Playing with Water (33 page)

We go back to the hut where I have some good rope. Intoy finds a hardwood thwart in his
bangka
. He carves notches in it as we walk back up. Once at the tree he climbs gracefully, walks along the branch above that fearful drop, secures two ropes with double knots. The ropes dangle down. I tie on the seat, adjust the height, check it all, lose courage. The swing hangs on the edge of space.

Intoy is consumed with pleasure, utterly distracted. The dream of Manila is in abeyance. Intrepid country boy, he slides down the ropes onto the seat. For someone accustomed to shinning up fifty feet of slippery palm trunk in the rain to fetch down a few pints of
tuba
this is playing. It is all playing. Directly beneath the seat is a surface of flat rock but a yard in front it slopes straight off into the drop. Intoy pushes off. Within a few swings his trajectory takes him out over the chasm, far above the skies of Drune. At last he makes me take my turn. It is stomach-lurching, exhilarating, the highest swing in the world. It is a
masterpiece of our joint imagination. The world beneath the world tilts and drifts between my legs. I stare up at the bough instead as I swing, expecting to see a knot unravelling, a rope’s end parting from the branch. There is no such thing. The knots stand out black and bunched against the sky but the sky itself wheels crazily and I lose my sense of up and down. I cling to the ropes; the swing slows.

Intoy leaps back on. There on the edge of the world he soars off and comes back with a rush. His hair streams and changes direction at the tops of his arc. His yellow T-shirt flutters, is pressed close to his slender back, flattened across his chest and stomach. He cries like a bird, like an oriole in its swoopings. Flashing brown and gold he stares excitedly into the middle nowhere which comes and goes, comes and goes.

I watch the flying boy.

For a while after Intoy left I had neither heart nor stomach for our swing. News reached me that he and his brother were delivering ice in Caloocan. One empty afternoon I walked The Field of Crabs through whose growing mane a wind ran. Suddenly I was reminded of the South Downs, of grasses bending their sheened blades under a bald sky. I should not really have been surprised to come upon myself, a nine-year-old stooping among the tufts, scowling privately in his search for cartridges. He might straighten up on catching sight of me, the pockets of his shorts lumpy with grenade fins, a smear of mud on one cheek, not a becoming child. Seeing only some boring man in middle age he would move away and return to his hunt while I smile nervously and carry on up towards the crown of the island.

I stand beneath the tree. Somebody in the intervening time has been up and cut down the swing; it was good stout rope. One of the severed knots is still lying trapped in a crevice. Of the seat there is no sign. I am neither surprised nor unsurprised. It seems not to matter very much. I lie on the edge of the cliff with my chin in my fists and gaze out
over the middle nowhere which, if I have one, I suppose must be my home.

The huge chasm at my face is full of light. There is nothing which is not suffused with it. It is a downpour from the sky, an upwelling from the sea. Far out on the ocean’s surface are the tiny pencil marks of fishing boats. I will know many of the invisible figures who wait there wearing straw hats against the sun, their faces wound with cloths against the glare. Many I will not know; they will be from away up the coast. Others, where a minute tatter of white sail shows among the dancing glitter, are probably from the dim bulks on the horizon, far islands, other worlds. We are connected by water, made inseparable by light.

It is at the last a motionless place on the very edge of motion, where the watcher himself dissolves into the movement and clarity. It is in just such a place Filipino archaeologists have sometimes come upon a single skull in a niche overlooking the sea, resting in a delicate Celadon-ware bowl of pale green cloudy glaze.

And so with his half-relationships in half-lived-in places the footloose citizen of no abiding city wanders and wonders his days away. His life is bereft, satisfactory, privileged. Nothing very much comes of it, but of what might very much have come? It seems like no alternative, but how else could it otherwise have been? The sun burnishes a bamboo hut into a gold pavilion. Its wickers creak. It is a basket slung beneath some radiant balloon where a dreamer might look down and gaze between the slats of its floor at brilliant strips of passing lands. At each dawn it is set down afresh, jarring new blond dust from termite holes, pale cones of powder on its ledges telling of inner depredations. In early afternoon when the sun lifts its blazing foot from the thatch and leans instead its dazzle against the upper walls, brilliances sift down to fall upon the dreamer’s face. I do not really know him. He is not the friend. He may wish to kill me with his love of deeps and inchoate things. It is the face of a man beginning to grow old though sometimes he reminds me of a distant child. Once he looked for cellars and now he has
walked a field of freshly baked crabs. He will not live for ever.

