The Breath of Night

by Michael Arditti

  The next day he came to nine o’clock mass.

  Thank you so much for the parcel, which has finally arrived. The Regional told me that it took all morning to beat the customs officer down from 500 pesos handling charge to 20, but he chose to think of it as both a battle of wits and a test of forbearance. He brought it up here himself, which gives you some idea of its value. There isn’t a single qualified doctor in town nor, it goes without saying, in any of the villages. Not that 99 per cent of the people could afford to pay for treatment. So they have to rely on folk remedies, which are, at best, useless and, at worst… well, I’ll tell you my own experience. Three weeks ago I had a fever (nothing serious, Mother, just a touch of flu). Consolacion, my housekeeper, called the district medicine man, who turned out to be quite literally a snake-oil salesman, since he prescribed a bottle of silt-coloured liquid with a small serpent coiled at the bottom. I never discovered if it was intended as an ingredient, a preservative or simply a garnish. Needless to say, I recovered without it, but then I have the constitution of an ox – or perhaps here I should say a carabao (water buffalo). For most of his patients it’s kill or cure.

  So you need have no qualms about sending me the antihistamines. I’m already dispensing them to the kids with scabies, which is pretty much the whole parish. I explained to their parents that, while they may not eradicate the infection, they will relieve the soreness. I’m less confident about the efficacy of the deworming tablets. Since I last wrote, I’ve discovered the scale of the problem. I took an eight-year-old girl, whose stomach had swollen up like a watermelon, to the hospital in Baguio. The doctor told me that, while it wasn’t the tumour I’d feared, she was infested with a knot of about sixty intestinal worms, some as long as twenty centimetres and as thick as my thumb. They couldn’t be removed without surgery.

  I paid for the operation, which has been a double success since the resulting scar made her the envy of her friends. But I’m rapidly running out of cash and, with the best will in the world, no parish can rely on the largesse of its priest. So I’m keen to touch hearts – and wallets – back home. In your letter, Mother, you say nothing of my proposal for a monthly fast at the Holy Redeemer, with the money saved being sent out here. I’m sure Father Ambrose will approve. I’d write to him myself, but it’ll carry more weight coming from you. It’s such a small sacrifice for such a worthwhile cause. Please don’t consign it to the box marked Julian’s Hare-brained Schemes.

  On a personal note, I’m especially grateful for the calamine lotion. It feels as if every mosquito within a fifty-mile radius has been using me for target practice. It’s odd, but most of my parishioners are amused. Perhaps I flatter myself but, while I believe that they’d be genuinely distressed if I were to fall ill or have an accident, they enjoy the thought of my suffering a minor mishap. It’s as though it gives me a taste of the constant hardship of their lives.

  Meanwhile, rest assured that I’m being well looked after. She may not be Mrs Hawthorne, but Consolacion is an expert housekeeper. She too has had her share of sorrow. Does it go with the territory? Please supply three references, including one attesting to a deep personal tragedy that will guarantee your life-long devotion to the family you wish to serve. In place of Mrs Hawthorne’s Adam and the Spanish Flu, she saw her husband murdered for resisting the Japanese invasion. By ‘saw’, I mean was made to watch while he was tied between two carabaos and torn apart. Widowed with four young children at the age of twenty-seven, she trekked from village to village selling vegetables. If you’re favoured, she’ll show you the dent in the crown of her head. In spite of it all, she remains cheerful and a permanent fixture at morning mass.

  She’s a creative cook in the loaves-and-fishes sense: what she can do with freshwater crabs and lichen is nobody’s business, although our staple diet is of course rice. Central Luzon is the rice capital of the Philippines. While farmers elsewhere are restricted to a wet-season crop, here they’ve developed an irrigation system based on artesian wells, which allows them to plant a second crop in the dry season (you see, Father, I haven’t totally turned my back on the land). Not that it seems to double – or anything like – their standard of living. People are truly dirt poor. Think Irish villagers during the Famine rather than the least skilled agricultural worker in Britain today. We have three haciendas (rice-growing estates) in the parish, each of which is home to around two hundred families, who live in the most primitive conditions: bamboo-matting walls; palm-frond roofs; earth floors; with no furniture other than sleeping mats and the odd chair. They have water pumps in the yard and share outdoor lavatories. The only shops are a handful of sari sari stores, which (I can’t have made it clear) are not dress shops. The people here can’t afford silk; most of them can’t afford cotton. They wear shorts, skirts and tops made from OLD RICE SACKS (I’m sorry but I feel like shouting). The sari sari stores are general stores selling a very limited range of canned food, cigarettes, soft drinks, cooking oils and household goods.

