Playing with Water (22 page)

A vignette from yet another holiday is imbued for me with a piercing melancholy. I have no idea now what we were doing there but we were at a place called Allhallows in the Thames Estuary, just downstream from Tilbury. It was probably mid-September, late tea-time. The afternoon was thick with mist. I recall only a damp marshy place at the edge of a waveless stretch of disappearing water. In this half-light my father was standing, sweeping with his binoculars the bank of fog which had rolled in from the North Sea. From somewhere within this fog came a deep bass hooting which gave everything an atmosphere of utter doom. After a while he said: ‘I think it’s the old
Burma Star.
Quick’ and handed me the binoculars. Somewhere in the grey I caught a glimpse of a greyer bulk out there before the fog swallowed it up. It might have been some prodigious mammal heading seawards to its secret burial ground. Then from behind that glooming opacity the heavy sound of a ship’s engines rolled across the water. ‘Yes,’ said my father in satisfaction, ‘that’ll be the old
Star
. Ohh.’ He gave a great sigh. ‘Think of it: Marseilles, Genoa, Port Said, Aden, Bombay, Rangoon …’ His litany made me want to cry.

The last memory I have of him with his binoculars did involve real tears. It was our last holiday together. I had just left Canterbury and was about to go to Oxford. I was miserably in love, crotchety, not wanting to be on a family holiday at all, not really wanting to be anywhere. My father now had less than a year to live. To this day I do not know whether he knew it. Doctors are as good as everybody else at concealing truths from themselves. We were in the south of France, had been to Avignon, had seen Arles, had passed north of Marseilles to rejoin the coast below Fréjus. At some point well inland, it might have been near Draguignan or even as far east as Grasse, we picnicked on high ground. My father trained his binoculars on the horizon. Glowering at some pâté I was only half-aware of a sound he made. Then
looking up I could see from my position slightly behind and to one side of him an eye brimming with tears. I was shocked. It had not been a good day so far, nor an easy holiday. Horrid late-adolescent egotist that I was I chose to interpret his tears as disappointment with his son. Full of self-pity I slumped further.

I am now sure my father’s tears were for nothing so immediate or prosaic. Most likely they came at one of those moments when anyone of a certain age can sit amid the ruins of a picnic and be suddenly unable to look through a pair of binoculars without seeing something besides what is merely imaged. Maybe from the perspective of an anxious and complicated life he was looking across eighty miles of shimmering French clarity at the southernmost tip of the Alps and feeling once more with a panging rush what mountains were to him, had always been, at a former uncontaminated vision which his every turning since had seemed only to muddy. Perhaps he knew, perhaps not, how little time he had left; but at forty-six and at his professional eminence he would have known he could never again find the time or fitness to set foot on a glacier or brew tea with meltwater from Annapurna. For that matter nor would fate once more afford him such blissful circumstance that he could be invited to sit in the pilot’s seat of an RAF DC-3 and, completely unqualified, fly thirty officers and men for a quarter of an hour high above Burma. In their way those, too, had been kingly days.

What is he to me now? I am at last old enough and temperate enough to be able to see what I have inherited from him. A physical likeness, certainly. Now and again I surprise a look on my face like the one he wore for his television appearance as a neurological expert in the series ‘Your Life In Their Hands’: part wistful, part stuffed. We are still opposites in much that I was determined we should be, but more and more I catch my own voice as out of nowhere saying ‘He would have liked that,’ or ‘If only he could see this.’ There was, finally, a part of him which escaped his parental family’s urge to do good. It escaped his own doctoring and his begetting and his breadwinning, it undercut
his yearning for respectable stability and could be caught gazing through binoculars at distant ranges where such things were of no account. In short there must have been times when that part of him wished me dead.

I am immeasurably cheered by this. It is a liberating realisation for a son to have because it frees him from any obligation to reciprocate that messy parental turmoil which masquerades as a simple and straightforward love. Instead I can meet him on that other level about which he could not speak and I would not have listened. For the first time I feel a certain closeness to him. Given how father and son hardly knew one another and scarcely ever talked it is strange this feeling I have that of all people it is he who would most readily understand what it is I am doing in the forests of Kansulay and among the reefs of Tiwarik, although he would have been as diffident about attempting to put it into words as I am ultimately unable. This reflection serves partly to remind me that I have no son with whom to share an experience, any more than my own father had.

