The Transmutation of Baser Metals into Paper and Plastic is an Excerpt from the novel The Sign of Jonah

by Charlie Canning 

Before Collins had been dispatched to Papua New Guinea, he hadn’t known very much about women. Neither had any of his friends. What was there to know when you didn’t go anywhere? Women were like your sisters, the sisters of your friends, and your mother when she was young.

In those days, it had been difficult for the mining companies to get people to work overseas. They had to offer lucrative contracts and liberal work schemes with airline tickets and long furloughs. The thinking had been that no Australian man would have anything to do with a woman from New Guinea, Ivory Coast or Ghana. You could stand being without a woman for a few months, but then you’d need to get back to Australia to see your girlfriend or your wife.

In the beginning, Collins had rushed home to Perth every chance he got. He’d spend the first few days catching up with his friends and drinking in the pubs. If Collins were lucky, two weeks would be long enough to talk an office girl or a shop clerk into bed.

But each time Collins returned, it became more and more difficult to fit in. Too much had happened in the intervening months. His friends began to bore him; Collins was boring them. One of the girls he’d been sleeping with spoke of marriage. The next time he had a furlough, Collins decided to spend it in Port Moresby.

That first stay in Port Moresby had changed everything. Collins rented an efficiency apartment where there were other guys on leave. These guys had experienced the same sense of alienation Collins had felt. “Don’t go back home, mate!” they told him. “This is what it’s all about.” They drank together, went to the beach, and took short side-trips into the jungle. Everybody understood what the other guy was saying. Nobody got bored.

Most of the Australian girls in Papua New Guinea were there with the missions. They didn’t drink. Collins would have had an easier time with them at a church social in Perth. That left the native girls. His feelings towards them had been undergoing a change.

When Collins had first come to New Guinea, the native women had looked like cut-outs from National Geographic. There was something mysterious about them. Perhaps it was the tribal element. Some of the masks and the carvings that he saw in the villages affected him deeply.

At the mine, Collins did not have much contact with the natives. He exchanged greetings with the local people in the small trading posts and towns in the western part of the country, but that was it. It was in Port Moresby that Collins got to know the women. Most of the girls who worked in the bars had come from the tribes. Some of them would tell you about their experiences if you asked. Over time, he began to see beauty where he’d never thought to look for it.

The old-timers who slapped him on the back after he had taken the first one home with him said it was just a question of “letting your eyes adjust to the light.” Beauty was a relative thing. One guy liked to tell a story about a long hike to a mountain village where there were ten women. It didn’t matter what they looked like. If you stayed in the jungle long enough, you would see beauty running up and down the scale just as you did in the shopping districts of Sydney or Melbourne.

Collins had a sense of foreboding then – that it wasn’t a question of “letting your eyes adjust to the light” but of your eyes adjusting to the darkness. He had crossed a threshold: For the first time in his life, he had paid for sex and it had had nothing to do with National Geographic.

He crossed other thresholds in rapid succession. The intervals became shorter and shorter. Before he knew it he was in charge of the construction of a tailings dam for one of the biggest copper and gold mines in the world. The run-off from the chemicals was getting into the river and poisoning the fish. The people downriver were complaining and something had to be done. Collins was assigned to work on the project with a group of engineers. Their tailings dam was to be state-of-the-art. When finished, the water coming out of the plant would be almost clean enough to drink.

Then it happened. A flood destroyed the dam before it was finished. They would have to start all over again. The company balked. Starting all over again would be too expensive. They had made a good faith effort to address the problem but then nature had stepped in. Evidently, God did not want a dam.

After that, it became harder and harder for Collins to look at the hole in the ground without shuddering. The mine was hugely successful but he knew what was flowing downhill. He bought a house on a beach near Port Moresby and stayed there as often as he could. Collins had a girl in town and was sleeping with one of the maids. He drank in the more upscale places now and had better connected friends. When one of them offered him a position with an international mining consultancy firm, Collins accepted. A year later, he was in the Philippines.

