Ghosts of Manila (2 page)

The four men form a specialist business somewhere between a cottage industry and a small firm, and as such are a legally constituted trading entity. They have various certificates and inspectorate slips to prove it, and by and large they abide by the rules. One of these forbids the sale of ‘waste matter’ for any purpose whatsoever, including fertiliser and animal feed. Every day the orange bin is trundled on a handcart to a fenced-off pit among the reeds and emptied together with the broth from the cauldron (which is, however, sieved first for stray teeth and bullets and the bones of the middle ear). Then a layer of quicklime is added, together with a covering of soil. To one of the fence posts a crucifix is tied. No-one besides the men ever comes near. Only the dogs approach, slinking and cringing and trembling with hunger at the scent in the air. The reeds whisper in the light, kerosene-laden breeze. Overhead the bleary travellers glance down and glimpse some peasants, perhaps, clinging nobly to their smallholding on the fringes of the city, still carrying on the timeless rituals of seed-time and harvest. Then the memory vanishes as the wheels thud onto the runway, sporadic applause breaks out from the rear of the economy section and the passengers’ adrenaline count soars steeply with the anxiety of arrival.

Soon the young man’s bones join those of a dozen others, including two children, already hanging in polythene garment bags on a rail in the stockroom. The buyer, another Chinese, will collect them all in a day or two but his visits are becoming less frequent even though the
price for the genuine article has been rising slightly as the market dries up. Rarity value, the men suppose. According to their information many developed countries have stopped importing real skeletons and have gone over to plastic. Or it may be that nations like India, which used to supply the majority of the British market until the mid-Eighties, have instead banned the export of their own ex-citizens. From now on illegal emigrants should be flesh and blood. Perhaps after all it is an uneasy business, smacking too much of Burke and Hare and unquiet graves.

Swabbing down and sweeping up to the sound of jet aircraft and pop songs the Chinese use a lot of water which runs away under the doors. The dogs wait for the lysol-flavoured runnels, fighting over nearly invisible strands of jelly. A skilled profession is winding down. Two of the men, who in evening light look almost elderly, might well retire. The other two – they are all distantly related to each other by blood or pacts – might stay on in business to fill special orders. One never knows where demand might come from. Only last month a trainee Buddhist arrived with the wrapped body of his master whose last wish had been that his bones might be used for his neophytes’ meditation. Plastic might constitute a
memento
mori
but was hardly as talismanic as the very bones of the teacher. Everyone thought this perfectly proper, including the police who saw no reason to interfere with religious wishes. They had taken their cut and gone their way. That had been good work: the two in the body shop had forgotten to cross themselves and had whistled while they worked. Some jobs just felt right.

W
HO COULD
remember 199-? Presidential shenanigans, monarchies on the blink. Growing populations of the homeless and workless swirling ever higher as if to swamp the classical columns of the nation states’ capitols, a demotic pollution eating away at the very marble of the seats of government. Wars, famines, fresh prodigies of international terrorism. The usual furniture of world events, in short, being moved about the same old room, while from outside came the rumblings of the familiar volcano or earthquake or disastrous typhoon. All this in that same year plus, of course, a spectacular outbreak of vampirism in a Manila squatter area. That, too, was a recurrent story, certainly no more mythic than wheat futures.

It was the year in which John Prideaux submitted an unconventional text as his dissertation, having concluded there was no other way of writing it. If it posed as a fictional account it would at least have an edge of readability over the more familiar slabs of word-processorese which passed as anthropology. After all, fact, like justice, was negotiable. People sometimes said that a weakness of much modern fiction was that it tried too hard to be documentary rather than ‘imaginative’; that it aspired to be journalism decked out with a few subjective ruffs and bows. Prideaux maintained that much journalism was vitiated by a pretence of objectivity. The average TV documentary, for example, had come to feel like pure fiction. Its language and conventions and formulae were all stock, by now so familiar that it dropped unremarked down the general well of
entertainment, at par with the news and re-runs of
The
Flintstones.
Famine victims tottered and wept just as predictably as prime ministers emerged from shiny limousines smirking or careworn.
C’était
leur
métier.
(His views on the subject of newzak were all too familiar to members of the university’s Faculty of Media Studies.)

