Free Ghosts of Manila by James Hamilton-Paterson Page B

being used as prostitutes-cum-slaves.
    Ysabella was unnerved by the details, shamed by the righteousness of the girls’ involvement. She was pained, too, by her own hesitancy. It was as if she had heard a shattering explosion in her childhood whose reverberations ever since were warnings against commitment to just these sorts of detail. Holes in the ground were safe: one could take refuge in them as one poked about the fragments of the buried past. Even newspaper stories lacked menace as wild fables of a land existing a little apart from the one she trod and dug, such was a stranger’s queer immunity. These girls, though, lived in that other territory and gave off its details in a reek of authenticity.
    Yet Ysabella had also been touched. She had left the house without feeling a burst of political solidarity with the sisterhood but liking Crispa for Sharon, whose world she now enviously saw went laterally as well as vertically. Abused overseas workers might easily be seen as having their roots in Intramuros, that colonial citadel. Her own world, on the other hand, felt ever more shapeless and hollow. It was surely without coordinates of any kind, as directionless as a view of empty ocean with dazzling chromatic glints being smacked from a coat of sulky oil.

8
    F ATHER HERRERA’ s reputation was that of a radical without, however, his being accused of open sedition. It was difficult to imagine his fattish figure inserted into the gaunt jungle barrios of Mindanao, swapping Bible for Armalite, becoming a fully-accredited rebel priest with a price on his head and occasional laissez-p assers to Malacañang. Prideaux had been given his name by a contact and offered him a workingman’s lunch somewhere on José Abad Santos, having formed an impression of a busy and unpretentious priest disinclined to waste either time or jeepney fares going too far from his parish for a mere meal.
    ‘The New Era,’ said the voice on the telephone. ‘The corner of Dumiguig.’
    The New Era was, predictably, Chinese and – less predictably – new. It was full of harsh fluorescent glare. In tanks along one wall mournful eels gulped and furious crustacea attacked each other in slow motion. The tables had circular holes cut in them; underneath each a gas cylinder was connected to a ring burner. Prideaux’s knees kept nudging the cylinder. ‘They call this shabu-shabu,’ said the priest delightedly. ‘Not to be confused with plain shabu, of course, which is a drug.’ What with the air conditioning and the bubbling wok between them the priest’s spectacles kept misting over. Every so often he removed and polished them on the T-shirt between his breasts. This had on it a shield which to Prideaux’s eye looked considerably like that of Oxford University, surrounded by comic-strip billows of steam.Below was the legend: “I graduated Sauna cum Laude”. ‘You’re an anthropologist?’
    ‘I’m writing this thesis,’ said Prideaux guardedly.
    ‘About Filipino religion, I think Bernabe said?’
    ‘I may have given Father Bernabe very slightly the wrong impression.’
    ‘I imagine one often has to’, said Herrera, crunchily spearing a crab from muzzle to rectum with a chopstick, ‘in order to get the interview one wants.’ He lifted the animal out of the wok, his eyes opaque behind twin grey panes.
    ‘My thesis is really about the concept of amok. Or, perhaps, breaking points.’
    ‘Guys going apeshit, you mean.’
    ‘Ah. Women don’t?’
    Father Herrera laid down his chopsticks and took a refreshing gulp of beer. ‘What a good point,’ he said. ‘You’re implying that going to pieces is culturally determined?’
    ‘Yes, of course. Obviously it would be pretty hard to predict the exact moment without knowing the individual, but the ways in which a person breaks are practically foreordained by their culture, don’t you think? True amoks are rare in Europe, for instance. Or so they say. Anyway, if one wanted to talk about