***

Since the company didn’t have an office in the Philippines, Collins arranged most of his meetings for the lobby of the Peninsula Hotel. It was a beautiful place with marble floors and columns, potted palms, and ceiling fans. But sometimes when he blinked, Collins had a vision of something else: The colonial splendor of the lobby was nothing more than a gilded hell. Once the sodium cyanide had stripped away the veneer, there would be nothing left of the well-dressed people in the room but a few ounces of sludge.

Collins’s client was a mining company in Australia that was looking to get into the Philippine gold business. The largest player in Benguet Province was hemorrhaging assets and some its holdings were going cheap. His job was to compare the book valuation of the mines under consideration against his forecast of future earnings. If his client saw an opportunity, Collins would be instructed to make an offer and hopefully, close a deal.

While Papua New Guinea was largely an Australian show, the Philippines was a free-for-all. Collins had never seen anything like it. Although it wasn’t exactly a level playing field – the Americans had the upper hand here – the Filipinos would do business with anyone. There were Germans and Nigerians, Albanians and Lebanese, Swedes, Arabs, and Chinese. Half of them weren’t even in the mining business!

The first time that he’d met with the Benguet mining executives in the lobby of the Peninsula, Collins had noticed that they hadn’t left the coffee shop – they’d just moved to an adjacent table and repeated what they’d said to him. Evidently, this was to be a kind of salon auction of closed bids. The more the suitors knew about each other, the higher the price.

It wasn’t long before Collins began drinking with the other buyers. One group of Filipino businessmen had no plan to operate a mine at all. They said that the real gold wasn’t in the ground but in the stock market. They had the money – all they needed was the name of a reputable mining company to form a holding company to list on the Manila Stock Exchange. Would Collins’s client be interested? They would pay one million dollars (Collins’s brokerage fee would be a hundred thousand dollars) plus millions of shares of preferred stock. Once their bid was approved by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and the Securities and Exchange Commission, Collins would get his commission.

Most of what Collins heard didn’t need to be relayed to Perth. Collins’s client was actually in the mining business. They were paying Collins for hard data like mineralogy reports, yield assessments, and assets and improvements valuations – not “get-rich-quick” schemes of questionable legality. Collins had been given the data from the Benguet mining company – window dressing reports for stockholders mostly – and a short three-page assessment written by an independent Filipino mining consultant, but he needed more information than that. He flew to Baguio and hired a driver and a four-wheeled drive.

The first mine that Collins looked at was in woeful shape. The starting point for fire sales was fifty cents on the dollar but Collins wouldn’t have offered five cents on the dollar for this place. In fact, he wouldn’t have offered five cents. It was an open-pit mine in a ridiculously tight spiral barely wide enough for a small truck. Looking at the paperwork in front of him, he thought he had the wrong place. But the guard told him that no, it was the Buena Amigo Mine. There had been a strike three months earlier and the mine had been temporarily closed. The only people left on payroll were a few security guards and a site manager. The manager was in Baguio, but Collins could look around.

He didn’t bother taking notes. The conveyors and the chutes were a patchwork of corrugated steel, aluminum, plywood and tin. Broken belts were strewn upon the ground. The power generator had been cannibalized for parts and the steel door to the stockroom had been taken off its hinges. Collins watched silently as two men loaded a truck with boxes and ten-liter drums.

Collins thanked the guard and got back in the Landcruiser. They crossed the river a few kilometers to the southwest of Buena Amigo. Collins knew the smell. In New Guinea it had been overpowering. Here it was faint but still detectable if you knew what it was. There were wildcatters down in the river using sodium cyanide and sulfuric acid on the rock.

The wildcatters worked the riverbeds just outside of the large mining claims. The small-timers didn’t have the mineralogy reports but they were savvy enough to understand that a vein didn’t necessarily end where a mining company said it did. Plus, there was plenty of gold in the tailings of the run-off from the mines. You could make a living off what ran downstream.

It didn’t take long for the locals to figure out the process. Many of them had worked in the mines and seen how the companies did it. You mixed sodium cyanide with rock known to contain gold. Then you used zinc to refine that. The last step was to remove the zinc with sulfuric acid leaving a gold sludge that was smelted into ingots and bars.

