Ghosts of Manila (33 page)

Vic moved forward curiously to peer at it. Slabs of collapsed wall were slanted precariously around a central hole of unknown depth, evidently some kind of cellar into which one of the bulldozer’s tracks had broken. Steps could be seen leading down, their topmost edges pulverised and scored. Had it not been for them, he realised, the machine would have dropped straight through the floor. He stared down but nothing was visible; the dying fires of San Clemente as well as this Gringo’s leaping pyre shed too much ambient light. He glanced around for the crazy melon-head leaning on his staff but he had gone, swallowed up among the dark trees beyond the glare. Slightly shocked, Vic walked back along the road. His face felt baked and brickish after staring for so long into the fire; the night air was almost cold on his cheeks. Reaching his car he took a flashlight from beneath the driver’s seat. At the bottom of the road a small group of police was gathered near a fire truck. At their feet a canvas hose snaked into the burning barrio from a hydrant across the Kapilang. Even at this distance he recognised Dingca’s tall figure and walked on down. Rio was filthy, his face and arms streaked with charcoal. A handkerchief was wrapped around one hand.

‘Do we have a casualty toll?’ Vic asked him.

‘Not so far. Not high, though. Too early for folks to be asleep. Herrera’s a definite
dedbol,
though.’

‘Who’s Herrera?’

‘Sort of a parish priest. One brave man. He went in to get some kids out of a house and it collapsed on him. Turned out the kids were
safe all along. Who in hell was that on the ’dozer? Did he get off?’

‘Didn’t even try. I was watching. He rode it the whole way.’

‘Who was it?’

‘Someone up there called him Gringo.’

‘Susmaryosep.
Bats Lapad’s brother,’ Dingca explained to his colleagues. ‘Yeah, that stunt had old Gringo written all over it. What was the big idea?’

‘Let’s go and see,’ said Vic. ‘He’s trashed Lettie’s tomb. I’ve got a flashlight here and my journalist’s nose is twitching.’

Dingca and a couple of other officers began walking up with him, implying there wasn’t much they could do down there among the pitiful knots of people who stood in silence watching their homes burn. When Vic glanced back he had a brief view, possible only because the intervening shanties had already collapsed, of the palm tree still standing there, its tall crown intact above the flames. He was just in time to see the first holes melt in the plastic awnings tethered to it. Slowly they tore like sheets of dough and fell in drooping strands into the excavation below.

When they reached the mausoleum Dingca shook his head. ‘Old Gringo did this?’ There was real affection and admiration in his voice.

‘He sure did. Laughing like a crazy.’ Vic shone the flashlight into the depths. The plumbing had burst and a split pipe was gushing. An inch or two of black water already danced on the cellar floor, but it was not that which held the men’s attention. Among the objects their curious gaze began to separate from the general rubble was an industrial vacuum pump on wheels suitable for sucking blockages out of drains, and stacks of cartons through whose torn sides innumerable plastic packs of what might have been sugar were slowly slipping into the water. There was a long silence and then Dingca turned and held out a boardlike palm which the journalist took. Rio’s eyes glistened in the firelight. His expression was that of a man who can at last say goodbye to a career.

‘In short, bingo,’ said Vic.
Flack-flack-flack.

