Playing with Water (17 page)

Neither were Manila or Manileños real to the huge pale pederasts – the German, the English, the American, the Swedish, Dutch, Australian, French pederasts – who sat about the air-conditioned shopping malls while small girls and boys in very new jeans and training shoes gathered at their tables packing in as much food as they could before the bill was called for and their beaming host lumbered off, towing one or two or three according to fancy to the seclusion of his room in the Hilton, the Hyatt, or a rented apartment in Dakota Mansions. The most notorious of these shopping malls was Harrison Plaza which later ‘burned down’ (Manileños supply their own inverted commas for this phrase whenever referring to a place razed to the ground for the insurance money or as part of a vendetta). A new Harrison Plaza has since arisen from the ashes on the same site and with many of the same stores but it is a very sanitised and gelded phoenix. For all that the Marcoses were to linger on for two or three years interested parties will maintain that to all intents and purposes the old Manila (their old Manila) died with the first Harrison Plaza. Apart from anything else an innocence has gone. A new breed of kid has arisen, they say, tough, streetwise, dangerous, maybe even with AIDS.
Sayang
. It could not last.

A correct perception, this. Part of the pleasure of a fantasy lies in knowing it is time off, untime in an unworld bought against ever-encroaching reality. There was a certain haste about those visitors like that of the metaphorical child on the loose in a sweet-shop. If there was a certain innocence, too, about their public behaviour it was because there was quite evidently no sense of guilt. Of course they were not monsters: they were helping the child economically … In any case the child had no real
existence of its own since it was part of a fantasy already older than itself. So while straight tourists strolled with their handbags and cameras through Harrison Plaza evincing outrage or a painstaking sophistication at the sight of men who were probably their own countrymen fondling and lolling and flirting with children who often looked (and often were) no older than ten, the fantasists seemed not even to have to affect unselfconsciousness. That had all been left behind as they passed beyond the last of the police at Schiphol, Heathrow and Frankfurt. The KLM, BA and Lufthansa storks had borne them safely beyond all legal clutches and delivered them babe-new into the sunny land of their wilder dreams. To all else they were oblivious. It was only the earnest, het couples from Iowa and Darwin who were so conspicuously un-born again, eyeing them aghast and sniffy with their sun-tan oil, righteousness and Hong Kong Nikons.

In order not to waste a moment of their fortnight or three weeks these men used to bring with them copies of type-script pamphlets with titles like
The Boy-Lover’s Guide to Asia,
typically published in Amsterdam. These booklets were part of the fantasy too, the injunctions and advice in them entirely un-ironised. Much could be read between their faintly printed lines. In their way they did their level best to fix a single-minded gulf between the cultures, to preserve the fantasy intact, to make sure an object never became a subject:

Nothing about the common Asian convention by which smiling and laughing may hide embarrassment or anxiety, simply the engaging amorality of the sweet-shop. Not much, either, to suggest that intense loyalty might not be unconnected with economic necessity, with a dependent family. Mark Cousins once posited an imaginary, wittier
and more ironic Bosie by proposing ‘the love that dare not name its price.’
The Boy-Lover’s Guide
was less reticent:

Is there something special about the position occupied by shoes in the imagery of racial contempt? One was suddenly reminded of the immortal remark by US Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, forced to resign in 1976 for observing ‘the only thing the coloureds are looking for in life are tight pussy, loose shoes and a warm place to shit’. In any case the gentle reader sipping his
calamansi
juice in VIP’s and eyeing the passing trade was not told about the men, often armed, who took their cut from the boys’ P25. Nor did he learn about the street gangs which effectively controlled (and still control) Manila, even Harrison Plaza, and whose tattooes on the boy’s shoulder or buttock he might later stroke with a jocular remark, provoking the child to pretend it was done as a joke by his brother. The Boy-Lover would still be unable to read the blue letters SSC or the cougar’s head as signifying the Sigue-Sigue Commando; nor the UFO sign as that of the Sputnik gang; nor the tartar’s head with horns and beard as belonging to the Bahala Na gang, famed as the ‘suicide’ gang whose street fights could leave half a dozen dead. Nor could he read OXO as a gang sign, nor BCJ as identifying the Batang City Jail where any child on the streets who was not obviously middle-class was (and still is) in danger of being hauled at any time of day or night by a policeman needing cash. Once in jail the child is free – indeed urged – to send a note to any next-of-kin, friend or remote acquaintance to beg them to stump up P50 or P100 to buy his release. Those unable to write find a jailer or gang member to act as amanuensis (for a cut,
naturally). Many boys and girls are able to buy themselves out in a day or two. Others are not so fortunate and have to contend for rather longer with the cockroaches, slops, violence, to say nothing of the theft of their new T-shirt, jeans or shoes.

