Ghosts of Manila (6 page)

‘End of story?’

‘Well, no. Beginning of a small but respectable family fortune. Lots of copra, lots of hogs, good fishing. Buy a jeep to take the produce to markets with higher prices than the local ones. Eventually buy a house and a lot near UP.’

‘He was arrested, though?’ Ysabella addressed this to Crispa, who smiled.

‘On what charge?’ she asked. ‘Here there are only three or four crimes the police take seriously. Homicide, drugs, major robbery. You can expand those to include obvious things like terrorism against the state and kidnapping. Anyhow, rape’s nowhere on the list because it’s considered a private matter between individuals. It’s up to the victim to file charges. If there’s what they call an amicable settlement nobody can do anything about it. All charges dropped. Case closed. Did I do the wrong thing? I was fourteen.’

‘But what
happened
to him?’

‘He died a couple of years ago. Very old. A stroke, I think. We none of us went to the funeral.’

‘No, I mean…
something
must have happened. Somebody must have done something? Sacked from his post? Spat at in the street? I don’t know.’

‘I believe he filed for leave of absence for two months and a deputy captain took over. It was a terrific scandal in the village, of course. He had his cronies and supporters, some of whom no doubt thought he was no end of a stud. Sixty, hey? Not bad. The majority thought he’d brought shame on the village and that he ought to resign and leave the area. But he stuck it out, sitting in his house with the shutters closed, and when nothing happened re-filed for another two months’ extension of his leave of absence. Eventually it all blew over. A minor and commonplace event.’

‘Don’t misunderstand,’ Sharon said to Ysabella when they were eating mangoes buried in chipped ice. ‘People here may seem forgiving and unjudgmental to the point of moral lethargy, but they don’t forget.’

‘Exactly’, said Crispa. ‘So wasn’t I right? A vile five minutes, a miserable month, but it set us all up with capital. Surely in England they have the idea that justice involves redress as well as punishing the offender?’

‘They’re pretty hooked on punishment, actually. We’re Protestants, you know. Forget
tout
comprendre,
c’est
tout
pardonner.
We think things like confession and forgiveness are soft and Roman.’

‘But doesn’t the offender compensate his victim?’

Ysabella had some vague idea that a recent British government had been keen to make criminals pay with more than their freedom. Perhaps that was drug barons, and their loot went to the government rather than to their victims? She felt whirled about by the edges of things not touching in their customary places, by shifting boundaries. ‘What about impoverished rapists, then?’

‘There’s always natural justice. It runs riot in the provinces. People put curses on them and they get hacked to death with
bolos.
Or someone sets fire to their house with or without their children inside… Why this sordid topic? Sharon tells me your work is excellent.’

‘That’s because I’ve yet to do any.’

And indeed that was the problem: yet another thing whose shape was different here. When she had put archaeology into her bag in London it had been a neat package of known dimensions, of familiar colour, shape and heft. What she had taken out in Manila had become mysteriously misshapen in transit. Armed looters fought over sites. Museum directors went absent on field trips. Second-rate stuff was put on display while really interesting and valuable pieces were ‘re-assigned’ elsewhere and became suddenly unavailable for study.

‘Sharon tells me you’re not married?’

‘Not yet, anyway.’

All three of them would be much the same age, she thought. Small talk that ought to lead somewhere, only I’m too weary. Or too grand. Or too lazy to work up emotional ties for a year only to have to ingest them all again when I pack up, like a spider eating its own web. Conservation of energy. An elderly disdain; and yet here we are, late twenties, early thirties. Prime time. Or maybe that, too, slotted differently here. Maybe here it was already over. Hugh would have said dourly: ‘Everything always is,’ as part of their conspiracy of nostalgia, of
eheu
fugaces
which was supposed to make sex tender so long as the talisman stood in the corner making a noise like wingèd chariots or grim reapers. Actually (she could now think, safely eight thousand miles away from him) the great drawback to sacred rites was that the more solemn and special they were, the more one’s attention was distracted by the priest’s crumpetlike complexion, by the embarrassing way his eyelids fluttered like those of a school chaplain feigning prayer. Hugh was doubtless another explanation for her being in Manila. A good reason for being cross with herself, if so. I only want the experience, she thought, never mind the details.

But details there were, as remorseless as an endless succession of small dishes which stubbornly refused to amount to a meal. Both her hosts were activists and let fall succulent morsels of this and that, appetisers from a banquet to which Ysabella didn’t quite want an invitation. Crispa was doing research on the ‘comfort women’ used as slaves-cum-prostitutes in World War II, groping about in the black sack of history hoping to pluck out a few reliable names, some grey-haired survivors whom the Japanese Government might be shamed or cajoled into compensating. Sharon was lobbying her senators and
diplomats to force the Philippine Government to provide adequate protection for female overseas workers presently being used as prostitutes-cum-slaves.