  The only communal buildings on the estates are schools and chapels. The schools cater for all ages, although few pupils stay on beyond twelve. Books – and even chalk – are luxuries, but the children put up with such privations in their eagerness to learn. Every morning during term, they walk for miles across rice fields, many carrying the boxes that they use as seats. Maybe, as well as fasting, we could set up a scheme for local church schools to send out their old textbooks (unless someone – naming no names, Father – felt moved to pay for new ones himself)? History would be inappropriate and Geography need to be carefully vetted, but we’d be fine with Scripture, English and Arithmetic. They wouldn’t have to be pristine; we’re not proud.

  Making do is the name of the game. Take the chapels. Only one of the three has walls and those are made of galvanised iron. It has no windows or, indeed, any decoration apart from a set of black-and-white photographs of the Holy Land, a gravure of San Isidro, and boards enumerating the Seven Sacraments and the Ten Commandments. Both the other two are open wooden structures that double as grain stores. Last week I arrived to celebrate mass at one to find the congregation busily removing sacks of rice. It puts sweeping the Holy Redeemer porch after a wedding in a very different light!

  Goats, pigs and chickens wander around at will. Cocks crow raucously throughout the day. They’re bred for fighting, which is the national sport – please don’t say anything to Isabel or she’ll write outraged letters to Mr Heath demanding that he send a gunboat. The big surprise, especially to one brought up on Father’s Friesians, is the lack of cattle. The few white Brahman you see around are so achingly thin that they look like an illustration of the Seven Lean Years.

  The general poverty is thrown into stark relief by the wealth of the haciendos. I’m not naïve. I grew up acutely sensitive to the gulf between the grandeur of the Hall and the modesty of the estate cottages. But you are closer to your most penurious tenants than they are to the richest of theirs. I’ll take the Pinedas as an example – not altogether at random since I dined with them last Sunday. The family lives in a large compound surrounded by ten-foot walls topped with brown shards of old San Miguel bottles: a particularly cruel form of recycling. Guards with automatic rifles man the gates. Why? I felt as though I were paying a call on Ceauşescu. Their broad grins as they waved me in made their weapons look even more incongruous. I followed the long gravel drive, lined by jasmine trees and bird-of-paradise plants, to the big house which, with its flouncy façade and chipped columns, put me in mind of a crumbling wedding cake.

  Don Florante is reputed to be one of the more enlightened landlords. He takes a paternal interest in his tenants, advancing them money for seeds and tools, selling them cheap rice during droughts, and standing as godfather to their children (which, here, involves far more than remembering them at Christmas and birthdays). During lunch, a succession of men shuffled in, heads bowed and holding out promissory notes, which he scanned and endorsed without ever once interrupting our conversation. I don’t know whi
ch I found more painful: the servile postures that the men were forced to adopt; their effusive gratitude at his endorsement; or their seeing me, their priest, enjoying the lavish meal from which they were excluded, especially after my sermon on Dives and Lazarus the week before.

  Once the ladies had withdrawn, I challenged don Florante about his treatment of his tenants, always conscious of how you’d react, Father, should Father Ambrose question the way you treated yours (I’m not comparing them, you understand, merely showing the need for tact). On the assumption that the guards were armed against the threat of NPA guerrillas and not to deter a desperate farmer from filching a piece of machinery, I put it to him that the surest way to push decent Christians into the arms of the Communists was to make them feel exploited. Far from taking offence, he smiled and told me that he left all such matters to señor Herrera, his encargado. If I wished to discuss them further, I should address myself to him. Then he offered me a cigar.

