saved them. Or maybe Bats Lapad, who had actually hauled them out.)
All these matters of low-lying terrain, floods and sewing came together in the issue of the Tugos family’s comfort room. Various crappers like thatched hen coops stood on stilts out over the Kapilang, which meant that in times of rising water worse things than cockroaches could appear in one’s living room. The Tugos crapper was a cupboard built over a trench leading down to the stream, up anddown which rats and piglets ran and grew fat. But the time had come, Nanang Pipa said, when enough was enough. She and her workers sitting jammed all over the house at their machines could no longer endure the stench. It was time for Edsel to get off his bum and dig. They would have a deep pit soakaway with a cement bowl, a proper comfort room.
‘The money,’ her husband groaned, meaning the effort.
‘I work, I pay,’ she retorted. ‘You dig. Get together those layabouts you spend your time playing pusoy with. Judge, Billy, Petring. All that lot. Bats, too. It shouldn’t take you long. Bayanihan, of course: they can do it for free in a spirit of neighbourliness. Starting tomorrow. We’ll supply you with merienda and cigarettes.’
‘We haven’t any spades.’
‘Yes, you have. When Bats left the Department of Public Works and Highways he brought some souvenirs with him. I know about six DPWH shovels, an air compressor and twenty bags of cement because the cement went into our floors, the compressor was lost at cards and Virgie told me only the other day she’s sick of having those dirty spades under the bed.’
‘Read all about it,’ muttered Edsel in a bitter allusion to his wife’s unofficial nickname ‘Diyano’, she being a veritable news-sheet of information about San Clemente and its folk.
‘Just dig, Eddie. Please. Think how nice it’ll be when it’s finished and we’ve got a decent CR.’
And eventually the men had mustered, armed with shovels and a crowbar made from an iron fencing post. They primed themselves with strengthening tots from a bottle or San Miguel gin on whose label the Archangel, an effeminate creature in yellow Renaissance hose and slashed pantaloons, brandished his sword above a vampiric black figure with ribbed wings cowering beneath Michael’s scarlet buskins on spikes of flame. Soon they were past the noisome top layer and were throwing up clods of the earth which had once nourished those far-off grasses, the long-dead deer.
7
Y SABELLA HAD ABANDONED her hotel for a rented apartment on Roxas overlooking the bay. It was not cheap. It also smelt of fuel oil, which was explained by her encountering a member of the Ku Klux Klan wearing over his head a T-shirt with eye holes punched through. He was on hands and knees with a spraygun, its nozzle in the gap between the corridor’s floor and wall where it roared hollowly. Oily mist hung about the passage. The maniac holes swivelled and looked up at her glisteningly as she passed, furtive and triumphant as befitted all who dealt in plague.
When she had first unpacked she spent a good deal of time faintly homesick, sitting on the bed removing labels from the clothes she had bought in a last-minute shopping spree in London’s West End. This was her habit, the act without which nothing new could be worn. A small heap of names, trademarks, logos and flashes would build up beside her, victims of scissors and razor. In order to wear one’s clothes as if they belonged – a prerequisite for anybody with pretensions to taste – all traces of previous affiliation had to be removed. Ysabella would marvel at people’s indifference to walking around covered in slogans, signatures, bogus armorial devices or a menagerie of little crocodiles, ladybirds, pandas and turtles. ‘Who wants to look as if they’d been dressed by their local airport?’ she wanted to know. ‘More to the point, why should I buy the clothes I want and be obliged to provide these shysters with free
All these matters of low-lying terrain, floods and sewing came together in the issue of the Tugos family’s comfort room. Various crappers like thatched hen coops stood on stilts out over the Kapilang, which meant that in times of rising water worse things than cockroaches could appear in one’s living room. The Tugos crapper was a cupboard built over a trench leading down to the stream, up anddown which rats and piglets ran and grew fat. But the time had come, Nanang Pipa said, when enough was enough. She and her workers sitting jammed all over the house at their machines could no longer endure the stench. It was time for Edsel to get off his bum and dig. They would have a deep pit soakaway with a cement bowl, a proper comfort room.
‘The money,’ her husband groaned, meaning the effort.
‘I work, I pay,’ she retorted. ‘You dig. Get together those layabouts you spend your time playing pusoy with. Judge, Billy, Petring. All that lot. Bats, too. It shouldn’t take you long. Bayanihan, of course: they can do it for free in a spirit of neighbourliness. Starting tomorrow. We’ll supply you with merienda and cigarettes.’
‘We haven’t any spades.’
‘Yes, you have. When Bats left the Department of Public Works and Highways he brought some souvenirs with him. I know about six DPWH shovels, an air compressor and twenty bags of cement because the cement went into our floors, the compressor was lost at cards and Virgie told me only the other day she’s sick of having those dirty spades under the bed.’
‘Read all about it,’ muttered Edsel in a bitter allusion to his wife’s unofficial nickname ‘Diyano’, she being a veritable news-sheet of information about San Clemente and its folk.
‘Just dig, Eddie. Please. Think how nice it’ll be when it’s finished and we’ve got a decent CR.’
And eventually the men had mustered, armed with shovels and a crowbar made from an iron fencing post. They primed themselves with strengthening tots from a bottle or San Miguel gin on whose label the Archangel, an effeminate creature in yellow Renaissance hose and slashed pantaloons, brandished his sword above a vampiric black figure with ribbed wings cowering beneath Michael’s scarlet buskins on spikes of flame. Soon they were past the noisome top layer and were throwing up clods of the earth which had once nourished those far-off grasses, the long-dead deer.
7
Y SABELLA HAD ABANDONED her hotel for a rented apartment on Roxas overlooking the bay. It was not cheap. It also smelt of fuel oil, which was explained by her encountering a member of the Ku Klux Klan wearing over his head a T-shirt with eye holes punched through. He was on hands and knees with a spraygun, its nozzle in the gap between the corridor’s floor and wall where it roared hollowly. Oily mist hung about the passage. The maniac holes swivelled and looked up at her glisteningly as she passed, furtive and triumphant as befitted all who dealt in plague.
When she had first unpacked she spent a good deal of time faintly homesick, sitting on the bed removing labels from the clothes she had bought in a last-minute shopping spree in London’s West End. This was her habit, the act without which nothing new could be worn. A small heap of names, trademarks, logos and flashes would build up beside her, victims of scissors and razor. In order to wear one’s clothes as if they belonged – a prerequisite for anybody with pretensions to taste – all traces of previous affiliation had to be removed. Ysabella would marvel at people’s indifference to walking around covered in slogans, signatures, bogus armorial devices or a menagerie of little crocodiles, ladybirds, pandas and turtles. ‘Who wants to look as if they’d been dressed by their local airport?’ she wanted to know. ‘More to the point, why should I buy the clothes I want and be obliged to provide these shysters with free
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