Ysabella was unnerved by the details, shamed by the righteousness of the girls’ involvement. She was pained, too, by her own hesitancy. It was as if she had heard a shattering explosion in her childhood whose reverberations ever since were warnings against commitment to just these sorts of detail. Holes in the ground were safe: one could take refuge in them as one poked about the fragments of the buried past. Even newspaper stories lacked menace as wild fables of a land existing a little apart from the one she trod and dug, such was a stranger’s queer immunity. These girls, though, lived in that other territory and gave off its details in a reek of authenticity.

Yet Ysabella had also been touched. She had left the house without feeling a burst of political solidarity with the sisterhood but liking Crispa for Sharon, whose world she now enviously saw went laterally as well as vertically. Abused overseas workers might easily be seen as having their roots in Intramuros, that colonial citadel. Her own world, on the other hand, felt ever more shapeless and hollow. It was surely without coordinates of any kind, as directionless as a view of empty ocean with dazzling chromatic glints being smacked from a coat of sulky oil.

F
ATHER HERRERA’
s reputation was that of a radical without, however, his being accused of open sedition. It was difficult to imagine his fattish figure inserted into the gaunt jungle barrios of Mindanao, swapping Bible for Armalite, becoming a fully-accredited rebel priest with a price on his head and occasional
laissez-p
assers
to Malacañang. Prideaux had been given his name by a contact and offered him a workingman’s lunch somewhere on José Abad Santos, having formed an impression of a busy and unpretentious priest disinclined to waste either time or jeepney fares going too far from his parish for a mere meal.

‘The New Era,’ said the voice on the telephone. ‘The corner of Dumiguig.’

The New Era was, predictably, Chinese and – less predictably – new. It was full of harsh fluorescent glare. In tanks along one wall mournful eels gulped and furious crustacea attacked each other in slow motion. The tables had circular holes cut in them; underneath each a gas cylinder was connected to a ring burner. Prideaux’s knees kept nudging the cylinder. ‘They call this
shabu-shabu,’
said the priest delightedly. ‘Not to be confused with plain
shabu,
of course, which is a drug.’ What with the air conditioning and the bubbling wok between them the priest’s spectacles kept misting over. Every so often he removed and polished them on the T-shirt between his breasts. This had on it a shield which to Prideaux’s eye looked considerably like that of Oxford University, surrounded by comic-strip billows of steam.
Below was the legend: “I graduated Sauna cum Laude”. ‘You’re an anthropologist?’

‘I’m writing this thesis,’ said Prideaux guardedly.

‘About Filipino religion, I think Bernabe said?’

‘I may have given Father Bernabe very slightly the wrong impression.’

‘I imagine one often has to’, said Herrera, crunchily spearing a crab from muzzle to rectum with a chopstick, ‘in order to get the interview one wants.’ He lifted the animal out of the wok, his eyes opaque behind twin grey panes.

‘My thesis is really about the concept of
amok.
Or, perhaps, breaking points.’

‘Guys going apeshit, you mean.’

‘Ah. Women don’t?’

Father Herrera laid down his chopsticks and took a refreshing gulp of beer. ‘What a good point,’ he said. ‘You’re implying that going to pieces is culturally determined?’

‘Yes, of course. Obviously it would be pretty hard to predict the exact moment without knowing the individual, but the
ways
in which a person breaks are practically foreordained by their culture, don’t you think? True
amoks
are rare in Europe, for instance. Or so they say. Anyway, if one wanted to talk about breaking points one would need to know what counted as stressful. I mean, stress in one culture might be a reassuring norm in another, mightn’t it? I notice the people here seem able to tolerate a constant physical proximity which would drive the British crazy.’

‘Maybe because they have to?’

‘Whyever. Cultures change, too. No doubt our own merry swains used to cram together into their sod huts and couldn’t have borne sleeping alone. That was then. So what’s changed? Living standards, I suppose. Codes of inhibition, self control, general attitudes towards one’s lot, stuff like that. Religion, too.’

‘Now I see.’ Herrera had also wiped his spectacles again, it mightn’t have been easy to relay all that over the telephone via old Bernabe.’

‘No. So you shouldn’t feel you’re here under false pretences.’

‘My friend, no lunch is a false pretence. Don’t you think lychees would be nice afterwards? Kumquats? Mangoes? I’m afraid my countrymen are not very religious at all. This may come as a shock.’

‘It would to most travel writers, at any rate.’

