When living in Kansulay I commute between the forest and the village by the shore, a distance of only a mile or so but quite enough to tinge things with the remoteness of the interior, the bundok.
The path from Kansulay takes me up a valley whose floor was long ago planted with coconuts. Eventually the path forks off, crosses a stream and climbs steeply up one side among wilder vegetation until it comes out on top of the bare ridge where my hut stands. From here I can look down into the valley without at any point being able to see its floor, only the dense crowns of the palms, infinite sprays of tail-feathers and the coconuts’ amber gleam. Invisible beneath them are two huts several hundred yards apart. One is the house of my nearest neighbours, the Malabayabas family, whom I see almost daily. The other is a ruin and stands by the stream amid the pink-grey pillars of the coconuts. There with several pigs once lived Lolang Mating.
Lolang Mating was undoubtedly an exceptional person by rural Filipino standards in that although she was a grandmother (as the honorific implies) she chose to live alone, away from her family who were down in the village. She was visited daily by her son and her grandchildren who are now muscular teenagers with feet calloused from climbing trees. They came as much to feed the pigs as to see Granny but to all appearances relations between them were reasonably cordial. However, the old woman refused absolutely to go down and live with them. Probably nobody had actually pointed out that it was unseemly for a woman in her seventies to live on her own in the semi-wilderness: it would have been superfluous in a culture where the principle of family proximity is supreme and where the question Who is your companion? is habitually asked whenever any activity such as eating or sleeping or merely walking home is proposed. In a land where nobody does anything alone from choice, where a bamboo floor densely packed with sleeping bodies is considered far preferable to luxurious solitude, where superstition as much as a lack of torch batteries keeps people indoors after dark, Lolang Mating chose to live alone in her hut.
In time I became friendly with her as I went to and from the village for necessities such as rice and cooking oil. When I fetched water from the stream nearby in the mornings I would see her, patched skirts tucked up around bowed mahogany legs and with her grey hair done up in a bun skewered with a bamboo sliver, standing in the current washing her wrinkled chest. With instinctive decorum we would pretend not to have seen each other as I suddenly found something to interest me a little way off. Then she would call out a greeting and I knew I could come and lay my plastic jerrycan on its side in the stream and chat. By now she would have changed her blouse and be washing yesterday’s with an end of bright blue detergent soap.
Those early morning conversations with Lolang Mating became a feature of daily life at Kansulay. We would sit on the low boulders with our feet in the current while the palm fronds combed the sunbeams as they fell on the water and butterflies floated on the air. She would talk and unaccountably fall silent, absently raising and lowering the blouse into the water, sometimes beating it with a paddle hacked from the spine of a frond as if to emphasise an inward voice. She would talk to me of the Japanese Occupation, of the anti-Japanese guerrillas, the Hukbalahap, whom she had once sheltered. She would talk of pigs and murders and Mayor Pascual who had been born without an arsehole – she knew because as the midwife she had delivered him – and the doctor had had to make one with a pair of scissors. She talked about the days when you could shop for a family with a single piso and when almost anyone who wore a proper hat spoke Spanish. She knew a lot about the magicians who lived in the hills of the interior and grew whole fields of tintang luya, black ginger, that rarest of freak plants whose properties were immensely powerful. Black ginger would help you cast spells or defend you against manananggal, vampiric horrors which squat in the rafters of huts where there are babies or the sick and let down their tongues to suck out the sleepers’ livers.
‘So aren’t you frightened here at night?’
‘Of course not,’ she said.
‘But believing in all those spirits and dwarves and ghosts and vampires?’
‘I believe in them of course, I often see them. But I’m not scared of them. They’ll never trouble me. They never have and I’m an old woman now. As long as I’m in my place they’ll leave me alone because they know it’s my place and not theirs.’
‘Like dogs.’
‘Like that.’
She told me she was born here. I looked instinctively towards her hut, its legs and walls bleached silver with age. It was not the house she had been born in, of course, but it was on the same site, as she explained on another occasion. To Europeans accustomed to nostalgia about old things Filipinos can sometimes seem strangely matter-of-fact about impermanence. In an architecture of light wood structures and grass or palm thatch, termites and typhoons between them make a fifty-year-old house an antique. Houses are quickly built and newness is valued as a sign that the family fortunes are on the up-and-up. A patched or sagging house speaks of poverty and low spirits.
