However, I am wrong. The sea has not deluded me so much as that in my eagerness I have misread it. It has not yet returned to its former clear condition and my pleasure at being back on Tiwarik is soon undercut a little by its uneasy state. This leaves my days with a certain hanging feeling when it no longer seems quite obvious how the time might be filled. This is of course also partly due to having spent just long enough in Kansulay to have adopted a dry-land routine. For a day or two, therefore, I mope about rather and allow myself to be dragged down. Embedded in the back of my mind is a fresh lump which I bump up against when thinking of other things, a bulk I would rather not consider and which in consequence insists on reminding me of its presence. If I can bring myself to look squarely at it I can see what I already know, that it is labelled ‘Water Project’. I am full of remorse at the foolishness of having allowed an officious public self to get away from me and start living a bossy sort of life on its own. I can’t imagine what I thought was wrong with living as I always had, giving and receiving small favours, none of them amounting to much but in time building into friendships such as that with Sising and Bini. Small acts of mutual regard were one thing. But projects, the expression of a diffuse and self-regarding concern – how could they lead to anything but trouble?
I become restless in a search for something comforting. I carry my bangka down to the water, retrieve the paddle from the roof of the hut and go across to Sabay to see if there is anything nice to be had in the village shop. I know the answer but making the journey is an occupation.
The shop in Sabay is really no more than a counter set into the side of somebody’s house. When it is fully stocked one might be able to find ESQ rum, soap, shampoo with an anti-lice ingredient, Birch Tree evaporated milk, fish-hooks, soy sauce, kerosene, cooking oil, nylon line, sugar, things of that sort. Cigarettes come singly: as in any sari-sari store in the country there is always an opened pack behind the counter and often a courtesy box of matches dangling on a string. (Even in Manila cigarette sellers weave in and out of the traffic offering individual smokes or sticks of gum to drivers, just as pavement vendors peddle single sweets to passers-by. In England before the Second World War it was similarly possible to buy cigarettes individually, as well as Woodbines in little packets of five.)
Also on the counter at Sabay is a cardboard box of assorted medicines, a jumble of old pills and capsules. Here can be found the tail-end of somebody’s course of antibiotics, pain-killers, home-made remedies, steroids, antacid pills, some saccharine tablets which have got in by mistake. It is a grab-bag of wrapped and unwrapped, named and anonymous, white and multicoloured from which people select what they feel looks most inimical to their symptoms. This system of self-medication appears to be quite successful and the notion that the patient plays the leading rôle in deciding his own fate is an excellent piece of psychology. Pharmaceutical roulette is an idea I should very much like to see introduced into the high-street chemists of Britain. A large drum like a bran tub inside the door with a cordial invitation to take a real gamble on getting better would suffice. Here at Sabay people buying pills fall into two categories: those who want proprietary brands for colds and ‘flu, and the rest. (Colds are very common, maybe because fishing is the main occupation.)7
This morning I meet Intoy at the shop. He has been sent by his mother with an empty lapad which she wants half filled with coconut oil. He is clearly pleased to see me back again, but remarks that I have become thinner and that I must have been leading an unhappy and unhealthy life at Kansulay.
‘It’s better here at Sabay,’ he says. ‘Here you will become happy and fat.’8 He is not familiar with the concept of comfort-eating under which regimen millions of unhappy people become very fat indeed and stay unhappy. Looking around the shelves of the village shop I cannot truthfully see much likelihood of that here. I send him back to his mother with several additional small things and he tells me he will start sleeping on Tiwarik again even though the sea is wrong for fishing.
But when I return to the island with my few basic purchases it still seems very unmagical. While I have been over in Sabay some fisherman has baled out his bilges offshore and a film of diesel fuel coats the wavelets, blunting their sparkle. Before dispersing it wafts its stench to my hut. It is a perfectly reasonable thing to have done but all of a sudden I feel prey to a kind of crudity. I long for uneasier people.
A couple of dull days later I decide to go to Bulangan, still in search of a comfort, a pleasure, something nice. Anything nice: it may be a tin of food or a drug, I shall know it when I see it. I am made of glass, deep black and very frangible. The jeep gets as far as Malubog when, too full of inertia to go any further, I get out to see what the smaller town can offer. Then, just before it is too late, I get back in again. Nobody finds this odd but it is exactly the sort of dithering which gets me down further.
Once in Bulangan I wander about, unable to find in any shop a single thing I wish to own or eat. Even the bakery, whose smell is normally enticing, nauseates me. The Filipinos put sugar in their bread, American-style, which as far as I am concerned makes it all but inedible. Even the pandesal has had its Spanishness vitiated. I buy a two-day-old newspaper and sit down in a cafe where it seems they have run out of everything but warm soft drinks and beer. My resistance is low; I call for a Coca-Cola although I detest the stuff.
I have no sooner opened the newspaper than somebody kicks back the metal chair on the other side of the table and bawls ‘Hi Joe!’, sitting down. I freeze and look at him over the top of the paper like an elderly Tory disturbed in his club. I know it is a waste of time. The ones that come on like that are unstoppable in every culture.
‘You know how to speaking Tagalog?’ he says. ‘I hear you talk to the girl. You are with the Peace Corps? What is your name? How old are you? Where are you living?’
This morning I put down the newspaper and say in Tagalog, ‘Kindly go away.’
‘We will make happy-happy.’ He ignores me completely, calling for two grande of San Miguel beer.
I am under no obligation to pass the time of day with this boor, still less to have a drink with him - or at least I wasn’t until by sheer misfortune someone I know slightly comes into the cafe at that moment and greets me. Worse, it turns out he is related to my persecutor so there is no easy way of simply getting up and going out without being rude to him. Besides, I have been meaning to ask him a question about bacteria in well-water. I slump back with not the best grace and stare at my drink while they get down to the beer and the questioning.