‘Oh, that. Well, if you will try to give thumbnail descriptions of a people you’re bound to make a fool of yourself, obviously. Sure, the guidebook version says we’re all deeply and fervently religious, ninety-odd percent Catholic, the only Christian country in Asia. My version is different. My version says my parishioners are about as religious as anyone anywhere living in the shadow of the West. What they are is deeply and fervently superstitious. We’re Asians. China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Thailand… all riddled with spirits and ghosts and necromancers and soothsayers and magicians and geomancers and devils and charms and amulets and potions and curses and witchcraft and.’

‘And, indeed.’

‘And that’s us. Do you know, I think rambutan rather than lychees? They have them sent up from Quezon or Palawan, according to season. This is Asia, this is the East. That’s what people forget. Westerners are too eager to join in our own conspiracy and pretend we’re practically as American as Hawaii, nearly as Spanish as the Azores. What’s that cliché? Three hundred years in a monastery followed by fifty years in Hollywood. But what about ten thousand years in Asia? We simply plundered our own invaders for fresh sources of myth and superstition. That might be an interesting research project for one of you people. He could collect superstitions which probably died out in Catholic Europe a hundred years ago. They’re still here in our provinces, pretty well intact, I should think. To rediscover vanished aspects of Europe you have to come all the way to the Philippines. Nicely ironic. Excellent rambutan.’ The scalp of soft red prickles split between the priest’s thumbnails to reveal the translucent scented brain.

‘And religion?’

‘Are you familiar with the concept of
balimbing
?
That’s what we call the star fruit, which has twelve sides. Only this morning I was hearing about a perfect
balimbing,
the eldest daughter of one of my parishioners. She was born a Catholic in the provinces. She falls in love with this boy, who is Aglipayan, our home-grown Church which broke with the Vatican early this century. So she becomes Aglipayan but then her family moves to Manila where she meets another boy whose people are Seventh Day Adventists. She becomes an Adventist while he
gets engaged to someone else. Poor girl. Off she goes to Olongapo, hangs around the bars until the golden dream comes true. She meets an American sailor. Love as deep as the ocean. Together forever. He even suggests they get married here before he’s posted home to San Diego. So what he’s a Mormon? If he can be, so can she. Eventually she does get to the States. They have children. He beats her up. She files for divorce and falls in love with one of his friends. He’s a Jehovah’s Witness. No problem… You get the idea? That’s a true story. I knew the girl. She was like any other of her age: silly, passionate, faithful, faithless. She lived in a world of
True
Love
Confessions
and screen romance. Perfectly normal. A nice, regular, lost kid.
Balimbing.
The only reason why she’ll never be a Moslem is because she’ll be too old. They like their brides very young.’

‘I thought hard cases made bad law?’

‘She’s exceptional, I grant. But her opportunism isn’t. Very well. If I dare to say, in the face of all expert assertion, that my countrymen are not essentially religious, I suppose I have to say they’re deeply something else. Spiritual? Or maybe hysterical? Mightn’t that have the right quasi-diagnostic ring to it to convince a man of social science like yourself?’

‘I only wanted your opinion, Father,’ said Prideaux. By now they were drinking green tea and from time to time he drifted away into intense little fugues of mental arithmetic, trying to prepare himself for the bill which he suspected was going to be quite a shock. ‘What about crucifixions, then?’

For the first time a look of exasperation appeared on the otherwise equable face. ‘It’s bad enough my having to admit that the Church is losing ground to all these weird American sects without being forced to deal with a tin can mischievously tied to its tail. I often feel some of my Spanish predecessors must have been almost malevolent to allow the Christian message to become so distorted. You mean the Holy Week celebrations in places like Pampanga? The bleeding flagellants? The people dragging home-made crosses to which they are then nailed? I’ve seen it and it’s grotesque. Nothing to do with religion, nothing at all. It’s one of the sadder parts of our Hispanic legacy that we should have inherited their dark, pathological tomfooleries.’

Passion rather became him, Prideaux thought. The greedy urbanity had vanished, making his face thinner in some way, like that of a
runner blown to an edge by his own swiftness. The energy of a combative intellect kicked out of its doze.

‘If I could outlaw it, I would,’ said Herrera. ‘Do you know what having yourself crucified in public really is? Showing off. Pure, self-indulgent vanity.
Machismo.
It’s a test of rival
machismos
to see who lasts the longest with the least sign of suffering. They have great local prestige, you know. They take loud public vows and build up to it for a year in advance. Everyone knows.
Next
year
it’ll
be
him.
Will he go through with it? Will he chicken out? It’s spectacle, a real crowd-puller. Better than television by far. One of the things that gives me hope for my people is that they stubbornly go on making jokes. They sniff out the bogus in things that pass for sacred. A few years ago one of the
penitensiyas
was called Nobo… you have to remember that we pronounce v’s as b’s… and he became known as Nobocaine. It was rumoured he’d injected his hands and feet. Who knows? Perhaps you should go to San Fernando and see for yourself. The atmosphere’s more like a carnival than a religious ceremony. If I get angry about it it’s because I can see it’s a genuine expression of something I’d prefer not to be true about us. It’s all show.’

