by Nick Joaquin
On the way out Sid scanned the door again. Crumbs of pulp indicated where something stuck there had been scraped off. The superintendent scratched his head, then remembered that the nameless door did use to carry a small drawing: of a sheaf of grain dripping, or something like that.
“And so to bed?” said Sonya as they flinched again to Plaza Miranda’s glare at Christmas shopping.
“No, to Intramuros. The old nunnery.”
This was, thought Sid, jolting through downtown, a Manila his backside did not recall. If I closed my eyes, this could be the dirt road to a childhood summer in the provinces. But how shut eyes as agape now as then at the primitive? Rizal’s image of the city as a frail girl wearing her grandmother’s finery no longer fitted; this was a dirty old broad got up all wrong in a yé-yé girl’s clothes. The old city walls that came into view across the soiled air and a bridgeful of chaos astonished with their look of calm and dignity.
The squatters’ shanty town he had left in there ten years ago had vanished, but the new high-rise offices along the muddy tracks looked just as wrong, were still squatters on ground that insisted on being more vivid remembered than seen. Only in the Cathedral, its thin dome widowed by an alien skyline, did memory and appearance converge.
Mrs. Borja slipped her car into the alley the dead end of which was the wall of the fort. To the right was another block of wall: the old nunnery. The door in that high blank wall, Sid recalled, had led to the nuns’ chapel, unlocked on great feasts to the world. The war had violated a cloister concealed for three centuries; the nuns had since moved elsewhere; cargo was stored where once God had a bridal suite.
From the stopped car Sid glazed at the closed door. This might still be a nunnery, so silent and secret its walls. Then, feeling Mrs. Borja’s eyes on his nape, he alighted, stepped up to the door, and knocked. He could hear the sound echoing back, returning to him deepened by, he supposed, the hollows of cell and corridor. He waited, then knocked again. But the door was deaf to the world as of old. Whoever was in there listening, thought Sid, computed in echoes.
As they backed out of the alley, a thick rain spat through the sunshine.
“The devil’s wife is mating,” yawned Mrs. Borja.
It was time to go home.
But Sid was for waiting a while, with the car parked across the street from the mouth of the alley, and the two of them inconspicuous in the back seat.
“There is some connection between here and that office in Quiapo, between Guia’s group and the Prophet Melkizedek.”
“Look, Sid, you haven’t seen Guia for ten years—”
“Not quite. Adela took her around the world when she was fifteen and they stopped over in New York. And three years ago, when she finished high school, I sent for her, she stayed a summer with me.”
“She already a kook then?”
“Not that I remember. She only went to the Village a couple of times. But very serious. Did all the galleries and museums, even made me take her all the way up the Statue of Liberty, my God.”
“And you told her not to be such a square.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t feel guilty about that, too!”
“It’s like I told you: I don’t mind other people’s being mad. I’ll encourage them, in fact. Adela thinks I encouraged Guia. Adela was going to give her a debut when she turned eighteen but Guia wouldn’t have it. She said what she wanted was to be allowed to live on. I made Adela yield. So Guia took an—”
“Apartment? What’s the matter, Sid?”
“The car! There’s the car!”
Coming up the street was the green and brown station wagon, a capped chauffeur at the wheel, two women inside.
“Is that one of the men who stripped you?”
“No.”
The car had stopped at the corner of the alley. The two women got out, carrying airline bags and guitars. One of them stopped to say something to the chauffeur. Sid could feel Mrs. Borja watching him staring, but he could not move, could not breathe, and knew that to move or breathe would be to feel pain.
He heard Mrs. Borja from far off:
“It’s Guia?”
Suddenly the pain was right there.
“That’s Guia.”
He could feel Mrs. Borja waiting—but what could a stricken man do?
“No, we don’t do anything,” he said.
