The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic
Page 27
“And you founded this movement.”
“I don’t think anybody can say he did that. This was more or less spontaneous on the part of different people. I am merely a part of it. Sister Juana and Sister Guia do wrong to address me as father, but I reprove them in vain.”
“We hope,” said Sister Juana, “the Church will take the initiative in recognizing Father Melchor, so we can have him for chaplain. We are happy to note signs of attention. When your brother-in-law came here with the churchmen they wanted to meet Father Melchor, but he was away then.”
“I told your sister here, Mr. Estiva, if you should express a wish to come, to bring you at once and show you everything.”
Sid glanced around at the shut shrine in the stone.
“Ah, Mr. Estiva, in every brotherhood there is an ultimate veil past which only the initiate may go. But otherwise we are ready to provide you with the usual information: aims and procedures, statistics. . . .”
Sid heard mockery and turned away to speak to Guia.
“Let’s meet tomorrow.”
“At Adela’s?”
“No, at the office. I hear our corp has a new office?”
“In Makati, very plush.”
“I’ll be there at—four in the afternoon?”
“All right. I’ll bring what data Father Melchor has prepared.”
They began to move out of the circle of ruins toward the back door, the two girls walking ahead. Sid paused and looked back.
“Aren’t you coming, Father?”
“No, I go in another way. When I’m here I stay in a separate part of the building.”
Sid looked at the dark man so tall and shaggy in the moonlight, standing in a ring of stone. The birthmark on his brow glowed vivider now, it seemed. Behind him rose the slab of wall where a flame burned before the shut door.
• • •
Sonya Borja said it before he could, on their way to Santiago’s club:
“The Prophet Melkizedek and this Father Melchor are the same person.”
“How many of the dames you talked to know?”
“Actually only one. But the others who did get to see the prophet describe him the way you did: wears his hair in a long bob and has a remarkable birthmark on the forehead. It seems not all who make an appointment at the Sign of the Milky Seed are serviced by the prophet himself. They have some system of selection. If you’re not thought worthy you’re only attended to by an assistant.”
“Palm reading and crystal balls?”
“The usual hocus-pocus. But not with the prophet. These clients of mine who claim to have had him say there were no gimmicks. Apparently it’s like with a psychiatrist: you find yourself Telling All. They all speak of the power of his eyes and the charm of his voice. And a funny thing, Sid. Though they all want to go back they can’t. After a session or two, they find they can’t get another appointment.”
“Few are called and fewer chosen.”
“Isn’t that a funny way to run a racket?”
“Not if the fortune-telling isn’t really the point of it.”
“Oh, they can tell fortunes all right. This one lady I turned up who did go beyond one or two sessions and made the transition from Milky Seed to Salem House, but didn’t stay, is a rich spinster.”
“So, the criterion would be, not just wealth, but wealth that’s all your own and disposable. Why didn’t she stay?”
“She’s herself stumped. There must be a second process of selection. She remembers up to six or seven appointments with the prophet and then he told her she was ready for epiphany and that their next meeting would be at this address in Intramuros. She showed up there and he revealed his other identity, Father Melchor, and he asked her did she want to find her true self too. So she joined the movement. She was too old to go on the road but she did home-front work, like lending her car and hustling up equipment. She understood she was preparing herself through labor for indoctrination. But one day she went to Salem House and the door was closed. She couldn’t get in then or the following days and when she asked around nobody had even heard of Father Melchor. She went back to the Sign of the Milky Seed but she couldn’t get in there either. The poor woman says she felt so lost until she gave up mysticism for science. Now she has joined the Andromedans, a society of flying-saucer watchers.”
“Maybe she wasn’t compromised enough to be usable.”
“Oh, rackets like that, they can easily get you into such a hole even if you want out you can be blackmailed to stay, or at least keep your mouth shut.”
“Keep your mouth shut about this, will you, Sonya, to my brother-in-law?”