W
HEN WRITTEN UP
later, polished into readability and coherence, fieldwork often takes on the broad outlines of a narrative. It is a strange kind of narrative, though: one in which the story-line is little more than the setting itself, with all the interest centred in closely studied details. In this it somewhat resembles pornography. Its protagonists have no character but stand as representatives of their species and gender and age-group. It is a view of things which tends naturally towards the freeze-frame. In the resultant thesis the thick listing of social customs, habits and beliefs gives a curious impression. Nobody could say it was wrong, precisely, but neither is it right. It excludes all possibility of the insignificant, of thin, listless days which pass unrecordably and without revelation of any sort. On days like that people simply come and go under fierce blue skies, doing the acts of the basic human animal with a remarkable lack of ethnicity. They carry things, prod pigs with sticks, laugh, snooze in the shade, gather firewood. In the tropic light it is not obvious to what extent custom might underlie such immemorial activities. It can feel a gratuitous Western contrivance to draw up lists of who may carry what, note that some peoples are vehemently pigless, theorise about humour, correlate the siesta with latitude, consider the effects of deforestation. To be sceptical about such procedures won’t do at all for academic purposes, of course. Home is where activities are neutral; abroad is where they are full of significance and hidden meaning. Days of fieldwork when nothing much seems to happen and one might just
as well be at home are not permitted to surface in the written version. They are simply boiled away as the stew of information simmers and grows ever more concentrated. In this way the conscientious anthropologist may aspire to produce a society’s stock cube version.

Well before San Clemente’s destruction Prideaux knew he was not a conscientious anthropologist. Over the months his conviction had grown that it was impossible to say anything very useful about another society or, indeed, about anybody at all. He remembered the awful rows with Jessie which had so often pretended to centre around some semantic nicety. He remembered also the bleak insight that even as he searched scrupulously for the right nuance he was actually taking pains to conceal what he meant, though he didn’t necessarily know what that was. We were dreamers, blanks to ourselves. And if we were blanks to ourselves how could another person be any clearer? If it became impossible to understand one’s own wife, what serious chance was there of understanding a culture whose cradle tongue one didn’t speak? It was beyond absurdity. In a moment of nearly exuberant glumness Prideaux toyed once more with the notion of changing the subject of his thesis. A new title suggested itself:
Determined
Mistranslation.
The
Myth
of
Inter
cultural
Understanding
and
the
Fiction
of
Interpersonal
Communication.
In this mood he warmed to the whole idea of communication as radically undesirable. The daily tons of newsprint, the torrent of words broadcast into the ether and down telephone lines, the yak and bluster of it all: finally it lost meaning and became mere noise. Of what use were endless documentaries when what was really needed was
silence
? International silence, that was the ideal. And he thought he might have glimpsed his private future, wandering restlessly in search of the last place on earth without television reception.

When not quite in this mood he thought it worthwhile to go about asking people what they understood by words like ‘corruption’ and ‘nepotism’ which were used by Filipinos themselves about their society but not always with the same import. That young English archaeologist, Ysabella, had clearly not taken this seriously at all, but on his slight acquaintance with her Prideaux was not much surprised. She had struck him as a sort of upper-class airhead, a dilettante prepared to poke around at bits of skull and porcelain for as long as was diverting. (‘“Corruption?”’ she said, ‘Here? Define it? I give up’.) He
wished she wasn’t British. In any case she didn’t seem theoretically inclined and evidently felt no necessity to be thoughtful about a word like ‘corruption’. Yet the issue remained. It was, he saw, all part of the problem anthropology had with vocabulary: the use of one culture’s words to describe another. All the resonances were wrong. To take a single example, he couldn’t see how it was possible to address Filipino social dynamics in either large or small matters without an understanding of the
padrino
system, of the
amo
s
who commanded loyalties and respect often seemingly beyond any personal qualities of leadership or patronage. It could be enough merely to have the right surname, the right historical links with sources of influence. In this way distant power rang faintly on in otherwise hollow people.

Such things could easily transcend, or at least muddy, the law itself, especially in complex transactions which a Westerner might crudely sum up as ‘bribery’. Senator Vicente had leaned against the palm tree by the dig and given the example of a motorist running over and killing a child. If the driver behaved properly he would apologise profoundly and come to an agreement, usually financial, with the family who would acknowledge that nothing he or anyone else could do would bring their child back. The money was an assurance that the words were not empty gesturing. If it was all done in the correct spirit the idea of further criminal prosecution became almost improper because the grievance between the parties was already settled as well as could ever be. The payment was thus an earnest of contrition and not a bribe to stop a prosecution, as it would be seen in the West.

