Rey broke off as a man walked past, his demeanour at once swaggering and shifty. He stopped to stare at them before spitting, sufficiently close to his own feet to forestall retaliation, and continuing down the road.
‘Who was that?’ Philip asked.
‘Albert Alias,’ Rey replied. ‘He used to be the hit man for the Mayor. He killed many, many good people. Now the Mayor is in prison, he is on his own.’
‘Isn’t it dangerous for him? Aren’t there relatives of the victims out to exact revenge?’
‘They too have to take care. Everyone knows that the Mayor will not be locked up for long. Already he has been let out several times. In the autumn it was for the marriage of his daughter. There were pictures in the papers. So many smiles.’
‘And the authorities didn’t intervene?’
‘He is too useful for them. At the last election he delivered to the government a thousand votes in a barangay where there were five hundred people. We should be very proud of our long-lived town. It is said that half the people on the electoral roll are more than a hundred years old.’
Rodel scribbled Methuselah lived for nine hundred and sixty-nine years on his slate, only to rub it off in fury.
‘So you would endorse what I’ve heard elsewhere,’ Philip asked, unnerved by the one’s tone and the other’s gesture, ‘that nothing much has changed since Father Julian’s day?’
‘We have changed,’ Rey said, banging his bottle on the table. ‘We have changed. That must change something.’
Dennis looked up on hearing the noise, at which Philip caught his eye and waved his own bottle meaningfully. Scowling, Dennis stood and fetched them a second round. Rey took a long swig and resumed on a new note.
‘This beer was first brewed by the friars. The Augustinians in Manila. Did you know that?’
‘If I did, I’d forgotten.’
‘I suppose this is one good thing we can thank them for.’
Rodel scribbled Let him drink and forget his misfortune, and remember his misery no more on his slate.
‘Did you also know that when the friars first came here they held long debates to decide if the Filipinos – “these uncivilised natives” – could be considered fully human?’
‘That’s monstrous!’
‘Is it?’ Rey asked. ‘What are we? No more than slaves. Look at him!’ He pointed to Rodel. ‘No, not at his face.’ He thrust his hand at Rodel’s crotch. ‘There is nothing there.’ Philip stared at the ground. ‘At least he has an excuse. What can you say for the rest of us?’ He began to weep. Rodel gently clasped his shoulder. Dennis watched, transfixed.
‘Only that Julian had faith in you. His life, not to mention his death, was governed by his love and respect for the Filipino people. If Rome endorses his miracles, St Julian of Benguet may be an inspiration to generations to come.’
‘Is that what this country needs? Another saint? More processions and music and ribbons and lechon? I know one man who would not agree. Father Julian said that what we needed was knowledge and action. No more saints, unless they are leading armies like St George!’ He took another long swig of his beer. ‘No, of course he should be a saint. He was a good man, a great man, a miracle worker. Give the people what they want. If he can make them happy, is that not a miracle? You should go now. We have told you all we can.’
Philip stood up, knocking the table and spilling one of the bottles. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’
‘It is of no importance. It is beer, not blood.’
Rodel scratched something on his slate but, before he could hold it up, Rey grabbed it and flung it to the ground. Rodel stared at it impassively.
‘You should go!’
Returning to the hotel, Philip went straight up to his room, switched on his laptop and began to transcribe the testimonies. He was midway through Felicitas’s account of the requiem when the light went out and the fan whirred to a halt. After waiting a minute for his eyes to adjust, he edged gingerly round the sharp-angled bed and into the corridor, following the contours of the walls to the stairs and down to the lobby which, to his consternation, was pitch-black, without a glimmer of illumination from the street. His hollow ‘hello’ was greeted by an unruffled ‘We are here, Mr Seward’ from Lerma and a loud guffaw from Dennis.
‘I am coming to help,’ Dennis said. ‘I am man; I am fearing nothing in dark.’
‘Neither, you’ll be pleased to hear, am I. But I am afraid of breaking my leg. What’s happened? Has the hotel’s fuse box blown?’
‘No, it is not here,’ Lerma replied. ‘It is all the town, maybe all the province.’ She lit a candle and placed it on the hatch.
