Fairy Tales 🧚 The Philippines

Maria de Tondo

Ermita, Manila, Jan. 1978

Because of the thirty-four bottles of San Miguel he drank the night before (one glass for every chapter of Deuteronomy), Ragor had a hangover the size of a watermelon. It therefore enraged him to hear a radio blaring through the thin wall of his pensione at ten minutes past nine in the morning. The noise was coming from the general direction of a picture on his wall, which happened to be a guilt-framed portrait of the Virgin Mary.

Ragor was so irritated by the sound of the radio that he picked up the nearest object he could find, which happened to be a Red Letter Bible, and threw it in the direction of the noise. To his amazement, the moral weight of The Book was so great that it crashed right through the Virgin’s well-fortified virtue and landed in the next room. 

When the dust settled, he could see the bare back of a dark-skinned girl in front of a mirror. It was an old mirror, like the Victorian one Alice Liddell used to stare into when she was on holidays in the Welsh town of Llandudno. Maria, however, wasn’t a Victorian lady. When she saw Ragor come crashing into her room, she covered herself with a flimsy, see-through negligée. Turning her head, she glared at the gawking foreigner. 

Ragor couldn’t believe his good fortune. Cautiously, he peered at her tiny shoulder blades, then thrust his big nose in between her and the mirror and asked what her name was. “Maria de Tondo. You are from Germany? I have friend live in Hamburger. Work in Strip Tea show. Many fat tourist. Many Dutch marks. But you no fat. Maybe you no from Germany.” 

He looked puzzled at this, but he was in fact admiring the caramel smoothness of her shoulders. So she continued her assault on the English language: “You want go on tour beautiful Pilipinas wit me? Don’t charge many dollar. Don’t eat many.” Mesmerized by this vision of a young woman looking at herself in the mirror not eating many, he fell into the dark pools of her eyes, and answered yes, yes, he would be delighted to go on such a Magical Mystery Tour.

The moment he said “Yes” she looked up at him in a businesslike manner, as if they had just signed a verbal contract that made them man and wife as far as any snoopy member of the government was concerned. In no time at all they had their suitcases packed and were off on their honeymoon, traveling southward on an old beaten-up bus through the suburbs of Manila.

🧚

Sipping on her pineapple martini frappé, Maria felt it necessary to set the record straight: “I never thinking we to be merry! Again, you nonsensing always. It was you talking talking in bar night before. You who buying drink after drinking. But not thirty-four bottle. Hardly, hardly! You drinking four not even five and fall down drunken. No blaming me. You oh so guilty in my bed. So patheticness! Maybe you feel guilty going with prostitute so making up fantasy. No Red Letter Bible in Tagalog. But why feeling guilty anyway? You do nothing in bed. Four San Miguel then kaput! Out like lightbulb. If making feel good thinking this way, fine go right way. You paying vodka, I shaking martini frappé. Deal.”

🧚

From the broken window of the bus, Ragor could see heaps of garbage piled at intervals along Taft Avenue. He saw t-shirts so dirty they must have been used as blankets on the pavement at night. Inside, the bus was crowded with bright cotton skirts, wire chicken coops, and fruit. There were middle-aged ladies carrying wicker baskets of papaya and mango, slick teenagers with combs in their pockets, pretty girls like Maria with dark Spanish eyes and soft South Chinese faces, children peddling an endless variety of newspapers, cigarettes, burnt caramel bananas and bubblegum. Amidst the chaos of bargaining and blaring horns, they proceeded through the stifling air and out of the heated cyclone that was Manila.

At Batangas, Maria and Ragor boarded a boat and were soon gliding atop emerald studded seas to the sands of Puerto Galera. They continued their voyage south through the palm-tree forests of Mindoro Island. Maria stayed inside the jeepney, in order to protect her tender skin from the dust clouds that floated in the wake of the buses and trucks. Ragor, who was hoping to get a good tan, stood on the wide bumper at the back. He held onto the railing on the roof, which was rusty and wobbling, yet nevertheless kept their luggage from bouncing like square beach balls onto the highway. Ragor grabbed his camera and tried to catch the chaotic progress of his journey: the haphazard jumble of streets and storefronts behind him, the cars and children, the palm-tree forest and the blinding sky:

By the time they reached Dangay Port, Ragor’s thoughts bobbed like freed hubcaps over the uneven road. Neither he nor Maria were in shape to bargain successfully with a scooter driver for a ride to a guesthouse along the coast. The scooter driver wanted to charge three times the usual rate. He did this simply because Ragor was a foreigner and because he saw US dollars bouncing in his shirt pocket like so many greenback frogs. Maria tried to convince the scooter driver that Ragor couldn’t really be a foreigner because he was not even remotely human. He hadn’t attempted to touch her at any time during the last three days. In fact, and here Maria’s voice faltered between anger and pride, he insisted on looking at her as if she were some kind of sacred icon in a church! 

