Ghosts of Manila (14 page)

Then came the orders from Malacañang:
Leave
it.
Carry
on
building
without
delay.
The rescuers decided there had been some mistake, a misunderstanding, and redoubled their efforts to claw their way through the now hardened slurry to reach their friends. It was here that, if Rio’s memories remained vivid, maybe events themselves became telescoped. He remembered clearly that no ambulance was allowed through for nine hours after the accident, that a complete security blanket enveloped the site. The next day a couple of newspapers had spoken of a minor accident which had killed two workers. Otherwise, total silence. It was not ambulances that arrived but staff cars and military vehicles: MetroCom and the dreaded NISA and MISA. It never occurred to him to wonder what Military Intelligence had to do with an accident on a construction site. Everyone knew. Saloon cars with smoked windows arrived carrying aides with express orders. The building was going to be finished on time, cost what it might, and time had already been lost.

Meanwhile, workers with jackhammers were still trying to free their
colleagues even as the concrete hardened around their limbs. Men died fully conscious, up to their waists in setting cement. After three days the stench of unreachable bodies was dreadful. Even so, there was still life in the very walls of the tangled canyons deep inside the building. Pneumatic drill bits pierced the concrete and released gouts of blood. But orders were given and obeyed. Bulldozers arrived and began pushing everything in a rubble of flesh and stone and metal out of the building and down to the sea where the gulls swooped and dived. Back inside, men with chainsaws went about lopping off flush the limbs and still-clothed bulges which protruded from the concrete. As a policeman, Dingca had been ordered to draw his gun and prevent further rescue work on pain of death. He and his INP colleagues stood there trembling with fatigue, their drawn weapons hanging heavy with cement by their sides. Each pretended not to notice those who silently wept. Outside, Army trucks kept drawing up with fresh PC men in military uniform who leaped out, saw only what they had been told they would see – a scene of sabotage and a communist-inspired labour dispute – and cocked their weapons. Within a week work was once again in full swing. Fresh concrete was poured over the remains; the smell grew fainter.

It never was determined how many died nor how many still lay entombed in the Film Center. There were no official figures. Those on-site who could list by name their missing friends and colleagues thought over 200, but it was anyone’s guess how many of their bodies had ever been removed. For all that 7,000 labourers were still working on the day before the first Manila International Film Festival opened, the building was finished on time and Imelda, who was after all the chief exhibit, had her day. Satyajit Ray chaired the panel which awarded a Golden Eagle to 36
Chowringhee
Lane.
But MIFF never took off and in 1983 had to show upmarket pornography in order to break even. It was doubtful whether anyone in Cannes lost even a wink of sleep over its potential threat.

MIFF was dead but the Film Center still stood. Now and again Rio caught sight of it from one of the new flyovers on Roxas, a vast, pillared cube in the distance. For him, as for the thousands who hadn’t been there that appalling week in 1981, it had gone on sending up a thick plume of ghosts which hovered over the whole spit of land. They were regularly seen and heard, and just as regularly there were
attempts to exorcise them. Many times the Church had sent its shamans and, when they failed, priests from the Ifugao and Igorot hill tribes tried their own expertise. Nothing worked for long and most people believed firmly that nothing ever would as long as the building remained standing. It was now an abandoned warehouse, empty, cracked and subsiding, reeking of Babylon after a mere dozen years. No earthly power would ever make Rio set foot inside it again. He knew that as soon as he did the structure would immediately become transparent and, looking up, he would see against the fabled sunset of Manila Bay the tumbled figures of the dead sitting, lying, upside down, spreadeagled, headless, shirtless, missing a leg or a hand or half a torso, their mouths full of cement and with the early stars coming out among their bones.

