Playing with Water (14 page)

Since I have firewood and utensils we cook and eat in the shade at the hut. The fish is as good as it only ever is when taken straight from the sea. Not the most instant of quick-freezing processes preserves that unmistakable flavour. It is
not a matter of bacteria or decay; it is almost as if the life still present in the fish’s cells at the moment of cooking had a taste of its own, a brisk marine ghost which otherwise fleets away. We also eat
kinilaw
, marinaded raw fish, which confirms my fanciful thesis for it is even more vibrant with cellular activity. At once I understand primitive ideas of incorporation (anthropophagy, Holy Communion). Maybe I shall now swim better. Soon we drowse over the remnants of an illegally-fished lunch.

The people of Sabay are practised bomb-makers, as I discover one morning when I paddle over to buy rice and matches and find Arman cooking up what he calls ‘dynamite’ in a large wok over the fire in his kitchen area, surrounded by empty gin bottles, helpful colleagues and children. Strictly speaking the explosive is no longer dynamite but
ammoniúm
, the cheaper and more legally available ammonium nitrate fertiliser they use for mango trees. It is white and granular, not unlike that powdery snow which falls as tiny balls rather than flakes. To increase its explosive force it is roasted with ordinary kerosene much as rice is fried. The junior pyrotechnician in me is reactivated after lying dormant for decades.

I tell him about the bombs I used to make when I was thirteen, also using various kinds of fertiliser and weed-killer, but mixing them with sugar rather than frying them in paraffin.

‘We used to use sugar too,’ Arman says. ‘Then some fishermen from the Visayas came here and stayed for a week on Tiwarik and told us you could get more power by using kerosene. So now we do it this way. They’re very inventive down there. Most of the bright ideas for fishing seem to come from the Visayas. It was they who taught us we could make our own igniters so we didn’t have to rely on the Army keeping us supplied with blasting caps.’

I didn’t say so but their igniters were hardly new, having been described in OSS field manuals dating from the Second World War. Arman shows me how they take a torch bulb and rub it against sandpaper until a hole is worn in the glass, enabling the bulb to be filled with powdered match heads before being buried hole-downwards in a gin bottle
packed with the still-hot fertiliser.

There is a story that it was the Army, in the form of a squad of rogue soldiers, which forced Sabay’s villagers into illegal fishing. This account has the air of a half-truth. I have no doubt the incident occurred, as similar incidents have occurred all over the Philippines. But for years before that dynamite fishing had been a way of life at Sabay and had evolved into a sophisticated art. As long as I have been living on Tiwarik I have remained in two distinct minds about it. One of these minds runs thus:

If I describe myself as a spear-fisherman, hunting for my own food, then I believe in terms of time and energy expended, in terms of sheer physical attrition I earn every ounce of my food. I eat my successes – generally in a matter of minutes – gratefully. My failures account for unrecorded hours which at present amount to my days. To take on wily and evasive sea creatures with an elastic-powered spear is a game loaded heavily against the hunter, whose life is under constant threat from an alien medium as well as from certain of its denizens. Kills which he makes on such unequal terms have often a sublime quality to them. To have out-thought and out-manoeuvred an animal in its own element means for a brief moment having stopped thinking like a middle-class Englishman, a university graduate, a writer, a human being even, and to have partaken actively of that anarchic amoral will which lies beneath all there is and all one pretends to be. The painstaking stalking of a parrotfish, the keeping its interest aroused by scooping up handfuls of sand from the bottom and stirring little clouds of silt; the allaying its fears by turning one’s back on it for half a minute and motionlessly lying in the water twenty feet down gripping a knob of coral; intriguing its colleagues and bringing them circling cautiously in at exactly the moment when one must go up for air or die, scattering them with that rise to the surface: that endlessly-repeated cycle is so much an analogue for stalking sexual prey it is impossible not to feel a strange bond with the fish which usually escapes in the end but which very occasionally is caught.

