Playing with Water (4 page)

‘At least you must have a
bantay
,’ somebody suggests.

I don’t think I will need a guard, there being no-one else on Tiwarik.

‘Ruffians come here,’ says Arman darkly. ‘All sorts of criminals from the Visayas. They may land one night, creep up and cut your throat.’

I say I think I am more likely to die several fathoms down than have my throat cut.

‘Well then, you must have a servant. Intoy here will keep you in firewood and bring your water across each day. He’s a good boy, quite strong.’

‘About as strong as boiled seaweed,’ agrees another boy whose job has been to cook rice for the construction team. Amid laughter he and Intoy tussle and roll down the shingle spit into the shallows where they thrash like porpoises. I know why Arman is insisting. It is partly that my payment of his cousin for houseboy duties would bring some money into the child’s family but also it is a matter of propriety. That a visitor – especially a ‘
kano
– should live nearby
unaided is not correct. I recognise this; it has taken me several years to establish my independence at Kansulay in a way which merely makes people rueful and indulgent rather than giving offence.

I explain I am a writer who needs time and space to himself. Intoy comes up and dumps himself down, dripping and panting, and says I can send him away whenever I wish. And in fact at that moment I want them all to go away and leave me alone with my new house.

After a bit they do and I lie on my stomach on the floor and watch from the open doorway their little flotilla nearing Sabay. The bamboo strips beneath me smell sweetly of sap, their curved surfaces still green. It will be some weeks before they turn to blond and the nail heads to black.

Later that same evening after eating fish and rice by firelight I go back down to the shore to clean the dishes in the lapsing wavelets, scrubbing them with handfuls of gravel. They remain coated with a film of cooking oil which will stay constant day after day. The moon is dazzling, awesome, full this very night. A drift of silver molecules washes away from the dishes; it will be broken down by marine organisms within the hour.

First nights in strange places can determine how one sees them for ever after. This is my second first night on Tiwarik and it is determined not to efface itself into just another tropic nocturnal. The puddled mercury which is the sea, the wheeling galaxies above and the island at my back full of the metallic sheen of leaves give off the strangest light. It is as if everything generated its own luminescence which the moon then gathers into its brilliant lens. Tonight the moon stimulates the secretion of light from things much as the regular use of a well encourages the flow of its own waters. The whole of Tiwarik, that irregular bulk of rock and soil jutting from the ocean, must be veined with capillaries along which this light leaks and gathers and overflows from cliff face and grass blade and forest canopy. The serenity and clearness seem a good omen and I go back up to my hut with the dishes, content to be here.

But the omens are not yet finished. I blow out the lamp
and lie on the floor listening to the slow breathing of the sea below, the crickets in the grass around the house. From nearby a gnarled rattling prefaces a tree-lizard’s loud repeated call as it names itself in Tagalog:
tu-ko, tu-ko, tu-ko
… American troops in Vietnam knew it as the
fuck-you
lizard but the sound of these syllables is less close, maybe saying more about the namer than about the named. As I lie pleasurably adrift I become aware of change. The noises are fewer, the chirpings and chitterings are stilled, the harsher cries from up in the island’s cap of jungle die away. Even the sea sounds muffled. I open my eyes. Instead of brilliant chinks of moonlight in walls and roof there is nothing but dark. I get up, open the door and fumble down the bamboo steps into a weird landscape.

The moon is still there but it has nearly gone out. Its flawless disc is still flawless but now dulled to a deep amber as if seen through a piece of broken beer bottle. A primaeval shiver runs over me, a sense of having been transported a million years forward to the Earth’s end. It would be more bearable if the insect noises were still confidently asserting independence of such cosmic trivia. But nothing moves. It is as if all living creatures together with the sea and the wind were silenced by the desolation of total eclipse.

As the minutes go by and the Earth is held motionless I recover sufficiently to reflect on my amazing good fortune. At school there had occasionally been announcements that everyone could skip the class immediately following Break in order to watch a partial eclipse of the sun, and we had dutifully gathered outside with pieces of smoked glass. But it had always been cloudy, that grey overcast which conspires to shield Britain from the universe. After half an hour we all trooped in again, not even particularly disappointed and with our faces smeared with lamp-black. Yet here, my second first night on Tiwarik, there is a total eclipse of a full moon in a cloudless sky which lasts for nearly two hours. It is astounding.