‘Has there been a massive power cut?’
‘No,’ she said, with a laugh. ‘It is the Governor. He tells his men to switch off the light.’
‘The Governor’s ordered the black-out of his own province?’
‘It is correct,’ she replied placidly. ‘He is a director of companies who ask for a big grant to build a new plant with coal. So one or two times in each month he makes sure there is no energy, to show the people the need for more supply. Even when we all know there is enough from the hydro-energet… how do you say it?’
‘Hydroelectric power.’
‘It is correct.’
With no functioning stove, Lerma proposed a dinner of dried cuttlefish, which Philip politely declined. He did, however, accept the candle, which seemed to be the only one in the hotel, and, clutching it tightly, picked his way back to his room. Sparing both his eyes and his iPod, he opted for an early night, waking after an uninterrupted ten hours feeling fully refreshed. Which was more than could be said for Dennis, who stumbled down to breakfast with hooded eyes and haystack hair, looking as if he had barely slept. Giving him time for only a single bowl of rice, Philip insisted that they leave for San Isidro and his appointment with Regina Romualdez.
Regina, alone of the town’s ruling families, had agreed to see him. Although Julian had barely mentioned her in his letters, the hostility he had shown towards her father and the opprobrium he had heaped on her brother made Philip anxious about his reception. In the event, he was pleasantly surprised. Dennis drove through the open gates of the hacienda, past a now unmanned sentry box, and down a long avenue of typhoon-twisted trees to the cracked portico of the big house. An elderly maid met him at the door and led him into a large salon, whose mildewed walls and faded grey-green curtains mirrored the gentle dilapidation of the façade. While she went to fetch her mistress, he tried out an eccentrically shaped chair with vastly elongated arms, leaning forward until his bottom was suspended in the air, at which moment he was simultaneously seized by cramp and greeted by Regina.
‘Wouldn’t you be more comfortable here?’ she asked, pointing to a battered leather sofa.
‘Thank you,’ he replied, dislodging himself with difficulty. Despite his embarrassment, his mishap seemed to have eased her, and her voice was far friendlier than it had been on the phone. She spoke perfect English with a mid-Atlantic twang and, after the usual small talk while the maid served iced green tea and savouries, he took out his notepad and asked for her impressions of Julian.
‘What sort of impressions?’
‘Whatever springs to mind.’
‘Deceit,’ she said emphatically. ‘I’m sorry, is that not what you were expecting?’
‘Can you elaborate?’
‘At first all the families were happy to see him. We knew that he was one of us. We thought that he would be an ally, but we were wrong. It felt as if he wanted to attack the world he had been born into, but he could not do that in England, so he came here, where the people are easily led, where they listen to the promises of a kind man with an educated voice and, of course, a white face. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Perfectly. Please go on.’
‘A priest should make promises, of course, but they should be about the next world not this one. He should not interfere in politics. According to him, whenever my father wasn’t expl
oiting his tenants, he was busy trying to buy their loyalty. But didn’t he do the same? The people loved him not because of the sermons he preached, which they were too ignorant to understand, but because of the money he gave for their medical fees and classroom equipment, and even some farming projects. And where did it come from? His family, who were no different from us, only thousands of miles out of sight. And for this they want to make him a saint? Shouldn’t a saint look in the mirror? Or would that be vain?’
‘I’m sorry. I’ve no wish to reopen old wounds.’
‘They have never closed; they will never close. Your saint did not understand how we live here. He failed to appreciate the links between my family and my tenants’ families, which have been forged over many generations. You met Tanya, my maid, now the only maid for this whole house. Her sister was a maid for my mother but she had to leave. It was very sad. Perhaps there was wrong on both sides. But we have put it behind us. Tanya has been with me for more than twenty-five years. That is our way.’
‘I think that’s what Julian objected to. He didn’t want a world that was split into masters and servants.’
‘No, he and his friends wanted revolution. They were terrorists, even if they had no guns – and, believe me, there are many who swear that they did. Suppose they’d succeeded, what then? They get rid of Marcos and end up with Mao or Pol Pot. Do you think that the people would have been happier with that?’
