The Breath of Night (17 page)
Read The Breath of Night Online
Authors: Michael Arditti
‘I don’t suppose you take American Express?’ he asked,
dragging
out her misery.
‘Only cash,’ she said anxiously.
‘Master card? Visa?’
‘Only cash.’
He peeled the notes from his wad and, as an afterthought, peeled off two more for Armin, who mutely bowed his head.
‘Armin will take you to find your car,’ she said, as she
disappeared
into the hotel.
‘No “We hope to welcome you back here soon”?’ Philip called after her, before following Armin down a shadowy alley, past rows of closed shops, unlit houses and a jeepney depot, to his car, which stood alone in an otherwise empty street. Armin handed him his grip, bowed his head again and walked briskly
away. Seeing no more sign of the fleeing lover than of the
vengeful
husband, Philip began to wonder whether 12 March were the Filipino equivalent of 1 April. He punched the door in
exasperation
and, hearing a rustle, peered through the window to find Dennis cowering beneath the driver’s seat.
‘Open the door, you idiot!’ Philip shouted.
‘Why you wait so long? Quick, quick!’ Dennis replied, turning on the ignition before Philip had even sat down.
‘Take it easy!’ Philip said. ‘I’ve already had my sleep broken. I’d prefer to keep my neck in one piece.’
‘We go to Manila, yes?’
‘No, we go to San Isidro. I have a very important appointment at eleven o’clock tomorrow – today.’
‘Then we go there now,’ Dennis said, taking no chances.
‘Unless you have a better idea. Perhaps another hotel where you can bed the proprietor’s wife?’
‘She good, yes? I see you are liking her. But, no, she is only liking me.’
‘Who wouldn’t like you? A gutless little cheat, scared stiff of being beaten up. You’re irresistible.’
‘What you mean? She is begging me to go away. She is afraid I am killing him.’
‘Oh, shut up!’ Philip said and, much to his surprise, Dennis did.
They parked on the outskirts of San Isidro, where they opened the windows, pushed back the seats and curled up for what remained of the night. Dennis’s bubbly snores, following closely on his brazen ‘Goodnight’, were the final indignity for Philip who, torn between fatigue and fury, steeled himself for a lonely vigil. He awoke several hours later to a gust of foul breath, which he instinctively blamed on Dennis, until he turned to find a goat staring through the window. His startled yelp scared off the animal and roused Dennis, whose unkempt, unshaven,
bleary-eyed
confusion would have been amusing had it not been such a mortifying reflection of his own. He felt grubby and parched, and
for the first time wished that he had come here during the rainy season, when he would have been able both to take a shower and slake his thirst. He tried to shift position, but his body rebelled at the slightest movement and so, easing himself out of the door, he leant back against the roof and cautiously stretched.
He did what he could to freshen up, using face wipes on his face, neck and chest, along with liberal dabs of aftershave. He brushed his teeth with bottled water in full view of a gang of schoolchildren who, he trusted, were impervious to Western eccentricity. He put on a clean pair of socks and T-shirt but refused to risk a change of underpants, even in the semi-
concealment
of the car. Dismissing Dennis’s pleas of hunger with an iciness he was determined to maintain until they returned to Manila, he asked him to drive to the
poblacion
square. With more than two hours to spare before he had arranged to call on Consolacion, he was planning to go back to the cemetery, but seeing a steady stream of people entering church he decided to follow, staying for what turned out to be nine o’clock mass. Despite his deep-rooted ecumenism, he thought it both polite and politic to remain in his seat when the communicants went up to the rail. At the end of the service he lingered behind to greet Father Honesto, who thanked him profusely for coming, adding that, had he known, he would have preached in English.
‘But would everyone else have understood?’
‘I speak to them every day.’
Ensconced in the musty sacristy, while the priest made tea on what looked like a Bunsen burner, Philip reported on his
progress
in the parish, expressing disappointment at having failed to track down the family of the boy with the withered leg.
