‘Is lanzones. Is very good, yes?’
‘Then let’s buy some,’ Philip said, anxious to expunge the memory of the pagkaon, only to change his mind when the stallholder made straight for a pile infested with ants. ‘Is it Poison A Foreigner week?’
‘Is best. Is because they know is sweetest,’ Dennis replied, brushing off Philip’s objections as casually as the woman brushed off the ants. ‘Insects more clever than English.’
Philip watched Dennis gorge himself on the lanzones. No amount of water could satisfy his craving for the succulent, if putrid, flesh. Back in the car, he contemplated the remaining journey with increasing irritation and after Dennis extolled the fruit for the fourth time (‘Is sweet like my burat’) he snapped off the radio.
‘I’m sorry, but I can’t hear myself think.’
‘Is not for thinking; is for listening,’ Dennis replied, with an offended air, which made Philip feel even more mean-spirited. To his relief they came to a crossroads, where a sign reading forty kilometres to Baguio showed that they were finally approaching their destination. As if on cue, the traffic grew heavier, with lines of cars, lorries and even a local jeepney, so packed that six of its passengers were sitting on the roof. The sight of them clinging on precariously as they rattled down the unmade road felt like a symbol for the balancing act that was their daily life: a symbol reinforced when Dennis drove past at excessive speed, covering them in dust.
At 4.30 they arrived in the centre of La Trinidad, the small town between Baguio and San Isidro where Philip had elected to stay. They found their hotel, a white concrete building with a row of posts jutting from the roof as if supporting a phantom storey, and pulled up beside a sign reading No Stopping At Any Time, Parking Only. Its three stars would have inspired greater confidence if more than one had been lit.
Even a single star struck Philip as generous once his eyes had adjusted to the gloom of the lobby. He dared not envisage the domestic arrangements of the guidebook writer who had described it as ‘the sort of place where you instantly feel at home’. On one side two bamboo banquettes with blue foam rubber cushions constituted the lounge area and on the other three dark wooden tables, with chequered vinyl cloths and a motley assortment of chairs, comprised the restaurant. In the centre a plywood partition, plastered with tourist-board posters, doubled as the reception desk and bar. The golden beaches, azure seas, verdant rice terraces and picturesque fishing villages might have been expressly designed to tantalise the unwary visitor with the delights to be found elsewhere.
Philip walked up to the desk and thumped the bell, which emitted a derisory ping. An attractive woman in her mid-thirties with a cast in her left eye emerged from a back room to greet him, answering all questions about his reservations with the single phrase ‘It is correct’. Philip would have felt happier had she been able to dispel his reservations about the hotel. After handing him a registration form which, to his bemusement, requested details of his weight and distinguishing characteristics (‘the only 6’1” sandy-haired Caucasian in town’?), the woman, who introduced herself as Lerma, spoke a few words of Tagalog to Dennis; Philip trusted that it was the language that made the welcome sound warmer. She gave Dennis a different form, which he deliberately withheld from Philip’s view. With both forms completed, Lerma summoned Armin, a slight, rubbery man, who was watching them from across the lobby. Handing him Philip’s key, she pointed to his case – a small grip that Armin picked up as cautiously as a trunk – and asked him to show their guest to his room.
Philip followed the plodding porter up the rickety stairs, down a drab corridor and into an airless room, which filled him with dismay. The bed frame stood six inches from the floor as if in an awkward compromise between Western and Eastern practice. The single pillow sagged like an empty mailbag. The lighting was as dim as in the lobby and there was no reading lamp. Armin switched on the electric fan, proving that the guidebook description of fan-cooled rooms contained a modicum of truth, although its loud whir would make it impossible to use at night. He then proceeded to demonstrate the room’s other amenities, opening drawers and drawing curtains, only to be caught out when the wardrobe’s sliding door slid out of its groove. Urging Philip ‘No use to worry; I fix’, he propped it against the wall, where it served to conceal a large damp patch, and led the way into the bathroom, whose cracked tiles and frayed matting finally gave Philip a reason to welcome the gloom. When Armin picked up a red plastic bucket and mimed flushing the loo, Philip was doubly grateful to have forgone the lanzones. He felt an urgent need to wash his hands and, with the hot water tap running dry, looked expectantly at Armin.
