Naguenos (Philippine writers series)

Naguenos CARLOS OJEDA AUREUS

University of the Philippines Press 1997

Copyright 1997 © by Carlos Ojeda Aureus Published by the University of the Philippines Press and the UP Creative Writing Center All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, broadcast or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission from the author and copyright holder; nor may translations from this work be undertaken, adapted for radio, stage or television, produced and distributed without expressed and written permission from the above, in care of The Director, University of the Philippines Press, U.P. Diliman, Quezon City 1101, Metro Manila, Philippines. PHILIPPINE WRITERS SERIES 1997 LIKHAAN: Sentro ng Makathaing Pagsulat Editorial and Production Supervision by Gemino H. Abad and Laura L. Samson Cover Design by Arne Sarmiento Book Design by Linda T. Lingbaoan-Bulong Body text set in Revival and titles in Fujiyama2 ISBN 971-542-146-6 The stories in this collection have been previously published in the Philippines Free Press and the Philippine Graphic. Grateful acknowledgement is due these two magazines for permission to reprint these stories. Printed in the Philippines by the University of the Philippines Press Printery Division

Naguenos

Contents

Chinita

1

Sanctuary

25

Flakes of Fire, Bodies of Light

44

Wings

70

The Late Comer

83

Typhoon

109

The Night Express Does Not Stop Here Anymore

125

Chinita

CHOC-NUT in hand, and a brown envelope tucked under an arm, Ricardo Caceres entered the seminar room wheezing.

He was not tired: the trimobile had dropped him in front of the seminary entrance, right under the streamer announcing the two-day seminar-workshop in Naga. That was just a few steps to the seminar room. He was not late, either: the registration of participants went on in the hallway, and Msgr. Nero, who was to deliver the invocation, was still in the parlor chatting with the delegates from Sorsogon. He was wheezing because one of the student observers, a coed from the Ateneo de Naga, had walked up to him earlier in the porteria to ask which way it was to the registration table, and when he opened his mouth, no sound came out. Instead, his ears flushed hot and his heart pounded in his temples and his bronchial tubes tightened. Mr. Caceres hoped the wheezings would subside, but he labored and whistled—even after every one had risen and sung the Pambansang Awit, even after Elmer Alindogan had delivered the opening remarks and Lily Fuentebella had read the message of the Archbishop. He kept rewinding and playing back the scene: a chinky-eyed schoolgirl in cotton-knit sleeveless blouse and patchwork shorts approaches him, brows drawn a bit together, lips half-pouting—excuse me, sir, can you tell me which way it is to the registration table?—her

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eyes squinting against the sun, her hair freshly moistened by an early bath, her nose beaded with sweat... Rosendo Alvarado, the emcee, set the tone for the self-introductions—just call me Ross, as in Diana Ross: couturier, beautician, manicurist, ex-Miss Gay Penafrancia, gay rights activist, atbp. I'm also a Leo, I finished in Ateneo, and I like Msgr. Nero because he buys my nata de coco—and soon after, every participant stood up and dished out similar CVs. So her name was Cynthia Dee, Chinita for short, a graduate of St. Joseph Chinese High School, now enrolled in Ateneo de Naga, majoring in English, minor in History. She also described herself as a Gemini (what white, perfect teeth), an ACIL treasurer, a Depeche Mode follower, a typical Atenista, and an avid fan of Greg Brillantes and Horacio de la Costa. He sat two chairs behind her. It was not exactly the best spot, considering that a Gerard Depardieu look-alike already sat right in front of him, and Mr. Caceres had to strain sideways to make believe he was listening intently at the speakers to be able to watch the white curve of her nape and bare shoulders slightly reddened by sunlight from the latticed windows. The bra, strapped precariously at the back and embossed cleanly through the thin blouse caused his imagination to run amuck, so that when his turn came to introduce himself, he squeaked his name, cracked a flat joke, and shrunk down to three inches. What was happening to him? He felt fine when he left the house that morning. Mr. Caceres' bronchial complaint was not congenital. It came to him (he remembered it very clearly; he had written it in his diary) one Septuagesima Sunday thirty years ago in the Naga Cathedral when he first heard the Mass said in the vernacular and the priest faced the people instead of the altar. At first the attacks were not that bad. The whistling sounds came in 1968 when he read Paul VTs Humanae Vitae. With medication, however, he had kept his ailment under control. Lately, he found out that he could dispense with the medication if he listened to Las Mejores Obras del Canto Gregoriano. In fact, the cromolyn sodium had lain in his cabinet for more than

