Ghosts of Manila Read online

  Swabbing down and sweeping up to the sound of jet aircraft and pop songs the Chinese use a lot of water which runs away under the doors. The dogs wait for the lysol-flavoured runnels, fighting over nearly invisible strands of jelly. A skilled profession is winding down. Two of the men, who in evening light look almost elderly, might well retire. The other two – they are all distantly related to each other by blood or pacts – might stay on in business to fill special orders. One never knows where demand might come from. Only last month a trainee Buddhist arrived with the wrapped body of his master whose last wish had been that his bones might be used for his neophytes’ meditation. Plastic might constitute a memento mori but was hardly as talismanic as the very bones of the teacher. Everyone thought this perfectly proper, including the police who saw no reason to interfere with religious wishes. They had taken their cut and gone their way. That had been good work: the two in the body shop had forgotten to cross themselves and had whistled while they worked. Some jobs just felt right.

  2

  WHO COULD remember 199-? Presidential shenanigans, monarchies on the blink. Growing populations of the homeless and workless swirling ever higher as if to swamp the classical columns of the nation states’ capitols, a demotic pollution eating away at the very marble of the seats of government. Wars, famines, fresh prodigies of international terrorism. The usual furniture of world events, in short, being moved about the same old room, while from outside came the rumblings of the familiar volcano or earthquake or disastrous typhoon. All this in that same year plus, of course, a spectacular outbreak of vampirism in a Manila squatter area. That, too, was a recurrent story, certainly no more mythic than wheat futures.

  It was the year in which John Prideaux submitted an unconventional text as his dissertation, having concluded there was no other way of writing it. If it posed as a fictional account it would at least have an edge of readability over the more familiar slabs of word-processorese which passed as anthropology. After all, fact, like justice, was negotiable. People sometimes said that a weakness of much modern fiction was that it tried too hard to be documentary rather than ‘imaginative’; that it aspired to be journalism decked out with a few subjective ruffs and bows. Prideaux maintained that much journalism was vitiated by a pretence of objectivity. The average TV documentary, for example, had come to feel like pure fiction. Its language and conventions and formulae were all stock, by now so familiar that it dropped unremarked down the general well of entertainment, at par with the news and re-runs of The Flintstones. Famine victims tottered and wept just as predictably as prime ministers emerged from shiny limousines smirking or careworn. C’était leur métier. (His views on the subject of newzak were all too familiar to members of the university’s Faculty of Media Studies.)

  He knew that an unconventional thesis ought as far as possible to be dressed up to resemble the regular article. Yet he soon found even this minimal disguise hard to achieve. It was usual at the outset to state the subject, after which the preferred method was to append the standard authorities and explain how one had managed to uncover, by sheer cleverness and originality, a loophole in their research or a weak point in the argument that fatally dated their work. Prideaux’s problem was that, faced with the eventual pile of his own typescript, he no longer knew what the subject was. It was therefore impossible to follow with the customary abstract: the pithy couple of sentences in bold print which summarised the whole thing. ‘Displaced Oklahoma dirt farmers enter the non-lucrative mid-1930s California citrus industry’, he had once seen somebody précis The Grapes of Wrath. How could even the laziest academic think this was a useful exercise? Proper fieldwork could hardly be boiled down without gross distortion or banality any more than literature could.

  He had also to confront the issue of his own middle-age, since he discovered it had a bearing on such matters Maybe the typical anthropology student in their early twenties might have picked the sort of subject that could easily be summarised, which lacked resonance. But a mature student in his forties looked at a different world through different eyes. Who with daughters and sons of their own at university would think ‘Kinship Systems Among the Nambikwara’ a nice, neutral little topic when the very word family had become synonymous with private anxiety, bafflement and guilt? The years went by and interests become more compromised and intricate even as tastes grew simpler. That went for theses, too. Such considerations were ignored by the academic establishment, whose judgements and expectations were based on the energetic callowness of comparative babies.

