The Breath of Night (23 page)

12 April 1980

My dear Mother and Father,

So Easter is over for another year. I trust that all went well at Whitlock. Do you still get up at dawn on Sunday to watch the sun dance on Beedles lake, Mother, or do you prefer to wait for High Mass? Our Holy Week traditions here are very
different
. There are some I’d happily dispense with: not taking a bath on Good Friday for a start! On the other hand, I’m still charmed to see Consolacion’s granddaughters standing beneath our banana tree, waiting for one of the heart-shaped bunches to fall. And, in church, I can scarcely make myself heard over the noise of the children jumping up and down on the seats. At first I was amazed to see mothers, who normally stifle the slightest murmur, encouraging such unruliness, but when I challenged one she replied without a hint of self-consciousness that it was ‘so they can grow up as tall as you, Father’. Enough said!

Elsewhere, the week was less of an opportunity to reflect on Christ’s Passion than a focus for the mounting tensions in the parish. It began on Palm Sunday when the
hermanas
refused to lay their cloaks down at my feet as I approached the church. On one level I was relieved, since I’d long been embarrassed by a display that smacked more of Sir Walter Raleigh and Elizabeth I than Our Lord’s entry into Jerusalem. On another I was aware that the girls, bitter rivals among themselves but ever quick to close ranks against outsiders, were acting on their fathers’ orders to protest against my agenda. But they’d misjudged both the man and the moment. The gospel reading was Christ’s throwing the money changers out of the temple and I’d prepared a sermon on the danger of placing the profit motive at the heart of society,
but in response to the provocation I scrapped it and launched a blistering attack on usury in all its forms, particularly that of landlords who drove their tenants into debt and then charged them extortionate rates of interest.

The following Monday I received an invitation (for which read summons) to the Arriola
hacienda
. As if to emphasise its urgency, don Bernardo sent his car. ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ might well be his watchword, since he holds me personally responsible for the radicalism sweeping through the estate. I suspect that he hankers for the bad old days of the Tridentine Mass, when the gospel was concealed in a fog of incense and incomprehensibility. He looks on the Church as an agent of social control, its wafers and fiestas a modern
equivalent
of bread and circuses. From the start, he bitterly objected to the BCCs and responded by raising the rents of any tenant who joined. On one occasion he sent his security guards to break up a meeting, which was being held in a school on his estate. That they used excessive force (you might regard the use of any force as excessive) was only to be expected from what is, in effect, a private army made up of ex-prisoners, many of whom are not even officially ‘ex’, but having been released from the provincial jail on his orders owe both their liberty and their loyalty to him.

Beyond that his hands are tied, first by his nominal allegiance to the Church, then by my ‘powerful connections’ and last, but by no means least, by my standing among the people. This has been enhanced by another extraordinary and, to some, miraculous event. You may recall that a few years ago a large congregation professed to have seen me levitate during a requiem. I’ve tried to put it out of my mind; I’ve read about mass hysteria and, given the nature of the service, emotions were running high (although I’ll never forget the intense and ecstatic sense of
weightlessness
). Last month there was a second such incident. One of my parishioners had developed a tumour on her breast the size of a grapefruit. The
baylan
gave her various herbs, to no effect. It goes without saying that she lacked the wherewithal to pay for
a doctor and, when I offered to help, she flatly refused since she was terrified of the surgeon’s knife. I went each morning to pray with her and on the last occasion, when she was too weak even to raise her head, she clasped my hand and pressed it to her breast. Anxious not to offend a dying woman, I left it there although it felt as if it were on fire. The next day the tumour started to shrink and within two weeks, it had vanished without trace. The woman hailed it as a miracle, crawling to church on her knees and making all sorts of preposterous claims on my behalf.

