Playing with Water (3 page)

Tiwarik
is, come to that, the name they give to the razor fish,
Aeoliscus strigatus,
which can be seen in small groups among the corals, its delicate snout pointing down and the three-inch blade of its translucent body with single dark streak switching and tilting in the drifts of current. The balletic precision with which all members of the group act as one is remarkable, as is their agility for fish holding their bodies vertically in the water. Only if really chased or threatened does their angle change, heads coming up a few degrees for short evasive bursts. This
tiwarik
is not eaten except in a special circumstance. Dried and then powdered it is slipped into someone’s drink and becomes a potion guaranteed to make the drinker fall in love. Everybody smiles but knows it works, so its potency is much feared and
tiwarik
is resorted to only by the most desperately unrequited: as with all spells one can never be absolutely sure that the fulfilment of a dream will in the long run turn out to have been wholly a good thing. Certainly it does seem to potentiate the effects of alcohol. I once saw a girl become stertorously drunk after (allegedly) only two small glasses of
tuba
. After a night’s vomiting she awoke next morning with a headache and said dolefully she had been magicked with
tiwarik
and that she knew who had done it. She was inconsolable: the man in question was not her fiancé, whom she would now have to renounce in favour of the lout who had long pursued her and had now won her by underhand means.

Surely the upside-down fish is powerful. With a flimsy body quite possibly toxic and quite possibly not, maybe its posture invests it with a sympathetic magic to express a condition which crosses a large cultural barrier: that of being head over heels in love.
1

For five years, on and off, I had been living up in the hills behind Kansulay, another tiny village some thirty miles along the coast from Sabay and Tiwarik Island. It is yet another oddity in my relationship with the island that I should have been living so near it for so long without
suspecting its existence. But thirty miles is very far in a province which has yet to build a tarmac road around its coast.

As is the way in the Philippine provinces, where everyone seems to know everybody else, I already had an introduction to the
barangay
Captain at Sabay. It turned out he had long known of me because until a year ago one of his daughters had taught at the elementary school in whose catchment area Kansulay lay. The presence of a strange ‘
kano
living on his own in the woods was much gossiped about and in consequence Sabay knew of me before I knew of it. One day I walked down to the village and caught the first of a series of battered jeepneys which took me along the rutted coastal road for hours past anonymous villages among the palms,
barrios
and
barangays
whose names I never learned, to ever-smaller provincial townships where I changed jeeps: Bulangan, Malubog, Sirao. After Sirao the road vanished into a track ridged with grey-black lava, on the left the slopes of the massif rising above the groves and bearing its rain-forests into cloud, on the right the mobile blue of water. And there suddenly Tiwarik, placed just so on the other side of its strait the better to be seen entire.

I was received in Sabay with caution and some astonishment. The smaller children ran away and hid behind their mothers’ legs or under the huts. Everyone smiled with unease. This changed to warmth and interest as soon as I had named names, spoken the magic syllables and identified myself as one encompassed – no matter how peripherally – by the huge and complex circle of family, friends and acquaintances spreading outward from Sabay. So this was the ‘
kano
from Kansulay? And he wanted to live on Tiwarik? Well, why not? But on the other hand, why? There was nothing there, no hotels or discos, no white beach, not even fresh water. Captain Sanso was baffled, not unreasonably, since I could give no explanation he would find plausible, especially not when I told him of the miserable and involuntary two days I had already spent there. I just thought I’d go back for a bit, I said, and did he have any objection to my putting up a temporary hut in which to live?

Captain Sanso did not own Tiwarik but he thought this a fine idea. Already, I knew, he was working out the spin-offs of my presence for his impoverished village. I in turn had decided how much in default of rent I should contribute to the local economy. For the equivalent of twenty pounds he would provide me with materials and labour with which to build my house. Until its completion I was, of course, to stay with him. I was deeply grateful and observed that the village pump needed renewing, something which I was sure would happen in the near future if things worked out well. So a deal was struck inside his own sitting-room on whose naked cement-block wall was nailed a Lions International plaque reminding the reader of the Captain’s subscription to the principle of mutual help. He sent his bodyguard/factotum off to the village shop for a bottle of ESQ rum with which to toast ourselves. Within an hour of arriving in Sabay I was in the middle of a drinking session.