  Initially, while still casting about for a suitable subject, Prideaux had been tempted by the wholly fictitious, as anyone would be who had once admired Carlos Castaneda. He had toyed with many titles, half prepared to reasearch and write a thesis to match any which took his fancy. ‘The Tribe That Dare Not Speak Its Name’ had had real possibilities and would have been a great pleasure to write. Only the difficulty of trying to invent a plausible location for this intensely superstitious and shy people had finally dissuaded him. Given the fictive nature of even the most scientific undertaking (its inventiveness, its arbitrariness as a human endeavour carried out according to human rules), he saw how the driest doctoral essay could become a roman à thèse. He had not considered this when he began his research and had given little thought to how his choice of topic was bound to be related to private preoccupations and public anxieties: the high whistling noise and cracking sounds as chips flew off interior façades. Was he not like the worried scientist in a disaster movie, taking an evening stroll along the top of the dam and suddenly noticing that the white lines in the middle of the road no longer quite match up? Eventually, though, his chosen area had seemed to settle itself; at the time he never wondered why. The very idea of a ‘national character’ was too nebulous and reductive for serious scholarship, but one might legitimately sidle up to it by calling the subject Transcultural Psychopathology. After all, every culture had its own peculiar vulnerabilities, no less than each individual, and these might be quite revealing. Accordingly he had reviewed the literature, beginning with the mediaeval dancing manias and children’s crusades, through the epidemic religious hysterias such as the ‘Jumpers’ and ‘Barkers’ in the Eastern US to the nuns in a German convent who believed themselves possessed by, or changed into, cats. He knew, too, of more specific and exotic disorders. There was pibloktoq in which Eskimos – mainly women – lapsed into a fit of crying and speaking in tongues before sprinting away naked across the ice. There was latah in Malaysia which also usually afflicted middle-aged women, a trance state featuring zombielike obedience which could be precipitated by the sound of a bicycle bell or the mere mention of a name. And there was Windigo psychosis among the Cree and Ojibwa Indians, when the sufferer became nauseated by ordinary food and could only be satisfied by cannibalism.

  Lastly, there was amok. John Prideaux had read his van Loon, his van Wulfften-Palthe, Yap, Caudill & Lin, Hirst & Woolley and much else. To these authorities amok was a standardised, culturally-acceptable form of emotional release, a disorder which, though temporary, often involved indiscriminate slaughter and for that reason equally often proved terminal to the patient. But such descriptions left him feeling they had stopped short. Had their authors been uneasier, less pedestrian, might they not have perceived an emblematic dimension to amok? The classic summary of its three stages (a period of brooding followed by homicidal frenzy and ending in exhausted amnesia) could equally well define extended periods of military service and combat duty, for instance. Come to that, it could apply to whole lives lived under any kind of unremitting stress. Was it too fanciful to imagine an entire society composed of individuals who, without knowing it, acted out from cradle to grave the symptoms of a chronic amok attack, slowed down by a factor of thousands? (If any of his examiners could say an unhesitating Yes at this point, Prideaux recklessly felt, they should stop reading at once and turn with relief to a more regular script.)

  Finally, he knew that anthropology theses should be t
ricked out to look and sound ‘objective’ in a way that aspired to the scientific. It was even rather touching. Such a thing might just be feasible in a laboratory experiment involving transgenic mice, but despite the best intentions fieldwork was still conducted by people, and people were culturally-dependent constructs. To deal with people was to deal with fiction. Thus he figured in his own narrative as ‘Prideaux’, who by telling his own tale came in the end to sound disconcertingly like a character. Wishing (before he disappeared entirely) to observe what remaining norms he could, he thought it only proper to acknowledge his dramatis personae, all of whom he had interviewed extensively, thanking them sincerely for their often extreme patience and help. In alphabetical order they were:

  Vic Agusan

  Ysabella Bastiaan

  Fr. Policarpio Bernabe

  Insp. Gregorio Dingca, WPDC, City of Manila

  Crispa Gapat

  Fr. Nicomedes Herrera

  ‘Capt. Melchior’

