Playing with Water (13 page)

Sising produces a handful of dry tinder which looks like (and probably is) kapok and within two minutes has a small flame dancing on the earth floor of my cooking area. He smiles up at me. His look is neither triumphant nor smug but merely suggests, ‘There, that’s how it’s done.’ Politely refusing a cup of coffee he gathers his tinder and sticks into the plastic bag, accepts a banana and goes. I hear his whistling descend the hill, become swallowed up in the rising chorus of birds in the waking groves, dissolve into the distant bleating of his own nanny-goat and his own children’s cries.

I discover later that retaining this skill is not by any means purely a generational thing: plenty of youngsters in the woods of this province can still make fire. Once more I am reminded of the irrelevance of the distant capital, of the complete independence of people who can survive typhoons, the rise and fall of governments, all sorts of disruptions and calamities and go on living in circumstances which for many would not be noticeably worse than usual. In Western countries with their dangerously
centralised economies where the standards of living even in rural areas are little different from those of the cities, each citizen is indissolubly a part of the body politic. If the system ever collapsed beyond a quick retrieval people would begin dying. At the very least it would once again become a commonplace – as it must have been in England until the nineteenth century and as it is here in Kansulay any day of the year – to see people go to each other’s houses to borrow fire, to meet a woman hurrying past with a single stick whose end is a glowing ember, trailing a wavering line of smoke.

My admiration for these survival skills, this independence, is considerable. But I know also that it is sentimental yet again to represent it as being born of anything other than necessity. It is a virtue for that reason alone and for none other. Likewise it is not thrift which sends Sising’s child to the village shop at evening to buy a quarter-
lapad
of cooking oil or a few spoonfuls of soy sauce in a knotted plastic bag; half a kilo of rice in an old biscuit tin; a single small onion or one cigarette.

If the gap between the lives of Sising and Bini and their landlords the Sorianos is vast, that between theirs and my own is unimaginable. Time and again, despite friendship, despite the intimacies of five years, I am brought face to face with it. That I have chosen to live so much in their world ought to make them deeply suspicious or at least to resent bitterly the ease with which I can buy their children Band-Aids.

As I contemplate this unpalatable fact I remember occasions when circumstances – an injury, a week’s torrential rain, sickness – have magnified the ordinary hardships of living to the point where they seemed overwhelming for a day or two. The last time it happened I had sprained my ankle so badly I could not go up and down the hill. Sising lugged my water for me, the children brought me vegetables and guavas, Bini came with plates of dabs and leaf compresses. Once I imagined I caught the vestige of a look on her face which brought to mind a passage in Michael Herr’s
Dispatches
where he deals with the incomprehension of the GIs in Vietnam when they learn that he and other
correspondents are over there to cover the war voluntarily, that they are running the same dangers and living in the same conditions but that they could be on a plane home that very afternoon if they chose. Sometimes Herr intercepted a look from a wounded soldier or from a man who had just lost a friend, ‘the look that made you look away, and in its hateful way it was the purest single thing I’d ever known …’

It was probably the first time that precise phenomenon had been so accurately recorded. Correspondents in previous wars no doubt felt occasional guilt at making a living from others’ deaths, as any journalist might at the scene of a disaster. But that was before electronic newsgathering and satellite links, before the whole world became a voyeur, before any image viewed on a television screen had attained the same inconsequential level of fiction. Just as air travel changed for ever the world which was flown to, so electronic newsgathering has changed for ever the world which is reported. Coming from the world of the voyeur it is no longer possible to take a step backwards and become a mere observer again. The rôle of the describing writer is different now despite all he might like to believe. It was still possible for Christopher Isherwood to play at being a camera amid Weimar decadence just as it was for Graham Greene to lie in hospital with a novelist’s chip of ice in his heart recording the behaviour of parents
around the bed of their dying child. But now we are video-cameras: our subjects know what it is like to be part of the audience, the actors are themselves viewers. They understand what happens to the pictures swallowed up by the lens, they perceive a world in its armchairs whose insatiable need for images has put forth tentacles in the form of cameras and cameramen, journalists with their tape recorders, writers with their deadlines. Above all they know that briefly to be the centre of someone else’s attention, even the world’s, does not necessarily presuppose either interest or concern but finally has more to do with good programming, selling products, entertaining.

