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Loneliness and Delirium
Coping with fever and a typhoon, and hanging out with vagrants, in Manila
Travelling alone is liberating when you’re healthy and cheerful, but terrifying when you’re sick and despondent. This shard of superficial wisdom was floating at the surface of my consciousness; it was better, given my delirium, to cling to this trite revelation. At other times, when the delirium intensified, I was having imaginary conversations (mostly with ex-girlfriends, especially the girlfriend I had drifted away from a few weeks before). There was no respite in sleep, as I was assailed by spookily violent dreams; wakefulness had its problems too – the ripples of soreness on my skin, the headache, the wheezes, the coughs. My cheap room at the Malate Pensionne in Manila reinforced the moribund atmosphere: it was hot and sticky, its window dirty, its dark-brown furniture morose, and it smelled of stale breath. And outside, the storm: dark sky, raging wind and rain, explosive thunder. My fever vacillated between 100oF to 104oF.
Never mind the fever. I still had to brave the tropical storm two times daily to fetch food and water, but I felt so weak that I never actually made it to the pharmacy three blocks away to buy medications. How I wished I had a friend – someone to do my shopping, or someone to listen to me, so my mind wouldn’t have to resort to those imaginary conversations that took me into the realm of psychosis.
It was the stress that had made me sick. Unlike most Westerners, the most boring thing I could think of is to lie on a beach, so I wanted to see the real Philippines. I had planned a tour of the interior of Luzon, the main island, and on to the remote Batanes Islands where I hoped to camp and join the fishermen on deep-sea fishing expeditions. But it was hard travelling cheaply in the Philippines, and the tenuous backpacker infrastructure frustrated and delayed me. In Vigan, for example, I spent a whole day hurrying in the fierce sun trying to figure out the public transport connections to the port where I could board a ship to the Batanes (I couldn’t afford to fly). Then I spent another day, a Sunday, trying to get cash – no one could change my travellers’ cheques, and no ATM gave me cash. By the time I got to the port, an impending tropical storm had grounded the ship. Three days later, giving up the wait, I hopped on a bus back to Manila, which is when I felt feverish.
After four days my fever subsided, but I felt so weak still that each time I contemplated a trip – even within the city – I balked. I wanted to watch the cock-fights, but never made it; I wanted to listen to a heart-thumping Christian preacher, but repeatedly got up late. Stuck in Manila, a city of frenetic and snarling traffic, a city of guards with guns and dark-tinted four-wheel-drive cars, a city of vagrants and putrid smells, I developed a routine. I got up late, I had coffee and cakes in a bakery, I read or wrote in the afternoon, or went to the Chess Park where a middle-aged man named Pol elaborated about all the ways I could make money, by importing things like used print cartridges, old computers, all manner of factory rejects – the detritus of the rich that was in demand in Manila. In the evenings I ate grilled squid stuffed with onions and tomatoes and accompanied by plain steamed rice at Emil Joy Grill. Sometimes I went out for a drink afterwards, but I got bored, and I shunned the sexy women who presented themselves to me. Yet this routine gave me confidence exactly because it was mundane and uneventful.
But I neglected my shaving and my washing; my skin was jaundiced. And I shed three kilos, partly because of my sickness and partly because I found the cheap Filipino food – everything soggy with deep-frying oil, or grilled: grilled chicken’s arses, grilled pig’s fat, grilled fish heads, grilled pig innards – practically uneatable. An overwhelming sense of morbidity heightened my sensitivity towards the people living in the street. One afternoon I found myself in Luneta, a small public space near Rizal Park where about fifty vagrants lived, and I invited two of the vagrants, a couple, out for dinner. Their names were Ria, 36, and Inna, 21, and they carried all their belongings in two small rucksacks. I bought us beer and grilled squid and rice and peanuts at Emil Joy Grill.
Ria, whose eyes had a grim and piercing intensity, told me he had been a reporter with a provincial newspaper once. In a scrapbook he had glued-cuttings of his best articles. I read one of those articles about antiques that had been transferred to the UK during the war and then returned – that was the story, without an angle, written in long rambling sentences of monotonous cadence. Flipping through Ria’s scrapbook, I found a death certificate drafted in Japan for a 31-year-old pregnant Filipina. Ria told me it was his sister, killed by Yakuza. But the certificate stated she had died in a bus crash? That was a cover-up, Ria said, and added that it was impossible that the bus had fallen down a ravine and only two of eighteen passengers had died. That was plausible enough, I countered. No, he said, it was Yakuza who had killed her, and afterwards they performed a macabre cleansing ritual on the foetus. He couldn’t offer any proof, and I thought then that perhaps he needed to believe this, because it made him feel afflicted, and he had convinced himself, as a rationale for his homelessness, that there were larger forces at play that had led him to his ruin. I asked him about Filipino politics, and he kept repeating one word: Corruption.
Inna was more cheerful, twittering incoherently, and every ten minutes she adjusted her make-up and brushed her hair. This repetitive grooming made me notice something else: they both smelled freshly washed, and both wore clean clothes, which was remarkable for a couple who had been sleeping on a piece of flattened cardboard for two years. But I didn’t ask them where they washed, just like I didn’t ask them where they had sex – I didn’t ask these things because I didn’t want to remind them of their condition, or of the difference between them and me.
As though insane, Inna filled the background space with disjointed, disassociated waffling. She giggled, and I reciprocated; in mutual laughter there could be no misunderstanding (or understanding). Like Ria had picked “Corruption” as his slogan of the day, Inna kept repeating “Drug lords” as a recurring thought, rolling the words in her mouth, being amazed by them. It was a phrase she had picked up from that day’s newspaper headlines. (The government was pledging to eradicate all drugs from the country in three months.)
After dinner we wandered back to Luneta, and I tried to challenge them into work. Why not work in one of the neighbourhood restaurants, so many of which had signs seeking waiters and kitchen hands? Ria told me he had had such a job, but it only paid P65 (less than US$2) daily. Only? It was enough to live frugally, which was better than living on a pavement. He said he wanted to work on a ship, and he was waiting for his lucky break. Nothing new there: the same kind of self-perpetuating fatalism and languor common to homeless people everywhere. Inna was also waiting – waiting for a Western man to save her, to take her to Europe or America. What would she do in the West? Dishwashing. I told her that that would simply mean shifting her poverty across the world. If she worked as a dishwasher in Manila, she would be poor, but so would she as a dishwasher in the West, where she might even be forced to have sex with the boss, something that happens to many Filipinas in servile jobs abroad.
A sputter of rain sent us running to the shelter of a shop’s awning. It was time for me to sleep, but my kindness and the rain made them clingy and demanding. They implored me to let them sleep in my room. Ria said: “You can have sex with Inna. And me, for as long as I am out of this rain, I can sleep standing up.”
I feared they would rob me, and I didn’t want to have sex with Inna because it would be taking advantage. Instead, I rented them a P120 (US$2.50) room for the night, a dingy room.
Later, fidgeting in bed, unable to sleep, I thought of them in their depressive room with the cockroaches on the walls, clinging to one another – their sense of allegiance was admirable and enviable. They shared everything, and having one another was the only thing that gave them hope. And imaging the solace they found in one another, I felt gloomy and sad, and close to tears, for my loneliness made me hysterical, and the spooky dreams would soon be upon me.
(C) Victor Paul Borg 
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