Toothbrush in raised hand, to tell Customs it was all his gear, Sid Estiva, lately come down from heaven but now unwinged by the general guilt, slunk past the courts of the baggage inquisitors, was thumbed the way to the airport lobby, stiffened to see a thin aisle through a crowd that smiled or smirked as he shambled by, ran smack into a tall woman in green who thrust her mouth at his face as if to kiss him. Were anyone here his welcomer it would be his sister Adela, but this woman was his sister only if Adela had been growing again in middle age. Besides, he and Adela now seldom kissed. The snouting kisser, however, aimed at neither his mouth nor cheek but an ear.
“Toothbrush!” she hissed.
His head jerked back in alarm.
“Drop the toothbrush!” snarled the woman. “People are looking!”
Suddenly aware that his right hand still held the toothbrush aloft, he clasped the shocked hand to his heart. Someone guffawed. He bowed coldly to the woman: “Thank you.” But she had seized him by the other arm and was dragging him aside.
“Hey, what’s this!”
“Shh,” whispered the woman, peaked mouth again in his ear. “Walk out to the driveway and wait on the sidewalk. The car’s a green and brown Chevy station wagon. Keep the toothbrush in your hand so the driver can spot you. But you don’t have to hold it up all that high, my God!”
“Listen,” cried Sid Estiva, “will you tell me who the devil you are?”
“Not here!” gasped the woman, eyeballs shuttling right and left; and indeed they were being engulfed by the two tides of welcomers and arrivals. “Here!” said the woman, thrusting a card into his left hand and scurrying away.
He glanced at the card. A toothbrush, bristles up, was sketched in black ink above a typed text. Before he could read the message a cry rang out and the crowd in the lobby swayed toward the entrances. Crushed forward, Sid Estiva shoved card and toothbrush into pockets, then fought his way up against the current. He was panting when he reached the bank of the airline counters. Whatever had driven up at the airport had disappointed the crowd, which was now surging back from the entrances, howling humorously. Sid Estiva could not place the tone: was it praise or protest? This was his first time back in Manila in ten years. The sweat that dewed his eyes like tears bewailed the amount of clothes he had on. His body sweltered that had been wintry only two days ago. He did not remember it was this warm here in mid-December.
“Mr. Estiva?”
The girl at his side was in gray sweatshirt and stretch pants and wore her lank hair down to her shoulders. Sid Estiva recognized the man haggardly peering over her shoulder as a co-passenger on the plane.
“Mr. Estiva, there has been a terrible mistake,” the girl was saying. “You were given something intended for Mr. Lao here. He says you met on the plane.”
The two men nodded at each other.
“Well, yes,” began Sid Estiva, “there was this large female in green—”
“Our Mrs. Mañago,” smiled the girl, “is not as capable as she looks.”
The three of them looked around as another cry swelled from the crowd; some kind of tumult traveled the farther end of the lobby.
“Tell me something,” said Sid to the girl, “what’s going on here?”
Her glance back at the crowd was sad.
“A lynching, Mr. Estiva. We’re supposed to have been insulted again by some foreign pop singers.”
“Those guys over there?”
“No, those are just the managers. The boys haven’t arrived yet. Mr. Estiva, do you have the card?”
“I put it in a pocket—” He began to knead this and that bulge on his suit. “I can’t remember which one.” Every pocket he delved into blocked his fingers with layer upon layer of handkerchiefs, cigarettes, match folders, aspirin, chewing gum, keys, and coins. Who the devil invented pockets anyway. The girl and the haggard man behind her tensely watched. “I can’t seem to find it,” groaned Sid Estiva, limply producing at last only his toothbrush. His two watchers flinched.
From the street came a wailing of sirens. This time its own roar seemed to blast the crowd away from the entrances and, knocked off balance by the recoil, Sid Estiva found himself falling now backward, now forward, now sideways, but somehow never down, propped up by the crowd that swept him along, his heels crisscrossing. A thickening of the mass slowed down the stampede and stood him up at last; nowhere in sight were the girl in gray and her haggard companion. He dug heels in; the crowd slid past round about him and cluttered up a stairway, leaving him at the foot of what he now perceived to be a stopped escalator. As he eyed that latest enigma he was seized on an elbow and whirled around: the large woman in green once more confronted him.
“The card!” she sputtered in his face.
The heels he now dug in had contacted mother ground; he was no outsider here to be pushed around but a proprietor, native to these shores, rightful breather of patrimonial air. He hardened eyes at the woman as, with thumb and finger, he plucked her hand from his arm.
“Go,” said he, “to hell.”
Turning his back on her, he marched up the unmoving escalator, not once looking back to see if she had followed.
On the second floor, which was lined on one side with bars and shops, the hunt had caught up with the quarry, or part of it anyway. Sid Estiva saw a white man fallen down on hands and knees to the floor trying to crawl away from the young wags poking at him on rib and rump. Girls in brief skirts and white boots wailed aloud as they tailed the procession, like the Marys on the Via Dolorosa. Sid Estiva had no idea if this sort of thing was as common here in the Philippines as in American cities, but this particular local march against the white man struck him as more downright than the civil-rights demonstrations he had watched—and watched uninvolved—in America. Here, to stop his blood from running with the hounds, he went into a bar, picked out a corner table, ordered a beer, and emptied his pockets.
He found the card crumpled into a handkerchief.
The typed message was about as mysterious as the sketch of the toothbrush:
Tuesday a.m. Appointment with dentist. Must.
Tuesday p.m. Get-together of section managers and trainees. Cocktails.
Wednesday noon. Luncheon meeting. Election.
At the Sign of the Milky Seed. Deck Six.
Sid Estiva amused himself with the card over his beer. What organization man was he ruining the schedule of by not surrendering this piece of pasteboard? That haggard man, Mr. Lao, hardly looked the organization type. Maybe he was only a trainee? On the trip from San Francisco, every time Sid glanced across the aisle, he had seen Mr. Lao huddling on another side in his seat by the window, sweating, it seemed, in spirit, a soul in discomfort. The stewardess had several times paused to indicate where the throw-up bag was.
He should, thought Sid, finishing his beer and a cigarette, return the card somehow and not add to poor Mr. Lao’s agonies. He slipped the card into his breast pocket, then tried to catch the waiter’s eye until he remembered that one didn’t catch Philippine waiters’ eyes. One hissed or hoy’d at them. The chit paid, he tarried in the dim cool bar, wondering again if he should have responded at all to the urgency of sister Adela’s cable. Had he been drawn back by more than brotherly concern? He had landed at noon; it was now mid-afternoon; Adela might be worrying—or had she even bothered to check which plane carried him? As he rose he caught the waiter clearing the table watching him from the corner of an eye.
The escalators were moving now; they had, he supposed, been turned off just to spite the pop singers, now unfaithfully departed. In the lobby below was no sign of the large female in green or the girl in gray or Mr. Lao. Why did the bare lobby look so soft?
A man interrupted his vague searching.
“Taxi, mister?”
Poor Mr. Lao would just have to go on anguishing. Sid Estiva followed the driver to his taxi, crawled into his back seat, and gave him Adela’s address. She had a new house in the suburbs. As he leaned back in the taxi Sid fleetingly thought that no beer in the world was quite like San Miguel beer.
When he next opened his eyes his first thought was that the new suburbs of Manila were even lusher than he had been told. To the right of him were rolling meadows fringed by woods: perfectly re-created countryside. But where were the chateaux? Then he glanced to the left. The body of water in the distance, sparkling in the afternoon sunshine, could not possibly be the Pasig or the bay. A sixth sense warned him not to start up. He had recognized the blue sparkle as the lake, which meant they were driving away from the city. He lay still, eyes half-closed, memorizing the taxi’s name and number, printed on the inside of one door. The driver just glanced around as the taxi turned right into a narrower bumpier road. Sid Estiva caught a glimpse of a large billboard announcing a “memorial park.” The American way of death out here? He had thought what was happening to him now only happened in James Bond movies. He had been warned against the taxis of Manila—but he was carrying no luggage and no money.
This was no more than a trail they were jolting through, a gothic aisle of boughs. Birds twittered in the green dusk where sunlight was but a neon edge on leaves. Eyes narrowed at the driver’s mirror, Sid Estiva crept a finger to his breast pocket, fished out the card in there, crumpled the card up in his fist, then shoved it down an edge of the upholstery.
As though abruptly awakened he sat up and yelled:
“Hey you, where the hell do you think you’re going!”
Not even looking around, the driver swung out his right arm. The backhand caught Sid in the face and flung him back against the upholstery. Round a bend appeared a green and brown station wagon parked beside a hut in a clearing. Two men in black jackets stood in front of the car, looking at the arriving taxi. The instant the taxi stopped Sid found himself dragged out by hands and feet and spread-eagled on the ground. He just had time to check on the theory that at such moments one’s life passes before one’s eyes. Nothing passed before his eyes; the enormous moment squatting down on him was a halt in time, a stoppage of breath and thought, a suspension of feeling. He could not even make himself make a sound, yet was aware of himself as being too stunned to be aware.
He was rolled over on his face and in simultaneous tugs was stripped of jacket and shoes, tie and socks, shirt and trousers, undershirt and shorts. He was naked but not being pressed down anymore and after a while made bold to lift his face from the grass. One of the two men was shaking his jacket by its hems and from the upturned pockets showered down handkerchiefs, cigarettes, match folders, aspirin, chewing gum, keys, and coins. The other man was crouched down on one knee intently sifting the spill. Among his underclothes on the grass lay Sid’s passport and plane ticket, Adela’s crumpled cable, that goddam toothbrush. The taxi driver stood apart, leaning against his car, smoking a bored cigarette.
The man shaking the jacket threw it away and walked over to where Sid lay. He shoved a shoe under Sid’s breast and heaved him over face up.
“Where’s that card, pare?”
The man’s thick shoe was nudging Sid on a shoulder.
“If it’s not there,” Sid heard himself saying, “I don’t have it.”
The shoe dashed against his jaw.
“Where’s that card, pare?”
The shoe loomed huge over Sid’s face, dangling from the sky.
“Okay, okay, that’s enough,” said the other man, the man on his knee in the grass. The huge shoe withdrew from the sky and Sid sat up and felt at his jaw. The two men stood whispering to each other. Sid began to breathe normally, and to itch. They were in trouble, not he; and he rose to his feet. The taxi driver flung away his cigarette and swore. The two men jerked heads as one toward the driver. From beyond the clearing drifted a sound of voices. The sound might have been a magnet yanking Sid bodily off the ground.
Joint and muscle, not thought, catapulted him from clearing to shrubbery. His body had become pure speed, unstoppable, crashing into bush and vine, rushing through undergrowth. His limbs acted by themselves, each dash or swerve spontaneous. This being was but movement, instinct, impulse, engine, and could have split a tree. Only when it had torn through a thicket into a second clearing did the brute energy, recovering mind, sputter to a halt, gradually embarrassed, knowing itself naked before people.
Staring at him staggering were a woman in a pink dress and a barefoot old man in white undershirt and khaki pants ripped off at the knees, frayed sombrero in hand.
“I was held up,” was all Sid could say. He waited, gasping, now utterly aware that he wore nothing but a watch.
“Well, but don’t just stand there,” laughed the woman, “cover yourself.”
Sid clutched at his groin.
“What happened?” asked the woman.
He told her only about being shanghaied by the taxi driver and stripped by the two men.
“Are they following you?”
He looked back over a shoulder, listening.
“I don’t think so.”
“Near here, sir, is a constabulary outpost,” gravely intoned the old man.
“Near here, sir,” giggled the woman, “is my car. Want to wait in the back seat for us?”
Vexed by her giggling, Sid coldly bowed at her and walked away with the dignity of one who rated a sir even with no pants on. The car was a small Jap coupé. Sid found newspapers in the back seat and spread them over his lap. The red x’s on his body were only scratches. The woman was still giggling when she and the old man got into the front seat.
“We’re taking you to the constabulary,” she announced.
“If you don’t mind,” he leaned forward as she started the car, “I’d rather you took me home.” He explained he had just landed and gave her Adela’s address. This sent the woman into another ripple of mirth.