Santiago’s club was, thought Sid, the apotheosis of Philippine baroque; a culture lately sneered at as being without grandfathers had, with a vengeance, discovered pedigree; and he was amused by the thought that there the reactionary and the neo-nationalist met on astonished ground. His brother-in-law’s reasons for finding the antique so congenial were surely different from those of the famous lady columnist waiting for her car on the driveway, to whom Sonya presented him. He knew from the outside of the club what he would find inside. An authentic old mansion had been restored to its elegance circa the 1890s: porcelain pedestals for flowerpots, paired seashells on the stairs, capiz-shell shutters in the windows, and on the walls of a main hall furnished like a sala in colonial days two enormous oils by some nonocento primitive: a beamy Death of the Just, feathery with angels, and a lurid Death of the Sinner, agrin with demons. One room Sid passed was hung with Moro gongs and Igorot wood art. Another room was crowded, like an old-fashioned domestic chapel, with holy images in brocade and smaller ivories under glass—the lares and penates of a frontier tribe.
Santiago was waiting out on the azotea, where a few empty tables stood under trellis and starlight.
“Order your drinks, Isidro, Mrs. Borja, while I fetch this person who has important information for us. I asked for a table out here so we can be alone.”
The person he came back with was Mrs. Banaag, still looking as edgy as when she had fainted in Adela’s den.
“I don’t know if I should be doing this but you’re a friend of my husband’s and, Estiva, he knows nothing of this, I don’t want him to know. But after learning what happened to you at the airport I was shocked and so I called on Mr. Ferrer here, trying to decide what to do. And he told me what I have to say might save your sister. Besides, I had long been trying to close my eyes to it, that they were using force, violence, but now that I know they are resorting to murder—”
Mrs. Banaag, who was speaking fast but in a low voice, with bowed head, darted a glance up at Sid.
“Those thugs around Father Melchor, they killed that taxi driver, they might have killed you too, and I fear they’re now about to kill another person. You remember a Mr. Lao? On the same plane you came in on. They’re holding him now, they’re hiding him somewhere.”
“Isn’t he with them?” asked Sid. “That card I got was meant for him.”
“Yes, he came willingly enough, it seems, to join them. But now he has changed his mind.”
“I saw him changing it,” smiled Sid, “on the plane.”
“It turns out,” said Santiago, “that this Lao is a priest.”
“They’re trying to recruit priests,” continued Mrs. Banaag. “The fallen-away ones. I think they got two or three in the provinces. That’s what the movement mostly is: thugs and women and priests in disgrace. They had heard about Father Lao being stranded in the States—he had been sent there to study but got mixed up with some girl and after she left him he just went to pieces. So they sent an emissary to contact him, told him about this movement he could join where he would still be a priest: he was on skid row, just bumming around then, and they helped him.”
“Stealing priests from the old church,” observed Sonya Borja, “is standard operating procedure for new
gospels.”
“Is it a new gospel?” asked Sid.
Mrs. Banaag wildly hesitated, eyes flashing, mouth contorting.
“If it’s too terrible to talk about—” said Santiago.
“Oh, we are all adults here,” said Sonya impatiently.
“It’s supposed to be a returning,” Mrs. Banaag said at last, herself looking puzzled and looking up to offer her puzzled expression to her listeners.
“A returning to what?” pressed Sonya.
“I can’t tell much . . . There are degrees of initiation.”
“How did you get into it?” asked Sid.
“That was strange too. I’ve heard they’re only interested in rich women, and I’m not. We don’t know each other. The staff members who go on the road, yes. But we older auxiliaries, if we recognize each other, it’s always by chance. I think they’re careful, when they assemble a group, that it’s of members who don’t know each other and move in different worlds—”
“You said it was strange,” interrupted Sid, “your getting in.”
