Authors: James Hamilton-Paterson
Melchior. One of the Three Wise Men whose name to Prideaux as a child had a sad ring to it. Probably a harmless lunatic or a man made eccentric by suffering, for all that Herrera claimed he was not mad. But then the young priest had himself been acting strangely, with his unstoppable open-air sermons. What on earth was going on in that shanty town? It seemed most likely that San Clemente was not at all untypical: that any other barrio could produce its drunks and cranks and occasional vampire. Yet there was something about its position, shallowly rooted on a hillside with the huge Chinese cemetery poised above it, which gave it and its people their own peculiar definition. It reeked of strain. In any case he knew he would have to return. He was going to have to find The Rotting Man again and confront him because there was something between them which would not let him be. He would force himself to perform this act because he was more scared of shirking it, of being thrown back yet again into sick reflection on his own timidity. Time was getting on; ghosts had to be laid. Missing Vietnam was one thing, missing the point far worse.
He thought he wouldn’t ring Vic Agusan. Much as he would have preferred company he didn’t wish to be dragged down into any more drinking sessions, discussions of vampires and talk about police. These days San Clemente was even more in the news. Apparently a body had been found, so had a skeleton. The two stories had become conflated in Prideaux’s mind, not least because he had spent the last few days largely out of town. On impulse he had begun making early morning bus journeys to nearby provinces, escaping the city. In relief he had lain on deserted beaches and wandered around the markets of
small towns which took him back to Indochina. These, too, had their slummy side; but the traffic’s roar was less and fresh breezes blew in from canefields and pineapple plantations, and he had seen fish offal swept off a market’s swilling cement floor into a ravine overhung by heavy vines and feathery stands of bamboo. He had wandered like a freed prisoner, blinking in the sun and gazing into people’s faces as if to catch up on something he had missed. Escaping Manila, certainly; but these day trips were also efforts to escape The Rotting Man, as he could now acknowledge. In any case he had not been at home and hadn’t called Vic. A part of him was beginning to insist there was little more to learn from a further piling-up of bodies. Each day a dozen men like Sgt. Cruz dumped their victims. The foulness of foul play merely repeated itself without further edification. The corpses were dumb. It was what the pre-corpses could say for themselves which might be interesting. In his mind’s eye he had an impression of San Clemente divided into two. The lower part was where all the attention was concentrated (though today’s tabloids gave off that exhausted reticence which implied there was currently a lull between the dramatic events of some days ago and expected future developments). The upper part of the barrio seemed to him altogether more mysterious, leaked into by the silence of the strange miniature streets and even stranger mausoleums among which The Rotting Man, that ultimate pre-corpse, flitted and gestured.
So on a sultry morning he took the LRT and walked up past where Vic and he had parked the Hersheymobile to the cemetery’s perimeter street. He would simply wander down through the barrio and ask around for ‘Melchior’. Soon he had left the Tan family’s extravaganza behind and reached the point where the tip of San Clemente’s triangle met the wall. A lone tomb stood close to it, one of those seldom visited and even more seldom maintained, to judge from its condition. With its metal window frames, stuccoed curves and flat roof it reminded him of a 1930s cinema, an Odeon among tombs, rusty, flaking, and with bushes growing over the shallow pediment. And like the Odeon (or Regal, or Roxy) there were shattered light fitments across its face, now nameless. Wondering what it looked like from behind, Prideaux discovered something not visible from the street. The tomb was connected with the top of the wall by skeins of wiring which bridged the gap like the brittle flying buttresses of mud termites build so that
not even space can hold up their depredations. It was satisfactory the way the liminal held such power in this place. All boundaries had their own potency; and juxtapositions of wealth with squalor such as one could see anywhere downtown were always ironic, if a little too photogenic. Here, though, a subtle unease was added by the wealthy all being dead. They exercised their tyranny over the living on the other side of the wall, while the living retaliated by draining them of unused volts. It was this economy which gave San Clemente its uniqueness, he decided, moving around to the front of the tomb again. Tombs and shanties, liers and squatters, each needed the other in order to retain a full identity. Some way off along the deserted street with its silent, uninhabitable houses, a tall bush glided out of shadow and flung up a limb with a wild fandango gesture. Prideaux felt his blood halt. As from afar he heard his own voice call: ‘Hey, I want to talk to you!’ and beneath him his feet began to move.
