The Breath of Night

by Michael Arditti

  ‘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.’

  Five

  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.

  ‘Relax,’ Max said, ‘or as you people say, “Chill!”’

  ‘I’ve never said “Chill!” in my life.’

  ‘That’s half the problem. You’re not here to meet your bank m
anager but to enjoy a slap-up lunch.’

  ‘It’s not the food that spooks me but the setting.’

  ‘Take it from your Uncle Max, it’s a compliment. I must have known Ray six or seven years before he invited me to join them on Qingming, and here you are, scarcely five minutes off the plane!’

  ‘That’s one of the things that spooks me. What if his wife and kids get the wrong idea? Is the Lady Precious Stream act reserved for selected company? Does he butch it up at home?’

  ‘At the risk of repeating myself: ‘Chill!’ They’re not naïve; they’re well aware of Ray’s catholic – sorry – tastes. And here’s Amel now.’ Max waved to the man heading towards them. ‘Amel,’ he said, giving his cheek a pat, ‘this is your father’s new friend, Philip.’

  Amel’s broad grin at the ambiguous phrase bore out Max’s claim of his ease with his father’s proclivities. Everything about him spelt sophistication, from the slicked-back hair and monogrammed white shirt to the grey silk trousers and snakeskin loafers. Which made it all the more incongruous that he should call him ‘Mr Philip’, like an ancient retainer addressing the son of the house.

  ‘A thousand apologies! I had no idea you were waiting.’ He glanced at his watch, as if to absolve himself.

  ‘Don’t worry. We’ve only just arrived,’ Max said with a smile.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Amel asked. ‘I’m afraid it’s a bit of a hike.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ Philip said, gazing at the gradual slope and trusting that he was being treated as a typically effete European and not as his relatively fit self.

  Max and Amel strolled ahead, chatting with an intimacy Philip would not have expected and leaving him to marvel at the mausolea, many as big as houses, all of them bigger than the houses he had seen in San Isidro. Christians, Buddhists and Taoists lay side by side in sepulchral splendour, united by both the refusal of the colonial authorities to admit foreigners into existing cemeteries and the wealth that had enabled them to circumvent the ban. With tombs dating from every decade since the 1850s, the architectural diversity rivalled the religious. Ornate pagodas and multi-tiered temples flanked neo-baroque chapels and squat, open structures, reminiscent of Mies van der Rohe. As with so many other vistas in Manila, the effect was marred by the occasional ruin which, nonetheless, provided a welcome corrective to the prevailing pomp.