UP AMONG the trestle tables heaped with shards and bones the two women had slipped into competitive mode. The Californian was slightly older and of much greater professional experience, while Ysabella was just Ysabella in a deplorably oblique, British sort of way – slightly grand, it had to be said. On grounds of looks it would be a truce. Ysabella thought Sharon resembled a toothpaste advertisement, actually; a little too aggressively healthy, especially for Manila. Overjogged was the word that came to her. Overjogged yet voluptuous. That wasn’t right.
For her part Sharon had taken several days to identify the train of thought set in motion on first meeting her new assistant. Then she had remembered a noisy scandal involving a peer’s daughter which was much in the yellow press headlines some years ago during her spell in the British Museum. She could still recall an evocative phrase from the tabloids: ‘Raven-haired temptress “strict at bathtime”.’ Evocative of what, though? It was puzzling to the point of being faintly sinister, as if the British way of washing was subject to rigid codes of behaviour and baths were in any case rationed. For much of her time in London Sharon had thought there were a good few cultural subtexts she was missing, and this was more or less exactly what she now felt about Ysabella. She wondered if it were mutual. Ysabella was holding up a skull so deformed by binding it was practically boxlike.
‘Unfortunate though this poor creature’s life probably was, he or she at least had the great advantage of never having to travel by air.’
‘You’d prefer to have walked to Manila?’
‘I’d like to have come by sea. But given that one’s virtually forced to fly everywhere nowadays, tell me why anything which aims for a mass market – be it air travel or fast food or advertising – always infantilises the consumer.’
‘It does?’
‘You can’t not have noticed, surely. Airline travel, like having babies, does something terrible to the intelligence. They both entail a public discourse of mindless twitter. Imagine – grown women and men, often extremely distinguished, paying large sums of money to sit meekly for hours under a bombardment of nannyish announcements. Complete rubbish in a mixture of gentilityspeak and Dr Johnson. Talk about quaint, always presuming the airlines want their messages understood by a polyglot audience. What do we get?’ Ysabella asked her skull. ‘Lavatories are never at the back. Toilets are, instead, located at the rear of the passenger compartment and even sometimes aft. Passengers are never asked, they are requested. Cigarettes are never put out, only extinguished. Nobody ever says “Please don’t smoke” in plain English. They say “You are requested to refrain from smoking”. On my flight we were “kindly requested to refrain from opening the overhead compartments without undue caution”. Without undue caution? Illiterate drivel. And as for that horrid little litany they tack onto everything, “For your own comfort and convenience”, as if three hundred adults hadn’t yet discovered what made them comfortable… Tell me that’s not infantile. I rest my case.’ Ysabella turned the skull around so its empty-eyed gaze faced Sharon.
‘I guess your jury’s been out a long time on that one, Counsellor. Since maybe the Twelfth century. But I could see they were impressed by the way they kept nodding.’
Ysabella withdrew her finger from the hole in the base of the misshapen skull. ‘Where was it you said this was from?’
‘Iloilo. Down in the Visayas. Received wisdom says it was done for beauty but since there are no written records nobody can possibly know. That’s the joy of received wisdom. How about this one?’ which had been bound so as to accentuate the cranium’s rearward occipital bulge, collapsing the forehead until it sloped backwards into a cylindrical extrusion like the end of a vegetable marrow. ‘Skull moulding.’ She handed it to Ysabella.
‘No odder than body sculpture, really. You know, pumping iron. In fact, it probably did less damage to the intelligence than lifting weights does.’
‘Chinese foot binding was extremely painful. Practised only on females, of course.’
Ysabella looked about her at the cavernous room. ‘A lot of stuff.’ They were in the Philippine Heritage Museum, which was housed in a vast capitolesque pile sometimes remembered as the Old Congress Building. The Museum straggled over two floors sandwiched between the Department of the Ombudsman downstairs and the Senate up. She had already been introduced to a grandee in the Senate lounge; had taken in the cerise carpet, the flames beneath the silver tureens on the buffet table at one end of the room, the grey hopsack sofas and settees around the walls. The people who counted wore filmy white barong Tagalog shirts. Now and then they were besieged by a Press contingent dressed for action: denim flak jackets, ponytails, holstered power-packs. That comfortable, oddly informal atmosphere which sizzled with power reigned a mere dozen feet overhead. The Department of Archaeology, by contrast, was gimcrack and dusty. In the hollow square of corridors beyond its door roamed crocodiles of schoolchildren, giggling and staring blankly at the display cases past which they were shooed by harassed teachers. In the room where Ysabella worked uncatalogued artefacts were piled on splintery tables and plywood desks were squeezed between them where impoverished scholars sat with borrowed dictaphones. Now and then some fairly ordinary mass-produced Ming tradeware vanished and the Department could at last buy itself a secondhand office copier or desktop computer. The scholars deeply resented the nation’s heritage having to be sold off in order that the Philippine Heritage’s collection might be properly catalogued, studied and protected, but times were hard all over.
‘Infantilism seems to be the flavour of the month in your current demonology?’ Sharon observed.
‘I learned last night that according to Mormon teaching, after his second coming Jesus Christ will designate Independence, Missouri as the New Jerusalem. Did you know that?’
‘Probably. It’s the sort of thing one tends to forget, not living in Missouri.’
