Read Online Ghosts of Manila by James Hamilton-Paterson - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: James Hamilton-Paterson
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out with each other in public, an event scarcely comprehensible to a British reader who knew that the majority of police weren’t armed, or fake, or moonlighting as security guards, drug traffickers or professional kidnappers. If the papers here were to be believed, hardly a senator or member of Congress seemed not to have some taint or hidden skeleton. Suddenly, everything became interconnected. The same names kept circling like bluebottles around carrion. National heroes were accused of treason, became fugitives, lived openly in Quezon City, vanished, popped up again being invited to Malacañang Palace for talks, discussed running for the Senate next time around. Trusted generals suddenly went AWOL, turned up in Mindanao organising a blue seal cigarette smuggling racket, came back as mayor of somewhere or other, helped fix an election, were found in a supermarket freezer chest minus eyes and genitals buried beneath twenty kilos of frozen pizzas. Men who had fled with the Marcoses, accompanied by their families and as much cash as they could carry, were sniffing around for amnesty or were actually weaseling back into government. Even Imelda herself cameand went, trying to buy deals for herself with the money she had stolen.
It was baffling, too labile to be grasped. The nouns Ysabella had been brought up to take for granted, which with their immutable bricklike nature went to build the administrative edifice that was a country, were here slippery, deformed or infinitely plastic. Everything was thrown into question, yet no question could be properly answered. A word such as ‘corruption’ became puny or nannyish. This was too grandly shameless a way of life to be contained – still less threatened – by invocations of morality. Yet what else was there? Here (she shook her paper in the rising sunlight) right here it said that the Air Force at last knew what had happened to one of its aircraft which went missing for six years. (Went missing? How did an entire aeroplane go ‘missing’ without talk of crashes, search parties, bad weather, grieving families and boards of inquiry?) It went missing because the colonel who used to fly it had condemned it as unfit for flying, thereby circumventing IRAN (Inspect – Repair As Necessary). He dismantled it on his own air base and sent the whole thing piece by piece, labelled as ‘spare parts’, to a private hangar inside Manila Domestic Airport where it was reassembled. The colonel then resprayed and used it for two years in his own transport business. (An air force colonel with a private business? Even that seemed not quite right.) After that he sold it to a company in the provinces. He had not yet been arrested because the police were still determining what charges to file.
Ysabella couldn’t decide if all this was the sign of an extremely backward society which had yet to fix the essential nouns of its being so that everyone understood the same thing by law, honesty, public service, police, elections and so on, or whether it was actually a preview of a sophisticated futuristic state likely to hold sway everywhere sometime soon. At this distance England presented itself as an inert blob of greenish substance, quite cool and weathered like a chunk of onyx or other mineral from which the surrounding rock had been worn away by rain. On closer inspection and in a different light, however, it became very much less sharply defined, fuzzy at the edges like an aspirin dropped in water, hazy and commonplace. She resented that Manila’s effect on her was to blur the fond image she had of her own country. Indeed, never before had going abroad been like this.From afar Manila had seemed exotic, and not with the Hollywood exoticism of Bali (lithe brown folk in native costumes doing highly formalised classical dances on a beach for the massed camcorders of drunken roundeye jet-setters). Manila’s aura had had something of Baudelaire’s corpse-light glowing about it: existentially
It was baffling, too labile to be grasped. The nouns Ysabella had been brought up to take for granted, which with their immutable bricklike nature went to build the administrative edifice that was a country, were here slippery, deformed or infinitely plastic. Everything was thrown into question, yet no question could be properly answered. A word such as ‘corruption’ became puny or nannyish. This was too grandly shameless a way of life to be contained – still less threatened – by invocations of morality. Yet what else was there? Here (she shook her paper in the rising sunlight) right here it said that the Air Force at last knew what had happened to one of its aircraft which went missing for six years. (Went missing? How did an entire aeroplane go ‘missing’ without talk of crashes, search parties, bad weather, grieving families and boards of inquiry?) It went missing because the colonel who used to fly it had condemned it as unfit for flying, thereby circumventing IRAN (Inspect – Repair As Necessary). He dismantled it on his own air base and sent the whole thing piece by piece, labelled as ‘spare parts’, to a private hangar inside Manila Domestic Airport where it was reassembled. The colonel then resprayed and used it for two years in his own transport business. (An air force colonel with a private business? Even that seemed not quite right.) After that he sold it to a company in the provinces. He had not yet been arrested because the police were still determining what charges to file.
Ysabella couldn’t decide if all this was the sign of an extremely backward society which had yet to fix the essential nouns of its being so that everyone understood the same thing by law, honesty, public service, police, elections and so on, or whether it was actually a preview of a sophisticated futuristic state likely to hold sway everywhere sometime soon. At this distance England presented itself as an inert blob of greenish substance, quite cool and weathered like a chunk of onyx or other mineral from which the surrounding rock had been worn away by rain. On closer inspection and in a different light, however, it became very much less sharply defined, fuzzy at the edges like an aspirin dropped in water, hazy and commonplace. She resented that Manila’s effect on her was to blur the fond image she had of her own country. Indeed, never before had going abroad been like this.From afar Manila had seemed exotic, and not with the Hollywood exoticism of Bali (lithe brown folk in native costumes doing highly formalised classical dances on a beach for the massed camcorders of drunken roundeye jet-setters). Manila’s aura had had something of Baudelaire’s corpse-light glowing about it: existentially
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