1993 - The Blue Afternoon (12 page)

“Precisamente,” Cruz agreed, nodding his big head.

Carriscant watched Bobby’s glance flit between the two of them, he could see he was troubled and unsettled.

“It’s a common practice,” Carriscant said, gently, a little unhappy to find himself siding with Cruz, “and essential.”

Cruz stepped away from them and pumped some gusts of carbolic spray into the atmosphere. Bobby gathered himself and had Carriscant explain to Cruz that Ephraim Ward’s body was to be returned to the San Jeronimo morgue immediately. Cruz refused to do anything without the authority of Governor Taft. Bobby said he would provide him with that forthwith.

“That man is a monster,” Bobby said, passionately, as they drove away from Cruz’s house. “Those poor fucking dogs and monkeys. The bodies stacked up in the next room…It’s not natural.”

“Always remember,” Carriscant said. “He is a peninsularo. They assume the world is organised for them. In Filipinas they decide what is normal. Or at least they used to for three hundred years. It’s hard for them to adjust.”

Bobby disagreed, but Carriscant was not really listening. He pursed his lips, frowning. He was thinking: those dogs…Two animals, one heart. What was the old fool trying to do?

P
antaleon spread the plans flat on the ground in front of the nipa barn and weighted the corners with stones. Carriscant squatted down on his haunches in front of them and made suitable noises of appreciation. “The Aero-mobile,” he read. “Good name.”

“I thought: you’ve got an automobile, what better description for a flying machine?”

“Sounds ideal.”

Carriscant scrutinised the fine drawings. What he saw looked like a cross between a cantilevered bridge and a stylised bird. There were two wrings, boxy with many struts and wires, but the tail at the end was curved and semicircular, with flutings, like the fanned tail of a dove, displaying. He found Pantaleon’s dream of powered heavier-than-air flight touching, a harmless obsession, but he sensed his natural curiosity about the project growing, despite his scepticism, and despite the fact he had only invited himself here on a pretext.

“It’s a competition,” Pantaleon said, explaining. “Two businessmen, an American and a Frenchman, have set up this prize, the Amberway-Richault prize. They’ve offered ten thousand dollars for the first flying machine to lift itself off the ground under its own power and fly for one hundred metres. Under its own power, no ramps, pulleys, gradients. It must be fully authenticated, of course.”

“And you think this…this
Aero-mobile
can do it?”

“In principle, I’m sure,” Pantaleon said, with quiet authority. “There are a few problems…Engine power is the major one, of course. But I’m on the right lines. The glider models have worked very satisfactorily.” He smiled shyly, confessing. “It’s what I’ve been up to this last year.”

“Most impressive,” Carriscant said. “Well, I really must be—”

“Fortunately for me,” Pantaleon lowered his voice, even though they were quite alone in his meadow, “even though I hate to admit it, the arrival of the Americans has made everything so much easier. They’re at the forefront, you see. Them and the French.” He looked about him, a small expression of contempt on his face. “We were rotting out here,” he said, “in every way. Nothing had really changed since the eighteenth century, when you think about it. Nothing.”

“Yes. Yes, you’re right,” Carriscant said, suddenly caught with some of Pantaleon’s passion. “Look at us, at our own discipline. We had to leave, go abroad, to discover what astonishing progress was being made. Yet we still have to deal with old quacks like Cruz and Wieland.”

“Can you imagine,” Pantaleon said dreamily, not really listening, “if I, Pantaleon Quiroga, were the first man to achieve powered flight. Here, in the Philippines…”

“You know that Cruz has kept the American’s heart and his liver,” Carriscant said, darkly. “Can you believe the arrogance? Bobby has protested again to Taft.”

“The twentieth century…How incredible to be living now. Everything will change, Salvador, everything.”

The two men fell silent, preoccupied with their own thoughts, as the evening light gathered around them in the blond windcombed meadow, peachy and warm, and across the river came the sound of the Angelus tolling mournfully. Carriscant clapped his young friend on the shoulder.

“It’s good to talk to you, Pantaleon,” he said sincerely. “It’s good for me, anyway. Gets my mind off…things.” He gazed back at the meaningless mass of struts and wires in the nipa barn. “I’m mightily impressed with your machine, your Aero-mobile. Let me know if I can help, in any way.”

“Actually, you might be able to, Salvador. Do you want to go for a beer?”

“Another time, my friend. I have to get back.”