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a week now, virtually untouched ever since he had been soothing himself with Gregorian music. But after she had approached him that morning, not only had the attacks recurred: strange things started happening too. Familiar sights and sounds—the arcaded facade, the Spanish windows, the clip-cloppings of calesas in Barlin Street, the whirring of the lawn mower in the football field—all had suddenly sprung up to giddying light and sound and color. His energy had perked up and seemed boundless. Even his Casio quartz sped up to a point that one number of the program blurred into the next in rapid succession. She was no Elle Macpherson, he kept snapping himself out of it, just a little girl lost asking directions. By whose authority do little girls wield the power to upstage the high and the confident, and put them off guard and awkward? What right do they have to constrict a man's bronchial tubes and have him all choked up? And all she did was ask where the registration table was. Was he in love? But how could anybody in Naga possibly imagine a cranky old bachelor like Mr. Caceres in love? Why, in the words of Ross Alvarado, Mang Carding had not even been in like—naku ha—why, but Mang Card-wing did not even know how to smile, excuse me. Of course, he was vain about his looks—a cross between Ric Manrique and Diomedes Maturan—although at fifty-two (and despite pints of Foltene applications) he could easily pass a stage audition for the role of St. Anthony of Padua or Thomas Aquinas. That would be in character, for he spent his life reading up anything and everything about the Catholic Church, from the Code of Canon Law to the latest Catechism of the Catholic Church. There was this sense of urgency about him: the Naga diocese was marking its 400th year, the millennium was ending, and the future of Catholicism was too important to be left to the theologians alone, just as Bicol culture was too important to be left to the Jesuits alone. The Archdiocese, in recognition of his efforts, invited him to speak in the seminarworkshop tomorrow afternoon. He himself chose the topic: The Future of Catholicism: Her Relevance in the Twenty-First Century. He liked the slight decongestion in his breathing.

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in Naga quite understood Mr. Caceres. In one sense, he was deeply conservative—as conservative as corduroy. For example, he was pre-Conciliar in thought, word, and deed. He believed that the Church should return to angels and saints, to miraculous medals and natural law, to scapulars and prayers for the souls in purgatory, to good manners and right conduct. He carried this air of conservatism about him a bit too far that nobody, including Msgr. Nero himself, dared call him Rick, but either Mr. Caceres or Mang Carding. But in another sense, he was radical too. He believed that unless the Church did something about her boring homilies and lousy guitar Masses, she might as well close shop. During the workshop, Lily Fuentebella divided the participants into two groups, alphabetically splitting them at L, on Lorenzana. Group A remained in the room whereas Group B transferred to the next. They arranged the chairs in a circle. Mr. Caceres grabbed the chair directly facing Cynthia Dee. From that time on, he had no idea what the group discussed about during the next one hour and a half. Cynthia Dee kept playing with her shoes, sliding them off and on, exposing those soft small white naked feet, so that for one hour and a half, his mind was occupied with nothing else save doing everything to them Joaquin had described in that foot-smooching classic of his. NOBODY

DURING lunchtime, in the refectory, he saw his opportunity: she sat alone in an isolated table near the entrance. The chairs beside her were empty. He sucked in his belly and dashed up to her, bumping tables and knocking off chairs; but as soon as he approached to ask if he may join her, Msgr. Nero called him from the other end of the room and requested that he sit at the presidential table with the priests and the nuns. Cynthia's table filled up in no time with her barkadas and former teachers from St. Joseph School. Henceforth, announced Msgr. Nero, this was going to be their "permanent places" during meals. (What the good monsignor actually meant was, national landmark or not, this was still the Holy Rosary Minor Seminary where old habits, like Ptolemy's fixed spheres, die hard): Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ, Our Lord. Amen.

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A special added attraction, Msgr. Nero announced in the middle of lunch, was a tour of the premises, to be conducted by no less than the ever-charming Ross Alvarado, let's give her a big hand. (Up here] Up here1.) At one-thirty p.m., Ross stood up to remind them, the participants were to assemble at the salon de recreos where s/he would orient them on the history of the Holy Rosary Seminary. From there s/he would lead the group through the study hall, the classrooms, the multi-purpose rooms, the parlors, the dormitories, the library, the chapel and the museum, anong say n'yo, mga beauties. As he picked his fork on the tasteless fried bangus, Mr. Caceres imagined what he'd do during the tour. He would not rush her. Cynthia Dee would be with the group asking questions, taking down notes. He would take his time. Haste, according to Saint Francis de Sales, is the enemy of true devotion. He would butt in casually and pretend to recognize her. Oh hi there, he'd say, not in a fresh tone though, just a fatherly-like tone. On second thought, he might come on too strong she might think he was one of those child molesters from Pagsanjan or those sexual harassers from U.P. and she'd freeze up and avoid him hereafter. No, he must come on more suave, less eager, like Rick Blaine in Casablanca, something like that, so the initiative would have to come from her. Like maybe she'd be walking from behind him and then he'd purposely stop and pretend to admire some cornices atop the balcony, and she'd accidentally bump up to him and say oh I'm so sorry sir and he'd tell her that's all right hija and he'd bow politely like a Spanish gentleman and she'd smile but he won't smile back because he wanted her to think he was kind but disinterested. But he'd follow-up immediately and assure her it's not your fault hija I just couldn't help admiring those delicately wrought iron grilles over there did you know they came all the way from Mejico and the black and white tiles we saw a while ago downstairs did you know they remind me of those I saw in Sevilla when I was there? something like that to show her he knew a bit about culture too and was well-traveled. And she'd be very flattered by his attention she'd keep cooing really sir? talaga? impressed not so much by the information but by his Rick Blaine voice.