Collins could hear the sound of dynamite in the distance. For some, nature was too slow in offering up her bounty. She had to be coaxed into giving up her treasure. He instructed the driver to turn around. It was a four-hour drive to Baguio. If they went any further, they wouldn’t be able to make it back by nightfall.

Collins remained in Baguio for three days. He had been planning to visit some of the other mines on the list, but after seeing the condition of Buena Amigo, he gave up the idea. On paper, Buena Amigo had looked the most promising of all the holdings – it would pointless to look at the others. In the hotel bar, Collins met two other suitors who had come to the same conclusion. One was from Stockholm and the other was from Nevada. The three decided to make a night of it by visiting some of the clubs in the red-light district.

The first place that the American brought them to was a smaller, less opulent version of the clubs in Manila. There was a stage at the front with ceiling-to-floor mirrors and three poles. On the stage were about thirty young women dressed in yellow and green bikinis with numbers pinned to their tops or bottoms. Most of the girls swayed disinterestedly to the music, barely keeping time. The three men sat down at a table in the middle of the room.

The American and the Swede said they were not going to bid on Buena Amigo. Ordinarily, Collins wouldn’t have trusted such candor from rivals, but the game wasn’t worth the candle and the three of them knew it. They turned their attention to the girls. The American liked the mestizas with the hint of Spanish blood, the Swede liked the tall, dark women that he couldn’t find in Stockholm, and Collins liked the Malays with the Chinese eyes. They laughed at their good fortune: There would be no bidding war tonight.

Three weeks later, it was a surprise to Collins when he reported to his Australian client that the best deal the company could make to enter the Philippine gold business was with the Filipino businessmen who had no intention of operating a mine. When his friends in Perth had refused to take him seriously, Collins had returned the consultancy fee and brokered a deal between the Filipinos and the South Africans. The Filipinos were right: Paper gold was the best kind.

***

Once the holding company was listed on the Manila Stock Exchange, Collins took his commission and his preferred stock and bought an entire beach on an island in the Visayas. He built a house, bought a yacht and took a wife. If Collins sold the stock at the right times, he wouldn’t be able to spend the money in a hundred years.

Now that Collins was rich, he’d taken to philosophizing with the other foreigners on the island. Their principal topic of conversation was the reform of the Philippines. Everyone had an opinion about how things could be improved. If the government would only do this or that, the corruption would end. But none of them really wanted the Philippines to change. In fact, Collins and most of the other foreigners on the island took a perverse delight in hearing the next tale of depravity and greed.

Some of the stories were incredible, to say the least. The previous week, Collins had heard about a guy in Manila who had willingly blinded himself because a blind beggar generally made more money than a lame one. The things that were common practice were even more surprising. Many of the reefs around the island had been dynamited to bits. The fishermen would set charges in the coral and then pick up the dead fish. A couple of sticks of dynamite in the right place would yield thousand of pesos.

Most of the people who bought fish at the market did not concern themselves with how the fish had been caught. If a head had been blown off in an explosion, you filleted the fish. If the intestines were hanging out, you poked them back in.

There were no visible marks on a fish that had been killed by cyanide. The locals claimed that you could tell by checking the gills, but Collins didn’t know how to do that. The safest thing was to buy your fish directly from the fisherman at Harbor Beach. When you bought your fish there, you could be reasonably sure it had been caught with a net and not a stick of dynamite or an eyedropper and rubber gloves.

Collins had been around dynamite and cyanide all his life. He’d used these two things to get gold out of rock. Once Collins had the gold, he’d put it in the bank and bought his fish with that. But maybe this was just one more instance of the Filipinos cutting right to the chase. If you fished with dynamite and cyanide, you didn’t need a bank account or the Manila Stock Exchange. You could feed yourself and your family without an ATM card.

Note:

The Transmutation of Baser Metals into Paper and Plastic is an excerpt from the unpublished novel The Sign of Jonah by Charlie Canning. A previous excerpt The Cebuanos was published in Eastlit in May 2013. Another chapter Ramirez was published in Eastlit in July 2013.