He knew that an unconventional thesis ought as far as possible to be dressed up to resemble the regular article. Yet he soon found even this minimal disguise hard to achieve. It was usual at the outset to state the subject, after which the preferred method was to append the standard authorities and explain how one had managed to uncover, by sheer cleverness and originality, a loophole in their research or a weak point in the argument that fatally dated their work. Prideaux’s problem was that, faced with the eventual pile of his own typescript, he no longer knew what the subject was. It was therefore impossible to follow with the customary abstract: the pithy couple of sentences in bold print which summarised the whole thing. ‘Displaced Oklahoma dirt farmers enter the non-lucrative mid-1930s California citrus industry’, he had once seen somebody précis
The
Grapes
of
Wrath.
How could even the laziest academic think this was a useful exercise? Proper fieldwork could hardly be boiled down without gross distortion or banality any more than literature could.

He had also to confront the issue of his own middle-age, since he discovered it had a bearing on such matters Maybe the typical anthropology student in their early twenties might have picked the sort of subject that could easily be summarised, which lacked resonance. But a mature student in his forties looked at a different world through different eyes. Who with daughters and sons of their own at university would think
‘Kinship
Systems
Among
the
Nambikwara’
a nice, neutral little topic when the very word
family
had become synonymous with private anxiety, bafflement and guilt? The years went by and interests become more compromised and intricate even as tastes grew simpler. That went for theses, too. Such considerations were ignored by the academic establishment, whose judgements and expectations were based on the energetic callowness of comparative babies.

Initially, while still casting about for a suitable subject, Prideaux had been tempted by the wholly fictitious, as anyone would be who had once admired Carlos Castaneda. He had toyed with many titles,
half prepared to reasearch and write a thesis to match any which took his fancy.
‘The
Tribe
That
Dare
Not
Speak
Its
Name’
had had real possibilities and would have been a great pleasure to write. Only the difficulty of trying to invent a plausible location for this intensely superstitious and shy people had finally dissuaded him. Given the fictive nature of even the most scientific undertaking (its inventiveness, its arbitrariness as a human endeavour carried out according to human rules), he saw how the driest doctoral essay could become a
roman
à
thèse.
He had not considered this when he began his research and had given little thought to how his choice of topic was bound to be related to private preoccupations and public anxieties: the high whistling noise and cracking sounds as chips flew off interior façades. Was he not like the worried scientist in a disaster movie, taking an evening stroll along the top of the dam and suddenly noticing that the white lines in the middle of the road no longer quite match up? Eventually, though, his chosen area had seemed to settle itself; at the time he never wondered why. The very idea of a ‘national character’ was too nebulous and reductive for serious scholarship, but one might legitimately sidle up to it by calling the subject Transcultural Psychopathology. After all, every culture had its own peculiar vulnerabilities, no less than each individual, and these might be quite revealing. Accordingly he had reviewed the literature, beginning with the mediaeval dancing manias and children’s crusades, through the epidemic religious hysterias such as the ‘Jumpers’ and ‘Barkers’ in the Eastern US to the nuns in a German convent who believed themselves possessed by, or changed into, cats. He knew, too, of more specific and exotic disorders. There was
pibloktoq
in which Eskimos – mainly women – lapsed into a fit of crying and speaking in tongues before sprinting away naked across the ice. There was
latah
in Malaysia which also usually afflicted middle-aged women, a trance state featuring zombielike obedience which could be precipitated by the sound of a bicycle bell or the mere mention of a name. And there was Windigo psychosis among the Cree and Ojibwa Indians, when the sufferer became nauseated by ordinary food and could only be satisfied by cannibalism.

Lastly, there was
amok.
John Prideaux had read his van Loon, his van Wulfften-Palthe, Yap, Caudill & Lin, Hirst & Woolley and much else. To these authorities
amok
was a standardised, culturally-acceptable
form of emotional release, a disorder which, though temporary, often involved indiscriminate slaughter and for that reason equally often proved terminal to the patient. But such descriptions left him feeling they had stopped short. Had their authors been uneasier, less pedestrian, might they not have perceived an emblematic dimension to
amok
?
The classic summary of its three stages (a period of brooding followed by homicidal frenzy and ending in exhausted amnesia) could equally well define extended periods of military service and combat duty, for instance. Come to that, it could apply to whole lives lived under any kind of unremitting stress. Was it too fanciful to imagine an entire society composed of individuals who, without knowing it, acted out from cradle to grave the symptoms of a chronic
amok
attack, slowed down by a factor of thousands? (If any of his examiners could say an unhesitating
Yes
at this point, Prideaux recklessly felt, they should stop reading at once and turn with relief to a more regular script.)