The questions. Where is your wife? Why are you not married? Where is your companion? Why are you alone …? Since these are the very questions one was brought up to regard as the depths of intimacy, hence otherwise the height of rudeness, how could they fail to provoke? Childhood training can be overlooked in the cause of social expediency, it may even be flouted completely in the pursuit of pleasure, but it can never be forgotten. Nowadays I have no difficulty in telling a stranger my age, how much I earn, how many brothers and sisters I have; it is of no consequence to me. On the other hand I have little incentive to ask the same questions back, which is not playing the game. Maybe this explains why the Filipino way with foreigners can sometimes be of belligerent curiosity. What is in your bag? How much did your watch cost? Such a person may think nothing of walking into your house, sitting down and going through your books, fiddling with your radio, a penknife, anything which catches his eye. With stoicism I sit it out, with good grace and a fixed smile. I owe that much to the millions of other Filipinos who behave with the ordinary courtesy which crosses all cultural boundaries. The international bad manners of this uninvited creature now swilling beer at my table are compounded by his shouting his questions with any interrogator’s lack of charm. This unfortunately is a Filipino characteristic, that of addressing somebody two feet away as if he were a buffalo on the other side of a paddy-field. Lord how I loathe extroverts, especially this morning.
Now I match his aggression by answering all his questions with perfect candour except the one about why I am unmarried. Finally, of course, this is the only thing he really wants to know. Very likely it is the only thing anybody ever wants to know about someone else in a cafe: Who or what do you screw? Once this is clear the stranger has acquired a handle and all else can become part of the larger narrative. All those details about his age and salary can join up a few more dots but already the broad outline of the beast has been discerned, already that tedious Latin polarity is clear: very well hung or very long ears. Well, boyo, stud or cuckold?
I sit not looking at my questioner, my hands folded on my unread newspaper, far-off and waiting for him only to stop as the interrogation goes on and on, sometimes emphasised by an insistent nudging of the back of my hand. Where is your companion? Har-har what about chicks?
This last word brings down upon me such a pall of blank misery I come close to standing up and saying very firmly and quietly: ‘Sir, I am quite twenty-five years your senior. I consider you grossly impertinent and do not wish to hear another word. Good day to you.’ Instead of which, drained of all energy, I merely hunch down and wait for it all to go away. That one word, heard so often here, lowers me and my surroundings so that suddenly the whole of the Philippines and I are sitting in something like a truckers’ cafe in Tulsa about thirty years ago. While still maintaining my thousand-yard stare I shoot it through this appalling little oik who I now notice is wearing a fraternity ring. The worst ones always seem to. Why on earth is he speaking sub-working-class American slang far older than he is? It will be dolls and dames next.
Of course it is aggressive of me too. By not answering I am rocking his cultural boat. I am a ‘kano who won’t conform to his stereotype, who apparently doesn’t like drinking much and ‘chicks’ at all. Nor does he seem interested in beach resorts and disco clubs, in tourist sites and duty-free hardware. That is unsettling. But my not being married and expressing neither contrition nor belated intent, that is a threat. It throws one of the eternal verities of Filipino life into doubt. Good.
Eventually he stops. He is getting nowhere. Even the staff of the restaurant are giggling with embarrassment while my acquaintance cannot find anything comfortable on which to rest his gaze. Sadly he leans it on the sloping shoulders of the beer bottle but time and again it slips off and drops to the formica table top. My interrogator shrugs and goes off, slapping a handful of peanuts into his open mouth, thinking it is maybe a language problem and little guessing how right he is.
*
Once in another province I was introduced to a venerable old man, the grandfather of a friend, ninety-two and eminently coherent. He was famous throughout the region for having fathered a quite unbelievable number of children (his last son was then rising five) and for being a stubborn Filipino patriot and nationalist. His family had emigrated to the United States before the Second World War, he alone refusing to join them. He had resisted the Americans, the Japanese, the Americans again, had mocked Quirino, welcomed Magsaysay, had fervently embraced Marcos. With the respect due to his age and querulous intransigence a silence fell whenever he spoke but I never heard him say anything at all interesting except once when he listed the cigarette brands available in Manila in the 1920s. If there was still heat and clarity in his old brain it came from the flame of a monumental ego still burning away in that hairless skull. It banished all the shadows, the flickers and half-lights of observation which might have been engaging, leaving only itself illuminating itself like a candle in a pumpkin.
People (all relatives of one sort or another, I judged) came and went in the room, ministering to the old tyrant in various ways and with a variety of honorifics as he sat in a high-backed chair whose motheaten velour seat was covered in plastic, calling for cold drinks, hot tea, authorising a chicken’s death and a fresh sack of charcoal for the kitchen.
I came by to see my friend a couple of days later and found his grandfather de-throned and transformed in a very Eastern manner into a little bent old twig in tattered underwear squatting under the pump in the back yard and soaping himself with a bar of Camay.
‘Pump!’ he was roaring in his monkey-voice which scarcely carried above the squeak of iron and rhythmic gush of water as a teenage girl moved the handle up and down, up and down, while her eyes watched the to and fro of heads in the street beyond the top of the wall. ‘Pump! Putang ina …!’ as the soap got in his eyes.
