The Manila which ex-President Ferdinand Marcos left in late February 1986 was, like the man himself, a notorious mixture of wealth and decay. His regime and family had become like the prestige projects they had from time to time dotted around the city to impress visiting popes, potentates, world bankers and suchlike. Their very prominence drew attention to flaking exteriors and gave off great wafts of savage dismay like the dank toadstool smell of air conditioners. On the reclaimed foreshore was Imelda Marcos’s pride and joy, her Cultural Centre of the Philippines to which the great and good of the world’s artists, opera singers and ballet companies came. Behind it on the inland side of Roxas Boulevard was the high-rise row of international hotels, gap-toothed here and there where a night-club or massage parlour had been burned to the ground. Several safe miles inland lay the upper- and middle-class enclaves, the opulent residential suburbs of Forbes Park, of Dasmariñas Village and Wack-Wack with its golf course, as well as the pocket Manhattan of the Makati Commercial Centre. In between, among the tumbled concrete breakwaters of the foreshore, in burnt-out ruins, even in trees and clumps of bushes, the squatters shrugged themselves into cardboard and plastic sheeting, their infants laid out asleep and black with flies on pavements amid passing feet. It was a city in which even the world’s bankers had lost faith.

I arrive in this place with my head still full of silence and glittering air, of unconfined spaces, which are at once smothered and forcibly replaced by crowds and carbon monoxide. Manila has to be faced. It is impossible to write anything about the Philippines without at some stage dealing with this extraordinary city. This is not from any conventional courtesy whereby a visitor pays tribute to his host nation’s capital – far from it – but for two other reasons. One of these is that most of the knowledge the world has of the Philippines comes via Manila; to a large extent the city mediates the national image and the consequences bear looking at. The second reason is the almost mythic position Manila occupies in the minds of Filipinos themselves. Maybe this is a common phenomenon in any country where rural poverty drives people centripetally towards its chief city. Certainly wherever one goes in the provinces one begins to get the feeling that scarcely anybody wants to remain where he is but is merely counting the days until the right quirk of fate will pay his passage to Manila, give him board and lodging there, help him out with a bit of pakiusap, offer him a job.

Sometimes from the way this desire is phrased it is possible to extrapolate a Manila which is no more than a necessary first step to emigration. If America remains the Promised Land for so many Filipinos the rest of the developed world still offers a worthwhile exile. The newspapers are full of advertisements for agencies and fixers who will wangle visas, see to the paperwork, back-handers and red tape involved with getting a passport, interview applicants for jobs abroad. Among the saddest of all recurrent tales in a nation of hard-luck stories is that of the young man in the provinces who applies for a labouring job with a construction company in Saudi Arabia. The agency in Manila handling the job calls him for interview with a letter full of hopeful signs. All the applicant has to do is present himself at an address on a date with some photographs of himself and an application fee of several hundred pesos to show he is in earnest and to pay for the processing of his papers. The young man is crestfallen: he can never lay hands on a sum like that. But he has a whip-round of his family, his friends, his parish priest, anybody. He beggars himself. He scrapes together his fare. Somehow he at last manages to turn up at an ad hoc office in Manila, is welcomed together with thirty or forty others like him. They all fill out forms, hand over their photographs, hand over their fees, are asked to call back at 3 p.m.

It is not unusual to read laconic newspaper accounts of men like him found dead, leaving suicide notes (in one case of an illiterate, written by an amanuensis) saying there was no way they could return home to those families, those friends, that parish priest. No way, either, to describe the impotent rage and shame when at 3 p.m. they went back to find a locked door and nobody who had ever heard of ‘Gulfcon Recruitment Enterprises Co.’ Yet other than the relatives of those who die, how phlegmatic most Filipinos are when they hear of such things. ‘Ay …’ They cluck once or twice, the same noise the English make to gee up horses but which here signals distress, then laugh slightly. That’s what happens; that’s how the world is, full of swindlers and cheats; better watch out; trust neither policeman nor President unless they’re members of your own family, in which case be doubly careful.

Such tales apart it is a melancholy enough business for any fond visitor to contemplate a country of great beauty and natural wealth most of whose inhabitants seem desperate only to leave and turn themselves into the world’s servants, its nursemaids, its amahs, cooks, chauffeurs, houseboys, labourers, bar-tenders, bell-hops and waitresses. It must signify something, this near-romantic dream which almost at times transcends matters of mere money. The southward urge to the land where the lemon-trees flower which the German romantics characterised as der Drang nach Süden has its counterpart in the modern Philippines as der Drang nach Ausland. ‘Abroad’ is good on any terms since it is better paid. But a mere skivvy’s wages in a London Wimpy Bar, magnificent though they are compared with what Sising earns in Kansulay, still hardly seem quite enough completely to explain how the mere act of being abroad is equated with success and status back home. There must be something else involved, some jackpot dream of treasures without limit for the myth to go on surviving the reality of merciless exploitation, the coldness both metaphorical and literal which pushes ordinary culture shock over the edge of the bearable and sends so many Filipinos in the UK into mental institutions.

