ABOUT SIX months after that Padre Rocha received a letter from Harkness. He was coming to Penang and requested the honour of a meeting with the Padre.
Padre Rocha looked closely at the handwriting on the letter. This man must have studied both Latin and Greek, he told himself. There was no address. It was a British civil servant’s prerogative to state his intentions unilaterally.
Harkness was not as young as Padre Rocha had imagined. But the Padre saw at once that this was a man he could communicate with.
After the introductory pleasantries, Harkness went direct to the matter on his mind in a rather unscholarly and somewhat blunt un-English manner.
“Father Rocha, I am indebted to you for your advice on the selection of the Regidor.”
“But I did not tender any advice to you, Mr Harkness.”
“Not directly …”
“How do you know that?”
“Father Mendoza, a most discerning young man, quoted you, Father Rocha.”
“Ah. I see …”
“You were right.”
“By the grace of God.”
Harkness smiled. What an appropriate and convenient comment, he thought to himself.
“But did you know that Mr Francisco de Mornay approached Father Mendoza and pleaded that he did not want to be considered for the office of the Regidor on the morning of the day I had to convey my advice to the Resident Commissioner?”
“Good heavens! No, I did not know that.”
“It was a surprise to me.”
“Did he say why?”
“No. But I found out later.”
“Huh?”
“Yes, Father Rocha. But I still don’t understand why. That’s why I thought I’d call on you to see what you think.”
“Yes …” Padre Rocha, bending forward, expectant.
“I think his wife twisted his arm.”
“His wife?”
“Did you know that Mr Rosario’s son was sweet on de Mornay’s daughter?” Harkness did not wait for an answer.
“They’d been exchanging letters all the time Ramalho Rosario was studying in Madras. The young blade wrote at about the time the Regidor business was on my lap that as much as he loved her and he wanted her to be his wife, he, a mere son of a fisherman, would not dare to ask her father, the church warden, for her hand. It pained him and all that sort of mush. But, he wrote, if his father was ever the Regidor he would be able to stand in front of Mr de Mornay, with confidence and pride, and plead for her hand in marriage, knowing that he could give her a place in the sun of their land that would befit her breeding and bring to her family something which he as an adopted Tamil boy would never be able to offer.
“Father Rocha, I saw the letter. I touched it. I felt my hands sticky with treacle after that. This must be some guy, this Ramalho. Philippa de Mornay fell hook, line and sinker for it.”
Padre Rocha shook his head from side to side. It was not a sign of disagreement. It was half in disbelief, half in horror at Ramalho’s wile and, he had to admit it, effective intrusion.
From so many hundred miles away in Madras …
“So Fonso Rosario is the Regidor?”
“Yes, Father.”
Padre Rocha sighed.
“And now we know, the right man.”
“I had no doubt …”
“It is strange how the ways of God work, isn’t it, Father?”
“Why do you keep calling me Father, Mr Harkness?”
“I am a Roman Catholic, Father Rocha.”
“Oh. Bless you. You are one of us.”
“Or rather was … I er …”
Padre Rocha smiled at Harkness. “My son, it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
He saw the warmth of reaction to his words in Mr Harkness’s eyes.
They sat in silence for almost two minutes.
Then Harkness spoke again. “Did you know that Mr Rosario is now a grandfather?”
“No! Adam’s son?”
“No. Adam’s daughter.”
“Fonso was the firstborn, a son. Adam was the firstborn, a son …” Padre Rocha mumbled.
“Oh?”
“And did they call her Eva?”
“No. They called her Philippa. It was Alfonso Rosario’s suggestion, they tell me.”
Padre Rocha brooded silently for a long time, appearing to ignore Harkness as only an old man would, knowing, as only an old man could, that it was not necessary to talk just for the sake of talking to keep one’s companion assured one still appreciated his presence.
“You know, Mr Harkness,” Padre Rocha said softly, “I have often compared myself to people like you. We both have responsibilities to people. In our district or parish. You often sit as the judge. So many of you are also magistrates. You decide the punishment. I sit in the box. (He knew Harkness would understand the word.) You sit on the bench. I do not judge. But I mete out the punishment. The sentence. The penance. It is not always easy. We all make mistakes. I made a bad mistake once. Many years ago. Because I let my personal irritations intrude. But I do not have to decide whether the subject is guilty or not. They come to me saddened and guilty.”
“But, Father, you do have to decide whether they are guilty at times, don’t you? When they themselves take on more guilt than they should.”
“Yes … Or when they have absolved themselves …”
THE FIRST WORLD WAR ended on the eleventh of November Nineteen Hundred and Eighteen. In the wake of the calm came a wave of disease that encircled the world. The influenza. At the seminary everyone was sure in his heart that it was the wrath of God against the meaningless slaughter of men by men. But no one dared express such an illogical connection while they bent their heads over their books, studying the philosophical nature of God and the complexities and almost infinite variety of the sins of man.