The deadly loyalties of members to their gangs, the deadly rivalries between the gangs themselves as between them and the police, the slum as village and battleground governed by obscure oaths, codes of honour and debts of obligation – such things are, of course, a part of the city which underlies the Manila the tourists see. In just such a way are the old streets Nick Joaquin celebrates disguised beneath new names and contemporary concrete, now so lost as practically to constitute a world of the imagination like Drune. The Manila which represents Fantasyland for rural Filipinos seeking their fortunes is a different city from the one which is Fantasyland for tourists, but occasionally the two overlap and are glimpsed by both sides as a battlefield. Fantasylands and battlefields have a good deal in common apart from the commingling of blood and passion, Eros and Thanatos, the Enemy and the Beloved and all those other celebrated couplings. Above all, they must depersonalise or the whole thing becomes impossible. Thus, Gook gets killed and Boy gets paid while somewhere in the middle, on that shady grey ground which both separates and mediates such economies, obscure
mafiosi
wheel and deal. To certain classes of outsiders it is vital for a country and its people to remain figments, real only in the rôles cast for them:
hostess, call-boy, bar-tender, bell-hop, waitress, peasant.
It is, after all, the essence of tourism.

Today in Manila there is indeed a strange crew, mostly foreign and left over from that old Manila, who are described in newspapers as the ‘Malate Mafia’, Malate being the particular area of the Ermita tourist belt which contains among other things Harrison Plaza. The Malate Mafia are characterised as people who have taken up residence and now largely control various rackets such as child prostitution and drugs and have become prime targets of post-Marcos reformist zeal. Catholic leaders and self-styled concerned citizens inveigh against them publicly, their
power (Economic? Crony?) frequently alluded to as the reason why their disbanding seems so difficult to achieve. Whether or not they are protected, and by whom, is uncertain. More certain is that they could hardly be as immoral as the poverty which ensures their survival.

Manila remains the nipple from which the world takes most of its information about the Philippines. Maybe this is inevitable. It has certain results in terms of the accuracy with which the country is perceived. This was especially noticeable during the famous Snap Election of February 1986 which brought to an end the twenty years of Marcos dynasty.

I was not in Manila at the time. I was not even in the Philippines but up a mountain in Tuscany, by turns apprehensive and relieved as news came in over the BBC’s World Service of crowds facing tanks and the tanks not firing. For a week or more every news bulletin was headed by the latest from Manila, the correspondents there filing dutifully and copiously, and by the end of that week I had the strange impression I was listening to descriptions of a country I had never visited, let alone lived in. The terms were familiar enough, of course: the Government, the People, the Opposition, the Armed Forces, the Police, the Church, the Authorities (how the British, in particular, love this phrase!). But the State they were describing was somehow unrecognisable, and the more one listened to journalists reifying their own descriptions the more one knew it would remain so.

