Ghosts of Manila (7 page)

It was chastening, it was intended to be chastening. The beginning of self-righteous resentment made Prideaux guess that the priest was his junior by probably ten years. At the same time he felt justified in his increasing belief that there was a deep flaw in an academic discipline which believed it was possible to drift about the world getting to grips with the alien, erecting theories over lunch, dressing them up in scholarly rhetoric and calling them fieldwork. Did Prideaux really feel he even understood his own countrymen? They were a constant bafflement. How then could he travel eight thousand miles and presume to grasp an utterly foreign people, especially those who took shelter behind English as fluent as this priest’s? What was patronage if not this? White man with tape-recorder solves kinship problem among the Fuzzies. Papuan humour cracked by Oxford don… He let Father Herrera ramble through a third pot of tea. The Church under threat. Condoms and Aids. Charismatics. Missionaries from Idaho and Utah wearing white short-sleeved shirts and boyish smiles and bearing a lot of nonsense about Joseph Smith into the credulous provinces. And Islam, of course. Green tea and dialectics had loosened Herrera’s tongue.

‘I always thought Christ was nothing like thorough enough in trying
to distinguish between politics and religion. That stuff about Caesar’s head on the coin was more of a wisecrack than useful, don’t you think? Too evasive, too lightweight an answer. You can’t just say religion’s a private matter, not when you encourage the founding of a Church with revolutionary views, not when you get publicly executed for it by nervous governors. It’s a messy argument. Judaism’s worse: the religion
is
the people
are
the state. Islam too, but by golly they’re just as hypocritical as the rest of us when they want to be. One stupid Christian missionary shoots his mouth off down in Zamboanga and the faithful put down their bottles of beer and caper about with that rabble-rousing stuff about blood and holy war. What’s that got to do with spirituality?

‘Down there in Mindanao they’ve already got their autonomous Moslem region but they still go on massacring each other. You think pork and Islam don’t mix? They do in Mindanao, and a good many drink like fish, too. The mixture of alcohol and weapons there is half the problem. But that should concern nobody but them. It’s a private matter. Why can’t we all be humbler? Even the Prophet Mohammed made mistakes. He was admonished in the Qu’ran for paying too much attention to bigwigs and turning away from a poor blind man eager for knowledge of God. You’ll find it in the
surah
called “He frowned”. The Prophet’s deputy, the Second Caliph, was also humbled. He admitted he was wrong for having spied on a party where he suspected they were drinking wine, for climbing up a ladder and getting over the wall into a private garden. They
were
drinking wine, but he was forced to concede it was none of his business even if he was the Second Caliph. “Which of you is without fault?” asked Christ. The same, you see. But today our great religions are perverted by egomaniacs claiming to be fundamentalists, and fundamentalists wanting to be politicians, and everyone being public busybodies at the cost of their private souls. God save us all from the zealous. Thank you for a delicious meal.’

Prideaux had the wilted sensation of a chef who from anxious curiosity has leaned too close to the oven when opening its door. Even emerging from the New Era’s fragrant chill into the roaring sauna of mid-afternoon traffic came as a lesser blast.

‘Give me a call,’ Herrera was saying. ‘The same number you used before.’ He took a visiting card from his plastic wallet. It was printed
in blue, overinked, slightly at an angle. ‘I’ll show you my parish. Next time lunch is on me. Of course you’ve seen squatter areas before. I imagine anthropologists are like journalists in that respect. But come anyway, if you’ve got time. This traffic.’ He turned away with an upraised palm and was borne away on the general tide of T-shirts.

‘Too old for this sort of thing,’ Prideaux told himself.
Could
he be so demoralised as to have been on the point of offering the damned man a donation for his parish? He wondered how real academics managed to limit themselves to a carefully defined topic. How did you stop something unravelling at every edge? The vertiginous and disheartening pit combined with the beer he had drunk to make him fretfully hate these streets, this city. What was the point of these excoriating lectures? Stay at home. Babble of green fields.