  Wasting no time, I made an appointment to see the encargado the next morning. I have rarely felt more compromised by my cassock. A heavily built man with pitted skin and an eye patch, Herrera steered me to a chair and, with a deference which we both knew was feigned, asked what he could do to help. I began by explaining that, as a priest, I was responsible for my parishioners’ well-being. I expressed shock at the living conditions on the estate, adding that improving them was not simply basic justice but sound economics. People with full bellies worked harder (I’m not sure whether that’s been proved, but it rang true and struck a suitably pragmatic note). I was dismayed by his response. Rather than acknowledging my argument and promising to take action, as I’d hoped, or agreeing with the premise but citing obstacles, as I’d feared, he launched a bitter attack on his tenants, who (I paraphrase) were ‘lazy, shifty, sloppy, unmotivated, squandering money on drinking, gambling, cockfighting and’ – this I recall verbatim – ‘prone to other vices which, in your presence, Father, I hesitate to mention’. I’m a priest, I wanted to say, not your maiden aunt! He then claimed that the reason for their poverty was that they had such large families. Seizing my chance, I said that this was because they obeyed the teachings of the Church and asked whether he didn’t find it odd that, while the tenants had eight, nine or ten children, he, don Florante and all the other bosses had only two or three. ‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘They live in smaller spaces so they touch each other more.’

  Adopting a more conciliatory tone, he assured me that the Philippines was a wonderful country but it could be hard for a foreigner to understand its ways. I felt like a blundering English officer ordering his Hindu soldiers to use beef fat in their guns. ‘Let’s each stick to our own, shall we, Father? I won’t tell you how to write your sermons and you won’t tell me how to run my estate.’ Then he called a security guard (armed of course) to take me back to my car which, to add to my humiliation, refused to start. My futile stabs at the ignition matched my bumbling efforts in the office and it required the intervention of the guard, stung by his friends’ ribald comments, to make a quick and effective adjustment to the engine. Gazing back at the house, I saw the manager watching from the window and knew that I could kiss any prospect of a new Mercedes goodbye.

  I returned to town feeling thoroughly wretched. I told myself that it was my first reversal and besides, the Church doesn’t set the best example of sharing wealth. Drive around the province and even in the smaller towns you’ll see conventos that look more like bishops’ palaces. I honestly don’t know how those priests can look their parishioners in the eye. But whoever may be at fault, it isn’t the farmers, most of whom do back-breaking work in the gruelling heat and expect to be fairly rewarded. They feel entitled to one square meal a day (note, I said one) and not to be reliant on the snails, frogs and crabs that their children dredge from the irrigation canals or the few grains of rice that their wives glean from discarded stalks.

  I’m sorry – was it Disraeli or Gladstone whom Queen Victoria accused of treating her like a public meeting? – but I needed to get that off my chest. I have to watch what I say here, even to my fellow priests. The political situation is far more volatile than you’d realise from reading the English papers. Until I arrived here, I had no idea that there were Communist revolts in several regions of the country. It’s difficult to gauge the extent of their support. Sometimes the government plays them up in order to justify its reprisals and sometimes it plays them down in order to reassure foreign banks. The revolts are spearheaded by the NPA, the New People’s Army, which began as a student protest movement, on the lines of our own Angry Brigade, only much more ruthless. The daughter of one of my parishioners is a member. Her mother looks after her four children while she trains with her unit in the hills. Meanwhile, her neighbour looks after the three children of a daughter who works as a hospitality girl (which barely qualifies as a euphemism) in Manila. Needless to say, the two grandmothers loathe one another. I, however, see them as two sides of the same coin or, more to the point, lack of coin.

  They may be extreme cases, but families throughout the parish are regularly torn apart as one or other of the parents leaves for Manila to be the… I’d say rice-winner if it didn’t sound flippant. Of course, the universal dream is to work abroad, as nannies, cooks, housemaids, bar boys or chauffeurs. It breaks my heart that this beautiful people’s best hope is to turn themselves into the world’s servants.