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Like bicol express, she'd be so spiced up (seventeen-year-old girls do go ninnies over lesser excuses) that she could not resist breaking away from her group to walk alongside him. She'd put on the same face she wore that morning at the entrance, pouting and beseeching, and confess that she'd actually heard of him and knew that he was a Bicol historian too would he mind if she asked him a few questions about the history of the seminary? and he'd pretend he was a very busy man but he wouldn't mind sparing her a few minutes of his time by obliging her, knowing it was within his power to remove her innocence, este, ignorance, and he'd spice up his answers with smatterings of Spanish and Latin, dropping a few historical names here and there like Jose Maria Panganiban, Tomas Arejola, Jorge Barlin and a few other alumni of the seminary, to show her he was well-versed in history too. Then, just as they'd go down the balustraded marble stairs, she'd extend her hand to him for help and he'd touch her soft hands and feel her soft fingers and press them extra tight but he'd pretend it was nothing as he was more interested in commenting on the black and white checkerboard pattern of the tiles. Finally, in the archeological room, she'd feel more comfortable with him. He would show her the burial jars, the anting-antings, the ancient gold teeth—he was into archeology too, in case she didn't know it yet (really? just like Indiana Jones? well, if you like to call it that, yes, something to that effect)—when suddenly she'd tell him she was frightened. So she would brush her body against his and he would step back a little because he was a respectable man and besides he had a reputation to maintain. But later she'd take advantage of the situation: as he talked busily about the bark-cloth beaters, the iron blades, the pottery vessels, she'd move closer to him because it was too hard to resist the charms of a walking encyclopedia. This time she'd be listening real close and looking intently at him with those pleading, chinky eyes, pouting her lips in irascible excitement and groaning oh? oh! ooohhh! like she was all worked up and coming, but he'd not stiffen up lest she'd notice the swelling in his corduroy and think he was one of those cuchinos who drank beer at Naga Cabaret. Finally, she'd press her body against his, and Elmer, who

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would be with the group, could not help admiring his way with the fair sex, because this time she would be so demonstrative Msgr. Nero himself would start doubting his own vocation. She'd tell him she wanted to know more about him, and he'd tell her he wasn't much, really, just a modest scholar he'd rather know more about her, and her face would turn red as litmus paper, awfully flattered that a person eminently namedroppable and of such intellectual and cultural calibre should even go down to her level let alone show interest in her. Then he'd tell her he was writing a book about all this he'd like to tell her more about it and he'd mention a decent place like Carl's Diner in downtown Naga if she were not doing anything in particular that Saturday—but she'd not let him finish because she'd be so gigil by now she couldn't help jumping and squealing, sure! I'd love to! talaga, ha? it's a date, ha, sir? But he'd be cool as ice cubes: the name's Rick. Just call me Rick. It was the perfect plan, he thought as he struggled to swallow the mess of unfamiliar food on his plate: fool-proof, fail-safe, sure-fire. It would all happen. None of the above happened. Right from the start, in the recreation hall alone, Mr. Caceres' hands went clammy, his palms froze and sweated, his vision blurred, and his knees wobbled. During the walking tour itself, during which her hips curved as heavenly as a hula dancer's, Cynthia Dee did not walk behind him: he did—a timid distance away—far enough to ogle the firm round cheeks of her buttocks and near enough to salivate at the chair-marked bacon strips-like bands of pink at the back of her thighs. He attempted every possible angle of attack: frontal, sneak, sideward, but her companions guarded her tight—"man-to-man"—even Jaworski himself could not penetrate such defense. So he followed her through the long corridors and up and down the stairs like a Singer sewing machine: atras-abante. She is a phantom of delight, he sighed, a child whose laughter flowed uncensored by propriety, a beauty among beasts. A cross-section of the latter: the high-heeled, bow-legged beata with the karaoke voice who guarded her on her left, the muscular English teacher with cotton candy hair whose English was as bad as the English translations

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from the Latin that resulted from Council reforms, the high-pitched fishwife in front who kept turning around every few paces and opening wide those hideous eyes that appeared even wider through thick glasses that looked like swimming goggles, the toothless CWL who kept laughing and laughing. The museum was located in the central pavilion, occupying rooms which used to be the administrative offices of the Spanish Vincentians. It had three sections: the liturgical room, the archeological room, and a bolted, nail-studded bodega that no one, said the aged nun who was with them, save an old janitor had seen in the last thirty years. Ross led the group to the first room and explained the mixed collection of church vestments, monstrances, chalices, candelabra, retablos, and candeleros. In the archeological room, Cynthia Dee was anything but frightened. On the contrary, she and her friends spent a delightful time giggling and pinching each other as each one stood up in line to peep at the interior of the burial jars before looking up to say Yesss. How he abhorred that expression. It stood for everything he despised about the way they have renamed everything. The word stood for all the silly, trivial, and unimaginative manner they have renamed Baptism into the rite of Christian initiation and Penance into the rite of Christian reconciliation and Extreme Unction into the sacrament of the sick and Holy Communion into the Eucharist. Nobody could ever get him to mention those new names, just as nobody could get him to say Yesss. Over his dead body. Realizing it was useless trying to penetrate Cynthia Dee's heavy guard, especially as they kept ejaculating that silly word, he joined the group of nuns hoping they might shed light on what was inside the third room and why it remained bolted and locked and why they were not allowed to see it. But all save one talked of nothing but their next planned march at the picket lines; so he finally settled with this lone aged nun who thought she looked like Louise de Marillac, and all through the corridors and the halls and up and down the stairs and the rest of the tour she talked of nothing but the daily obituaries and Jennifer Jones and how great she was in The Song of Bernadette.