Meanwhile Manila itself remains a goal for the unqualified, a halfway house for the more plausible, a positive clearing-house for those with degrees and qualifications. Of the emigrants few have no dreams of returning one day, typically and wistfully to the small pond of their rural origin in which their new wealth will make them very big frogs indeed (The envy! The adulation! The delicious settling of old scores!). Of the transients who harbour similar fantasies most seem to stay and after some time find they have crossed into the category of residents. This must be true since the city goes on growing.

It is conventional to make the point that Manila strikes most Europeans as disturbingly without a centre. The Second World War and the elements have destroyed much and the old vernacular architecture of wood and nipa thatch was by its nature impermanent. It appears to them a shapeless, confused and unrelievedly twentieth-century mess strung out along a reeking bay. Some visitors are better informed, in which case it becomes conventional to discern amid the sprawl distinct villages still organised into barangays exactly as they would be in the provinces from which many of the inhabitants have so recently arrived. These visitors might also have read a book or two by Nick Joaquin, one of the best known of contemporary Filipino writers. Amongst his collected journalism, much of it written under his anagrammatic nom-de-plume of ‘Quijano de Manila’, are scattered pieces in which, full of affection and nostalgia, he wanders around his city disinterring points of interest.

It is Quijano rather than any guide book who can set a traveller down on a nondescript corner of this howling city and help him put out a few tentative roots. It is precisely not the guide book places which touch one: not the old Spanish inner-city fortress of Intramuros, nor the hotel where General MacArthur occupied a suite, nor even the national shrine on the spot where Dr José Rizal was executed by the Spanish in 1896. Above all the sunsets in Manila Bay are clearly fakes achieved by some vulgarian with the aid of Technicolor. Since there is little left in Manila which a European would consider at all old he turns to Quijano to glimpse the palimpsest beneath. In default of buildings and monuments he must rely for re-making the city on such things as the courses of certain streets. By some fluke the principal commercial and fashionable street of the late Spanish period – Escolta – still exists, and under its own name. It is now on the edge of Chinatown and is a desultory place of watch-shops and restaurants. But for nearly everywhere else Quijano is needed to make sense of streets whose names have changed and whose present undifferentiated squalor conceals a historic individuality. Calle Azcárraga, for example, which only some twenty-five years ago was renamed Claro M. Recto after the late nationalist intellectual. Writing of this street’s Tondo end Quijano observes:

A pleasurable sense of history is hard won in Manila and one doubts that even for a committed Manileño like Quijano the bibingkas were quite what madeleines were for Proust. Perhaps the pleasurable is out of place, even irrelevant. Certainly one pauses on a bridge near the Post Office above the deep khaki Pasig River, feeling the concrete vibrate uneasily to the immense stream of traffic for which it was doubtless never designed. The substance below is scarcely water at all even though it bears on its swarming and iridescent surface bunches of foliage as a reminder of its far-off inland provenance. To be plunged into it would surely be to die instantly. Certainly one pauses there, if only to reflect that this poisoned sump is the very river from which some etymologists derive Tagalog, the name, the tribe, its language (taga + ilog: inhabitants of the river). At this point it has just flowed past the gardens of Malacañang Palace.3

I explained at the beginning of this book that I originally came to the Philippines because it was one of the places in South-East Asia I had not visited at the time of the Vietnam War and which was to some degree involved in that war. Consequently Manila has for me a powerful ability to invoke a time nearly twenty years ago, not least because it is in some ways so old-fashioned. The awful concrete architecture, the scabby trusses of overhead wiring, the jeepneys which look like (but which mostly no longer are) re-bodied Second World War jeeps, the beer-houses and nite-spots and go-go bars and the rest are all reminiscent of an Asian re-creation of an American garrison town. It is largely post-South Pacific, although some of it by not much. It may be a modern international city as the guide books and handouts say; it may exhibit all the newest wrinkles of contemporary urban drift and crisis as the sociological studies assert; but for me Manila exudes the smell and the feel of another era. When I am in Manila I am also, however slightly, in the past in Saigon or Bangkok, an illusion strengthened by the US-style uniforms worn by the military. The shoeshine boys, the squalor, the violence, the shootings, the beggars, child prostitutes, ‘hostesses’, pick-pockets are the same; the occasional crew-cut Asian heads are suggestive; the burnt-out bars and hotels and massage parlours only too similar.