Such were Dingca’s ghosts. They lived on in a lesser way in the subsequent history of the police force, being reawakened each time something else happened to remind him of the essential difference between the civilian force he served and the Philippine Constabulary. They were both described as the police; but while his training at the Police Academy had been ‘service oriented’, in the official phrase, the PC trained with the military and were ‘mission oriented’. The two forces frankly despised each other, on occasion being reduced to public firefights. Then in 1991 they were officially merged, creating the Philippine National Police. The intention was to form a truly national civilian police entirely separate from the armed forces. Dingca and his INP colleagues glumly predicted what would happen and were glumly proved right. Almost without exception the ex-PC men took over the top jobs and gave their old comrades the plum assignments while the ex-INP men carried on trying to be ordinary cops. The venerable Police Academy, which in the postwar years had turned out the spruce ranks of Manila’s Finest, was abolished. In its place was the National Capital Training Command in – of all ominous places for a civilian force – Camp Crame, the Army HQ.

The unhappy amalgam which was the PNP had been given two years to shake down and to date showed not the slightest sign that it ever would. Under its provisions a policeman could now be reassigned anywhere in the country, which meant there were now Manila policemen who knew nothing about the city, while men like Rio Dingca kept their heads down for fear of being posted to some
godforsaken provincial oubliette. He knew perfectly well that most of the ex-Constabulary men whose orders he now took were unqualified to be policemen, as were plenty of officers who had been recruited in the old Martial Law days and who had simply bought a fake High School education certificate in order to join the force. Nowadays one had to be a College graduate, an excellent notion fatally undercut in a force already full of men unqualified to wear any but a janitor’s uniform. Demoralised by politics, Dingca and his friends were unhopeful for their future. Morale was terrible, behaviour worse. Policemen rampaged like delinquents, firing off their guns at whim, organising kidnapping syndicates, drug rings, car thefts, protection rackets, the fencing of stolen goods. Almost daily they shot each other, in and out of uniform. They held each other up, busted each other’s scams to take control of them, stole each other’s loot. When lumped together with the armed forces one could say, as Rio Dingca often did to Sita, that the law enforcement authorities constituted the country’s single biggest source of crime.

All of a sudden, out of the blue, he had been struck by the sadness, by a furious sense of waste of which Babs was only the most poignant recent example. Not long ago he had had to deal with a halfwitted squatter who had been set up for a carnapping rap which Rio was sure he hadn’t merited since he knew the policemen who were running the ring. Their usual trick was to spot a car they fancied, arrest the owner and impound the vehicle, which would then vanish without trace from police custody. He had recognised the jailed squatter and had sprung him by showing that he couldn’t even drive. There was a pathos to this. It was the squatter’s wife he liked, an admirable and hardworking soul from whom he regularly bought his girls’ T-shirts at rock-bottom prices. Shortly after restoring her worthless husband to San Clemente Rio had bumped into the parish’s rogue priest, Fr. Herrera. Generally speaking, Dingca hadn’t much time for priests or, indeed, for churchgoing, which he felt was all right for women. Unlike Fr. Bernabe, the parish’s other priest, Herrera was unconventional, cynical, sour and knowledgeable about the most surprising things, including fighting cocks. Rio had persuaded him without much difficulty to have a cold glass of something. At the back of his mind he had an idea that he might tentatively sound the man out on the subject of ghosts, which were beginning to disquiet him more than he liked.
With old Bryan Macawili retired from the force Rio knew nobody else he wished to confide in.

As a matter of fact there were several things he quite wanted to put to Fr. Herrera but couldn’t work out how to turn them into questions. Once after seeing Babs in ‘The Topless Pit’ he had had the most extraordinary vision of Judgement Day while driving morosely back to San Pedro, Laguna. Summoned to appear before the Almighty and explain how she had spent her time on earth, Iron Pussy would say, ‘Sir, I used to open Coke bottles with my cunt for tourists… er, my vagina, Sir,’ while cherubim and seraphim cracked up behind discreetly held wings. Dingca further fantasised that there really was justice in heaven because God would then thunder ‘BRING ME THOSE TOURISTS!’ instead of dumping on poor Iron Pussy, who had only been putting to use the peculiar talent He himself had given her. Such metaphysical extravaganzas were not easily translated into questions one could pose a parish priest, Rio decided.

In the event it scarcely mattered because Fr. Herrera, by then on his third bottle of Red Horse, drifted into his own strange monologue which now and then seemed to inhabit the sort of territory Dingca found interesting.

