Ghosts of Manila Read online

  ‘Which would you rather be, a dead Chinese or a living Filipino?’ ran the joke question that was neither question nor joke and expected no answer, lnsofar as there was an answer it lay on the other side of the cemetery wall in the shape of a parody suburb in miniature. Here were well-swept, empty roads with proper pavements and neat plots with patches of lawn, each with its little building. Or house. Or palace, even, for some were cased in polished marble. Behind their padlocked wrought iron gates a sarcophagus rested in what could only be a living room, given the mats and vases of flowers, the brooms tucked neatly behind the staircase in one corner. Stairs because there was often another room above which no doubt (according to those from over the wall) contained a fax machine, a Betamax, a telephone and all the other things essential to dead Chinese businessmen. Votive lights burned in the tombs of the Catholics, otherwise in shrines containing curling photographs, old joss sticks and scraps of red tissue paper. Solidly built and mostly well maintained, these vacant houses with their water and electricity were visited on anniversary and feast days by families who parked their cars in the empty street and bore supplies of food and metal polish through the iron gates.

  Not all these tombs were well looked after, just as many were not palaces. Some – especially those of such flamboyantly weird design as could only have belonged to the sort of lone eccentrics who leave no family – were in sad disrepair. They were cracked, tumbledown, overgrown. One or two were broken into and inhabited briefly by squatters until noticed and ejected by the cemetery’s police detachment. Generally, the grander and newer tombs were those offering services and it was behind one of these that an illegal standpipe had been plumbed into a water main and supplied the people living on that side of San Clemente. The ordinary muser, the stroller in the cemetery (it being one of Manila’s few oases of comparative calm) might wander for hours in this Lilliputian townlet without knowing of San Clemente’s existence, or of its barely distinguishable neighbouring slums separated each from each by a stretch of wall, a muddy lane or a rivulet of effluent. Only, from one or other vantage point grey waves and crests and hollows could be glimpsed as the shanty roofs spread out below in a frozen sea of tin. True, children came up from these barrios to play, but they stayed close to the gaps in the wall, ready to scuttle back at the sign of a patrol by the cemetery police. This detachment was billeted in an infrequently used chapel somewhere in the middle. Their presence was assured by the city’s predominantly Chinese administration, as well as by the privately donated funds of the Chinese community. They were there partly to prevent the ever-rising tide of squatters from lapping over the walls and flooding in (swirling around the classical columns, eroding the very marble!). But they were there also to stop the stealthy bands of grave robbers who might otherwise come by night and dig to their hearts’ content. Never mind gold teeth: there was a brisk market in any old teeth to supply the nation’s thousands of dental students, each of whom had to acquire some for practical exam projects. Many a body lay in a provincial cemetery minus lower jaw or entire skull. Much, too, might be mentioned of more occult purposes.

  San Clemente, then, rose to the flanks of this cemetery from a miasmic dell of sewage to a lesser eminence, sandwiched between the living and the dead (if the mainstream of city life was represented by howling boulevards like José Abad Santos and Aurora Avenue). Upwards of two hundred families were crammed in. Inside this walled village were no streets, only trails scarcely four feet wide which twisted and dipped according to the haphazard siting of the shanties. Here, some casually abandoned planking jutted untrimmed from somebody’s wall, forcing passers-by to dogleg around it. There, certain of the huts with upper storeys (houses, really) had fused together at head height and the path plunged into a slimy tunnel for yards at a stretch. In the dry season these thoroughfares set hard into the lumps and bumps left from winter’s mud, peppered with embedded bottle caps, wicks of plastic and stumps of wood polished by bare feet. Tiny stores opened their shutters onto the paths, their shelves lined with staple goods, a courtesy box of matches dangling on a string for those who bought their cigarettes singly. There were always surprises. Cold drinks and ice were often on sale, arguing a refrigerator. Behind curtained doorways or up stygian staircases more like bent ladders might be veritable parlours with a bamboo settee, a colour TV, an electric fan, as well as that hallmark of the returning overseas remittance man, a suitcase-sized radio cassette player. Such things gave San Clemente an illusory aspect of permanence. One could forget that these homes were often little more than huts cobbled together from scraps, resting on bare earth which at any time might be reclaimed. Indeed, a certain patina of age hung about them and in places it would have been impossible to say for sure how old a group of shanties was. At night, especially, or during brownouts when the little stores glowed yellow with candlelight, San Clemente might have been an impoverished souk of great antiquity.