The scooter driver wouldn’t listen to Maria’s gloating, or to her stories of guilt and inadequacy. Nor did he care to hear that there were so many younger girls coming from the slums nowadays. The competition was fierce, as were the girls themselves. What with her advancing age and her commensurate experience, it wasn’t easy to look like a blushing virgin anymore. The scooter driver couldn’t have cared less about her sob story, and flatly insisted that her boyfriend was as white as the inside of a coconut. Maria cursed the scooter driver but also realized that if they were ever to escape the stench of the market then they had better just take the damn scooter. 

Throughout this heated exchange Ragor felt marvellously detached. While Maria screamed and wept, his alienation from life allowed him to see things with a philosophic eye, an organ which scientists are still coming to terms with, on account of its ability to both see and philosophize. 

While the scooter took them through the dilapidated outskirts of town and toward their beach destination, Ragor continued to use this miraculous thinking eye, intuiting that by a fluke of birth he had been born in a country where money was sextupled in value. While the driver skidded to a halt and demanded extra pesos for the luggage, Ragor realized that his money went five, six, seven times as far as that of the average Filipino. As a crowd gathered round them, he concluded that it was only fair that a skin tax be levied on the goods and services he purchased. The scooter driver who wanted to swindle him was merely the sheep Justice in wolf’s clothing. This last thought occurred to him just as Maria threw a handful of burning pesos into the driver’s face and yanked her philosopher away from a six-inch blade.

Ragor’s interpretation of the driver’s judiciary role was altered somewhat after listening to the complaints of Christina, the thin, overworked manager of the guesthouse on the beach. Christina had eleven children and a husband who drank like a tuna fish, yet she was still forced to pay five times the official fare — to the scooter driver! Otherwise, the driver would forget where her guesthouse was the next time a foreigner asked to be taken there. The driver reminded Christina that her guesthouse wasn’t the only one in town. Other guesthouses had large patios and whirlpools, and better beaches.

Indeed, Ragor couldn’t help noticing that the beach was nothing special. Toward the far end, it even began to resemble Maria’s description of Tondo, the notorious slum in Manila. In front of the shanties was a boat buried in the sand, with a group of kids sitting in its shade.

The carcass of the boat reminded Ragor of a beached whale, with its bones sticking out at an 80 degree angle. It seemed like a skull one might find in a gravesite, ringing in its hollows the conch-like sadness of forgotten jests and jibes. Ragor thought of how many people once traveled in it, and how those people would now find it hard to stand upright on its deck.

🧚

It was a strange quirk of disconnection, this human DNA. It linked and spiralled, performing feats of genetic wonder, yet it didn’t connect one human tribe to the next. Blue Dreamer geneticists had carried out studies of the Kraslikan family tree for the last 5000 years, and the one constant they found was that the further nord the species, the more the DNA retained vestigial markers of where it came from and of to whom it was once connected.

As a Bluprint, Ragor could see a clear difference between nordern Dreamer DNA and midbelt human DNA. His Dreamer DNA included his ancestors explicitly, and allowed for extrapolations about what other directions his ancestors might have taken. These extrapolations weren’t just in the background, but were part of the Dreamer’s thinking, and could be confirmed and built upon with his conscious mind, which was constantly being fed with information about other Dreamer branches of the family. He knew the way distant Dreamers thought, the way they felt, even the way they talked and experienced life.

His human DNA on the other hand only retained information from the past in the form of instincts. Or, even worse, in the form of defunct and static knowledge — like the appendix of a body or book: it operated separately and was often seen as unnecessary. In a body, it watched as the liver and kidneys did their work. In a book, it was there at the end, but wasn’t even required reading. Moreover, one book stood on one shelf while the next book stood on another. The knowledge of ancestors and of other branches seemed extraneous, superfluous, disconnected. More damaging was the fact that it was never updated. And yet, it was crucial, just as humans were finding out that their body’s appendix isn’t a mere relic, but a safe-storage place for good bacteria in case the digestive system goes into crisis mode. Dreamers knew it all too well: learn from the past or leave yourself vulnerable to attack.