The complete antithesis of this private combat is the use of explosives. After that underwater gasp followed by a
slamming concussion the immediate area is an anonymous battlefield. The seabed is littered with corpses since not all dynamited fish float conveniently to the surface belly up. Some lie on their sides on the bottom presumably because the same shock-wave which ruptures their vascular system also deflates their buoyancy sacs. Whether a fish sinks or floats seems to depend on several things, among them the temperature and salinity of the water and the species of fish.
Tulingan
, for example, a year-round staple food fish in these parts, is a little member of the tuna family without an air sac which invariably sinks in the deeper waters it frequents and is consequently one of the many species unsuitable for dynamite fishing. Meanwhile at the scene of the explosion there are always some fish cavorting horribly across the scene, their brains broken. To break a fish’s brains by firing a steel rod through them is, to be sure, no better for the fish. All the hunter can say is that the victor of hand-to-hand combat is not left as tainted as he who soars scathelessly overhead and drops his undiscriminating bombs. And when one of the bombers miscalculates and his bomb goes off too soon taking with it an arm, a hand, the head of a companion with screaming shards of gin bottle, the hunter on hearing this tale of tragedy from up the coast piously says how awful it is – as it is. But inwardly he sides with his beloved prey instead of with his own species and cannot suppress a deep and secret thought: ‘Serve them right.’

That is one of my two minds. The other readily recognises the imperative of feeding not just a lone hunter but an entire family, of earning enough money to buy essentials. It readily recognises how disgusting moral stances are when taken by outsiders like myself who, no matter that they choose to submit to the rigours of that life, still do not have to. It also recognises the skill of Sabay’s dynamiters, for theirs is no indiscriminate bombing. They discovered years ago that if their charges were too large or set to go off too deep they damaged the corals and that stocks of inshore fish depended entirely on healthy reefs. Furthermore they generally aim for one particular species at a time, most often
dalagang bukid
, and select their target with care. It is
astonishing after that horrendous concussion to see the bottom strewn with dead
dalagang
bukid
but with the other species swimming around above them apparently unharmed. This is not because
dalagang
bukid
are particularly susceptible but because they have been so skilfully hunted.

The modus operandi is that a boat drifts, one man wearing goggles lying across it with his face in the water looking for a shoal large enough to merit one of the precious bombs. He signals directions by waving a free hand behind him in dumb semaphore while a companion with a paddle steers accordingly. In the prow stands the bomber poised for the throw, armed with a light (if they are using a conventional fuse) or wires and battery if not. This drifting and signalling under the blazing sun can go on for hours, the patient watching informed by a good deal of knowledge about fish behaviour, for all these men are spear-fishermen too and theirs is the craftiness of long experience. Often they will go home without dropping a single bomb, occasionally they will strike lucky within minutes.

When a suitable shoal is found the tension goes up for this is the moment of greatest danger. This is because
dalagang bukid
often move quite close to the surface. The bomber must control the depth at which his charge explodes mainly by judging how long to delay his throw after lighting the fuse, sending the gin bottle glinting over and over in a high arc into the sky or holding it while it sputters in his hand.

The moment is dangerous not just for the waiters and watchers in the little boats gathered around, all of whom hope for a share in the catch. It is so for any nearby swimmers or divers who may have gone unobserved or who may themselves have been too preoccupied to notice the sudden activity on board the quietly drifting craft. I was once down at fifteen or twenty feet behind a coral outcrop when a revolting noise went off in my head followed at once by a shock-wave I felt over the entire surface of my body. I came to the surface in a daze, my head ringing, not knowing where to look, for the noise and the impact had been completely directionless, afflicting my body simultaneously
inside and out. When I crawled shakily onto the rocks expecting to find blood pouring from my ears and nose I saw a knot of boats at least a hundred metres away. To this day I cannot imagine how it is that fish survive a matter of yards away from the point of the explosion but I know that they do. The noise is excruciating. Sound travels oddly in water: I have often been deep beneath the surface when bombs have exploded a long way away, half a mile, a mile, even. The first thing one hears is a sharp hiss like a sudden release of soda water and only then the great bang of sound. If one comes up quickly enough one may often hear the same bang again, conducted more slowly through air.