Now, far too late, I miss him. He is long gone.

The cordillera opposite has stilled. Behind it the dawn is coming and the strengthening light has frozen its black outline in mid-skip. The stars are dimming and night is leaving in a great turquoise sigh. I get stiffly to my feet and stretch. Down there beneath the sea across whose face the dawn wind skitters the parrotfish will be slipping out of the mucus sleeping-bags they made themselves for the night. Among the corals shifts are changing: the predators of darkness are giving place to the predators of day. Between them are a suspended twenty minutes or so of near-inactivity, a general pause as if the attention of all creatures were preempted by the daily miracle of growing light.

I walk down to the shore. The hermit crabs have gone; nothing moves. I cup my hand and drink several mouthfuls. It is harsh, sweet, alive. Naked I swim out and slide down the blue gulfs.

Something has happened to the weather. Maybe it is a foretaste of the
habagat
, the south-west monsoon. The days are comparatively windless but the moon, perhaps, is dragging the water into fretful heaps at nightfall when the tide drops unusually low. It is the season. The tops of corals emerge, whole stretches of level shelf broken by crevasses. In the water one is lurched into jags and spines: rocks approach and bang one suddenly leaving a shoulder bleeding while tensed against the receding suck. The water itself is cloudy, the agitation of the upper layer reaching down to involve pockets of silt long ago washed off the land. The tides are full of plankton and diatoms. Night fishing is no longer worthwhile, visibility being so reduced that one is diving blind into a black soupsown with the mines of sea-urchins.

I cross in my boat from Tiwarik and visit friends on the lower slopes of the mountain behind Sabay. All among the coconuts and steep red fields of baked clods are the bleached heads of fishermen, temporarily deserting the sea to work the land. Their flexibility surprises me. At Kansulay farmers and fishermen tend to remain separate and do not swap rôles when the weather does not suit them. They sit indoors and drink instead, one occupation in which both feel at ease.

The top of one field is bounded by a low cliff whose volcanic face is pitted with various-sized holes. Arman and I walk past, instinctively and at the same moment slightly stooping to see beneath an eyebrow of rock which protects a socket of unknown depth. We notice each other at once and laugh in recognition: two displaced hunters looking for fish on dry land.

I decide to go back up the coast to Kansulay for a few
days and let the sea recover from its struggle with the moon.

Kansulay at dawn. The crowing of Sising’s cock below is relayed to other cocks hidden among the palms, taken up and passed on, some cracked and flawed and some archetypally true of note, like calls to prayer from leafy minarets fading distantly down to the village. I am up and admiring the bustling activity in the air, the grass, the bushes. Everything shines: the gloss of dew and natural oils blazes off the pale midribs of banana leaves whose elegant droops balance themselves in the gently rising air. From day to day it is precisely the same while like all dawns suggesting it is the first in the history of the world. The birds are particularly riotous. It is
sound
which is a part of the scene as much as anything, the part I most miss when living in Italy. For there, while the house commands an astonishing view and while the sense of isolation in rough hill-country with its great sighing forests faithfully conveys the sight of the seasons in their turning, the place is aurally a desert. That disease of being unable to see a living creature without wanting to kill it at once, preferably with an automatic shotgun, has achieved a general muteness broken mainly by the sound of gunfire. Another of my landscapes. Over a quarter-century ago Rachel Carson foresaw a silent spring; in my part of Tuscany it has finally happened. Only for a month or two may one lie in the shade of the vines and hear that extraordinary sound of swifts’ wings cutting the air at seventy miles an hour, a tearing rush like a glider’s aerofoils at times so sudden and so close it raises gooseflesh as from some primordial terror of gigantic raptors.

In Kansulay the aerial sounds of wings come principally from the ragged-tipped crows, not unlike their English counterparts, as they flap low over the ridge looking for chicks following their mothers through the undergrowth with one eye always on the sky. Another characteristic sound is of the wings of wren-like birds, lustrous brown with delicate curved beaks like carpet needles. As they hover
around the
lumboy
trees they produce an explosive whir of beaten air not unlike that of humming-bird hawk moths sipping nectar at dusk. Thirdly, the crispness of tight and powerful wings clatters down from golden orioles when chasing each other aerobatically or mobbing a crow back to its own territory.