“My God, I can’t drive you in there the way you are. That’s a posh village. Tell you what, mister—”
“Estiva. Isidro Estiva. I’m called Sid.”
“Oh, I think I know you well enough to call you Sid!”
“Please do. And whom have I the pleasure—”
“Mrs. Borja. Tell you what, Sid—I live just off the highway; we could stop there and make you decent. Unless you want us to go back to where you say you were held up and see if we can locate your clothes?”
“You think it’s only a story. I really don’t usually go around without my clothes on, believe me. But, no, we better not go back there. I won’t have you and your companion take the risk.”
She smiled at the old man at her side.
“Mang Ambo here takes care of my lot back there, Sid. I’m planning to build soon.”
“Isn’t it rather out of the way?”
“When I first built off the highway I was a voice in the wilderness. But it’s too crowded for me now. So off to a new frontier.”
They came to where the memorial park billboard marked the mouth of the trail. She stopped the car and repeated instructions to the old man before he got out. He bowed toward Sid: “I commiserate with you, sir. Whatever help is in my power—” They left him bowing at the corner, the car turning left to join the thicker late afternoon traffic on the highway. Sid slid lower on the seat, pulling the newspapers up to his neck. Where the highway ended she turned left on another road, then right into a side street that seemed to be one motel after another, with names like Saratoga, Windsor, Biarritz, Versailles. “One reason I’m moving out,” muttered the woman at the wheel, nodding toward something called the Taj Mahal Motel.
They stopped before a gate painted in quadrangles of different colors; she sounded her horn; a girl came running to open the gate; and they drove up to a low-slung house cresting a wave of lawn. She stopped on the carport and looked round at him.
“I’m afraid I can only lend you teenage clothing, my son’s.”
“I’m smaller than your husband, or bigger?”
“I don’t have my husband’s clothes.”
He hesitated.
“Are you a widow?”
“No.” Then she added, as she got out: “We just don’t live together anymore.”
She left Sid in the car. When she came back she was carrying mustard-colored dungarees and a shirt-jac in bold black and orange stripes. “I’m afraid I can’t do anything about shoes.” She inspected the shrubbery along the driveway while he dressed in the car. The shirt-jac was too broad in the shoulders for him but he had to squeeze his legs into the tight trousers. Neither shirt-jac nor trousers would button at his waist. Crippled by the trousers, he limped out of the car to show Mrs. Borja the mid-riff gap between man and boy.
“I’ve sent the maid for a taxi,” she was giggling again. “You haven’t developed a phobia about them?”
“Is the younger generation really built this way? How old is your son?”
“Fifteen.” That would make her around 35, thought Sid. “There’s a telephone,” she said, “if you want to call up your sister.”
“No need, I think.”
They were standing where the driveway and a piazza merged and the junction was marked by a bit of rock garden built against a corner of the house. On top of the rocks was an old wooden image of a saint; above it hung a capiz-shell lantern. He glanced toward the piazza; instead of the usual wrought-iron art were wicker chairs with lyre backs in the antique manner, a perezosa, even a round marble table with a clawed leg.
“You look surprised, Sid.”
“Very. Is the past really this much in fashion?”
“How long have you been away?”
“Ten years. When I went away one was sick if one looked back at stuff like that.” He nodded toward the termite-eaten saint on the rocks.
“Oh, everybody’s collecting them now. Why, did you look back?”
“And got jumped on the neck for it. I thought I was a poet then, or maybe an artist. And I was rather fascinated by old things—folk fiestas, icons, the décor of the past. But being interested in that sort of thing was supposed to be unhealthy, reactionary.”
“Well, Sid, you’ll be happy to learn that what was reactionary then has become very avant-garde. Do you know we actually organize expeditions now to see old fiestas? I must read what you wrote.”
“It wasn’t much. And I stopped long ago.”
“Because they jumped on your neck?”
“Not entirely. I think I got scared. If you go back into the past it could come back.”
“How do you mean?”
“People who said that sort of interest was unhealthy were not wholly wrong.”
“And so you gave it up to become—what?”
“I’m with a UN agency, in New York.”
“Oh—to save the world.”
“But it has come back.”
He was staring at the saint on the rocks.
“Stop it, Sid. You trying to scare me? And there’s your taxi.”
They moved down the driveway together.
“If you need help,” she said, “I’m in the book. Look under interior decorators. Sonya’s. That’s me and mine. But you’ll be shy about us meeting again?”
“Oh, I want you to know me with my clothes on.”
Adela’s village was the other way up the highway and was entered through a sentinel’d gate, like a fort. The houses here all had low walls and chic front lawns and unbarred windows. Bidding the taxi wait, Sid Estiva hobbled on bare feet up the driveway to the front door, which was actually on the side of the house facing the driveway. Beside the open doorway was a prop on which stood a small ravaged old wooden Virgin. Sid stepped into the living room. Adela was parting the drapes at a window, to let in the last of the afternoon light. Sid planted himself in the middle of the room: bare-footed, boy-trousered, shirt-jac’d, arms akimbo—the returned native, escaped from the perils of passage.
“Ah, there you are, Isidro,” said Adela, looking around. “Plane got in all right?”
• • •
The guests that evening were mostly Adela’s crowd but she had dug up two of Sid’s old chums, Jing Tuason and Etoy Banaag, and their wives.
“But before you boys go off into auld lang syne,” said Adela, “Isidro has to meet everybody.”
Like most of the women there, Adela was in patadyong and kimona. The men were mostly in tan or faded-blue business suits. Sid was in a baro and gray pants borrowed from his brother-in-law. The brother-in-law, Santiago, Adela’s husband, looked antebellum in white sharkskin, small gold cross on lapel.
“I thought,” said Sid to a woman he had just been presented to, “everybody here now wore black suits at night?”
“To something informal?” The chill in her tone was for what she clearly assumed to be a New Yorker’s irony. “Only the very young or the very naïve maybe.”
Sid noticed how certain phrases recurred like refrains: fashion’s current passwords apparently. “Do that” or “Yes, do that” was what the ladies smiled if he said he would call them up or get them a drink or have to rejoin Adela. If he asked a man about the last election or the Vietnam war or any current event, the cheerful snap was “No comment!” and everybody listening roared with laughter as though something witty had been said. Sid supposed that a local significance he was unaware of had made the phrase funny and he felt himself an outsider after stopping feeling puzzled each time they laughed.
But he was impressed by the shine of the crowd. This was a middle-aged collection, not beautiful people really, but they moved with an ease fibered by money in the bank and food from supermarkets. Perhaps it was that which, making them beautiful in each other’s eyes, produced their collective aura. Sid was startled, as he circulated, to be told that his sister wore “famous clothes” and was a “glamour matron.” As far as he could see, Adela was as doughy and pudgy as ever—but her husband was a bank president and a Papal Knight. Still, Sid had to admit that the shine came from more than the mutual admiration of bank accounts. These were not the top nobs but they were clean, decent, reasonably honest folk: salt of the earth agleam. The prevalence of bald heads and paunches in the men coincided with the cantilevered masses of hair and bosom on the women, for whom couture and coiffure had rashly become architecture. They also now sipped at wine or booze; and Sid waited in some suspense until Adela announced that the buffet table was “ready to be raided.” She added that, in deference to the returned native, presumably famished for home cooking, the food was “barrio fiesta.” The buffet table offered a sopa de fideos, boiled lobster, stuffed boned bangus, a kari de pata with bagoong, pork and chicken adobo, a coconut-heart salad, and lechon. Remembering the steak and barbecue parties of the fifties, Sid felt he was heaping his plate with the culinary equivalent of the antique Virgin in Adela’s portico.
Candlelit tables had been set out on lawn and piazza but Sid found his old chums Etoy and Jing among the folk who preferred to eat indoors, in Adela’s den, where furniture from their father’s house environed a life-size photograph of the old man himself, in its old baroque frame, on a paneled wall.
“We’ve been admiring it,” said Etoy Banaag, putting an arm around his wife. “Picture of the Founder. He looks quite a fellow.”
“Vitality, he had it.” Sid waved a fork at the picture. “Born penniless, educated himself, became lawyer, editor, politico. Married three times, all heiresses. Had one child by each wife. Third time a widower when he died.”
“Mrs. Ferrer is not your full sister?” asked Mrs. Banaag.
“No, Adela’s mother was from Vigan. My mother was from Bacolod. And the youngest of us, Guia, the child of my father’s old age—her mother was from Ermita.”
“North, South, and Centre,” laughed Jing Tuason. “Hey, your old man was some sexual geographer. And sexual economist, too. Your sister Adela’s tobacco money; you’re sugar—Guia is real estate?”
“But we used to think,” said Sid, “that Guia was the Cinderella. Her mother’s Ermita property wasn’t worth much after the war, ruined and all. Now Guia could buy out both Adela and me.”
“I remember Guia,” said Jing Tuason. “That little skinny kid I kept thinking was your niece?”
“Well, Adela used to get so mad when I was mistaken for her nephew. There’s a decade between every two of us. Adela’s forty, I’m thirty, Guia is twenty. Adela has been resurrecting things. She used to think this sort of stuff was hideous—you know, the old Sun Studio life-sizes in gorgeous frames. Had this taken down from our sala and stored away. She said it was vulgar and scared off her boy friends. This was just before the war; I was seven: Father only laughed. Father’s having the last laugh, too.”
“High, high camp,” said Etoy Banaag. “Boy, to hang a life-size pic of yourself in your house, you’d have to have a lot of nerve.”
“Which,” shrugged Jing Tuason, “we don’t have.”
“But we don’t call it no nerve,” said Etoy, “we call it understanding.”
“Guia Estiva!” Jing Tuason’s wife suddenly cried. “Why, we were in the same school, I was a couple of grades ahead, but we were on one judo team together. Oh, you’ll never guess where we last met. At a fortune-teller’s.”
Looking around at Mrs. Tuason, Sid noticed that Etoy Banaag’s wife, nestling in her husband’s arm on the seat they shared, had sat up.
“A fortune-teller,” repeated Jing Tuason’s wife, setting her plate down on the floor and licking her fingers. “I don’t know what had got into me. This was last year, Jing—when the baby didn’t seem to be going right inside me and I felt so rotten? Well, there was this dame told me about this fortune-teller—for my peace of mind, she said. No, not one of those crummy joints in Quiapo where they spit on your palm. This was high-class; I was told the clientele included eminent society matrons. You had to make an appointment, like at the dentist’s, so the clients wouldn’t bump into one another, I suppose. One’s shy at confessionals. But that day there was a mix-up. Guia and I bumped into each other. Our appointments were for the same time. I told Guia she could have it and scrammed. What a relief. I suppose Guia was doing it just for kicks. She was always rather far out, a kook.”
“You didn’t see the prophet himself?” asked Etoy Banaag’s wife.
“No, as I said I scrammed.”
“What did the place look like?” asked Sid. “The fortune-teller’s.”
“Like any reception hall in a plush office. Carpeted, air-conditioned. This was in that big new building in downtown Quiapo. High priest something, he called himself. Mystic Doctor of the East and all that jazz. Some fiesta-fair swami gone up in the world, I suppose.”
“Out of this world, out of this world!” groaned Jing Tuason, shaking his head at his wife.
“Out of this world,” said Etoy Banaag’s wife, in a careful voice, “could also mean from this world, in this world, of this world. The here and now, I mean—not anything fantastic.”
Sid became aware that a woman wearing what looked like a Moro costume—patadyong with a kind of sari—was interested in his group’s talk and had detached herself slightly from her own group to listen. She seemed to be trying to catch Mrs. Banaag’s eye.
“Oh, the here and now can be fantastic enough,” said Sid, raising his voice, on a hunch. “You folks should hear what happened to me at the airport this noon, and all because I waved a toothbrush.”
He was looking straight at Mrs. Banaag.
“A toothbrush,” she said, and waited. No expression at all. But Sid now found the woman in Moro dress at his elbow.
“A toothbrush, Mr. Estiva?”
“Oh, hello. Yes, just an old mangy green Prophylactic. Gather around, folks, and I’ll tell you the horrid story.”
“Yes, do that.” The woman smiled round at the group. “I must hear this. What happened, Mr. Estiva?”