‘They left San Isidro last year. There had been some trouble. The father was a very greedy man, who tried to make money from the miracle. Many of his neighbours took offence. It was better that they left, although perhaps not better that they went to Manila. I do not know where such a family will live when they are there. It is like looking for a mullet in the sea.’
Philip returned to the car, where a newly compliant Dennis drove him straight to Consolacion’s house to be greeted again by Mark.
‘I’m afraid that I may be a little early,’ Philip said.
‘No, it is good. I have stayed away from the school. I am happy for you that she will speak to you. Come inside with me, please.’
Feeling both elated and apprehensive, Philip followed Mark through a dark hall into an uncluttered living room, where a grizzled woman with filmy eyes, sunken cheeks and skin like a dried-up riverbed, sat in a low armchair, her legs wide apart, listening to a madrigal on the radio.
‘You must go close up to her,’ Mark said to Philip. ‘She is blind.’
‘I can see,’ Consolacion said in a surprisingly clear voice. ‘Only not with my eyes.’
Confused by both Mark’s injunction and Consolacion’s response, Philip walked up to her and, praying that it was not presumptuous, lifted her hand from her lap to shake. She pulled him gently towards her, running her fingers across his chest and face. ‘Yes, I can see the resemblance,’ she said.
Philip wondered if she had mistaken his relationship with Julian or were referring to something beyond the physical. Mark switched off the radio and told him to sit next to his
grandmother
, who was also rather deaf.
‘I hear enough,’ Consolacion said uncompromisingly. Philip hoped that she could not hear the nervousness in his voice, as he told her how thrilled he was to meet someone about whom he had read so much.
‘Really?’ she replied, with an indifference that might simply have been her natural tone.
‘Father Julian mentioned you in every one of his letters home.’
‘I was his housekeeper for thirteen years. I lived with him for longer than I lived with my husband.’ Her eyes misted at the memory of one or both. ‘We had a dog. I forget his name.’
‘Grump.’
‘What is it you say?’
‘Grump! The name of the dog.’
‘No, that was not it. I should know the name of my own dog,’ she said, with a conviction that threw doubt on the rest of her testimony. Philip looked at Mark, who put a finger to his lips, at which Consolacion, as if sensing the movement in the air, spoke to him briefly in Tagalog.
‘Please to excuse me,’ he said. ‘I will bring some snacks.’
As he left the room, Philip asked Consolacion for her
memories
of Julian. She repeated the familiar stories of his kindness, although with none of the warmth that he would have expected from one who had lived with him at such close quarters. Mark brought in the snacks, plain pastries filled with coconut and peanuts, which contrasted sharply with the sticky confections he had been offered elsewhere. They chatted generally about Julian, with Mark, who turned out to be older than he looked, adding his own impressions of the man who had funded his education.
‘He was good to all the people in my family,’ Consolacion said. ‘He was good to all the people in the parish. To some of the people he was too good.’
‘I suppose that it goes with the territory,’ Philip said.
‘I am not understanding.’
‘I’m sorry. Part of being a priest.’
‘Not all priests are so good,’ Consolacion said. ‘Not one
especially
: Father Benito. He had been living in Brazil. He brought back many ideas. Bad ideas. It was not for me to say, but Father knew that I did not believe in them.’
‘
Lola
,’ Mark said in a voice full of warning.
‘Am I not to speak? Mark does not wish me to say any words against Father Julian. He paid for him to study at the university.’
‘Yes,
Lola
, we have already told him this.’
‘Have we?’ She sighed. ‘Well some things are good to be told again. They are good in the middle of much that is bad.’
‘I think you must go now,’ Mark said to Philip. ‘It is wrong to be reminding her. I am sorry.’
‘You think I forget? I remember these things every day. No, he has come to ask me questions. I shall give him answers.’
‘No,
Lola
, I do not wish it.’
‘You do not wish it, perhaps,’ Consolacion said, addressing the air to one side of him. ‘But you are not the one who is going to Hell.’