Do I unconsciously look for it and therefore see what I look for? Worse, am I myself in the grip of some squalid nostalgia? I do not think so. Certainly I am astonished at how it all goes on, noisily, vividly. I am less astonished by what overseas visitors do not want to know. Reading what lies beneath the surface argues not knowledge so much as that glum lack of personal investment which permits knowledge. It is both pleasanter and easier to spend money than ask questions. It is still too soon after the self-styled ‘People’s Revolution’ of February 1986 to know whether Manila itself will change out of its hackneyed role as whorehouse of the East as if it were still ministering to troops on R&R who magically remain invisible. Very probably an era has indeed passed. But it is harder to see how the economic imperatives will themselves change at all quickly. The thought occurs to someone like myself for whom this city remains so strangely dated that it is not after all caught in some cultural time-warp but quite simply stagnating from lack of the right kind of spending. It is as unmysterious as that.

In the late Seventies and early Eighties – that is to say in the declining years of the Marcos dynasty – the country appeared superficially to be in a state of stable anarchy brought about jointly by the rigours of Martial Law and the untrammelled freedom of public officials to do pretty much what they liked. In this strange political half-life Manila had some of the high, wild, fin-de-saison qualities ascribed to other famous cities under regimes in their lapsarian heydays: Batista’s Havana, Faroukh’s Cairo, even Mussolini’s Salò. ‘Ah, I remember Manila then,’ old hands will reminisce in thirty years’ time, the semi-scandalised tone of their original narratives long having given over to a sundappled worldliness. ‘My God the place was wide open. Anything went and I do mean anything. Provided you had the money, of course. But you hardly needed very much of that. Oh well, it couldn’t last, and quite right too’ (the token responsible citizen); ‘the poverty and abuses were sickening’ (the obligatory humanitarian). ‘But …’ (The wistfulness, the wistfulness).

What a city, what a whole country turns into at such moments is Fantasyland, a far-off place on which the rest of the world can superimpose its unbridled dreams. There in the distance beckon baroque structures of vice, Disneyesque set-pieces of outlandish appetites gloriously catered for, a shimmering vista of carnality. It would have been a venereal Las Vegas except that even Las Vegas has laws; this country, this city had none for the paying foreigner. If his activities were shameless it was precisely in the way that fantasies are without shame since without consequences. Neither the country nor its capital were real for those who flew in, got drunk, were massaged back to consciousness, unloaded their seminal vesicles into an ‘escort’ and flew out again. Later they shook their heads in rueful male complicity in the less hectic bars of Hong Kong, saying only ‘Whew!’ as they belatedly discovered the loss of a gold tiepin or the acquisition of gonorrhoea.

Neither were Manila or Manileños real to the huge pale pederasts – the German, the English, the American, the Swedish, Dutch, Australian, French pederasts – who sat about the air-conditioned shopping malls while small girls and boys in very new jeans and training shoes gathered at their tables packing in as much food as they could before the bill was called for and their beaming host lumbered off, towing one or two or three according to fancy to the seclusion of his room in the Hilton, the Hyatt, or a rented apartment in Dakota Mansions. The most notorious of these shopping malls was Harrison Plaza which later ‘burned down’ (Manileños supply their own inverted commas for this phrase whenever referring to a place razed to the ground for the insurance money or as part of a vendetta). A new Harrison Plaza has since arisen from the ashes on the same site and with many of the same stores but it is a very sanitised and gelded phoenix. For all that the Marcoses were to linger on for two or three years interested parties will maintain that to all intents and purposes the old Manila (their old Manila) died with the first Harrison Plaza. Apart from anything else an innocence has gone. A new breed of kid has arisen, they say, tough, streetwise, dangerous, maybe even with AIDS. Sayang. It could not last.