I can’t think why this ordinary domestic scene entranced me but when the old man got up and began trundling the soap around beneath his underpants I was glad it had. The gaunt, veined shanks and hanging flesh of his ancient body were scarcely a surprise, but the tattooes were something else. I had not expected a ninety-two-year-old local sage to have deep blue - almost black - etchings of naked girls on both arms and extending beyond his withered biceps out across his rib-cage as if with time the ink had bled along the fibres of his skin. Yet they were not at all the fading, spidery traces of a former youth scrawled across a parchment whose own message was loud and clear. They were more like the lines marking out an ice-hockey pitch, thick, ineradicable and of indeterminate depth.
Bizarre, gross - the adjectives suggested themselves but lapsed. Once again what was being expressed was that old announcement of an extraordinary hubris. But why, when the human ego decided to advertise itself, did it choose something about as subtle as cockcrow which told of anything but individuality? Such tribal markings the world over, the nude women, were they to remind the wearer of his own sexual preference in case of a moment of beery amnesia? Or to convince others? Or were they simply a ploy, a charm against ageing just because it was so unimaginable that the array of a sappy twenty-year-old should still be clearly legible seventy years later?
This bedraggled creature now rootling round his crotch with Camay suds under the broad leaves of a talisay was not at all sad for those particular slants on mortality. In fact there was nothing sad about him. There was only an echo of that awful old cockcrow, that perpetual cry of the human male from its dunghill as it proclaims its uniqueness in the sparkling light of a new day while merely sounding indistinguishable from all other cocks that have ever crowed, a facile metaphor for self-betrayal.
It is this crudity the traveller remarks, surprised at finding the world so full of it. Not the crudity of imagery (what do they matter, the outline drawings of genitalia, the graffiti scribbled on skin?) but the sheer relentless uniformity of it. He is always meeting myrmidons, usually when feeling at his least defended, of the unending army of those who sit down opposite and grab him by the arm and ask questions, the hordes upon hordes who rise over his skyline like the eponymous heroes in Zulu! roaring ‘Chicks! Chicks! Chicks!’ or stencilling it in crimson letters on the jeeps he rides in: Chix, Chix, Chix. There are times when the most amused and phlegmatic traveller in the Philippines (and elsewhere) yearns for a country of deep reserve and formality where everyone calls each other ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam’ and wishes to know no personal fact of any kind. This country, it is true, sounds like a cross between Claridges and Ladakh. In such a place, he feels, he might encounter that silence alone in which things may be learned. Perhaps it does exist after all, somewhere near Thailand or Burma … Tibet? Or deep in Amazonia? Or maybe the crotchety traveller is once more blaming a country for not being his imagined land, his own egoic mirror.
*
I leave the cafe in Bulangan and wander down to the aromatic sheds which form the market by the shore. And there, at last, two things catch my eye. First a young girl walks past selling necklaces of strung sampagita flowers whose scent, though a little unelusive, is wonderfully fresh and cheering. I buy one, gladly overpaying her, and amble with it threaded loosely round the fingers of one hand like Islamic prayer beads, sniffing it from time to time. Next I come to a stall of caged birds manned by someone who could be Nilo in thirty years’ time, a retired bird-catcher who has finally hung up his komokon-perch and birdlime and instead buys and sells the birds which other people catch. He has the air of somebody who has spent a lot of time staring at the sky, a little vacant, sometimes pursing his lips absently to send a warble to cheer the spirits of his drooping wares. From him I buy a small cage made of fine cane containing two greenish finches which seem not yet completely got down by their captivity.
Leaving the market with my still-unread newspaper draped over the cage to protect the birds from the sun I am hailed from across the street by Arman. It is a pleasure and surprise to see him: running into people away from their home territory often makes me feel how lucky I am to know them at all and my recent ordeal in the cafe only increases this feeling. He promptly offers me a lift home in the Jhon-Jhon, for today he has come by boat. I accept with gratitude and for the next hour sit in the prow well forward of the unsilenced exhaust, my finches at my feet, sniffing at the sampagita flowers as we skim over the water and the low shoreline unrolls to our left. Soon from around a headland Tiwarik appears in the distance, its strangely unstable appearance increased by our angle of approach from the sea so that for a moment, forgetting all the other possible reasons, I decide this must be the real origin of its name. I feel a sudden burst of affection for its singularity.
Arman very kindly drops me off at the island and says he will tell Intoy to bring my bangka back from Sabay when he comes. I wave him off from the shore and watch the boat head across the strait carving its evanescent threefold wake. When I am sure it is far enough away I open the cage and release the finches. They fly a bit stiffly, unbelievingly, into the nearest tree. Then simultaneously, as of one mind, they go looping steeply upwards, whirring flitches of green, towards the invisible top of the island. My spirits lift with them.
*
I do not know what has happened to the weather. The sea clears for a day or two, then clouds up again. The rains are overdue, the heat intense. I seem to have no appetite for food and often do not bother to take my spear gun into the water with me. Off and on I catch Intoy looking at me with concern and he comes over from Sabay with suman his mother has made, with niyubak and bukayo to fatten me up. I send him back with fish.
The soil of Tiwarik is baked, the grassfield is stiff and harsh against my bare legs as I wade up into the sky each day to look at the trees. From the way this expanse of cogon is divided by rocky outcrops as it ascends towards the miniature forest I have come to think of it more as three separate fields and named according to the plants growing there. These are: The Field of Chillies, The Field of Guavas and The Field of Pineapples - for quite recently I discovered two of the small ‘native’ pineapples which have somehow seeded themselves. They are like little green hand-grenades: proportionally slenderer than the usual Hawaiian variety, their flavour is to those great yellow bombs of juice and sugar as that of wild strawberries is to the contents of glass dishes at Ascot and Wimbledon. Although I do not know it at this moment I am about to re-name The Field of Chillies.