Carriscant left Pantaleon at his barn as he said he was about to start fixing the fabric to the wings and intended to work into the night. He retraced his steps to Santa Cruz and picked up a carromato that took him the short distance to Sampaloc.

Sampaloc was little better than a slum, one level up, perhaps, from the squalor that was Tondo, but all the same it presented to the eye a mean scatter of wooden shacks with galvanised iron roofs and unpaved narrow lanes noisome with filth and sewage. Gardenia Street was its one mark of distinction, a short cobbled avenue of shops that had been converted into makeshift bars and cafes. These establishments still retained the canvas awnings of the old shopfronts, great skirts of material that projected out from the facade on a metal beam and then hung almost to the ground, designed to produce maximum shade. The effect was to curtain-off the interior from the casual passerby but one could see and hear, in the gaps between the shopfronts, the glow of coloured lights, the sound of music and the laughter and noise of men’s voices. This partial shrouding was more enticing, Carriscant found, than any overt display of licence.

He sat in a small bodegon on the outskirts of Sampaloc reading a newspaper and drinking many cups of coffee until the gathering darkness outside necessitated the lighting of the oil lamps. Once he felt he could venture out with some hope of maintaining his anonymity he set off down Gardenia Street. It was busy with men, American soldiers and sailors, and the air was loud with English voices, a disorientating and unsettling experience for him. He realised that he had not heard so many English voices since he had boarded his ship at Liverpool for his trip home in 1897. As he wandered up and down the length of Gardenia Street he felt a sudden clutch of melancholy seize him as he mentally contemplated his younger self all those years ago. He remembered his rapt astonishment as he walked the streets of Glasgow at the commencement of his medical studies. How he would take the horse tram from Gilmorehill, with the new university on its crest and the Infirmary at its foot where he worked and studied, and travel into the centre of town. All these people in their heavy dark clothes. He would walk about the thronged streets dazed with the noise of the traffic and the gabble and blather of English in his ears. Paving underfoot, every square yard, hard stone. The iron wheelrims of the trams and the cabs and the drays clattering and ringing. Writing everywhere, names and advertisements on every vertical surface, it seemed. In one shop a window filled with 200 straw hats. It seemed to bring a presentiment of sun, of the tropics, to this solid square city, with its tall, ornate, sootblack buildings, muscly with commerce and civic pride.

How different from his home, Manila, the low green odorous city on its lazy steamy estuary, clustered round the vast, crumbling, weedshagged walls of Intramuros. A dome, a spire here and there, peering above the trees and the plain of white tin and terracotta roofs. The heat, the damp, the crawling pace. Life moved at the speed of a caraboa cart, people said, one mile per day. And now here in Sampaloc he heard those loud white voices again, different accents but with the same bustling swaggering confidence. Here too commerce held sway. He felt a brief pang of nostalgia for the life he had known before the Americans came. The late start to the day, the city stewed in humid lethargy, the siesta, then the polite curiosity, the discreet and civil flirtations of the paseo…But he shook the mood off him as his more immediate needs reimposed themselves and he decided to enter an establishment called “The Thichupwah Ice-Cream Parlor”, one of the street’s larger and more substantial buildings. On its second floor, above the awning, there was a crazy-looking wrought-iron balcony and through the open windows in some of the rooms Carriscant could see the flitting shapes of what he took to be women moving to and fro.

He pushed past the canvas awning and opened the door on to a large noisy room, blurry with smoke, filled with American servicemen, most of them in uniform. Many games of cards were in process and the unselfconscious shouts of bid and counter-bid almost drowned the noise of the large phonograph in the corner, playing ‘My Kentucky Belle’ for the few listless couples shuffling about the small wooden dance floor at the rear. Carriscant pushed and weaved his way through the tables to the bar where a large sign said ‘American Beer. 40 cents, Mex’. He ordered a Schlitz and glanced carefully and, he hoped, casually around him. Behind the bar a white woman with a pinched face never designed to be painted in the way it was asked him if he wanted to dance. She spoke English with an unlocatable foreign accent. Polish, for all he knew, Corsican, Walloon.

“With you?” he asked, not thinking. One of her front teeth was badly chipped, and the armpits of her thin cotton dress were dark with sweat.