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After the afternoon lectures, during which he sat in his usual place behind her, committing every conceivable sin against the Ninth Commandment, he came up with another strategy. Before the participants poured out of the seminar room to go home after the first day session, he would beat them to the porteria. There he'd beso-beso the matronas goodbye, hope you liked the lectures, see you tomorrow, hasta manana. He'd also shake some hands and crack a couple of Jesuit jokes. Cynthia Dee would be going out that way of course, and he'd beso-beso her too, just like he'd done the matronas. So he made a dash to the exit and waited there, squinting horribly. But no sooner had the participants arrived at the gate where Mr. Caceres stood with his eagerly extended hands, somebody shouted pa-Kodakl and the once tame departing guests suddenly transformed themselves into a horde of camera-hungry maniacs hurling themselves through the exit past him towards choice places in the patio, the lunatics armed with their Instamatic cameras and reminders for every one to say cheese. Shortly after, Cynthia Dee and her group climbed aboard the waiting St. Joseph School Bus. As soon as it coughed and sneezed and sputtered away, everyone inside waved wildly. Mr. Caceres waved back tamely, like a kindly priest, his hand in a gesture of blessing, just like Msgr. Nero's. It was an unexpected gesture, especially when Cynthia Dee was actually waving at him, but if there were a time to appear harmless, this was it, especially when one of Cynthia Dee's seat mates, the one who looked like Lorena Bobbitt, kept giving him that snipping look. ALL male participants who were not from Naga were to sleep in the seminary. Although Mr. Caceres was from Naga, he volunteered to sleep in the dormitory—not to keep the visitors company, but to be able to wake up early next morning and wait for Cynthia Dee downstairs in the porteria—excuse me, sir, has the Mass started yet? (her brows drawn a bit together, her hair freshly moistened from an early bath, her lips half-pouting...) Ross Alvarado regaled every one with her/his yarns about aswangs and dwarfs and UFO's and weeping statues and soul mates and earth-

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bound souls. S/he also read palms, analyzed handwritings, read some faces, and insulted others. Then s/he talked about the latest Marian apparitions, the poor souls in purgatory, the power of prayer, and the forthcoming Papal visit. Mr. Caceres liked the last one best (Ross promised to give him a copy tomorrow of the Pope's itinerary) because they were familiar to him, even as he marveled at Ross' enthusiasm for topics both sacred and profane, and how s/he effortlessly shifted from one subject to the other as casually as the box of Fig Newtons s/he was passing around for everybody. All but Mr. Caceres took from the box. He didn't like the taste of Fig Newtons. They were too soft, too doughy, too fake, too sosyal—as chippy as the Yesss expression of the young. Give him an old-fashioned Choc-Nut instead—the cool film pooling under his tongue, the chocolate seeping into his throat, the gritty nuts pressing against the roof of his mouth and clinging to his teeth as he rounded them off and carried them down his throat—that was genuine, that was natural and honest, like pre-Conciliar liturgy. Not to offend Ross, however, who insisted on the offer (don't snub my beauty, Mang Carding), Mr. Caceres took a piece, wrapped it in napkin, and put it in his breast pocket. Nobody could get him to eat that silly thing just as nobody could get him to say Yesss. Over his dead body. About half past midnight, everyone took Ross' advice on beauty sleep, enough of stories and free snacks, ano kayo, sinesuwerte?—everyone but Mr. Caceres. The springs in his brass bed squeaked and squeaked. Tomorrow would be the last day of the seminar, and he hadn't spoken a single word to Cynthia Dee yet. If only he could meet her again downstairs early tomorrow morning. This time he would be more assertive—good morning, hija, I was just on my way to the chapel. Come, let me take you there—the hell with the rest. He strained his head to peer at Elmer and the rest: they were padded lumps of darkness against the floral curtains in the Spanish windows. Four things bothered him that night. The first was this way he felt about Cynthia Dee. How could this have happened to him. Of course, it did not mean he had no eye for beauty, for on the contrary, his tastes in matters of beauty were quite fastidious. For example, he thought Christelle Roelandts should have won the Miss