But The Rotting Man only repeated his gay military wave and moved off among the tombs, olive drab rags and camouflage net bobbing in and out of visibility, traversing light and shade and then remaining fixed until Prideaux caught up and found only a shrub with tiny scarlet flowers like wounds. Then, looking about him in frustration and dread he would see again the distant club of a hand in its private semaphore. As they progressed he was aware of two things. The first was that if the streets they crossed were vaguely concentric then they were headed deep into the cemetery. The other, that this was no chase. He realised he could easily catch the hobbling figure ahead. Despite its visual elusiveness and spritelike gestures it was, in fact, moving quite slowly, even painfully. He found himself hanging back, almost out of respect, as if acknowledging that something which had eluded him for so long had always been within easy grasp, a seizable moment.
Through the trees to the right was some sort of church. On its porch steps four men were sitting around a trestle table playing cards. A bottle winked in the sun. Prideaux remembered Vic Agusan having said something about a detachment of cemetery police. Well, detached they certainly were, as unseen through the bushes nearby a middleaged foreigner pursued at walking pace a decaying fugitive from the armed forces. Beside the church a few huts stood beneath acacia trees, selling refreshments to those visitors who came to tend the plots and tombs. A
boy lay asleep along a bench in a puddle of shade, hat over eyes, a kitten dozing on his stomach.
If this was the centre, the cemetery couldn’t be anything like circular. Not much further on the tombs’ condition worsened considerably and, emerging between walls set with niches for coffins, Prideaux came on what was clearly a boundary. There were gaps, as over on the San Clemente side; but instead of a view of shanty roofs here was only a wasteland of tall grasses and low trees. However improbable it seemed in the middle of Manila, his ravaged Pied Piper had led him to the threshold of a savannah. He assumed they must be somewhere near the point where La Loma, North and Chinese cemeteries all touched, the point furthest from the roads which served them, most distant from the expensive and fashionable plots. Here, in the tangle of undergrowth, graves lay opened and empty, their inscriptions leached off by tropical rains. Of their occupants there was no trace. The dead had been raised by robbers, ghouls, dogs. There were the remains of small bonfires, charred patches littered with heat-shrivelled lengths of puce and lime ribbon, a wired bundle of twigs that had been a sheaf of flowers, black meshes into which wreaths had been woven. The sun was strong, the light rebounded from cracked cement surfaces, burned against a forehead already pink from his recent trips into the provinces.
As his eyes adjusted to a nearby patch of shade they resolved a mossy reclining angel into a recumbent figure with its spongy head resting between the pages of an open marble book.
‘Five minutes,’ said the figure. ‘You’ve never been a soldier.’
‘What?’
‘It took you five minutes to see me. You died four minutes fifty-nine seconds ago. You were point man. You led your whole platoon into the killing box. Give the man a medal.’
Absurd though it was, Prideaux felt shame rise to his face.
‘Okay,’ said the figure. ‘You were looking for me and I found you. Big deal. I’m Captain Melchior. You’re John Something.’
‘Father Herrera told you.’
‘Father’s good.’
‘Yes, he is.’
‘Not what I meant,’ said Melchior, ‘but what the hell. You want to know about stress in this country?’
‘It sounds stupider put like that.’
‘Yeah. Why don’t you move out of the sun? Us baldies gotta watch the sun. You think I might know something?’
‘Maybe. It’s up to you. Perhaps another piece of the puzzle. I don’t expect a definitive revelation as the reward for having pursued the extremest person to the extremest place.’
‘Excuse me? You’re British, right? The accent. Makes it harder.’
Prideaux, nettled by disadvantages he hadn’t considered, asked bluntly, ‘What are you wanted for?’
‘Murder. Theft. Desertion. Things like that. Why, you scared?’
‘No,’ he said, surprised to find it true. ‘The worst you can do is kill me, steal my money and abandon my corpse.’
‘No it’s not,’ said Captain Melchior. ‘Not by a long way. But I’m sick of dying and I’m sick of death.’
‘Funny place to choose if you’re sick of death,’ Prideaux said with an attempt at flippancy. ‘A graveyard.’
‘Wrong. It’s the only place left in this city a guy can hear himself think. Gotta hear yourself think when you’re dying. Might overhear something useful.’