‘Sometimes no hot water,’ Armin said, turning the cold water on fully as if to compensate.
‘How often?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘How long does it last?’
‘Sometimes six weeks,’ Armin replied, smiling so broadly that Philip felt certain he must have misunderstood.
He dismissed Armin and unpacked his case. He then took a freezing cold shower and, bracing himself with the thought of all the backpacking privations he had missed by spending his gap year in Rome, lowered himself on to the bed, where he fell fast asleep. He woke shortly before eight with a crick in his neck and a fierce, if unverifiable, conviction that someone had been spying on him while he slept. He dressed and went downstairs, to find that one of the tables had been laid with spoons, forks, paper napkins and four bottles of sauce: barbecue; soy; sweet chilli; and banana ketchup. It was hard to believe that the previous evening he had dined in the filigree elegance of the Manila Hotel Champagne Room. The gulf between the capital and the provinces, which Julian had observed forty years ago, did not appear to have narrowed. True, there was now electric light, but it was barely strong enough for him to read the menu; which turned out to be no great loss since it was as notional as the hot water. At Lerma’s prompting, he opted for the chicken adobo.
‘Is that the only dish available?’ he asked suspiciously.
‘It is correct.’
Dennis swaggered down the stairs ten minutes later, and Lerma ordered Armin to bring the food. She addressed the old man so abruptly that Philip was shocked to learn that he was her father.
‘Is true!’ Dennis said, taking Philip’s scepticism as a personal slight. ‘She tells me is family business like bakery shop. This hotel is belonging to her husband who is away in conference in Cebu.’
‘Let’s hope it’s on hotel management,’ Philip said, at which Dennis looked up from his plate with a scowl. As soon as he finished dessert (a bright purple ice cream which tasted of sweet potato), Philip returned to his room where, reluctant to strain his eyes, he listened to his favourite Doors tracks on his iPod, falling asleep to the sound of Jim Morrison urging him to ‘Ride the Snake to the Lake’, a lyric that sneaked disturbingly into his dreams. After another cold shower he went downstairs, where Dennis was already eating breakfast.
‘This is a first! Did you sleep well?’
‘I do not sleep. I am with woman,’ he announced in the smug tones of the first boy in the class to sprout pubic hair.
‘What woman?’ Philip asked, just as Lerma’s arrival rendered the question superfluous. Their air of sexual complicity left him feeling even more excluded than their conversation. He was gripped by such irrational jealousy that he was grateful the regulation cutlery did not include knives. His frustration peaked when Lerma, offering them a dish of daing na bangus, translated it as ‘grilled milky fish’, taking him back to the first meal he had shared with Maribel. Wretched, he pushed his plate away.
‘This fish is cold.’
‘Is supposed to be cold.’
‘Then it’s too tough,’ Philip replied, knowing that the bitter taste in his mouth had nothing to do with the food. ‘Besides, we must leave for San Isidro at once. We’re not here to amuse ourselves.’
‘No, you not funny at all.’
Dennis cleared his plate as slowly as he could without openly rebelling and,
after an affectionate exchange with Lerma, followed Philip to the door.
‘Now we must go. I am ready.’
They drove the few miles to San Isidro which, to Philip’s delight, he recognised from the descriptions in Julian’s letters. As they circled the main square, he pointed out the town hall and the row of crumbling colonial houses to Dennis as confidently as he had pointed out the Ferry Hotel and Bellrope Meadow to Julia on their first ever visit to Cookham. They stopped outside the church, as much the centre of Julian’s world as it had been of Stanley Spencer’s and therefore an essential port of call.
‘Do you want to see inside?’ he asked Dennis.
‘I am feeling very tired,’ he replied resentfully, as if it were work that had kept him awake all night. Pulling down his baseball cap, he curled up in his seat.