Now Prideaux recalled something that Fr. Herrera had said over lunch in the New Era restaurant some months ago, for it also concerned matters of terminology.

‘We Filipinos listen respectfully when Westerners speak,’ he had said in between sucking noisily at the stony flutes of crab’s legs. ‘That’s what we’ve been brought up to do. But the educated among us ought to become damned impatient when we hear that cliché about “Eastern fatalism” used to describe our passivity, our apparent high tolerance of injustice and pain. It’s as much a failure of English vocabulary as it is of perception. You use the same word “fatalism” to describe the pious Arab’s
inshallah
approach to life as you do our own completely different attitude. If people here strike you as passive it’s not because they think they’re seeing the inevitability of God’s handiwork but
because they know they’re enmeshed in a social system they dare not fight. They don’t believe their goat dies because God directly wills it but because the medicine they need is away in town, costs money they can’t spare and comes with instructions they can’t read. They’re frightened to spend cash on the fare, to borrow from friends and risk being hoodwinked into buying the wrong expensive drug by an unscrupulous shopkeeper, and of being humiliated into the bargain. Better to keep one’s head down and try a folk remedy. If that doesn’t work, write the animal off and hope it won’t happen again. That’s not fatalism, that’s common sense. Even more so if your problem’s with injustice of any kind: a dispute with a
padrino,
a quarrel with a landlord, discovering your daughter failed her exam because she didn’t slip the teacher enough money. Mess about with stuff like that and all the world’s grief’ll drop on your head. What has that to do with fatalism? Anybody can deal with Fate; it’s the hand of man which beats you to a pulp.’

This line, Prideaux thought, would have made for an interesting luncheon had Fr. Herrera sat down with Thomas Hardy. Now poor Herrera was dead and who could tell to what extent he would have seen his own demise as fated by his principles or decreed by the hand of man? The precise cause of the fire would never be known but no-one doubted it had been deliberately started. Lettie Tan’s interests had been too perfectly served for her not to be suspected. All further shilly-shallying and delay had been neatly cut short. San Clemente’s shanties were destroyed and would not be rebuilt; the problem was solved in an hour. Aside from the bodies of Herrera and Gringo a third corpse had been found, its charred wrists and ankles loosely circled with wire. It was female and a steel tooth identified it as having been Ligaya Rosales. Revenge? Justice? Or Lettie Tan ridding herself of a stooge who no longer had any function? It was opaque, and would no doubt remain so. Herrera’s death, by contrast, was transparently heroic, ironic and revelatory. The man’s heroism had been exemplary and therein lay the irony for Prideaux. He could vividly recall Herrera lecturing him and saying that living well was the best revenge. Dying well was no doubt better still, and a priest could hardly have died better than in trying to rescue his lambs, even if the lambs turned out to have been saved already. And the revelation was the news that they hadn’t been his lambs after all, it wasn’t his flock, Herrera was not
even a qualified shepherd. ‘Father’ Herrera was not even ordained, wasn’t a priest at all, had been Fr. Bernabe’s long-term companion and lover. Stranger still, everybody but Prideaux himself had known.

Once again this society had undermined a definition until it collapsed. In a land of fake policemen, bogus officials and impostors of every kind, a false priest had been revealed by an act of sacrifice as a true Christian. The social complexities were boundless; anthropology was like trying to dig mist with a spade. The subtexts of human behaviour were unfathomable and always would be: strange loves and compassions lost in the cracks, messages which disaster sometimes brought to light but which otherwise remained forever concealed. The ashes of San Clemente gave nothing back. To stand at the bottom of the hill and look up to the singed trees marking the boundary of the Chinese cemetery was to see the charred stubble of a battlefield, something erased for whose erasure conflicting reasons might be advanced (including race war) but whose actual agency could be left simply as
flames.
Prideaux had wandered the crunchy ruins. The souks and alleys were no more. Sheets of corrugated iron lay bent and pinkened by fire among pegs of charcoal which broke and tinkled like a soft black allotrope of ice. A community was demolished, its roots torn up, the bonds broken, members scattered.