Of the house in which Lolang Mating had been born not a trace remained but a blackened rectangular pit where she told me one of its four legs had stood. The original post-hole had been enlarged and was now used as a kiln for making charcoal from coconut shells.
‘When I was born there were no coconuts here,’ she said one day. ‘This was all forest like up there where you live. We had a clearing where my father kept pigs. We found bananas and papayas in the forest and grew kamoteng-kahoy which we carried down and sold in the village. Then our landlord bought the land and decided to cut it all down and plant coconuts. I remember how ugly it looked, the land burnt off and with tufts of coconut seedlings in rows. Now of course it’ll soon be time to cut them down and replant them. They should have been re-planting all the time, not waiting for them to become old at the same moment.’
This spot by the bend in the stream had always been her place regardless of what vegetation came and went, and about it she was not a bit matter-of-fact. She spoke of Kansulay as of some alien city, not as a small collection of houses identical to her own a bare mile away by the sea and lived in almost exclusively by her own relatives of varying remoteness.
‘Too much noise there,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t live in that house of Dando’s’ (Dando was her son). ‘Children and cooking and drinking all the time, day and night. And I don’t like that electric light they want to put in. It hurts my eyes. Too much light at night is harmful: you can tell because it makes people look older, even the children. It does something to the skin. And when you go outside you can’t see anything for five minutes.’
A genuine solitary, then, recognisable at any time and in any culture. The thought was not displeasing that I too might end my days standing in a dappled stream at dawn soaping my wrinkled chest and at night putting luminous fungi in a glass jar to cast a soft radiance inside my hut. One day Lolang Mating was found sprawled on the earth beside her kayuran, the low wood tripod with a serrated flange fixed to its beak used for grating coconuts. She was taken down the track to the village and put to bed in Dando’s house. I went to see her a day or two later. She was ambling about on her tough old legs but as if lacking a pig to feed or a blouse to wash she could no longer remember where she was going. There was talk in the family about ‘high blood’; I assumed a minor stroke. She seemed quite unimpaired but there was a remoteness in her eyes that was new.
‘They won’t let me go,’ she told me. ‘They say I can’t go on living there, I might die there all alone.’
‘I expect it’s for the best,’ I said ritually, but we both knew it wasn’t. She had been born there, why could she not die there among the fireflies and the frogs and the crickets? What was so special about having family faces stare down at you and pester you with medicines?
‘Lazy,’ she said confidingly. ‘They can’t be bothered to come up the track and fetch me down to bury me.’
She made it sound a long way off to her land. It was obvious that had she lived in a world where one did not have to consider social rituals and pious custom she would have chosen to be buried there among the coconuts by the bend in the stream rather than in the cemetery at Bulangan where the salt sea breezes rotted the cement sepulchres and within ten years made them look sordid rather than venerable. She was cut off from the land of her death and quite possibly now at the mercy of an alien crew of territorial spirits. Each time I saw her she seemed more silent, more worn down with the sheer proximity of people.
‘Take her home,’ I urged Dando. ‘Go on, even if it’s only for a visit while you feed the pigs.’
And apparently he did, probably raising his eyebrows to passing villagers’ unspoken enquiries with a mime of filial helplessness as his ancient mother walked back to her country. She was not allowed to do anything when she got there but sat once more in the doorway of her hut with her feet on the polished bamboo rung of the top step as she always had, looking out at the sift of sunlight into her glade and the lurch of butterflies in and out of the dapples. Dando and her grandsons bustled around grating coconut for the pigs, shinning up a tree to collect the bamboo flask of tuba. Now and again they glanced to where Lolang Mating slept the sleep of an old person after a long walk, leaning against the doorway with her head against the jamb. And when it was mid-morning and time to set off home for lunch they found she was not to be woken.