‘That’s why I wanted to tell you while I still remembered. Why there, I wonder? Maybe Joseph Smith owned real estate in town. How did he manage to second-guess the divinity’s geographical preferences? Or why should he, of all people, be told in advance? These are deep waters. Infantilism? I don’t know why it’s suddenly got to me. A foreign city, perhaps.’ Or the dark pall coming up from behind to settle around the shoulders, that gown of strangerhood from whose folds the view even of one’s own culture falls apart into oddity. ‘I’m noticing fast food chains, each with its cartoon grotesque outside – Ronald McDonald, Mr Jollibee and so on – and inside, too-strong lighting and bolted-down playschool furniture in horrid colours. The food’s designed for children, too, because you’re not expected to be able to manage anything grownup like cutlery or proper napkins. Polystyrene boxes full of buns and slime. Nursery eating. I can’t imagine how such places ever caught on. I mean, the food’s not even particularly cheap.’
‘Staple diet of the urban poor.’
‘Well, leave aside that with a bit of effort they could make themselves proper meals at half the price, why does it all have to be so babyish? Ah, bones. They’re what it all comes down to.’ She hefted a femur. ‘Half lives. Atomic decay. Thermoluminescence. What’s Ronald McDonald? Plaster and chicken wire; I don’t know.’ All this was watched in silence by several departmental drones as well as by the eminent author of a monograph which had stood on its head the original conclusions – or received wisdom – of the Sta. Ana burial site. Baffled, amused or disgusted as they may have been, they mainly appeared respectful. Sharon found it irritating: too patient, too indulgent by far of this peculiar and opinionated Briton.
‘The Director will be back next week,’ she told Ysabella. ‘Then you can be properly assigned.’ She had long since decided that her eccentric visitor was not really an archaeologist at all, not if one thought it a matter of temperament as much as of the intellect. Her own leanings had developed into an obsession with historic Manila, the last thousand years, a period which could be further narrowed by starting at Magellan’s arrival in 1521 and ending with the razing of the city’s centre in 1945 when American troops finally crushed the Japanese. Much of her own fieldwork had been done a bare half mile away in Intramuros, the old Spanish citadel. In the 1970s one of Manila’s worse slums had been bulldozed and there, practically in the shadow of San Agostin church, Sharon had dug down beneath the broken rum bottles and flattened pork-and-beans cans of squatterdom, past Japanese helmets and rusting bayonets, back to coins of Philip II whose name a nation had inherited. She had recognised that these holes of hers dug within the dark grey sloping walls had become a private earthworks thrown up against sundry ghosts and vampires which stalked the caverns of the Philippine Heritage Museum: chiefly, the ghost of General Yamashita and the vampires of pot-hunting. At the most she would only ever find curios: a fragment of machine gun belt, a dented powder flask, a doubloon or two, pieces of messware. These things were safe, of little monetary value. From them she could reconstruct the ebb and flow of the citadel’s boundaries which did not always match the plans contained in vellum-bound archives in Madrid. That palimpsest of site over site, shifting and blurring (did the charred staves of narra wood at 4m 85cm corroborate the magazine fire recorded in 1688?), the vertically of her personal world, partially safeguarded her against the horizonless present. This was the cliché of scholarship, naturally. But most archaeologists had not to contend with museum authorities selling off items from its own collection to the tourist industry, nor with the hysteria of treasure hunting which surrounded any discovery or dig. At the merest hint of Japanese capital behind a construction site, island or beach resort anywhere in the provinces, the story would spread that somebody had inside information about the vast treasure looted by General Yamashita and hidden somewhere in the archipelago as he fled in 1945, hoping to retrieve it at leisure. Or a scuba diver had only to find a barnacle-encrusted dish or cannon to trigger a well-equipped assault on the site by rival gangs of looters. Conflicting claims were sometimes settled at sea or on beaches by night with brisk firefights of automatic weaponry. Far in the rear, the agents of the state came puffing along in leaky boats with rented gear, waving Ferdinand Marcos’s 1974 Presidential Decree no. 374 which specifically included underwater sites in the Cultural Properties Protection and Preservation Act (1966). By the time they arrived the vampires had like as not torn the place apart and irrevocably scrambled yet another fragment of the past. Laws these people had coming out of their ears; implementation was something else.
‘Properly assigned,’ Ysabella was saying. ‘Improperly assigned. What is it he’s doing, exactly, this Director of yours?’
‘Liwag? He’s down in Panay, at Tugtugo. That’s the galleon I was telling you about? In eighty feet of water? He said he’d be back mid-next week. Assuming there’s no bagyo.’
‘Bagyo?’
‘Sorry, typhoon. One of the acts of God which rule life in these parts. A bad typhoon and the country falls apart for a few days into seven thousand storm-lashed islands, each fighting it out with the hatches battened down. No flights, no boats, often no radio. But it’s the wrong season. He’s probably haggling with the Aussies.’
‘The Aussies’ were a professional team of archaeological divers the Museum often employed to beef up its own over-stretched resources. Bonifacio Liwag had a real liking for fieldwork, to the extent that his desk in the office down the passage was nearly always empty. He had, Sharon had observed over the years, a real interest in Chinese ceramics and Australian divers. He was rumoured to be a member of Opus Dei, too, an organisation with a shadowy reputation for being a cross between Masonry and the Mafia. She wondered what he would make of Ysabella.