The heat is solid. On all sides the ocean slumps in its bed, the fish are sluggish. Only at dusk a light breeze may come wafting off this immensity of water with a summery smell of ozone and send a cooling drift of air through the walls of my hut. This heat intensifies the smells of sea and land. Sometimes the wind comes across from the mainland bringing with it the steamy rot of forest, exotic resins leached in their fractions from different layers of vegetation and boiled away by the heat. This same mysterious perfume may often be smelt far out to sea with no view in any direction but of water, from smacking bamboo outriggers to the furthest horizon. Then suddenly this olfactory mirage born who knows how long before and on what brooding shore: oils of pepper, boxes of cigars, compost heaps, damp bath-towels. Strange quays come to mind with barrelled produce standing in the sun, salted fish, coconut oil, sacks of copra, tarred rope. Behind the quays rise the hills of the interior brewing their monstrous chlorophylls, their stagnant muds and dappled glades where pods crack and strew the earth beneath with yet more seeds. This unknown shore breathes out its rancid soul into the hearts of its lovers so that for a moment in mid-ocean their back hair lifts in pleasure and they stare at the bilges around their feet with blurring eyes. Countless voyagers from colder climates have been intoxicated by this scent. The most prosaic of men have dreamed under its influence, the sternest or dullest have felt the stirrings of unformed desire. Conrad sniffed it and was lost. And now this same tropic opiate fills my lungs and heart and awakens memories of things which have never happened and foretelling things which will never be.
Often the nights are lit with prodigious lightning but over Tiwarik at least no sound yet shakes down from the sky, nor the least drop of rain. Up the coast on the mainland it is a different matter. Far away a storm is in progress; its lightnings are very slow. Thirty miles off, electricity crawls low in the sky above Kansulay. In every corner are flickerings, pinkish blazes dying slowly in distant cloud banks, but the night above Tiwarik remains clear and still.
Then one night I am violently woken by a huge explosion and with the memory of a searing flash across some internal retina. Even as I sit up to look through the open door the echoes of a great clap of thunder are rolling back from the rocks, from the far side of the strait, from the low underside of the cloud layer. Perhaps two hundred yards away a flame is dancing in The Field of Chillies. It swells, grows rapidly taller. In alarm I suddenly appreciate how vulnerable the island is. Unhindered, a fire might sweep it practically bare. While I am indulging visions of a cindery rock where once was a miniature land the fire spreads rapidly. I shuffle into a pair of rubber sandals, grab the bolo as much for comfort as for utility and hurry up the path. In doing so I glare at the sky. Why for Christ’s sake won’t it rain? For only heavy rain could now control the grass-fire I shortly come upon: a ragged orange wall advancing with horrid speed up towards the forest. A local wind tugs at it, the fire’s own need for oxygen whipping momentum from the air.
In despair I make impotent sallies into areas which are already no more than bare char wormed with dying red, whacking at the sparking earth with the flat of my blade. I shout. I curse. I blaspheme with abnormal inventiveness. Clearly this is most efficacious for almost immediately the rain, as if it had been holding itself in until the last most pleasurable and exasperating moment, drops in raw tonnage from the sky. The fire still burns, however. It has run the length and breadth of The Field of Chillies, has somehow crossed a promontory of rocks and is - as near as I can judge - a third of the way through The Field of Pineapples. It has even spawned an offshoot, a tentacle which reaches way up beyond The Field of Chillies into the fringes of the forest itself.
But the rain is immense. It is not, as I discover the following day, rain at all but finally, at long last, The Rains. Within ten minutes I can stare upwards at the bulk of Tiwarik and see not a speck of light anywhere. The fire is drowned. Already water is beginning to run down the path, as yet unable to penetrate the baked surface. I return to the hut drenched, rinsing off the charcoal smears from arms and legs in the smiting downpour. My roof is leaking but I do not care. I roll up the sodden mat and lie naked instead upon the bare slats, panting. Sweat or rain runs from my hair as I listen, enclosed within this ecstatic sound. Everything is all right now. The fire is out, the monsoon surely has arrived. Tomorrow over at Sabay everybody will desert the sea and go to work the softening land: planting rice, planting cassava, planting vegetables. Their huge delicate buffaloes which for so long have stood comparatively idle, grazing in the shade, will be harnessed once more, glistening with grey mud, then resting in baths of slime in their newly reconstituted wallows. Even I might plant something.
In the morning I rise late, something to do with the night’s exertions or with the incessant noise of heavy rain arousing memories of a time and a place of soft beds and winter storms, of bedclothes pulled a little higher. Improvidently I have let much of my firewood get wet; I am not an instinctive camper. Coffeeless I hurry off through the rain to inspect the damage.
At first sight The Field of Chillies is desolating: hundreds of square metres of charred stubble, a sodden black desert tufted with black and dotted with white and pinkish stones. I walk up it with the pungency of quenched bonfire in my nose. I find to my relief that only a tiny inroad has been made into the fringes of the jungle: a couple of trees will have been killed, a couple more partially so, still others merely scorched. I cheer myself further by remembering that grass fires are usually too quick, too lightly fuelled to generate enough heat to kill roots. The cogon will sprout again. My elaborate blasphemies clearly struck the right note at exactly the right moment. Mere prayers and entreaties would have had no effect and had I relied on them I would undoubtedly now be surveying the cinders of a magic isle. But my invocation of the anatomical details of the Trinity’s constituent members obviously jolted the rain from the skies. Immoderately pleased I stand there, streaming, making facetious plans to circulate my efficacious spells to leading African churchmen, Baptist ministers in Wyoming, Marxist agronomists in Ethiopia, the FAO. I descend the mountain like Moses bearing revised laws.