Humans found it hard to connect to, or learn from, the past for the simple reason that the past wasn’t an integral part of their functioning systems. The further sood one went, the worse this problem got.

Fallarian DNA was even more detached. For this reason, the Fallarians had no respect whatsoever for tradition, but only for what worked for them in the present. They felt no communal sympathy with neighbouring Fallarians, let alone for other branches of the family in distant galaxies. And yet they had learned to survive this way, unburdened by what they ought to do, or what was done in the past. They didn’t learn and weren’t guided by their DNA so much as they made their DNA an extension of their will.

A human being, as Alexander Pope noted 200 years ago, is a mix of high and low: “Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, / A being darkly wise, and rudely great: / With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, / With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride.” Humans are connected, and yet not connected. They see the plight of other humans, feel sympathy, act in empathy, or go their merry way.

🧚

As Ragor walked back to the guesthouse he chatted with the kids, who were apparently used to tourists straying down from their strange worlds of mountain-high pork adobo and from coconut heavens of dish after dish of halo-halo, with its layers of shaved ice, coconut slices, plantains, yam pudding, and custard. The children followed him back, eyes wide open, ever curious, the shipwreck of their situation not apparent to their smiling minds. They reminded Ragor of another passage from Pope’s Essay on Man:

Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears Him in the wind;
His soul, proud science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk, or milky way;
Yet simple Nature to his hope has given,
Behind the cloud-topped hill, an humbler heaven;
Some safer world in depth of woods embraced,
Some happier island in the watery waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold.
To be, contents his natural desire,
He asks no angel’s wing, no seraph’s fire;
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.

Ragor saw this situation repeated over and over: smiles in the doors of a shanty; children splashing in water so dirty that Ragor wouldn’t clean his runners in it; smiles appearing on faces that by every Keynesian law of the free market ought to play Ophelia to the rotten state. But there they were: brown, dancing, insistent in the tropic breeze, while the stench of the island slums floated through their hair.

Ragor got out his green travel notebook and wrote a poem in order to exorcise the guilt he felt for existing in the form of a rich tourist, whose dollars by a fluke of mathematics multiplied like magic into a mansion of pesos. 

Math

Be not distraught that life this morning too much holds / Just try to see yourself in others / Dirty shoes, the leaking soles of which tread a path / They’d never choose if they had half your rights of math / But they have none, so have begun to kiss the sun, and dance / With eyes so bright and angel-tinged, and laugh.

Writing the poem helped a bit, but still Ragor felt depressed. He refused to listen to Maria, who told him that he had nothing to do with the poverty around him. According to her, it was the fault of mean dirty men who did the work of mean greedy men who did the work of mean powerful men who hardly worked at all. But Ragor couldn’t shake his feelings of culpability, and kept writing poems. His Bluprint DNA simply didn’t allow him to put the issue to rest.

Ragor was also experiencing a phenomenon that the geneticists back on Premium Blue hadn’t counted on: he was applying his sense of Dreamer connectedness to his human condition. Swirling around his human DNA, that wavered schizophrenically from caring to indifference, were bands of Dreamer thinking and feeling. These blew the indifference away, and made him what humans would call an angel of his better nature.

And yet this also got the best of him in another way. His feelings of guilt got bigger and bigger, until he felt that he alone had created the spirit-crushing heart-breaking steam-roller of capitalist greed.

Numbers

What spectre roams within the fragments of our soul? / What corporations — Dole and Dow Chemical — / feed on the alien harvest, on lands of coffee ripe for exploitation,  / perking in our lives in cups with sugar cane? / What interest do we share with these men, / the controlling ghosts of consumption's stratagem?

On the horizon the clouds were acting like rabid mongrels. Men from the village waded into the water to meet the boat which Ragor and Maria were going to take to a nearby island. Ragor watched uneasily as several dozen large sacks of rice were loaded on board. The waves took on the grey, choppy aspect of the sky. The prow sagged deeper and deeper into the lengthening waves.

During the boat ride, Ragor had the opportunity to examine the contents of the national diet as it flew by his nose on the way toward the bowels of the sea. The Filipinos were in the cabin praying, while the handful of tourists on deck wondered if they were not hasty in their rejection of God. As it turned out, the prayers of the devout were victorious: the heavy boatload of sinners made it across the strait and entered a landscape of white beaches and lonely peaks that reminded Ragor of Paradise. 