The station wagon drove past and the two girls, both in sweatshirts and jeans, scampered up the alley (it was still drizzling through the sunshine), stepped up to the nunnery door, and rapped. The door opened, then closed behind them, and the alley muted up again in the sunny shower.
Sid was still staring.
“Now we know,” said Mrs. Borja, “there are people there. Shall we try again?”
“No, not now.” Sid had sunk back on the seat. “Take me back to Adela’s,” he said.
• • •
Guia’s voice, low-keyed but lively, drew him to Adela’s den when, having woken in surprise to darkness (had he slept through noon, afternoon, evening?), having shaved and bathed, and picked a shirt and trousers from the clothes he had ordered, he came downstairs wanting supper.
He paused at the door of the den, dreading the encounter. Adela and Guia sat with heads together, on opposite chairs, softly chattering. Above their heads rose their father in eternal tuxedo. In a rocking chair angled to the sisters’ vis-á-vis sat another girl, sipping at a cup—the same girl Guia had been with this morning. The girl glanced around, saw Sid in the doorway, and leaned forward to speak to Guia.
“Sid! Oh Sid! I thought you’d never wake up!”
Guia had sprung up and was running toward him. She kissed him on both cheeks: “You poor dear, I’ve heard of your ghastly homecoming.” She linked arms with him and drew him into the room: “Come and meet Sister Juana.”
Sid bowed to the girl in the rocking chair, then gave Adela a look. “I’m hungry,” he said. He had told her nothing of this morning’s detective work. “I didn’t want to wake you up,” said Adela, and called for a maid.
“You look fine,” said Sid to Guia. In the snaps she had sent him during her beat phase she had hair falling down to her elbows. The hair was now cut short, hugging the ears. She wore a simple blue dress with a short skirt and matching sandals. He saw no gleam of her mother’s jewels.
“I’ve been telling Adela she should join me on these trips, if she wants to reduce. Oh, these are fun trips, Sid. I’ve got a whole new slant on the Apostles when they first hit the road.”
“You just got in?” Sid asked very casually.
“No, this morning. But we had to report at headquarters. And wash up. I hadn’t had a bath in weeks.”
“You’re burned black,” said Adela.
Guia hugged her bare arms.
“Yes, I am tanned. But I like myself this way. Hey, you remember Papa teasing us? He said you two were country but I was town. He should see me now!”
She laughed up at the picture on the wall.
“Papa,” said Adela, “should see what you’re up to now. And I a Daughter of Isabela.”
“Are you for real? He turned Aglipayan to marry your mother, Adela. She was Aglipayan.”
Adela looked so put out Sid choked with mirth.
“But,” he said, coming to the aid of the Daughter of Isabela, “Papa was reconverted when he married my mother.”
“Hey, Siddie, remember how you used to make Adelita cry?”
“Said she was a heretic, a heretic, a heretic.”
“I,” snorted Adela, but beginning to laugh too, “was baptized Holy, Roman, Catholic, and Apostolic, what are you?”
“Anyway,” said Guia, “Sister Juana here can tell you we have at least two Daughters of Isabela in our movement.”
“Just what do you do?” asked Sid.
The gi
rl in the rocking chair sat up and cleared her throat.
“Well, Mr. Estiva, we try you might say, uh, to bring the Vatican Council to the masses. For example, more public participation in ritual. But our parish priests don’t have the time to train all their flocks in the procedure. This is where we come in. Wherever we go we gather a crowd to train. We use the techniques of traveling salesmen: our personnel put on a show. We are usually a combo of four, with guitars. Sister Guia here does an exhibition of the twist or the frug, we sing Beatles songs. But we also slip in the songs now enjoined for Mass. Presently the crowd is joining in. It’s the guitars, Mr. Estiva. They make even sacred songs native and contemporary. Especially to the young. We suspect organ music intimidates; that’s why people don’t sing in church. In some backwoods parishes that are so poor they don’t have organs the priests are sometimes bold enough to invite us to play during Mass, on our guitars, and you should hear the response.”