And now, re-crossing the ashes of The Field of Chillies, I make a discovery. The pink and white stones scattered among the blackened stubble are not stones at all. They are crabs. Nor are they hermit crabs, either, like those whose stealthy clinkings come at night from high up the beach as they scavenge the fish-hunters’ guttings and leavings. They are proper crabs with square bodies two or three inches across. Their fat fighting claws are sprawled unmoving amongst the char. They all seem to be facing uphill, more or less in the same direction, as if having found they could not grapple with this enemy they had tried to outrun it. The white ones are calcined: their bodies are mere shells containing rattling shards and chitins. The pink ones are cooked, done to a turn. And so, unbreakfasted and now breakfasting, I slowly browse through The Field of Crabs, sucking at legs, scooping out meat, crunching claws. Their flavour is delicate with the faintest trace of the grasses in which they were broiled, the rain rinses off the dirt. Standing there surrounded by opacities of falling water it is not hard to imagine myself on an ocean bed with sparse clumps of black weed thrusting up in stiff bunches from the silt marine creatures scattered among them. It is yet another example of the way Tiwarik inverts the normal world.
I ought not to be able to return elated and full to the hut I left empty and apprehensive, but I do. I am resolved to plant ampalayá, aubergines, calabashes. Who knows what may come up on an island where lightning can provide one with breakfast?
*
But I am now quite definitely out of sorts, I cannot go on pretending otherwise. The downhearted spells recur, everything grates. For what seems like weeks I have been nauseated by food. The very thought of my repetitive diet fish-and-rice, rice-and-fish is intolerable. On the other hand I find myself thinking obsessively about other kinds of food entertaining fantasies of the most refined cuisines. In my imagination I prepare dishes which in real life I have never cooked and would probably be scarcely able to except that my memories of leafing through other people’s cook-books now come back almost photographically. I start making mental oeufs en meurette, sautéeing button mushrooms in butter and oil, poaching eggs in the rich liquid from blanched bacon strips, onions, garlic and stock … But no, not eggs. Better would be the more ascetic subtleties of volaille du Roy Henry truffée au gros sel: the bird served with a bowl of rock salt and pickled gherkins, the fragments of truffle visible beneath its skin … Again I lose interest, am sidetracked by the agonisingly delicious promise of a Marmite sandwich, a cheese soufflé … No again. What I really want is bruschetta, that peasant delicacy they eat around the fire in Tuscany, up in the wintry mountains. Thick slices of tough Italian bread toasted on both sides and a piece of garlic rubbed in until worn down to tatters of aromatic skin between the fingertips. Then rich green olive oil poured on from a little slippery oil can and a sprinkling of salt. Probably the simplest and most delicious thing ever invented by man …
These fantasies are at once cut short by tearing gripes which drive me out among the rocks of the hillside. It is raining hard. Grey curtains hang drifting across the strait, opening and closing on blurred views of Sabay. Around the unseen peaks of the cordillera behind it purplish lightnings blaze. In the inadequate shade of a madrekakaw sapling I squat and think that I have indeed become rather thin. My rich diet of imagined cuisines seems unable to sustain my body and it certainly bores the mind. I wonder vaguely what, then, is being fed that keeps the interest going.
Later that day Intoy comes over with a bottle of ESQ from Arman to warm me up. The rain makes him merry, as it does many Filipinos, since it has a cultural significance quite different to that in England. His hair is stuck flat, his clothes plastered to his body. It is a kind thought and indeed the rum does seem to glow and settle in my stomach.
‘I bet you’ve got bulate,’ he says when I describe my symptoms.
‘Worms?’ I know they are endemic but I feel I should be exempt, being a foreigner, maybe immune.
‘I’ll bring you pills from the shop tomorrow. They really work.’ Intoy goes to inspect the arrangement I have made with polythene sheeting and a plastic dustbin to catch the rainwater. ‘No more problems with water now,’ he says and paddles cheerfully off into the downpour. His boat disappears behind a shroud of falling water. The sea around him is flat calm, only its surface being lashed into froth by the rain’s intensity.
The next morning he returns with a screw of paper containing two pinkish pills.
“‘Combantrin”,’ he says.
‘How can you tell?’ I ask, thinking of the pharmaceutical grab-bag on the shelf in the village shop. These have ‘Pfizer’ written on them; beyond that, nothing. But that familiar nausea rinses through me and I don’t much care. The conviction comes that I shall soon be cured whatever I take so I swallow them both with a gulp or two of ESQ. Intoy eyes the bottle with glee.
‘Ha, you’ve drunk all that since yesterday. Wow, you must have been pretty lasing last night.’
‘I was no such thing,’ I tell him sternly. ‘This is medicine. You can’t get drunk on medicine.’
‘My father can. He swallows enough of it and he never seems to get any better.’
These simple pleasantries cheer me up. Intoy, who is supposed to be helping his father at this very moment in the fields, has to leave and once more I see him off into the downpour. Then in the early afternoon I am driven out onto the hillside. The rain has redoubled its force and I am soaked at once. My jaw shivers of its own accord and cannot be stopped as I lower myself weakly into a squat and deliver myself of what looks like a foot-long earthworm. I stare at it in amazement. Surely this can’t be right? I remember all the animals I have wormed and none of their tapeworms or pinworms or roundworms looked like this. It is a pinkish grey and apparently not yet quite dead for it makes a slight, stiff movement.