Sid’s watchful eyes caught no flicker of cognizance between the woman and Mrs. Banaag. The latter’s blank look now included both him and the intruder.
“What happened? I got shoved a card: somebody’s schedule of appointments.”
“What an anticlimax!” laughed the intruder, rolling her eyes.
“Oh, there was more,” said Sid. “I was kidnapped, stripped, almost beaten up.”
“And all at the sign of a toothbrush,” chortled the woman.
“No,” said Sid. “At the Sign of the Milky Seed.”
This time he saw Mrs. Banaag start. But the sari’d woman at his side was still chortling.
“That sounds like a health bar,” she snickered, “or an ice-cream parlor.”
“It sounds to me,” said Sid, “like something else.”
“Hey, what’s all this!” cried Etoy Banaag, sitting up. His wife was doubling over, clasping her hands. The Jing Tuasons frankly stared.
“It sounds to me,” said the sari’d woman, “like a very shaggy dog story. And look what you’ve done, Mr. Estiva; reduced your audience to stitches.” She bent over Mrs. Banaag. “It’s not that bad, girl. I’ve heard worse.”
Mrs. Banaag lifted her face. The two women looked at each other, the intruder smiling as she straightened up and drew back, Mrs. Banaag staring.
“What’s with you, hon?” asked Etoy Banaag of his wife.
She coughed, shook her head.
“Too much to drink, I guess. Excuse me.” She smiled at the company. “I have to go to the little girl’s.”
She rose, sped headlong across the room, bumped against an edge of table, and sank to the floor. The sari’d woman was first at her side, lifting her head up, whispering in her ear. The chorus of squeals had brought Adela to the doorway.
“What’s the fun in here?” she asked eagerly, with her hostess smile.
Etoy Banaag had raised his wife to her feet and was now helping her toward the doorway, the sari’d woman hovering solicitously on the other side.
“Don’t tell me someone else has passed out!” laughed Adela, hurrying forward and enfolding both the Banaags in her arms.
Watching from in front of his father’s picture, Sid Estiva mused that Adela was of the North indeed: she never lost her head.
• • •
Santiago Ferrer, with jacket doffed and tie loosened, still looked as correct as when smiling attendance on his guests, the last pair of whom he had just seen to their car. Sid now found the courtliness focused on him. The hired bartender, as he folded up his tent on the piazza, was bidden to mix Mr. Estiva a nightcap, which the host himself carried to Sid in the living room.
“No, cuñao, I know little of your friends the Banaags. He teaches, writes a column for one of the weeklies, is said to be a fervent nationalist. She also teaches and, I suppose, follows her husband’s ideas.”
“How about that Moro lady?”
“But she is not a Moro lady, cuñao. She is a distinguished businesswoman, she runs a travel agency.”
Adela came in and shooed away the servants picking up plates and ashtrays from the floor.
“Santiago, sit down. Put away that drink, Isidro, and listen.”
“Are you going to scold me about the Banaags?”
“Goodness, why? I liked them. No, we have to talk about Guia.”
“My dear,” said her husband, “at this time of the night?”
“Tomorrow, she may have arrived. She’s in the provinces now, with that group of hers, evangelizing I suppose.”
“Let me tell him, my dear,” interrupted her husband, “what I told her the last time she was here.”
“Yes, do that.”
“I told her, if she really had a vocation, here was this community willing to accept her as postulant. I warned her that if she continued with this group of hers, which is not recognized by the Church, and I doubt it will ever be, she may find the door of every convent in this country closed to her. But your little sister, cuñao, is hard-headed. She believes this group of hers will in time win ecclesiastical approval, which is madness.”
“Why, what’s wrong with her group?”
Brother-in-law Santiago pressed thin lips together and darted eyes upward.
“Heaven forbid,” said he, humorously enough, “that I should ever speak against the Holy See. But it seems to me that the Vatican Council has only wrought confusion. At Mass now, nobody knows when to stand, when to kneel. Everything has been disarranged. Only yesterday a young man came to me at the bank; I almost fainted when I found out he was a priest: he was dressed in the style of a teen-ager. And with permission. Now what is happening here, I ask you.”
“Well, then, maybe Guia is right to hope.”
“Oh no, no, cuñao—with her group it is different. Yes, on the surface, it may look like one more of these modernizing movements. Making Christ meaningful to our times, relating the faith to the world of today. Yes, that is how they talk, her group. And they protest that theirs is not a formal order, not a congregation, not even a cofradia yet—merely an informal club of the devout. But such are the rumors about it that the ecclesiastical authorities have deemed it wise, though also informally, to conduct an investigation. We suspect this is not really a religious movement but a nationalist one. They have rented that old nunnery turned into a bodega in Intramuros and made it their headquarters. I visited it with the commission. They have a kind of chapel. The images there are like Igorot carvings, like primitive pagan art. I saw, let me tell you, a figure of the Virgin pregnant, like those figures dug up in Batangas and Mindoro.”
“I am not,” Sid laughed out loud, “shocked!”
“Wait, cuñao, wait. These people never applied for a chaplain, but we hear they are being served by a defrocked priest who sings a Mass to which they dance.”
“Dancing in church,” Sid was still shaking with laughter, “is not exactly new to Philippine Catholicism.”
“Do be serious, Isidro,” cried Adela. “Oh, all this is your fault. When Guia asked to have her own apartment I was for her staying under my roof but you sided with her.”
“She had turned eighteen.”
“She is my and your ward until she turns twenty-one and should be living with you or me.”
“Oh, don’t be such a fossil, Adela.”
“Well, look what has been happening since she went off on her own. One crazy thing after another. This weird New Christian group is just the latest. First there were those awful young writers, then a beatnik gang, then she went into advertising and all those media people, and afterward oh all for nationalism. And now religion. I do not for one minute believe she has any vocation. She just likes fads. I didn’t mind the other phases; she made do with her allowance, rarely pestered me for more. But this now is serious, this now is a crisis. That’s why I cabled you. And you’re to blame, Isidro—egging her on instead of trying to put some sense into her. Now what are we to do? Papa put us in charge of her. Are we to abdicate, declare her of age, turn over the estate to her as she now demands, though we know perfectly well she’ll only turn it over to that crazy sect of hers?”
“I’d have to talk to her first.”
“But she’s in the hands of adventurers, Isidro.”
“How did she get mixed up with them anyway?”
“In that world she has run off to, it was inevitable. That’s where all the queer birds fly: artists, radicals, beatniks, charlatans, and heaven knows what else. I may be a fossil but I didn’t interfere, though the things I heard. Let her live her own life, I told myself, as you bade me, but she’s not living it, she’s ruining it. Well, I do think this prodigal daughter has had a long enough holiday from the real world. Two years. She has had her fling. Now I am putting my foot down. She is not to dissipate her inheritance. She is to come back to this house and stay here, learn the duties of a woman, associate with normal folk, go out with nice boys, marry and have children and a home. Carlota Jones has long had her in mind for her eldest boy, and still does, despite this bohemian silliness, and I am for pushing the match. I can’t be at peace with my conscience till I’ve seen her settled down. She has always been more of a daughter than a sister to me.”
“My dear, not so fast,” put in her husband. “If the girl is going through a mystical phase the kind thing to do is let her get it out of her system. Which is why I advise putting her in a regular congregation. If the life is not for her she will get out fast enough and then it will be easier to marry her off.”
Guia, thought Sid, shouldn’t have happened to such a couple as the Ferrers. Looking round the room, he wondered if more than a party had laid it waste. But amid the disorder sat Adela and her husband, side by side on a sofa, alike faces turned to each other, sensibly and politely arguing: she for a quick marriage, he for a temporary veil. Sid smiled at the old-fashioned sense of their expedients, yet marveled that they could remain so practical in the glare of underworlds from which (or so he had heard that night from the party’s mothers) no home today was safe. At any moment might suddenly appear at the door, for children “of the best families,” a policeman with a warrant of arrest.
No sooner had he thought this than a maid came in to say a policeman was at the door, asking for Mr. Estiva. Brought in, the policeman admitted to having no warrant of arrest. Mr. Estiva was merely being “invited” to headquarters, to answer a few questions. “I’ll come with you,” said Santiago, already getting into his jacket. Sid stared as Adela, smiling hostess again, offered the policeman a saucer of olives.
“I’ll call up Attorney Arranz, Isidro, and send him after you,” she said.
“Do that,” said Sid before he could think.
In the police jeep he felt himself the Kafka hero, being borne to judgment for he knew not what crime. But I know what my crime is, thought Sid. That goddam toothbrush (what was happening now was, of course, its latest repercussion) had been waved as a banner of non-involvement. If he traveled without luggage it was because buying clothes at the other end was less fuss than opening up to Customs and explaining. If he lived abroad it was because being alien committed you to nothing local. You couldn’t read a newspaper at home without upping your blood pressure; abroad, newspapers read like anthropology. Even his job at the UN agency involved him in nothing, save in his group’s illusion of being useful: present as relief wherever the world hurt. But the benevolence was magic by remote control: papers moving from office to office, a figure in a report, a line on a graph. And at the other end the recipients of benevolence were statistics. Because he would bypass Customs he had traveled bearing only a toothbrush, had come home with no gifts for Adela and Guia, for kith and kin, and for that crime was now being harassed by the native gods of custom.
“Don’t say anything,” said brother-in-law Santiago when the jeep stopped at headquarters. “I’ll do the talking.”
The first thing Sid saw when he entered the police station was a frayed sombrero resting on knees: the old man of the white undershirt and khaki pants cut at the knees sat patiently on a bench, dignity still intact at that late hour in this criminal porch. Then he saw Mrs. Borja advancing on him, a Mrs. Borja smiling apologetically, as if this were still Adela’s party and she were coming in late.
“Sid, oh Sid . . . Hey, now I’ve seen you with your clothes on.”
“Not yet, these aren’t mine—what are you doing here?”
“Oh, Sid, I had to tell them where you were.”
“What’s it all about?”
“They haven’t told you?”
“No, nothing.”
“That taxi you took at the airport—the driver has been murdered.”
• • •
The driver had been shot from behind, in his taxi, at the wheel, when just about to drive away from that clearing in the woods of the proto-suburb. A constabulary patrol had come upon the body; the summoned police had found their way to Mang Ambo’s hut nearby and Mang Ambo had led them to Mrs. Borja.
“I think they rather thought,” laughed that lady, “I was a gangster’s moll, Sid. Yours.”
She and Sid, released from their all-night ordeal after giving statements and the promise to be available, stood beside the tragic taxi, in the taxi company’s yard. The taxi had been washed inside and out. Sid had searched the back seat in vain: the card was not there. Now they waited while an employee fetched the boys who had washed the car.
“Your homecoming hack, Sid.”
“No, my getaway car.”
“Toyota ’65. Jap invader number two.”
“I was trying to escape as usual.”
“Do we look unwashed: your crumpled baro, my crushed coat.”
“Because I didn’t follow through a kindly impulse—return that goddam card—a man died.”
“Oh, Sid, we had this all out at breakfast: it was because they had slipped something in your beer.”
“No, it’s like I told you: I don’t like fuss, getting involved.”
“Who does?”
“You are enjoying this, Sonya. You like a happening. I don’t. Not to me anyway. I’m not curious, not adventurous.”
“How about that young go-go for old things?”
“The safely dead past. Kicks from icons. Yeh, man, we dig. Hah. Daring of me, wasn’t it? Besides, that wasn’t me really, only my father in me. He was a vulgar adventurer, the kind they say battens on experience. If anything scared me off, it was the thought of him coming back. Like, now, in my sister Guia. I think she’s the only one of us who’s our father’s child.”
“We are all of us our fathers,” sighed Sonya Borja, “though we don’t know it.”
“My wife used to say I was like that Quaker who told his wife all the world was mad except him and her and he sometimes had his doubts about her. Now that wasn’t fair, as I tried to explain to my wife. But explaining was a mistake. After I had made it clear I didn’t object to other people’s being mad, she left me. She said it had become a strain: pretending Manhattan was a desert isle where only the two of us lived. Now she’s married to a Pinoy old-timer on the West Coast who raises horse feed.”
The employee came back to say the “washing” had found nothing.
