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The Fishermen and the Curses
A portrait of a small isolated fishermen’s village in the Philippines where I spent many days
Pedrito and Bhing had been compelled to emigrate eight years ago in search of new prospects. In the original home where Pedrito was a fisherman the fish had been decimated by over-fishing and the reefs had been obliterated by fishing with cyanide and dynamite. Their livelihood lay in tatters, and Pedrito and Bhing emigrated to Culion, a sparsely inhabited island in the south of the Philippines. They found clear sea, dense mangrove forests knitting the shores of the large bays, mountains clad in jungle, and pristine reefs with abundant fish. Other fishermen had chanced on the same idea, and the population of the fishermen’s village called Binudac grew from two families to 500 inhabitants in the past twenty years.
But Pedrito and Bhing, relatives of my Filipina girlfriend, had little to show after eight years of effort – three children, and a diminutive hut walled with bamboo and roofed with corrugated tin. The hut was like its neighbours in the village, set in a small enclosure crowded with some benches, a table, a cooking hearth, and a rooster (reared for the feathers the fishermen need for their fishing hooks). “I built the house myself,” Pedrito told me. “I had no money for lumber so I had to use the branches of trees for beams.”
Binudac feels like it’s at the edge of the earth, set in a tiny island sprouting up in the South China Sea; the island only has one port, and the drive from the port to Binudac was along a rutted track twisting through the mountains for 40km. We paid some labourers who had a jeep to drop us off there, and we arrived at a village that was awfully small for the size of its population. Most of the huts were tiny, with stark and dark interiors; our hosts’ hut was large enough for all of us to squeeze together side by side at night on the floor. Sleeping directly on the wooden floor gave me a neck ache, and there were no reprieve from discomforts by day either – the unrelenting sand flies, and the choking heat (the jumble of close-knit huts blocked the breeze, and the air in the enclosure warmed through the corrugated tin roof like the still air in a hot house). Why built so tightly when there was so much empty land? “All the land is privately owned,” Pedrito explained, “and it’s expensive – our plot cost P30,000 [US$600].”
The villagers couldn’t afford to buy land on which to grow crops and rice, and neither could they venture in the forest that surrounded the village looking for edible pickings. All the food except fishes was imported from the mainland. The beach was the only ground that belonged to no one and everyone. It was cluttered with the fishermen’s colourful outriggers, and it served as the village’s playground – full of frolicking children, groups of fishermen sitting on the sand, and women staking money on bingo and table games.
As for fishing, groupers constituted the prime catch, fetching US$30 per kilo if sold alive. But aggressive fishing had already decreased groupers, and the fishermen were now catching young groupers and fattening them in tanks. A few fishermen had large boats in which they organised crews of eight to go fishing for an entire week at a time, bringing in large exotic fish, including hammer-head sharks and giant rays. Pedrito joined these expeditions.
In theory, the fishermen could make money if they worked hard and saved diligently. Instead they lived from day to day, squandering some of their earnings on whiskey, card games, and cock-fighting. And Binudac became something of a trap where everything belonged to someone else – even the coconut trees that blocked the paths belonged to someone – and the villagers became caught in the mentality of refugees. They lacked an ancestral attachment to the land, and they were like squatters who remain disassociated from the land they couldn’t grow crow crops on and the forest they couldn’t hunt in. Outside the village they were trespassers, and their future was uncertain – sooner or later the fish in the sea would be denuded. The government-organised village committee failed to arouse a sense of co-operation or shared responsibility, and this could be seen from the way they had turned the beach into a rubbish tip and a sewer – they defecated on the sides of the beach. “When the committee calls a meeting no one goes,” Pedrito chuckled one day. “But everyone goes for the cock-fights.”
So did anything give them hope? Perhaps the Madonna depicted in posters pinned in their huts? Or prayers in the chapel?
The chapel was always deserted, and when I asked Bhing about mass, she said, “We have no priest to perform mass.”
“But you’re Christians?”
“The people here don’t like priests. The previous priest used to raise his voice and tell us that drinking is wrong, sex before marriage is wrong, betting is wrong, and that we shouldn’t be having so many children. We don’t like people telling us what to do, so we drove him away.”
So the posters of the Madonna – pinned alongside prints of semi-naked models – were mere detritus from a previous live. Christianity had lost its immediacy, and it was fading; the villagers were relapsing into a world of superstition, where tragedies and diseases and misfortune are caused by bad spirits or curses. Scariest are the spirits that fly at night; everyone swore that they existed, and some said that they had seen them – dark shadows that loomed large or small, and took various human-like forms, terrorising lone wanderers at night. The curse on Pedrito manifested itself in a dog that had bitten his leg, causing Bhing to become shifty and suspicious, and she took to rubbing his wound with garlic. And Bhing warned me not to drink coffee offered by strangers. “It might contain poison that makes you cough up your blood,” she said.
I chuckled, and she said tersely: “I have seen it happen.”
But superstition could also be a fluke, as I found out on our last day when a group of villagers used our imminent departure as an excuse to loiter in the house, playing cards and drinking whiskey. They became reckless when drunk, berating me for not drinking, and the women pissing in the enclosure. Then one of the women, who was thirty-eight and two months pregnant with her seventh child, started staring at me lasciviously. Her leering was unflinching, and, noticing my discomfort, one of her neighbours explained: “She is looking at you because we believe that if she looks at you and desires you for long enough then her new child would be as beautiful as you.”
This confession caused a man who had been drinking to speak out. “By the time you visit Binudac again I’ll be dead.”
He was sixty and well-built; his job was to haul heavy stuff. I said: “But you’re stronger than me. You’ll live another twenty years.”
He tottered towards me and hugged me. “My friend, I haven’t had sex with my wife for twenty years. I will die soon.”
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
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