‘No one here is going to Hell.’
Philip listened enthralled, unsure how much their Hell was a figure of speech and how much the full eschatological works.
‘I am. I am the one who has lied. When they asked me where he was on the night when they arrested him, I swore that he was at home, sleeping. I swore this on the Holy Bible.’
‘But you knew that he wasn’t?’ Philip asked, while Mark stared at his feet.
‘I have heard him go out.’
‘Were you trying to protect him?’
‘I thought that he had a woman. I had not seen any sign of it for myself, it is true, but he had been stopped by the soldiers with a pregnant woman on the road to the hospital. There was much talking in the parish. Like many of the people, I expected that the baby was his.’
‘And you weren’t shocked?’ Philip asked incredulously.
‘When I was a girl, we had a priest here from Spain. When he called us his “children” in the church, we all used to laugh because we knew that, for the cases of Anna and Joshua Padero, this was not just a way of speaking. It is strange, I can
remember
their names but I am forgetting his. Do you remember, Mark?’
‘
Lola
,’ he said mildly, ‘that was eighty years ago.’
‘Was it? Yes, you are right. When people said how it was strange that they were having European faces, the priest said that it was because this woman – his woman – had prayed before the
santos
of the Blessed Mother. A beautiful
santos
that he had brought to San Isidro from Spain.’
‘And you believed him?’
‘He was the priest and I was a small girl; naturally, I believed him. And my mother believed him. All of the people believed him.’
‘But Father Julian didn’t have a woman?’
‘No, he had a different secret. And I was the only one person who knew.’
‘Won’t you tell us what it was?’ Philip asked eagerly.
Consolacion pressed on as if she had not heard. ‘When he went back to England, he asked me to put into boxes all of his things: all of his papers and his books and his records and his clothes. And in one of his pockets I found a small map of the place where he had been spending that night.’
‘Do you still have it?’
‘I burnt it. I burnt it and I have tried to forget it. But I see it in front of my eyes now. They say I am blind, but I see it.’
‘
Lola
!’
‘What was it of? Please tell me.’
‘That’s enough now,’ Mark said. ‘She is exhausted. You really have to go.’
‘Just one more minute, please!’ Philip said, his gratitude to Mark rapidly waning. ‘Surely, if it was anything significant, the police would have found it? They must have searched the house.’
‘The police came to the
convento
only twice, once to arrest the Father and once to question me.’
‘And you never showed this map to anyone?’
‘I burnt it.’
‘Why? What were you afraid of people seeing?’
‘I burnt it, and ever since then I have never been once inside the church. Not even for the deaths of my friends. Mark drives me to Baguio to our own church –’
‘The Philippine Independent Church,’ Mark interjected.
‘But I have never been once inside his church. He has healed others, but he has taken away my faith. And now you wish to make him a saint!’
‘Not me, the people of San Isidro – your neighbours. They are the ones who petitioned the Bishop.’
‘Yes, I know this. A saint!’
‘And the map? Was it really so incriminating? What did it prove? That he knew where the killers were hiding? That he took them the last rites?’
‘I forget. I am an old woman. I have been living for too long and I am frightened to die.’
‘I know nothing about the Independent Church, but does it have no place for confession? Can’t you be absolved of the lie, the sin, whatever you choose to call it?’
‘But you wish to make him a saint and my sin will grow bigger. My sin will grow bigger every time that some person prays to him.’
‘Why? Even if you disapprove of the rebels, surely you accept that, as a priest, Father Julian had a duty to bring them the sacraments?’
‘Mark!’ She held out her arm, which he moved to take. ‘I am tired now. Thank you for coming here, but it is time that you must leave.’ She shuffled towards the door, every punishing step echoing her anguish. ‘You are right; it is not good for us to worry about these things which we cannot change.
Bahala na ang Diyos
.’