Certainly it is easy to understand people’s terror of eclipses, even of the moon. When on my ninth birthday I was given an Army signal lamp I was enraptured by it and its accessories but became wary of one particular piece of
equipment. This was a pair of rubber goggles with deep red lenses for use when a red glass cap was fitted over the lamp, enabling the signaller to send without the beam giving away his position. The first time I went out into the garden on a sunny day wearing them I was seized with a complete terror of the apocalypse. The world had turned to blood. The tennis lawn and the cherry trees were an alien landscape, as it were Mars at war. Above it flamed a terrifying sky, raging with billows of incandescent gases. I was suddenly the last person alive anywhere, my parents and sister and dog a million years dead on another world and I condemned to witness the destruction by fire of the universe before myself being consumed. I tore the goggles from my face and surfaced into warm June sunlight. Beneath its reassuring lambency the lawn was now a luscious green while in the sky overhead the boiling smoke had changed to mild heaps of drifting cumulus. Thereafter whenever I wished to frighten myself I would walk about wearing the goggles, sweat pooling in the rubber eyecups, partially emboldened by the spicules of white light leaking in at the side of the lenses through ventilation holes.

Now on Tiwarik I note the reddish tinge of the eclipsed moon and understand the biblical references to its turning to blood. At the same time, of course, I am captivated by the oddness of the phenomenon. It is so rare and completely unexpected I do not know quite what to do with it, so after walking about experimentally for some time I come back and sit on the top step and watch the first splinter of silver as the untrammelled disc begins at last to slide clear of the shadow. No doubt about it, this heavenly body has nothing whatever to do with the bleak satellite on which men landed nearly twenty years ago. That was merely the Earth’s moon. But the brilliant mandala whose last segment of tarnish is wiped clear as I watch, this is The Moon. The Moon is an act of the imagination and will remain forever unmarked by the cleated boot-prints of interlopers. And from all around crickets burst back into song, the
tuko
calls, the sea breathes again. Now I can go to sleep.

When living in Kansulay I commute between the forest and the village by the shore, a distance of only a mile or so but quite enough to tinge things with the remoteness of the interior, the
bundok.

The path from Kansulay takes me up a valley whose floor was long ago planted with coconuts. Eventually the path forks off, crosses a stream and climbs steeply up one side among wilder vegetation until it comes out on top of the bare ridge where my hut stands. From here I can look down into the valley without at any point being able to see its floor, only the dense crowns of the palms, infinite sprays of tail-feathers and the coconuts’ amber gleam. Invisible beneath them are two huts several hundred yards apart. One is the house of my nearest neighbours, the Malabayabas family, whom I see almost daily. The other is a ruin and stands by the stream amid the pink-grey pillars of the coconuts. There with several pigs once lived Lolang Mating.

Lolang Mating was undoubtedly an exceptional person by rural Filipino standards in that although she was a grandmother (as the honorific implies) she chose to live alone, away from her family who were down in the village. She was visited daily by her son and her grandchildren who are now muscular teenagers with feet calloused from climbing trees. They came as much to feed the pigs as to see Granny but to all appearances relations between them were reasonably cordial. However, the old woman refused absolutely to go down and live with them. Probably nobody had actually pointed out that it was unseemly for a woman in her seventies to live on her own in the semi-wilderness: it would have been superfluous in a culture where the principle of family proximity is supreme and where the
question
Who is your companion?
is habitually asked whenever any activity such as eating or sleeping or merely walking home is proposed. In a land where nobody does anything alone from choice, where a bamboo floor densely packed with sleeping bodies is considered far preferable to luxurious solitude, where superstition as much as a lack of torch batteries keeps people indoors after dark, Lolang Mating chose to live alone in her hut.

In time I became friendly with her as I went to and from the village for necessities such as rice and cooking oil. When I fetched water from the stream nearby in the mornings I would see her, patched skirts tucked up around bowed mahogany legs and with her grey hair done up in a bun skewered with a bamboo sliver, standing in the current washing her wrinkled chest. With instinctive decorum we would pretend not to have seen each other as I suddenly found something to interest me a little way off. Then she would call out a greeting and I knew I could come and lay my plastic jerrycan on its side in the stream and chat. By now she would have changed her blouse and be washing yesterday’s with an end of bright blue detergent soap.

Those early morning conversations with Lolang Mating became a feature of daily life at Kansulay. We would sit on the low boulders with our feet in the current while the palm fronds combed the sunbeams as they fell on the water and butterflies floated on the air. She would talk and unaccountably fall silent, absently raising and lowering the blouse into the water, sometimes beating it with a paddle hacked from the spine of a frond as if to emphasise an inward voice. She would talk to me of the Japanese Occupation, of the anti-Japanese guerrillas, the Hukbalahap, whom she had once sheltered. She would talk of pigs and murders and Mayor Pascual who had been born without an arsehole – she knew because as the midwife she had delivered him – and the doctor had had to make one with a pair of scissors. She talked about the days when you could shop for a family with a single
piso
and when almost anyone who wore a proper hat spoke Spanish. She knew a lot about the magicians who lived in the hills of the interior and grew whole fields of
tintang luya
, black ginger, that rarest of freak plants
whose properties were immensely powerful. Black ginger would help you cast spells or defend you against
manananggal
, vampiric horrors which squat in the rafters of huts where there are babies or the sick and let down their tongues to suck out the sleepers’ livers.

