Ghosts of Manila Read online

  God, this traffic was awful… For the last two years Dingca had been assigned to the Northern Capital Command under a police reshuffle, which was less than convenient for somebody living way to the south in San Pedro, Laguna. But he’d finally paid off the mortgage and was damned if he was going to up sticks and move now. Seventeen years ago the pressure on land hadn’t been so acute and his lot in new Ylang-ylang Village had been generous. Nowadays he couldn’t hope to afford anything as good elsewhere, not with his own mature mango tree in the yard, to say nothing of the kids’ schools and the Bowl-o-Rama lanes one block over. No, he would stay put if the commuting killed him. Besides, it would be just his luck to move north of the river and find himself posted south within a couple of months. Ahead, the Superhighway traffic crawled beneath a rug of fumes which yet allowed the early sun to splash dazzlingly off windscreens and polished aluminium. A jeepney driver in front of him revved his engine and sent a sooty blare of frustration billowing from twin tailpipes, momentarily engulfing Dingca’s open-sided jeep. The Inspector cursed and punched the squawk box on the roof. A siren under the hood wailed briefly and died with throaty menace. But what the hell was this? Woo-woo-woo… The bastard was razzing him back! Anarchy, right? Anyone with five hundred pesos could go into a shop and buy one of those little Taiwanese gadgets. They had a selector knob and gave a choice of twenty – check it out – twenty different wahs and wails: ambulance, police, bing-bongs, screamers, bells, whistles, you name it. Real cops were reduced to simmering in silence in traffic jams, a cocked automatic pistol by the gearshift and the day’s first sweat beginning to pool around the coccyx.

  There was some scheme afoot to lessen the rush hour by making government employees clock in at seven a.m. and go home at four, while private companies couldn’t open before nine. In Dingca’s opinion this was simply going to prolong the nightmare instead of diluting it. Out of office hours and outside Metro Manila the expressway turned into a racetrack with buses and jeepneys cutting each other up in clouds of smoke, chunks of rubber flying off their retreads. Vehicles going in unexpected directions, too, when one thought of that tanker a while ago laden with x gallons of coconut oil which had driven all the way up from Batangas or somewhere with a stopcock open leaving a seventy-mile oil slick behind it. That had been a caper. Over sixty accidents but by some miracle only two dead. Comedy, really. Sometimes you’d think this was Africa.

  Half an hour later Insp. Dingca had just crossed the Pasig River which muddily bisected the city more or less east-to-west. He wished he could call the station on his radio, tell them he’d be late, make someone jump, just order up a cup of coffee. It had taken him a long time to pry loose the money for the radio – a natty Japanese hip-pocket affair with a stubby black antenna. Loose, that is, from the usual press of school fees, phone bills, water charges and just plain living, since it was his personal property. It crackled to an invisible world of commands and messages and curt witticisms, as well as long rambling calls about girls between parvenu executives. Still, having access to that world made him feel like a proper cop. Unlike in the American serials, though, the whole thing fell apart since the station had no funds to buy its own radio and nobody there could receive him. Most police work was done by phone. How – thought the Inspector as he turned into the station compound at last – was one expected to fight crime without the most basic equipment? Even the vehicles the cops used were mostly their own private cars, with no allowance for wear-and-tear or maintenance, just some coupons for a measly ration of fuel. What were 300 litres a month? Nothing, not in this traffic. In the middle of the compound was the station’s only official vehicle, an aged Tamaraw, with one wheel off. In the back were three blue oil drums which he recognised. He braked by it.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘Bearing, Lieutenant.’ The Tamaraw driver habitually used his old rank. His various assistants looked up from where they crouched, hands black with grease. ‘Overloaded, probably.’ This was said without a smile but Dingca knew his sergeant. ‘Deadweight.’

  ‘Better get a tarp over them. The sun.’

  ‘Right.’

  Dingca swung away and parked by the weapons range. He thrust the holstered pistol into his waistband, pulled his shirt down over it and trotted up the steps into the station, suddenly a tall and agile man and not another beer paunch with private wheels. On the splintered desk a candle guttered. The overhead fans were still. A couple of twilight figures were slumped in the holding pen.