A correct perception, this. Part of the pleasure of a fantasy lies in knowing it is time off, untime in an unworld bought against ever-encroaching reality. There was a certain haste about those visitors like that of the metaphorical child on the loose in a sweet-shop. If there was a certain innocence, too, about their public behaviour it was because there was quite evidently no sense of guilt. Of course they were not monsters: they were helping the child economically … In any case the child had no real existence of its own since it was part of a fantasy already older than itself. So while straight tourists strolled with their handbags and cameras through Harrison Plaza evincing outrage or a painstaking sophistication at the sight of men who were probably their own countrymen fondling and lolling and flirting with children who often looked (and often were) no older than ten, the fantasists seemed not even to have to affect unselfconsciousness. That had all been left behind as they passed beyond the last of the police at Schiphol, Heathrow and Frankfurt. The KLM, BA and Lufthansa storks had borne them safely beyond all legal clutches and delivered them babe-new into the sunny land of their wilder dreams. To all else they were oblivious. It was only the earnest, het couples from Iowa and Darwin who were so conspicuously un-born again, eyeing them aghast and sniffy with their sun-tan oil, righteousness and Hong Kong Nikons.

In order not to waste a moment of their fortnight or three weeks these men used to bring with them copies of type-script pamphlets with titles like The Boy-Lover’s Guide to Asia, typically published in Amsterdam. These booklets were part of the fantasy too, the injunctions and advice in them entirely un-ironised. Much could be read between their faintly printed lines. In their way they did their level best to fix a single-minded gulf between the cultures, to preserve the fantasy intact, to make sure an object never became a subject:

Nothing about the common Asian convention by which smiling and laughing may hide embarrassment or anxiety, simply the engaging amorality of the sweet-shop. Not much, either, to suggest that intense loyalty might not be unconnected with economic necessity, with a dependent family. Mark Cousins once posited an imaginary, wittier and more ironic Bosie by proposing ‘the love that dare not name its price.’ The Boy-Lover’s Guide was less reticent:

Is there something special about the position occupied by shoes in the imagery of racial contempt? One was suddenly reminded of the immortal remark by US Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, forced to resign in 1976 for observing ‘the only thing the coloureds are looking for in life are tight pussy, loose shoes and a warm place to shit’. In any case the gentle reader sipping his calamansi juice in VIP’s and eyeing the passing trade was not told about the men, often armed, who took their cut from the boys’ P25. Nor did he learn about the street gangs which effectively controlled (and still control) Manila, even Harrison Plaza, and whose tattooes on the boy’s shoulder or buttock he might later stroke with a jocular remark, provoking the child to pretend it was done as a joke by his brother. The Boy-Lover would still be unable to read the blue letters SSC or the cougar’s head as signifying the Sigue-Sigue Commando; nor the UFO sign as that of the Sputnik gang; nor the tartar’s head with horns and beard as belonging to the Bahala Na gang, famed as the ‘suicide’ gang whose street fights could leave half a dozen dead. Nor could he read OXO as a gang sign, nor BCJ as identifying the Batang City Jail where any child on the streets who was not obviously middle-class was (and still is) in danger of being hauled at any time of day or night by a policeman needing cash. Once in jail the child is free – indeed urged – to send a note to any next-of-kin, friend or remote acquaintance to beg them to stump up P50 or P100 to buy his release. Those unable to write find a jailer or gang member to act as amanuensis (for a cut, naturally). Many boys and girls are able to buy themselves out in a day or two. Others are not so fortunate and have to contend for rather longer with the cockroaches, slops, violence, to say nothing of the theft of their new T-shirt, jeans or shoes.

The deadly loyalties of members to their gangs, the deadly rivalries between the gangs themselves as between them and the police, the slum as village and battleground governed by obscure oaths, codes of honour and debts of obligation – such things are, of course, a part of the city which underlies the Manila the tourists see. In just such a way are the old streets Nick Joaquin celebrates disguised beneath new names and contemporary concrete, now so lost as practically to constitute a world of the imagination like Drune. The Manila which represents Fantasyland for rural Filipinos seeking their fortunes is a different city from the one which is Fantasyland for tourists, but occasionally the two overlap and are glimpsed by both sides as a battlefield. Fantasylands and battlefields have a good deal in common apart from the commingling of blood and passion, Eros and Thanatos, the Enemy and the Beloved and all those other celebrated couplings. Above all, they must depersonalise or the whole thing becomes impossible. Thus, Gook gets killed and Boy gets paid while somewhere in the middle, on that shady grey ground which both separates and mediates such economies, obscure mafiosi wheel and deal. To certain classes of outsiders it is vital for a country and its people to remain figments, real only in the rôles cast for them: hostess, call-boy, bar-tender, bell-hop, waitress, peasant. It is, after all, the essence of tourism.

