Playing with Water (23 page)

‘You’re still
baklâ
though,’ retorts a mischievous sister. Laughter on all sides from among the bananas and coconuts, laughter in which the boy himself joins. Good-natured whoops startle the chickens and the pigs.

At night, however, my place on the hill is still as deserted
of humans as I wish it to be. Lolang Mating keeps all casual visitors at bay, the glowing timbers of her collapsed shack a demarcation beyond which none dare set foot unescorted. Not even Sising would come up alone. Instead my hut is the nexus for non-human visitors of a kind which would reinforce the worst fears of the superstitious. The
lumboy
trees become thick with big fruit-eating bats fighting and squabbling, the air loud with their leather wings. Some have bodies the size of cats with wings of well over a metre span. At dusk a cloud of lesser bats fumes up from the forest into the purple sky, but only with the coming of real darkness do these fruit bats unfold themselves and row across from the forest top, pulling up at the tree above my hut with a noise like wet mackintosh being shaken. All night they clatter in the branches while twigs and
lumboy
stones rain on the thatch. Now and again one of the smaller bats may fly straight through the hut from one open window to the other, passing only a foot or so above where I lie on a mat on the floor, naked body fanned by their whirring passage.

One night the bats seem particularly noisy: my sleep is broken by an insistent thin mewling, a lost and hopeless wail. When dawn comes I have forgotten it but soon afterwards another group of boys arrives and makes triumphant noises beneath an adjacent
lumboy
. I discover they have set a trap the previous day consisting of a single nylon thread high in the air from which dangle fish-hooks. One of the fruit bats is caught on two of these hooks, hopelessly entangled, and has been hanging there all night.

A boy climbs up and a good deal of shouting ensues, instructions and cautions mainly for the bat is still very much alive and has a jaw the size of a small cat but narrower and with needle-sharp canines. After some wrestling up among the leaves during which the bat screams twice it comes thumping through the branches to the ground where it heaves impotently, for the boy has broken its wings halfway along thus immobilising them and its fine little hands. The splintered ends of bones now poke through the reddish fur of both forearms. Its head swivels to meet menace, eyes huge and black and perfectly spherical like beads of ink. I am shaken by its vulnerability which seems
caused as much by its being caught out of its proper medium as by hooks and broken bones. It is a victim of daylight, a fish taken from water, deserted by all the skills which ordinarily make it so powerful. The boys tie its wings outstretched to a length of cane; crucified, the bat looks from one of us to the other.

‘Take it away and kill it quickly,’ I say brusquely. The boys are baffled by my anger; they do not know my hut has been violated by their casual brutality. I make them take down their fish-hooks and forbid them to put them up anywhere in the vicinity. At the same time my annoyance is increased by having to listen to myself giving these tetchy orders. Who am I to forbid people to trap their food? I am no campaigner for animal rights (how could I be without hypocrisy?) and still less do I own so much as a single square foot of their home territory. But life would become impossible, I try to explain; I would be unable to sleep for listening if I knew there were traps set nearby.

They affect to understand and agree to set them far away, a compromise I accept. That is how Arcadia is. Later in the day I pass the house of one of them and find the bat still alive on its cross though now visibly weakened by injuries and thirst. My look attempts to convey something to the young man leaning out of the window above it but he just smiles. No electricity, no refrigerator, no quick and early death, he might have said. But he wouldn’t: it just means nothing to him.

Amid all this my hut is calm and expressionless. It lives as I do, as we all do, exposed to all sorts of animal and vegetable activity. In some senses the life is that of endless camping except that being able to stand beneath one’s own roof is a luxury whereas crawling into canvas makes me low-spirited. The gathering and drying of firewood, the daily fetching of water from the pump at Bini and Sising’s, such are ordinary enough chores which become noticeable only when the weather is bad. Things of this sort become mere habit. I had more difficulty adjusting to the
persistent discomfort of a cushionless world: right-angled chairs made of bamboo, benches made of two poles lashed across trestles, seats of split logs. The body touches the ground at the soles of the feet; all the rest touches hard wood polished by thin bottoms and bony limbs. I look around for somewhere – anywhere – comfortable to sit. I dream about my study at school, about the JCR at university, about libraries and clubs. I come from a sitting culture where speculative conversations are conducted from deep armchairs in book-lined rooms. I am (I tell myself) a bachelor of the Victorian, Holmesian model. I crave a favourite dog-eared smoking jacket, chairs over whose plump buttoned arms I can swing my legs, a glass of good brandy ‘to aid lucubration’. There is no such thing in Filipino life as a three-pipe problem, as smoke-hazed chambers of conceptual thinking, as quiet rooms designed for the unhindered life of the mind …