‘With respect, you ended up with Cory Aquino.’
‘Ah yes, the plain, simple lady, beloved in the West, who smiled and spoke softly and didn’t spend money on shoes. What precisely did she do for the peasants? She brought in land reform, which hit small estates like ours while great ones like hers were exempted. Our tenants – our former tenants – can’t afford to run their own farms and we can’t afford to help them. So now we are all worse off.’
‘It may surprise you to learn that Julian was equally disillusioned by the Aquino government.’
‘Forgive me, but I am not interested. What happened to the hacienda broke my father’s heart. I say this as a fact. He felt a pain in his shoulder during lunch and two hours later he was dead. I have been left to take over, to run things as best I can, never knowing if we will still be here from one harvest to the next.’
‘Don’t you have a brother?’
‘He is no longer in the country,’ she replied curtly. ‘I am sorry; I cannot help you. For me, Father Julian is no saint – not at all. There is injustice in the world, along with cruelty and suffering, but they count for nothing in the face of eternity. It is the priest’s job to keep our minds on the justice and peace to come. You remember Jesus’s words when Judas condemned Mary for pouring the precious oil on His feet: “You will always have the poor among you.” I like to think that they have a particular significance in the Philippines.’
‘Elsewhere He spoke very differently. “Blessed are the poor”, for a start.’
‘Blessed, exactly! He did not say rich or happy or even well-fed. There is an order on earth and there is an order in heaven, and it is our job to respect the first and to prepare for the second. I love and honour all the saints. Father Teodoro, our priest before Father Julian, called them the rungs on the ladder to God. I treasure that phrase. As a girl, I used to dress the santos for the feasts, until Father Julian forbade it.’ She screwed up her eyes as if in pain. ‘Whatever the Bishop decides – whatever the Congregation in Rome decides – I refuse to believe that in ten or twenty or even one hundred years’ time – another little girl will be dressing the statue of St Julian.’
Seeing that there was nothing to be gained from further questioning, Philip took his leave of her and went outside to find Dennis, who was sitting on his haunches, puffing contentedly on a thin cigarette.
‘Now we go back to the hotel?’
‘No, the poblacion,’ Philip replied, priding himself that he was now able to pronounce the word with native sibilance. Dennis looked at him like a child who suspected his parents of reading his diary, but said nothing. They headed back into town, where Philip proposed to pay a call on Consolacion. Although she had replied to neither his nor the Vicar General’s letters, he was pinning his hopes on a direct approach. Page after page of Julian’s correspondence attested to their closeness and, despite her bewildering loss of faith, she of all people must wish to see his virtues recognised by the Church. She might not even have read their letters but, like many old people daunted by unfamiliar writing and postmarks, have buried them at the bottom of a drawer. Casting his mind back, he wondered whether Julian had ever mentioned that she was literate, before dismissing such conjecture as both desperate and distasteful.
With supreme self-confidence, Dennis led them down several dead ends before finally chancing on the right road and drawing up outside a small house, with breeze-block walls and a corrugated-iron roof. As he walked through the well-tended garden, past a sparse vegetable patch and a half-dozen banana trees, Philip felt like a devious antique dealer out to cheat an old lady of her treasures, which was doubly absurd when he would be helping to preserve the thing that she treasured most: Julian’s memory. He reached the door, where his knock was anticipated by a cheerful man in his mid-thirties, as crisp and spruce as his shirt.
‘Hello! I hope I’m not disturbing you. My name is Philip Seward. I’m here to –’
‘Yes, I know. This is a small town. News travels fast.’
‘In which case you have me at a disadvantage.’
‘I’m Mark Villena,’ he said with a broad smile. ‘The local schoolteacher, for my sins, as you English say.’
‘We English generally have good reason.’
‘And Consolacion’s grandson. She came to live with Jennifer – my wife – and me ten years ago. Next month she will be ninety-four.’
‘That’s a great age,’ Philip replied, wondering whether she might prove to be one of the few genuine centenarians on the electoral roll. ‘I trust she’s in good health.’