B
ACK IN MARCH
that year Insp. Dingca had attended his elder daughter’s High School Graduation. His best polyester slacks were growing tighter all the time, he had noted. Must watch that. Don’t want to start looking like Jun Santiago, the desk sergeant, who needed but snout and trotters. Part of the problem was having to shove a holstered pistol down his waistband. He had had a meeting first thing that morning with one of his ‘assets’, a transvestite informer named Babs, and had calculated things well enough to speed back to Laguna against the mid-morning traffic and sidle in at the back of the hall like a furtive schoolboy. Far away on a stage teenagers cut from sheet metal came and went, creased and ironed and shining with endeavour. Flags were saluted, anthems sung, stirring poems declaimed. Banners with golden fringes billowed gently to the delighted exhalations of hundreds of proud parents. Dingca stood and sweated and clapped with sudden force as Eunice stepped forward from the tin ranks, received her scroll with becomingly bowed head, moved away in a firestorm of flashbulbs with a demure swirl of knife-edged pleats. The collective virginity of it all was awesome and reassuring. These were good girls and boys, the hope for the future, the something or other… Babs had just fingered his club’s owner for kidnapping children and selling them in the provinces. The proprietor was a Chinese businesswoman with close connections in the Mayor’s office. It needed thought. Tangle with City Hall and the next thing you knew was you were posted to Davao or Nueva Ecija, or maybe no further than the bottom of Manila Bay.

Afterwards there was an open-air buffet on the school parade ground. The glum, brownish smell of mudwater blew in from the lake, the incense of an industry in decline since Laguna’s once-flourishing fishpans were silting up or starved of oxygen or maybe just plain polluted. Dingca, who used to take a proprietorial interest in the lake he had decided to live near, was confused by the conflicting newspaper reports. Whatever they meant, Laguna de Bay had clearly become yet one more thing infected by scandal or impending disaster. For the present, the pondy smell brought an authentically rural whiff to these festivities. The capital city was spreading, true. Manila was not as far away as it had been, the cordon sanitaire of fields and creeks and paddies infiltrated now by ribbon development practically all the way from the back of the airport. But Eunice and her classmates were good girls, still thank God innocent of the tainted metropolis which yearly crept nearer. He beamed indulgently, circulating among friends and neighbours, greeting bowling cronies, Lions, Rotarians and local businessmen. They each held a plate of spaghetti in tomato sauce with sweetmeats of sticky rice, slices of white bread, and a wodge of violet gelatine all crammed together and eaten in no particular order. He came to rest beside his wife and daughters, patting little Divina on her ribboned hair.

‘You cut a very distinguished figure,’ he told Eunice. ‘Easily the best-dressed girl of 1992’ – a judicious piece of flattery since Teresita had made the clothes herself. ‘I felt like a Sixth Grader.’ This was true. The sight of all those seventeen-year-olds standing there with their black shoes and white ankle socks pressed together, their brown legs
sealed,
had given him an erotic jolt and he heard again an inward phrase he hadn’t spoken to himself since he was thirteen:
Big
Girls.
It was uneasy and enticing, so that he now over-praised his own daughter for the shocking allure of the girl who had stood two down the line, her ugly plastic ID card imaginatively concealed by a little bunch of white blossoms, ‘It’s a terrible burden for a father to have such a sensationally beautiful daughter.’ He laid a fond fist around her shoulder, managing not to spill his glass of watery pineapple juice down her dress.

‘I thought I was going to faint it was so hot up there. We were all ready to drop.’

‘I know,’ said her father, who hadn’t noticed, ‘I was sort of
impressed by your composure.’ He saw an opening. ‘Not like that poor girl standing near you. The tall one with the bunch of flowers?’

‘Oh,
Patti.
Patti Gonzales. Well,’ Eunice sniffed.

‘I thought she looked a bit under the weather.’

‘Not from the heat, I shouldn’t think,’ said Eunice darkly.