Filipino drinking habits have a strange, intense air to them. In Europe, even when the drinking is done by the round as in an English pub, people do it mostly at their own rate and from their own glass. In the Philippines a single glass circulates, refilled as each drinker downs it at a gulp. When a spirit like rum is drunk a glass of water is on hand to act as a ‘chaser’. To see a table of people knocking back slugs of spirit with a shudder and at once follow it with a slaking gulp of water makes one think of an ordeal rather than a convivial custom. The drinking takes on an insistent, almost brutal rhythm. It is as if people were drinking to become drunk, as they usually end by becoming. What makes the custom more bearable is the code which insists on a plate of
pulutan
on the table: any kind of food which people can pick at with a communal fork or spoon. This may be no more than salted peanuts or it may be a stew of chicken or dog, vegetables done in coconut milk, fried fish. There is also a formula with which a timid or queasy drinker may skip a round by nominating a
sakop
or proxy. I have frequent recourse to this system; remarkably few nominees ever decline the extra burden.

Captain Sanso introduces me to his youngest brother Arman, to Totoy and Danding and Silo and Jhoby and
Bokbok. The names, at once familiar and unmemorable, slide through my rum-fumed brain. I smile until my face aches answering question after question. How old am I? Where is my companion? Why am I not married? Why do I want to live on Tiwarik? Is there treasure there? Where did I learn Tagalog? I answer some of the questions, duck others. The affability is tangible but under it curiosity runs with a hard and knowing edge: nobody does anything or is anything without good reason. From long experience I am conscious that these strangers are likely to become daily colleagues and friends. I try to make a dignified impression but merely look stupid because I keep forgetting who is who. Occasionally when I glance up from the arena of the table, now covered in puddles of rum, water and stew at which flies are sipping, I notice faces pressing in at the doorway, children’s curious faces, an old man with a stick. A group of girls bursts into giggles behind me so I turn and to their embarrassment ask them what they are
really
laughing at. Eventually one of them covers her mouth with a hand, a girl of saintly beauty who asks nearly inaudibly if I am related to the actor George Hamilton. I tell her that I expect I am if one were to go back several centuries. For some reason this excites the girls still further.

In the late afternoon I strike a drunken deal with Arman to hire a small
bangka
from him, something in which I can paddle back and forth between Tiwarik and Sabay and the next morning, clear-headed and seen off from the beach by children, I head towards the island with the early sun rushing down on all sides. I bound over the wavelets; my arms seem tireless with excitement and well-being. I am filled with the overwhelming desire to do something, there is no telling what.

That was the day I never did do anything but climb up to the grassfield and daydream. It was not until the following day I made a serious effort to acquire Tiwarik’s geography. Until I knew what the island contained and how it lay I could not begin to build my house. Site is everything, of course; I had freedom of choice since I had no claim on the land and the hut I was going to put up would probably not outlive the first serious typhoon.

A position at the foot of the cliffs near where my companion and I had taken shelter had always been a possibility but I now found that the coral strand had changed its shape and position. Before, there had been a steep bank of shingle with a declivity which filled with water at high tide and became a hot lagoon before draining away at low tide. This bank had now vanished and with it the recurrent lagoon. Instead there was a spit of shingle jutting from an altogether narrower beach like a miniature port with its jetty. I soon realised that the whole coral bank shifted constantly, changing its shape with nearly every tide and during severe storms practically disappearing for a while as violent currents swirled it away. Yet it always returned. Consequently landing on Tiwarik was seldom the same twice running. I took pleasure in this feature. No sooner had the blackened corals, clumped together as supports for fishermen’s cooking pots, become familiar in their disposition than the sea scoured the beach clean of all sites taking with it the carefully-collected piles of fish spines (otherwise a menace to bare feet), cigarette packets, frayed ends of nylon twine and crisp curls of abrasive skin torn off a species of trigger-fish known locally and mystifyingly as
bagets
or ‘teenager’. All in all, then, this strand was clearly no place for a house.