“I always try not to be where the action is,” said Sid as he and Sonya walked out of the sunny, busy, dusty yard so heartlessly moving out its own traffic jams to the glut beyond, “so, now, I’m up to my neck in it.”
A greasy girl of about fifteen in shirt and denim pants suddenly blocked the sidewalk.
“Sir, ma’am, you are looking for something?” The accent was southern. “Maybe I found it.”
“Are you the washing?” asked Mrs. Borja.
“No, missis. I have a stall inside where they eat, the drivers. There at the back, where they wash the cars. Sometimes I look in the cars first, but not always, no—just to see was something forgotten. Sometimes a magazine, or a fallen coin. Very often, panties. Aie, por bida man guid, I would not touch those, no, not even if golden.”
“This taxi where the driver was shot—” began Sid.
“Yes, I looked inside but I saw nothing. Then I put my hand down the edge of the seat. Sometimes money drops in there. I found only waste paper. So I threw it away.”
“You threw it away.”
“Then I heard, sir, you were looking for something there. So I ran to where I had thrown it away.”
“Yes?”
“But they had swept the yard already.”
“Alas,” said Sid.
“This,” said Sonya, “is beginning to kill me.”
“So,” said the girl, “I ran to where they throw the garbage, and I searched and searched.” She paused, enjoying it, hands behind her back. “And I found what I had found.”
She held out a fist that opened to reveal a crumpled card. Sid picked it up and pulled it flat.
“Is that it, sir?”
“Yes, girl, this is it.”
The girl’s palm was still up. Sid glanced at Mrs. Borja. She laughed, opened her bag, fished out a peso that she clasped into the girl’s hand: “Thank you, Inday.”
In the coffee shop across the street they pondered the card together.
“My hunch is that they get at the women through a fortuneteller.”
“Milky seed . . . milky seed . . . Deck six . . .” mumbled Sonya.
“You getting warm?”
“And fortune-teller . . . Listen, Sid, there’s this prophet, and he’s supposed to cater to high society, who calls himself Melkizedek. Melki-zeed-dek.”
“Mrs. Banaag used that word: prophet.”
“And you said the other lady spoke of a big new building in Quiapo?”
“Deck six would mean a sixth floor. Are there many buildings now in downtown Quiapo six stories and over?”
“Only one that I know of, and right on Miranda.”
“Elementary, Dr. Watson. Shall we go?”
• • •
The elevator that took them to the sixth floor of that “big new building in Quiapo” surprised Sid by being an express. The process of elimination (all the other offices on that floor had names on their doors) brought them to Room 666, which had no name on the frosted-glass door, no lights inside.
“You wait here, Sid. I’ll get the building superintendent. He’ll open up for us. I’ve decorated at least two offices in this building.”
The superintendent garrulously opened up. Room 666, said he, had never had a name on the door, was leased to a Mrs. Cruz, who had moved out just the night before, leaving no forwarding address. Her people—to the annoyance, said the superintendent, of the watchmen—had spent the whole night emptying the suite. However, everything was in order. Mrs. Cruz had simply forfeited her rental deposit. The superintendent shrugged that, yes, Mrs. Cruz was most probably only a front; he had heard the real tenant was a magician.
The state of the suite—a reception hall and two inner offices—confirmed the hasty evacuation. The floor was littered with crushed newspapers and packing-case straw. But nothing had been left behind save one trash can into which someone had leaked on the ashes of burned papers.
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 girl 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.”
“Salem 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.”
“Yes, brat, you were a pain in the neck.”
“My young tears on your neck, silly. But you were a darling to baby me when you were a perfect baby yourself. When you went away it was like Father had died again.”
“I’m sorry I ditched you.”
“Whatever became of your writing?”
“Also ditched. Whatever became of your writing?”
“Rite of passage, brod. Like sharing that awful apartment in Cubao with this girl from the U.P. We called it Cockroach Farm.”
“The same girl you opened a bookshop with?”
“I don’t know what impelled us to. Yes, I do, too. This young writers’ crowd we were with, terrible, we couldn’t always be having them at the apartment, you know. The neighbors were square na square naman. Oh, perfect creeps. Always kicking about this and that. And in the middle of the night, too. Lacson her name was, my partner, Pomona Lacson, but we called her Lucky. So, the bookshop was called The Lucky Steve. Everybody called me Steve in that crowd. Short for Estiva. What do you know, we hadn’t been in business a week yet when here were those stupid cops raiding us. And in broad daylight. Pornography, they said. And Lucky and me only eighteen. I said to this officer, hey, first time I heard of minors corrupting a big grown man like you. Because he said he was so shocked. Lucky was wonderful, she has connections. Had the whole thing hushed up and we reopened. Though we had to junk half the stock. I think, do you know, that did it in, my Steve phase. No, it had been building up already. Like the time we attended this writers’ workshop and got kicked out when all we did, our crowd, we slept on the beach. Kicked out. The whole crowd. Just for sleeping. Imagine! And things like that. Well, anyway, the writing wasn’t going at all. Not mine nor my crowd’s. We’d all been published—a poem apiece, a story apiece. Rimbaud cum Joyce cum Kerouac and Angry Young. But I felt myself more and more on the outside looking in. At them. The Group. Young Writers. Which was dingy of me considering the crap I was guilty of, myself. But I felt they were just monkeying with words, and helling around, but pretending all the time this was being creative. I said to myself, I said, if I was going to hell around I might as well do it with people who didn’t have to pretend it was art for art’s sake, my ass. Now don’t be having ideas, Siddie. I was taking care of myself. Still intact virgin and all that. Though there was a time or two, like when the bookshop was flopping and we rented the upstairs to roomers, when I almost gave. Because they were beginning to think I must be lesbian or something and there was this Pakistani painter renting an upstairs room, not bad-looking but very secretive about the stuff he did. So I went up there one day prepared to give myself to him. I knocked, he opened, I swayed in—’naks, real sexy—but one look at his paintings on the walls and, bo-rother, I knew if I was going to be deflowered it wasn’t going to be by anyone that corny.”
“So what followed?”
“The nagwawala babies, going for lost. The Young Barbarians, Kamikaze, target society. Not the Group now but the Barkada. You know: scooters and motors, drag races, combos, stomping in movie houses at rock-’n’-roll films and squealing in chorus at the Coliseum at pop singers, jam sessions with gin and dog on the side, sometimes nude swimming in somebody’s pool if their olds were away, oftener a gang rumble—the whole teenage routine.”
“And no longer intact.”
“Still most wonderfully intact, though it took some work. I was Ginny to my barkada, Stowaway Ginny, because I lived out. Took a pad with this coed I didn’t even know was a call girl, bless my innocence. The Ginny phase didn’t last very long, you know.”
“Too old for that sort of thing?”
“I was still eighteen, what are you, but, yes, something like that. They looked like babies. And another thing: I find I tend to be zany among squares, square among zanies. Now why is that? In school I was the Compleat Kalog. But afterward, in New York, where everybody tries to be so kooky, you said I was a square, remember? The rebound was to the lit’ry bohemians—but I still couldn’t let myself go. Not all the way. They said it was the convent school in me. Nerts. They couldn’t turn me on. But I wanted so to let go it shot me right into the teen-age jungle. Now that was better really. Basic. Down to basic things. Food, drink, sex, action. The primitive. And you begin to see everything else, especially laws and churches and reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic, as just the red tape that’s messing up life and making people so sick. Excess baggage. Often, in rumbles, I’d get a feeling all this teen-age violence would finally set off one global explosion hurling out all that trash. The world would be flat afterward but what was left of it could start clean. Now that was a good cool feeling. Made you feel dedicated. Like the feeling you get when the barkada says let’s go there and you go, or says let’s do this and you do. You’ve no will of your own, you’re just part of something on the move. Don’t you some times want to be that, Sid?”
“Then why didn’t you stay with it?”
“Because it was bogus, too, like the lit’ry life as a sleeping around. This barkada of mine, they were basic, they were primitive, they could afford not to be bothered about anything except eating and drinking, sex and action, but only because they had allowances. And whenever they got into trouble they fell back on mommy and daddy. They said they wanted to be free, hah—their freedom was just freeloading. And how can you stage a strike that’s subsidized by the company? That’s when I asked Adela to stop my allowance. I had begun to feel like a crook. So, goodbye to Ginny, Stowaway Ginny. I got this job with an ad agency, moved in with some media girls, got to know the executive-shirt boys.”
“If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em.”
“But I did show I could do okay copy for the rat race: style-wise, market-wise, offbeat approach-wise.”
“And got rechristened once again?”
“Gigi this time. You should have seen Gigi’s layout. Pink-rimmed eyeglasses, a pouf, linen suits, a rolled umbrella, an attaché case. Cocktails now, instead of gin and dog. Night- club-hopping instead of motorcycling in a pack up to Baguio on the spur of the moment in the middle of the night. But it was good to be able to talk again. This new crowd I was with was with it, whichever it was in: hot jazz, new-wave films, Salinger, the young ones. I felt queer, though, talking about teen-agers instead of being one. Talking. That was a talking crowd. Compulsive punners to a man, to a corporate man.”
“But Madison Avenue still wasn’t Damascus.”
“Know what, Sid—I never did figure it out. There I was so anxious to be sincere, ready to wrench my soul if need be to Believe in the Product. But nobody did. Not even in what they said about it. If you praised someone for a catchy slogan he’d say: ‘Yes, it’s so bad it’s good.’ And all the time all this murderous jostling for position but pretending all the time all they really wanted was to write the Great Filipino Novel. My God, there must have been 359 books in progress in this agency I was with, everything from epic poems to exposés of the Filipino soul. They were the least of the status symbols there but they were supposed to keep the package honest. This guy I was going around with, a soft-sell poet wanting to become a high-pressure executive, he said the copy he did was really a blow against the Establishment. He said the crap he produced helped swell the crap being rammed down the public’s throat that at last would have to come out, in one big violent throw-up. A revolutionary, what do you know. But all the time wanting oh most pitifully to make it to account executive—and a house in San Lorenzo with an Impala in the garage.”
“Any chance of him getting there?”
“All he has got so far is an ulcer.”
“And what did you get?”
“I got confused, very. You have to be schizoid to last in there, I think. Even the punning’s their urge to split up meaning. I worked mine off by beginning to march with the nationalists, because they were at least trying to integrate meaning. Before I knew it I was a card-holding member of the KKKs: Kami’y Kilusang Kabataan.”
“This isn’t Gigi anymore.”
“No, Gigi had become a split personality and I let her lie where she dropped. For the nationalists I was Guiang: hair in a knot, native fabrics, much poring over Rizal and Recto, demonstrations in front of Congress and the U.S. embassy, the protest marches to American bases, Go Home Yankee, and Come Home Filipino. The pre-Hispanic thing.”
“Guiang sounds close.”
“But not close enough. Still not radical enough for me. I wanted to go back, not just look back in anger, like Guiang and her crowd. College professors, parlor pinks, magazine writers, proletarian poets, rich boys with a conscience and shrewd fathers. Back to native roots, they said, and was I rarin’ to go. But every time we started off, where we always ended up was at the American embassy or the American bases or some American firm. I got to thinking the way back to native roots must be through Washington, D.C. And some of them, poor finks, they marched Yankee-ward so often they finally stopped there. Like this poet who was almost my b.f.—always T-shirted and denim’d, unwashed and unbarbered, and in a fury—whom I started a fund for so he could write his angry proletarian poems. Next thing we knew, he was with this American firm. Last time I saw him, he was in a white, white suit, would you believe it, and a silk tie yet, a crewcut yet, but still doing the Angry Young Man bit as he passed cigarettes around in a gold-plated case. Oh, that was sad. I felt it was the PRO world all over again. You could stay honest doing crap as long as you were the first one to admit it was crap and you were really meaning it against the Establishment. Oh, too sad. And afterward—that boy did break my heart, Siddie—Guiang with her Marikina shoes and Tondo-boy slang was just window dressing. She had to be swept away, too.”
“Steve, Ginny, Gigi, Guiang. Down the hatch. And now Sister Guia.”
“Yes.”
“On the real road to Damascus.”
“Yes indeed.”
“But what got you on that track?”
