Playing with Water (2 page)

The places a writer writes are always somewhere else. He may describe a journey, a foreign land; but no matter how faithfully he disposes his rocks and trees, his tokens of difference and the humdrum exotica he comes to love, certain delinquent breezes drift through landscape and writer alike dishevelling things at their root. One of those breezes is no doubt what John Clare overheard beneath Salters Tree:

while another, less mystical but no less mysterious, blows up from the writer’s own past and causes everything in his eye to lean imperceptibly in a peculiar direction. A third breeze is the one which in a sense blew this book into being by carrying me unerringly if wanderingly on a journey which began at a scarred school desk and ended thirty-three years later on the island of Tiwarik.

One June day in 1953 aged twelve I sat in a classroom and drew a map. I deduce this because by some fluke a single exercise book of mine survived all the burnings and sheddings of clutter and turned up last year. It is full of references to the Coronation of that month as well as badly done French exercises and pencil drawings of aeroplanes and islands. When it so unexpectedly came to light I turned it in my hands as if it were a teacup dredged from the
Titanic
: a trivial object made weighty by the mere fact of having survived a long-ago disaster, the very implausibility of its physical presence having me turn its pages with a disbelief almost bordering on reverence. On the
penultimate page I found a sketch which made me sit straight down on the floor and stare and stare. For there on the ruled paper was a drawing of Tiwarik, an island in the Philippines I had first set eyes on only two years before. True, the map was not correct in every detail, but in its main features – outline, peak, a grassfield – it was probably as good a map as I could have produced at that age had I been drawing it from actual memory.

This discovery made a silent concussion in my life. For a week I was bemused. It was like a twist in the plot halfway through a novel which suddenly makes new sense of events and at once invalidates one’s presumed understanding of the narrative. What had happened? Had I had some psychic prefiguring of a place I was destined to visit? Or once having invented somewhere had I doomed thirty years of my life to discovering its analogue?

There is a third possibility which I now think is the most likely explanation. The shape I drew was not dreamed up that far-off June day but had existed for me since infancy in a rudimentary way. Maybe if I had been asked to draw a picture of my own mind I might have imagined it looking something like that – a damaged poached egg with uplands and downlands and immense bluish distances. From that earliest moment when its outlines wavered and turned milky and became firm I was not in search of a physical counterpart for it, not even unconsciously. But when I stumbled on one called Tiwarik Island there was an instant of profound recognition. Later the chance finding of my boyhood doodle showed me a shape I had once seen so clearly and had later forgotten.

The effect of finding this sketch has not been to make the intervening years an irrelevance or a pilgrimage, a waste of time or a purposeful trek. All that has happened is that everything I have done, all the countries I have lived in and passed through, now seem congruous and coherent. That is all. There is no meaning to it but it is consistent in some way. I could not have planned it or done differently. It was neither willed nor unintended. To have discovered that, at least, produces from nowhere a billowy sense of freedom. It is as if until that day came when I was to crouch alone on
Tiwarik with monsoon rains drumming on my back and deliver myself of a great dying worm I could never have been truly carefree.

I first set foot on Tiwarik during a mis-timed fishing trip in 1983 when a friend and I pitched a wind-whipped tarpaulin on the beach and huddled beneath it for two days and nights. The island was for us merely a blob of land amid a churn of waters, our view of it occluded by grey squalls of rain – actually the tail-end of Typhoon Litang – and reduced to the stretch of coral shingle on which we crouched. Behind us amorphous shrubbery rose steeply to unseeable heights. We were wet through and cold, for the tropics can be cold in a way which has little connection with thermometers. The temperature does drop, of course, but the perceived cold is as much the effect on the spirits of being denied the usual blaze of noon, the languid air drifting through the walls of one’s wicker hut and up between the bamboo slats of its floor.