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Universe crown. It was a beauty, not an I.Q., contest. Too, when it came to beauty, he knew where to look. Last week he was in Robertson Cinema to watch Darna, not for the story but for the filmily clad Anjanette Abayari. And the week after that he was at Naga Cabaret, not for the beer but for the beauteous fig-leafed stripteaser, that most beautiful working student in Naga. But that was all there was to it; he admired Beauty—from Venus to Astarte to Isis to Shakti to Kwan Yin to Ikapati—from an aesthetic distance: these girls were beauteous beyond compare, stars in the firmament, but unreachable, impossible dreams. The second thing that bothered him was his lecture tomorrow.. He himself had been having doubts about the future of the Church. Despite the charisma of John Paul II and Veritatis Splendor, he felt that the visiting Pope no longer commanded agreement among many Catholics who did not accept principal doctrinal propositions and ethical norms. Three decades of Ecumenism had not only brought about too much autonomy of parish and diocesan structures; they had also minimized important differences among religions and eroded whatever distinctive traits left in Catholicism. Everything solemn seemed collapsing quickly, so that if no one did anything about it, he was sure that by the turn of the century there would be nothing left of Catholicism except perhaps some indigenous Bicol customs to distinguish it from other Christian denominations, like Presbyterianism. Could the Church be revivified? If so, how? He did not know. The third thing that bothered him was Ross her/himself. There was something that bothered him about Ross' manner of addressing God. Why did Ross keep addressing God in the feminine gender? Or was it one of those lapses in grammar that accompanied gender mix-up? But not once that night did Ross address God in the masculine. The address seemed deliberate. Was God to Ross a She? The fourth thing that bothered him was the bodega. Why did they keep it bolted under lock and key? What was inside that room? These four things kept disturbing him, and each one appeared unrelated to the rest. Or were they? If David Bohm were to be taken seriously, then they had to be related somehow in the implicate order. A farfetched thought, he forced a yawn, but a consummation devoutly

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to be wished—for he belonged to an ordered pre-Conciliar universe, and the thought of unity amid chaos thrilled him. Come to think of it: if the four things were indeed related, can spring, O Bysshe, be far behind? He would whirl like the ceiling fan, spin around the football grounds, soar above the rooftops of Naga, fly above the clouds, yodel in Mount Isarog. A farfetched thought, he forced another yawn. He pulled the freshly starched sheet over him, tucked his feet in its cold folds, and worked his way to sleep, but all through the night and the wee hours of the morning, he was sole captive audience to the bullfrog concertos in the football field and the fieldmice playing patintero in the roof. His half-closed eyes fell on the Catholic calendar on the wall. It read: October 1994. By the light of the full moon, however, the 1994 appeared like 1944. That was wartime Naga, he thought, a tense and dramatic year. How come his life had no drama? What if he traveled back in time and found himself with Cynthia in 1944? What a dramatic setting to meet each other—such stuff as great Hollywood romances are made on. What if he wrote a true-to-life screenplay starring Rick Caceres and Cynthia Dee set in wartime Naga? He would base the story on a Hollywood classic already too familiar to him for having watched it on Betamax tape dozens of times. He thought of the synopsis: The date is October 1944. The war in the Pacific drags on. In Japanese-occupied Naga, a general confusion is in the air, as Chinese businessmen wait for their exit visas to Hong Kong. Meanwhile, life goes on in Rick's Cafe, a nightclub owned and managed by the cynical and mysterious Rick Caceres, alias Bogey. Rick's Cafe is situated in the heart of downtown Naga in the area where Carl's Diner now stands. It is a famous place in Bicol patronized by both Japanese and Filipinos who come to its neutral grounds as friends to seek respite from a world gone mad. Enter Victor Dee and his lovely young niece Cynthia. They come from Manila. They came to Naga, they say, because they heard that their exit visas are here. Victor needs an exit visa badly before the enemy finds out about his underground activities. When Cynthia sees Rick, her face turns red like litmus paper. Rick, on the other hand,

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wears a poker face. A messenger comes in with bad news: General Hasaharu Homma is in Naga searching for the killers of two Japanese couriers who were carrying the exit visas. With Homma are Bhoy and Jhun, two Bicolano pro-Jap informers, and they are doing a house-tohouse search for the "bandits." Exit Victor and Cynthia. Enter Rosendo, a small-time spy for the underground resistance movement. S/he has the exit visas, but before s/he is caught by Bhoy and Jhun, s/he succeeds in passing them over to Rick. Victor hears from Rick's barber at Tolentino barbershop (where Rick has his full, thick hair trimmed regularly) that Rick has the exit visas. Victor tells Cynthia this. Cynthia, knowing that the visas would get her and her uncle out of Naga, returns to Rick's Cafe and confronts Rick. Rick admits to her that he has the exit visas, but he scorns her for breaking a promise she made three years ago. Flashback to December 1941, in Manila. Cynthia Dee, a pretty senior high-school student at St. Joseph College, in search of her lost uncle, meets Rick, a Nagueno on a business trip to the Open City, and finds herself terribly drawn to the charms of the irresistible bachelor. Rick himself is aware of her interest in him, but he is not too keen in courting her. Besides, he is a respectable man, not a crib-snatcher. But Cynthia persists in dating him, so Rick acquiesces. After two meetings, a romance develops between them. But time is against them: the Open City has just become an Occupied City. So Rick and Cynthia decide to escape to Naga. Just as Cynthia is about to meet Rick at the Tutuban Station, she learns that her lost uncle Victor whom she believed to be dead is alive but badly injured. Bound to her uncle by his desperate need for help and by her conscience, she fails to meet Rick at the train station. Ignorant of Cynthia's plight, an embittered Rick leaves alone. In Naga he broods and drinks as the war rages on. Only Sammy Benito, the pianist-crooner at the club soothes Rick's loneliness by singing 'As Time Goes By." Forward to October 1944. When Rick and Cynthia meet again, it is clear that they still love each other. He agrees to help them—on one condition: that she stay behind. Cynthia, torn between her uncle's need to escape and her love for Rick, agrees. Rick personally brings