Philip walked down the path, lifted the rusty latch on the creaking door and entered the church. As he surveyed the simply furnished interior, breathing the stale fumes of incense and watching the motes of dust dancing in the light from the clerestory windows, he felt a strong sense of mystery. The crudely painted stone-block walls, the clumsily foreshortened figures on the dome and the tinselly altar offended all his artistic instincts, while reviving religious instincts he had supposed dormant. Satisfied that he was alone, he edged along a row of chairs and fell to his knees.
Discomfort had never struck him as an aid to prayer but, for once, he was willing to endure it since he was not addressing God but trying to reach closer to Julian. Although he had been no more than a temporary custodian, the church was somehow infused with his presence – or at least his priesthood. Philip closed his eyes and tried to picture himself among the awestruck mourners at the murdered basketball player’s requiem. Alerted by a cough, he gazed up and, for one heart-stopping moment, he wondered if he too might be witnessing a miracle, but the priest looming over him was a fresh-faced Filipino. He jumped to his feet and introduced himself, at which the priest, flushed with excitement, invited him into the sacristy, offering him a cup of tea with such doleful disparagement of the facilities that Philip felt obliged to refuse. Looking relieved, Father Honesto expatiated on the parish, to which he had recently been posted after studying in Rome. ‘God is testing me,’ he said, as though he were St Anthony hounded in the desert, rather than the overtaxed priest of a provincial parish. ‘The people here are good people – very good people – but they are so small. They have no imaginations in their heads. They take mass like if it was medicine.’
Philip was disturbed to hear someone who could have been no more than two or three years his senior sound so jaded. He compared him with Julian who, in the face of calumny and persecution, never lost his faith in the ability of ordinary people to effect change. Was Honesto’s disillusion that of an ambitious priest mouldering in a backwater, or a shrewd judge of human nature?
‘I will show you something very special,’ he said, unlocking a wardrobe and taking out a purple chasuble trimmed with gold brocade. ‘A gift for Advent from the family of Father Julian,’ he explained, holding it up like an auction house porter. ‘His mother and sister made this pattern with their own two hands.’
‘Really? His mother?’
‘This is what his housekeeper has told me. She is very old, but her memory for this is strong. My predecessor could no longer keep wearing it when… look!’ He pointed to a frayed edge. ‘The good people have too much enthusiasm for their new saint. But I will share with you a secret – see, you will hear a priest’s confession. Sometimes when the church is locked and I am alone, I put it on to pray and I feel that Father Julian is here beside me. That is why I am so happy to find you have come. The Bishop is a very busy man. He does not always see the whole of the picture; he does not always see people for everything that they are worth. You are here from England; you will quicken things up. The Holy Father will give us our saint. Clever people – cultural people – from all over the world will come on visits to San Isidro and I will write its history.’
‘Great! I didn’t realise that so much had happened here. Apart from Julian, of course.’
‘It will be a history of the spirit which, with much humbleness, I will mix together with my own. It will show how a very ordinary man, so very ordinary that his Excellency the Bishop does not remember my name, can also think big thoughts.’ For a moment he appeared to be lost in them. ‘But I am holding you back. You have many people to meet: many ancient friends of Father Julian. And I must visit a farmer in a long-way-off barangay. By now he may already be dead.’
‘I’m so sorry; I had no idea. I’ll go at once. But if I may beg one last favour? Would you point me in the direction of the cemetery, that is if it’s within walking distance? I’d like to pay my respects.’
‘Of course. It is on the back side of this wall. We will need to go out through the church.’
Father Honesto led the way through the sanctuary, genuflecting casually to the altar. They emerged in a shady courtyard where four young boys were playing football. Catching sight of the priest, they rushed up to kiss his hand. Barely slackening his pace, he made the sign of the cross over each in turn, as he conducted Philip into the street and up to the cemetery gate.
‘Here I must leave you,’ he said, ‘but I am hopeful that we will meet again during your stay in San Isidro.’
‘I look forward to it,’ Philip replied. Too shy to shake a hand that had received such reverence, he gently bowed his head.