“Any of the girls. I cost extra.” She smiled, showing a lot of gum, and gestured at the girls sitting on a bench by the dance floor waiting for partners. “Fifty cents for a dance. Two dollars, Mexican, for a
dance
upstairs. The white girls cost five dollars.” She smiled at him again. “I’m ten…You American?”

“Yes. Thank you.” He could barely pronounce the words.

He left the bar and made his way through the yelling gamblers towards the dance floor, beyond which, he saw, was a flight of stairs. Amongst the half dozen women not dancing were three white ‘girls’, two thin, one plump, all with unnaturally coloured hair. The plump girl was a pure white-blonde, her hair piled untidily on top of her head, with a few uncoiling ringlets hanging down, reminding him, unfortunately, of the flypaper in Dr Cruz’s laboratory. The other girls were indias, dressed in lurid versions of their traditional clothes: wide-sleeved abaca blouses and bright shawls round their waists over ankle-length calico sayas. They all waved fans against the fug and heat, causing the paste bracelets on their wrists to wink and gleam in the light and click in uneven rhythm to the plangent scratchy music. One of the girls wore her dark hair down, glossy and congealed with coconut oil. She was small with unusually full lips and heavy eyebrows which gave her an air of unlikely seriousness. Carriscant watched as she snapped her fan shut and reached it behind and round her to scratch an itch on her shoulder blade. He walked round the dance floor towards her, having made his decision, his hand reaching in his pocket for money.

He spoke English. “Two dollars,” he said, gauchely, like an ignoramus, showing her the notes, “upstairs.” In the moist heat of the room he could smell the coconut oil on her hair, sweet and spicy.

She took the money, folded it away somewhere gracefully, discreetly. “You come me,” she said, “we room five.” She set off immediately across the dance floor towards the stairway. A swaying couple cut directly across Carriscant’s path and he had to pause and then negotiate their maladroit shuffle before he could follow his girl. His girl…“You come me, we room five.” It was all so clear-cut, a matter of plain business dealing, no fuss, no pretensions. He was always struck by the simplicity of this exchange, its no–nonsense straightforwardness—money in return for the short loan of a body—on the few occasions he had resorted to it before. By the time he reached the foot of the stair, however, the girl had already ascended. And coming down, adjusting his belt, was Dr Saul Wieland.

“Well, if it isn’t the esteemed Dr Carriscant,” Wieland said loudly, showing both rows of teeth in a yellow grin. “That your little chicken I just patted on the keester?” Wieland was drunk, as usual.

“What are you talking about?” Carriscant held himself stiffly, arms by his side.

Wieland had reached the foot of the stairs, and lounged on the banister. He was a small man, in his fifties, with folds of jowl, like wattles, overlapping his stiff collar. He had a shaggy untrimmed moustache and an odd loose pouting mouth with wet lips.

“I won’t tell Mommy. Relax.” He lolled forward and patted Carriscant’s elbow, reassuringly.

Somehow Carriscant managed a contemptuous snuffle of a laugh. He reached forward and took hold of the handle of the door in front of him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Carriscant said. “I’m here to attend my cook’s mother. She has a hernia. Good evening to you.”

With that he snapped down the handle and swung the door open, stepping through confidently and closing it behind him. He heard Wieland say, with grotesque sarcasm, at the closed door, “Oh, so sorry, I’m sure.” Carriscant did not pause further, in case Wieland should try to come after him. He walked down the corridor, past an opening that led to a cramped dark kitchen, and then out of a rear door that gave on to a long narrow high-walled yard. One side was lined with chicken coops and he could hear the soft clucking of the roosting hens and smell the nutty, brothy reek of their accumulated shit. He felt his way carefully to his left and squinnied through the gap in a shutter. He could see Wieland sitting at a table with three other white men in civilian clothes, one of whom was dealing out a pack of cards.

Carriscant had no desire to allow Wieland any further opportunities to glimpse him in the ‘Ice-Cream Parlor’ or to practise his scornful innuendo further and so he decided to wait until it was possible to leave unobserved. No-one, it seemed, had spotted him enter the yard so he was probably safe there for an hour or so. He moved further down into the darkness at the rear until he found a screened position against the wall. He pulled a section of old matting over and sat down upon it, snug in the angle the wall made with the solid wooden wheel of a caraboa cart. He stretched his legs out and rubbed his face, laughing at himself a little halfheartedly: so much for his ‘low flying dove’—she would be up there in her nest, wondering where her Americano had gone. Fool, he said to himself, fool, fool, fool…