“What we do,” put in Guia, “we make the hymns such top-ten hits in the barrios when people hear them in church they’re so familiar everybody wants to sing.”
“And then,” said Sister Juana, “it’s so much easier to teach them the dialogue portions of the Mass because they’re already so eager to know everything.”
“Wherever we really go over,” said Guia, “you should see the change in attitude about going to church. No longer a deadly bore, or just a duty. Everyone simply dying to go. And when they come out, after all that active worshipping—oh Sid, such a glow on their faces you could cry.”
“Your brother will think we’re gushing, Sister Guia.”
“It sounds harmless enough,” said Sid.
“Harmless, what are you!” cried Guia. “You should see the chain reaction. I won’t go into the civic thing: people becoming a community and all that. You’re always so het up about popular taste. Well, let me tell you this new excitement is nerving some priests into throwing away all those awful plaster images and replacing them with decent stuff. We’re in this, too. We try to direct their taste. The Philippine look and all that.”
“Oh, we don’t mean,” laughed Sister Juana, “anything so superficial as putting a barong tagalog on Christ or a kimona on Our Lady.”
“Just following the line,” said Guia, “of our native statuary, from the pagan carvings to the santos. And that’s our line, Sid: continuation. Electric guitars and Beatles songs and the Tijuana Taxi may not seem to be in the tradition—but they are, Sid, they are. What I mean is, whatever is Mod is God, or can be, but isn’t only because we won’t use it, thinking it blasphemy. Look, weren’t we dancing something like the twist or the frug when Christ first arrived here? And we didn’t think it blasphemy to dance our twist and frug when we first worshipped Christ. We still do, don’t we, in Cebu, before the Santo Niño? But our processions now—do we have to just file stiffly past carrying candles? Can’t we be more . . . more . . . spontaneous?”
“You mean,” said Adela, “like those savages in the Quiapo procession?”
“Well, why not? At least they worship with the whole of their bodies, with their sweat, snot, phlegm, and all. Which is more than I can say for those pale polite Christians of yours, Adela, who think God is the Establishment. And reading their missals is like reading Emily Post—too, too refined. But we want to put muscle back into worship—frenzy even, violence even. All the limbs and organs in wild prayer. That’s how our people used to worship. Look at the holy frugging in Pateros, or in Pakil and Obando. And the tadtarin in Paco, Sid. It’s that manner of worship we’re trying to revive—not automatons moving in a row, but worshippers leaping, hopping, shouting, laughing—”
“We have this theory,” said Sister Juana, “that telling children, for instance, to keep still in church gives them a dreadful idea of God—a grumpy old man who’s so sick he’s vexed by the least stir.”
“And imagine,” cried Guia, “giving the impression that God frowns on dancing as sinful when dancing most probably started in worship. It has to be brought back there.”
“Yes,” said Sid, “I hear your group has its own Mass, where you dance.”
He saw the two girls just glance at each other.
“We have,” said Sister Juana, “no Mass of our own, Mr. Estiva. We go to the regular kind.”
There was a pause in Adela’s den. Sid felt Guia at his side not moving, the parted lips breathless. It was a pose he remembered from her childhood. Whenever she was very excited she went still all over, the parted lips breathless. Then he noticed that Adela was crouched forward on her chair, plump hands on thighs clenching. Their father seemed to be leering down at them from his wall.
The maid came in to say that table was laid for the señorito.
“We’ll watch you eat,” said Guia, springing alive. “Come on, Sister Juana.”
“No, please excuse me. Mrs. Ferrer has offered to show me her collection of antiques.”
Adela, Sid noted with relief, had sat up and again looked a heap of blessings like a collection plate in church.
• • •
“Adela’s just being a fogey,” said Guia at table, filching bits of food from Sid’s plate as he ate. “In nine-ten months anyway I’ll come of age and get the caboodle. So what’s the dif giving it to me now?”