Today in Manila there is indeed a strange crew, mostly foreign and left over from that old Manila, who are described in newspapers as the ‘Malate Mafia’, Malate being the particular area of the Ermita tourist belt which contains among other things Harrison Plaza. The Malate Mafia are characterised as people who have taken up residence and now largely control various rackets such as child prostitution and drugs and have become prime targets of post-Marcos reformist zeal. Catholic leaders and self-styled concerned citizens inveigh against them publicly, their power (Economic? Crony?) frequently alluded to as the reason why their disbanding seems so difficult to achieve. Whether or not they are protected, and by whom, is uncertain. More certain is that they could hardly be as immoral as the poverty which ensures their survival.

Manila remains the nipple from which the world takes most of its information about the Philippines. Maybe this is inevitable. It has certain results in terms of the accuracy with which the country is perceived. This was especially noticeable during the famous Snap Election of February 1986 which brought to an end the twenty years of Marcos dynasty.

I was not in Manila at the time. I was not even in the Philippines but up a mountain in Tuscany, by turns apprehensive and relieved as news came in over the BBC’s World Service of crowds facing tanks and the tanks not firing. For a week or more every news bulletin was headed by the latest from Manila, the correspondents there filing dutifully and copiously, and by the end of that week I had the strange impression I was listening to descriptions of a country I had never visited, let alone lived in. The terms were familiar enough, of course: the Government, the People, the Opposition, the Armed Forces, the Police, the Church, the Authorities (how the British, in particular, love this phrase!). But the State they were describing was somehow unrecognisable, and the more one listened to journalists reifying their own descriptions the more one knew it would remain so.

It was perhaps not the journalists’ fault. Being shunted about the world from one newsworthy crisis to the next is scarcely conducive to knowledge. It is not easy to be over-respectful of the opinion of a ‘South-East Asia correspondent’, on the same grounds that we would mistrust a South Korean newspaperman whose beat was ‘Europe’. Britain would be merely one of the many countries which fell within his bailiwick. No matter how many sedulous months he had spent in a library in Seoul we might well doubt he knew much about Britain if he had only ever lived a month or two there, including the obligatory couple of days in Northern Ireland with the Provisionals. We might be even more sceptical if he relied entirely on interpreters and guides. Had he lived with Yorkshire hill-farmers? Was he familiar with the preoccupations of commuters in pubs on Saturday evenings in Westerham or on the Hog’s Back? Did he really appreciate the subtleties of the various trade-offs made by a million families deep in the grip of deficit financing? Above all, did he actually understand the politics?

Yet the Philippines was perhaps the one place in the Far East where many Western journalists evidently felt the pressure to do additional homework was not so acute. Enough to give it the old experienced eye for a week or two from – for the best of professional reasons – a large hotel; be urbane and amusing and readable while doing the couple of days’ up-country NPA bit and flashing the old humanist credentials over the slums in Tondo. They all did it. How else, to be fair? That is journalism. Was the place not a quasi-American satellite? Plenty of old hands to give them the run-down. Apart from anything else a familiar friend had already been identified, a polarity they recognised: the Corrupt Dictator vs the Downtrodden People. In fact their typewriters and modems were still warm from the same story only a matter of days before in Haiti.

Among the reasons why journalists must have felt comparatively easy about this new assignment were religion and language. The Philippines declares itself officially to be 90 per cent Christian and 100 per cent English-speaking. As an ex-Spanish, ex-American colony, runs the assumption, the culture must be reasonably accessible. Like Hong Kong it is an honorary part of the West but unlike Hong Kong it does not have that aspect of a Chinese majority behind whose significant dragons and complex ideograms so much remains hidden to all but the most expert. The Philippines, by contrast, must be comprehensible.

This very accessibility constitutes a strange barrier. The West’s insistence on holding up a linguistic mirror to the world and seeing its own flawed reduplication makes this a difficult barrier to perceive, let alone to cross, especially when talking about these two subjects, religion and language. The Philippines’s version of Christianity is often a religiose form of Catholicism full of elaborate superstitions and, at Easter, crucifixions. It is thus of a dated kind which many secular Europeans find considerably more foreign than Buddhism. To them it smacks of the mediaeval when they hear of the devout poor further pauperising themselves to buy a handful of fake pearls to sew on the stiff little cope of some crude effigy of the Santo Niño or Our Lady of Biglang-Awa (Sudden Mercy). So it does when they see the pictures in Good Friday’s evening papers of a pious carpenter from Tondo hanging for three hours nailed to a cross he himself lovingly made, of a provincial mayor penitently thanking his God for the failure of an assassination attempt (the bullet struck his rosary) by crawling three kilometres with spiked blocks strapped to his naked back. It all sounds too much like the Holy Week flagellants in Spain: bloody, dark, hysterical. It is certainly very un-twentieth century.