“Magic.”
“The Prophet Melkizedek?”
She sat up and passed palms along the sides of her head.
“Here we are,” she said, “at Salem House.”
• • •
The door, one step up from the street, opened into a narrow hall, dark save for a flame floating in oil in a coconut shell, flickering before the figure that had shocked Santiago: an Igorot-style wooden carving of the Virgin pregnant, asquat on her haunches, halo of stars round her head. The rude face stared from the dusk of a niche in the side wall.
Sid paused just beyond the door, waiting for the girls to switch on a light, but they glanced back at him in wonder.
“Haven’t you got electricity?”
“Oh, we do, Mr. Estiva, but we prefer candle and oil, for atmosphere.”
“Siddie, you’re not afraid of the dark!”
He advanced to the middle of the stone-flagged room. It was mostly bare but in the winking twilight he could make out a gallenera bench, a couple of round inlaid tables with clusters of high-backed chairs, and what looked like part of an old retablo now turned into a bookshelf.
“This was the nuns’ chapel,” explained Sister Juana. “We have made it our common room. That wall where the altar stood separated the sacristy and the chaplain’s quarters from the nunnery proper, which was behind this side wall. When this was a bodega, after the war, they tore up what used to be the nuns’ choir to make a passage into the interior.”
Sid followed the girls through the short passage and emerged into a small square courtyard surrounded on all four sides by the restored edifice, of two stories, the upper story ajutting over the lower one to form a roof for the walk. From each of the four posts at the corners burned a torch leaning from a strap.
“This was the cloister,” said Sister Juana. “The arches were completely destroyed during the war but we have been able to rehabilitate the cells.”
She waved at the doors that lined the square.
“Come and see my cell,” said Guia.
She opened a door and Sid peered in over her shoulder. An oil lamp on a cheap wooden chest revealed a bamboo papag, a stool, a small high window without bars.
“How many of you stay here?”
“Oh, usually not more than half a dozen at a time; we’re usually on the road. We’re growing fast, I think, but we’re still not a movement of hundreds.”
“And what’s beyond the cloister?”
“Come, I’ll show you.”
One door opened into a narrow hallway with another door at the end. Sister Juana unbolted the door and they stepped out into an angle of open space, where a cluster of ruins jagged the moonlight. Beyond darkened a high wall.
“This is how the nunnery must have looked after the war,” said Sister Juana. “The nuns’ compound was in the shape of a triangle, with the longest side parallel to the city walls. This is the upper angle. The original complex must have extended up to here and you can see that whatever building stood here must have enclosed a small circular courtyard.”
“Look what curious ruins the war left,” said Guia.
Nothing remained of whatever building had stood here save parts of its wall round the courtyard. Six or seven fragments of this wall, unequal in height but still massive though long moldering and pillaged by weed and shrub, stood in a ring, indicating the shape of the courtyard. Sid walked up to the ring of ruins and stood in a gap between two boulders, gazing into the moonlit circle. Guia and Sister Juana appeared in other gaps in the ring.
“We think,” said Sister Juana, “the nuns did their washing here. There must have been a well or pool in the center of this courtyard.”
“What’s that in the middle now—a barbecue pit?”
“No, you silly,” giggled Guia. “Those are adobe blocks we found lying about and didn’t have the heart to throw away. They must be centuries old. So we piled them up into a kind of table there.”
Sid walked up to the pile. Four longish slabs had been set side by side and another layer of four slabs had been laid crosswise upon them.
“The altar stone?” he called out.
“Well, why not?” laughed Sister Juana. “If we ever get permission to hold the sacrifice of the Mass here.”
Standing before the adobe pile, Sid looked up and saw a small light in the boulder directly across. As he approached it he noticed that this remnant of wall had been cleaned of weed and shrub. There had obviously been a tall window in this part of the wall but the hollow was now enclosed by a rounded metal door, silvery in the moonlight. A flame deep in a tall glass burned before the shut door and on the ledge were scattered flowers, a sheaf of grain.
Sid glanced around, skyward, and found Guia and Sister Juana standing behind him.
“It faces east,” he said.
“A Philippine superstition,” said Sister Juana. “Doors and stairs must face east.”
“What is this a door to?”
“Our great devotion. Corpus Christi.”
“The Sacrament?”
“No, just an image, Mr. Estiva.”
“But it’s shut up like a tabernacle.”
“Not everybody is ready to understand.”
“Oh, primitive statuary.”
“And you don’t find that shocking.”
“Can you open it up for me?”
“No, I don’t have the keys.”
“Your great devotion.”
“Mr. Estiva, shall we go in now?”
“What do you call it?”
“We try not to call anything by name, Mr. Estiva. The basic terms have been so corrupted.”
“Then when do you celebrate it?”
Sister Juana merely shrugged but Guia spoke up.
“New Year’s Day, you donkey. Now shut up and let’s go.”
“Why New Year’s Day? That’s not liturgical. Oh yes, it is. Feast of the Circumcision.”
“And you’re cordially invited to our patronal festivities, donkey. Now let’s go in. I’m cold.”
Sid turned to follow the girls but stopped, seeing something standing in shadow in a gap in the ruins. As he stared at it the shadow moved, emerged, crossed the ring of stone—walking with an almost imperceptible limp—and stood before him: a tall man with long hair in a black suit. Sister Juana had hurried back.
“Father Melchor, Mr. Estiva.”
Sid glanced at the man’s throat: he was wearing an ordinary tie, not a Roman collar.
“Are you a priest, Father?”
The man smiled and bowed.
“But not a practicing one, Mr. Estiva.”
“Oh, you’re the—”
“—defrocked priest your brother-in-law mentioned?”
“Father Melchor,” said Guia, drawing nearer, “was never defrocked, as we tried to explain to Santiago, who’s another hopeless donkey.”
Not wanting to, Sid found himself meeting the man’s eyes. He looked between forty and fifty, very brown, with competitive shoulders and a face deep in ambush in the coarse locks that, hardly graying, dangled to his shoulders. But no Beatles bangs curtained the forehead to hide the birthmark there: a slight swell of skin like a welt, darkly purple, the shape rather like a tree aslant. His voice, pitched low, seemed to be muffling thunder.
“It’s a long story, Mr. Estiva. I was ordained in China. I had gone there as a lay brother of this order I had joined, but my superiors thought it fit, despite certain physical defects of mine, to elevate me to the priesthood. I was originally in Fookien province but had been sent to Tibet on a mission and there I found myself stranded during the revolt and the change in regime. Unable to join my colleagues, I stayed where I was, serving in the local parish, until I was permitted to leave the county two years ago. When I arrived in Hong Kong I heard that I was under a cloud for having served with the Church in China after it broke with Rome, and that my order had dropped me. I therefore thought it wise when I came back to the Philippines not to raise the question of my status but to return as a simple layman.”
“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 were 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.
“As I said, his end is as mysterious as his beginning. One day he was there, the next day he was not. But many of those who were in his New Jerusalem believed all their lives that he would return one day and call them back to his kingdom.
“And now I come to the serious part of my story. Two years ago, a man came to visit me, here in this room. That this visitor of mine and the mysterious Baltazar, whom I knew as God when a boy, are the same person, I have not the slightest doubt. He looked exactly as I remembered him: the flowing mane, the slight limp, and that fire on the brow. Ah, but it was I now who was older than he!
“He said he had come back as he promised, under another name, Melkizedek, to start the rebuilding of his kingdom. Would I join him again? I tell you, if I were not crippled, I would have stood up that instant and followed him. But all I could do was try to remember for him where this or that survivor of the New Jerusalem had last been heard from. He thanked me and left. He has not come back. But I hear about him. I hear he has been in the provinces tracking down the children or grandchildren of those who were his followers and that many of these young ones, for whom, of course, he is a family legend, are joining him. In what? A new uprising? A new Kingdom? That, I cannot tell. But sometimes, as I sit here musing, I wonder if they are to come back, truly, again: the great days, the Revolution—and how I wish I were young again!”
• • •
“Dotage?” asked Sid, on the way to their next stop: the friar order Father Melchor had claimed.
“Not dotage,” said Sonya. “Exultant nostalgia.”
“Which an impostor took advantage of.”
“An impostor, yes, I suppose, or we’d have to posit a man who’s over a hundred years old and looks forty.”
“What would the friars say of this?”
“An imposture!” said Fray Calezón, who was young, Spanish and had a sheaf of yellowing documents on his desk. “An imposture, Mr. Estiva. I asked for these papers after you telephoned me. We had been gathering them since we heard that this Father Melchor claims to have been of our order. Yes, we had a Father Melchor, but these papers will prove that he could not be this impostor going under his name. No, impossible. Our Father Melchor lived toward the end of the eighteenth century. Look, there’s the exact date of his entrance into our order: 6 January 1776. That would explain why he took the name Melchor de la Epifania.
“Let me draw your attention to the notations on the deed, which indicate considerable correspondence on this matter. The reason was that it was rather extraordinary: this Melchor was an indigene—or, as they said then, an Indio, possibly the first to be admitted into our order. Here’s a letter from the prior at that time of our house in Pangasinan. You can see he has little information on this Melchor’s origins, no information save that he was attached to our house in Pangasinan, evidently as the personal servant of one of the fathers there, the procurator.
“When this father was assigned to our mission in Fookien he urged that Melchor be sent too, because he had shown such industry and intelligence. It was finally arranged that Melchor was to be admitted into our order as a lay brother and sent to China.
“These three documents are the pertinent reports from China, several years later, recommending that Brother Melchor be ordained priest and given full missionary scope, having shown a talent for it. The corresponding answers have, alas, been lost, but again we can deduce considerable debate. Here, read this paragraph where our men in Fookien argue for a dispensation in behalf of Brother Melchor. A dispensation was necessary, not for lack of training—apparently, Brother Melchor had already taken Latin, philosophy, and theology—but for physical reasons. Brother Melchor was a bit lame and he had an ugly birthmark on the forehead. Our rules forbid the ordination of any candidate with ugly physical features. The dispensation was granted and Brother Melchor became Father Melchor, in 1796. After this the record breaks off. All we could find is this report from Indo-China in 1800, where there is mention of the ‘Melchor scandal.’ Apparently, Father Melchor had disappeared in Tibet, after joining an esoteric Buddhist sect there.
“Here you have the documents before you, Mr. Estiva. On such evidence what else can you conclude save that this man who claims to be the Father Melchor of our order is an impostor? Unless he can prove he is over 200 years old! Yes, yes, we have heard of the limp and the birthmark. But those can be faked. Although we are a bit curious to know how he learned about them. As far as we know, all the information about the real Father Melchor is in these documents; and they are, how do you say, or used to be, ‘classified information.’
“But now I still have this book before me. It’s one of the volumes of the history of our order in the Philippines. This is personal research now. You can see I want to give you, how do you say, ‘all the angles.’ When I was told to search for these papers on Father Melchor, the description of him in one of the documents I found—about the limp and the birthmark—rang, as you say, a bell. I had read about them before—but where? I thought back and thought back and finally remembered where: in Avila, at the old convent, while preparing for the Philippines by studying the history of our order here. So I reread the history and located the passage—or, rather, passages.
“Here, I have the first one marked in the book. Read it. Fantastic, no? Yes. Our order was, but not immediately, in charge of evangelizing the Central Plain. You can see whoever was before us did not do a thorough job. There were still these stubborn pockets of paganism. That passage refers to what must have been a very stubborn resistance on the part of the old religion. But note the description of the leader of the uprising: he is a high priest of the old cult, he wears his hair long and dresses in the manner of women, he limps a bit, and he has this remarkable mark on the forehead, which his followers, mostly women, take for a sign of godhood. They believe he has been touched by God—that is, struck by lightning. This resistance to Christianity in the Central Plain—and it was an armed resistance—is suppressed; but unfortunately we are not told what happened to that stubborn high priest with the god mark. This is in the late 1500s, practically toward the end of the Conquista—or should I use that word. But there is more. Now turn the pages to the next mark I have put.