‘What else?’

Herrera said, as the bill arrived, ‘You’re not religious, I know that,’ although at this very moment Prideaux, reading, inwardly uttered a sacred name. ‘But I ask you, can you imagine Christ approving of such behaviour? He underwent crucifixion because he had to, in order that nobody else might have to. He was an incisive man, even quite merciless on occasion. He would say that volunteering for the same fate in the late Twentieth century was sheer useless indulgence, mere showbiz. He would ask the man if he’d do it in private, without telling anyone, without the crowds of admirers. He’d observe tartly that being crucified was easy – far easier than actually living a Christian life. It’s a short cut to the stigmata, no more than that, and I’m none too happy about those, either. High time the Church came out unequivocally against these theatricals. The whole of humanity’s already locked into the theatre of cruelty. The really hard thing is to learn to be kind. If you’re dead to kindness, to the
poetry
of compassion, then all the Masses and Hail Marys and flagellation in the world won’t save you. It’s empty show. Now,’ he eyed the plastic plate the waiter brought bearing a little change,
‘you’ve
been very kind indeed. Has it been worth it?’

‘Is being. But I suppose you have to get on?’ The priest had eaten with haste and dexterity.

‘We could certainly have some more tea. Any further pots are free. I liked your point about cultures changing. To take it at face value, I understand you’re saying that a hundred, two hundred years ago Europe was the same as here, living in huts, believing in vampires and penance. You’re implying that the essential difference between us is merely that of economic development. The upwardly-mobile peasant evolves into the neatly-suited banker, no longer stressed by swine fever and the weather but by exchange rates and brownouts?’

‘More complicated, though.’

‘Naturally. If it weren’t, you’d be out of
a job… That was a joke.’

Beyond the greenish tinted glass in the door and windows the traffic was inching past as if along a seabed. Periodically it halted. In and out of its currents moved minnowlike youths with shallow rectangular wooden boxes whose compartments held varieties of cigarettes, gum, matches, mentholated candy, a can of lighter fuel. Others dashed about with sheaves of newspapers, calling up to the jeepney passengers, thin arms locked into a muscular crook.

‘You’re surprised that I was vehement about such a minor thing, an annual pageant,’ said Herrera. ‘The point I was trying to make, try to make all the time, is that things like that are a distraction. The real issue is that the people of this country undergo crucifixion daily, nailed flat by poverty, corruption, shameless swindlers and brutal authorities. And still they make jokes. One of our senators recently called us Asia’s Jews, forced to flee pogroms and vileness, going to any lengths to get away, to go abroad. Even becoming part of an exploited diaspora doesn’t deter us. We still go by the thousand knowing we’re going to be screwed, going illegally even if it means running and hiding from police and immigration authorities. Like the Jews we’re condemned for slyness and duplicity, grudgingly praised for our skills and slave-like qualities, disliked for being truly foreign after all despite having names like Maria and Joseph. The Jews were accused of eating Christian babies; we’re despised for eating dogs. But anything’s worth it if only for the chance of making enough money for a proper life, enough money to send home to husbands and wives and children still caught in the trap. Should we stay where we are, be loyal to some imaginary global status quo, when everyone knows the world’s just a
rich man’s free-for-all? But we’ve not yet reached that point when we all cry as one: “Enough! No more!
Never
again!
Next
year
in
Manila!”
Let’s hope it doesn’t take the equivalent of the Holocaust. Maybe your own researches will provide us with a cool little answer to the question. What exactly does it take to make the Filipino people run
amok
?’

‘That’s not –’

‘You were saying to yourself “Aha! A joke priest! A fat glutton who allows himself to be treated to an expensive and over-nourishing lunch while his parishioners eat boiled rice with their fingers.” Of course you were and I don’t condemn it. You’re quite right. I am greedy. I like my food. It’s a fault, undoubtedly. I used to confess it all the time. But my having yielded to your generosity has denied my parishioners nothing. Not only has it given me and my stomach great pleasure but it’s providing me with an opportunity to beg you to remember only one thing. That laugh as we do, farce as it appears, what’s happening in this place is deadly serious. How can you write about
amoks
without knowing how, when and why laughter suddenly stops?’