Suddenly I begin to laugh helplessly at the streaming ground. I laugh like a fool, in celebration of this fool crouched in the rain on a sullen isle. Consider his childish determination to defy and invert all the values to which he was heir. It cannot be an accident which brings a middle-class Englishman from a family of doctors to be squatting on an uninhabited island and watching his own intestinal parasites flop out around his ankles while the tropical rain drums upon his back. I consider this, still laughing. No, it isn’t defiance which has brought him to this absurd state. It is writing. Writing, that fatuous pis aller which has so little to do with making marks on paper and even less to do with being read by casual strangers. What but such a pointless pursuit could so effectively have stood this fool’s life on its head, could have caused whole years to vanish, could have imagined the worst and deftly magicked it into nasty reality? In short what else on this sketch of an island could have written the worm out of this fool’s rectum and now be unable to write it back in again? There it lies, as large as life, craning blindly in a broth of mucus for the warmth it misses. It is all too real and the fool is held in his squat over it by gripes and giggles. Shaking with laughter he castigates himself for all the normal life he has written off. Fool: the years gone. Fool: the friend, the companion of days. Fool: the man of moderate success. Fool: the comfortable citizen. What else could they think but fool in Sabay and Kansulay?
The mud squidges up between my toes. It is pleasant. The gripes are over. That is sweet. The worm is out and now seems dead. That is good. The rain will make the cogon grow again and cover the burnt baldness of The Field of Crabs. Already the char is pouring past me in a black slurry. The promise of bright new grass is infinitely cheering. I stand up, wipe the water from my face and drop a large rock on top of the worm. Then I walk down to the sea to swim. One has these low spots.
*
Months go by. The rains stop. The conventional calendar has long since become a redundant fiction. Time passes in new ways. The phases of the moon control my hunting, dominate the one-man economic system of Tiwarik. My life enters and leaves its own phases according to a never-ending succession of wounds and their healing: the fortnight when I could not wear a plywood flipper on my left foot because of the open sore, the coral-grazed knee which turned septic and stuck to the mat when I lay on my left side. They slowly healed and were replaced by others, by a recurrently aching ear, by sinus trouble, by minor infirmities of the soul. Overriding everything is the constant working for daily food and the constant watching of the island in its detail. In such elemental ways a life could be, is being, spent.
Sometimes the straits appear to have widened so that walking up to my hut at dusk or in the morning’s heavy heat I might be surprised by how far away Sabay has receded, its own huts invisible and its fissured mountain a numb bulk such as appears on the horizon at the end of a long sea voyage. I wonder whether Tiwarik might not stealthily have detached itself and even now be drifting out to sea. Even the mainland’s occasional sounds fall fainter, the cocks remote, the dogs heard from another world. At such moments I can be overwhelmed by exhilaration and sadness: the confidence of recognising all there is, the melancholy of acknowledging all it is.
Christmas approaches, is in progress, passes. Daily the sea-eagles soar from their jungle top and drift above the ocean surface watching for shoals of dalagang bukid, for the unwary dallier with upper brightness, then unleashing their clawed bombs in a flurry of spray and climbing back up with crimson and silver in their feet. It is a villainous isle full of watchers without mercy who care nothing for a year’s decline, unknown tomorrows.
But one night the sound of feet and cheerful voices from the shore:
‘Happy New Year!’
‘Happy New Year!’
Captain Sanso and Arman between them staggering with the weight of an iron torpedo. Wives and girls with baskets, boys with mysterious bundles, youths with lengths of thick bamboo on their shoulders. Taken by surprise I am bemused, wander dazedly in their wake, now following the women as they invade my lean-to kitchen and kindle a fire, now Intoy and Arman as they begin disposing the bamboo tubes among the rocks, muzzles pointing out across the straits to lightless Sabay.
‘Kanyon,’ explains Arman. ‘This place needs livening up. You can’t let an old year pass in silence as if you’re ashamed of it and you can’t welcome a new year in as if you’re afraid of it. You’re malungkot. Why do you always want to be so malungkot, James?’
I don’t think I do.
‘Of course you do. Why else would you cut yourself off in a place like this without a wife, without a companion, without even so much as a cat? Always fishing and fishing as if you had no other way of staying alive and always writing and writing as if you had nothing else to fill up the time. Always alone. Always miserable. Ay, kawawa!’
He is a little drunk. Everyone laughs and applauds since they are, too. Because there is no way of replying to such undeniable charges I pour myself a glass of tuba from a Clorox container and resolve to join them. I crouch beside Arman’s brother as he heaps boulders over one end of a bamboo.
‘What’s that horrible smell?’
‘Kalburo.’ He hefts a carrier bag full of what seems to be chips of greyish rock. I suddenly recognise the stench of acetylene and deduce kalburo to be carbide. I have some vague memory they use it for speeding up the ripening process of fruit, in particular bananas and mangoes. The artificer in me surfaces once more.
‘Cannons!’ I cry. ‘Of course. You’ve knocked the bamboos through.’
‘All except the last two compartments this end. See? We’ve made a touch-hole just before the joint.’
And now all over the hillside the bamboos are deployed. It is evident that the pyrotechnicians of Sabay are as studious as Howard and I had ever been and that years of experiment have gone into producing known effects. Some tubes are fat and long, others thinner and shorter. Some have their muzzles bound with rope or rattan, others are smooth and unadorned. Excitement drifts over the scene with the evaporating acetylene. A fire has now been lit outside my hut and woks are sizzling over it. Yet another is lit beside it and a great fish laid over a griddle of green sticks. Children pour up from the beach, eddying among the rocks and whooping as one by one newcomers’ boats ground on the shore below. If there were moon or stars tonight the strait would seem a silver pond bearing a flotilla of tiny sticks slowly across to Tiwarik with phosphorescent pocks of paddle-strokes.