So just before the bomb is thrown cries of ‘
matera!
’ or ‘
hagis!
’ (‘throwing’) go up, warning even those merely staring over the sides of their own boats to take their faces out of the water. There follow the glittering arc, the splash, the breathless wait. Then from the sea twenty metres away a short white spurt of fume and spray leaps up and the wood of the boat slams into footsoles and the backs of thighs. Scarcely has the foam fallen back than the boatman of the bombing crew starts his engine, now driving the compressor. The retrievers bite their air-hoses, snatch up hand nets and jump overboard.

But already the hangers-on are in the water, swimming down to see how many bodies they can gather before the boys with the air-tubes and nets arrive to make their methodical sweeps of the sea floor. Everything depends on the depth of the water. Very few of Sabay’s fishermen will swim down to more than thirty feet to retrieve a few
dalagang bukid
since the energy they expend is hardly worth a handful of small fish especially if there is a current running. Once down, the freebooter finds the fish hard to hold: they slip easily out of his fists, wriggling feebly as some still are. And always at his back is a swift-moving boy with twin plywood flippers, bulging net trailing behind him like a park-keeper’s litter sack, the gallons of exhaled air gushing in fine prodigality from between his grinning teeth. Generally the bombing crew will allow hangers-on to keep what they can scavenge provided it is no more than half a dozen reasonably sized fish and provided that their own
haul is good. In the old days I used to get away with a couple of dozen fish until they discovered I was a non-smoker and my lungs would happily take me down to forty feet in a succession of dives. Now I am a notorious vulture and they laughingly but rigorously search my boat. Mostly, though, I watch impotently as the compressor takes them down to sixty, eighty feet for as long as they want. Instead I scour the coral ledges for minor fry while below me, his hair streaming in the currents and lifted by gouts of air like any Pre-Raphaelite Lady of Shalott’s, a boy with his net turns and sweeps and gathers from the steep hillsides and rocky gorges.

Sometimes a single bomb will net no more than fifty fish. If the bomber has no motor in his boat and hence no compressor and has miscalculated so that his victims lie in deep water, retrieval is such an effort he can virtually make the same claim as the hand-to-hand hunter: that each fish was earned the hard way. If anyone doubts this they should try swimming down to fifty feet in order (if they are lucky) to come back up holding two small herrings, and then repeating it nine times. By the end they may also be in the second of my two minds over the issue of dynamiting fish as it is practised here at Sabay. In any case it has long since become a vital part of the place’s economy. If it were suddenly stopped an already poor community would be practically ruined, for while conventional fishing methods could probably keep them alive they would offer no hope of advance, allow of no improvement, pay for nobody’s medicine, no child’s education, buy no petrol for a single fishing boat.

This being said there is, of course, a conservationist case. To say the catches of the bombers of Sabay are paltry compared with those of the Japanese ships crammed with high-tech, fishing devices which infest the archipelago is both true and irrelevant: this I know. I know that neither technique is desirable, that both will have future consequences. It is safe to predict that the consequences will unfairly be worse for the villagers than for the Japanese, who can always trawl elsewhere. Meanwhile, listening to the right-minded gentlefolk of Europe I do occasionally
find myself wondering if because their supermarket fish fingers and cod pieces come deep-frozen in neat geometrical shapes boxed with pictures of peaceful marine scenery they think the fish have been gently farmed and humanely killed. Presumably they must think vast factory ships don’t trawl swathes across the ocean, sweeping paths clean of practically all living creatures and leaving long empty corridors. Likewise they must assume those creatures are not suffocated or frozen to death and then pulped, mangled and processed into acceptable products ranging from fish-meal to fillets.

Meanwhile I keep the company of dynamiters while wandering my island like a Balkan king made uneasy by the sound of Anarchists growing ever closer. Intoy, in his way the purest little anarch of them all, is a devoted jester. He springs out from behind a rock, his head breaks what I took for empty water, his laughter floats from trees.