Maria Rosario fell to the attack of influenza as it swept through the Malay Peninsula, through Malacca and the Mestico kampong. She clutched Fonso’s hand, with the family all around her, her face pale with exhaustion, looking up at the attap thatch in their crumbling shack. Padre Mendoza administered Extreme Unction, and as he bent his head in prayer, thought he heard her whisper “Fonso” before she shut her eyes and left them.
They told Padre Rocha about Maria Rosario as he lay in his bed exhausted with the fever and coughing that had descended upon him so suddenly.
Seventy-five. Seventy-five. Gloria in Excelsis Deo. In Nomine Patri et Filio et Spiritus Santus … Vellupillai! Credo in Unum Deo et … Corpus Christi … Ah yes, of course, Mrs Delgado, Agnus Dei qui tolis pecata mundi … Inche Kabin today, tuan … Father, I have sinned … a torrent of meaningless sounds assailed his ears, his mind and his eyes flamed hot with fever.
But he could smell the vinegar and mint of the wet rag in the hand on his forehead. “He’s gone bad again.”
“Chicken soup, Padre.”
The world around him swayed. And all went black.
“Please, Father, try to swallow it. The doctor says …”
When he open his eyes he looked at the ceiling with its regular thin battens of varnished wood and the white squares between the battens. A chessboard all white.
The sea in which his bed was tossed was blue-black and angry. He saw the waterspout, like a huge paper cone full of tiny cream nuts, kachang puteh, on the surface of the waves, sucking up the water, swaying to and fro in the grey sky, coming closer and closer. Then his mind cleared and he knew, he was sure, that he was in Penang. But in the next instant he was on the beach in Malacca.
He was sitting under a coconut tree, with the periwinkles Indian-pink and holy white around him, looking out to sea. He was wearing his black padre’s hat.
Twenty, thirty, he stopped counting, … great Portuguese Nao were sailing into Malacca with their white sails and the metal surfaces of their cannons catching the lights of the evening sun, like beautiful, powerful swans. But between them a man was swimming. Swimming for his life.
When he woke up he felt a terrible tiredness in his body. Mrs Conceiceo was dribbling a thin Chinese rice gruel between his lips. He forced himself to follow her instructions and swallowed a few mouthfuls.
And there was the taste of soy sauce. Salt.
He was calmer now. Did they tell him that Francisco de Mornay had been lost at sea? Lost at sea. Funny. His flock did not go into the open sea. They walked the seabed with their nets stretched between the poles. Or had he forgotten how they caught their tiny shrimps, the udang gerigau? He saw the rough ring of the jala fall on the surface of the sea, its edge weighted with steel rings hitting the water first in a distorted circular form, pulling the net down faster than any fish could move.
And in between, Francisco swimming. One? Two? Three? months after Fonso had been appointed Regidor.
He made another effort to breathe. Every breath brought a brief relief. The tiredness came back into the very core of his bones.
Oh God, let me sleep. Just let me sleep.
He dozed off but strange images kept coming into view. Buffaloes with heads of tigers, pigs formed of lumps of clay sticking out of the earth but still a part of the earth, rabbits carved of wood leaping into fires whose flames kept changing from rooster tail feathers into thin shavings of wood, slivers of beaten gold foil, and back into tongues of flames.
All around his bed seas suddenly surged up, the waves rising high above the mosquito net. The froth at the top turned into white horses which came tumbling down as he stared at them, disappearing into the sea as they hit the surface of the water.
His body went cold at the thought that his mind was being destroyed by the intense heat in his skull and immediately a surge of warmth shot through him when he realised that the nightmarish visions were not the product of his fevered brain but divine revelations of what would come to pass in the next five, six or more decades that his Creator was unfolding to him.
He felt himself being transported up into the mountains of Malaya. He saw below him the convent at Tanah Rata where he had stayed a few times. Explosions like a series of gunshots erupted all around him. He fell tumbling through crimson clouds into the dark damp jungle, where two snakes were writhing, entwined with each other and an enormous tree. Then he was suddenly in Singapore where he had only been twice. He recognised the French Cathedral. He was sitting in the middle of the road in front of it. Great big trucks came rushing past him. There were old cannons of the great Portuguese Nao mounted on the trucks firing cannonballs of steel as the trucks passed, belching out an eerie blue smoke.
When the smoke cleared he saw a solitary soldier lying on his stomach in the grass pointing a musket at him. The man’s face was green. He was a Chinese. Young. His hair was green. His hands were green. His eyes were Satanic red.
Then he saw a lion on his stretch of beach in Malacca.
A huge dirty yellowish beast walking slowly at the edge where the froth swirled in the fringe of water and sand. He saw the animal with its head held high, plodding along, laboriously pulling each foot vertically out of the soft sand with much effort as it moved.
THE IMAGE in his mind blurred and when he looked again he saw the lion was still padding its way thoughtfully along the sea’s edge but now he saw a naked woman astride the beast, her brown thighs dark against the lion’s, half covered with the yellow-gold mane flowing from its head, protecting her from her naked self.
Her hair fell tangled over her eyes but he saw passion in her half-opened wet mouth and tried to shut out the vision of her voluptuous breasts that hung down from her brown body riding astride the lion.
Then darkness fell upon his world.