Finally, he knew that anthropology theses should be tricked out to look and sound ‘objective’ in a way that aspired to the scientific. It was even rather touching. Such a thing might just be feasible in a laboratory experiment involving transgenic mice, but despite the best intentions fieldwork was still conducted by people, and people were culturally-dependent constructs. To deal with people
was
to deal with fiction. Thus he figured in his own narrative as ‘Prideaux’, who by telling his own tale came in the end to sound disconcertingly like a character. Wishing (before he disappeared entirely) to observe what remaining norms he could, he thought it only proper to acknowledge his
dramatis
personae,
all of whom he had interviewed extensively, thanking them sincerely for their often extreme patience and help. In alphabetical order they were:

It was Ysabella Bastiaan who stepped into his thesis the instant she exited the portals of Ninoy Aquino International Airport, Manila. Jet-lagged and wilting in the early morning heat within yards of leaving the air-conditioned concourse, she allowed herself to be taken over by white shirts and brown arms pulling her towards one taxi or another. We note that a curious passivity can overtake people after a long flight similar to that of patients newly arrived in hospital. There is the same desire to press foolish sums into the nearest hand in the hopes of soon being left alone in a cool dark room. According to her later description Ysabella found herself in a luxury cab padded in white Naugahyde whose windscreen was partly obscured by a portrait of Jesus hanging from the rear-view mirror with a sign reading ‘Bless Our Trip O Lord We Pray’ and the following verselet:

Somewhere in the general ruckus beyond the tinted windows she caught sight of a newspaper vendor. The banner headline of a popular daily read (had she been able to understand it) ‘Binondo Vampire Strikes Again! 3 Sucked Dry!’ Without knowing it she had just entered the past. Or maybe the future. The present definitely eluded her as the taxi dragged through the badlands of Pasay before beginning the long haul down Roxas Boulevard, Manila Bay on her left and the irregular line of seafront properties to her right: nightclubs burnt out in gang wars interspersed with high rise apartment blocks and condos.

She reached Imelda Marcos’s showpiece, the Philippine Cultural Center, and was swung eastwards into the tourist belt of Ermita, here coming to a near halt. The traffic was backed up like sewage. No lights were working. At occasional crossroads a man in khaki uniform was blowing a whistle and thrashing his arms.

‘Brownout,’ said her driver laconically. And indeed Ysabella had
been wondering at all the little generators on the pavements adding their clatter and monoxides to that of the stalled traffic. Behind these was a series of clubs and bars, some with slats of wood nailed crosswise over their doors and painted with the slogan ‘Closed By Order of Mayor Lim’. The others pulsed a dismal thudding of disco music into the generators’ roar. Now and then a door opened briefly. Against the interior’s perpetual night-time gleamed pale limbs and teeth and pallid dresses designed to shimmer electrically in ultraviolet lighting. At eleven-thirty in the morning? she wondered. She had entered that febrile state when things could be noticed but not taken in, leaving at their back a vague disquiet as of something fatally wrongheaded, of an intolerable future being presaged when the remainder of the planet would also be locked into slow-motion anarchy and din and the disruption of appropriate appetites.

Her hotel came into view trailing a thick diesel plume from its own generators, a blocky white cruise liner bound for nowhere. By the time she checked in, the glacial aircon calm of the hotel lobby was no antidote to her forebodings. Peace and private space were expensive commodities in rationed supply. The polished marble and uniformed bellhops gave off something precarious which mixed uneasily with the vanilla ghost of hot waffles seeping from an invisible coffee room. The corners of her eyes constantly picked up a tremble in the lights, the flicker of emergency power supply. Cycles per second. The concealed fluorescent tubes in the Hitachi lift buzzed faintly. Her curtained room felt rubberised in its insulation. Floor, walls and ceiling gave back not the slightest echo. Dead space for the dead tired. The bellhop turned the air-conditioner on and left her standing in an icy blast of mildew, yeasts and fungi. By parting the curtains Ysabella could see derelict rooftops and a traffic-locked street which the tinted glass turned wan mauve. From an inch away the pane transmitted the midmorning heat of outside. The airline passenger’s world.