  ‘How long has Cruz been working on that Tamaraw?’

  ‘Since night shift. Before I came on.’ The fat desk sergeant wore a pair of tortoiseshell framed spectacles. ‘He had to go up to Kalookan to get a new bearing. Asks to remind you to indent for it and go and pay them by lunch.’ He produced an invoice.

  ‘I’m afraid his passengers will be experiencing a slight delay.’

  ‘No complaints yet,’ said the desk sergeant, whose greying hair and horn rims gave him a benign, even wise, air.

  ‘You can’t say they weren’t warned,’ said Dingca. ‘We told them often enough we’d give them a free ride to Malabon. Generous. They just weren’t allowed to quibble about when.’

  ‘There you are,’ the sergeant agreed.

  ‘So what’s on?’

  ‘Rumoured snap CapCom inspection, but they aren’t going to do it while there’s a brownout and the beer’s warm. Couple of drunks in the tank. One of them’s a Rugby-head, too. Doesn’t look good. Keeps puking.’

  ‘Cut him loose before he dies on us, Jun. Glue and rum? Get him out.’

  ‘He couldn’t walk out of here for a pension.’

  ‘Jhon-Jhon in yet? Get him to take the fellow home, if he’s got a home. Goodwill gesture. Support your local police. We’re service-oriented, not mission-oriented… What have I left out?’

  ‘Sniff only the best glue. Avoid inferior brands.’

  ‘Right. That it?’

  It was mid-morning before the battered Tamaraw, wheel restored, was ready to leave. An ochre tarpaulin covered the three blue drums in the back.

  ‘I don’t want to know, Cruz, but not that Chinese pie factory this time. One of your passengers is intsik, isn’t he?

  ‘Sure, Lieutenant. They’re going for a vacation by the sea. Miami Beach.’

  4

  UP AMONG the trestle tables heaped with shards and bones the two women had slipped into competitive mode. The Californian was slightly older and of much greater professional experience, while Ysabella was just Ysabella in a deplorably oblique, British sort of way – slightly grand, it had to be said. On grounds of looks it would be a truce. Ysabella thought Sharon resembled a toothpaste advertisement, actually; a little too aggressively healthy, especially for Manila. Overjogged was the word that came to her. Overjogged yet voluptuous. That wasn’t right.

  For her part Sharon had taken several days to identify the train of thought set in motion on first meeting her new assistant. Then she had remembered a noisy scandal involving a peer’s daughter which was much in the yellow press headlines some years ago during her spell in the British Museum. She could still recall an evocative phrase from the tabloids: ‘Raven-haired temptress “strict at bathtime”.’ Evocative of what, though? It was puzzling to the point of being faintly sinister, as if the British way of washing was subject to rigid codes of behaviour and baths were in any case rationed. For much of her time in London Sharon had thought there were a good few cultural subtexts she was missing, and this was more or less exactly what she now felt about Ysabella. She wondered if it were mutual. Ysabella was holding up a skull so deformed by binding it was practically boxlike.

  ‘Unfortunate though this poor creature’s life probably was, he or she at least had the great advantage of never having to travel by air.’

  ‘You’d prefer to have walked to Manila?’

  ‘I’d like to have come by sea. But given that one’s virtually forced to fly everywhere nowadays, tell me why anything which aims for a mass market – be it air
travel or fast food or advertising – always infantilises the consumer.’

  ‘It does?’

  ‘You can’t not have noticed, surely. Airline travel, like having babies, does something terrible to the intelligence. They both entail a public discourse of mindless twitter. Imagine – grown women and men, often extremely distinguished, paying large sums of money to sit meekly for hours under a bombardment of nannyish announcements. Complete rubbish in a mixture of gentilityspeak and Dr Johnson. Talk about quaint, always presuming the airlines want their messages understood by a polyglot audience. What do we get?’ Ysabella asked her skull. ‘Lavatories are never at the back. Toilets are, instead, located at the rear of the passenger compartment and even sometimes aft. Passengers are never asked, they are requested. Cigarettes are never put out, only extinguished. Nobody ever says “Please don’t smoke” in plain English. They say “You are requested to refrain from smoking”. On my flight we were “kindly requested to refrain from opening the overhead compartments without undue caution”. Without undue caution? Illiterate drivel. And as for that horrid little litany they tack onto everything, “For your own comfort and convenience”, as if three hundred adults hadn’t yet discovered what made them comfortable… Tell me that’s not infantile. I rest my case.’ Ysabella turned the skull around so its empty-eyed gaze faced Sharon.