So they did cart her off down the track away from the fireflies and the frogs and in due time shovelled her into Bulangan. And there the salt sea-wind blows over her cement lid and the lizards run over the lettering carved with a trowel tip in wet mortar. And for many weeks afterwards I still approached the stream with caution out of sheer habit before going to lay the jerrycan on its side by the stones where we had sat. I would get back from the market in mid-morning and pass her hut and miss her intelligent gaze, for in the doorway now lolled the uncommunicative horny soles of a grandson as he snoozed.
Then I went away for some months and when I returned found Lolang Mating’s hut canting and derelict. Her family had abandoned the site for it was more convenient to move the pigs and find another tree for palm wine closer to home. The roof had largely blown off in a storm and the slatted bamboo floor which had once been buffed by her bare feet was now black and spongy with wet, for the rains had come. In the mud nearby I found the ladle she had made for pigswill and took that up to my own hut where I still use it for boiling water. But it was not until I first passed her place in the dark that I found a strange thing. For there on a moonless night among the black pillars of this crypt Lolang Mating’s hovel glowed softly. Presumably her habit of bringing luminous fungi into the house had seeded the whole structure with spores which, with the sudden coming of the wet season, had sprouted. Alive with yeasts her hut pulsed with cold energy while by day one remarked only a sad trapezoid of spars and slats.
It was not long before other people passing by at night noticed this and the predictable rumours circulated that the old woman had been a witch and that her familiar spirits or even her own spirit still haunted the spot where she had lived and died. The place was shunned, the hut fell down completely, and I was thought madder than ever to go on living at the end of a path which led through spookish wilds.
I went to Dando’s on the anniversary of his mother’s death even though I think he half believed I had helped cause it by overwhelming his better judgement. I went for the eating and conviviality rather than the prayers for her soul, which I had no doubt could take care of itself. Her grandsons had thickened with muscle and drinking; one of them had gone off to the town some miles away to work as a Petron boy, turning the handle of a petrol pump. Even the pigs had grown fat, roaming the foreshore at dawn to unearth the leavings of the villagers who decently waited until nightfall before defecating in shallow scoops in the sand, like turtles laying their eggs.
*
Only after she had died did I realise that throughout our acquaintance Lolang Mating had never once asked me what I was doing in Kansulay: a person of phenomenal discretion. Certainly when I first arrived I could not have told her had she asked. It dawned on me only gradually that she might have understood if I had said ‘My father’, since she was also living alone in the bundok because of her family and because of the person she was.
To explain it to myself, though, I would have to go back several decades and seven thousand miles to confront a few of those signal incidents which mark the trail leading here. I am old enough now to disdain the slow chronology of childhood and adolescence, most of it as boring to recount as it was to live through, and fix on a handful of events. I judge their importance to me in the way everyone does, by the manner in which they seem to echo down a life and go on appearing weirdly relevant and even influential in what one is and does. Drawing Tiwarik at the age of twelve was one obvious example of such an event. Another comes from a family summer holiday, that set-piece scene for so much collective friction in English family life.
This memory is of a particular skirmish in the protracted feud with my father which in retrospect seems to have begun the day he was demobbed and which lasted until his death in the week before my university Prelims. examination. We were somewhere in the West Country, having a picnic lunch on a beach. The day was warm, the Atlantic glacial. My younger sister Jane with her child’s imperviousness to cold had earlier insisted on bathing, forcing at least one adult in with her to rescue her if need be from the green and pounding waves. I was sitting slightly behind my father, anxious not to be within his range of vision. He was slowly eating a tomato sandwich, gazing seawards as if at the fleets of ships he had always wanted to design in preference to a worthier career in medicine which presumably left the inner eye littered with nothing so much as corpses. Suddenly I saw the wasp which had settled on his sandwich and was busy in one of the doughy indentations of his last bite. I said nothing. I watched as without looking he took another mouthful and began his measured, irritatingly thorough chewing.
It was impressive. He spat out on the sand a bolus of goo flecked with red and yellow-and-black, itself shocking enough since my father was a stickler for table manners as well as having a horror of public scenes of any kind. My mother looked at him in amazement wondering what she had done wrong.
‘Dammit I’ve been stung. Ow.’