Dingca was about to pounce on this remark but was forestalled by the insinuating passage of his daughter’s mathematics teacher, aglint with teeth and spectacles. The moment was lost, converted at once into tedious stuff about grades. His mind returned to Babs. This kidnapping young children racket was pretty small-time. Besides, it was nothing new. As long as there was a demand, kids would disappear. Babs had pointed a slender, manicured finger at Lettie Tan who owned the club he worked in on M.H. del Pilar. This was ‘The Topless Pit’, where the most beautiful hostesses were all male while authentic females were restricted to performing tricks like opening bottles of Coke with their vaginas, ‘drinking’ the contents and ejecting them in a tawny spray of froth into the delighted faces of drunken Australians. What had Iron Pussy and her colleagues to do with Dingca, whose precinct was now miles away on the other side of the Pasig? Maybe nothing. Having been posted off his old patch he was nowadays only too happy to leave the Ermita fleshpots to WPDC Station 5. None of Babs’s information (‘
Hot
news, Inspector. You’re going to
love
this’… Why did Babs, of all people, call him by his correct, new, demilitarised rank?) would have registered had it not been for two recent, minor, and previously unconnected events. The first was that a woman had been arrested in Harrison Plaza shopping centre pretending to be the mother of a toddler who was trotting happily at her side, licking an ice cream. By sheer chance the real mother, who had been scanning the crowds of shoppers in panic, happened to spot her own infant even though it was now wearing a little blue cap with mouse ears. The mall’s security guards had held all three, their task made no easier by the child’s reluctance to show the least preference for either woman until the ice cream was gone. Then it wailed, the fake mother tried to make a run for it, was arrested and hauled away. The odd thing was that Dingca turned out to know her vaguely because she was from San Clemente and he heard of the case back at the station. The other minor event was a formal complaint lodged with his station chief by a wealthy citizen who alleged that the
police were turning a blind eye to the despoliation and looting of a family cenotaph in the nearby cemetery. The wealthy citizen, who hadn’t deigned to come in person but had sent a notarized letter via a young man who was either an action movie star or a goon and probably both, was Lettie Tan.

Dingca, the father not the Inspector, had for many minutes been saying ‘Exactly, Mam’ and ‘Nowadays you can’t be too careful’ to a succession of teachers wearing their best shoes. He now caught sight of Patti Gonzales a little way off and in the sudden lurch this caused him made two simultaneous discoveries. One was that she was Patti
Gonzales
as in Butz Gonzales, the owner of Bowl-o-Rama; the other was that she looked a good deal like Babs.
Babs?
That twilight creature? His asset? But yes… Especially the perfect teenage neck. And this realisation smeared a grotesque continuity over the whole morning, eliding the sleaze pits of Ermita with the rural innocence of San Pedro, and doing something too complicated to think about to his image of Patti. He and her father exchanged waves and began drifting in each other’s direction.

‘Hey, Rio.’

‘How come I never knew you had a daughter? Especially one so beautiful? I thought you just had the boys.’

‘She’s our youngest. The scholar of the family. Thank God there’s one, eh? If she gets this NCEE thing it’s either the Civil Service or dentistry. Got to have someone to keep us in old age, right? No, Patti doesn’t go out much. Books, books, books. Either at home in her room or in the library here. Right, Patti? Pat, come say Hi to one of Manila’s Finest.’

‘Finest what?’ His daughter moved languidly over, the now wilting white flowers nodding tiredly over her ID as though sated and weakened by too lengthy proximity to her breasts. ‘Joke only.’

‘Policemen, of course,’ said Butz, ignoring her last words. ‘It’s an expression.’

‘Thank you, Daddy.’ She held out a long, slender, ringless schoolgirl’s hand. ‘A great pleasure to meet you, sir.’

‘This is Rio Dingca. He’s a lieutenant and one of my greatest bowlers.’

‘Dingca? Are you Eunice’s dad, sir?’

‘Yes. Indeed I am. None other. Though nowadays I’m actually an inspector.’ The shy boy betrayed by his own pomposity.

‘Wow. We’re all envious of Eunice, you know. She’s so clever. And beautiful.’

