Ghosts of Manila - Mark Kram [78]
“He ready to be a corpse,” Gyp said. “Not much left. The right hand slow. If you ask me.”
“He never looks good in training,” Joe said. “Was he hangin’ on the ropes like usual?”
“Yeah, you know how he is. Lets them big guys tear at him.”
Joe looked at Futch.
“He won’t be there in Manila,” Futch said.
“What else happenin’?” Joe asked. Gypsy did a little shuffle with his feet, looked at Eddie.
“Well?”
Joe listened to the abuse Ali had poured on him, then said: “Ya hear that, Eddie? He’s always after your manhood! Anything else?”
“Well, Smoke,” Gyp started. He hesitated, and Joe snapped at him, saying: “Gimme it!” Gyp said: “It was a big crowd. Couldn’t move in the place. He hopped ’round like an ape. Said you not fit to be champ. And you smell so bad they can smell you in another country.”
Joe turned, gunned a hole in the thin wood of the wall, then flipped over his desk. Futch tried to calm him. Joe, rubbing his hand, finally said: “Eddie, listen up! Whatever you do, whatever happens, don’t stop the fight! We got nowhere to go after this. I’m gonna eat this half-breed’s heart right out of his chest.”
“Joe…” Futch said.
“I mean it,” Joe said. “This is the end of him or me.”
A land of palabas, dramatic spectacle, it was said of the Philippines. Nothing was small there except the people. The squalor was immense, made worse by pounding heat and sun, relieved only by the monsoons, which drove against the islands like sheaths of warm metal. Outsize disaster had a regularity, overloaded island ferries going down with two thousand aboard, whole settlements even in the city washed away in an instant by floods, and always the promise of even worse from coughing volcanoes. Certain religious ceremonies—though increasingly viewed in the land as exhibitionistic machismo—portrayed a hunger for more suffering, with parades of bloody self-flagellants and crucifixions. Even the torture commandants of Marcos, it was said, had found new, diabolical ways into the human spirit; for the very special, a special room in the Malacanang Palace that contained the blackest practices. Yet the Filipinos were seen around the world as a remarkably peaceful, passive, fatalistic people, a myth according to one dissident priest who carried a gun while serving mass in what was known as the Church of the Black Nazarene in the noisy Quippo section, its statue of Christ black from the bombing ash of World War II.
“Do not believe what you think you see or read in tourist books,” the priest said. “We are a gentle people but behind the smiles and our endless patience there is a fuse of violence that can go off at any time. One thing is that we know how to survive. We survive better than any people on earth. We suffered the Japanese, having even to bow to them on the streets. We suffered the Americans, who taught us how to be corrupt. The Spanish before them turned us into worthless peons. Centuries like this are evil to a culture, hard to escape. We will outlast Marcos, too.”
Manila did not provide the usual backlighting of film noir, endemic to boxing but for a long time hardly evident. Instead, the city, sagging under the weight of millions from the provinces, threw up the feel of tropic-gothic, a place, as Graham Greene once said of Saigon, that “held you as a smell does.” It was not hard to imagine Sydney Greenstreet, in a white suit stained by sweat, rolling his girth through an out-of-the-way, dark shop on a rumor, looking for the obsidian glare of the Maltese Falcon. The city was a crossroads of sorts, teeming with gem dealers and smugglers, weapons merchants, Arabs shopping for indentured slaves, homosexuals trolling for little boys, GIs from nearby Clark Field feverishly searching for the action that, unfortunately with each new posting, spread unfairly the label on Manila as the oral sex capital of the world. What other name could its powerful religious head have but Cardinal Sin?
Rumors moved as fast as the drinks by the pools and in the lavish hotels that Imelda Marcos, a queen with an “edifice complex,” was raising at