If these same secular Europeans happened to pass through Kansulay on Good Friday they might see Tatang Naldo testing his own powers which according to tradition ought then to be at their height. On this day he eats glass and devours bars of Superwheel as well as (I am unreliably assured) frying eggs on the front of his T-shirt. ‘Demonyo’, say the people of Kansulay respectfully. Precisely related to this phenomenon – repeated in a thousand barrios up and down the Philippines – was an incident related in the papers of Holy Week 1986. An off-duty policeman in Manila offered to test lucky charms by firing at them with an M-16 rifle on a waste lot. The climax of the story was not really the child who was killed by a ricochet but the failure of the majority of anting-antings to resist a .223 bullet travelling at 3250 ft/sec. They were obviously fake charms and their wearers unfortunate dupes. Two charms were apparently undamaged, presumably living up to their owners’ claims that they could deflect any weapon. As to what an off-duty policeman was doing with an automatic rifle and a stock of ammunition at large on a slum lot was not clear. It was Good Friday, not a day for questions of that sort.4

Where language is concerned, too, the Philippines’ claim to be the world’s third-largest English-speaking nation is extraordinarily deceptive but is one which the visitor to Manila might not find time or even reason to doubt. American English is very much the language of the middle-class educated, of the élites of government, commerce and administration. Most of the capital’s serious newspapers are in English as are the main American-style radio stations. Since it is recognised as an élite language English is aspired to and pretended to so that a Filipino may give an impression of understanding far more than he actually does.

The official language of the Philippines is Pilipino, which is essentially Tagalog with loan-words from other dialects. Tagalog was the original language of the people who had settled the area of Luzon in which Manila lies. In 1936 it was adopted nationally as the basis of Pilipino against strenuous rival claims from other large linguistic groups, especially those in the Visayas. Today’s Pilipino is sometimes disparagingly described as a fossil language whose purity – like that of French – needs to be preserved by an academy. Critics like Nick Joaquin make a distinction between it and Filipino, which they say is the language colloquially spoken by half the population as their mother tongue and by the other half as a lingua franca: a mobile, energetic Pilipino full of argot and borrowings and inventive formulations.

That, then, is the nationalist point of view. As regards the American English often learned at mother’s knee by phrase rather than with any real linguistic fluency, an expedient daily compromise is reached with ‘Taglish’, a bastard hybrid used by broadcasters, government officials, anyone fancying themselves as at all sophisticated. The Tagalog carries the colloquial and comprehension element, the English the kudos. At its worst Taglish is mere pidgin-Filipino and pidgin-American, as witness this extract from a film review in the magazine Babae (Woman):

The main purpose of this mindless stuff is not to convey information so much as make the reader feel she is ‘where it’s at’ (another favourite Taglish phrase). On the other hand at its best Taglish can show an easy familiarity with both languages which often hinges around word-play, undoubtedly one of the hallmarks of relaxed and civilised man. A banner in a demonstration in the run-up to the February election read: Kailangan Bigas Hindi Teargas (We Need Rice Not Teargas), a phrase whose pungency would have been lost had it been purely in either language. As for ‘na-mangle’ and ‘pagtu-twists’ in the extract above, connoisseurs of etymology will take pleasure from such cross-lingual declensions, as from the notice Bawal Umistamby which means ‘Loitering Prohibited’ (by extension from the phrase ‘to be on stand-by’). Thirty years ago as we plodded achingly off the rugger pitch we would say ‘Je suis utterly knackeré’ or ‘Shaggé, c’est moi.’

One cheering thing I learned on my return to Manila a month after the election was that during that tense week many of the radio stations of the capital reverted to Filipino. It was as if at a moment of real crisis all pretensions were dropped in the urgent necessity of being fully understood. It was also Manila’s way of acknowledging that the rest of the nation which might be eavesdropping could well have a genuine problem understanding English.

But at the time, when the world’s journalists were filing their reports, ‘Manila’ must have served them all too readily as shorthand for ‘the Philippines’ just as they made their own familiar nouns describe entities quite unlike those at home. It became apparent that the Philippines is most dissimilar to a Western country at the exact moment when it is being described by Western journalists – which accounted for my sense of puzzlement in distant Italy. For when a Briton hears phrases like ‘the Government’, ‘the Army’ and – and how! – ‘the Authorities’ he knows in his heart it means the legitimately constituted, orderly, impartial Authorities of Great Britain. Transposing to a foreign country, he assumes that there, too, the Government’s writ runs the length and breadth of the land; that the Armed Forces are answerable for their behaviour and unswervingly loyal to the Crown; that in turn they are supported and obeyed. Similarly, the Briton assumes that basic services and impositions are para-governmental and that their implementation will be uniform. Barring calamities water is always on tap, the electricity always works, postal workers do not on the whole rob the mails or take unfranked stamps off envelopes and re-sell them for their own gain, nor do tax collectors go from door to door collecting income tax in cash and paying off their own gambling debts with it. Come to that, the tax collectors are seldom fake tax collectors, any more than the policemen are fake policemen.