But what is this love of his? Why this romping with the elements, the frisking with light, the bathing in fire, the scuffing up of earth? The playing with water? Will he not tire of it? Might he not weary even of the place beyond place? I sit outside my hut and watch the massive wrinkles crawl across the straits as night falls. A dog barks in Sabay; the moon slides up one side of the sky. It is The Moon: round, perfect, immemorial. It tells the hunter that tonight his task will be in vain. It awakes the dreamer to set about the proper business of dreaming his land.

Like The Moon, Tiwarik is an act of the imagination. It is not its grasses my feet have trodden nor its little coastline I have so lovingly followed, and neither does it retain any trace of me. There is another island locally known as Tiwarik but it is only an exact facsimile, a fly-spit on the map of the objective planet which we agree to inhabit. That particular Tiwarik is indeed pocked by the post-holes of my hut, the earth slope nearby where I stood and gazed seawards while cleaning my teeth splotched white as with the droppings of some exotic bird of passage until the next rains. On that Tiwarik, also, there is a hanging tree on top of a cliff with a bough whose bark will be faintly scarred by ropes, just as there is fresh grassland where recently there was a fire.

Yet even though it is a facsimile this solid island still has magical properties. Somehow in its inverting lens it alternately conceals or reveals the other Tiwarik whose image was seen entire thirty years before and which then disappeared into the shadow-play of the mind, fragmented, mocking, celestial, naive, to emerge once more as from a prism at an unexpected angle but miraculously whole. Whatever weird instrument, whatever bent telescope connects that time with this, I am left amazed. The conviction I have of the appositeness, of the inevitability that once having been glimpsed Tiwarik was destined to re-appear is
impossible to reconcile with the arbitrariness of existence. What if I had died in the meantime? It might so easily and unremarkably have happened.
I was waiting for Tiwarik.
The man of bones at the door with his black cowl and unrusting scythe has perhaps already concealed a yawn and nodded equably. This year, next year, some time; it is all the same. Nothing to him the desperate appointments of sublunary lovers.

Experiences of great intensity – an especial dream, a period of concentrated work, a sudden absorption, maybe a love-affair – have in common that they are unusually real while they last. Yet it is precisely this quality which so easily vanishes. Afterwards, how unreal it all suddenly seems! We lost ourselves in that dazzling fugue whose importance to us we do not doubt and yet which now is so imaginary. Time which seemed not measurable, so endless, suddenly lapses back into the diurnal and leaves behind it disquiet and longing for a lost intensity. We observe there is no rapture which will not later seem chimerical, no vision or intellectual fervour which will not come to feel more vaporous than that waking sleep, the dull discourse of ordinary days. It becomes a toss-up as to which is the more delusional, the higher reality or the lower. For everything shares a common insignificance in this vain pursuit, this hapless devoir of taking an accurate stock of how things are before they cease to be.

Yet there does remain a knowledge, like the pleasurable stiffness in muscles after a previous day’s unaccustomed exercise, to prove that something occurred. Something did after all take place to tax the muscles of the mind. For an unmeasurable time one went somewhere extraordinary and loved extraordinary things. One has been a traveller; and it is not a traveller’s feet which ache.

Author’s Note

The inclusion of Tagalog and Pilipino words is largely of nouns for which there is no single or simple English equivalent and which would otherwise call for a laborious explanation in mid-paragraph. A good example is the word
yamas,
grated coconut from which two lots of coconut milk (and hence most of the oil) have been squeezed for use in cooking and which is then given to pigs and chickens.

A few Tagalog words,
cogon
, for example, occur throughout the text spelled with a ‘c’. In Tagalog the letter ‘c’ does not exist and ‘k’ is used instead, taking its place in the alphabetical order. However, certain words are often spelled with a ‘c’ even in the Philippines and since they are commonly recognised by Westerners I leave them in this less authentic version. I have also left a few other words of Spanish origin such as ‘barrio’ in their original form.