William Boyd - The Blue Afternoon

Annaliese Leys was the youngest daughter of a German tobacco wholesaler, Gerhardt Leys, who with his brother, Udo, had a small but thriving business in Manila exporting cigars to Europe. Carriscant had met Annaliese at an open air concert on the Luneta, shortly after his return from his medical studies in Scotland in 1897. She had seemed to him petite and lively and intelligent, and-more relevantly-she reminded him acutely of a girl he had met and silently yearned for in Edinburgh one summer, where he had spent a damp and lonely vacation wandering the wide beaches at Musselburgh and trying vainly to master the secrets of the game of golf. He and Annaliese had been married within a year but shortly after that her mother died and her father, whose health had been affected by the tragedy, sold up and returned with the rest of his family to Bremen. It was then that their marriage began to run into difficulties, perhaps because she was on her own for the first time in her life, perhaps because she was grieving, but there had been, Carriscant reckoned, a perceptible hardening in her personality from that date on. The warmth began to ebb from her.

They had made no private acknowledgement of this distancing, and to the outside world all was well. Annaliese worked part time for the Bishop of Manila, assisting with the accounts of the cathedral school (she had a good head for figures) and generally participating in diocesan matters where it was felt an enthusiastic member of the laity would be more use. The Americans arrived in 1898 but as the war with the Filipino insurgents began and then continued and as it became apparent that their life in Manila was on the verge of irreversible change so too did they finally admit that it was time to drop the pretence and privately confirm that the happy marriage of Salvador and Annaliese Carriscant had become a convenient sham. They had wealth and reputation, they were prominent and respected figures in the foreign community in Manila, which was rapidly enlarging as the process of American colonisation remorselessly consolidated itself- Annaliese was even on cordial terms with the Governor's wife – but whatever affection, whatever love that had existed between them, was gone.

The prime indication of this state of affairs was that, for over a year now, there had been no sexual relations between them. It had begun most curiously with Annaliese asking him what operations he had performed at the hospital that day. If he had done any amputations she refused to let him share her bed. This animus, directed more at his profession than at his person, had grown. Some evenings she would taunt him cruelly: 'How many legs did you cut off today?' Usually he ignored her, until one night, goaded too far, he had replied, 'Two, actually, plus an arm and an eyeball,' and she had fled weeping from the room. She complained also of the smell off his clothes, a sweet stench that clung to him, which he claimed he could not detect, but which he knew was the smell of putrefaction, of pus. All this dismayed him: he felt impotent and clueless. What was he meant to do, find a new job? Troubled by this bizarre collapse of his marriage and exhausted from his work at San Jeronimo, he had taken to sleeping on the divan in his study, a temporary arrangement, he had told himself, to avoid disturbing her when he came in late, but it was a circumstance that had inevitably become permanent.

He looked at his wife now, objectively, a little sad, and tried to conjure up an image of her naked body, some detail or special character that he used to cherish -the wide-slung shape of her breasts, the fine downy hair on the areolae of her nipples, her surprisingly deep navel -that would stimulate the old feelings, cause old memories to flare up, like a hot coal breathed upon, but nothing stirred. His thoughts turned instead to a view and an idea he had had that afternoon as he stood in Pantaleon's meadow and looked over at the tin roofs of Sampaloc. Sampaloc and its notorious Gardenia Street, with its bright bars and brothels… What did they call the girls there? 'Low flying doves.' It was not natural this restraint, this forced celibacy. A man of his age masturbating on his divan in the dark like an adolescent. Perhaps a low flying dove on Gardenia Street was what he required?

Dr Carriscant paced slowly down the aisle between the beds in the post-operative ward. He had just examined the Chinese boy and had discovered that although the tongue appeared to be healing well he was now running a temperature, some three days now since the operation, which was a little worrying. He looked up: Pantaleon was signalling to him from the far end of the ward, trying not to attract the attention of the nurses.

Carriscant walked over. 'Pantaleon, what's -'

'The body has gone.'

'What body?'

'The American soldier. It was taken yesterday.'

'By who? Bobby?'

'No. I think it was taken by Dr Cruz.'

Paton Bobby, with Salvador Carriscant by his side, drove his carriage into the small village of Flores. It was midday and the stallholders in the plaza had already packed away their goods. Only a man selling salted fish seemed reluctant to leave; sitting on a low stool, waving away the flies with a palm frond whisk, he stared curiously at the Americanos, as their fine carriage with its two glossy Abra ponies clattered by.

Carriscant directed Bobby to turn right at the adobe church and they passed between two crumbling brick gateposts and drove up a potholed dirt track, lined with rozal bushes, towards Dr Isidro Cruz's imposing house.

'I still can't understand the man,' Bobby repeated. 'How could he just go in there and take it? Who does he fucking think he is? The Lord Mayor of the Universe? I ask you.'

'Typical Cruz. Remember he's a peninsularo. He'll never change.'

'What do you mean, peninsularo? He's a Spaniard, isn't he?'

Carriscant explained about the various class divisions that existed in the Philippines during the Spanish period. At the top of the tree were the settlers and officials who had been born in Spain, the peninsulares. They looked down on the insulares, Spaniards who had been born in the islands, whom they regarded as coarse and unrefined, rejects from Spanish society who could only find a niche in a distant colony. The insulares in turn disdained the mestizos, half castes, Spaniards or Chinese who had intermarried with the locals. Everyone looked down on this last category, the indios, even those educated indios – the illustrados – who had studied abroad. And the indios themselves? They made no distinction: everybody white was a kastila-a Castilian-and their enemy.

'Until you Americans came,' Carriscant said cheerfully. 'Now they have a new white man to dislike.'

'So you're a mestizo?' Bobby asked.

'Yes, but not of the family, if you know what I mean. My father was British, my mother's people insulates. Very complicated. But Cruz is old school: he hates everybody, except perhaps Alfonso.'

'Who's he?'

'The king of Spain.'

Bobby was not impressed. He was a straightforward man, he told Carriscant, whose working maxim in life was 'fair play'.

'And I mean fair play for all. Not just for peninsulars or insulars or whatever the Sam Hill they're called. Fair play for one and all, that's my motto. But I don't mind playing unfair once in a while to bring it about.'

Carriscant said he could understand the skewed logic of that position.

'This Cruz'd better not mess with me,' Bobby said. 'I lived for a year once off nothing but birds' eggs and rainwater. He'd be well advised to step real cautiously.'

Cruz's house was a substantial stone building with a tiled roof, hairy with weeds, and a saffron lime wash on the walls which was flaking and dirty. Two big busi palms grew on either side of the wide balustraded staircase which ran up to the front door. Behind the house, screened by a grove of guava and balete trees, were a range of wooden outbuildings with steeply pitched roofs thatched with grass. Beyond the gardens were a few scrubby acres planted with beans and tobacco.