Playing with Water (12 page)

‘Don’t rush me, Mom. Mr James is our visitor and we haven’t met before although I have heard so much about him … Er, I think my mother wishes to say that the pump, having been installed on our family’s land, was with effect from that moment
our
pump. This is Filipino law. It is unfortunate that at the moment my mother had urgent need of it you were out of the country.’

‘Urgent need? It’s outside the window there, rusting on the ground. What was it urgently needed for, a chicken perch?’

‘Ha, a chicken perch,’ laughed Cads. ‘That’s a good joke.’

‘Plans change,’ said Mrs Soriano.

Perhaps emboldened by so recently having been in
Europe that I still felt a sophisticated globe-trotter ’s immunity, perhaps thinking of Sising being made to remove with his own hands the pump he had helped install, but most likely not wanting to go all the way to the river once again to fetch my own water, I abandoned caution and took the line I thought most likely to succeed.

‘Mrs Soriano, I don’t know whether you are aware of it but for many years I was a journalist and I still have a great many friends in the European and American Press.’ This was completely untrue. ‘If that pump is not back, installed and working at Kansulay by tomorrow evening I shall make it my business to ensure this story gets printed in the newspapers and that the name of Mrs Soriano is given global publicity as that of a wealthy Filipina who finds it necessary to steal a hand-pump from the penniless peasants who work her own estates. Believe me,’ I lied, ‘Associated Press and Reuters will leap at a story like this, especially now that the Marcos regime is starting to get a bad press.’

Mrs Soriano blinked. Cads was sucking his ring hard.

‘That’s the world-wide angle,’ I went on. ‘Now as regards the local scene: I happen to be quite good friends with an ex-Minister’ and I named an old member of Macapagal’s government which the Marcos dynasty replaced. He was truly a has-been but still respected in many quarters as a serious man of culture and integrity who had survived the Martial Law persecutions with his honour intact. I noticed from her expression that Mrs Soriano knew exactly whom I meant. ‘Also, I believed the Governor of this province when he told me personally over dinner about his concern for land reform.’ This was outrageous. The man in question had indeed expressed concern, but I suspected it was
lest
land reform should ever be implemented. Nor did I point out something which Mrs Soriano would later work out for herself: that owing to my recent absence I had to be referring to the previous Governor, not the one who had just been installed in an attempt to redress some of my host’s flagrant misdeeds and repair the ruling KBL party’s public image.

But it appeared my shameless and mendacious name-dropping had had its effect. Mrs Soriano was now all smiles.

‘But don’t you see, Mr James, it has all been nothing but a misunderstanding. I think I didn’t explain myself well. Thank goodness you came here so we could clear the matter up.’

‘I came here to get the pump back.’

‘Of course. But what I have been trying to explain, only I am so bad at it, is that it’s fine now.
Ayos na
. It’s okay. Good as new.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I think,’ said Cads, ‘my mother is saying she had the pump dismantled to carry out maintenance. It was broken.’

‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Soriano. ‘Broken. No water would come. I said at the time they dug it wrong, they did not put a filter so sand gets in and wears out the
balat
… Cads, what is
balat?
’

‘Washer,’ I said wearily. ‘I understand perfectly, Mrs Soriano. That was very thoughtful.’

‘No, no. Those poor people.’ She was relaxed now, her rings flashing in the light from the louvred windows. Both sides had been allowed to lie their way onto neutral ground; faces were saved but I had won. That would not be forgotten at some future date. What I really wanted to say to her was
Ano ka na, suwerte?
, now a slightly dated piece of
kanto
-boy slang but which could still mock and deflate. It might be translated unidiomatically as something like ‘What are you, lucky or something?’ meaning, ‘Did heaven shit gold on you?’ But stressed with just the right inflection it really asked the same thing as that English phrase, inflected with equal subtlety:
Who the hell do you think you are?