17 June 1977
My dear Mother and Father,
I hope this finds you safely back in Whitlock and not pining for the tropical sun. Both your cards have arrived, along with
Mother
’s letter. Many thanks. For some reason the post is far more efficient from Mexico than from England. Maybe Greg should ask a question in the House?
Chichen Itza has amazed everyone who visits the
convento
. I’m not surprised that you didn’t attempt the climb. Your story of the retired accountant wooing the South African
millionairess
made me laugh out loud, Mother. I’m delighted you found some kindred spirits among the passengers – not least the
all-important
bridge partner. Though how you managed to
persuade
Father to leave home in the first place is a mystery. But now you have, what about that long promised trip to the Philippines? There’s no excuse to put it off, especially when you got on so well with the cabin staff. As you’ve seen for yourselves, they’re an exceptionally kind and accommodating people.
When – I refuse to say
if
– you come out here, you must be sure that it’s in February or March, avoiding both the extremes of temperature and the worst of the storms. In your letter, Mother, you mentioned rough seas in the Atlantic. I don’t wish to sound like Mrs Healey trumping everyone’s misfortunes with tales of her ill-fated family, but against your blustery winds I raise you an F3 tornado. Consolacion, never the cheeriest of souls, had been predicting calamity ever since the downpours started and the breeze remained scorchingly hot, but the first hint of danger came when Grump tore through the house like a thing possessed. All at once we were plunged into darkness.
I rushed outside to see dense black clouds sweeping across the sky around a silvery vortex, shaped first like a cigar and then a spike. The palm trees bordering the square were bent double, their trunks swinging to and fro like women shaking their hips to a furious drumbeat. Coconuts tumbled on to corrugated roofs like volleys of gunfire. Then the roofs themselves broke loose and wheeled through the air. I was transfixed by the eerie spectacle until Consolacion grasped my shoulder and pulled me indoors. We squeezed under the kitchen table with only Grump between us. This must be what started the rumours about Father Teodoro, I thought, easing Consolacion’s hand away from my thigh and on to my rosary. Then, after five or ten minutes, which seemed to stretch into eternity, the winds died down as quickly as they’d blown up and we stepped out into Armageddon.
Roofs, doors, shutters, windows and furniture had been flung about the square. The old colonial houses had had their
balconies
and verandas torn off, and stucco façades shattered by the uprooted trees. At the centre, the Rizal statue had been turned into a modernist war memorial. For the first time I gave thanks for the parish’s poverty: that the windows were made of capiz shell not glass; that there were no fallen power cables underfoot; and that my car, which had been dragged fifty yards down the road, was an old jalopy. The
convento
had escaped fairly lightly, with only the fretwork smashed and the outhouse flattened, but, as ever, the most resilient building was the church. Except for a few windowpanes and a bench dedicated to don Florante’s mother (which had been universally shunned on account of her collaboration with the Japanese during the war), it remained intact. The people, needless to say, hail it as a miracle. I, however, am racked with shame to think that generations of friars should have devoted so much time and money to strengthening God’s house, while leaving His people exposed.
The devastation in the countryside was even greater than in the town, although the blocked roads meant that it was two days before I could set out to investigate. Women sat stupefied on
dirt floors, guarding the boundaries of their former homes, with no walls but scattered palm fronds and no ceilings but the sky. Their few sticks of furniture were now simply sticks. Dogs, goats and hens straggled through the wreckage, while a disorientated sow circled round and round her former pen, her seven piglets trotting aimlessly at her heels. Men on all three estates lined up outside the manager’s office to claim their emergency rice rations and to negotiate loans to rebuild their homes. The work has already begun although, naturally, there are priorities: on the Pineda estate it’s the repair of the private generator without which the food in their two refrigerators will rot; on the Arriola estate it’s the reconstruction of the hutches for don Bernardo’s prize-winning cocks. ‘Hutches before houses?’ I hear you ask. Quite.