‘She has various aches and pains, and some difficulty walking, but her mind is as sharp as ever. Her biggest problem is that she’s blind, so she can no longer read the Bible every day.’
‘That’s sad,’ Philip said, feeling more ashamed than ever of his recent surmise.
‘I should tell you now that she won’t talk to you about Father Julian. She won’t talk about him to anyone, not even Jennifer and me. I’m sorry if this means that you’ve had a wasted trip.’
Undeterred, Philip emphasised the importance of the meeting, not just for Julian’s sake but for Consolacion’s, to help her gain ‘closure’ (a term appropriated from his grief counsellor) after a loss so harrowing that she could no longer bear to speak Julian’s name. Mark, visibly impressed, agreed to plead his case and, while promising nothing, asked him to return the following day.
After eating a hot dog and noodles at a stand in the poblacion square, Philip left Dennis stretched out on a crumbling stone bench and walked through the near-deserted streets to keep his appointment with Jocelyn Alvarez. He had been nonplussed on asking her for her address to be told to ‘take the left road from the east side of the plaza and look for the pink building; you will not miss it’. In the event, the bright salmon walls, which seemed to blush at their own audacity, bore out her words. It was a huge house by neighbourhood standards, with two floors and an attic, a wide verandah at the front and a small flight of steps leading to a second door at the side. As he strolled up the gravel path, Philip was curious to know how Jocelyn could afford it, but no sooner had she come out to greet him than the mystery was solved. It belonged to her son who, she declared unrepentantly, ‘was making much more money as a nurse in Los Angeles than a dentist does in Manila’.
Modesty was once again set aside, as she led him indoors and claimed credit for much of the design and decor, including ‘two comfort rooms on every floor’. That her son shared her taste was evident from the faux Gainsborough portrait of him in a powdered wig and frock coat, painted by a Beverly H
ills artist who, according to Jocelyn, was a ‘personal friend of First Lady Reagan’, and which hung in a place of honour on the sitting-room wall.
‘You will be hungry,’ she said, reaching for a bell, even though a maid was hovering within earshot. The switch from the emollient English she adopted for Philip and the tart Tagalog with which she chivvied the maid verged on the grotesque. Philip watched as the girl wheeled in a trolley that would not have been out of place in the Berkshire drawing rooms of his youth, trembling for her as its wheels caught on the fringe of the rug which, fittingly, was a giant reproduction of a 100-dollar bill. Disaster averted, she handed him a glass of iced tea, with a mint and lemon garnish, and a far more varied selection of sticky cakes than he had been offered by Felicitas the day before.
Jocelyn, meanwhile, regaled him with a series of anecdotes about Julian, who had baptised one of her children, married another, and buried two more within the space of eight years. ‘He was a good man; he came from such a good family,’ she said, as if virtue had been in his blood: first ‘honourable’, then ‘venerable’, then ‘blessed’. ‘I was fortunate to meet his niece and her intended when they came to stay. Please to say to doña Isabella good morning from the woman in the churchyard. She will know.’
‘Of course,’ Philip said, cloyed by both the chatter and the cakes. ‘Do you think it is time to send for señora Vaollota.’
‘She is in here already.’
‘Really?’ Philip looked around.
‘Of course. She is in the kitchen. I keep her there with the other woman while you have your tea, so that you will not become disturbed. Modesty aside, I think that you enjoy your conversation more with me. I have spoken English in Hollywood.’
Resigned to the need to share her visitor, she rang for the women who entered with a diffidence that Philip suspected owed more to their presence in Jocelyn’s sitting room than to meeting him. Jocelyn introduced him as Philip Seaweed, evoking painful memories of prep school, while not seeing fit to introduce them at all, so that when the older of the two launched into a fervent account of how praying with Father Julian had destroyed the tumour on her breast, he assumed that she was Benigna and had forgotten the English ‘neck’. It was only when she added that her cure was not considered a miracle because she had previously been treated by the baylan – at whose name Jocelyn looked as if she might spit, were it not straight into Benjamin Franklin’s eye – that Philip realised she was someone else entirely, who found the lack of official recognition for her recovery as distressing as the original disease.
The Breath of Night Page 13