Now that he was standing by him, Prideaux found himself able to look down at The Rotting Man without dread and with very little disgust. It helped knowing his name and rank. Now he was Captain Melchior, clearly waiting for the celestial medevac chopper and the Great Corpsman. ‘You’re a mess,’ he said.
‘Affirmative.’
Prideaux judged that the worst of his cranial distortion was hidden by the camouflage netting, for the lumps and bulges visible beside his eyes seemed to be part of a mass which had its roots elsewhere. The unnatural width thus given his face made the eyes too close and concentrated their force. All the fingers were missing from his right hand, which ended in a flap of skin like a pasty’s crimped edge. The thumb was intact, as was his left hand. Both wrists were covered with open sores which also blotched the long sleeves of the army shirt he wore. The rest of his body gave the impression of being similarly afflicted. Phrases like ‘neurofibromatosis’ and ‘Elephant Man’s Disease’ went through Prideaux’s mind as he confronted this suffering creature, who exuded a bitter pollen smell like pear blossom.
The Captain watched this pitying inventory and clearly hoped
to forestall further conversation on the subject by saying ‘Incurable.’
‘What, all of it?’
‘Everything.’
‘I’m sure somewhere like Makati Medical Center –’
‘Ay!
came the interruption. ‘The
Kano
’s
going to throw money at me! I’m not a squatter, John Something. I’m an ex-Ranger on the run. There’s a difference. I’d get to spend a morning in my two-hundred-bucks-a-day bed covered in electrodes before I had a foul dream, woke up in Camp Crame stockade medical centre and found the electrodes now clipped to my balls.’
‘Ah, you mean incurable in that sense, then. Daren’t be cured rather than can’t?’
‘No. Either way I’m a dead man. I prefer to do my dying here.’
‘Why can’t they find you here?’
‘Have you any idea how many AFP men are on the run with prices on their heads for bank robberies, kidnappings and God knows what? Thousands. Half the country’s gangs are AWOL military and police. There aren’t the men available to comb acres of cemeteries just for one miserable Ranger who isn’t even armed and who only arranged the death of a commanding officer that deserved far worse. If I’m going to talk,’ the swollen head sunk in the Book of Job eased itself tenderly, ‘I need something to drink.’ Passages of chiselled Latin could be seen surrounding the halo of camouflage netting. ‘Soft drinks.’
‘I’ll get some. What about food?’
‘No food. Just Coke.’
Prideaux woke the boy with the kitten on his stomach and thirstily drank two bottles of Sprite. Then he bought a family size Coke, overpaying the boy who was already a little petulant at being woken and now was inclined to be querulous about the deposit and his own lack of change. The bottle emerged from a chest of watery ice and sawdust like a log from a swamp.
‘Good and cold,’ said Captain Melchior when he took it from Prideaux. He tucked it beneath his right arm, screwed off the cap and drank deeply. ‘Oh wow.’ He belched. ‘You’ve drunk, haven’t you? John Something did some thinking as well as drinking.’
‘It would have looked odd, wouldn’t it, a foreigner coming out of nowhere and disappearing into the bushes with more than one drink? It’s not an obvious place for a picnic.’
‘Sure. Wise precaution. Wouldn’t have mattered, though. They all know I’m around. How else can I eat? I get my food from them.’
‘What about the police in the church?’
‘They’re okay. They’re Catholics. Also they’re Chinese. And they’re not military. They’re not about to help the AFP clean up its shit. I know them all. We’ve done a lot of talking, specially at night. Don’t sleep much nowadays, so we talk. Stories. Politics. The time passes. What they call the graveyard shift, right?’
‘And they keep you.’
‘Negative. Nobody keeps Captain Melchior. Captain Melchior tells stories and eats rice. We’re all Christians, aren’t we? Who’s counting? They want to hear. They’re just city kids, mostly. Never been out of Manila, let alone Luzon. But I was down south for years, all the Visayas but specially Mindanao. Fighting the Moslems. They love to hear about fighting the Moslems in Mindanao.’
‘Why that, particularly?’
‘Why not? Moslems everywhere are news these days. Here we’ve got this little old war been going on for years and years, not over in Saudi or somewhere but right here in-country. These kids know nothing. They’re boys. Boys like war stories.’