“Because I’m not religious. I stopped believing a long time ago. I’m a free-thinker like Etoy, my husband. Early this year he was invited to speak to some civic groups in New York, but he could get neither passport nor visa. When he raised a fuss it almost cost him his job. These schools where he teaches, they almost threw him out when they learned he was supposed to be a Red. Which is absurd. We are nationalists, not Reds. I was so mad I joined pickets and demonstrations and wrote letters to the editors. Then I got a note saying there was somebody, the Prophet Melkizedek, very interested in my problem. An astrologer, oh my. But I was mad enough to do anything.
“We met once, we met again, I found myself going back, no longer to the prophet but to Father Melchor. It seemed to make sense, what he said—that nationalism was not a political but a spiritual problem. Our people had to be renewed in spirit. They were not really political, they had no political ideas: nationalism as a political movement, like Recto’s, would never reach them. But they were deeply religious in the sense they believed in magical forces. And the nationalist movement could reach them only if it came in the guise of religion, a magical nature religion, but with the Christian forms familiar to them.
“It made sense then, as I said. So I committed myself to the movement; its nationalist format appealed to me. And besides, I was getting back at all the people who had tried to hurt us.”
Mrs. Banaag, beginning to bristle like her words, suddenly drooped again. She shook her head and sighed.
“No . . . I’m sorry but I can’t stay much longer, I have to go, it’s late . . .”
“What happened?” insisted Sonya.
Mrs. Banaag looked helplessly around.
Then: “I went in quite cynically but found myself drawn deeper.”
“Becoming,” said Sonya, “a true believer, you mean?”
“It was no longer a question of belief, or doctrine, or ideas. Ideas seemed utterly unimportant compared to this felt wisdom in the blood, in the flesh. . . .”
“A clairvoyance?” Sonya’s voice had dropped to a whisper.
“It was more a growing awareness of instincts in oneself, a growing capacity for intuition, insight, impulse, as though feeling were thought.”
The two whispering women were now leaning toward each other, gazing into each other’s faces, and seemed to have forgotten the two men at the table.
“And they know when you’ve reached that stage.”
“The first initiation?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Banaag.
“An outraging, of course.”
“He said all shame had to be burned out of us, if we were to recover innocence.”
“Dancing in the flesh.”
“—in the moonlight. This was last October, the last day, behind Salem House. There’s a circle of ruins. And a shrine in one stone.”
“A shrine?”
“An image of Christ.”
“Oh yes, in the primitive manner.”
“More.”
“More of the outraging?”
“But somehow not outrageous—”
“Naked?”
“—during that dancing to the moon.”
“But it was.”
“And in the extremest manner.”
“Last day of October, that was Halloween.”
“Oh, if only there were not this violence—!”
“Mrs. Banaag,” Santiago broke in sternly, “your duty would be to notify the police.”
“And what would that do?” She was smiling scornfully, head up. “If they traced that station wagon they would learn it belongs to the wife of a very high official. If they raided Salem House they would only find an innocent girls’ dormitory. And whatever is being done in the provinces, all they’d see would be a girls’ combo singing hymns.”
Santiago leaned toward the woman.
“Mrs. Banaag, do you or don’t you want to help expose this gang?”
Shaking her head, she retreated from him, at bay against her chair.
“I can’t be involved . . . I’m afraid . . . There are things they can tell . . . But, yes, I suppose I should help. Because I think they want to get at my husband, through me—recruit him, I mean, for their purposes. Listen, I can give you a lead. There’s an old man who seems to know about Father Melchor.”
“An old man?” prompted Sid.
“Dr. Lagman, Ciriaco Lagman. I know because my husband recently did a piece on peasant movements and he went to interview Dr. Lagman because he’s one of the few witnesses left of a peasant religious uprising in Pangasinan in 1900. And Dr. Lagman said why didn’t my husband talk to this person who called himself the Prophet Melkizedek, who should know about it, but my husband didn’t think the lead worth following. He just happened to mention it to me and I have sometimes thought of going to see Dr. Lagman myself. I’ll give you his address.”