The ideal site, of course, was somewhere on the uplands where with the sea-eagles I could command the bright gulfs to every horizon. However, my scrambles up the cliffs had made it clear that convenience would have to take priority over enchantment: the thought of carrying water daily up to the top of the island was too forbidding. It was going to be enough to fetch it from the mainland in the first place. Eventually I compromised and chose a spot above one end of the strand where a prehistoric fall of Tiwarik’s black igneous rock had left a ledge, roughly level and some twenty feet deep, covered in shingle and a scatter of topsoil on which grew a succulent mat of vines. From here I could gaze across the strait to Sabay, watch the comings and goings on its beach or let my eyes travel up the great slopes of the cordillera behind it, past the tilted prairies of
cogon
to the gorges of scree and observe the veilings and vanishings
of cloud about the peaks. Even the most unsatisfied eye might not grow restless at such an outlook.

I gave Captain Sanso money, he gave orders. Soon
bangkas
laden with helpers landed on Tiwarik’s strand and the cliffs echoed to the sound of bamboos being split. Several sorties to the top of the island were organised and various stout timbers borne back from the forest, dripping with sap which dangled snot-like from their cut ends. Apart from nails, tools and nylon line little had to be brought from the mainland. The one exception was palm fronds for weaving the panels of
sulirap
with which to cover the bare bones of roof and walls. The lack of a single palm tree on Tiwarik was fairly conclusive proof that the island had never been inhabited. There was not even a wild papaya tree, which surprised me for I had already noticed the steady traffic of birds across the strait and would have imagined they had long since brought in their gut the seeds of this ubiquitous tree. The papaya, like the dragonfly, is unchanged from its fossil predecessors: a survivor which seems to suggest it is perfect in some way not immediately apparent (certainly not in the boringly-flavoured, cheesy-textured fruit it bears like skin tags around its bole).

At the end of three days I have a simple house and several new friends. Arman, perhaps by virtue of being the Captain’s brother, has about him an ease and openness which makes him accessible. He is immediately recognisable as a fisherman for instead of the uniform Asian black his hair is a strange layered thatch of brown with auburn tints and streaks of authentic dark blond. Only the fisher-boys’ hair goes this colour, and only if their fishing is full-time and involves diving. Ordinary fishermen – generally the older ones – who sit in boats for hours with a hook and line remain largely unaffected. Arman also has a diver’s physique: deep chest and shoulders, slender waist, powerful thighs. At twenty-seven he must be past his physical peak but is still probably the fittest of all Sabay’s fishermen because – as I discover later – he alone does not smoke.

Arman has brought with him his young cousin Intoy, a boy in his earliest teens whose hair is also tawny. Intoy is unabashed by my foreignness, is openly curious about the
whim which has brought me here, wants to know if I have any
komiks
with me. He laughs a good deal and leaps about like a sprite. Once he discovers I am a spear-fisherman we have an earnest discussion about techniques and trigger design which brings Arman and the others over. This of all subjects seems to be the great ice-breaker. We might have had one of those knowing, raunchy conversations about sex which occasionally serve but I would not have been treated as seriously as I now am when I describe my own method of waterproofing a cheap Chinese flashlight for night diving. Intoy asks about the commonest species of fish ‘where you come from’. He means Kansulay and makes it sound as remote and vague as England (which everyone in the provinces here thinks is one of the states of the Union).

When finally my house is complete Intoy walks all round it appraisingly and announces he will live here. Arman promotes this idea.

‘You can’t live without a companion,’ he says.

I tell him I am quite used to it. Everyone is aghast so it is clear they had none of them believed me at the drinking session that first afternoon.