‘Listen, Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘The sadness and cruelty of this world are overwhelming and without remedy. They leave no survivors, of course. Folk deal with this as best they may. They have recourse to their gods and their devils; their drugs like tobacco and alcohol and money; their cynicism as much as their wishful thoughts and quiet retreats snatched between blows; their lovers and families. I say without remedy because I’ve come to know that’s true. I’ve also heard it said that living well is the best revenge. For years I assumed that meant wealthy living, the so-called “good life” which I must say has always struck me as a creed of dim greed. Strangely, though, I discovered that the best revenge really
is
to be good, to be moral, to live well in that sense. What’s more, I know there’s no alternative. It has nothing to do with pleasing a god or satisfying a social convention. It actually is the most logical and intelligent way to live. To all those not yet old or scarred enough to recognise the truth of this it sounds like bullshit, and always will. It can’t be taught, only learned.’

‘And that’s your remedy?’

‘No, I told you, there is no remedy. It’s merely the proper way for a
person to live. There are no rewards and no punishments: that’s the worst we have to face. People think little acts of kindness, when sown here and there like – excuse the simile – mustard seeds, will grow and spread and gradually cover the earth with a bounteous crop of, well, mustard I suppose. But it doesn’t happen like that because along comes a new generation and it all has to start again from scratch. Little acts of kindness are purely local. They may not be forgotten, but then nor are slights. Neither a kindness nor a slight guarantees its own propagation. It requires too much effort to take things any further. They simply vanish, the good and the bad alike. Nothing is ever learned. Each generation just starts all over again.’

‘You’re a strange kind of priest, I must say.’

‘Is there any other kind? What do you want, Catholic dogma? I can do that, too.’

‘Then what do you tell your parishioners about condoms?’

‘That I’ve never worn one.’

‘Maybe you should,’ said Dingca with leaden mischievousness.

‘Maybe I should. I tell them to be sure and buy good quality if they’re going to buy them at all. They know perfectly well what the Church teaches. I tell them it’s up to them. Everybody has to make their own decisions. But people want to be told what to do, have you noticed? They want someone identifiable to disobey, I think. You obey gods, but men can be disobeyed.’

‘I thought the man represented God? The man in the Church’s pay?’

‘I wouldn’t presume. There’s nothing in the Bible about condoms, or overpopulation, or Aids. We know nothing of Christ and his teaching except what’s in the New Testament. All the rest is hearsay. Pure gossip, no matter how much it’s dressed up as revelation and patristic tradition. In that sense you could say I’m a fundamentalist.’ Fr. Herrera tipped his bottle until the foam in his glass rushed up to cover its mouth. Then he took off his spectacles, polished them with a paper napkin and held them at arm’s length, squinting up through each lens in turn. ‘As for the Church’s
pay,
I’m no better paid than you are, Lieutenant. Even worse, probably. In that sense God’s work is a truly lousy job.’

‘With respect, Father, you sound to me like a priest who’s lost his faith.’

‘And am I not sitting opposite a policeman who’s lost his hope?
Losing your faith is like giving up smoking, I’ve discovered. You suddenly realise that countless millions are getting by without it and always have done. It doesn’t matter. I still wish to live my life well, and for that I need no faith at all. The discovery that wishing to live my life well means helping others to do the same is oddly strengthening and calming. Not praiseworthy; simply logical.’

The two men drank in silence for a while.

‘I hate my job,’ said Dingca at last. ‘I know it sounds stupid and naive now, but I really did want to be one of Manila’s Finest when I joined. There are good men on the force, you know. Despite everything. There are still some real policemen.’

‘Of course. As opposed to the military thugs you’re now having to share a bed with?’

‘You’ve said it,’ was Dingca’s bitter reply. ‘It’s in ruins. We’re all lost. Everything’s topsy-turvey. You’re lost, too. You called me “Lieutenant” a moment ago, but you’re out of date. I haven’t been a Lieutenant since 1991. When we were reorganised we were all given civilian ranks to replace our military ones. I’m actually an Inspector these days. The military thugs, as you call them, have stopped being Majors and Lieutenant-Colonels and have turned overnight into fully-fledged Chief Inspectors and Superintendents. The names change, the duties change, the crimes go on being the same. We’re all ghosts of what we’re supposed to be.’