I am not being deliberately obtuse. Of course journalists qualify things by referring to ‘Army factions’ (a very un-British concept) and ‘the Marcos Government’, and of course the intelligent Briton knows perfectly well that things are done differently abroad, especially in the more anarchic areas of the world. Unfortunately the vocabulary remains the same and cannot help having inappropriate echoes. The mere use of words like ‘Government’ and ‘Authorities’ sets up an expectation of something familiar, no matter how distorted it may temporarily have become. This can produce an inner hiatus, a brief moment of blankness, as when the listener to the BBC in London learns that ‘a spokesman for the Philippine Armed Forces is pleased to report the number of private armies in the Philippines is probably no more than 133.’ Suddenly he is on unfamiliar ground; there’s a contradiction somewhere, something he hasn’t been told about. Who, then, might ‘the Authorities’ refer to?

At last in increasing bewilderment and scepticism he is beginning to approach the wavelength of a Filipino who asks himself that very question year in and year out, according to local and national circumstances. Shoot-outs are common between rival police forces in the nation’s capital, between real policemen and fake policemen, between good policemen and bad policemen, between ones on the take and others who want a slice. Units of the Armed Forces engage each other in firefights over claims of legitimacy, secret plots, over fiefdoms they have annexed as their own. Provincial governors and mayors run rackets, private death squads and goons; they keep slaves, siphon off development funds. In short there is no single writ of Authority which infallibly runs the length and breadth of the Philippines (in size the archipelago is, conveniently, comparable to the British Isles).

It is hard for people from the democracies of the industrialised West to remember how their own countries once exhibited such phenomena, and not so long ago. Surprisingly, it remains hard even when there are large-scale scandals at home to remind them that the anarchy they so readily identify abroad is never far below the surface anywhere. Even in a European country like Britain, which in certain respects has arguably become over-governed, there have been scandals: corruption by provincial bigwigs (Poulson), by Cabinet ministers (Stonehouse, Maudling), by London’s incorruptible Metropolitan Police (the great vice-ring shakeout of the early Seventies).

But perhaps the hardest thing to imagine is a country where there can be so little connection between the governors in the capital and the people in the provinces. As suggested earlier, a distinct rusticity can exist even in Metro Manila itself behind the whitewashed hollow-block walls erected to screen the slums from the gaze of tourists, while immemorial village life begins practically at the city limits, at least in attitude if not in aspect. From the provinces the capital is infinitely remote. What happens in Manila has almost no bearing on the way real life is conducted. Marcoses may come and go and the Manileño middle class can describe their uprising as a ‘People’s Revolution’ but in the real world the people are busy planting rice and catching fish; the mango season arrives and improvised parties are held among the coconut palms. News of external events scarcely percolates.

Out in the country old skills remain unforgotten. What kind of disaster can befall a people who can get by even without matches? Who rely on their own abilities and on each other and never on a distant government which has seldom visited them with anything good and often with corrupt mayors, with thieving and murderous troops? If there is a national insouciance about tomorrow … bahala na … it must be at least partly because even quite urbanised Filipinos are often still close enough to their rural origins to feel that in the last resort they can always go back to the provinces and feed themselves. The streets of Manila are full of young people – Totoy Matias now among them – who are only months removed from a life of climbing palms and ploughing paddies. In a devastating economic crisis they might well desert the capital and its governors just as at a moment of constitutional crisis they deserted an alien language.

Knowing all this, how is one to treat those phrases like ‘The Will of the People’ or ‘National Sentiment’ or even ‘Popular Feeling’ when used, as they all were, by Western journalists about a country such as this? In Britain, a state linked to itself by television which almost everyone watches, by newspapers millions read, glutted with opinion polls and phone-in programmes and protest marches and all the democratic ways of ensuring that there actually is such a thing as a majority national opinion about almost anything, such phrases mean something. But how is consensus to be reached in a nation divided by eighty major dialects and eleven main language groups, linked by no reliable telephone network, where travel is laborious and often dangerous? A nation which in percentage terms reads little but comics if it reads at all, and from sheer force of habit mistrusts its own Press? Loyalties are to family, to barkada, to gang, to community, to ethnic group. They cannot reliably be used for extrapolating anything as coherent as ‘The Will of the People’. In this context the phrase means nothing so the country to which it was meant to apply was, when I heard of it from Italy, not one I recognised.