So it is fine to note how people sing, their cheerful resourcefulness. It is all very well to remark on their dignity in the face of suffering. It is inspiring to watch them (on television) sitting down like Manileños in 1986 in the path of tanks and APCs, just as it is to observe (in actuality) their delicious improvisings in the face of disaster. But a disaster it remains, the life of the people of Kansulay and Sabay and all those like them the world over. That it is a slow, unclimactic disaster goes on being true independently of the lives which may be lived happily, contentedly, sadly or miserably in its shadow. I chat to Bini while she is washing the clothes; I follow her eyes as they rest in resignation on the too-thin body of Lito. When her singing drifts up to me I no longer think about the indomitable human spirit, I think of a national health service and that there are certain basic things the human spirit should no longer have to contend with at the fag-end of the twentieth century.

Many times Filipinos have asked me: ‘Are you writing a book about the Philippines?’ In the past I have truthfully replied, ‘No, I don’t know enough,’ and glimpsed a passing look of relief before the conventional expression of disappointment, that surely the place is significant enough to interest someone
out there?
That look of relief is the first acknowledgement that the new era which Michael Herr so eloquently heralded has dawned here too, a growing suspicion that a writer might do something as cynical and prudent as to invest a good deal of discomfort in a book which may later make him money.

This is the crux: the eavesdropped world now wants to know who is listening and why. Anyone could have come to Kansulay with a journalist’s writ (‘Get the background, the
real
grass-roots feel’) or as a doctor, a worker with an international charity, an adviser on some construction project. But to have come as none of these, neither intentionally to write about the scene nor yet completely as a voyeur but simply to
live
: this reduces everybody, myself included, to incomprehension.

Yet I now know that I did imagine that look I thought to see cross Bini’s face as she brought me food up my hill. What Michael Herr saw I have still to see in the faces of my friends here in Kansulay and Sabay although it would be incredible had the idea of resentment not crossed their minds in private. If so, and they still allow no evidence of it to show, then all I can say is that it betokens an astounding generosity of spirit which characterises my entire experience of their country. This generosity of spirit is indeed the most angelic of the Filipinos’ qualities. In terms of their own ruthlessly exploited history it is probably their greatest flaw.

But there again maybe that, too, is a sentimental construct. The more one tries to make sense of one culture in the terms of another the more the whole issue disintegrates into polemic. The fundamental oddness and unknowableness of human beings, their sheer otherness, is what remains. I think of the (to me) mysterious private world of Sising and Bini and their children living amid the coconuts, nowhere, anywhere, dancing their dances and singing their songs. That part of them which I can put a price on – their few commodities, their labour, their aspirations to have at least one of their children working in Manila or married abroad – that I know. But there is another side, far more alien, which has only a little to do with
nono
and the whole range of peasant beliefs. It has rather more to do with confronting death and typhoons and landlords, with living uninsured in a world of disasters for
which there is no redress. It has to do with ancient cultural norms which once, not so long ago, existed in Europe but which now are forgotten or out of fashion.

One day another song makes its way up through the trees, sung by the children to a tune which for me has become wistful. Among the young voices I can identify that of Marisil, Bini’s fifteen-year-old daughter. She produces angular sounds which are entirely Eastern; in their scraped quality the words carry intact through the leaves:

Suddenly the words are no longer those I know by rote. They become immensely sinister. Just as underneath certain of Grimm’s fairy-tales lurks the true savagery of the human psyche so this artless song strikes me for the first time with its terrifying threat of the stranger to whom bad children might be handed over, the unknown to which anyone might be consigned for summary metamorphosis:

The obliqueness haunts me, the children singing of ‘this child’ but not meaning themselves, singing as if they were already parents conjuring a bogeyman with which to threaten their own offspring. I look towards the invisible singing, across the valley with its canopy of fronds beating back the sun in green and gold spears and concealing all sorts of primal rawness. Having glimpsed an elemental and unchanging world and in the temporary grip of afternoon melancholy I ask myself what on earth I think I am doing messing about with water projects, what kind of parental ghost I am myself appeasing by this idiotic way of life.