‘Let me have a look, darling.’ My mother was an anaesthetist and had taught my father anaesthetics when he was a student at UCH just before the war.
‘There won’t be anything to see,’ my father told the sand with his head between his knees. ‘It’s just damned painful.’
‘Soft palate or throat?’
‘God, woman, I don’t … Sort of round about the uvula, it feels like. Oh,’ he said, suddenly understanding. My mother had been thinking ahead. ‘I don’t think I’ll obstruct. But it’s swelling all right. I can feel a lump.’
We were a long way from the car which in turn was miles from the nearest cottage hospital. My mother persuaded him to submit to an examination.
‘Ow,’ she said in sympathy. ‘Yes, I can see where it is.’
My father eyed her. Whatever the correct procedure should have been – such as running for the car – it was evidently too late now. He would simply have to weather it out. His voice was already hoarse and his breathing noisier.
‘In the last resort you’ll have to do a tracheo,’ he told her. ‘At least I suppose I couldn’t be in better hands.’
‘But …’ my mother looked about her helplessly at the picnic things, at the jam-smeared spoons, the bakelite mugs, the thermos of orange juice. She picked up the breadknife, a decent affair with a round wooden handle and a proper serrated edge.
‘Come on you two,’ she said to my sister and me. ‘Daddy’s going to be all right. You just go on down to the sea and play for a bit but you’re not to go into the water yet, it’s too soon after lunch.’
We left them willingly. Down by the foam which licked raggedly at the blotting sand Jane said:
‘Is Daddy going to die?’
‘Yes,’ I told her with an elder brother’s superior knowledge. She began to cry since she believed she was quite fond of him in the way children do. I was myself frightened by what I had done, quite rightly not bothering to distinguish between allowing something to have happened and actually causing it to have happened. We were both absolutely intrigued by the idea of the drama thirty yards away which we couldn’t bring ourselves to turn round and watch: Mummy sawing away at Daddy’s neck with a Harrods’ bread-knife. After a tense five minutes, though, we could see her beckoning arm. The swelling was beginning to subside; beach surgery was not going to be necessary. I felt light with relief, so perhaps I hadn’t really wanted him to die either. (It was another ten years before he really did obstruct, this time lower down the alimentary tract, not from a wasp sting but from the pincers of the dreaded crab. Nor bread-knife nor all the glittering cutlery of St George’s Hospital could save him. He was forty-seven, a scant two years older than I am now.)
Later that afternoon when the wasp business was all over my parents were lying like most other people on the beach in a kind of post-lunch torpor, soaking up the weak sun with that English fixity of purpose which recognises there won’t be much more of it this year, next year, ever. I was sitting some way off making a corniche road with banked sand up the face of an outcrop of rock. Suddenly looking up at all those supine bodies it struck me they were already halfway sunk in sand. Supposing the sand were actually absorbing them as they lay dozing, that shortly there would come from all over the beach a series of soft noises, flut! thoop! glup! and I would look up to find it deserted of humans, of dogs, of parents, with only the faintest of outlines on the smooth surface to suggest what had lain there, like spoons allowed to settle beneath thick soup. I alone would survive … I do not know much about Freud’s theory of wishing one’s father dead; I think my fantasy coming so soon after the wasp incident was very much to do with doctors. It is doctors who, above all, see themselves as survivors since it is their duty to minister to the ailing and moribund, and doctoring was in my blood.
Both my parents were consultants who were passionate founder-supporters of the National Health Service. Neither of them practised at home so there were no discreetly ringing doorbells and low voices or sudden gasps coming from behind the study door. Nevertheless the evidence for its being a medical household was plentiful. The magazines, advertising and – in those days – free samples of drugs which rained steadily on to the doormat six days a week were a part of it. Also a part were the anaesthetic machine and various accoutrements my mother kept in the cupboard under the stairs. The homes of schoolfriends I visited also had cupboards under the stairs but they were generally full of boring things like Hoovers and sewing machines and slide projectors. Nothing like as interesting as our cupboard with its gleaming equipment, all knobs and dials, the little cylinder of dreadedly-explosive cyclopropane, the bottles of waste ether and trilene which every anaesthetist of that era brought home for stain removals and putting down hamsters with tumours. There were blood-pressure machines and orange rubber bags and stethoscopes and catheters and old-fashioned glass syringes with rings to put the fingers through. By comparison my father’s doctoring tools were feeble, consisting mainly of a rubber-rimmed knee hammer and about a hundredweight of file cards (he was doing research on Parkinson’s Disease).