  ‘I guess your jury’s been out a long time on that one, Counsellor. Since maybe the Twelfth century. But I could see they were impressed by the way they kept nodding.’

  Ysabella withdrew her finger from the hole in the base of the misshapen skull. ‘Where was it you said this was from?’

  ‘Iloilo. Down in the Visayas. Received wisdom says it was done for beauty but since there are no written records nobody can possibly know. That’s the joy of received wisdom. How about this one?’ which had been bound so as to accentuate the cranium’s rearward occipital bulge, collapsing the forehead until it sloped backwards into a cylindrical extrusion like the end of a vegetable marrow. ‘Skull moulding.’ She handed it to Ysabella.

  ‘No odder than body sculpture, really. You know, pumping iron. In fact, it probably did less damage to the intelligence than lifting weights does.’

  ‘Chinese foot binding was extremely painful. Practised only on females, of course.’

  Ysabella looked about her at the cavernous room. ‘A lot of stuff.’ They were in the Philippine Heritage Museum, which was housed in a vast capitolesque pile sometimes remembered as the Old Congress Building. The Museum straggled over two floors sandwiched between the Department of the Ombudsman downstairs and the Senate up. She had already been introduced to a grandee in the Senate lounge; had taken in the cerise carpet, the flames beneath the silver tureens on the buffet table at one end of the room, the grey hopsack sofas and settees around the walls. The people who counted wore filmy white barong Tagalog shirts. Now and then they were besieged by a Press contingent dressed for action: denim flak jackets, ponytails, holstered power-packs. That comfortable, oddly informal atmosphere which sizzled with power reigned a mere dozen feet overhead. The Department of Archaeology, by contrast, was gimcrack and dusty. In the hollow square of corridors beyond its door roamed crocodiles of schoolchildren, giggling and staring blankly at the display cases past which they were shooed by harassed teachers. In the room where Ysabella worked uncatalogued artefacts were piled on splintery tables and plywood desks were squeezed between them where impoverished scholars sat with borrowed dictaphones. Now and then some fairly ordinary mass-produced Ming tradeware vanished and the Department could at last buy itself a secondhand office copier or desktop computer. The scholars deeply resented the nation’s heritage having to be sold off in order that the Philippine Heritage’s collection might be properly catalogued, studied and protected, but times were hard all over.

  ‘Infantilism seems to be the flavour of the month in your current demonology?’ Sharon observed.

  ‘I learned last night that according to Mormon teaching, after his second coming Jesus Christ will designate Independence, Missouri as the New Jerusalem. Did you know that?’

  ‘Probably. It’s the sort of thing one tends to forget, not living in Missouri.’

  ‘That’s why I wanted to tell you while I still remembered. Why there, I wonder? Maybe Joseph Smith owned real estate in town. How did he manage to second-guess the divinity’s geographical preferences? Or why should he, of all people, be told in advance? These are deep waters. Infantilism? I don’t know why it’s suddenly got to me. A foreign city, perhaps.’ Or the dark pall coming up from behind to settle around the shoulders, that gown of strangerhood from whose folds the view even of one’s own culture falls apart into oddity. ‘I’m noticing fast food chains, each with its cartoon grotesque outside – Ronald McDonald, Mr Jollibee and so on – and inside, too-strong lighting and bolted-down playschool furniture in horrid colours. The food’s designed for children, too, because you’re not expected to be able to manage anything grownup like cutlery or proper napkins. Polystyrene boxes full of buns and slime. Nursery eating. I can’t imagine how such places ever caught on. I mean, the food’s not even particularly cheap.’