But that had been two years ago. Now Kansulay’s water project was about to move on a stage, entering the sphere of local politics. The morning after we braved the
nono
in their lair my engineering friend and I go off to our test dig and find the hole full of dusky water, overflowing away towards the eroded gully of the stream. Actually I am impressed by the quantity of the water and the speed with
which the pit has filled. Not wanting to make my enthusiasm the pretext for his assent, however, I opt for a restrained, judicious note.

‘Well,’ I want to know, ‘tell me again: is it worth spending real money on a proper spring box here? Plus of course, what? a good kilometre of two-inch PVC pipe? If we decide to go ahead we’ll be getting into real money even allowing for all the work being done
bayanihan
.’

He looks up at the forested hill above the spring and thoughtfully produces a calculator from his hip pocket. I am easily impressed when people produce the tools of their trade on-site; it denotes seriousness of intent. My father, who after all was not a surgeon, used a scalpel to sharpen his pencils. (Even I, carrying my home-made spear gun down to the beach at evening, walk in a little glow of professionalism.) I now notice my friend’s calculator is a scientific one, covered with buttons labelled for arcane functions. I want to feel confident in him.

‘I think,’ he says at length, ‘I think there will be enough water. But only for drinking. People must still do their washing in the stream.’

‘It’s as marginal as that?’

‘Yes. Also another very important thing. You know who owns this land? The Sorianos. If they want to make a
kaingin
here,
ay
, no more water.’

The air suddenly seems loud with the clapping wings of metaphorical pigeons coming home to roost. In those intervening two years I had only seen Mrs Soriano once or twice in the market, long enough for each to bare teeth judiciously at the other, to enquire after the other’s health in that way which makes solicitude seem like bad taste. Who the hell does she think she is? I had wanted to know; and now here am I hoping to see the village’s new water system installed on her land. I know who the hell she is, and she me. My friend has correctly spotted the weak link which could break the entire project. For if indeed the Sorianos did decide to make a
kaingin
and grow cassava where before there was merely a tangle of vegetation dotted with wild bananas and papayas, then that was undoubtedly what would happen.

Kaingin
is the most basic form of cultivation: slash-and-burn. It offers short-term rewards and long-term disaster; naturally people opt for the rewards. It is an easy way to clear a patch of land and the natural fertility of fallow ground is supplemented for a while by the potash and nitrates left by the burning. But on the steep hillsides of this province the rain soon washes away the topsoil once its cover is gone, silting up the streams and even altering the offshore fishing. From the air much of the Philippines is visibly scarred by this primitive form of agriculture. Some provinces are nearly ruined by it, whole populations having been forced to move from the wastelands they have made. Here at Kansulay’s potential source of drinking water it is easy to imagine what would happen should at some future date one of the Sorianos look at this unproductive hill and spitefully decide to get a couple of years’ worth of cassava out of it before turning their attentions elsewhere. Shorn of its lush green vegetation the bare soil would parch in the sun and the water which at present percolated the earth would be drawn upwards to boil invisibly off into the tropic air. Similarly when it rained the water would run straight off since there would be nothing to retain it.

‘What I’ll do,’ I say, trying to sound measured and responsible although I am already, unworthily, becoming a bit bored by the whole business since it has so quickly led into potential feud-and-trouble territory, ‘I’ll tell the
barangay
Captain what you say about the water only being enough for drinking and also that I will agree to start spending money only when he has extracted a written undertaking from the Sorianos that they will not turn this hill over to the
kaingineros
.’ How decisive that sounds. How dubious I really am about ‘written undertakings’. An ‘accidental’ fire (‘I have of course punished the offender’) and Kansulay will go back to drinking contaminated stream water.

When I think of Sising and Bini or of my friends at Sabay, I come up against ordinary affection, the urge to do them
justice. I finally think the way to do it is not to describe their lives as they see them, in terms of a daily struggle against poverty, though I am no stranger to the details. How well I know Sising’s income from his eleven rented
karitan
or
tuba
-yielding palms, his entire pay for three days’ copra-making of 84p, the average monthly sum from all sources coming into his household of about £12.
2
I know exactly what his cigarettes cost, the soap, the matches, the little bags of brown sugar, the essential rice. I know the price of kerosene which fuels the decrepit Coleman lantern he uses for finding crabs in the stream at night, which is why when I visit him after dark I often find their house lit with the smoky orange flames of
tangan-tangan
beans from the castor oil bush, ‘Nature’s candles’ as Bini blithely describes them. I also know why even the most selfless mother thinks twice before spending fifty centavos on a small Band-Aid dressing to put on her child’s wounded foot: even less than 2p is a recognisable portion of the family’s daily budget of 35p.