What was it, then, this country which coincidentally bore the same name? It was largely an invention of those Western journalists who, by turns cocky and earnest, produced yet another of their homogenised Third World nations for breakfast-table-reading. In almost complete historical, political and cultural ignorance of the country they were describing they relied extensively and unconsciously on the American version. No-one is surprised at this; everyone ought to be deeply shocked. It is astonishing that a modern independent nation is seen almost entirely from the view of its old Colonial rulers. It is – for example – as if present-day Indian politics could only be explained to the world by Englishmen whose ears were still attuned to the trumpetings of the Great Durbar and Lord Curzon, for thus the long-ago fictions of General Mac-Arthur’s version of Bataan and Leyte do indeed still echo down the corridors of the State Department and hence, ghostily, over the wires of Reuters and AP.

It is America, of course, which underlies the Philippines’ history throughout this century. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that America overlies the Philippines, as its strategic and economic taxonomy of the globe overlies so much of the objective reality of states and nations. In this way the entire Philippines is in one sense a palimpsest whose faint outlines stubbornly appear and re-appear beneath the guises American foreign policymakers have chosen for it: anti-Communist bulwark of South-East Asia, unsinkable American aircraft carrier, the land of Del Monte’s pineapple estates. So if one describes the Western Press’s view of the Philippines as largely its own invention, the amount of inventiveness is actually very slight. It is more a matter of convention. But this convention still images an unrecognisable country, just as tourist brochures do to the lands they are trying to sell.5

If this is true of Manila it is doubly so of the rest of the country. For if the Philippines ever explains itself to those who have the time and inclination to listen, it does so in the provinces and not in the capital, where all sorts of subtly distorting lenses – domestic and foreign – project lurid images to suit all fantasies: city of gold, historic city, city of sin, developing city; cultural centre, seat of government, groves of academe, banking and commercial nexus, heart and soul of the nation. All are true and untrue. All, claiming everything, mean almost nothing.

What has Manila to do with Tiwarik?

I have tried to suggest how utterly remote is an islet off an island which is itself off an island province. Yet even that islet exists as a political entity, is involved in the politics of everyday living. Some years ago – long after the declaration of Martial Law in 1972 – troops stationed up the coast near the provincial capital turned up one morning in Sabay. It was merely a day’s stopover on a leisurely tour they were making of the province, which must have been a dull place for them since there was no political opposition there, no NPA guerrillas, no angry students or farmers. To fill the time they made an effort to improve their own living conditions and came to Sabay on the scrounge. They requisitioned Arman’s father’s boat for an afternoon’s drunken fishing and, having caught nothing, shot it full of holes and let it settle on the rocks off the beach. For a time it looked as though they might shoot its owner too.

Since then they demand that barangay Captain Sanso give them fresh fish regularly on the plausible grounds that Army food is atrocious and one of their officers is anyway selling canned stores destined for his own troops in the market at Bulangan. The quid pro quo is that the soldiers keep the village supplied with blasting caps and demolition fuses so the fishermen can use dynamite. This ensures their catches are sometimes large enough for another officer to sell off any surplus in the market at Malubog.

If dynamite fishing had already been part of the way of life of Sabay (as throughout much of the archipelago), this episode made it an impossible habit for the villagers to break even if some of the more observant fishermen were beginning to worry about dying corals. The unofficial threat of a handful of official troops became one more of the interlocking imperatives which entangle the lives of a socially complex, isolated community.

And thus a familiar view from Tiwarik. A small boat drifts on the glassy calm, its occupants muffled against the sun, hanging over the sides, gazing down for hours. The sea is molten, nothing moves. Then beneath it a great door slams, loud enough to bring me out of my hut to look in all directions. But there is nothing much to see: a wisp of steam and spray dissipating above a patch of foam on which other boats converge, their occupants already slipping purposefully overboard with sleeve nets.

Far away in Manila there is a law ratified by all sorts of governmental and international bodies which says this sort of thing is completely illegal. But here at Sabay it is at the express command of ‘the Authorities’. It is as if they had known all along I would one day come to live on Tiwarik and were adding that touch of ordnance and war without which my arcadian landscapes are never complete.