I’ve no doubt that there’s a perfectly rational explanation. It may be that the
baylan
’s herbs had a delayed impact or that the growth itself was temporary: some kind of giant cyst. There may even have been no growth at all. I’m sure I don’t need to cite Cora’s ‘pregnancy’ to tell you that the mind can play strange tricks on the body. On the other hand she’s unlikely to have had the same desperate yearning for a tumour as Cora had for a child and when I touched it, it certainly felt real. Either way, there’s no question among people here that they’ve witnessed a miracle and once again I’ve become the subject of unwanted publicity. I’m not claiming any special powers – quite the reverse – but I have to be alive to the possibility that God may be working through me. After all, if He uses me every day to celebrate the mystery of the mass, why shouldn’t He use me to perform a more mundane miracle?

The
haciendos
are faced with a dilemma. There’s nothing they’d like more than to trade on people’s credulity, yet I’m too much of a maverick to be trusted with greater influence. So they have to tread cautiously. A few days after don Bernardo’s summons, don Florante Pineda invited me to lunch, which promised to be a more relaxed occasion until I met my fellow guests: the Bishop; the Mayor; the Senator; the Police Chief; the Constabulary Commander. We gathered in don Florante’s ‘den’ and after several generous glasses of whisky, which in my case were shared with a nearby hibiscus, we proceeded to the dining room. I felt sorry for the Bishop, forever walking a tightrope
between social obligation and pastoral care, since it soon became clear that despite the best efforts of doña Arcilla’s cook, the main dish on the menu was me.

I was attacked from all sides with, of course, a veneer of
courtesy
proper to the occasion, although like all veneers in this climate it quickly cracked. To my surprise, my most
formidable
adversary was Melchior Quesada, the Constabulary
Commander
, whom I’d previously dismissed as a uniformed thug, not least because of the four gold teeth he bares at every
opportunity
. It turns out that as a boy he felt called to be a priest and was sent to a minor seminary, but his father died and his mother was forced to withdraw him. He joined the army and claims that he is now serving God with a gun. I was shocked to see myself through his eyes, not as a man who has left behind family and friends to save souls in a far-off country, but as a foreign agitator who regards the semi-literate peasantry as more fertile soil for revolution than the educated workers in the West.

I’ll jot down the gist of our discussion as best I can; it helps me to clarify my thoughts and may help you to understand my position. I suspect you’ll find many of my ideas as unpalatable as they do. After all, one of the charges against me – voiced by the
haciendos
, left unspoken by the others – is that I’m a traitor to my class as well as my cloth. Their objections all boil down to my involvement in politics or, as the Senator put it less
contentiously
, ‘public affairs’. Quesada challenged me outright: ‘Didn’t Jesus Christ tell us to “pay Caesar what belongs to Caesar and God what belongs to God”? Shouldn’t priests leave the rest of us to deal with worldly affairs and fix their own minds on Heaven?’ ‘Not at all,’ I replied, with a confidence that confirmed their prejudices. ‘Our Lord was seeking to extricate Himself from a dilemma. He found a formula to appease the authorities, not a principle for compartmentalising our lives. Besides, He knew better than anyone that everything belongs to God.’

With a show of deference that fooled no one, Quesada appealed to the Bishop to arbitrate. The Bishop, whose increasing
befuddlement had, I suspect, been part of a prearranged plan between don Florante and his butler, stuttered that in his view the only purpose of life was to save one’s soul. I intervened, both to state my case and to protect the Bishop, whose slurred speech was arousing the open derision of our fellow guests. ‘Yes, but poverty and oppression endanger the soul along with the body. A woman whose children are starving may break the seventh commandment, just as a man driven mad by tyranny and
injustice
may break the fifth. So as a priest, I’m obliged to concern myself with the here and now as much as the hereafter; indeed, the two are inextricably linked. If a priest is to stand in the person of Christ, he can’t avoid being political –’ I should point out that, as well as paraphrasing, I’m eliding several remarks. ‘Our Lord was killed not because He preached the kingdom of Heaven but because He was accused of fomenting rebellion. He posed a threat to the civil and religious hierarchies. Remember, too, that however inclusive His message He directed it entirely to outsiders. Even the Holy See, which is hardly a hive of
sedition
, enjoined all Christians, clergy and laity alike, to devote themselves to eradicating poverty in the
Populorum Progresso
encyclical.’