Dingca was aware, from a certain peppery scent like playground dust in the air, that he had strayed onto the outer fringes of some secret teenage battlefield. He suddenly felt protective of his own daughter. Patti’s graceful neck, he now saw, had on one side the faintest blemish, a slightly darker oval patch. Only someone looking quite hard would have noticed. A fading bruise? Such as one might accidentally pick up in a library when a heavy book toppled from an upper shelf, h’m? Butz would have fallen for it. Fond dad with his attention fixed more firmly down the road at Los Baños, where he was planning to open another Bowl-o-Rama if he could arrange a little juggling with the land use of a plot on the outskirts. Dingca caught himself staring too intently at Patti, scanning her as if anxious to detect signs of coarseness from close to, little giveaways blatant only when set against his own daughter’s authentic dewiness. But the faint bruise apart, there was nothing. Patti in propinquity was as monumentally perfect as Patti at a distance.
Big
Girl.
Not big in the blowsy sense, and certainly not strapping. She was only slightly taller than most of her fellow students though it was exaggerated by her slender figure. No, she was a Big Girl to Dingca’s little boy: the sort of girl his thirteen-year-old former self had looked up at in covert wonderment as too distant in age and beauty even to be a realistic repository for desire, for anything but the most diffuse and poignant longing. He had been obliged to turn back to girls his own age who still gulped down glasses of Sunny and went about with the ghost of an orange moustache. Touching, but not
it.
Nor were their legs ever as good as those of the Big Girls. They still bore the circular fading scars of a hundred childhood sores, most of which had healed without trace other than a slight blotchiness here and there, deeper brown on brown. But real Big Girls’ legs were unmarked, as if they had been chosen from infancy to remain immune to the frequent
bakukang
around which flies clustered and which could leave legs mottled from the knees down. And if it was true of legs, so of faces. Big Girls never had acne, either. Big Gi-

‘Do you know what Eunice is planning to do, sir?’

‘Oh.’ Dingca shook himself back to being forty-plus. ‘Do? Eunice?’ To his own astonishment he realised he had no idea. He must have been consulted or told a thousand times this last year, surely? He
nearly said ‘Dentistry’ before remembering in time that this was what Butz had just said Patti was considering. He found the solution. ‘I thought everything nowadays depended on the, um, NCEE?’

‘Do you know if there’s any truth in this rumour, sir? That they’re going to do away with the NCEE? Or replace it or something? A national examination, yet none of our teachers seems to know.’

‘You mean a policeman would?’

One way and another it had been a weird day with its own particular ghosts in close attendance. One of the less substantial but still pervasive of these had been Lettie Tan’s. Back on duty Dingca had been duly despatched with a PO1, a rookie named Benhur Daldal, to visit the cemetery and report on the condition of the Tan cenotaph. Unsure where to look they had driven up past the barrier towards the central cluster of chapels. In one of these they found the cemetery police unit playing
pusoy.
Between them they found a Tan lot on the faded old plan. Back in the jeep they meandered through the network of miniature roads with mature trees casting their shade across the pavements. They met nobody. The plot offered one of the less pretentious tombs: a plain two-storey narrow building washed in dull yellow. Instead of iron gates it had a pair of bronze doors which were shut tight. Dingca and Daldal walked all around it, peering in through a couple of barred windows. Everything seemed secure. The bars were firm in their cement, the panes unbroken. Inside, a marble sarcophagus glimmered in semi-darkness.

‘Are we looking for unlawful intruders or what, sir?’ asked the rookie.

‘Who knows? We just had this report which said the place had been messed about. It looks okay to me.’

‘It’s in a lot better condition than my place.’ Daldal, Dingca knew, lived on the railway tracks over in Sampaloc in a house to whose rear wall a squatter’s shack clung like a barnacle, splashed whenever a train rumbled through the puddles into which the lines had sunk. ‘Imagine all this just for a
dedbol
.’

‘We can’t see anything wrong, agreed? Woman needs her head examined.’

‘You don’t think,’ the rookie said tentatively once they were back in the jeep with José Mari Chan singing “Beautiful Girl”, ‘there might be more than one Tan tomb?’

‘No relation, you mean?’

‘It’s a common name.’

Back to the map. After reorienting themselves they drove down towards the gate and branched off parallel to the boundary. The road ahead curved gently around to the right, following the perimeter.

‘
Susmaryosep
.’ They both saw it simultaneously: a sort of miniature Moorish villa in white with turrets. Over the door, which was bound in polished brass straps like a family Bible, incised golden letters said TAN. Around the entire building ran portcullis-style iron railings, points uppermost, painted black. Evidently the place was comparatively new.

‘If you saw that over in Dasmariñas Village you’d think it belonged to a presidential aide.’

‘A small one, though.’