“We are now in the 1690s, a century later. Yes, that passage I have underlined. Can you believe it? Here we have another uprising, but this time not of pagans resisting Christianity but of Christians regressing to paganism. The thing here is the leader, a Christian by the name of Gaspar who claims he has all along been a high priest of the old cults. From the evidence, we must assume that the old worship had been continuing all the time, but underground, like a guerrilla movement. This high priest Gaspar declares that the time has come to restore his kingdom, and we have this revolt, again in the Central Plain—oh, quite an uprising. But note the description of the leader. Again he has long hair, he limps, he has a mark on the forehead. The good father who wrote the history, he does not know what to think of the coincidence, save that it must be the work of the devil. The Gaspar uprising is suppressed. His lieutenants are caught and executed, but again we are not told what happened to the high priest who would be king again. Gaspar. King that was and king to be. The ‘once and future king’—that is the term, no? More, there is this puzzled note that nothing seems to be known of his origins.
“What are we to assume from all this? One: that there has been a series of impostors copying the message and the appearance of a pagan original, and with a predilection for the names of the Three Kings: Melchor, Gaspar, Baltazar. Or two: that there is a man now among us who must be four centuries old: this man who poses as Father Melchor and leads a group that is beginning to call itself the New Salem. Yes, we have heard the rumor that this man also poses as a prophet under the name Melkizedek. One can see the connection he would establish.
“The Melchizedek in the Bible is also priest and king and is said to have had no father and no mother. What do we know of him? He simply suddenly appears in Genesis offering bread and wine, and blessing Abraham. And yet he has a rich legend. He is said to have been in charge of the body of our Father Adam, buried in a cave in Hebron. The Talmud mentions a sect of Melchizedekians who worshipped Adam’s body. Adam is the only other character in the Bible who had neither father nor mother.
“Ah, all this fascinates me. My Gothicism, it is fearful. I was in Sta. Ana when they excavated in the church there and as I watched the artifacts being unearthed my hair stood up. A Christian church standing on a pagan burial site. Heathenism emerging from consecrated ground. How do we know what else we resurrect, what else we bring back? This man who calls himself now Melkizedek, now Melchor—is he an impostor or a pagan priest of old come back across the ages? A preposterous question, no? But there are more things in heaven and earth, as your Shakespeare said. Oh, he is not your Shakespeare? Well, anyway, I like the wit of this impostor. Really audacious. Because I know what line in the Bible he is acting out. It is an awesome line, the most mysterious, I think, in Scripture:
“Thou art a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek.”
• • •
The office that afternoon was an elegant igloo after the journeys in the heat of the day. This new heart of Makati was a transplant of American downtown—from tree-lined curb to penthouse’d roof—but glittered anomalously between the rank provincial decay of Manila and the lordly tin roofs of the suburbs.
Guia, in jeans and plaid, was waiting in an inner room that had drapes at the windows and a shoe-deep carpet on the floor.
“The three tables are one for you, one for Adela, and this one is mine. We should come here oftener, Sid. That side door is the executive washroom, strictly private, but it connects with Santiago’s office on the other side. We shouldn’t let him do all the work for us; all we do is collect dividendazos. And where have you been? You said four. What are all those packages?”
“Just some items I picked up. Mrs. Borja took me around the bookstores.”
“What’s up between you and this Mrs. Borja? Adela is titillated.”
“Did you bring the data?”
“Here in this folder. Aims and procedures, statistics—all the worldly information about us Christniks.”
“Drop the cool, sis. I’m on to your group’s nik.”
“Are you, Sid?”
Having dumped bundles on a table, he crossed over to the table she sat at and leaned over it, palms propped on the polished wood.
“And,” said he, “like Adela I am putting my foot down.”
She swiveled back and forth on the chair and pretended to be jawing away at a wad of gum.
“Drop the heavy, brod. What bugs you?”
“Your new gospel. Only it’s the oldest one in the world.”
“Yes.”
“Yes? Just like that?”
“If you expect me to deliver an apologia—”
“Shouldn’t you try to convert me?”
“I can’t think of anyone who needs it more. Except Adela.”
He straightened up.
“Now what is that supposed to mean?”
She sprang up from the chair and strode to the middle of the room, arms hugging each other.
“Oh, don’t be so prissy. Just what in this bothers you, Sid? You’re not a prude.”
“I’m not that alienated either.”
“Alienated. Man, are you way off. This is for bringing back people.”
“All shame burned out of them.”
“But that’s only where you start from.”
“I’ll bet.”
She was standing still, staring, parted lips breathless. Then she ran toward him.
“Oh Sid, Sid, you’ve got to understand! You’re the one outsider I had hoped would understand.”
“But you wouldn’t even show me your god.”
“Oh, is it only that that’s worrying you? An image?”
“In religion there’s no such thing as only an image or only a symbol.”
“Yes, I know; but only when you know what it means.”
“Anybody can be trained to find the most outrageous things meaningful.”
“Outrageous. Ha, ha. The first Christians thought it outrageous of God to be born a baby, in a cattle shed, among animals.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
“And that’s why it’s no longer shocking to you. And that’s why there always has to be a new idea of God so different from the old one it’s shocking.”
“Your image?”
“You’re shocked, aren’t you, just by the idea of it, without even having seen it?”
“Oh, I’ve seen it. Not there in Salem House, but I’ve seen it. I have been around. I saw it in India, in the Levantine; I saw it in Greece and Italy; I saw it in Mexico. It’s the oldest image of God.”
“But so old, so forgotten, so carefully shoved back by civilization, it now emerges as something completely new.”
“Because outrageous? But I shouldn’t be outraged, should I, unless I’m sick? All things clean save to such as think dirty. . . . Oh, for God’s sake, Guia!”
“Yes, Sid. For God’s sake. We don’t claim to have found a new gimmick. This is the longest tradition in Christianity: presenting a new image of Jesus. The babe in the manger. The suffering servant. The risen victor. And all these images were found shocking in their time. How many centuries before anybody dared put up for adoration that mangled dying body on the cross? A scandal to the classic world, but how it sent the medievals. Or take the Sacred Heart. Rather corny now, I’m afraid: a sentimental Jesus for a sentimental age. But when the idea was first broached, what an outcry of horror. How could God’s love be represented by a physical organ? And the pioneers of the devotion had to claim that Christ himself had told them that the idea of the Sacred Heart had been reserved for a late, late age of the world when the world’s heart had grown cold. It turns out they were being optimistic. We’re in a later, later age, with a colder, colder heart. We have need of a new Christ we can relate to.”
“Christ as hip turned on.”
“The carnal Christ. Why not? Take the fig leaf off the Incarnation so we can see the man hid by 2,000 years of shame. All we’re trying to do is restore to worship what was always central to it before ascetics and puritans drove it out as unclean. How else can we now express Christ as being on the side of life? And if it was all right to worship his heart, why not some other part of his body?”
“Decorum forbids.”
“Decorum has been the death of God.”
“Decorum, young lady, is what you’re going back to, like it or not. I’m giving you twenty-four hours to pack your things, say your goodbyes to Salem House, and return to Adela’s. I’m speaking as your legal guardian.”
She turned away from him, turned her back on him.
“I’m not a young lady, Sid, and it’s not decorum you’re sending me back to. It’s death. Don’t you know why I had to flee from that house? Because it’s sick. The very air is so unhealthy I had to burst out of there to breathe.”
“Oh, come now, sis. I know Santiago and Adela are squares, but they’re good decent squares.”
She looked round at him over a shoulder.
“What a withdrawn chap you are, Sid. So you don’t know about them? After their one child, he made a vow of chastity and she had to agree to it. It couldn’t have been too hard on her then, she was too busy social-climbing. But now she has got everything she wants, what she hasn’t got is making a sickness inside her. It’s hard on her now, you can see it. Have you noticed how more like Father she looks as she grows older? And Father never was easy to keep down. Oh, I’m not hinting she cheats, or he neither. I know they both behave—and that’s what’s so terrible. Whatever they’re respectively trying to keep down makes that house fester. Even their son prefers boarding school.”
“A man and his wife have the right to make their own private arrangements.”
“But it’s twisting them—or her anyway; he has money to fondle. After I took an apartment, there were these mysterious telephone calls at odd hours of the night. Or I’d see a car parked across the street. I only knew it was her when the family next door told me she paid them to use the room next to my wall. And wherever I have moved I have felt her hovering.”
“Isn’t that natural? She was trying to keep an eye on you.”
“No, she craved a taste of my life at second-hand. I was sore at first, until I thought of the loneliness that must have driven her to that.”
“This doesn’t change anything.”
“I am to go back there?”
“Right away. Then you’re coming with me to New York, where you can either stay in my flat or have one of your own.”
She still had her back to him. He took her by the shoulders and gently swung her around. Her head was bowed.
“Guia baby, don’t be like that, we’ll have fun, it’ll be like old times again. Listen, we’ll go biking in Central Park.”
She rested a quiet cheek on his breast.
“Give me until tomorrow night,” she said.
• • •
After Guia had gone—Sister Juana came to fetch her—Sid rang up Adela’s. A maid answered. The señora was dining out; Don Santiago was not expected back till the following day. Sid left word that he was to be contacted at Mrs. Borja’s.
Then he went through Guia’s folder and the books he had bought, mostly history and anthropology, until an employee poked a head in at the door. All the staff had left; would Mr. Estiva be staying longer?
“You go on home, too,” said Sid. “I’ll close up.”
Out in the corridor, silent now and deserted, he paused to recall which way one turned for the elevators. As he tentatively walked down one hall a door opened and he was yanked in. He was in a dim room, between two familiar figures: the black-jacketed goons who had stripped him in the clearing.
“The boss,” said one of them, “wants to see you, pare.”
“Do I keep my clothes this time?”
“Abah, he’s wise to us already,” said the other, finger on Sid’s back steering him toward another door. He was shoved in and the door pulled shut behind him.
This second room was lit only by a lamp near the door. As Sid looked around a form emerged from the shadows: black suit, flowing hair, gleaming mark on the forehead—Father Melchor.
“Forgive me, Mr. Estiva, for compelling your presence here, but have no fear, you will suffer no harm. I merely wish to talk to you.”
“And give me back my things, I hope.”
“Surely. But not now. We were in such a hurry my men did not think to bring them along.”
“Some religion you have. Using goons and blackmailing women.”
“And did they not use violence and women to drive us out? Why should we not use the same means to come back? I am not one of your moralists, Mr. Estiva, who so naively believe that the end is shaped by the means. The end is shaped only by success. Whatever wins is right.”
“I see. Smuggle back the pagan in Christian disguise. Use Christianity to restore paganism.”
“They used the ground of our cults to implant their faith.”
“And deluding young girls with all this talk of a new image of Christ when it’s really back to the heathen.”
“Deluding—tch, tch, Mr. Estiva. You know that’s not so. The god is worshipped, the true god. Does it matter if we call him Baal or Bathala, Priapus or Christ? What is the point of that passage in the Bible where Abraham and Melchizedek worshipped together? Melchizedek invoked his heathen god El or Zaduk; Abraham prayed to Yahweh. But the Bible makes no distinction between the deities, calling Melchizedek, too, a ‘priest of the most high God.’ And when St. Paul placed Christ himself in the line of Melchizedek, was this not a recognition that the pagan priesthood was resumed in Christ, that the old cults were being continued in the new faith? Abraham had already made such a recognition: he paid a tithe to the pagan high priest Melchizedek. It didn’t matter to Abraham who Melchizedek was or in what name he worshipped God.”
“And it doesn’t matter either who you are?”
“Yes, I hear you have been making inquiries. No, Mr. Estiva, I don’t think it matters. What mattered to Abraham was that Melchizedek was on his side. The important thing here is that I am on your side.”
“My side!”
“You are of those who called me back.”
“I don’t think I ever went that far back.”
“Ah, Mr. Estiva, if you go back at all it’s impossible to set a limit: up to this point and no farther. If you dig up one grave you have also unlocked the ones that lie below. You’ve heard of the diggings during the Renaissance: how it was feared that with the resurrection of their vessels and icons the old gods that had gone underground had surfaced again?”
“And you think that’s happening here now?”
“Oh, I don’t pretend to be one of the old gods. Merely to be in their service—as you are, though you may refuse to admit it. And as your sister will be, when she has gone beyond the Christian image and learns by herself what is the question that must be asked: the name of the god she worships. It will be her illumination. Therefore, I ask you not to block her path.”