And on the brink of this port-stained nonsense something gives in another direction and I am through to the far side of discomfort. Suddenly the slat floor on which I sleep seems better designed for the body, the breeze filtering up through it delightfully cool. Life becomes not luxurious but eminently possible again, the craving for softness has gone. What better than that one write standing up, like so many Victorians? I have some idea Dodgson wrote much of
Alice
standing; Edward FitzGerald wrote the
Rubaiyat
on his feet; solid Anglican favourites like ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ and ‘Through the night of doubt and sorrow’ flowed from the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould’s pen as he stood thoughtfully at his desk. I buy nails, I borrow a saw, I cut some bamboo. Now outside my hut in the shade of the
lumboy
tree stands a makeshift bamboo lectern at which I write. The children are bewildered by such behaviour. Evernew standards for the bizarre are being set. Writing is weird but writing standing up on a mountain surrounded by forest and palm trees is beyond-weird fit to set a fashion.

Other adjustments, too, are necessary. One evening a speckle rain begins. Later that night I am woken by water falling on my ribs. Outside is a steady downpour which the roofing of last year’s fronds cannot entirely shed. Another
repair in the morning, I think: cut some palm branches, weave some new sections of
sulirap
. It is early yet for the rainy season but nevertheless time to prepare for the arrival of real monsoon deluges. I roll on the floor in search of a dry patch. In that half-awake state when one’s eyes open onto black I wonder how many of my ex-classmates – now all in their forties – have to roll on the floor at night to avoid a leaking roof. What evidence of abject failure that would have seemed in those days had I known what the future held for me. I would have been at a complete loss to understand what kind of a calamity could have overtaken me to bring about the forfeiture of my birthright to become a respectable and affluent middle-class Englishman. I should probably have been forced to conclude that somewhere along the line I had fallen prey to missionary zeal: that from deep in my blood The Call had inexorably come, something genetic asserting itself and condemning me to good works in the outback.

At that time a far simpler likelihood would never have occurred to me as I sat in class and considered a career, that I might instead have been overtaken by something far more voluntary, altogether more reasonable: an utter boredom with all I was supposed to become. For I never suspected then I would one day be foxed by that over-prosaic world we were earnestly envisaging for ourselves, or baffled by how so many people successfully ignore the fallings-away and blatant constructedness of such a world. My juvenile self never foresaw my astonishment at how huge numbers of individuals remain steadfastly immune to distraction, to effusions of light and scent and sound, to ravishing disorder, to the discreet pleasure of living chancily in the cracks of a universe so clearly and so sublimely never designed for human beings at all. How could I ever have contemplated sitting in a traffic jam morning and evening on the South Circular Road listening to the radio and cursing, still less have agreed to that as a reasonable price to pay? (
O time too swift, O Swiftnesse never ceasing
.) I am flawed in some way and it is incurable. The flaw does not make me yearn to have been Burton or Speke but it does require me to acknowledge that exploring
always carries with it an element of the desire to become lost.

And lost I am: eyes sightlessly open in a hut on a hill in a forest, hard to imagine on any particular map. It is scarcely a place, even, more a locus for sleepy speculation like that with which the fitfully dozing airline passenger looks out of the window at the dark earth below, sees a fragile cluster of lights and wonders idly where it is and what it is called, an unnamed island in an unknown sea. Then, headphones back on, he naps again and slips below the horizon. Many times I have looked up at night from among wave-tops, from a desert or a forest, have watched the winking lights of his passing and listened to his diminishing thunder.