The
haciendos
aren’t the only ones to have failed in their duty. The soldiers who paraded daily through the streets have been notable by their absence. You might think that they’d want to build bridges – literally, given that two have collapsed on the Agno – but according to their commander, who could barely conceal his indifference, his forces have been called away to deal with a disturbance near Bokod. As for the civil authorities, the Mayor is on one of his regular furloughs in Manila and, rather than hurrying home, he’s stayed on to solicit aid.
Meanwhile, I’ve put the church at the disposal of the
homeless
. When I visited the Romualdez to beg for bedding, doña Teresa offered to ‘cut up all my petticoats if it will help any of those poor wretches’. I assured her that blankets would be more use. In the event she sent a gardener with a basket of old rice sacks. Consolacion monitors the evacuees with a rigour which, in another life, would have made her the perfect Ampleforth matron. Woe betide any boy who turns the font into a
makeshift
goal or girl who sneaks up the sanctuary steps to brush the
santos’s
hair.
Like everyone else, the children help with the repairs. It’s quite common to see toddlers scurrying behind their older
brothers and sisters, dragging scraps of wood and metal twice their size. Even so, the work would be taking far longer had we not received support from an unexpected source.
Returning
one afternoon from the ravaged Pineda
hacienda
, I sensed a new mood in the town. I was putting it down to delayed shock and a gradual awareness of the back-breaking task ahead when I came across a knot of young men and women erecting a shack. Among the unfamiliar faces I recognised Alma Balitaan, a former parishioner who, shortly after my arrival, had quit her family to join the NPA. She looked equally startled to see me; the last time we met I was at least three skin tones lighter,
clean-shaven
and in full clerical fig. I hesitated to greet a member of a terrorist group which, even allowing for government distortion, had committed numerous atrocities. Then the sight of her four children working alongside her, the youngest clinging tightly to her skirts, alerted me both to the price she’d paid in leaving them and the risk she was taking in coming back.
Despite the official propaganda, which brands them as
psychopaths
and outcasts, most of the group remain in regular contact with their families. Hearing from her mother about the typhoon, Alma had brought her comrades down to help with the reconstruction effort, although in accordance with their code her mother’s house has had to wait its turn. From its inception – and this certainly hasn’t been broadcast by the government machine – the NPA has given practical support to the farmers. They’re not Robin Hoods (at least not in a BBC teatime version); they carry guns and make no secret of their readiness to use them. Nevertheless, they’re far from the cold-hearted killers we’ve been led to suppose. Their commitment to building a just society is much the same as mine; except that I look to Christ and they look to Mao. Indeed, on first principles, it would be true to say that I’m closer to them than to you. Forgive me – and correct me! – if I’m wrong but it strikes me that in your
different
ways you’re both dyed-in-the-wool pessimists: Mother, with your belief that we’re slaves to our sinful nature; Father, with
your belief that we’re doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. Whereas Alma and her friends, with their conviction that life is perfectible, fill me with hope.
They stayed with us for a week before being tipped off by a sympathetic policeman that their presence had grown too conspicuous, whereupon they vanished into the mountains as swiftly as they’d come. The next day we buried Ronald Veloso, the typhoon’s one fatality. So far I’ve refrained from describing a Filipino funeral, partly because I’ve no wish to fuel Father’s view that my faith is morbid (I must have been one of the few
teenagers
with a martyrology hidden under his mattress) and partly because I’d hate either of you to write off their practices as
primitive
. Nevertheless, given your account of Richard Goddard’s requiem, Mother, you’ll be relieved to know that things might have been worse. If Cora was disturbed by Richard’s open casket – and, for all Greg’s horror at her attempts to wipe off Richard’s ‘make-up’, he clearly overreacted – she’d have been traumatised by Ronald’s corpse. Having been sewn up and embalmed, it was placed on a chair in the centre of the room to preside over the nine-day wake. Each evening his brothers slaughtered and roasted a pig (I couldn’t help wondering if one were the
disorientated
sow from the
hacienda
). On the ninth day the corpse was placed in a coffin, which according to custom was a snug fit, to prevent the spirits of his loved ones from joining him. It was then closed and carried to the church. Although the service itself stuck close to the missal, you might be surprised to learn that even I no longer went straight home from the cemetery but took a roundabout route – just in case!