The golden oriole is the Philippines’ National Bird, a very handsome animal not much larger than an English blackbird but slimmer, more powerful and with a heavy pink bill. Its plumage is a dazzling yellow and black and against the green ribs of the coconut fronds up whose spires it climbs and twirls it glows like an exuberant jewel. On this particular morning there is one hanging from a string around the waist of Kado, Sising’s nine-year-old son, who emerges an hour or two later into the clearing with a couple of friends. They walk towards me, smiling, competent. Little hunters, their teeth sparkle in the sun. They are all carrying catapults, all have strings from which dangle small birds by their feet, some still fluttering feebly against their shorts. I congratulate them on their skill.

‘
Pulutan lamang
,’ said Kado disparagingly. ‘Just snacks.’ But they are clearly proud. One of the boys sights at something in a nearby tree. There is a brisk snap of elastic and a stone claps against wood and hums away over the valley. The boy shakes his head and laughs. I laugh too, feeling an admiration which would be jealousy were I not myself a spear-fisherman. Anyone who can bring down the National Bird with a catapult at twenty paces knows how to live in this world. Kado now takes the splendid corpse from his game larder. Its saffron breast is streaked with crimson for its head is smashed and one eye knocked clean out. Exemplary shooting.

‘Pretty,’ he says, laying it out on the ground on its stomach and spreading its wings as if it were still flying high above an endless plain. One of his companions adds other little birds from the collection at his waist, finches mostly. The struggles of the living have tightened the nooses around their feet so he has difficulty in undoing the knots. He pulls impatiently and their twittering becomes strident; a bit harder and it becomes a thin tiny screaming. Their
feet come off entirely like twigs and the child adds these forcible amputees to the row on the ground where they beat their wings in the dust. ‘Seven,’ he says. ‘Very good roasted.’

The sound-quality of anguish has nothing to do with its volume. This is as true in a Mozart opera as in an interrogation centre. Presumably these birds are yelling at the top of their lungs but the sound is not as loud in terms of decibels as their ordinary song at dawn. It is merely high, hopeless and unbroken. It reminds me at once of a morning when I had to call on an Italian farmer very early and found him in his kitchen brewing coffee and inspecting his mousetraps. These were not sprung traps but pieces of thick paper spread with birdlime. On this particular morning there was a mouse stuck to a sheet of paper on the floor outside his larder, its ineffectual scrabbles of the night clearly legible in the dense glue surrounding it. As the farmer chatted about what the hail had done to his vines the previous afternoon he scrumpled up the paper, glue, mouse and all, and tossed the ball onto the fire. I had not been paying much attention to what he was doing and from the mouse’s necessary immobility had assumed it dead. But then from the fireplace as the ball of paper caught there came a tiny appalling scream. I don’t believe the farmer noticed it at all: it was less than the momentary squeak of steam from a damp log, the breath of a lobster in a restaurant kitchen. That minute bellow of unhelped pain still rings in my inner ear, however, set off by the finches, a memorable commonplace which itself prompts other commonplaces:
What casual fate is in store for you?
and
Do fish feel less for their silence?

For indeed not all fish are silent when speared.
Bujhong
, the long-beaked eel fish go
aww, aww, aww
as if protesting a monstrous unfairness. Many species of trigger fish (such as
boriri
) produce a drumming sound. These are perhaps alarm noises rather than expressions of pain: I have occasionally heard these fish make them when threatened but unmolested. Most species merely flap silently, mouths working or fixed open in a rictus,
O
, in which the delicate chitinous plates of the mouth-parts and cheeks are fully extended and, because no longer overlapping, become translucent and project the fish’s lips spectrally in front of
its head. I am clinical, I feel remorse, I eat. But one day I know I shall eat only vegetables. It is not precisely squeamishness (I have death on my hands and they are familiar with their task) but more a weariness with squatting on the imagination, with the dejection of causing pain. At some point killing to eat is a reason, not an explanation. An explanation was given by Rilke when he said ‘Killing is one of the forms of our wandering mourning.’

I have only been back in Kansulay for a few days before I discover my mountain retreat is no longer the isolate fastness it was. By night Lolang Mating’s ghostly familiars no doubt still exercise their guardianship, but with the daylight full on the hill’s abrupt spine children move from dense patch of shade to dense patch of shade with long-handled fishing nets. The
duhat
season has arrived.