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them in his Oldsmobile to the Naga Airport. Meanwhile, Bhoy and Jhun find out about the plan and report this to General Homma. As Victor is about to board the plane, a convoy of military jeeps, led by Bhoy, arrives. Bhoy says the three of them are under arrest. He orders them to surrender. Or else. Rick ignores Bhoy's warning and orders Victor and Cynthia to board the plane. Then he faces Bhoy: Go ahead, make my day. That one-liner galls Bhoy. If there's anything Bhoy doesn't want, it is plagiarism. A volley of gunfire strafes the building. Bhoy is determined to punish Rick by cuting him down into tiny pieces. Rifles and semi-automatics pound continuously, but none of them hit their mark, as Rick ducks and jumps from one parked car to another. The Japs keep firing at the cars. The bullets dig holes in them, but Rick is nowhere to be seen. Suddenly he emerges, this time wearing a facial expression that is a dead ringer for Fernando Roe, Jr. He infiltrates in the dark and blows up military jeeps. He snipes from one hidden position and slashes throats with switchblades. He makes a punching bag out of Bhoy and Jhun, beating them up black and blue, using the FPJ "labu-labo" nonstop punching technique. The enemy is confused. They cannot pin down this savage fighter, this ruthless man-at-arms, this hit-and-run fusiler who hits with deadly precision, this fire-spitter, this "Indian Warrior," this king of action stars. As the enemy runs, Rick orders Cynthia to go join her uncle quickly on the plane, for Victor needs her more than he. Besides, a hero must be willing to sacrifice self-interest for the larger interest. Cynthia begs to remain behind. She tells him his bravery and indifference to danger has made her fall in love with him even more. But Rick is adamant and orders the reluctant girl to forget him and board the plane to freedom. Alone again the next evening at the cafe, Rick listens to his favorite song and keeps telling the pianist to play it again, Sammy. He is waiting for the Japanese to come and arrest him. But he is armed to the teeth and ready for action. Suddenly the door swings open and in comes Cynthia. She brings good news: MacArthur has returned and has landed in Leyte, and the enemy is on the run. Liberation is in the

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air. Victor, she says, does not need her anymore. He met two business partners in Manila and together they had planned to start a corporation. So Cynthia bid her uncle goodbye and took the next available flight back to Naga to be with her T. L. She throws herself at him, almost spilling his drink, and begs him to embrace her, to take all of her, to kiss her lips, to marry her—but Rick, ever maintaining that characteristic poker face, pushes her gently aside and shakes the ice cubes in his glass: Here's looking at you, kid. THE carillon chimed thrice in the chapel, to wake everybody up, but it was mezzo soprano Ross' bathroom aria in B flat major (Togee-a-thur Again) and whiff of heavy cologne that drove Mr. Caceres out of bed. After brief ablutions, he dressed up quickly and rushed downstairs to the porteria. Shadows still deepened the crevices in the corridors, but the security guard had already opened the main door. Mr. Caceres sat in the parlor sofa, partly hidden in shadows, an early bird but no worm he. No sir, not anymore. The sights and sounds of Sunday morning in Naga enclosed him: the panadero yelling tinapay in Barlin Street, a flock of geese cackling in Judge Grageda's backyard, a street sweeper picking up dirty newspapers in the Cathedral parking lot and shooing a congregation of neighborhood dogs on overtime committee meeting. The St. Joseph School Bus arrived first. His heart leapt m excitement. But Cynthia Dee was not among the passengers. Another car, a Tamaraw, followed shortly. She was not in it, either. Mr. Caceres stayed on in the entrance, watching every arriving participant, but none turned out to be her. The Mass upstairs had ended, but he was still in the porteria, waiting. He skipped breakfast. He had no appetite, no energy, no strength left, no desire to do anything but wait. And wait. Then the program started. But he remained in the porteria, waiting. And waiting. When it became clear she was not coming at all, he walked to the seminar room, his shoulders drooped, and sat through the lectures and the open forums and the musical numbers and the poetry readings with a gaze as empty as a patient coming out of amphetamines.