We would leave our tarpaulin to haul the boat higher up the coral strand until the tips of its outriggers nosed into the thorns at the cliffs’ foot. Then we hurried back to shelter and threw ourselves face down once more, scrabbling absently into the coral fragments, sifting branches, twigs, chips of sponge and brain from the millions of infant conchs no bigger than mauve seeds whose inhabitants had long since predeceased us. We passed many listless hours examining this graveyard by day; by night the incessant clicking of hermit crabs and their plucking at our toes and hair reminded us there was no flesh which this shore might not absorb. A moment’s inattention and it could digest us too.

On the second occasion I arrived alone and for months, during which Tiwarik Island was reborn and became alive for me. The day was blue as I crossed the strait, the water blue and purple beneath the keel. Clear under the silent glass into which my paddle dipped as into lacquer lay the squares and minarets, arcades and loggias of the sea floor
which linked Tiwarik with the mainland. Had I known it then I would have been terrified, enchanted, that one night in the future I would make a reverse crossing down there, working amongst its spires and crags and over its plains and stinging pastures by the light of a torch and with a thin polythene air-hose stuck in my mouth.

Of course the island could not assume an identity before it had acquired a position. My memory of that first visit was of a lost and roaring beach nowhere in particular. The view then had been what any stranded tourist might have seen. But a traveller works to let a place into his imagination (or maybe to chip it free) else he becomes weary and discouraged by an endlessness of mere location. Even on that first unpromising landfall something of Tiwarik’s significance must have struck me. It was after all an inveterate childhood sketcher of imaginary islands who had watched the South China Sea fling tons of coral chips into the air and tried to light driftwood fires in the lee of the boat to cook rice. Even that partial view from beneath the flapping eyelid of a tarpaulin had been enough for the boy within: he had recognised from a series of glimpses an entire terrain and the man without had had no choice but to return. The jungle, the cave, the pathways later to be dotted by his feet across the grassfield, all were already there in his head. Conventional child, though, he had once pencilled beacons on all his islands’ high points to light when the speck of a schooner appeared at the universe’s rim. He could not have guessed that in later life rescue was the very last thing he would want; that, on the contrary, in his desire to be lost he would long to light an anti-beacon of enchanted kindling whose invisible smoke would envelop his world and render it transparent. The island’s image would waver and be gone, leaving the captain of the distant schooner thoughtfully to push together his telescope and enter ‘mirage’ in the ship’s log.

Tiwarik lies little more than a mile off the coast, immediately opposite the fishing village of Sabay which from the seaward side appears as a straggle of huts on stilts half lost among the coconut groves. In front of them on the stony beach boats are drawn up, each of which in time becomes
identifiable so it is possible on any particular day to read the beach and know who is doing what. The island is uninhabited (uninhabitable, practically, since there is no water) and tiny, being about a quarter of a mile across. But its size on a map – and I have never seen a map large-scale enough to mark it – would be deceptive, for it rises to a peak off in one corner which cannot be less than four hundred feet above the sea. There are no beaches, merely that one shifting coral strand on which we camped, maybe a hundred yards long and facing the mainland. The rest of Tiwarik rises from gurgling boulders more or less vertically up volcanic cliffs of black rock. From one quarter there is a steep sweep of coarse tall
cogon
*
grass up to the forest which caps the peak. Seen from the strait on a breezy day the sunlight goes running up and up through this wild grassfield. It is the same effect as with young hair and similarly afflicts me with deepest melancholy, affection and pleasure.

The island is normally used by fishermen in transit. The locals from Sabay and from Sirao and Malubog a few miles up the coast stop there and cook their lunch over driftwood fires lit between lumps of coral. They sit and repair their spear guns and lie up under the thin shade of the thorn bushes to snooze away the noon. Some of Tiwarik’s transients are from much farther afield, coming from provinces and islands in the south, Visayans speaking motley dialects and burnt black by the sun, journeying for weeks on end through the archipelago and selling their catches as they go. These are nomads whose boats have a subtly different cut and the left-over scraps of whose food are red with chili. They may sit out a storm on Tiwarik or appear at dusk to drape their nets among the corals. By dawn they have gone, leaving only the long scars of their keels.