Tablas Island had lush, craggy hills, Greek-white beaches, and mangrove roots snaking into the sand. He saw smiling faces with bodies smoother than nectarines and eyes darker than the centres of wishing wells. Yet as Ragor floated through this Gaugin landscape, he had the impression that something was not quite right. He felt that one of his feet was still on the ground where people starved and sat like shipwrecked sailors on rocky beaches, while the other was skimming the blue water and drifting past bays of emerald and sun. 

When the jeepney reached the southern tip of the island, they boarded a glass-bottomed outrigger that did nothing to dispel Ragor’s sense of unreality. Small waves cast patterns beneath the boat onto the sandy floor below. Porous, heavy-headed rocks jutted out of the water like gigantic mushrooms clustered in a circle. 

Soon they reached Boracay Island, a long, thin strip of bright sand that marked the western frontier of another universe. Though they were in fact in the middle of a country torn apart by politics and despair, they had nevertheless entered a separate dimension that only fishermen and tourists knew how to find. The boundary of this country was marked by an invitation to enjoy Coca Cola.

Installing themselves in a beach hut, Ragor and Maria spent three languid weeks staring into the cool blue waters. During this time Ragor tried to drink himself clear of the notion that paradise had as much to do with ignorance as it did with bliss. 

After three or four beers, he began to see that there was no point in despairing over a political and economic situation he couldn’t change. He told himself that he’d need the clout of the U.S. Army and the selflessness of Mother Theresa to effect any lasting change. He may as well accept the fact that he was merely an impotent Canadian with good but nebulous intentions.

So instead of wallowing in guilt, he focused on the icing-powder sand and the crystal blue water. He heard the sound of children splashing in the water in front of his hut and he heard the deep-voiced engines of the fishing boats. In midday these boats were propped up on dry docks of driftwood. In the mirage of the intense heat they seemed to bob gently on the white ripples of sand, and at sunset young men rode on their prows like Vikings headed for Valhalla. The outrigger wings made them seem like giant water dragons. In the evenings he watched as the sail boats soared through the dark orange of dusk, skimming atop the navy blue and purple edge of the horizon.

Time drifted like orange seagulls of icing sugar climbing down from the sky. To Ragor, the moment felt as light as the sand falling freely between a narrow hip of glass, or between his toes as he dug them deeper into the sand and wondered what the angels were singing about. 

Yet Ragor didn't lose sight of Time’s larger designs: the Filipino children counted the minutes with sand castles, and the boatmen knew the precise flow of the currents and tides. Ragor had heard so much nonsense about Filipino Time that you’d think the natives woke up at dinner and ate breakfast in the middle of the afternoon. You’d think they had no concept of clocks, post offices, or dinner schedules. But in fact it was the opposite: Filipinos lugged the crates of Coke, sett up the dinner tables, and checked the backpackers in and out of their huts; tourists spent the hours inventing an antidote to the world as it was understood by Timex. 

At night, Ragor and Maria ate in the restaurant behind their hut, along with dozens of other young travellers under the stars. Above them were three bright fluorescent tubes that gleamed like fingers in the tropical darkness. Next to them was a long, purple rod that zapped insects with demonic glee. While all this was going on overhead, a group of Filipinos would saunter into the restaurant with their guitars. They would proceed to sing songs in English and Tagalog. The foreigners would clap or tink their beer bottles in unison to the smooth melodic rhythms, oblivious to the larger drama that was playing itself out in the Milky Way. 

Ragor could see this larger picture of Universal Studios, but he was content to play his small part among the international travellers and itinerant guitarists, and to be sitting with his beautiful Platonic mistress who spoke German and English, as well as an exciting dialect of costume jewelry and bright sarongs. Once again, he thought of Alexander Pope, that strange little deformed man who lived three hundred years ago, wrote poetry in archaic couplets, and had so much to say about everything:

Then say not man’s imperfect, Heaven in fault;
Say rather man’s as perfect as he ought:
His knowledge measured to his state and place;
His time a moment, and a point his space.
If to be perfect in a certain sphere,
What matter, soon or late, or here or there?
The blest to-day is as completely so,
As who began a thousand years ago.

Once the music was over, Ragor and Maria would saunter toward their mosquito nets and the cool breezes of sleep. Eight hours later, the big yellow light in the sky was turned back on, and everyone flocked back into the restaurant for banana pancakes and toast. The same day began over and over again. This continued until one morning Ragor realized he was nearly out of cash and their flight to Northern Luzon left in two days. 

🧚‍♀️

Next: The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Back to Top

Table of Contents - Chart of Contents - Characters - Glossary - Maps - Story Lines