Four chickens die protestingly, their still-flapping bodies dunked in the woks of boiling water so their feathers will come out in easy, sodden handfuls. An enamel bowl full of the thick slops of their lifeblood is carried off to the kitchen. The women slaughterers exchange their knives for glasses of ESQ and fizzy orange which has been mixed in the plastic bowl I use for marinading fish. The children are tipsy with excitement and in the case of one or two twelve-year-olds with rum and cigarettes as well. And suddenly in the middle of all this the first kanyon fires with a deep explosive chug! which reminds me uncomfortably of a mortar round being launched into its high parabola. Outgoing.
‘Not quite right.’ Arman is in an exalted frenzy, tuning his thunder machine. ‘It hasn’t got hot yet.’ A wisp of sap-steam floats from its muzzle. He pours a trickle of water down through the touch-hole onto the grains of carbide, leans forward and gives a light puff to the hole, wafting the acetylene vapours the length of the barrel, then puts a taper to the hole. This time the blast is ear-splitting. An exclamation of flame spurts from the muzzle which in turn leaps from its bed of rock. The explosion crosses the dark strait, whacks the side of the distant mountain and twenty seconds later its echo comes back to Tiwarik where it is welcomed like a returning traveller. Arman smiles proudly but critically, head on one side. He drops a small nugget of carbide into the breech, adds water, blows, ignites. Again the noise batters our ears and slams away across the sea, this time being joined almost immediately by a tenor crack from one of the smaller bamboos in its emplacement up by the rocks and undergrowth behind the hut. Soon all six bamboos are in use, the barrage continuous, the night lit by stabs of flame and cooking fires. For once the sea beneath us is empty of human hunters. Tonight the fish can prey on each other uninterruptedly as the bombers deploy their explosions on a higher plane.
‘Why don’t you fire stones from the kanyon?’ I ask. ‘They must easily be powerful enough.’
‘They are. But if you do that the bamboo won’t last. I think if you block up the muzzle with something, however loosely, it increases the pressure in the barrel and sooner or later it splits. That’s why we’ve bound it with abaka. Sometimes when it splits - ay, very dangerous.’ Arman is delighted and puts half a coconut shell over the muzzle of his own mortar. It vanishes like the lid of a skull into the night sky.
‘When is it midnight?’ But no-one is wearing a watch; almost no-one has a watch to wear. I look for mine, having some vague memory of leaving it in one of my shoes which are tucked up into the roof. I wear them only for infrequent trips to Manila when after months of barefoot living they cause an anguish of pinching and rubbing. In the lamplight they are now seen to be blue with delicate moulds. In one of them is a jewelled spider holding its eggs in a silk disc beneath its body, in the other the white pearl of a house-lizard’s egg and my watch. Despite my having ignored it, it has a life of its own and has ticked on unconsulted. Now it tells me the month has twice changed since last I looked, that today is Monday and that it is eleven forty at night.
‘Time to get the labintador ready.’
‘You mean you’ve brought fireworks as well?’
‘Home-made only.’ Arman searches around in the dark until he trips over the torpedo. In the light of a lapad of paraffin with a rag wick I can see it is not a torpedo at all but a large gas cylinder from an oxy-acetylene welding set. Generally it lies half buried in rubbish just above the tide-line on the beach at Sabay, so rusty its colour coding has long vanished.
‘Oksiheno.’
I had always supposed the cylinder empty. Now willing hands drag it to a convenient spot, a decrepit spanner is found down below in someone’s boat, a length of firewood whacks the spanner. There is a sharp hiss and everyone exclaims in delight. Two boys are dispatched to the beach to siphon off a few cupfuls of petrol from a boat engine. The teenage pyrotechnician within me has his ears pricked: the proceedings are new to him.’
I remember we did this ten, twelve years ago,’ says Arman. ‘I was a boy then but I can remember it very clearly. We had a party on the beach over at Sirao.’ He gestures with his chin, pursing his lips towards the invisible headland a mile up the coast from Sabay. ‘After an hour of our labintador there is a noise like an aeroplane coming from the sea. A searchlight comes on. Soldiers with M-16s are suddenly running all over us. Ha, we were only kids: we’d forgotten that Martial Law had been declared’ (this must have been shortly after 1972) ‘and they could hear the explosions all the way from Malubog and even Bulangan.’
This was impressive for Bulangan is many miles away, far closer to Kansulay than to Tiwarik. It is an odd possibility that in special circumstances Tiwarik and Kansulay might just be audible to each other.
‘The Mayor of Bulangan thought there was a civil war in Malubog and called out the garrison. The komandante there thought the NPA had at last set up heavy artillery in the mountains here and were shelling the town as a prelude to an all-out attack. Ay!’ Everybody is laughing helplessly, those who can remember the incident and those who can’t. The children who are now as old as Arman was then are in fits with drink and mischief. The delicious chaos! Turning out one lot of troops to fight supposed rebels who themselves believed they were under bombardment despite a complete absence of falling shells! And all because of a lot of boys on a beach playing with labintador.
‘Ay, ‘sus, Mandoy, we were lucky.’ Silo had also been there. ‘Those troops were scared. They might easily have shot up the beach first as they usually do. But nobody got worse than a thick ear that night. I still think what saved us was the fire we had going. They must have been able to see us from their patrol boat.’
Fresh laughter at the thought of a tense commander surveying through his binoculars a beach party of cavorting children in the middle of what he assumed to be a war zone. By now the boys are back with a lapad full of petrol. There is some rummaging in bundles and several of the large plastic sacks normally used for transporting similya are found.