After they had dropped Mrs. Banaag near her door, Santiago and Sid took Sonya Borja home. She remarked that the Banaags’ intelligentsia made up for mindlessness by minding. Sid wasn’t sure this was really a sneer.
“But the Prophet Melkizedek intrigues me,” she said. “If you’re going to this Dr. Lagman, Sid, I want to be along.”
“Unfortunately,” said Santiago, “I’ll be out of town tomorrow.”
“I’ll pick you up in the morning,” said Sid to Sonya. “Dr. Lagman first, then Father Melchor’s former friars.”
In bed that night, Sid stirred from sleep knowing that something had happened that had not happened to him since young manhood. He tried to recall the dream, in which he had watched a confused procession coming up from darkness; but nothing in the dream explained its effect. It was a long time since he had felt any impulse there and had so approved the UN agency because it seemed to use up the material for such impulses. But he was now as wetly sprawled as any adolescent. The wondering lulled him back to sleep.
• • •
Dr. Lagman was a small frail ancient in a wheelchair, hugging a patch of sunlight by his window.
“The Prophet Melkizedek? When I tell people they think my mind is going. You, my dear lady, my dear sir, will think likewise. But you come to me asking. Bueno, I will oblige. Two years ago a man came into this room. I had already begun to keep to my bed, having suffered a fall. This man who came here, one look and I recognized somebody I had seen when I was a boy, a boy of ten. This was in 1900, when my parents fled with the landlord’s carabao and the landlord’s rice, and with all of us their children, to join the New Jerusalem in Pangasinan.
“We were part of a great exodus from the North to this New Jerusalem. Peasants by the thousands, on the move, in the dead of night, fleeing to a world without landlords, without soldiers, without rich or poor. For in this New Jerusalem God had appeared, God resided. The roads we
re clogged with a peasantry escaping to God. Escaping from the capataces of the landlords and the Yanquis of MacArthur.
“In the New Jerusalem in Pangasinan, my parents turned over the carabao and grain to the common wealth, as did all comers. It was a Christian communism: what was put in was shared equally by all. Meat and grain would never fail, for more and more refugees arrived each day, with the landlord’s carabao and the landlord’s rice. And every day was fiesta. The adults did not farm, we children did not school. At night there was drinking and dancing—and ceremonies we little ones knew nothing of because we were put to sleep first.
“All houses were equal, but there were special houses. In one dwelt Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary; in another, the Holy Ghost; in a third, The Twelve Apostles, who were resplendent creatures, booted and uniformed. But one house, a little apart from the settlement, was the most special of all, for in it dwelt God. Few saw him, only the maidens in his service and the small boys called in to husk the floor and empty the chamber pots. But even we boys who served there in shifts seldom saw God. He dwelt in a dim chamber where, when we entered, he was but a bulk and a voice. But I saw him in light three times. Once by sunlight, once by lamplight, once by moonlight. A big man with flowing hair and shining eyes and the Godhead was a red mark on his brow. I did not go blind, as they had warned me, but watching from ambush I felt faint and suffered a fever after each of those three times I spied on God.
“Our New Jerusalem lasted barely two years. In March 1901, General Otis sent a Gringo infantry battalion to occupy the town. The Twelve Apostles and the Virgin Mary were thrown into jail; Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost were hanged in public. Pues, the end. We were driven out of Eden, each family returning contrite to where it had come from or desperately seeking a new home. Mine found its way to Manila, where I had the good fortune of winning the sympathy of an American missionary couple and becoming their protégé. But the mystery here is: what happened to God? He had vanished when the infantry arrived.
“At the trials before the military court it was learned that his real name was Baltazar. He did not seem to have any other name. Nobody could say where he came from. He had simply appeared during the Revolution, in the Central Plain, exhorting the peasants to rise, but in the name of his religion. And the peasants began to follow him until he had an army of his own that would harass both Aguinaldo and the Americans. By 1897 he had established his headquarters in this place that was to become the New Jerusalem. At that time, according to testimony, he was already more than forty years old.