Back on Tiwarik I have been spending a domestic morning making a fish-drier: four lengths of wood from the forest supporting a chest-high top of woven rattans. It is a few metres from my hut, angled to catch the sun and near enough to deter the sea-eagles as well as the crows which now and then flap across from the mainland on the scrounge.

Keeping food edible in the tropics without refrigeration is an art. After a bout of night fishing it is possible to hang the catch up in a tree for the rest of that night without gutting, scaling or salting it and still find it fresh in the morning. But the moment the sun rises it must be cleaned or cooked. If after a greedy breakfast there is still fish left over the best thing is to dry it.

I have become very fond of sun-dried fish although much can depend on how it is marinaded beforehand. First though, the individual fish must be properly cut. Small or flattish fish are opened down the spine so that they hinge apart at the belly. This ensures the thickest meat along the back is fully exposed to the sun. Thicker fish such as eels are cut twice so the fish may be opened out into three flaps with two thin hinges of flesh. The fishermen of Sabay can do this with great dispatch and dexterity while scarcely watching what their hands are doing.

Next the sliced fish are carefully washed to rinse off any blood and pieces of internal organ and put into pans to soak for several hours. If only salt is used as a preservative the solution must be strong enough to prevent the growth of bacteria but not so strong as to render the fish inedible. The correct degree of salinity may be judged when the fish float in the solution rather than lie under it. Personally, I prefer a more elaborate marinade of chopped onions, garlic,
crushed peppercorns, soy sauce and
tuba
vinegar, the salinity brought up to strength. A few chillies add interest. Then the fish are laid out flat in the sun on a
tuyuan
such as I have been making. When thoroughly dried they can be kept a long time although care needs to be taken in damp weather lest they ‘sweat’: being hygroscopic the salt absorbs water from the atmosphere. Kept dry, the fish are crisp and papery. They rustle when sorted and are delicious fried. It is provident to keep some by one for lean and future days, besides which they are always readily saleable as
daing.

While at work on this drier I have all the while been conscious of occasional explosions somewhere in the background. Every so often a thud shakes the air about Tiwarik and the echo of a dull clap falls to the beach as if, having bounced tiredly off the peak, it lacked the energy to go any further. At the same time I have had a tune running obsessively through my head in the way that happens sometimes when one’s hands are occupied. It is a tune I have not consciously heard in decades, something released from childhood like a trapped pocket of prehistoric air returning to circulation from the heart of a smashed flint. A particularly loud bang from close around the nearest headland has jarred the association loose in my brain. An especial quality in the explosion, something reminiscent about its
timbre
, enables me to identify the piece of music as part of a Mozart sonata for four hands. And suddenly with a rush an entire memory comes back of Mozart and detonations and bright sunlight. Once again, it seems my present life on this curious island has evoked a private past.

There was a summer long ago just before I went to Canterbury when my friend Howard and I shared certain interests, two of which were music and explosions. In the long holiday we spent much time at each other’s house where we did more or less exactly the same things. Often we sat at the piano earnestly inventing ever more elaborate descants for well-known hymns or playing Mozart duets. Then a different urge would take us out to the garage to make bombs.

I still had some of my original cordite collection left,
Howard (whose elder brother was a National Serviceman) a lot of empty .303 cartridge cases. We would drill a small hole near the base of these and feed in a length of Jetex fuse which was available in those days for setting off model rocket motors. Then we filled the cartridges with a mixture of sodium chlorate weedkiller and sugar and crimp the open end in a vice. These little bombs made an immense noise, tearing apart into ragged brass petals. Sometimes when set on their bases on a wooden surface they blew out the ignition caps and took off like missiles, leaving a gleaming copper disc embedded in the wood. No boffin at Peenemünde working on his Führer’s programme of rocket-propelled retribution can have experimented more carefully than we did, varying the proportions of mixture and writing it all down in an exercise book. We cross-referenced the different explosives with the way they were packed, too, for we not only used rifle cartridges: we tried lengths of gas-pipe, jam-jars of plaster of Paris, balls of clay, a roll of lavatory paper with both ends bunged and the whole encased in yards of the elasticated webbing Howard’s father treasured for the roof-rack of his Humber Super Snipe.