‘So aren’t you frightened here at night?’

‘Of course not,’ she said.

‘But believing in all those spirits and dwarves and ghosts and vampires?’

‘I believe in them of course, I often see them. But I’m not scared of them. They’ll never trouble me. They never have and I’m an old woman now. As long as I’m in my place they’ll leave me alone because they know it’s my place and not theirs.’

‘Like dogs.’

‘Like that.’

She told me she was born here. I looked instinctively towards her hut, its legs and walls bleached silver with age. It was not the house she had been born in, of course, but it was on the same site, as she explained on another occasion. To Europeans accustomed to nostalgia about old things Filipinos can sometimes seem strangely matter-of-fact about impermanence. In an architecture of light wood structures and grass or palm thatch, termites and typhoons between them make a fifty-year-old house an antique. Houses are quickly built and newness is valued as a sign that the family fortunes are on the up-and-up. A patched or sagging house speaks of poverty and low spirits.

Of the house in which Lolang Mating had been born not a trace remained but a blackened rectangular pit where she told me one of its four legs had stood. The original post-hole had been enlarged and was now used as a kiln for making charcoal from coconut shells.

‘When I was born there were no coconuts here,’ she said one day. ‘This was all forest like up there where you live. We had a clearing where my father kept pigs. We found bananas and papayas in the forest and grew
kamoteng-kahoy
which we carried down and sold in the village. Then our landlord bought the land and decided to cut it all down and plant coconuts. I remember how ugly it looked, the
land burnt off and with tufts of coconut seedlings in rows. Now of course it’ll soon be time to cut them down and replant them. They should have been re-planting all the time, not waiting for them to become old at the same moment.’

This spot by the bend in the stream had always been her place regardless of what vegetation came and went, and about it she was not a bit matter-of-fact. She spoke of Kansulay as of some alien city, not as a small collection of houses identical to her own a bare mile away by the sea and lived in almost exclusively by her own relatives of varying remoteness.

‘Too much noise there,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t live in that house of Dando’s’ (Dando was her son). ‘Children and cooking and drinking all the time, day and night. And I don’t like that electric light they want to put in. It hurts my eyes. Too much light at night is harmful: you can tell because it makes people look older, even the children. It does something to the skin. And when you go outside you can’t see anything for five minutes.’

A genuine solitary, then, recognisable at any time and in any culture. The thought was not displeasing that I too might end my days standing in a dappled stream at dawn soaping my wrinkled chest and at night putting luminous fungi in a glass jar to cast a soft radiance inside my hut. One day Lolang Mating was found sprawled on the earth beside her
kayuran
, the low wood tripod with a serrated flange fixed to its beak used for grating coconuts. She was taken down the track to the village and put to bed in Dando’s house. I went to see her a day or two later. She was ambling about on her tough old legs but as if lacking a pig to feed or a blouse to wash she could no longer remember where she was going. There was talk in the family about ‘high blood’; I assumed a minor stroke. She seemed quite unimpaired but there was a remoteness in her eyes that was new.

‘They won’t let me go,’ she told me. ‘They say I can’t go on living there, I might die there all alone.’

‘I expect it’s for the best,’ I said ritually, but we both knew it wasn’t. She had been born there, why could she not die there among the fireflies and the frogs and the crickets? What was so special about having family faces stare down
at you and pester you with medicines?

‘Lazy,’ she said confidingly. ‘They can’t be bothered to come up the track and fetch me down to bury me.’

She made it sound a long way off to her land. It was obvious that had she lived in a world where one did not have to consider social rituals and pious custom she would have chosen to be buried there among the coconuts by the bend in the stream rather than in the cemetery at Bulangan where the salt sea breezes rotted the cement sepulchres and within ten years made them look sordid rather than venerable. She was cut off from the land of her death and quite possibly now at the mercy of an alien crew of territorial spirits. Each time I saw her she seemed more silent, more worn down with the sheer proximity of people.

‘Take her home,’ I urged Dando. ‘Go on, even if it’s only for a visit while you feed the pigs.’