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SHE arrived in the middle of the afternoon, right after merienda, and just before Mr. Caceres' scheduled talk. This time she wore a drop-waist peach sun blouse that emphasized her curves, and a miniskirt with a waist which rose just under her breasts, giving her a girlish fresh outdoor look. Suddenly everything burst into a dizzying conflagration of light and sound and color again, and Mr. Caceres' energy seemed boundless. Ross Alvarado presented the last lecturer as no other than El Senor Don Ricardo Caceres. Ross could well have announced Heeeeere's Johnny! when s/he introduced Mr. Caceres, for the latter mounted the platform wearing that confident smirk of Johnny Carson every time he makes that entrance in The Tonight Show. Thank you, thank you. Applause, my friends, at the beginning of a lecture, is a manifestation of faith. If it comes in the middle, it is a sign of hope. And if it comes at the end, it is always charity. Words taken, my friends, from Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. The audience laughed and applauded. Mr. Caceres glanced at Cynthia Dee and saw her giggle. There never was a speaker quite like Mr. Caceres. He was a man possessed. Is the Catholic Church relevant to the future? he began. If so, can Catholicism survive after three decades of post-Conciliar changes? The timbre in his voice surprised and pleased him. Can we bring the Faith to the twenty-first century and beyond? his hands swooped up the ceiling a la Zubin Mehta. Are there elements in Catholicism that represented a unique contribution to the human condition, elements which Roman Catholicism alone is capable of contributing differently from, if not better than, other religions? After a dramatic pause, he answered all his questions in the affirmative. He glanced at Cynthia Dee. She appeared spellbound! Every one in the audience was all ears. Then in trumpet-like voice, he spoke out loud and bold in praise of this Great Monolith, this marine corps of churches, this rock and how it stood firm against the turbulence of the centuries, this solid and permanent and immovable and inert bastion of faith and morals that had inspired converts like Cardinal Newman and Dorothy Day, this massive structure that had produced intellectual giants from Augustine to Aquinas to Dante to Joyce to

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Joaquin to Brillantes to de la Costa. True it is that Vatican II had decaffeinated the liturgy, he argued, but to leave the quotidian Church over mere post-Conciliar disagreements would be like throwing the baby with the bath water. No, the idea was neither to leave it nor to wring drops of sustenance from its dry dugs, but to rediscover, to recapture the primal joy of the Roman Catholic Faith and carry it gloriously over to the next millennium. That was his magnificent obsession, for his heart was a-song (move over Carreras, Domingo, and Pavarotti) and his soul a-flame. He was a man in love. Then, something happened. Cynthia Dee started scribbling a note. It distracted him. Was she taking down notes? He looked at her again. She seemed engrossed writing something that had nothing to do with the topic. It was too long to be a note. It must be a letter. She was actually writing a letter (to her boyfriend, how dare she1.) in the middle of his lecture. She was not paying attention. His ears flushed hot and his eyes blinked and blinked furiously. When he opened his mouth, no sound came out. He had no choice but to squeak an abrupt thank you, pull himself out of the podium, and shrink down to three inches in his chair. Then he started wheezing again. It was a torment for him to remain in the seminar room, so he walked out and skipped the open forum and the musical numbers and the poetry readings to ramble aimlessly about the dark corridors. Suddenly he had no energy again, no strength left, no desire to do anything else but to wander and mope, his shoulders drooped, his gaze empty like a patient coming out of amphetamines. From beyond the seminar room, he noticed the museum door open. He needed desperately to be alone, so he walked in and shut the door on his back. He liked the sound of door shutting. It muffled the noises of the participants outside. Nobody else was inside the liturgical room, so he diverted himself by going over some yellow books owned by Bishop Jorge Barlin, the directory of the Bicol clergy now brittle as eggshells, and a few antiquated scholastic records laid out on the table. In a corner was a pile of ancient prayer books. A pile of rubbish, he muttered scornfully. Of what use was prayer in post-Conciliar times? Where was God when that C-130 PAF plane

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bringing relief goods to Typhoon Monang victims crashed in barrio Tanang, Libmanan, killing all twenty-nine social workers, including Fr. John Tria? Where was this God when the Colgante bridge caved in crushing, drowning, and impaling helpless women and children? Where was God when his first cousin lay dying in Mother Seton Hospital's ICU—the Carmelite nuns prayed, the family prayed novenas and Rosaries hour after hour—and he died anyway? Praying to a deaf God was an exercise in futility, because this post-Conciliar God preferred to perform His operations through the Rotary Club of Naga rather than deal directly with the petitioner. The tomb-like smell of the archeological room assailed his nostrils, already flared wide open by forced breathing. He looked at the preChristian artifacts on the floor and wondered if Catholicism was on the way to becoming a post-Christian artifact too. All the signs were there. They had removed the sacred, the solemn, the beautiful from the Church. The stations of the cross, the statues of saints, the stained glass windows have all disappeared from their familiar places in the Naga Cathedral. They had replaced Gregorian music with pseudo-folk guitar music, and worse, sung by lousy singers who moved him to tears of disgust. He never thought he'd live to see the day the laity could receive the Sacred Host in their hands instead of having it put in their mouths. There seemed nothing distinctive left in the Catholic Church anymore, no reason to belong except the accident of birth. His lecture did not paint the true picture: The Great Monolith, the solid, inert, geocentric Church had in fact moved as early as the midsixties and had kept on moving, there was no use ignoring it, and he knew that by the time the world entered the Third Millennium there would be nothing left of Catholicism to distinguish it from other churches. Year after year, he had witnessed the dwindling attendance in Naga's churches, the uncertainty about doctrine, the mass exodus of Roman Catholics to other denominations, from Praise the Lord and Charismatic groups to New Age pap and Aquarian mush. And as if that were not enough, inside the Church herself, like termites eating it up from within, a new breed of "sinister, secretive, and Orwellian" ultra-conservative elites have sprung up to hasten her demise.