  Sharon Polick

  Epifania Tugos

  Sen. Benigno Vicente

  It was Ysabella Bastiaan who stepped into his thesis the instant she exited the portals of Ninoy Aquino International Airport, Manila. Jet-lagged and wilting in the early morning heat within yards of leaving the air-conditioned concourse, she allowed herself to be taken over by white shirts and brown arms pulling her towards one taxi or another. We note that a curious passivity can overtake people after a long flight similar to that of patients newly arrived in hospital. There is the same desire to press foolish sums into the nearest hand in the hopes of soon being left alone in a cool dark room. According to her later description Ysabella found herself in a luxury cab padded in white Naugahyde whose windscreen was partly obscured by a portrait of Jesus hanging from the rear-view mirror with a sign reading ‘Bless Our Trip O Lord We Pray’ and the following verselet:

  Grant me, oh Lord

  A Steady hand and

  A Watchful eye

  That no-one shall be hurt

  As I pass by.

  Somewhere in the general ruckus beyond the tinted windows she caught sight of a newspaper vendor. The banner headline of a popular daily read (had she been able to understand it) ‘Binondo Vampire Strikes Again! 3 Sucked Dry!’ Without knowing it she had just entered the past. Or maybe the future. The present definitely eluded her as the taxi dragged through the badlands of Pasay before beginning the long haul down Roxas Boulevard, Manila Bay on her left and the irregular line of seafront properties to her right: nightclubs burnt out in gang wars interspersed with high rise apartment blocks and condos.

  She reached Imelda Marcos’s showpiece, the Philippine Cultural Center, and was swung eastwards into the tourist belt of Ermita, here coming to a near halt. The traffic was backed up like sewage. No lights were working. At occasional crossroads a man in khaki uniform was blowing a whistle and thrashing his arms.

  ‘Brownout,’ said her driver laconically. And indeed Ysabella had been wondering at all the little generators on the pavements adding their clatter and monoxides to that of the stalled traffic. Behind these was a series of clubs and bars, some with slats of wood nailed crosswise over their doors and painted with the slogan ‘Closed By Order of Mayor Lim’. The others pulsed a dismal thudding of disco music into the generators’ roar. Now and then a door opened briefly. Against the interior’s perpetual night-time gleamed pale limbs and teeth and pallid dresses designed to shimmer electrically in ultraviolet lighting. At eleven-thirty in the morning? she wondered. She had entered that febrile state when things could be noticed but not taken in, leaving at their back a vague disquiet as of something fatally wrongheaded, of an intolerable future being presaged when the remainder of the planet would also be locked into slow-motion anarchy and din and the disruption of appropriate appetites.

  Her hotel came into view trailing a thick diesel plume from its own generators, a blocky white cruise liner bound for nowhere. By the time she checked in, the glacial aircon calm of the hotel lobby was no antidote to her forebodings. Peace and private space were expensive commodities in rationed supply. The polished marble and uniformed bellhops gave off something precarious which mixed uneasily with the vanilla ghost of hot waffles seeping from an invisible coffee room. The corners of her eyes constantly picked up a tremble in the lights, the flicker of emergency power supply. Cycles per second. The concealed fluorescent tubes in the Hitachi lift buzzed faintly. Her curtained room felt rubberised in its insulation. Floor, walls and ceiling gave back not the slightest echo. Dead space for the dead tired. The bellhop turned the air-conditioner on and left her standing in an icy blast of mildew, yeasts and fungi. By parting the curtains Ysabella could see derelict rooftops and a traffic-locked street which the tinted glass turned wan mauve. From an inch away the pane transmitted the midmorning heat of outside. The airline passenger’s world.

  3

  NOT MANY MILES to the south, beyond the outskirts of Manila at a place called Muntinlupa, was the National Penitentiary. Every morning police Inspector Gregorio (‘Rio’) Dingca practically passed its doors as he drove his unregistered stainless steel jeep into the city from his home in San Pedro, Laguna. From this prodigious jail, as well as from the various penal colonies scattered throughout the archipelago, some 2,715 prisoners had escaped in the previous five years, leading a senator to describe the prison system recently as ‘Porous. Of a porosity impossible without the active connivance of the highest officials.’ Inspector Dingca seldom wondered, when he passed the compound travelling in the other direction at night, how many were still there who had been inside that morning. Sooner or later he would probably find out.