  Epifania Tugos – or Nanang Pipa, as she was generally known – ran a sewing cooperative from her house about a third of the way up San Clemente’s slope above the creek. This was perhaps a slight exaggeration since the business was really no more than a loose organisation of various families who had the requisite skill and access to a machine. It could never become a real cooperative, a legal entity with the minimum fifteen members and eligibility for bank loans, because it lacked a proper address. In all other respects, though, it was run very much as a business with outlets for its jeans, T-shirts and children’s underwear in Divisoria Market as well as with regular suppliers of material. There were links, too, with Nanang Pipa’s home province, where relatives of many of San Clemente’s inhabitants carried on the rag trade for their local markets. The people in her group had divided up their labour. Those without machines did the cutting or took the cartons of finished clothes down to the market. At almost any time one might meet a great bundle of bright material with a pair of polished brown legs beneath it threading its way adroitly through San Clemente’s mud lanes.

  In the early days of this cottage industry harsh lessons had been learned by those living down near the creek. If one happened to be out at the time of a flash flood one might return to find the house partially demolished or, more likely, the ground floor room full of drowned rats and the sulphurous smell of drains, the walls black with mud up to the ceiling, the Singer sewing machine festooned with slime. The chief things the villagers feared most were floods and fire, followed by ghosts. (Much too far down their list came bulldozers.) Floods were quite bad enough, though, for those forced by lack of land to live within the danger zone. In the months of July to November someone tried to be always on hand, ready at the first sign of flooding to begin carrying everything upstairs or to safety in a house further up the hill. Often the first sign wasn’t mere heavy rain but the sudden appearance of cockroaches in unusual numbers. They, too, were headed upwards, swarming in the roof. In 1989 when Munding’s children were swept off by the Kapilang in spate the villagers remembered seeing two balls of beetles twirling away downstream: the children’s heads alive with cockroaches. (It was either a miracle or an iron grille at the entrance to the underground sewer which had saved them. Or maybe Bats Lapad, who had actually hauled them out.)

  All these matters of low-lying terrain, floods and sewing came together in the issue of the Tugos family’s comfort room. Various crappers like thatched hen coops stood on stilts out over the Kapilang, which meant that in times of rising water worse things than cockroaches could appear in one’s living room. The Tugos crapper was a cupboard built over a trench leading down to the stream, up and down which rats and piglets ran and grew fat. But the time had come, Nanang Pipa said, when enough was enough. She and her workers sitting jammed all over the house at their machines could no longer endure the stench. It was time for Edsel to get off his bum and dig. They would have a deep pit soakaway with a cement bowl, a proper comfort room.

  ‘The money,’ her husband groaned, meaning the effort.

  ‘I work, I pay,’ she r
etorted. ‘You dig. Get together those layabouts you spend your time playing pusoy with. Judge, Billy, Petring. All that lot. Bats, too. It shouldn’t take you long. Bayanihan, of course: they can do it for free in a spirit of neighbourliness. Starting tomorrow. We’ll supply you with merienda and cigarettes.’

  ‘We haven’t any spades.’

  ‘Yes, you have. When Bats left the Department of Public Works and Highways he brought some souvenirs with him. I know about six DPWH shovels, an air compressor and twenty bags of cement because the cement went into our floors, the compressor was lost at cards and Virgie told me only the other day she’s sick of having those dirty spades under the bed.’

  ‘Read all about it,’ muttered Edsel in a bitter allusion to his wife’s unofficial nickname ‘Diyano’, she being a veritable news-sheet of information about San Clemente and its folk.

  ‘Just dig, Eddie. Please. Think how nice it’ll be when it’s finished and we’ve got a decent CR.’

  And eventually the men had mustered, armed with shovels and a crowbar made from an iron fencing post. They primed themselves with strengthening tots from a bottle or San Miguel gin on whose label the Archangel, an effeminate creature in yellow Renaissance hose and slashed pantaloons, brandished his sword above a vampiric black figure with ribbed wings cowering beneath Michael’s scarlet buskins on spikes of flame. Soon they were past the noisome top layer and were throwing up clods of the earth which had once nourished those far-off grasses, the long-dead deer.