This is how they themselves describe their lives to an outsider. With the utmost trepidation I will not do the same. There is always a gap between how people portray their lives to differing audiences and how they actually live them. Poverty is all; and yet it isn’t. It grinds away daily but doesn’t explain the hours spent gossiping, laughing, yearning, being utterly diverted by a hunt for a wood-wasp’s nest. It is just as sentimental to misrepresent the poor as obsessed all their conscious hours by poverty as it is to depict them as always singing. Nevertheless it is an inescapable convention of the times that rich and poor should confront one another on territory bare of nearly everything but bleak economic factors. It can take a long while before that terrain fades and is replaced by something else, by affection and shared experience. That I have to deal with my own useless guilt as well as love where my friends here are concerned is my private misfortune and not their responsibility. It is something anybody from a developed country living in an undeveloped must face. The important thing for me is that Sising and Bini no longer talk about themselves as they once did, as representative poor confronting
representative rich. We now allow ourselves the latitude of humour, of gentle mockery even.

‘H’m,’ says Bini one afternoon, peering closely at the side of my head where the sunlight strikes it, ‘grey hairs. Time marches on and still no wife.’

We are knocking back ESQ at the table outside her house.

‘Steady on,’ says Sising, but his wife is not to be steadied.

‘No, but really. Half the girls in the village would give their teeth to make him a wife.’

I observe that half the girls in the village seem already to have done so: their extreme beauty is often marred by endemic tooth decay. This makes Sising laugh and he says something encouraging about being unlucky in love.

‘Unlucky can sometimes hide Unwilling,’ says Bini. This old saw gives a glimpse of how she will be at sixty if she lives that long: too knowing to be really sententious but probably rather implacable all the same.

‘God save me from peasant wisdom,’ I say defensively.

‘He has,’ says Bini in triumph.

This exchange breaks us all up and our laughter scares the piglets and brings the children running to hear the joke. When they see the rum they go back to what they were doing. The afternoon wears into evening; night falls and our improvised party stretches on into supper. Sising gets out his home-made ukelele and our songs rise in the clearing, lurching and ungainly like the hens trying to get into the trees. Events become a bit blurred. I vaguely recall a dearth of matches and one of the children whispering to me the suggestion that he raid the door-post. (This was a reference to the bamboo hinge-post of the house door. It is a custom, now dying out, of the older people in this province to put small coins through the slots for the door’s cross-members to bring luck to the house. Bini’s old father always did this when he visited. To the children, though, this secret hoard building up in one of the internodes represented a piggy-bank rather than a fund of good fortune. They were always trying to winkle the coins out with knife-blades when Sising and Bini weren’t looking. It was a conspiracy I shared with them not to tell their parents.)

Next morning I wake headachy but early – so early that
the valley below remains full of inky pools where the chickens are no doubt still coming down out of the trees. There is unexpected whistling from the path; visitors or passers-by at any hour are rare. I wait in the dew, barefoot, holding a half-eaten banana. It is Sising.

‘I think last night you didn’t believe me.’

My brains are drowsy. They can remember nothing of last night. Sising opens the old plastic bag he is carrying and shows me two lengths of bamboo, the halves of a single tube about two inches in diameter split lengthwise. One has a long slice taken out of its rounded upper surface so that the internal wall is very thin. There are many scorched holes in this wall. At once I remember: I had expressed scepticism when he told me he was not worried to be caught without matches because he could always make fire. I thought of fire-making as an aboriginal accomplishment, maybe still practised in remote areas of the world almost out of perversity rather than from necessity. I associated fire-sticks with ethnology museums and rubbing pieces of wood together with jokes about Scouts.