Ghosts of Manila (15 page)

‘I know,’ said Herrera. ‘But I also know you’re right about there being good men on the force. It’s like the fire-fighters. Despite the scoundrels who won’t tackle a blaze until they’re given cash or something to eat there are always men who perform absurd acts of heroism unpaid and on an empty stomach. Of course. They’re the ones who understand the logic, the intelligence of living properly. That intelligence
is
compassion. You and I are really in the same line of business, Lieu-
Inspector.
Every day we see people struggling against impossible odds to live morally and intelligently. The majority of the people in this country would give their eye teeth to be able to be clean.’

‘So what do you tell them?’

‘I tell them they ought to rejoice at their marvellous freedom. I tell them they’re free to murder and cheat and steal if they want, and equally free not to. The choice is theirs. Within that greater freedom there are, of course, predisposing factors which make certain choices
more likely or more difficult. There was a French writer called Anatole France who once remarked on the freedom shared by rich and poor alike to steal bread and sleep under bridges. That’s a very Filipino thing to say, I’ve always thought. I suspect he was really one of our Pinoy diaspora just pretending to be French. Come to that, I believe there’s a Jewish saying of more or less the same meaning. Something about counting no man honest until he’s had the opportunity and the need to steal. By the same token priestly virtue’s no virtue at all, is it? I’m expected to be good. I’m badly paid to be good. Just like you. Since I’m never tempted to steal it’d be grotesque to commend me for honesty. It’s not the middle classes who fill the jails.’

‘I sometimes think this would be a better world if they did,’ said Rio Dingca, surprising himself. But he knew that what really filled the jails, like the streets themselves, was ghosts.

A
SERIOUS DISCUSSION
was taking place in the Tugos house in San Clemente. Because it was so private all the shutters had to be closed owing to there being no glass in the windows and people coming and going in the mud alley in front. This gave the place a portentous air as if it were concealing a conspiracy or the goings-on of a fanatical religious sect. Inside, all sewing had been suspended. The downstairs room was full of the co-operative’s members as well as Eddie, Bats, Judge and Billy, not yet properly washed after their digging. On one of the sewing tables was a cardboard box which had held packets of Birch Tree milk and now contained something far more potent. From time to time somebody lifted the flap curiously, nervously, as if to check that the skull hadn’t moved or turned into something else. Nanang Pipa was automatically acting as the meeting’s chairwoman, Eddie not being one of nature’s chairmen. She had just sworn everyone present to secrecy, the Bible passed around and right hands raised solemnly as in courtroom dramas on television.

‘I think we’ve got three alternatives. We can tell the police, we can tell a priest or we can try to keep quiet about it.’

‘Four,’ somebody said. ‘We can tell Monching.’

Monching Jandusay was the barangay captain and ought indeed to have been the first to know, to have had the entire problem dumped in his official hands, had he not been so tremendously drunk most of
the time. Nowadays his capacities extended little further than being able to decide that he needed to pee. Even in this he was not infallible.

‘Exactly,’ said Nanang Pipa briskly. ‘Three alternatives. We’re lucky here. People may say he’s a mad radical but Father Herrera’s okay. Rio Dingca’s okay, too. But the problem with telling the cops is we can’t guarantee to get Rio. According to him there are 157 policemen in his station and my bet is that once some senior officer hears what we’ve got he’ll come here himself to make sure.’

To make sure he gets the loot, everyone was thinking. For that was indeed the idea at the top of each mind. Skulls meant foul play or treasure, and treasure was the preferred option. Nobody seriously believed it was General Yamashita’s, of course, and in any case the Marcoses were supposed to have found that and kept it for themselves. But the details of that treasure’s burial, true or not, had acquired a mythic status to which all other buried treasure ought to conform. The essence was that you forced conscripts to dig a hole and manhandle the loot down into it. Then you made them shovel half the earth back before you shot them and buried their bodies beneath the remaining soil. To anyone weaned on this myth a skull was as good as a cross over a grave. Both were an earnest that something lay beneath.

‘Maybe it’s just an ordinary body,’ said Judge. ‘Perhaps this used to be a graveyard right here a long time ago, say in the time of the Spanish. Before the city grew and they had to build the big cemeteries over there.’ He gave a backward nod towards a wall covered with a polyester tapestry of a group of dogs wearing eyeshades sitting at a table, playing cards and smoking cigars. Everyone’s mental eyes flew through it and up to the great burial grounds beyond.

‘I suppose so,’ said Nanang Pipa dubiously. Nobody liked to feel they were living over a disused cemetery. ‘In which case I suppose we ought to put it back.’

‘And then shit on it?’ said Bats.

‘Oh my God.’ The original purpose of this pit was suddenly recalled. ‘Maybe the –’

At this moment there was a knock on the door and a boy of about thirteen appeared holding a knotted plastic sachet containing half a cupful of soy sauce. He was one of three children in San Clemente usually distinguished by being better dressed than the others. His jeans were of heavier quality, his shirts prettier, his trainers genuine Nike or
Converse instead of local imitations. Rich foreigners were easily seduced into shelling out for the real McCoy.