It was perhaps not the journalists’ fault. Being shunted about the world from one newsworthy crisis to the next is scarcely conducive to knowledge. It is not easy to be over-respectful of the opinion of a ‘South-East Asia correspondent’, on the same grounds that we would mistrust a South Korean newspaperman whose beat was ‘Europe’. Britain would be merely one of the many countries which fell within his bailiwick. No matter how many sedulous months he had spent in a library in Seoul we might well doubt he knew much about Britain if he had only ever lived
a month or two there, including the obligatory couple of days in Northern Ireland with the Provisionals. We might be even more sceptical if he relied entirely on interpreters and guides. Had he lived with Yorkshire hill-farmers? Was he familiar with the preoccupations of commuters in pubs on Saturday evenings in Westerham or on the Hog’s Back? Did he really appreciate the subtleties of the various trade-offs made by a million families deep in the grip of deficit financing? Above all, did he actually understand the politics?

Yet the Philippines was perhaps the one place in the Far East where many Western journalists evidently felt the pressure to do additional homework was not so acute. Enough to give it the old experienced eye for a week or two from – for the best of professional reasons – a large hotel; be urbane and amusing and readable while doing the couple of days’ up-country NPA bit and flashing the old humanist credentials over the slums in Tondo. They all did it. How else, to be fair? That is journalism. Was the place not a quasi-American satellite? Plenty of old hands to give them the run-down. Apart from anything else a familiar friend had already been identified, a polarity they recognised: the Corrupt Dictator vs the Downtrodden People. In fact their typewriters and modems were still warm from the same story only a matter of days before in Haiti.

Among the reasons why journalists must have felt comparatively easy about this new assignment were religion and language. The Philippines declares itself officially to be 90 per cent Christian and 100 per cent English-speaking. As an ex-Spanish, ex-American colony, runs the assumption, the culture must be reasonably accessible. Like Hong Kong it is an honorary part of the West but unlike Hong Kong it does not have that aspect of a Chinese majority behind whose significant dragons and complex ideograms so much remains hidden to all but the most expert. The Philippines, by contrast, must be
comprehensible
.

This very accessibility constitutes a strange barrier. The West’s insistence on holding up a linguistic mirror to the world and seeing its own flawed reduplication makes this a difficult barrier to perceive, let alone to cross, especially
when talking about these two subjects, religion and language. The Philippines’s version of Christianity is often a religiose form of Catholicism full of elaborate superstitions and, at Easter, crucifixions. It is thus of a dated kind which many secular Europeans find considerably more foreign than Buddhism. To them it smacks of the mediaeval when they hear of the devout poor further pauperising themselves to buy a handful of fake pearls to sew on the stiff little cope of some crude effigy of the Santo Niño or Our Lady of
Biglang-Awa
(Sudden Mercy). So it does when they see the pictures in Good Friday’s evening papers of a pious carpenter from Tondo hanging for three hours nailed to a cross he himself lovingly made, of a provincial mayor penitently thanking his God for the failure of an assassination attempt (the bullet struck his rosary) by crawling three kilometres with spiked blocks strapped to his naked back. It all sounds too much like the Holy Week flagellants in Spain: bloody, dark, hysterical. It is certainly very un-twentieth century.

If these same secular Europeans happened to pass through Kansulay on Good Friday they might see Tatang Naldo testing his own powers which according to tradition ought then to be at their height. On this day he eats glass and devours bars of Superwheel as well as (I am unreliably assured) frying eggs on the front of his T-shirt. ‘
Demonyo
’, say the people of Kansulay respectfully. Precisely related to this phenomenon – repeated in a thousand barrios up and down the Philippines – was an incident related in the papers of Holy Week 1986. An off-duty policeman in Manila offered to test lucky charms by firing at them with an M-16 rifle on a waste lot. The climax of the story was not really the child who was killed by a ricochet but the failure of the majority of
anting-antings
to resist a .223 bullet travelling at 3250 ft/sec. They were obviously fake charms and their wearers unfortunate dupes. Two charms were apparently undamaged, presumably living up to their owners’ claims that they could deflect any weapon. As to what an off-duty policeman was doing with an automatic rifle and a stock of ammunition at large on a slum lot was not clear. It was Good Friday, not a day for questions of that sort.
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