  ‘Staple diet of the urban poor.’

  ‘Well, leave aside that with a bit of effort they could make themselves proper meals at half the price, why does it all have to be so babyish? Ah, bones. They’re what it all comes down to.’ She hefted a femur. ‘Half lives. Atomic decay. Thermoluminescence. What’s Ronald McDonald? Plaster and chicken wire; I don’t know.’ All this was watched in silence by several departmental drones as well as by the eminent author of a monograph which had stood on its head the original conclusions – or received wisdom – of the Sta. Ana burial site. Baffled, amused or disgusted as they may have been, they mainly appeared respectful. Sharon found it irritating: too patient, too indulgent by far of this peculiar and opinionated Briton.

  ‘The Director will be back next week,’ she told Ysabella. ‘Then you can be properly assigned.’ She had long since decided that her eccentric visitor was not really an archaeologist at all, not if one thought it a matter of temperament as much as of the intellect. Her own leanings had developed into an obsession with historic Manila, the last thousand years, a period which could be further narrowed by starting at Magellan’s arrival in 1521 and ending with the razing of the city’s centre in 1945 when American troops finally crushed the Japanese. Much of her own fieldwork had been done a bare half mile away in Intramuros, the old Spanish citadel. In the 1970s one of Manila’s worse slums had been bulldozed and there, practically in the shadow of San Agostin church, Sharon had dug down beneath the broken rum bottles and flattened pork-and-beans cans of squatterdom, past Japanese helmets and rusting bayonets, back to coins of Philip II whose name a nation had inherited. She had recognised that these holes of hers dug within the dark grey sloping walls had become a private earthworks thrown up against sundry ghosts and vampires which stalked the caverns of the Philippine Heritage Museum: chiefly, the ghost of General Yamashita and the vampires of pot-hunting. At the most she would only ever find curios: a fragment of machine gun belt, a dented powder flask, a doubloon or two, pieces of messware. These things were safe, of little monetary value. From them she could reconstruct the ebb and flow of the citadel’s boundaries which did not always match the plans contained in vellum-bound archives in Madrid. That palimpsest of site over site, shifting and blurring (did the charred staves of narra wood at 4m 85cm corroborate the magazine fire recorded in 1688?), the vertically of her personal world, partially safeguarded her against the horizonless present. This was the cliché of scholarship, naturally. But most archaeologists had not to contend with museum authorities selling off items from its own collection to the tourist industry, nor with the hysteria of treasure hunting which surrounded any discovery or dig. At the merest hint of Japanese capital behind a construction site, island or beach resort anywhere in the provinces, the story would spread that somebody had inside information about the vast treasure looted by General Yamashita
and hidden somewhere in the archipelago as he fled in 1945, hoping to retrieve it at leisure. Or a scuba diver had only to find a barnacle-encrusted dish or cannon to trigger a well-equipped assault on the site by rival gangs of looters. Conflicting claims were sometimes settled at sea or on beaches by night with brisk firefights of automatic weaponry. Far in the rear, the agents of the state came puffing along in leaky boats with rented gear, waving Ferdinand Marcos’s 1974 Presidential Decree no. 374 which specifically included underwater sites in the Cultural Properties Protection and Preservation Act (1966). By the time they arrived the vampires had like as not torn the place apart and irrevocably scrambled yet another fragment of the past. Laws these people had coming out of their ears; implementation was something else.

  ‘Properly assigned,’ Ysabella was saying. ‘Improperly assigned. What is it he’s doing, exactly, this Director of yours?’

  ‘Liwag? He’s down in Panay, at Tugtugo. That’s the galleon I was telling you about? In eighty feet of water? He said he’d be back mid-next week. Assuming there’s no bagyo.’

  ‘Bagyo?’

  ‘Sorry, typhoon. One of the acts of God which rule life in these parts. A bad typhoon and the country falls apart for a few days into seven thousand storm-lashed islands, each fighting it out with the hatches battened down. No flights, no boats, often no radio. But it’s the wrong season. He’s probably haggling with the Aussies.’