‘Sorry, Nanang Pipa. Mum said to return the
toyo
she owes you.’

‘We’re in a
business
meeting,
Danny,’ Pipa said sternly. ‘But thank you. And please thank her as well.’

The door closed. The interruption was a timely reminder of yet another problem, which was keeping the news of their find from the barrio’s other inhabitants, at least until some plan had been agreed. Once it leaked out onto the gossip circuit anything could happen. It was not lost on those present that Danny’s mother was also a member of the sewing co-operative and would shortly want to know why she had been excluded from the meeting. More rumour, more rifts, unless this was handled just right.

‘What we’ll do,’ said Nanang Pipa, ‘is keep the skull here for the moment.’

‘You mean in the
house
?
asked Rey the chop-chop boy with a theatrical shudder. ‘Oo. I shouldn’t like that. Imagine, sewing away with that horrible thing beside me.’

‘It won’t be beside you, it’ll be up on that shelf there. And it’s not a horrible thing, it’s just somebody’s head. Or was. In any case I’m going to put the Bible in the box with it, and a Rosary. Meanwhile, the boys will go on digging –’

‘We’ve got to get to the bottom of this,’ said Bats, laughing.

‘– will go on digging,’ resumed Pipa in her best chairwoman’s no-nonsense manner, ‘until they find something else or until I say so. I want a comfort room. And just remember, we’re all under sacred oath. That means not a word, not a whisper, not a hint.’

‘All right,’ Judge said. ‘But what’s this meeting been about, then? People will want to know.’

‘Perfectly simple,’ said Pipa. ‘We’ve been deciding what to give Danny’s mother as a birthday surprise.’

And
that,
the ability to think on her feet, was what enabled her to take charge, thought Eddie with rueful pride as he and the rest of the gang trooped out of the back door. It was people like her who sat about making decisions while the aptly-named “sons of sweat” toiled with spades. ‘Go a bit slow,’ he called softly down after Bats as if wearing a shred of his wife’s mantle. ‘We don’t want to be, er, breaking anything.’ This was all said in a low voice, for only a couple
of feet away was a neighbour’s kitchen. There was a slimy patch beneath an overhang from which washing-up water, grains of rice and escaped noodles periodically gushed and drooled between slats.

It was good advice to little avail, for within fifteen minutes there came a hollow crunching sound and up came spadefuls of earth mixed with pale fragments.

‘Is that another one?’

‘No!’ bellowed Bats. ‘It’s just an old pot.’

‘Shut up, Bats, you cretin,’ hissed Judge, squatting on the edge. ‘And go
slow.
That old pot may be part of
it.’

‘Oh. Ah. Sorry.’

The pieces were taken inside and washed. Once they had been cleaned, an imaginative eye could see they would fit together into a little blue and white porcelain bowl, round and slightly squashed, like a sea urchin’s fragile shell. By nightfall there were more bones, too: a handful of sticklike objects, some curved and some straight and all stained ochre with earth. Several were so small the co-operative began to lose heart.

‘Surely you don’t find chicken bones in a treasure pit?’

‘Maybe they stopped for lunch.’

‘Well, I say we go on a bit tomorrow.’

‘I don’t like it,’ said Mrs Piedragoso, a timid seamstress who so far had played an entirely silent part in the developing conspiracy. ‘I remember this legend we used to have in Marinduque about the guardians of treasures. My father said he’d often seen them. Chinese pirates used to come ashore and bury their treasure so they could pick it up later. What they did was they posted a spirit guardian on it to stop anyone digging it up. Only the Chinese were able to do it because they had a special knowledge. My father said he’d see the spirits at night on the beach, hovering over the sand. They had demon faces with enormous fangs and blazing eyes. Supposing there’s a guardian here, too? That bowl looks Chinesey to me.’

So it did to everyone else. Despite a crisp, rational ‘H’m!’ from Nanang Pipa a distinct uneasiness filled the room.

That night Eddie and the boys got pretty smashed, all things considered, drinking beer mixed with gin and nibbling with a fork from a tin of liver spread. Pipa was out at Danny’s mother’s house, a politically motivated visit of some adroitness. From outside came
sudden bursts of panting and shouts, very close, together with the scuffling of bare feet on beaten earth. A basketball now and then bounced off the wall of the house with a thud. Inside, conversation was about almost anything but the afternoon’s discoveries. This was partly due to a shared feeling that it would be dishonourable to get drunk and risk being overheard, but mainly because the events were still too recent to have sunk to that deeper layer of perennial topics to which a mixture of gin and beer provided reliable access.