The shade is cast by venerable
duhat
or
lumboy
trees, each with its heavy crop of purple fruit. These fruit are about the size of a rose hip with a single stone inside, the flesh watery blue, sweet-astringent with a slightly resinous flavour. I quickly tire of them but they are highly prized by others. Now the children in bright fragmentary T-shirts and torn cotton shorts festoon the branches, calling out of great cumuli of leaves, cheerful parakeet-voices, while beneath them a rain of droppings patters to the ground as fresh-sucked
duhat
stones. My hut is built directly beneath one tree. The voices overhead come from bright blue mouths. The sound of stones plopping onto the sun-crisped thatch brings me out and looking up I see branchloads of children examining each other’s tongues competitively to see whose is bluest.

But there is another current of village life which intersects here as I discover when several teenage boys, one of them Lolang Mating’s youngest grandson, come asking if I have an old tin they can borrow. Thinking of
duhats
I lend them an odd battered aluminium pot with a handle I once found on the seabed and which I now use for gathering wild beans. The boys thank me solemnly and disappear behind a tree. I go back to writing. Smoke drifts across the shade and up towards a palm whose head is backed by cloudless blue.
The smoke is barred and sliced by the shadow of its leaves as it slips through and disappears beyond. Eventually I go to see what they are doing.

They are cooking, somewhat earnestly, over an open fire. In the now blackened pot balanced on the flames, the contents dim behind smoke and steam, is a vegetable mess. They are making an infusion of guava leaves which is good for fresh wounds. Who, then, has been wounded? The answer is they all have. Their slightly strained manner and unnatural calm betokens pain, for just that morning they presented themselves at a hut down in the village to be circumcised.

Empathic anguish shoots through me which I conceal by offhanded cheerful concern. These are not children: the eldest is sixteen. I recommend that if the guava leaves don’t work they should come back and I will give them sulphanilamide powder. They are pleased by this idea of medical back-up and borrow a pair of nail scissors to cut up a cleanish T-shirt they have brought with them. They make a quantity of circular patches and, with much mutual joshing about diameter, cut a hole in the centre. They take their pot of brew and withdraw, laughing.

I thought at first this was some peculiar hang-over from the days of the Americans, a petty-bourgeois puritan obsession with hygiene or guilt which required the mutilation of male children regardless of medical indications. It is not, however. In this province at least circumcision is a real rite, an entry into manhood. So much so, in fact, that while they remain uncircumcised boys are often referred to as
baklâ
, a word which translates approximately as an effeminate homosexual. There is an accepted social place for the genuine
baklâ
and whatever mockery he may attract it is far more tolerant amusement – even affection – than the merciless hounding which certain other cultures afford. Yet however inoffensive, it is still a taunt although one which can apparently be rendered without substance merely by recourse to a razor blade, and the reason turns out to be very simple. It is not that the boys of Kansulay really feel their sexual orientation is dependent upon submitting to an operation without anaesthetic in their early
teens. There is a straightforward belief that an uncircumcised man cannot make a woman conceive. That they know this to be false is, of course, no bar to their belief any more than any other kind of knowledge has the least reference to faith. So perhaps after all it is merely an ordeal many feel attracted to and they choose the long school vacation (which happens to coincide with the
duhat
season) so they may recover at leisure.

The boys return to the mountain daily to brew up fresh leaves and anoint their wounded members. I ask slightly gruffly how they are: the truth is they are quite unembarrassed and I am extremely so. I refuse to look at anything; I keep insisting I am not a doctor. I am appalled at the thought of my hut being turned into a sinister clinic of the woods. Already I see it in English Sunday-tabloid terms.
Who is this mysterious foreigner posing as a doctor at whose isolated house a constant stream of adolescent boys submits to intimate examinations?
After several days when it is clear from the boys’ remarks that guava leaves cure but slowly (not surprising when one sees the dark brown liquid with its flimsy silvery scum like a pot of cold tea) I give them orange paper sachets of sulphanilamide powder, instructing them to use it sparingly on clean dry dressings. No infusions, no washing, no wet for a couple of days at least and then come back for some more if the wound still isn’t drying. I am a school matron dealing with the rugger team’s
tinea
cruris
.

They all return for a second sachet and naturally it occurs to me they may be selling them back to the chemist where I bought them and relying on time-honoured guava leaves with which, after all, everybody else seems to recover. On the other hand the chemist is a long way off in town and after a couple of weeks the boys greet me in the village, calling from their houses that they have recovered now.