  After seventeen years on the force Dingca rated himself as peaceable. If he was in favour of ‘salvaging’ constant offenders who were a menace to society, and drove with his Llama copy of the 1911 Model Colt .45 automatic holstered and cocked on the transmission console next to him, he was no different from most of his colleagues. ‘Don’t make waves and be prepared’ was the advice he gave to rookies. This unexceptional precept was too banal and grandmotherly to impress the new kids, who were mostly conscious only that they presented a gleaming target as they took their freshly-bought uniform out on patrol. Either that or they were eager to latch as soon as possible onto the various scams which could bump their wages up from the beggarly to within striking distance of the poverty line. They had, after all, paid for that new uniform out of their own pocket. Indeed, they had had to buy everything they stood up in from shoes to hat; everything except their badge and gun, and most replaced the gun as soon as they could afford to. This was a Squires Bingham .38 of local manufacture, generally rated as life-threatening to all except the person being fired at.

  Some of the scams were dead simple. With a bit of help you could set up a tong collection point and take thirty pesos off every jeepney driver who passed, all day, every day. Do that for a month or two and you were talking big money, which was why the help would need to be quite senior. It was also advisable to bring in as many people for questioning as you could, irrespective of whether they were genuine suspects. From each one could mulct some matrikula or ‘tuition fee’. It had a certain elegance to it, getting people to pay for their own wrongful arrest. But best of all were the grander deals which needed connections and seniority to bring off successfully. Of these, one of the most popular was hiring out prisoners for the day from Muntinlupa Penitentiary and other jails. There was elegance in this, too. The rich always needed crimes committing: a bank transfer stolen, a rival permanently removed, a grievance settled, a nightclub burnt down. Who better to use than a professional already behind bars for armed robbery or murder? The perfect alibi. Seen in this light, places like Muntinlupa were simply overcrowded talent pools waiting to be tapped.

  One way to work it was to bribe the warden to allow your prisoner of choice out under armed escort for a checkup in a private clinic or hospital. At a pre-arranged moment he would disappear into medical regions, leaving his guards to some uneventful hou
rs in a waiting room doing crosswords and flirting with nurses. Meanwhile the prisoner was speeding along the highway being briefed on his mission. A typical job would be like the one some weeks ago when a businessman was assassinated with an Armalite in broad daylight in Luneta within sight of strollers and their children as well as a scattering (mot juste) of tourists. By merienda time the killer was back in his cell in Muntinlupa, alibi intact, having struck a deal whereby he would be allowed to escape within the month at no risk of being shot. Guaranteed.

  If Insp. Dingca was not outraged by such things it was because there was nothing to be done about them without changing the entire system, top to bottom. As that would include himself, and as the system sometimes worked in the police’s favour, he thought this unlikely and probably undesirable. Status quo. And yet he had to admit the status quo ante had once been a lot better. For the first two or three years back in the Seventies Ferdinand Marcos’s Martial Law had brought some discipline at last. A few significant heads had rolled. Rackets were regularised, if not actually cleaned up. Guns had been harder to come by. ‘Shabu’ (or ‘crack’ or whatever they called it in the States) had not yet been invented. Like many other cops, journalists and savants of recent history the Inspector was sure he could date the moment when things had started to go wrong, when the welcome orderliness of Martial Law began to slump irreversibly into total corruption. This had been on November 7th 1975 when Imelda Marcos became Governor of Manila, a few months before she appointed herself to her own newly-created post of Minister for Human Settlements. Poor old Marcos. It was often the way with these men of vision, Dingca thought. They never noticed until too late what was going on right under their own noses, the slow taking-over of the reins of power by some cunning bitch. By the time he had woken up to what was happening the wretched man was too ill to do anything about it, disinclined to stray too far from all that emergency medical hardware in Malacañang Palace.