At any time a pair of dots might appear in the middle of the empty glitter, insectival as the minute twitch of paddles becomes visible. They land for a while then depart leaving blackened stones and several fish-spines. It comes to seem less volitional on their part than that the sea which sweeps through the strait has carried them here and borne
them off again; that Tiwarik stands like a rock in a stream past which the water scurries, depositing small flotsams which eddy momentarily in freak pockets of calm before being carried away. This is not entirely fanciful; it is tempting to gaze across at Sabay only a mile or so away and think how swimmable it looks. In fact it is, but you must choose the moment. The current becomes very fast when the tide is going out. It is one of the place’s minor deceptions. When the sea is flat calm and the sun seems to hold everything in slow motion you can identify the distant figures on the beach opposite – Arman’s red T-shirt as he carries a pail from water’s edge to his beached boat
Jhon-Jhon
– and the sense of being able to talk to him is so strong it suggests that a mere few minutes’ pleasurable exertion could annul that small gap which separates you. As you were swept off down the coast for the thirty-hour drift through the archipelago to Luzon or – missing that – the rather longer trip to Taiwan you would have ample time to reflect on the un-novel idea that calm tropical surfaces can conceal fatal business.

As I prepared to become a resident of this beautiful and significant rock, this divider of a current, a sense of austerity and impermanence exhilarated me. I knew I had reached somewhere, while of course reserving the right at a later date to deny ever having felt anything so portentous. After all I was already accustomed to the living conditions I would find there: I could hardly expect to learn anything new about leaky grass roofs and driftwood fires, the mildew and charcoal which bit by bit give all one’s few possessions a familiar and uniform colour. But to live alone in the middle of the sea would be something different. Hitherto I had always had a great bulk of interior at my back, mountains and forest patched with the orange scars of primitive agriculture receding into hazy distances with the sea comfortably confined behind a ruled margin of coastline. From now on the terms of living were to be drawn by water.

That first sunlit morning of my return to Tiwarik, instead of doing the useful and practical things I had intended I simply climbed up above the beach to the grassfield and lay there looking down at the map of my new world the corals
drew beneath the blue water. In the drowse, the half-shut eyes against the glare, the mind deceives itself. It sets itself adrift and feels the island move. The current coursing past Sabay towards Malubog and far Kansulay is no current but a wake. The sea is still; it is the island bearing the mind off on a voyage of its own with its sole inhabitant, its Crusoe.

Because I have never seen Tiwarik on a map I do not know if the island has an official name. Presumably it must, for the American Navy charted these waters most thoroughly when they supplanted the Spanish in 1898 as the Philippines’ occupying colonial power. Then in 1942 the Japanese took over forcibly, occasioning General MacArthur’s famous promise to return which he made as he stepped off Corregidor Island in Manila Bay into the light surface craft which carried him away to another theatre of war. Maybe the Japanese forces gave Tiwarik a name of their own during the three years of their occupation. Yet it seems unlikely they would have bothered with so insignificant a blob of land: there was much else to do besides work out Japanese name-equivalents for all seven thousand one hundred-odd islands in the archipelago. In fact I do not wish to know the official name of this place. I am afraid that discovering it would damage its identity. It would be like trying to adjust to an old friend who had suddenly changed his name by Deed Poll.

It is the locals who call the island ‘Tiwarik’, which in Tagalog is ‘upside down’. The reason for this is not clear unless it is that from its seaward aspect the lump of hill with its awry cap of jungle appears oddly top-heavy and might fancifully be imagined turning turtle one stormy night, trapping its undetermined load of snakes, insects, tree-lizards and single majestic pair of sea-eagles among brush and branch under tangled foam. This apart, ‘Tiwarik’ might have been some long-dead fisherman’s nickname or a corruption of a forgotten original word not necessarily even Tagalog, since the influence of Visayan dialects is everywhere in the language the locals speak.