But it was not just the props: the medical ethic was plentifully there and, on my father’s side of the family at least, fairly interwoven with the Christian ethic of the Good Doctor as well. My father had been born of medical missionaries in China, like Mervyn Peake, and was sent back to England at a tender age to be educated at Eltham College where Peake also was, some four years ahead of him. My grandfather went on to be interned by the Japanese in China and tottered heroically through the war looking after his fellow-inmates of the camp. On his release he was a survivor, but only just. I remember him as an ill old man, very quiet and gentlemanly. His nervous system was being eroded by something irreversible; he died when I was about twelve. His nephew, my father’s cousin, was a doctor; his son is a doctor. My father’s younger brother, my uncle, is a doctor, so is his eldest son. My aunt was a pharmacist.
My mother was a black sheep, opting to be a doctor at a time when it was not ladylike for a girl who had been presented at Court to do anything as sordid as medicine. The medical ethic was strong in her too, the Christian ethic vanishingly weak. She was something of a socialist in a devoutly Tory family (my grandfather was Conrad ImThurn, heavily involved in the Zinoviev letter affair of the 1920s). I grew up with her accounts of doing her midder in the Thirties in the St Pancras area of London, chiefly remembering her shock at discovering how the poor lived and her anger at herself and her class for electing not to have known. I especially recall her saying how common it then was to go into tenements north of the Euston Road and find the top floor inaccessible because the occupants had burnt the staircase for fuel. In such houses she would deliver the baby on sheets of newspaper (fresh newsprint being, apparently, remarkably germ-free) and tuck it up in one of the pulled-out drawers of a chest, there being nowhere else for it to go.
Actually my mother did have a great-aunt who was a pediatrician so she was not a complete loner in the profession on her side of the family. Nonetheless I honour the independence of her spirit. When I was growing up everybody except my parents took it for granted I would simply follow the family trade. But it was out of the question. I was already fighting my father: I could not have been a doctor had it been the last profession open to me. I made quite sure of this by failing abjectly in every science subject except Biology, which seemed interesting and neutral and which finally came to my rescue by allowing me to take up a place at university since I had ploughed ‘O’ level elementary mathematics seven times, then a school record for any member of the Upper Sixth and one which I would be proud to think remains unbroken to this day. It was not until my father’s premature death partially released me from the obligation to be mindlessly contrary that I was able to exorcise the lingering medical ghost by working in St Stephen’s Hospital, Fulham Road, where in all I must have spent nearly a year.
*
Kansulay has a water problem, relying for all fresh water on the stream which winds its way from the interior down past the place where Lolang Mating used to wash and where I still fetch my daily ration when I am living there. Further downstream it comes to where the coconut groves are more densely inhabited and finally flows through the village itself, under a shaky timber bridge and into the sea where it has created its own gap in the fringing reef offshore. This stream is Kansulay’s lifeline. Over the centuries it has eroded a bed for itself which is quite four yards wide and often more, but unless there is a sudden downpour in the distant mountains the water seldom fills it. Instead it meanders in a sub-riverbed within the larger bed, winding from rock to rock, pool to pool. Often there are wallows under the muddy banks in which buffaloes lie, their cool grey tonnage tucked into the curved recesses they have worn, muzzles resting on the surface, birds perched on their heads.
Upstream of Lolang Mating’s old place few people actually live in the forest, as opposed to the groups who occasionally pass a night or two there while making copra from the furthermost coconuts. The water as I collect it is clean, kept so by leeches and by the little crabs, prawns and whelks which make nocturnal hunting trips (wading upstream with a pressure-lamp) a source of food. Sometimes one comes across a dead chicken or a loaf of buffalo turd but nothing to make one seriously doubt the water ’s fitness for drinking. Downstream from Lolang Mating’s, however, it is another matter as more and more people use the stream for washing themselves, their clothes and their animals. By the time it has reached the village it must be carrying quite a lot of domestic waste; there is a steady incidence of gastroenteritis and worms, especially among the younger children whose habit of defecating in or near the water cannot much help.