  7

  YSABELLA HAD ABANDONED her hotel for a rented apartment on Roxas overlooking the bay. It was not cheap. It also smelt of fuel oil, which was explained by her encountering a member of the Ku Klux Klan wearing over his head a T-shirt with eye holes punched through. He was on hands and knees with a spraygun, its nozzle in the gap between the corridor’s floor and wall where it roared hollowly. Oily mist hung about the passage. The maniac holes swivelled and looked up at her glisteningly as she passed, furtive and triumphant as befitted all who dealt in plague.

  When she had first unpacked she spent a good deal of time faintly homesick, sitting on the bed removing labels from the clothes she had bought in a last-minute shopping spree in London’s West End. This was her habit, the act without which nothing new could be worn. A small heap of names, trademarks, logos and flashes would build up beside her, victims of scissors and razor. In order to wear one’s clothes as if they belonged – a prerequisite for anybody with pretensions to taste – all traces of previous affiliation had to be removed. Ysabella would marvel at people’s indifference to walking around covered in slogans, signatures, bogus armorial devices or a menagerie of little crocodiles, ladybirds, pandas and turtles. ‘Who wants to look as if they’d been dressed by their local airport?’ she wanted to know. ‘More to the point, why should I buy the clothes I want and be obliged to provide these shysters with free advertising?’ She had spent real money on having craftsmen remove the name from the face of her Audemars Piguet watch and make trainers in single plain colours (three black pairs, three brown). Somewhere in Belsize Park in a lock-up garage was her futuristic Japanese sports car from which she herself had removed an embarrassing name and assorted chrome letters and numerals from its rear.

  The result was to give everything she wore or drove an exclusive, one-off aura. When she and Hugh had gone skiing everyone on the slopes immediately noticed her difference without as easily identifying its source. Blonde hair and striking figures were no particular rarity in Klosters; in fact they were common, and looked it. Ysabella stood out for reasons of absence, because of what she didn’t have, wasn’t wearing. Her absurdly expensive carbon fibre Head skis had been resprayed matt white, obliterating all the semiotics of skiing. Her suit was a uniform severe smoke grey. Her knitted hat was tawny, the colour of an old harrow abandoned in the corner of a field. Her exclusiveness was terrific as she sped deftly, clad in her powerful lack, among the anonymous day-glo throng. Their march was stolen. They launched counter-attacks under the ‘for your own good’ flag. ‘Break a leg up there and you’d be only too glad to be wearing something visible to a helicopter.’ ‘No I shouldn’t,’ she retorted. ‘I’d be downright ashamed.’ In a closely zippered pocket she carried a large square of hideous material. ‘What kind of wet goes out dressed for rescue? Always the safety net? A third parachute?’

  But a few weeks of living by herself in Manila in something called an ‘apartelle’ (a word she couldn’t bring herself to say) was producing its own subtle erosions, as if it had begun to unpick the nametape from the identity she treasured. There were the capering children who besieged her whenever she left the block, faces bright with snot and eyes, who she discovered were displaced victims of the Mt. Pinatubo eruption. They lived in boxes and packing cases on a scrap of wasteland behind the building, running out barefoot among the traffic temporarily halted at the lights along thundering Roxas, flitting like little ghosts with outstretched hands through the fog of exhaust fumes, begging from drivers and passengers. A part of her began to unravel slightly, leaving her both anxious and listless. It was as if a small haemorrhage had opened up which she had yet to find and staunch, a desultory tropic bleeding which did something to the will.

  She was an early riser and could find nothing nearby which was open and would serve her breakfast. Dunkin Donuts was out of the question. Instead she brought home a clutch of newspapers and made herself coffee in a kitchen which contained almost nothing except three butter knives with bamboo handles and a jar of black treacle which had been instant coffee until the humidity got to it. She would sit at a table overlooking the scatter of moored ships waiting to unload and read the Philippine English language press with diverted incredulity.