“My sister is leaving your gang, is leaving the country.”
“Then I must warn you, Mr. Estiva, that you are invoking forces that are without mercy.”
“I hope quite soon to meet those forces, across a police desk.”
“Very well, Mr. Estiva, I have warned you. It is all I can do. If you and yours move, so will the furies. My men will show you out. The elevators are at the next bend of the hall. And if you think to raise the alarm I advise you to save yourself the trouble. We will not be here when whoever you call arrives.”
• • •
Supper was laid on the marble table on Sonya’s piazza, somewhat to Sid’s surprise.
“I thought I was taking you out?”
She limply grimaced.
“Some other time . . . Not in the mood.”
She was in a sleeveless yellow blouse and black palazzo pants, and from her ears dangled concentric gold triangles. He found his eyes following their swing along her neck. They ate to the light of candles in tiny glass lamps; she ate listlessly, an elbow on the table.
“Tired, Sonya?”
“I did my Christmas shopping after we parted.”
“And cooked all this.”
“It’s my maids’ day out.”
He felt that they were alone within layers of wall—the high walls that enclosed her lawn; the still higher and discreetly blind but whispering walls of the motels roundabout, where air-conditioning eared the mock-adobe with eave after eave of rumor.
“The candles,” he said, watching their glint on her earrings, “are proper tonight.”
“December 21?”
“The eve of the winter solstice.”
“No. Bonfires, I think.”
“But candles too. That’s why we have the Christmas lantern.”
He was now watching the shadows the earrings danced with on her neck.
“Tonight the sun god dies and is born again,” he said.
“So they light bonfires?”
“To help him warm up.”
She shivered and spread fingers over her naked golden arms.
“It is getting chilly,” she said “—but why feast the sun’s dying?”
“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
“A rage of food, drink, fire?”
“And love too, and love especially. It was the supreme magic, the magic to ensure that the sun would burn again.”
They were looking not at each other but into their glasses of chianti.
She said, after their silence and a bit of wine: “Imagine all that, when they must have thought it the end of the world.”
“The late late show.”
“Man’s bravado spirit, and bravado from the start. Tell you what, Sid—”
“Let’s celebrate the bravado?”
“And help the sun be born again. There’s that pile of leaves and trash on the lawn.”
Kneeling to the pile, he thrust a kindled rag into it, then settled back on the grass beside her and took her in his arms. The fire grew slowly, the heart of flame burning buried by itself, yielding a coiled smoke as it slowly steadily dwindled, almost on the wane, only a smoldering, before it began to spread, gleaming into a line here, leaping into a burst of sparks there, the traveling tongues that swayed toward each other seeming to yearn for each other and for that heart of heat now swelling to include them too, now glowing into a furnace round which the darting sparks, shattering, multiplied, the thicker smoke pushing in between brightening as, let loose, it uncoiled, unrolled, arose, rippling now from one blaze, one bush on fire, one total incandescence that rose, rushed, rustled, roared, raged, until, at last, finally fluently flowering, oh, oh, the burst body of it broke free, in a fountain of fire springing up to the skies; and they clung fast to each other, shuddering to the ascent.
Later that night, waking up in her bed, he saw a redness at her window that said the bonfire still burned, though more gently now, as if because they slept; but becoming aware that, awake, too, she, too, lay watching that glow at the window, he spoke her name and, needing no other word, turning as one, they fell on each other’s flesh in gluttony.
When he next stirred, the window stood dark, but her body was a darker shape before it. She glanced around, sensing his awakeness.
“Don’t you want to get up and watch the newborn sun rising? After all, we did help it.”
Naked together at the window, they saw the first edge of sun above the roof of the Taj Mahal Motel.
“We weren’t the only ones helping it,” she smiled.
“Come back, Sonya, come back.”
“It still needs helping?”
“It’s only a baby sun yet.”
After breakfast he had a taxi called. Sonya seemed to have lost her bravura, was again as listless as when he had arrived the night before, and breakfasted with one elbow on the table, the golden triangles swinging from her ears.
He said: “I thought it was the man who was tristis post coitum?”
“Last night always seems last year the morning after.”
“It’s still around three a.m. to me.”
“Don’t take too long to wake.”
“What is up, Sonya?”
“The workaday sun, hon. And look at the mess that bonfire made. We’ll have to clean up the whole place.”
She stood at the gate to wave goodbye, in the palazzo pants and a turtleneck sweater, the earrings flashing arcs on her neck in the sunshine.
When he arrived at Adela’s Adela was at the telephone; it was Mrs. Banaag who ran out to meet him.
“Did you get my message?”
“Good morning, Mrs. Banaag. No, what message?”
“I called you up yesterday afternoon.”
“Here?”
“Here first. The maid said to try Mrs. Borja’s. So I called up there. She said you were expected but had not come yet.”
“What did you want to tell me?”
“They had a gathering last night. In Antipolo. The whole group. Including him, yes, the prophet. And those two goons who murdered the taxi driver. Last night was Father Lao’s turn. I didn’t know what to do. So I called you up. Didn’t Mrs. Borja tell you?”
“No,” said Sid, “she didn’t tell me.”
Adela came back from the telephone.
“I couldn’t sleep all night,” Mrs. Banaag was saying, “and first thing this morning I came here, to hear what had happened. I wanted to call you up again, at Mrs. Borja’s, but—”
“But I told her better not,” said Adela. She gave Sid a look. “It’s all right, Isidro, Santiago was there—oh, very much there. It seems he rescued this Father Lao. And captured one of the gangsters who held you up. This was last night, in Antipolo. On a hill there where they were having some kind of ceremony.”
“Last night.” Sid looked from his sister to Mrs. Banaag.
“The winter solstice,” said Mrs. Banaag.
“Oh my God,” said Sid.
“That was why I was trying to reach you yesterday,” said Mrs. Banaag. “I think they planned to have the ceremony in Intramuros, but Salem House has become hot, so they transferred to Antipolo. And after last night they plan to go underground. All of them. Including your sister. But I told Mrs. Borja all this and begged her to be sure and tell you. Didn’t she?”
“No,” said Sid again. “No, she didn’t tell me.”
• • •
Father Lao and the captured thug were brought back from Antipolo at noon and Sid went to the police station to identify the thug, who was one of the black-jacketed pair all right. Santiago was in a rapture of excitement. Clothes rumpled, the night’s growth on his chin, he looked too happy to be sleepy. He had been on a crusade: Santiago Matamoros! Father Lao, too, though as haggard as ever, and even more rumpled in the gray suit he had traveled in, seemed to move in exaltation. He had rejected the forces of evil, he had performed an act of contrition.
“What I did, cuñao,” related Santiago, “was what we should have done long before but did not do because we are not that kind of people. But after my first interview with Mrs. Banaag I decided to do it. I went to a private detective agency and asked them to trail Guia and her companions. Night before last, when we met at the club with Mrs. Banaag, I had already been told that something was afoot in Antipolo. I had learned from the agents that immediately after your visit to Intramuros Guia and a group drove up to Antipolo and stayed the night there. The place is a very isolated hacienda on a hilltop which belongs to a rich widow.
“So, yesterday I joined the agents in Antipolo. There is a high wall around the hacienda and all about it are woods and very rugged ground, but one of the agents had managed to sneak inside and he reported that a man was being held prisoner in a hut in the orchard, behind the big house. Last night they began to assemble. We saw at least ten cars drive up that zigzag road to the hacienda. I was told that Guia, too, had arrived, with her prophet.
“At first, nothing happened, they were all in the house. We were hiding in the woods outside and had one man up on a tree, with binoculars. Then, around midnight, out they all came to the orchard behind the house. Our man on the tree reported that they were dancing around a bonfire—and they were naked, cuñao, all of them, men and women. It was then that our agent on the tree saw Father Lao, gun in hand, hurrying this thug through the dark area along the wall. I had some men climb on the wall to pull them both up. We took them at once to the town police and Father Lao pointed to this thug as one of the murderers of the taxi driver.
“The trouble was, we then had to wake up a judge and all that to get a search warrant. When we returned to the hacienda it was too late. Nobody was there. They had all fled. But it’s all right, we know where they are. This thug has been talking all night and he has told us plenty. It seems they have a smuggler’s boat waiting somewhere on the Cavite coast to take them away, but the constabulary has gone after them and you can be sure that before this day ends the whole gang will be in the hands of the law. This thug has testified that the girls know nothing of the gang’s villainous activities. So, I have asked that Guia be separated from the group and brought home at once. As soon as he has finished with his statement, Father Lao is coming home with us too. He has nowhere to go, poor man. He went astray but has repented. I have promised to intercede for him with the ecclesiastical authorities.”
In Adela’s den that afternoon, Sid and the Ferrers heard Father Lao’s story. The priest was about Sid’s age, a gaunt ghost with a glitter in his eyes, and still in such an ecstasy his hands trembled uncontrollably as he talked.
“When they first came to me in L.A., I was waiting for a sign. I walked the streets at night waiting for God to find me again. For two-three years—no, longer—God had been absent. It is terrible not to be able to pray. I tried, I tried, but God was not there, God was not listening. This was in a university town in Kansas, where it was always the dark night for me. And because I felt so abandoned I fell into sin. There was this girl—oh, she was a witch, the scarlet woman, the whore of Babylon. She was evil, evil. But I sinned only from despair, because God had withdrawn. And when I was ruined I fled from that town and hid in L.A. I lived among outcasts and was viler than any of them. But now that God had done his worst to me, I said to myself, surely he would now come back to me? And so I walked the streets in my vile state waiting for a sign.
“Then they came to me, with their evil proposition: that I use my sacred priesthood in their service. The service of the devil. Oh, I knew at once it was that, though they talked of history and renewal and the native soul. I knew what I was being invited to. And what a blow it was to me! I had begged God to send me an angel; what he sent me was the devil. And if that was how he wanted it, I bitterly said to myself. Again, if I sinned, it was from despair: God had abandoned me utterly.
“So I went with them to San Francisco and they set me up in a hotel and there they left me to make up my mind. When I flew to Manila I was still not decided. I knew there was hope for me yet as long as I did not traffic with what was most sacred in me. And all through the flight I entreated God to show me a sign, show me a sign.
“Then it came, at the airport—the sign, the sign I had so long awaited, the unmistakable sign that God cared. They had told me to carry a toothbrush in my hand. That symbol of their abomination was to identify me to those who would fetch me. But when they found me I learned that somebody else had gone before me, carrying a toothbrush—somebody who had been mistaken for me and was given the message intended for me. God had sent an angel before me, to deliver me. Yes, I know it was only you, Mr. Estiva—but don’t you see the miracle of the coincidence? God was using you to communicate with me. And at that moment, there at the airport, I felt the presence of God. God had come back. The desert, the dark night, was over. I could pray again. And although still mystified that God should have involved me in the forces of evil, I could no longer doubt that in this, too, was design; in this, too, was purpose.
“When they came to me in my hotel that afternoon I told them that I could not serve their god. I was forcibly taken to their headquarters in Intramuros and kept there all night and I found that I had indeed fallen among thieves and murderers. I heard how they had held you up, Mr. Estiva, and killed that taxi driver, because he was going to the police. Oh, I know they were trying to terrorize me. But they made one more effort to persuade me peacefully. At noon the next day, a girl came to my cell and talked to me of their religion. How innocent it all sounded, coming from the lips of one who looked so pretty and innocent, but was a witch, was the scarlet woman, was the whore of Babylon, and evil, evil. And then it was that I understood why God had brought me right into the fortress of the forces of evil. It was because I had been chosen the instrument to destroy that fortress and to slay the forces of evil.
“That night I was taken to the place in Antipolo and kept under guard in a hut. I knew they meant to liquidate me: I had sworn to expose them; but only yesterday did I begin to realize how they meant to do it. I was to be sacrificed at their abominable rites even as the heathen offered human sacrifices to their gods. I had heard they would be having a ceremony at midnight. I felt no fear. I knew that God would deliver me and destroy them. I had noticed a man sneaking around the grounds who was clearly not one of them.