‘It won’t be forgotten, though, will it?’ he wanted to ask Crispa who was helping Sharon and her colleagues pull long strands of partly-burnt plastic sheeting out of the hole where they had fallen like melted cheese. ‘It’s all filed away? It wasn’t casual to them just because they were squatters? They’ll remember it, surely?’

Such stupid questions could hardly be asked. A far better question to pose himself as he walked the ruins of the wasted ville was how it was he had managed yet again to miss the war, to be forced to reconstruct it and its rich stew of nostalgias from the later accounts of eyewitnesses. John Prideaux, the man with the gift of absence, the man on whose headstone might be carved the epitaph
‘In
Absentia’
.
This unfailing instinct – or unconscious determination – to be consistently in the wrong place at the right time was the one attribute which disqualified him from ever making a success of journalism, anthropology or, for all he knew, marriage. Was it Fate which had inexorably led him to try all three? Or only passivity? He had no idea.

He spent a further month in Manila tracking down the story which
had already tracked him down. He talked to Rio Dingca at his home in San Pedro, Laguna, and spent a beery evening with him and his
barkadas
at the Bowl-o-Rama, even briefly meeting the Big Girl herself, Patti Gonzales. Patti, who struck him as dull and demure, had evidently changed her mind about a career in the police. She was working as a checkout girl in the local Mercury drugstore. Dingca drove him back to the city next morning, sedately and rather silently, keeping to the middle lane all the way. When they arrived he confessed to having been nervous about highway holduppers since he felt acutely responsible for his foreign guest. One of their techniques, he explained, was to lurk on the shoulder and pounce on likely targets in the slow lane. Prideaux thought he was also regretting having been rather too frank and unbuttoned the night before.

From him Prideaux obtained Mrs Tugos’s address. He went looking for her and found her, to her evident amazement, embarrassment, and probably distress. She was living in a room the size of a large cupboard in Baclaran where the whole family slept on cartons of their own belongings. He went twice and had gone away with at least one of his questions answered. She, at any rate, would never forget San Clemente. Her husband’s death would have been reason enough; but she spoke of the barrio’s destruction as if it had marked the beginning of her own, the end of her resilience. Already she looked older. She seemed not to notice the stench of sewage brewing up somewhere nearby. The electric fan tied to a nail on the low ceiling only intensified it since there was no window anywhere in the plywood box which marked Nanang Pipa’s new horizons.

He saw little more of Vic Agusan since the journalist had asked to be sent for a month to Davao to follow up some incredible police racket or other. His breaking of the Lettie Tan story, complete with dramatic pictures, had been masterly. She, of course, was no nearer arrest than she had ever been despite the discovery of the best part of eighty kilos of
shabu
in her family’s mausoleum as well as a murder weapon, to wit, one pump. Her lawyer described the evidence as ‘flimsy and inferential’. His defence was to maintain that the Tans were victims of vandals, San Clementeños with a grudge who had broken into the tomb and planted the evidence just as they had once broken in and stolen the water. This was brazen enough to content the already satisfied. Vic’s pertinent question – as to how squatters too poor even
to buy the rice they needed had come by eighty kilos of an upmarket illegal drug – was unanswerable and so went unanswered. One day after a long, long delay it would doubtless all come to court and be thrown out for lack of evidence. Where was the case now that San Clemente’s inhabitants had vanished? On the other hand Vic’s own advocacy in a week’s worth of vividly sarcastic columns had queered Lettie’s pitch to the extent that nobody in government was prepared to risk public crucifixion by allowing Tango Muniplex Corp. to go through with its project. The matter was put on hold until some other, less tainted, corporation came forward to do the right thing by the nation’s heritage. The latest news was that Senator Benigno Vicente was forming a consortium.