I am walking down early from the forest to the village in order to meet a local government official from the regional water authority or something. He might be bossy because he has authority in such matters and I have none. On the other hand he might be deferential, obsequious even, because I have a rumoured access to money and he and his council certainly haven’t. (In the event he is charming and useless with a San Miguel beer pot pushing out his bogus Lacoste sports shirt like a tumour.)

As I walk towards the village the first butterflies of the day float out of the shade into the sun as spangled membranes before lurching out of the light once more and turning back into large insects. I begin to meet the first villagers making their way into the forest to patches of ground they till or to the huts where they keep pigs, goats, chickens and which they often use as temporary bases during the day. If they have chicks not yet old enough to roost up a couple of members of the family might spend the nights there as well in order to chase off snakes, wildcats and crows. When copra-making takes place far from the village and especially when the landowner wants his workers to do overtime in order to catch a particular boat or a favourable market price these huts often become crammed dormitories and
scenes of convivial labour by night. Then the light from the cooking fires supplements that of the
tapahan
fire smouldering in its pit beneath the stacked coconut halves and makes even more intense and threatening the blackness of the forest which surrounds them.

We meet each other with that characteristic Tagalog greeting which so irritates certain foreigners when they discover what it means: ‘Where are you going?’ I was once told of an Australian who had actually bothered to learn the phrase for ‘Mind your own business’ expressly to reply to this greeting. This was seemingly the only Tagalog he knew and he was probably unaware of the effect it had. Had he been at all reflective it might have struck him that seen from neutral territory it was no more intrusive to ask someone where they were going than to ask how they were feeling, as in ‘How you doing, sport?’, especially as both conventions require only the most noncommittal answers. ‘Fine.’ ‘Okay.’ ‘Not bad.’ are merely the Western equivalents of the replies I now give to those who greet me on the road to Kansulay: ‘There’. ‘Down’. Sometimes in response to my own greeting the people I know offer a bit of explanation: ‘To the forest’. ‘To feed the pigs’. – hefting an old plastic container half full of swill. Or they may with equal courtesy not reply verbally at all but make a gesture I thought in my ignorance peculiarly Filipino until I came upon this passage in an eighteenth-century Chinese novel, Cao Xueqin’s classic
The Story of the Stone:

That is it exactly – pointing with the pursed mouth rather than with a finger. To gesture with the organ of speech instead of speaking with it strikes me as oddly expressive.

Who else is coming along the path towards me? Several children going to their family’s huts with provisions or merely carrying large knives. Boys are seldom without their catapults. Soon I encounter the carpenter’s son Nilo
and his friend Yor (whose nickname derives laboriously, by inversion, from the word for ‘Ouch!’ dating from the day he found a bees’ nest). Nilo is carrying a pole with a crossbar on top. On one of the limbs sits a disgruntled-looking dove tethered by its leg to a little bamboo drinking cup; the other limb is wound about with what looks like browning chewing-gum, an extremely sticky birdlime made of various resins. As they walk Yor is practising his
komokon
calls: the dove’s characteristic hollow coo on one note repeated
accelerando
. He does this with cupped hands as any European country child imitates an owl. All three of them face a long morning sitting up in the hills trying to induce another
komokon
to perch beside the decoy.

Nilo himself is a born woodsman with an amazing repertoire of bird and animal cries, whistles, grunts and screams. I have watched him call golden orioles to a palm tree, standing invisibly in the dappled shade with odd pieces of brown skin showing through his tattered shorts and T-shirt. He is a true Filipino Papageno with no need to dress up in feathers to make the point. But something awful is happening to this gifted bird-catcher: his voice is breaking and he can no longer do some of his best calls. Either he will have to re-learn everything using falsetto or employ mechanical assistance. (Perhaps that was why Papageno had a flute, to make up for the real magic he lost at puberty.) Nilo is resigned to becoming a less good bird-catcher, however temporarily. But no matter how pleased to be growing up he is quite sad to be losing his undisputed position as Kansulay’s number one bird-boy. It is amusing to imagine him in a quite different milieu dressed in white linen amid cool grey Gothic, suffering the erotic melancholy of being unable ever again to sing the treble solo in ‘O for the wings of a dove’.