  Day by day she read the papers and drank her coffee. At first the news entwined itself with the faces of friends back in England who, she thought, would particularly enjoy this irony, that outrage, those headlines. After a while, though, the stories just boiled up like a plume of oil from an abyss, spreading out into a uniform and iridescent stain, variable in local details but predictable overall. The incidents all had about them the air of having taken place at night, as if it was only the morning sun falling across the page which finally brought them to light. They covered Ysabella’s news-sheets in a bright slick. A few weeks’ assiduous study made of them something almost ritualistic. Yet if she thought this oily glint might be a society’s recognisable features, its personality and heart remained enigmatic and concealed. Day by day policemen shot it out with each other in public, an event scarcely comprehensible to a British reader who knew that the majority of police weren’t armed, or fake, or moonlighting as security guards, drug traffickers or professional kidnappers. If the papers here were to be believed, hardly a senator or member of Congress seemed not to have some taint or hidden skeleton. Suddenly, everything became interconnected. The same names kept circling like bluebottles around carrion. National heroes were accused of treason, became fugitives, lived openly in Quezon City, vanished, popped up again being invited to Malacañang Palace for talks, discussed running for the Senate next time around. Trusted generals suddenly went AWOL, turned up in Mindanao organising a blue seal cigarette smuggling racket, came back as mayor of somewhere or other, helped fix an election, were found in a supermarket freezer chest minus eyes and genitals buried beneath twenty kilos of frozen pizzas. Men who had fled with the Marcoses, accompanied by their families and as much cash as they could carry, were sniffing around for amnesty or were actually weaseling back into government. Even Imelda herself came and went, trying to buy deals for herself with the money she had stolen.

  It was baffling, too labile to be grasped. The nouns Ysabella had been brought up to take for granted, which with their immutable bricklike nature went to build the administrative edifice that was a country, were here slippery, deformed or infinitely plastic. Everything was thrown into question, yet no question could be properly answered. A word such as ‘corruption’ became puny or nannyish. This was too grandly sham
eless a way of life to be contained – still less threatened – by invocations of morality. Yet what else was there? Here (she shook her paper in the rising sunlight) right here it said that the Air Force at last knew what had happened to one of its aircraft which went missing for six years. (Went missing? How did an entire aeroplane go ‘missing’ without talk of crashes, search parties, bad weather, grieving families and boards of inquiry?) It went missing because the colonel who used to fly it had condemned it as unfit for flying, thereby circumventing IRAN (Inspect – Repair As Necessary). He dismantled it on his own air base and sent the whole thing piece by piece, labelled as ‘spare parts’, to a private hangar inside Manila Domestic Airport where it was reassembled. The colonel then resprayed and used it for two years in his own transport business. (An air force colonel with a private business? Even that seemed not quite right.) After that he sold it to a company in the provinces. He had not yet been arrested because the police were still determining what charges to file.

  Ysabella couldn’t decide if all this was the sign of an extremely backward society which had yet to fix the essential nouns of its being so that everyone understood the same thing by law, honesty, public service, police, elections and so on, or whether it was actually a preview of a sophisticated futuristic state likely to hold sway everywhere sometime soon. At this distance England presented itself as an inert blob of greenish substance, quite cool and weathered like a chunk of onyx or other mineral from which the surrounding rock had been worn away by rain. On closer inspection and in a different light, however, it became very much less sharply defined, fuzzy at the edges like an aspirin dropped in water, hazy and commonplace. She resented that Manila’s effect on her was to blur the fond image she had of her own country. Indeed, never before had going abroad been like this. From afar Manila had seemed exotic, and not with the Hollywood exoticism of Bali (lithe brown folk in native costumes doing highly formalised classical dances on a beach for the massed camcorders of drunken roundeye jet-setters). Manila’s aura had had something of Baudelaire’s corpse-light glowing about it: existentially exotic, morally exotic, its legs raised by the pressure of its own putrefaction ‘comme une femme lubrique’. Yet once here she found herself being ground down by the heat, the filth, the choking traffic, the Jollibees and Pizza Huts and Dunkin Donuts of it all. What national costume there was derived from Nineteenth century Spanish dress. What national cuisine there was merely played with Spanish and Chinese dishes. The handicrafts were not as good as those of Burma or Thailand and besides, who since the death of chinoiserie in Europe wanted creaky furniture made of rattan and bamboo? Or unspeakable Madonnas standing in grottoes made entirely of lacquered seashells? Nothing had prepared her for the sheer unrelieved ugliness of this city, much of which looked like a parody of the grimmer parts of Milwaukee. Yes, that was it: that the faint traces of Europe had been swamped by the worst of Pepsicolonisation.