Chapter 9 The Island of White Stones #3
“Because it did not stop.” Mina put her good hand on the gunwale.
“I need to say the next part carefully, po, because it is not fair to say it to you and then leave. The pumping station at the end of your road did not fail. In January, three numbers in its control system were changed by a contractor who was paid to change them, so that the pumps would not start until the water was already inside your house. I have the paperwork. I have the dates. I know who signed it and I know who paid him and I know why.”
Josephine Bayani stopped shelling.
“Why,” she said.
“Eighty hectares. This barangay and the four next to it. They need the land empty and they need it to look like nature did it.”
The old woman sat with that for a long time. Down the street somebody’s child was being called in. The water made its noise against the houses.
“Ate Josephine,” Mina said, “I am not able to promise you anything. I want to be honest with you about that, because I promised you something on Tuesday in front of eleven million people and it was worth nothing, and I am not going to do that to you twice.”
Josephine looked out at the water over her own barangay.
“My mother was born here,” she said. “Nineteen fifty-one. She used to say that when she was a girl you could see the bottom.” She put the bowl down.
“Puting bato. White rock. There were rocks and they were white and you could see them, anak. That is not a story. That is a thing my mother saw with her eyes.”
“Po.”
“Now.” Josephine gestured at the brown. “Now it is this, and they say it is because of us. Every time somebody on the television talks about cleaning the bay, they show our roofs.” She looked down at Mina.
“You want to know what I want? Not compensation. Not a house in Rizal, thank you, my son unloads container ships four hundred meters from where you are floating and they want to put him in Rizal, which is two and a half hours each way on four jeepneys, so he will lose the work in a month and then the house also.”
“Then what?”
“I want somebody to say out loud, on the television, that it was not the rain.”
Mina sat in a boat in the dark.
“That,” she said, “I can do.”
The survey team came at half past six, in the last of the light, which was when Mina understood that they had been waiting for it.
Two aluminum boats with outboards, moving fast enough to throw a wake into people’s second-floor windows. Six men in dry-weather gear over office clothes. A drone went up off the second boat and started running a grid pattern at about forty meters, in the rain, with a light on it.
And in the bow of the lead boat, a man in a clean high-visibility vest with a can of orange spray paint, marking a cross on the gable end of every house he passed.
Mina, standing on a roof beside Josephine Bayani, watched him do five houses in four minutes.
The gable ends were the only part above water.
She was aware of Mang Rey’s boat coming up beside the roof, and of Rey standing in it, and of Hal behind him with his hands still black from a generator, and of about forty people who had come out onto their roofs to watch this happen to their houses.
“Have they done this before?” Hal said.
“In February.” Rey did not take his eyes off the boats. “And in April. And in June. In June they had a lawyer.”
“And what happens after they mark them?”
“Nothing happens after they mark them.” Rey said it flat. “That is what I have been telling everybody for eight months. Nothing has ever happened after they mark them.”
Out on the water the drone finished its grid and came down onto the second boat, and the man in the high-visibility vest capped his spray can and said something to the pilot, and both boats came about and went back out toward the harbor gate without ever once acknowledging the forty people watching them from the roofs.
On the gable end of Josephine Bayani’s house, four feet from where Mina was standing, the paint was still running in the rain.
“Ate,” said Mang Rey, quietly, “you did not answer him.”
“What?”
“The American. He asked what happens after they mark them, and I gave him the answer I give at the barangay meeting.” Rey turned around in the boat and looked up at her, and he was not a man playing dumb, and had never been.
“You have come here in a truck full of real rice with a broken arm and a face like Tuesday. So I am asking you, and I would like the real answer in front of these people, because they are my neighbors and it is their house. What happens after they mark them?”
Forty people on the roofs waited.
Mina Hermosa looked out at the two boats going away into the dark toward eighty hectares of reclaimed waterfront, and at the drone’s landing light, and at the cranes of the container terminal standing up over the roofs of Isla Puting Bato with their lamps on.
“Nothing,” she said. “Until there is a flood big enough to justify a declaration. Then everything at once, in about nine days, under emergency powers, with no hearing.”
Nobody said anything.
“And how big is big enough?” said Mang Rey.
“Higher than tonight,” said Mina.