‘Come on, hurry up. It must be nearly twelve.’ Arman impatiently seizes a bag and into it pours about a table-spoonful of petrol. Then he gathers up its neck loosely and, holding it to the rust-corroded valve of the oxygen cylinder, inflates it. He knots the neck and shakes the taut bag, coating the inside of the membrane with petrol until it must largely have evaporated for there is soon only the faintest patter of drops from within. He hands the bag to his younger brother. ‘Not yet,’ he enjoins sternly and makes five more plastic balloons in quick succession. I am a little sceptical: a polythene bag hardly offers much resistance to an explosion and I expect no more than a pleasing fireball blooming momentarily in the night. What I am leaving out of the equation is pure oxygen. ‘Well?’ asks Arman, tapping his wrist and looking up from where he squats.
‘It’s twelve.’
‘Ay. Maligayang Bagong Taon sa inyong lahat. Happy New Year everyone.’ He plucks one of the balloons from his brother’s hands, goes to the nearest fire and from a couple of paces tosses it towards the flames while backing smartly away. For an instant the plastic bladder hesitates between falling and ascending in the column of heat and then there is a stupendous blast which sends live firebrands whirling like tracer through the air. Everyone has been too close for comfort, everyone screams with delight. How the noise can exceed that of the bamboo cannons I have no idea but it does. In the confusion somebody sneaks off with a balloon and finds an ember in the scrub behind the hut. Another chrysanthemum of flame, another prodigious detonation as much felt in the intestines as heard. I jump involuntarily. Incoming.
Now the making of balloons becomes a feverish activity. The cannonaders are running out of carbide but their bamboos – several now splitting around the muzzles – are so hot that ordinary paraffin can be substituted with practically no loss of power so well does it vaporise. Pour, puff, ignite. Pour, puff, ignite. The ballooners are introducing granules of fertiliser into their petrol/oxygen mixture. Tiwarik leaps in the dark, tilts in flashes of flame, thumps our feet. Its percussive breezes box the ears. I am drunk. I am drunk with explosions, too. I am no longer a hunter being deafened and blinded. I do not care. To hell with the sea. I go and squat beside Intoy as he deftly purses the plastic bags and fills them with a tearing screech of gas. In the firelight, the oil lamps, the intermittent flashes, it is not his hands I watch but the shadows of his cheek, the outline of an ear, a burnished shoulder. I am amazed by the slenderness of his elbows, the fineness of his wrists, at the delicacy of his chest as he turns to pass the filled balloons back to eager hands which knot and shake them. Petrol fumes hang about his hair. How can anything so fragile be as accomplished under water as he is, so competent in the face of the sea’s brutal energies? It is a miracle of sorts.
By now my co-celebrants, my fellow-orgiasts, my friends all have about them the aura of miracle as we drown ourselves in violent sound. We stumble into each other in the dark: glasses of tuba slop and clash, the necks of rum bottles saw unsteadily against beaker rims. Indiscriminately we embrace, are embraced in turn by, children, men, women, chins glinting with chicken fat, while all around the petrol, the oxygen, the carbide, the paraffin blaze and blow away our words, reducing us to gesture.
‘Ay, last year …’
‘A bad year, that …’
‘Shitty.’
We all know who died, who lost a boat, whose children never went to school. We all know the slow attrition caused by endless petty economies: the wounds left unplastered, the jeep fares saved by two hours’ hike to town, the nights made interminable by keeping lamp oil for an emergency. We all know pretty much what everyone has in their largely cupboardless bamboo houses whose walls are stuffed with hoarded pieces of paper, plastic bags, half-used biros, perished scraps of spear gun elastic. We have seen behind the curtain made of rice sacks and have admired the wedding-dress being carefully kept for the eldest daughter just as we have admired the yellowing laminated plaques on the walls, plaques awarded by anonymous or defunct institutions and colleges certifying in copperplate a long-ago graduation, a course attendance, an honourable membership.
A shitty year. So what better than to stand it on its head here in Tiwarik and welcome in the new with a prodigal overturning of normality? The precious petrol blossoms skywards and its thunders run up and down the dark coast, chased by those of misered paraffin. The release is boundless. Not only the children weep, nor only with pleasure. The great barrage keeps up, the arcadian silence is abolished. Out on the dark sea tonight there would be no way of telling if the sounds were those of battle or celebration and even on the island, as the flames briefly photograph faces streaked with tears and mouths thrown open, it is not really clear. I am suddenly sure it can after all be heard from my hill-top in Kansulay, the concussions crossing the intervening miles of sea as once across the English Channel the summer winds wafted the sounds of slaughter in Picardy and Flanders to the ears of ladies in long gloves and netted hats bending over their beehives in Sussex. Sometimes it seems this century has re-drawn all human boundaries so that now we shall always be within earshot of war, of that battlefield on which we so increasingly live.
Time passes until the dawn is only an hour or two away. The hut is crammed with sleepers. Boys sleep on their sides among the rocks, hands between their drawn-up knees. The women and girls who have done most of the cooking are rolled together beneath a tattered yellow tarpaulin. Drunken artillerymen are slumped over their cold pieces, for the last grain of carbide has gone, the last drop of paraffin, the last trickle of petrol. Nobody knows how much oxygen is left in the cylinder. It is one of the marvels that it appears to be inexhaustible in a world of things which perpetually run out. A ringing silence has descended on Tiwarik which suddenly swims out from under a smokelike cloud of overcast and sails beneath a clear stellate sky. I lie on my back and watch the meteorites end their billion-year dark voyages in evanescent streaks.
And bit by bit across the strait the cocks awake and crow in the deserted village which is Sabay.