The barangay Captain there told me that all community development funds had been frozen by the new government: no projects were to be undertaken until either the national debt had been paid off or all local officers from the Marcos period had been investigated to find out what they had done with the money for similar projects in the past. Supplying Kansulay with drinkable water seemed rather more important than assisting international usury or national witch-hunting so I suggested to the Captain that if he could supply labour and technical knowledge I could probably squeeze the necessary finance out of friends and relatives in Europe.
Which was how I found myself one day walking in the woods not far from Lolang Mating’s with a young Filipino graduate who had worked on the provincial government’s water schemes in the days when there had been any. We were not expecting to stumble on an abundant source which could take the place of the stream, but it seemed to us that if we could find a steady spring we might pipe this down to the village to a series of stand-pipes where people could at least get their drinking water. They might still have to do their washing in the stream; and if they were unable to break their children’s habit of crapping in it and drinking from it then natural selection would simply have to run its unemotional course and weed out the incurably brainless (there being nothing like low-budget good works for reducing one to a heartless pragmatism).
We encountered forest dryads, nymphs and sprites variously disguised as old men and women feeding pigs in a clearing, cutting a chicken’s throat and digging up edible roots with a rusty crowbar. It was several hours before we came upon a hollow beneath a jungled hill which dripped and ran in a way which at once cheered my companion. After some loping about like a retriever quartering the ground for scent he announced we would have to dig a test hole to see if the flow of water justified building a proper concrete ‘spring box’.
We returned to Kansulay to find men with spades willing to donate an hour or two’s labour under their bayanihan system where everyone cheerfully chips in for a common project. There were plenty of volunteers, even a few cheerful ones, until we explained exactly where the spring was. All of a sudden people became unenthusiastic, looked at the ground or remembered other things they ought to have been doing. Tired and bitten, I was swept by a churlish rage. I walked off to the river nearby where I pettishly threw stones at the piglets wallowing in the pools, indulging a savage inner monologue. Typical. You take the initiative, get the Captain’s okay, offer to scratch around for the money and spend hours tramping the jungle to find a bloody spring and you’d think after all that a couple of them might be willing to do an hour’s work on it. I mean, who the hell’s it for, anyway? My drinking water’s fine; it’s not my children dying of dysentery and worms. Right: they want to go on living like that, no problem. They don’t want improvements, all they want is handouts. It’s all the fault of the Americans fostering the aid mentality, that and those sodding charities. No-one can save the goddamned Philippines but the goddamned Filipinos and until they work that out they’re going to have to go on living a hundred and fifty years in the past …
And so on for quite some time. What was particularly disgraceful about this silent outburst was that it came as if from a reforming zeal I despise and which I dread may be in my genes. It seemed to put me firmly into that class of professional believers in Progress who must often have indulged similar passions of self-righteousness, whether they were Victorian social reformers tackling the rookeries of Tottenham Court Road, missionaries endeavouring to stop penis-eating among the Mbwele or Japanese soldiers trying to get a decent day’s work out of British construction crews on the Burmese railway. Always there is that element of condescension, a disparity between doer and done-to-whether cultural, educational, financial or racial.
Luckily there is no obligation on anybody to do anything for the right reasons, as the piglets discovered when I stopped throwing stones at them because there were no more left of the right size. In any case I was feeling better. The water expert was approaching.
‘You were very wise to go. I think some of the people were ashamed in case you were laughing at them.’
‘Laughing at them?’ I say in real surprise.
‘That’s what I tell them. “James is very understanding,” I said. “He never laughs at anybody.” They know that but some are ashamed to you.’
‘Ashamed.’
‘Because of nono.’