  I’ll leave it there. If you want to hear about the problems of tenant farmers, you need only take a stroll to the Gaverton Arms. Instead, I’ll tell you of one of my more exotic adventures, among people you’re unlikely to have come across even in the wilder reaches of County Durham. Last week, I drove sixty miles (see, I’ve taken on board your objections to the metric system) to the far perimeter of the parish and then hiked into the mountains to say mass for an Igorot tribe, whose ancestors have lived there since time immemorial. I felt as if I’d stepped into the pages of the National Geographic. They were practically naked: the men in black and red loincloths and the women in black, red and white skirts. The language barrier was firmly in place since, unlike the townspeople, none of them speaks English and very few speak or, at any rate, admit to speaking Tagalog. So I was dependent on Eddie, a local teacher, to act as interpreter. Custom dictated that, before anything else, we eat and drink together. They cooked a chicken in the age-old manner, first holding it upside down and bashing its head several times with a stick. nb, it’s even more crucial that you don’t breathe a word of this to Isabel or I’ll lose what shred of moral authority I still possess.

  After the meal, I held an open-air mass for 300 people. The crucifix on the altar bore a disconcerting resemblance to the rice gods carved on the door frames of their homes. They profess to be Catholics, but I suspect that their faith is only skin deep – and sometimes not even that: how many Catholics do you know who have their arms intricately tattooed with a mixture of plant juice, soot and hen’s excrement, to protect them from evil spirits? I’m not setting out to destroy their ancient traditions and I’m well aware that the early Church adopted various pagan rites, but I will have no truck with worship in which Our Lord is merely one god among many, a native fetish rather than the Saviour of the world.

  Then again, it’s no wonder that the pagan influence lingers on when the Church has been so compromised. In recent years, there have been too few priests to tend their flocks. But all that will change, and I’m proud to be playing a small part in the transformation. I’ve saved the best until last. With Father Benito Bertubin from the neighbouring parish of the Holy Cross, I’m instituting a network of Basic Christian Communities. Father Benito, a truly splendid man, has just come back from a year in Brazil where he experienced such communities at first hand. They give people the opportunity to think for themselves, rather than always depending on their priests (which even Father must admit is in line with the new spirit emanating from the Vatican). Our most pressing task is to establish teams of lay leaders. We’ve sounded out the different barrios
for suitable candidates, using the criteria that St Paul proposes for bishops and deacons in the First Letter to Timothy. We’re planning to start selections in the new year, and then… watch this space!

  Now I must leave you. I send you all my love and prayers for the Feast of the Nativity; I can’t help feeling a pang that, for the first year since my burst appendix, I shan’t be celebrating it with you. I’ll have to make do with picturing everyone at the Christmas Eve carols, Boxing Day meet, New Year’s Eve ball and, of course, Christmas Day mass. I shall be spending the day at the convento. I was invited for lunch at the Arriola mansion but I declined, much to Consolacion’s delight. My place is here, to welcome any waifs and strays. Besides, I’m developing a taste for bat.

  Your loving son,

  Julian

  Philip felt as if his whole body were covered in gum. He had scarcely stepped out of the hotel, and he was already disorientated by the glaring sun and the swampy heat and the cacophony of car horns. Leaving for his third and, he hoped, final day at the library, he resolved to ignore the line of taxis in the forecourt and walk the short distance across Rizal Park. First, however, he had to brave the freeway on which the constant flow of vehicles bore no visible relation to the working of the lights. As he wavered on the kerb, a pedicab driver drew up in front of him, bombarded him with questions and promised him ‘the most cheapest and most comfortable ride in Manila’. Treating the polite refusals as a negotiating ploy, he repeatedly lowered his price, as though the sight of a Westerner on foot were not just a wasted business opportunity but an affront to his world view.

  Trusting to the red light, Philip wove through the colour-blind traffic and, by some miracle (although, given his mission, he was wary of the word), reached the opposite pavement unscathed. After pausing to gain both his breath and his bearings, he entered the eerily empty park. A handful of joggers circled the perimeter, oblivious to everything but the music in their ears; a class of schoolgirls practised tai chi on the grass; a pair of lovers, whom he romantically – or nostalgically – identified as students, embraced beside a blaze of poinsettias; a vagrant lay sleeping on a bench, his matted hair and tattered trainers telling as poignant a story as any in the newspaper that covered him.