“Last night, when they began their abominations, I pretended to have fallen asleep. There were always two guards with me in that hut but one guard went off to join the rites and the other who stayed clung to the window, so absorbed in his lecherous watching he had forgotten that his gun lay on the table beside him. I crept up, grabbed the gun—I still have it—poked it in his back and made him lead me through the orchard to the wall. And there was Don Santiago waiting. Ask him what was the first thing I did. I kissed the cross on his breast.”
Sid listened as dead-pan as the thought of having been Father Lao’s guardian angel would allow. The priest looked so drained after his outpouring Adela bade him retire for the day. Santiago, however, still keyed up, could not be kept from going off to get the latest reports from the constabulary.
Sid rang up Sonya’s number. A maid replied, asked him to wait, then came back to say she was sorry, Mrs. Borja was out.
Then Santiago called up from constabulary headquarters. The captured Salemites had arrived but Guia refused to be separated from the group. Would Sid rush over and talk to the girl?
“Did they capture everyone?” asked Sid.
“If you mean that other thug who killed the taxi driver—yes.”
“Everyone then?”
“Except the prophet, cuñao. They could not find the prophet.”
Guia, in jeans and a black cardigan, sat in a room with the sisterhood. They were all there: the large female who had been in green at the airport, the girl with long hair who had been in a sweatshirt and stretch pants, the “distinguished businesswoman” who had been in Moro costume at Adela’s party, and a softly weeping Sister Juana. Doggedly wearing bafflement like veils, the grouped women might have been the Marys at the equinox, left with the vinegar of their lost Lord.
Sid strode up to his sister. She had been Steve, Ginny, Gigi, and Guiang, and had now come to the end of Sister Guia.
“Come on, baby. Let’s go home.”
She looked up at him, then rose without a word. He put an arm around her and walked her out of the room, down the hall of the military, and out to the cold December evening. In the car she lay quiet in his arms; and he remembered her as quiet in his arms, not weeping, a mere child, when they returned from their father’s funeral. He thought: I should never have left home.
Adela waited in her den: all their gatherings seemed to require their father’s tuxedo’d presence, hugely there on the wall.
The sisters touched cheeks, Adela flinging her arms around the girl.
“You poor thing. To have had to go through this at your age. Come and sit here beside me.”
The two of them occupied a sofa; Santiago enthroned himself on a high-backed antique; Sid took a rocking chair; their father remained standing on the wall.
“But it’s over now,” continued Adela, sitting sideways to face her sister. “We won’t even mention it again. From tonight you’re the debutante you weren’t. Carlota Jones is bringing her boy over for lunch tomorrow, and she’s only the starter.”
“Or,” said Santiago, “if you prefer a period of transition, Guia, there is this very nice religious community where you could stay for a time.”
“Guia and I have already decided,” said Sid. “She’s coming to New York with me.”
There was a pause, during which the three elders looked at one another while Guia sat still, hands folded on lap. Then Adela protested, Santiago opined, Sid refused to argue and then argued.
Guia abruptly stood up.
Sid hated himself for looking up at her, askance, like Adela and Santiago.
“Don’t haggle over me,” she said.
Adela threw her hands up.
“But, Guia baby, we’re only thinking of your own good.”
The girl looked around at the three of them.
“My own good, Adela? Or your spite? You think I don’t know? You envy me my angers and my passions. And you’d have me as trapped as you are. Poor Adelita’s revenge on life! Isn’t that why you want me married to that Jones boy? Everyone knows he’s incapable of marriage—”
She veered toward her brother-in-law.
“As incapable, Santiago, as you are. Ah, but you can hurdle mountains and climb walls for something else. Ad majorem Dei gloriam? Come on, Santiago. Why were you so frantic? Because you might lose my money, lose the corporation? And so you want me tucked safely away in this nice religious community that banks with you. Imagine what my dowry would be and you’d get to handle it all for them—”
“Guia,” cried Sid, springing up, “have you gone out of your mind?”
“And how about Siddie boy? What’s your cut here, brod? Am I on to your nik? What’s this about me and you holing up in Manhattan? With me as what? The baby you wouldn’t have, the wife you couldn’t keep, the mistresses who have to rape you?”
Sid shook: “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Ah, but I do, brod. I’m the one girl you can be sure will have to love you always, and the perfect partner in solitude because I’m almost not another person, I’m almost only you again. Picture the two of us so nicely becoming old maids together—”
Sid moved a hand toward the girl but she backed away.
“Don’t touch me, don’t any of you touch me!”
She backed out of the family circle.
“I’ll make you sorry you stopped me!” she cried, then turned on her heels and ran to the doorway, but halted there and looked around again.
“Remember,” she smiled, “there will be nine-ten months of this, nine-ten months of us being together like this, before I let go of you!”
It was then they saw a figure looming up from the dusk beyond the doorway, saw a face glittering into the light of the doorway: Father Lao, in a tremble, popeyed at the girl.
Seeing their stare shift, she whirled about and saw the man in the doorway.
“You!” he cried, and now trembled in every limb.
Still standing by the rocking chair, Sid rather leaned forward to catch the words—witch? scarlet? whore?—that the man was so wildly mumbling as he lifted his right arm.
The instant of seeing what he had in his hand was the same instant they heard the gun howl once, howl a second time, to his twin shrieks of “Evil! Evil!”
Then, the gun dropping from his hands, he clung to a side of the doorway, trying to hold on but sliding down to his knees.
Santiago sat petrified, a stone image enthroned. Adela, collapsed on her side on the sofa, helplessly shudderingly moaned. Conscious of their father leering down at all this from his wall, Sid stiffly walked to where Guia lay prone on the floor.
He turned her over in his arms: the parted lips were breathless.
• • •
New Year’s Day was cold, almost arctic in the office where Sid had been staying since the funeral. It had been quick, the funeral, with only himself in attendance. Adela was in a nursing home with a nervous breakdown; Santiago had retreated into a monastery. Sid had had to take over at the office, sleeping there too and having his meals sent up. Far below, the holidays had danced by unheard, their mirth muffled by the drapes at the windows.
• • •
He stood at the windows, in a bulky sweater, holding aside a weight of cloth to look at afternoon sunshine aslant on the cliff below. Practically no traffic down there, whether human on the sidewalk or vehicular on the street. They were all at home recuperating. He let the drape fall back, extinguishing a streak of pink afternoon. Wintry dusk settled back in the large room, save at his desk, where a lamp floodlit a sheet of paper on the glass top.
He returned to his seat at the table and reread Mrs. Borja’s letter, from Baguio.
“My son is at military school here and instead of him going down for the holidays I came up. I couldn’t very well have stayed there. However, I owe you an explanation. You must have been wondering why I did what I did; maybe you’ve even thought I was one of them?
“No, I’m not and I wasn’t; but after Mrs. Banaag called up that afternoon I had a visitor. Yes, the prophet. He knew I had information; he told me it shouldn’t reach you. We talked only a quarter of an hour or so, but in that short time I knew that this thing of his must not be stopped. No, not from any persuasion of his. This was, as Mrs. Banaag would say, instinctive on my part, something I felt quite strongly. How strongly you can guess when I tell you that what Mrs. Banaag had particularly impressed on me—that a man’s life was in danger—suddenly seemed unimportant. I was prepared to be ruthless—or something in me was. Maybe Lawrence’s dark gods of the blood? We were theirs that night.
“Afterward, of course, I was horrified. One doesn’t chuck mind that fast. My husband said he could hear my mind at work even when he was making love to me; so he ran away. Now it’s I who am running away. What I do now seems so silly. We play with the past, making chi-chi fashions out of it, or décor for a party. Maybe I’m being punished for having used it so frivolously, as mere bric-a-brac.
“But it was madness to come up here. This is their country, their terrain, the dark gods. I was in Bontoc and Sagada and up to Ifugao country and they were all about me. Remember telling me how, as you ran from those goons, you felt your naked body had become pure movement, without a mind, every limb thinking for itself? That’s how I feel now, as I run and run but always find myself where I would run away from. . . .”
Sid dropped the letter, made aware by a movement of air of a presence in the room. At the farthest end of the dusk the door had opened. Someone stood there looking in, someone closed the door, someone slowly crossed the darkness toward the circle of light where Sid sat.
Father Melchor stood before the table, a bundle in his hands, a sadness in his droop, the mark dark on his brow.
“Here I am, Mr. Estiva, if you want to call the police.”
Sid had risen to his feet: “You get the hell out.”
“As soon as I have returned your things, Mr. Estiva, as I promised.” He placed the bundle on the table. “Your clothes, Mr. Estiva.” He put a hand into his pocket and what he drew out he laid one by one on the table. “Your passport. Your plane ticket. And your toothbrush. I think everything is there now?”
Sid was staring at the things on the table. Then, ruefully, he picked up the green Prophylactic with the frayed bristles.
“My symbol of non-involvement . . .” he murmured.
“We made it mean the means to deepest commitment.”
“But what a coincidence that I—”
“There are no coincidences, Mr. Estiva. When you called us back years ago you set in motion certain forces that made inevitable, not only that you should come home but that you should come home bearing a sign aloft to proclaim a connection you were unaware of; and that, like magnet or lodestone, or the smell of blood that attracts the creatures of the deep, you should draw all about you the other participants in this drama that you initiated. It was no coincidence when they—But why do you stare at me so, Mr. Estiva?”
It seemed to Sid that he was noticing for the first time the stripes of white in the man’s hair, the fine lines that webbed his face, the stoop to the shoulders, the tired eyes.
“You think I have changed, Mr. Estiva? Yes, the weariness comes when one fails and has to hide again. But I have come back before, I shall come back again. A faith thrives on the blood of its witnesses. And we have a new one. Saint Guia, virgin and martyr.”
He put a hand in his pocket, pulled out a bunch of keys and dropped it on the table, upon the plane tickets. “The Salem House keys, Mr. Estiva. I want you to take care of the place until I come back.”
“That is a round-trip ticket, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“Oh, I did.”
“And I’m leaving soon.”
“No. Mr. Estiva, you are not going away again. You have come home.”
He stood quiet for a moment and seemed to be smiling through his melancholy. Then he turned and moved away, and Sid noticed that the limp was heavier: the man seemed to be dragging his right foot as he hobbled into the darkness. Sid heard the knob turn, the door open, and the cold rush of air in the moment before the door closed again.
His jacket hung on the chair. He pulled it on, over the sweater; pocketed passport, plane ticket, keys, and toothbrush; then turned the light off on Sonya’s letter.
It was sunset when he stopped the car before the door of Salem house. He found the right key, opened the door, and stepped into the stone-flagged hall. The archaic furniture stood as he had last seen it but no light burned before the pregnant Virgin. He walked through the passage into the cloister, where sunlight lay level with the roof, past the rows of shut doors and into the second passage at the back. He unbolted the door there and stepped out into the angle of back yard. Behind the high wall throbbed a final blush of light. The rising of ruins stood half in shadow, peaks bathed in light.
He stood in a gap in the ring, the evening sun on his face. Not a breath of wind stirred the air. The adobe blocks were gone from the center; they had been found piled up again into a table in the Antipolo orchard. He crossed the ring toward the shrine in the stone facing east. Gone from the ledge were the scatter of flowers, the sheaf of grain, the tall glass of light. But a gap showed between the rounded metal door and one side of the niche. He slipped a hand into the gap and pushed. The door swung around into the niche that now stood open.
But the niche was empty.
The niche was the void where night had begun, though it was another night he heard.
—When do you celebrate it?
—New Year’s Day, you donkey. Now shut up and let’s go.
—Why New Year’s Day? That’s not liturgical. Oh yes, it is. Feast of the Circumcision.
—And you’re cordially invited to our patronal festivities, donkey. Now, let’s go in. I’m cold.
It didn’t seem right to go without making a gesture. He put hand to pocket, fetched out the toothbrush, and stood it up in the niche, sticking the handle in a crack of rock.
But something else was needed. He pulled out the plane ticket, crumpled it into a wad, placed it in the niche, and lit a match to it. He waited for it to burn before walking away.
At the edge of the ring he paused to look back, looking back across the still evening at the wedge of wall where the wad of plane ticket burned, a flame tall in the void, steady before the standing toothbrush.