And apparently he did, probably raising his eyebrows to passing villagers’ unspoken enquiries with a mime of filial helplessness as his ancient mother walked back to her country. She was not allowed to do anything when she got there but sat once more in the doorway of her hut with her feet on the polished bamboo rung of the top step as she always had, looking out at the sift of sunlight into her glade and the lurch of butterflies in and out of the dapples. Dando and her grandsons bustled around grating coconut for the pigs, shinning up a tree to collect the bamboo flask of
tuba
. Now and again they glanced to where Lolang Mating slept the sleep of an old person after a long walk, leaning against the doorway with her head against the jamb. And when it was mid-morning and time to set off home for lunch they found she was not to be woken.

So they did cart her off down the track away from the fireflies and the frogs and in due time shovelled her into Bulangan. And there the salt sea-wind blows over her cement lid and the lizards run over the lettering carved with a trowel tip in wet mortar. And for many weeks afterwards I still approached the stream with caution out of sheer habit before going to lay the jerrycan on its side by the stones where we had sat. I would get back from the market in mid-morning and pass her hut and miss her
intelligent gaze, for in the doorway now lolled the uncommunicative horny soles of a grandson as he snoozed.

Then I went away for some months and when I returned found Lolang Mating’s hut canting and derelict. Her family had abandoned the site for it was more convenient to move the pigs and find another tree for palm wine closer to home. The roof had largely blown off in a storm and the slatted bamboo floor which had once been buffed by her bare feet was now black and spongy with wet, for the rains had come. In the mud nearby I found the ladle she had made for pigswill and took that up to my own hut where I still use it for boiling water. But it was not until I first passed her place in the dark that I found a strange thing. For there on a moonless night among the black pillars of this crypt Lolang Mating’s hovel glowed softly. Presumably her habit of bringing luminous fungi into the house had seeded the whole structure with spores which, with the sudden coming of the wet season, had sprouted. Alive with yeasts her hut pulsed with cold energy while by day one remarked only a sad trapezoid of spars and slats.

It was not long before other people passing by at night noticed this and the predictable rumours circulated that the old woman had been a witch and that her familiar spirits or even her own spirit still haunted the spot where she had lived and died. The place was shunned, the hut fell down completely, and I was thought madder than ever to go on living at the end of a path which led through spookish wilds.

I went to Dando’s on the anniversary of his mother’s death even though I think he half believed I had helped cause it by overwhelming his better judgement. I went for the eating and conviviality rather than the prayers for her soul, which I had no doubt could take care of itself. Her grandsons had thickened with muscle and drinking; one of them had gone off to the town some miles away to work as a Petron boy, turning the handle of a petrol pump. Even the pigs had grown fat, roaming the foreshore at dawn to unearth the leavings of the villagers who decently waited until nightfall before defecating in shallow scoops in the sand, like turtles laying their eggs.

Only after she had died did I realise that throughout our acquaintance Lolang Mating had never once asked me what I was doing in Kansulay: a person of phenomenal discretion. Certainly when I first arrived I could not have told her had she asked. It dawned on me only gradually that she might have understood if I had said ‘My father’, since she was also living alone in the
bundok
because of her family and because of the person she was.

To explain it to myself, though, I would have to go back several decades and seven thousand miles to confront a few of those signal incidents which mark the trail leading here. I am old enough now to disdain the slow chronology of childhood and adolescence, most of it as boring to recount as it was to live through, and fix on a handful of events. I judge their importance to me in the way everyone does, by the manner in which they seem to echo down a life and go on appearing weirdly relevant and even influential in what one is and does. Drawing Tiwarik at the age of twelve was one obvious example of such an event. Another comes from a family summer holiday, that set-piece scene for so much collective friction in English family life.

This memory is of a particular skirmish in the protracted feud with my father which in retrospect seems to have begun the day he was demobbed and which lasted until his death in the week before my university Prelims. examination. We were somewhere in the West Country, having a picnic lunch on a beach. The day was warm, the Atlantic glacial. My younger sister Jane with her child’s imperviousness to cold had earlier insisted on bathing, forcing at least one adult in with her to rescue her if need be from the green and pounding waves. I was sitting slightly behind my father, anxious not to be within his range of vision. He was slowly eating a tomato sandwich, gazing seawards as if at the fleets of ships he had always wanted to design in preference to a worthier career in medicine which presumably left the inner eye littered with nothing so much as corpses. Suddenly I saw the wasp which had settled on his sandwich and was busy in one of the doughy indentations of his last bite. I said nothing. I watched as
without looking he took another mouthful and began his measured, irritatingly thorough chewing.