharon’s tone was that of a New World democrat.

‘Well, of course not. As for how Vicente made it from the car pool to upstairs I’ve no idea. Only in the Philippines would one be unsurprised.’

‘Or in the United States,’ said Sharon acridly.

‘But I think he’s probably a bore, anyway. Not because he isn’t old money or anything but
because
, I don’t know. A bore’s manner, I suppose.’

‘He’s probably just nervous. You’re the daughter of the man who was blown up. And you do scare people, you know.’

‘
I
do? Oh nonsense, Sharon.’

But she knew it was true and didn’t much care, was even secretly pleased. ‘He has this pet hobby-horse, doesn’t he?’

‘You mean the OCWs? That’s the large point in his favour. It’s high time somebody in the government here took some notice of what’s going on. The cynicism’s unbelievable. They published some statistics
the other week. Every year an average of eight hundred and nineteen Filipino overseas contract workers die of maltreatment abroad. Can you imagine? Eight
hundred
a year? It’s worst in the Middle East and Africa. Between six and seven hundred thousand Filipinos work there. Crispa went to the Department of Foreign Affairs and found out that between 1987 and 1990 alone more than three thousand of them died in, quote, ‘mysterious circumstances’, unquote. Does the government here demand stricter law enforcement in the host countries, better criminal and legal enquiries, proper explanations and indemnity for the families? It sure doesn’t. Between them, the OCWs worldwide are pulling three billion pesos a year into this collapsing economy and it’s not about to annoy any of the geese laying all these golden eggs. Score several belated points for your senator.’

an

‘It certainly does seem pretty feeble,’ agreed Ysabella, blithely dusting. ‘Good for him, then. He said Filipinos were the Jews of Asia.’

‘He often does.’ But Sharon’s quieter remark and her sudden abandoning of the BICOL table left her companion irritated by the passion this implied. It was all very well playing naive and righteous, but what the hell did she expect? Migrant workers were by definition exploited, always had been, always would be. Having nothing to sell but their sweat they were expendable in a buyer’s market. She glanced across at Sharon’s back and decided not to mention slavery in the US, or John Steinbeck, or grape-pickers, or that she had once read a book of harrowing details about Castle Garden and Ellis Island where – if she remembered aright – some three thousand potential immigrants to the US had committed suicide while in detention awaiting deportation for having various ailments imaginary or otherwise, or the wrong papers, or not enough money to bribe the officials who made fortunes out of penury and despair. Not that Britain’s present-day record on immigrants was anything to write home about. She had recently read that until he was deported to Hong Kong in December 1992 the UK had an unconvicted detainee who had been held in jail for seven years, scarcely a matter for national pride.

They smouldered at each other for a day or two beneath heatless professional exchanges. It was not completely clear to either why there was this smell of burning in the air. But Ysabella’s casualness, with which she might have lit an airy cigarette, had evidently ignited an obscure fuse. Not even Vicente’s record on OCWs was proof against
Sharon’s anger when his familiar
bon
mot
recurred yet again in print. In this mood, once more was once too often.

‘Listen, Ysabella, the next time you see your friend kindly tell him from me not to use that comparison ever again. It’s damned inaccurate. Also damned offensive.’

‘I’m not quite sure –’

‘Then I’ll tell you, just so’s you get it straight before you pass it on to Benigno-baby. In no sense whatever are the Filipinos the Jews of Asia. The Jews, alone among humanity, have survived damn near three thousand years of nonstop persecution. The Filipinos haven’t been a unified people for three hundred at the longest, most would say barely since Independence in 1946, some would claim they’re not a unified people yet. What unique force kept the notion of Jewishness intact for three millennia? Scholarship. Literacy. Not even merely religion but learning, enquiry, solid and unceasing mental effort.
The
text.
Banished, exiled, pogromed, scattered, they were left with nothing but the pursuit of reason, reflection, the crazed certainty that justice had to prevail eventually according to humanity’s own laws which it had written but periodically pretended it hadn’t. I’m not a religious Jew, I’m an atheist Jew. I’m also pretty much of a pessimist. But when I get really low I cheer myself up by remembering that, incredibly, the Jews are the living proof that the pen really
is
mightier than the sword. Constantly banned from all sorts of jobs in all sorts of societies, instead of giving up and going to seed they took refuge in simple trades by day and the intellect by night. Not even the filthiest, poorest
shtetl
in Eastern Europe ever lost its awe of learning, of argument, of cynical debate. All their ancient persecutors, where are they? Babylonians, Egyptians, Romans, Crusaders? The Spanish Inquisitors, the Tsarists, the Stalinists, the Third Reich? The best you can say is that one or two have left new inheritors of their old names, and the worst that there are always fresh candidates to step into the shoes of dead persecutors. But we Jews, we’ve survived and even prospered, held together by tradition, by Torah and Talmud and sheer, stubborn intellectual resourcefulness.

‘So you can tell Senator Vicente that when he and his people have made that effort for three thousand years he can call them the Jews of Asia. But not until. Never until. I’ve been here long enough to be extremely fond of this country, and I love Crispa very much indeed.
But this place’s tragedy is not that of the Jews, and it only muddles and conceals the problem to pretend it is. The real tragedy of the Philippines, and plenty of other countries as well, is precisely that it
doesn’t
have three thousand years of literacy and identity to draw on as remedy. What text can unify the barely literate? What scholarship shore up those with little tradition? These last two days I’ve thought of nothing but this. Things I’d never organised as thoughts before, certainly not in connection with my life here. So I can thank you for that, at least indirectly. This morning I worked out something grim which I know is true: the impossibility of
being
anything without
knowing
something. Without knowledge people have no identity. I’m afraid that applies just as much to nations as to individuals.’

Sharon vanished for two days after this highly partial outburst. Ysabella thought of ringing her at home, decided against it. When she reappeared she was back to the self Ysabella believed she had first met. Together they walked to Intramuros where some students were digging at her site under the supervision of an ethnology professor from UP. It was a pleasure and relief to get back to trowels and camel hair brushes, squatting beneath the greenish heat of a canvas awning. Suddenly and with tenderness Sharon put a muddy hand on Ysabella’s arm, leaving a sweaty print.