That summer rang with tunes and bangs. I can remember adults only peripherally. Howard’s elder sister Judith seems a presence, less because she was a very pretty sixteen-year-old with blonde hair she could practically sit on than because our noises frightened her pony. She didn’t like Mozart and she thought boys with bombs were silly. We didn’t like ponies and it was universally acknowledged that girls constituted a category of silliness such as to re-define the word. Our mines threw up clods of earth at the feet of her horse, sending it cantering with flared nostrils to the protective shade of an elm in the corner of the paddock in whose branches there nestled a ‘blinder’: one of our better devices full of magnesium powder which burst with immense lightning and crack. Shattered twigs and elm foliage rained down behind it as the horse took off once more, eyes rolling, for the far corner of the field where it tore through the hedge and vanished.

We set bombs off at night to watch the flash; we sent them
up on the backs of gliders and kites to see what an explosion in the sky looked like. We even sacrificed Howard’s oldest control-line plane, substituting a bomb in the cockpit for the plastic pilot whose moulded head and shoulders had been glued beneath the canopy. The realism of this explosion exceeded all expectations: it ignited the fuel in the tank and the entire plane blew apart in mid-air while travelling at speed. To children brought up on movies of the recent war it looked entirely authentic: the severed wings fluttering to earth, the E.D. ‘Bee’ engine shooting forward from its mounts and plunging through the greenhouse roof, the trail of smoke across the summer sky.

And still we were not satisfied. I filched ether from my mother’s bottle of waste anaesthetic, Howard stole petrol from his father’s Atco motor mower. How we never blew ourselves up was a miracle but we never between us lost more than an eyebrow or two. No neighbour complained, no parent intervened. Presumably they were all too busy elsewhere being doctors and lawyers to notice what their sons were up to. ‘That sounds nice,’ said Howard’s father vaguely one evening after we had played some duets. ‘Better than those fireworks you keep letting off. I didn’t know you could buy them in August. Never could when I was a boy.’ My own father, too, was oddly tolerant. The only time he objected was when I embarrassed him. This came about one evening as he, my mother, my sister and I returned home from seeing a film and dining in town. It was late, a dark summer’s night. For some reason I was carrying one of the cartridge bombs in my pocket. While my father was putting the car away and the others were sleepily opening the front door I let it off in the front garden to see how much of a flash it made. The noise was very satisfactory and I went through the hedge into the orchard with a torch to find the torn metal casing which I had heard rattling through the apple branches. Within minutes there were sounds of conversation from the front. I overheard my father saying ‘No, I’m afraid it was my son letting off a firework. I’ll certainly speak to him. I’m sorry you were bothered, officer. Goodnight.’ I made myself scarce for as long as I could without risking being locked out and went in to find my father white
with rage not because I had been exploding bombs but because he had had to explain to the local bobby who arrived on his bicycle in a lather of sweat and trembling with dread of being the first on a murder scene. Giving an innocent policeman a nasty turn, making my father apologise on my behalf – far from becoming a family joke such was not a laughing matter. On the other hand I now suspect that my mother, true to her more subversive nature, was secretly amused.

In the meantime Howard’s and my days were endless, our friendship without bounds. Yet my memory of that summer is not that it was conventionally carefree. Henry Ward Beecher’s observation that despite their intent energy ‘boys have hours of great sinking and sadness’ applied to us well enough but especially to Howard who was older than I in an unchronological sense. Already he had glimpsed the future and one night he was not to be consoled. In the dark of his bedroom he worked himself into a peculiar mood of despairing seriousness which I associated with adulthood and which ended with him in tears. He said that soon we would never see each other again; he was going off to one school, I to another. He said he knew we wouldn’t still be friends in five years’ time. He was ‘frit’ (our slang) about having to do his National Service. Suddenly five years seemed nothing. It was as if men in khaki would be coming round any day now to tear us from our homes and march us away as even now his brother William was exiled and being shot at in Malaya.