As he walked through the buckled gate and down the overgrown path, he felt an immediate sense of peace. A passion for brass-rubbing in his teens had put paid to the fear of graveyards that had haunted his childhood, but ever since Julia’s death they had held a new appeal. Although he shrank from returning to the Gaverton churchyard where she lay in a nursery coupling with Greg, he regularly visited them elsewhere. While others lit candles in memory of their loved ones, he sat on a bench or a tomb, if it were sufficiently old and nondescript, and communed with his. It was as though all the graves in the world were connected and, like a medium summoning a spirit guide, he could reach through them to Julia.
The connection here was particularly strong, since the grave he sought was that of her uncle. The densely packed rows of snaggled stones were hard to negotiate so, without any map or guide, he made for the largest monument, which stood against the church wall. Long before reaching it, he realised his mistake. Even Hugh, who had overseen the arrangements, would have baulked at burying so unassuming a priest in so grandiose a tomb. Moreover, a cursory glance at the inscription revealed that it was not in fact a tomb but a memorial, erected ten years after Julian’s death by the Knights of Columbus, In Loving Memory of all the Unborn Children, Victims of Abortion, May God Have Mercy on Us. A marble tablet by its side was engraved with a letter from An Unborn Son to his Shameless Mother. After reading the first three lines, he turned briskly away.
One of his rare quarrels with Julia had been over her readiness to defy the Vatican line on birth control while supporting it on abortion. Even so, he was sure that, were she with him today, she would back down. Nowhere was the gap between the sanctity of life and the dignity of living wider than in the Philippines where, by the Church’s own reckoning, hundreds of thousands of unwanted children roamed the streets of the major cities. Their short, violent, abused and abusive lives showed that the mercy which the Unborn Children sought for themselves was more urgently needed elsewhere.
He wandered at random through the graves, finding several familiar names among the epitaphs. Bernardo Arriola, one of Julian’s prime antagonists, lay alongside his wife beneath a huge slab of black granite, inscribed only with their dates of birth and death: the latter revealing that doña Yolanda had survived her husband by a mere nine days. A stark white cross in the next row bore the name of Augustin Herrera, manager of the neighbouring Pineda estate, with the phrase Born 12–4-37 Last Seen 2–8-93, leaving Philip wondering if it were the local equivalent of Not Dead, Only Sleeping, or the pointer to an unsolved
crime. Across the path, closer to them in death than he had ever been in life, Gener Jimenez, victim of the fateful basketball match, was buried beneath a small pile of stones.
Mindful of his imminent meeting with Felicitas Clemente, the widow of Julian’s cell mate, Juan, Philip walked back to the gate where he was hit by a powerful fragrance. He swung round, unnerved by the memory of the policemen who had retrieved Julian’s corpse, but saw, to his relief, that it came from a huge stack of freshly cut sampaguitas. Beside it was a simple plaque Fr Julian Tremayne MHM 11 September 1940 to June 1989. Requiescat in Pace. As he gazed at the grave, Philip felt strangely empty. Willing himself to feel something profound, he fell to his knees, but all that resulted was a slight stitch and considerable frustration that the writing on the various petitions and prayers dotted among the flowers was either smudged or faded. Standing up, he took four quick photographs and walked back to the car, where he was amused and touched to see Dennis giving mock driving lessons to three boys whose hands barely reached the wheel.
The boys scampered away so fast on his approach that he dreaded to think how Dennis had described him, but when questioned Dennis simply replied: ‘Peasants! They are having fears of everything.’ He evinced a similar contempt when Philip insisted on changing his T-shirt in preparation for his visits. ‘Why you bother for these sweaty people?’ he asked, as if a few squirts of deodorant were all it took to obliterate any trace of his own rustic past. Philip, conscious that in Dennis’s world respect was confined to those higher up the social scale, said nothing as he took out Felicitas’s letter, with directions that seemed to have come straight from a Boy’s Own story: ‘Turn right at the house with the green shutters, carry on down the road until you reach the shrine to Santa Barbara, turn right again and drive on until you pass the broken-down jeepney. Don’t worry, it has been there for years. Follow the path past a row of houses, and mine is the last but one with the two mango trees in the front.’
The Breath of Night Page 11