In case you – that’s you in Whitlock, not you at the lunch – dismiss this as the pious fancy of a privileged Westerner, let me remind you that the Philippines isn’t Africa. We have typhoons and floods, to be sure, but we’re not devastated by droughts and famines. The country abounds in mineral deposits and natural resources. If people are starving here, it’s not from the harshness of Nature, let alone the indifference of God, but as the direct result of the rapacity of those at the top, several of whom were seated round the table. So I took the offensive. ‘When I said that poverty endangers souls, I wasn’t referring to the souls of the poor, who are driven to sin out of desperation. The rich who condemn them to such hardship live in far greater danger. I’m more and more convinced that the distinction between sheep and goats is that between rich and poor.’

‘If that’s true,’ Quesada said, his fixed smile leaving me in no doubt on which side of the divide he stood, ‘shouldn’t you show more concern for the rich who face the prospect of eternal damnation?’ Don Bernardo weighed in with the charge that I had near enough demanded that he be thrown out of church on Palm Sunday. I was about to reply when the Bishop slumped across the table in a stupor.

The look of scorn on Quesada’s face still haunts me. Was its intensity the product of his own frustrated vocation? Does envy lie at the heart of his fanaticism: the sheer contempt for the suffering of others, which leads to the routine ‘Not under my command, not under my command’, whenever I file a complaint against an individual officer? I’ve no way of knowing. What I do know is that nothing I said at lunch, any more than from the pulpit, will have the least effect on his or his men’s
behaviour
. Since when did celibacy become emasculation? Or is that a question you prefer not to contemplate, let alone answer?

Forgive my bluntness, but the situation here demands it. Unrest is rife on every estate, most violently on the Arriola. I told you how President Marcos awarded don Bernardo’s cousin the logging concession to a chunk of the Cordilleras, displacing hundreds of Ibaloi families in the process. Don Bernardo then proposed to build a road for the transportation of the wood,
displacing
hundreds of his own tenants. His attempts to bludgeon them into submission have proved less effective now that they have the backing of the BCCs. Indeed, there can be no clearer proof of the adage that ‘keeping the poor in ignorance keeps the rich in power’ than the depths to which he and his fellow
haciendos
will stoop to have the BCCs suppressed. Having failed
dismally
, he has kept up the pressure by bringing in casual labourers to operate machinery, assist with the planting and harvest, and do essential repair work on the dykes and ditches, thus
depriving
the
hacienda
families of vital income.

The newcomers live in ramshackle bunkhouses, in
conditions
that hark back to the days of Thomas Hardy. They have
no beds, blankets or mosquito nets but sleep on the bare
floorboards
. They have no sinks or lavatories but share a pump and relieve themselves in the bushes, wrapping their excrement in scraps of paper and flinging it on to the midden. Walking past an abandoned bunkhouse, I feared that it must have been the scene of a gruesome murder, but it was simply the stench of unwashed bodies that lingered from months before. Should they protest about their conditions, the men risk instant dismissal and the loss of their meagre savings to pay for the ticket home. Friction is inevitable between the men who’ve been robbed of their jobs and those whom they blame for stealing them. Don Bernardo employs his security guards to keep the peace and in the process inflict a few sharp blows on his opponents. Matters came to a head last week when a hired hand was killed, after allegedly raping the daughter of one of the tenants. The guards retaliated by breaking the father’s legs and setting fire to several of his neighbours’ farms.

So I’m sure you’ll understand, Father, why I couldn’t come home for your seventy-fifth. Agnes wrote me a detailed account and Greg dictated a brief one to his secretary. He’s promised to send me the photographs, which I’m longing to see. I gather that the morning room was piled high with presents. On which note, I trust that you’ve received a letter from Ryan Alvarez, the young dental student whom I’m sponsoring in your name. I only hope that he keeps his word not to head for the big bucks overseas but to stay and serve the community. It would have been wonderful if Isabel and Hugh could have planned their celebration to coincide with yours but, Hugh’s work commitments aside, I doubt that Whitlock would have withstood the strain. Still, there’s less than a year to go until the return of the prodigal. Will we recognise each other or must I carry a red rose and a rolled-up copy of
The Times
?