The overwhelming response to the typhoon was resignation, as seen in Consolacion’s favourite phrase ‘
Bahala na ang Diyos
’ (‘Leave it to God’). Coming from a very different world where we pray ‘Your will be done’, with the tacit proviso of ‘except to someone as loving, faithful and honourable as me’, I’m apt to fall into the trap of regarding the Filipinos as innately more devout. But faith is not fatalism. It’s too easy for people living in abject
poverty to invest their power in authority figures. So prevalent is their tendency to infantilise themselves that I’ve given up
referring
to them as ‘children of God’, preferring even the loaded word ‘servants’.
I see it as my job to help them reclaim their power, acting, if you like, as an honest
encargado
between them and the
landlord
. Like any good
encargado
, I have my pet projects, the first of which is the introduction of worm casings. I doubt that’s a phrase you ever expected to hear from me, someone who, to quote you, Father, ‘can’t tell a compost heap from a haystack’, but five years with the BCCs have taught me more than thirty at Whitlock. On the one hand the only way to make the land pay is to plant high-yield rice, which requires pesticides and fertilisers the farmers can’t afford. On the other, the overuse of those
pesticides
and fertilisers by greedy
haciendos
is drawing the
goodness
from the soil. So the farmers lose out both ways. What are they to do? Pay more for their rice and end up in worse debt? Sit back and pray for a miracle? Or sign up to Father Julian’s vermiculture programme? Our goal is to build a factory, but for now we’re based in the church crypt, where we have fifty large clay pots filled with worms producing several tons of manure each week. It’s cheap, full of nutrients and, much to my relief, it doesn’t even smell.
After initial qualms, the farmers have embraced the scheme. I’ve been at pains to point out that the worms come from the earth (their province) and not from the sky (mine). The
haciendos
and
encargados
, while forced to acknowledge the benefits, are less enthusiastic. A hungry tenant is a subservient tenant. I’ve been rebuked more than once for ‘politicising the gospel’, a charge I utterly deny. Any halfway diligent reader of the Bible knows that Our Lord’s words can be interpreted in different – even contradictory – ways, but there’s no disputing the message of His life: His challenge to the rich and powerful; His
identification
with the poor, the marginalised, and the oppressed. Señor Herrera, don Florante’s man, led the attack on me. Citing my
contacts with both Alma and Rommel Clemente, the son of one of our lay leaders, he accused me of having secretly joined the NPA. Risible, I know, but I have to take such things seriously. With opposition parties silenced, the only challenge to the
government
comes from the Church. Most of the bishops are in cahoots with the regime, but a few brave priests have spoken out. As a foreigner, I’m well protected, but I must keep on my guard. Rumours spread; mud sticks.
What Herrera didn’t know was that the day before our meeting I’d received a request from the NPA to lend them my car for use in a mission. Assuring me that there would be no bloodshed, they explained that they were desperately short of vehicles to ferry operatives from one base to another. After a night of soul-searching I refused.
Was I wrong? Having witnessed their courage and idealism, I would like to have helped, but such practical assistance felt like a step too far. Is that the defence of time-servers everywhere? As an ex-officer, Father, you must have a view on this. If you’ve any advice for one whose gospel of nonviolence is wearing thin, please don’t hesitate to write.
Meanwhile, remember me to everyone at Whitlock.
Your loving son,
Julian
Philip stood beside Max at the entrance to the Chinese
cemetery
, waiting for Ray to escort them to his family tomb. Having dressed in suitably muted colours, he had been disconcerted to find Max wearing a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts, as gaudy as the gateway above them, and prayed that his manner would be more subdued than his clothes. He was already feeling anxious about the invitation to meet the relatives and honour the ancestors of such an unlikely family man.