Until then I had not glimpsed this future for myself but Howard’s words now filled me with his contagious panic. I was upset by his upset, frightened by his fright. For a long time we both lay in tears, each staring at his private vista of never-ending uprootings and separations which we knew to be our common lot. The seemingly endless world of childhood was finishing, as it does not when children do precocious things with grown-up earnestness but when tomorrow first begins to weigh upon today. Temporarily adrift somewhere between mourning and panic we indulged ourselves splendidly with a kind of solemn hysteria. What were we really doing? What but making a
hostile sea of the future the better to make an eternal island of the present. What but whipping up a storm to earn ourselves the luxury of consolation as young lovers might do while the summer moonlight fell across their bed like a cold scythe.

The next day we were up early and making bombs with strange intensity. That morning we must have got through pounds of Howard’s mother’s granulated sugar and bags of his father’s weedkiller; when that ran out we moved on to their fertiliser. I remember crouching beside Howard as he tamped a bomb into a hole in the earth. I remember watching not his hands but the edge of his ear with its bright curve of fine hairs, the light down on his forearms, the caramel smell of burnt sugar which hung about his hair, the vulnerable neck in its Aertex collar. In the afternoon we hit belatedly on the idea of underwater explosions, lowering bombs into the water-butt, a vast oak barrel once used for molasses. By tea-time we had devised a way of keeping the fuses dry and had sent up stained gouts of water into the sunlit air, falling as rain across a bed of nasturtiums. We had inadvertently killed a goldfish he had won at a fair and forgotten was in the tub as well as a couple of newts which had also been there. We didn’t discover about the goldfish for a day or two when bacteria brought it to the surface with a bloom of white saprophytes around its gills.

That night I felt it my turn to work up a storm, but it was not the same. It was too self-conscious, too much an attempt to repeat something which had happened spontaneously, inevitably, in its own time. We went through the motions and again the summer moonlight fell across our bed but this time it suggested instead that we got up and went out into the warm air smelling of night-scented stock to look for Yellow Underwing moths with the ultra-violet lamp from under the stairs.

We never did see each other again; Howard had been right. We were neither of us the type who keeps in touch with gangs of friends or goes to reunions or Old Boys’ dinners. We might have made a pact but didn’t. Probably each of us was daunted by visions of an awful meeting between two gangling sub-adults making that preening
gesture with one hand at the neck as if to check the latest shave and affecting the formal insouciance of our class:

‘Christ, it’s Andrews.’

‘By God, it’s H-P. Well I’m buggered. What are
you
doing here? Oh, I’m awfully sorry, this is Felicity.’

(In fact, though, whenever I had fantasies about seeing old schoolfriends the meetings usually took place abroad as if foreign travel would set the seal on one’s adulthood. I envisaged running into people on the Champs Elysées, in Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo, on the campus of Berlin University. Or we might find ourselves with our respective girl-friends on the same Rhine steamer or in the same cable car high above Kitzbühl. ‘Good Lord, it’s …’ ‘What on
earth
…’ ‘Well, let’s all have dinner … Sorry, this is Lisl.’)

I can still remember the music we played, though. On distant, piano-less Tiwarik it suddenly all comes back, summoned from the attics of memory by explosions. These are soon explained as Arman’s
bangka
grounds on the shingle. He and Totoy Matias spring out looking pleased with themselves, as well they might since the bilges are full of a slithery mass of silver and pink fish – mainly
dalagang
bukid
, a small herringlike variety of
Caesio
whose charming local name means ‘country maiden’. A successful morning’s dynamiting has earned them a good lunch. Democratically (for he is the
Jhon-Jhon’s
owner and skipper) Arman sets about cleaning fish. He has been acting as bomber, Totoy Matias as aimer. The other two crew members who are rather slower out of the boat have had the more strenuous task of swimming down to retrieve the catch. Silo in particular looks done in and even rather cold. Non-smoker Arman tells him he ought to smoke more, since there is a widespread belief that smoking gives a man energy and keeps him warm.