“We don’t want you to commit it to something you may not like as much nine-ten months from now.”
“This is my life work, what are you. Be a darling and cut me just a teeny bit of that pork chop? Uy, thanks. Excuse my fingers. No, Sid, I’ve found myself, as they say in first novels.”
“You ‘found yourself’ a number of times before, you know.”
“Oh, those. Just stops along the way. You never heard of growing up? But everything was leading up to this.”
“Even fortune-tellers and so forth?”
Again he felt her stiffen but only for an instant; she poked food into her mouth, rubbed her fingers on the tablecloth.
“How I got here, Sid, doesn’t matter. Even silly things can become a way. All the roads lead to, you know.”
“No, I don’t. Where exactly are you? If in church, why are the official church people against your group? And what’s this group anyway? How is it organized? Who are its leaders? Has it even got a name?”
She leaned back and clowned a gape at him.
“Siddie, I’m shocked at you. You’re talking like digging the squares. Organization, my holy fink. When that, dearest brod, is what we’ve been avoiding like the plague. We don’t want to become even a cursillito. Organization has always been the death of things like this. Look at our old beaterios and cofradias: as long as they were the coming together of the devout they were true brotherhoods. Once they organized they became just convents of nuns or status-symbol clubs, with the hermanos only trying to outdo each other in splash. We don’t want to end up like that. We’d rather stay outsiders if that’s the only way we can remain informal, freewheeling, experimental, spontaneous. Not organization men.”
“Your Sister Juana talks like one. Technique, personnel—hah.”
“Well, we also say headquarters. We deliberately use current idioms but we resist even thinking of our group as a name. It’s bound to get one, of course, sooner or later. Beginning to get one right now—”
“Well . . . ? What?”
“Salem, salaam, maybe salamat. Because when we’re asked who we are we say we are people of Salem: it means peace. In the barrios that becomes salaam or salamat and they’re beginning to call us salamatistas, or salmatistas, especially since we end every show with a psalm in which we say salamat. We catch ourselves already referring to the headquarters in Intramuros as Salem House.”
“Wasn’t Salem the kingdom of the high priest Melchizedek?”
“Yes. What a lot you’ve eaten, Sid. You must have been starved.”
“Can you take me there? Now.”
“Sale
m House at this time of the night?”
“It’s only eight. Didn’t you say you were the spontaneous ones?”
“Well, all right. Somebody has to take us back anyway.”
“You girls there don’t have a curfew?”
“Goodness, no. On the road we sometimes start our show as late as ten or eleven, because that’s when our target audience is free. We tell each other we’re The Late Late Show.”
“I’ll tell Adela to order a car. Or did you girls come in one?”
“In a taxi.”
“Salem House doesn’t keep a garage?”
“Oh, this morning we were fetched from the train by somebody’s station wagon. Very posh. Our glamour members take care of services like that.”
“I see.” Sid heaved a full breath. “All right, go wash your hands, brat, if you’re riding with me.”
Adela drew him aside in the living room.
“Santiago called up. He wants you to call back. He’s at his club. Isidro, I can see she’s beginning to influence you.”
“All I’m doing, I’m taking a peek at their set-up. Why don’t you come along too?”
She hesitated. Then: “No, somebody has to remain objective.”
Sid rang up his brother-in-law.
“We have to meet tonight, cuñao,” said Santiago. “Will you be long at the Intramuros place?”
“I don’t know. And afterward I’m picking up Mrs. Borja.”
“An admirable lady. Bring her here. Remember where the club is? But come, cuñao, be sure. This is important.”
In the car Guia kicked off her sandals and snuggled up against him; Sister Juana had elected to sit in front with the driver. Sid’s arm round his sister enclosed again her lonely orphaned childhood.
“Oh Siddie, oh Sid—you smell of puppies and primers and my first bike: the whole of that old house in Paco. If I cry at all now I smell your hair tonic.”