And suddenly everything becomes clearer and it is my turn to feel shame. It was neither indolence nor fecklessness which caused their change of heart, but superstition. The pantheon of demons, spirits and genii in which many of the villagers believe is vast: I do not think I have learned more than a fraction of it, and that fraction is merely a short list of names. Being able to identify spirits by name is but a beginning; what gives such beliefs their cogency and power is the mass of lore behind them, the myths and stories and inexplicable daily happenings which give them life. Each time I hear a new story I realise how ignorant I am of such matters.
Nono, then, are spirits whose characteristics seem to vary according to the places they inhabit although they may actually be of different varieties. They range from the reasonably neutral to the nasty: those associated with water as in streams, wells and damp places are reckoned the fiercest. This at once explained the men’s reluctance to go to a part of the forest they anyway normally avoided and start attacking the nonos’ residence with spades. That was simply asking for trouble, for displaced ghosts to light upon them. Certain other things began making sense. I had once been looking for wild guavas and chillies somewhat above Lolang Mating’s place and, tired of crashing about, sat down by the stream to watch it for a while with my plastic bag of guavas at my feet. I am very easily entranced by water and must, watching its motion, have become motionless myself. In a short while Lolang Mating appeared wading slowly upstream, her torn dress bunched up in one hand as with the other she made sudden lunges into the water, coming up with small dark crabs she put in a plastic litre pot which had once held motor oil. She was talking out loud to herself, I presumed in the way most people do when engaged in something on their own.
‘Damn you!’ she said mildly as she bent down again. Clearly the crab had eluded her, only it hadn’t for when her hand emerged it held a large specimen which she dropped into the pot where it scrabbled hollowly. But then she said ‘Go away!’
She was not looking at me when she said this; furthermore she had used the plural ‘you’. I had now left it too late to announce my presence. Embarrassed I sat without moving and hoped she hadn’t seen me after all. Nor had she. After a moment she turned round, went back downstream and disappeared behind swags of dense greenery. Well, the old, I thought. Or we solitaries, perhaps; we’re always addressing the people in our heads.
Weeks later I overheard a companion who was ahead of me jump over a rivulet and pause on the other side to light a cigarette. Before the scrape of match on box he said: ‘Susmaryosep tabi nono.’ Seconds later when I caught up with him I did not ask him what he had meant but remembered the phrase since I had not heard the word ‘nono’ before. ‘Tabi’ meant variously ‘edge’ or ‘to one side’ and hence was used to tell someone to get out of the way. ‘Susmaryosep’ was common enough, mostly as an interjection but usually with a hint of genuine invocation rather than as a mere expression of surprise (typically Filipino, of course, to call on the Holy Family instead of on something coldly cerebral like the Trinity). And now, of course, it made sense. Both he and Lolang Mating had been addressing the genii loci. Suddenly I began hearing everybody do it, which suggested that just as the undersea creatures I don’t recognise can remain invisible, so speech I don’t understand is often inaudible.
So there it was: Kansulay’s water project seemed temporarily stalled for lack of diggers. At this point it became clear that not everyone was equally worried by the threat of nono and that a certain delicacy obtained in which nobody was mocked for believing. I was anxious lest the believers should feel that a foreigner with his natural immunity to such things would make fun of them and maybe even shame some of them into digging against their better judgement. In the event, however, nobody cried off for the simple reason that those who felt it essential took anti-nono precautions. Among effective charms were copper, salt, ‘metal-shit’ (i.e. swarf from a lathe), a kind of seaweed, incense, holy water and a cross made from a palm leaf. Several men, as they dug, told the nono to leave them alone but obviously felt secure enough with their charms to be amused when someone suggested that nono didn’t understand Tagalog and that it would be better to address them in Latin like a priest. (Nono must have been apprehended and addressed differently before the Spanish came.)
In the event the test-digging was a great success. Not only did no-one fall ill but the expert said the water was welling up in sufficient quantities to merit building a proper cement ‘spring box’. In short, the project was on. Would he, I asked, if he were in my position – in other words organising the funds – be as certain and as sanguine about it? Oh yes, he assured me. If lower down the pipeline we were to build a large collection tank which could fill up overnight, and if people could be persuaded to turn off the taps when they were not using them, there would be adequate drinking water for Kansulay. This was excellent news and we all returned mud-smeared and cheerful.