Slum Pirate

by Hugh Todd

Rene was a pirate.

I don’t know where his French-sounding name came from, because he was Filipino, but it did have something of a piratical ring to it. He lived not far from me in the slum where I stayed from mid 1985 until the end of the following year.

We lived in the easement land between a railway embankment and high walls marking, on my side, an orphanage and on Rene’s a petroleum depot. The embankment led up to a bridge crossing the Pasig River, which ran down from Lake Laguna to Manila Bay.

Rene, and a number of his neighbourhood friends, contributed to their families’ income and nutrition by raiding passing river traffic; barges, fishing boats, anything unguarded. I often heard the sound of Armalite bursts from boats warning Rene and his friends to keep their distance.

The Pasig itself was a wide, brown river on which, especially in the rainy season, clumps of water-lilies glided past in endless flotillas, accompanied by the detritus of the city; timber, plastic bags, bottles, dead dogs and faeces. Boys younger than Rene fashioned steel rings, attached mesh and long ropes to them, and stood on the steel parapet of the bridge. They cast these small nets maybe 10 metres down into the water ahead of plastic items they spotted, snaring them to sell to a local recycler.

Rene and his friends were more likely to attach fish spears to ropes and throw them into the holds of passing bangka, the brightly-coloured boats carrying their catches down to the markets in Divisoria. Or they might board slow-moving, unguarded barges and strip them of anything they could grab, to sell to the local fence.

They were wryly proud of their activities. One Christmas, when squatters hung extra-large versions of the star-shaped Christmas lanterns known as ‘Parol’ over the railway tracks as part of a local competition, the young pirates constructed one of their own, in the shape of a shark. Yet at Easter they walked all night to a church high in the hills of Antipolo, where they crawled on their knees to the altar in penitence before returning, on foot again, to their lives of crime.

I was in Manila on a mission. I had read stirring stories of redemption for gangsters and drug addicts in America and Hong Kong, and I wanted to be a part of that sort of action. Sta Mesa, where I was living, was where I was supposed to be coming to terms with the local culture and language. Being a somewhat shy, middle class New Zealander, I probably spent too much time poring over my language books, but I would make a sortie or two every day to practise new sentences and talk with anyone who would give me the time of day.

When I heard of people who had gone to hospital or been imprisoned, I often went to visit them, perhaps to pray for healing or to discuss options and the wider meaning of their lives. And it was on one of these errands of mercy that I came into closer contact with Rene.

The story reached me that Rene and some others had attacked a passing barge. In the melee on board, the barge’s crew had managed to grab one of the long-handled fishing spears and ram it into Rene’s backside. This had given him quite a lot of pain, but not enough to dissuade him from joining two other friends that evening in a ‘hold-upping’ raid on a jeepney.

‘Hold-uppers’, Manila’s equivalent of highwaymen, generally travel in threes. They board jeepneys (something like elongated World War II Jeeps, with bench seats running either side of a central entry well in the rear), and at a given signal bring out their knives and tell their drivers not to stop, while they relieve passengers of their valuables. Tales are told of passengers losing ring fingers along with their rings, and conversely of hold-uppers taking pity on poorer passengers, helping them with their fares.

On this occasion, however, one of the passengers had a pistol. Rene’s two friends managed to dismount and flee, but before he managed to join them Rene fielded a bullet through his forearm, which broke his ulna and radius.

In hospital, Rene was subdued, and willing to talk. He had lost his customary bravado. I visited a couple of times, and in the course of our conversation suggested that, in view of his calamitous day and the fact that he had nonetheless survived, maybe God was giving him another chance. He seemed receptive to this idea. We prayed together.

Renee told me he was going to discharge himself early. I decided to accompany him home, wondering whether it might be too early for him to have come to terms with his apparent change of heart.

I was right to have been concerned. As we neared home his swagger returned and I could see that I was surplus to requirements.

A few weeks later, I encountered Rene sitting on the railway tracks with some friends, inhaling the fumes of Rugby glue from a plastic bag. I sat down beside him.

‘Why, Rene?’ I asked, after some moments of silence.

He turned to me with bloodshot eyes. ‘Next time,’ he said, pointing to his temple, ‘I want the bullet to go through here.’