One inevitable subject in any company which included Bats was his brother Gringo, in whose cab Eddie had shared many an adventure involving dogs, drugs and the occasional semi-conscious tourist calling for madder wine and louder women. Gringo was never stumped for loud women or just about anything else a tourist might want, including a fully-armed, leather-creaking police motorcyclist named Hitlerito. The point about Gringo that made him crop up again and again in such conversations was his laughter, which was unreal, and his rage, which was very real indeed. In 1989 he had been working for what was thought to be one of the more honest cab companies, the Silver Taxi Service, when it became the centre of a famous labour case. Silver’s management had long been collecting Social Security contributions from all its drivers until the day one man, deep in a family health crisis and needing emergency funds, went along to the Social Security office to claim help and discovered that none of his remittances had ever been paid in. Neither, on closer inspection, had anybody else’s. The drivers promptly called a strike, demanding to know where all their hard-earned pay had been going, thereby crippling the Silver Taxi Service. True to type, Silver’s management responded by hiring a police heavy to kill the strike leaders. He assassinated the President of the drivers’ union. Not long afterwards the strike collapsed. Gringo was one of many drivers interviewed by reporters, for it became a celebrated issue of its day. From them he learned there was no serious doubt about the killer’s links with Silver’s management since several
Inquirer
reporters had seen them all drinking together in the Sunlight, a four-star hotel which was also Silver-owned. The killer was later reassigned as provincial police chief up in Ferdinand Marcos’s old territory.

Gringo, like many of the other Silver drivers, was left with considerable undischarged fury. Not only had gross injustice been
done, it had been seen to be done by anybody who could read a newspaper. Yet there was no restitution, no redress. The innocent had been robbed and cowed, the guilty free to carry on stealing and intimidating. A man had been killed, his assassin promoted. Gringo being Gringo, his anger came out as anarchy: in ever-zanier exploits which often left him hunched over his own wheel, laughing until tears came. Underneath, though, anyone could recognise that injustice piled on hardship and topped with ever more injustice bedded down into something not unlike a permanent state of pain: that pain which so many carried and which now and then could break out in a frenzy with a gun spraying bullets or a machete flailing in a last, desperate attempt to clear a path for the soul through a tangling darkness.

Gringo did not, of course, own the car he drove. It was one of a fleet of thirty called Melody Cabs owned by a Chinese and named for his wife, though as Gringo would say the only melodious thing about them was gearbox whine. Melody cabs all looked a little odd inside, but in a way only someone in the know could identify. It was like one of those visual perception tests in which an apparently random jumble of black and white blotches suddenly jells into a picture of Jesus Christ. Once having seen the figure, one went on seeing it: the picture never reverted to its former incoherence. Similarly, once having driven in a Melody taxi one knew it for ever as a chop-chop cab. Chop-chops were made up of spare parts of Japanese domestic vehicles, less duty being paid on imported parts than on fully assembled cars. Labour being so cheap they could be put together in a workshop outside Manila and still represent a saving. The only problem was comparatively minor, that the Japanese drove on the left so vehicles for their home market were all right-hand drive. This required ingenuity at the assembly stage which never completely overcame a certain oddness about the fascia, the instruments being curiously grouped.

But the cabs worked, and Gringo worked. The engine was hardly ever switched off. Just as ‘bedspacers’ slept in shifts in a single rented bed, so Melody drivers began their stint at the wheel in a driver’s seat still damp with a colleague’s sweat. He would touch the luminous crucifix which dangled beneath the ‘Bless Our Trip’ motto, drape a clean towel behind his neck and edge out into what seemed to be the world’s biggest traffic jam. It was from Gringo’s tours of duty, his
pasadas,
that the news, the gossip, the stories came to enliven and
inform his brother’s drinking sessions with Eddie and the others tucked away behind the walls of San Clemente. The fare who fell silent in Mandaluyong because his lady escort was sitting on his face. The off-duty policeman unconscious with drink whom his riotous colleagues handcuffed to a seatbelt bracket on the floor with his own cuffs before tossing the key out of the window (‘Don’t worry, he’ll pay,’ they said as they climbed out in Balik-Balik and disappeared.) And the Canadian nun whose luggage had exploded on the way to the airport.

That had been a near thing, actually, though hilarious retrospectively. There had been two of
them sitting side by side, Sisters of the Rosy Pillar or something, chatting away as they bowled along Roxas. Suddenly there was this tremendous fizzing and popping noise and immediately afterwards a muffled
thump.
In his mirror Gringo could see white smoke jetting from every crack of the suitcase, bursting even from the keyholes of the locks. In an instant, and despite the open windows, the cab filled with choking chemical clouds. Screams and a red glow were coming from the rear as he swung across two lanes of traffic into the providentially handy entrance to Navy HQ and leaped out. The rear windows had both lost their handles and were jammed down so it was easy to get a door open, grab the suitcase and hurl it out. By now flames had melted a hole in the lid but luckily seemed not yet to have spread downwards. The blackened Sisters emerged pretty much intact except for streaming red eyes behind their rimless spectacles. They leaned on each other, coughing into handkerchiefs, and watched their luggage burn. The Navy guards deserted their posts and joined the curious onlookers straggling over from squatter shanties pitched against the sea wall.