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There was no use denying it: after three decades of post-Conciliar changes, the Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church had reached its level of incompetence. This idea of trying to renew it by taking bits and pieces here and there to adapt it to the next century seemed to him useless now. For thirty years, he had hoped the old certainties would return, but all those years had gone to waste: like him, Roman Catholicism had outlived its purpose, and had reached the end of a very long phase. Perhaps Catholicism was not meant to be. Or even Christianity itself. Or any religion. Or God. What was the use serving a God who never answered your prayers? Power of prayer? According to who— Ross? Bah. If you talked to a stone, it didn't answer you. If you talked to plants, you might get a little response. If you talked to your pet dog, you'd get more response. If you talked to other people, they talked back at you. But if you talked to God, you got no response, nothing, nada, silence. Was this God less responsive than a stone? Two thousand years of praying the Christian way and men were no better, if not worse, than before Christianity: the rapes went on, the corruption went on, the hatred, the greed, the envy, the violence went on. What kind of God was this who could stand the ethnic slaughters in Rwanda and the carnage to go on in Bosnia and Somalia and Haiti? A remote Being, nothing more, who merely loved to receive but not to respond; an omniscient, heartless, powerless Snob: Yahweh the self-evident, Jehovah the jealous and cruel and genocidal God of Israel who ordered Joshua to slaughter the innocent men, women, and children of Jericho; Jehovah the sadistic who spread diseases and pestilence upon the helpless Hebrews; Jehovah the Machiavellian, slave-driving, alarmist, insecure, sexist, male-chauvinist God who punished Eve and Adam and all of us for one measly bite at that silly fruit. He wheezed and he whistled and he gasped his way back to the exit, his vision blinded by tears. Just as he was about to leave the archeological room, his blurred eyes fell on the door of the third room: it appeared unlocked. He wiped his eyes: it was indeed unlocked. He turned around to look for the janitor, but nobody else was inside the museum. The door creaked when he pushed it open. It was dark inside, like the murky

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dimness that meets movie-goers when they first enter Cine Bichara, so all he noticed were the flaked chunks of plaster detached from the limestone walls, crumpled and damaged by heat and humidity. He looked up the ceiling and noticed the plaster in a sorry state of deterioration. For all the decomposition, however, he felt strangely different here. None of that strait-laced solemnity of the liturgical room, nor the sepulchral air of the archeological room. This room was cool and quiet in a special way, and for some wordless reason, he felt at peace here. When his eyes adjusted to the dark, he found himself standing before an area that was designed to look more like a parlor than a bodega. Gradually, like the dim lights of a stage, the parlor began presenting a tableau of its own distinct iconography: gilt-framed portraits unevenly distributed, tables too high for the chairs, furniture obviously donated by some prosperous Bicolano family that had moved on to more modern lifestyles. On one corner, a green sofa appeared orphaned, self-conscious amid the company, and fighting back singlehandedly the brown and dust motif of the room that was planned not for comfort but to serve as mock setting for visiting church dignitaries in their medieval robes and their deacons who spoke only in carefully calibrated declensions. Not to be outdone, the black and white polished floor tiles drew attention to themselves by emitting a strong odor of floor wax. A glint from an outside electric bulb seeped in the space between the plywood and lawanit boards they had nailed clumsily across the latticed windows to shut out the light. When he moved closer to the darkest corner of the room, he found himself surrounded by strangely familiar things. Here were the statues they had removed from the Naga Cathedral thirty years ago; here were St. Anthony of Padua, St. Christopher, St. Joseph, St. Dominic Savio, St. Aloysius Gonzaga, St. Catherine; here were the stained glass windows, the Missalae Romanum, the brown scapulars, the miraculous medals, the estampitas, the novenarios to the souls in purgatory, the Baltimore Catechism. He noticed white ants on top of the brittle pages of The Vinculum, but when he blocked the light, they were the color of dust, gritty and brown.

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Then he saw Her. Her face was serene but not cold. She stood there as if expecting him, but there was neither blame nor reproach in Her expression, for Her face was full of warmth and understanding. Yet when he tried to ask himself what that face expressed, he had no ready answer except that the face was neither indifferent nor aloof. On the other hand, it would be inaccurate for him to say that it expressed eagerness and devotion, for it was quiet and eloquent at the same time. No, it was an innocent little girl's face, yet at the same time a face which innocent little girls did not happen to have, for the face was also full of wisdom. He felt that all the words put together could not describe the expression of that face. There She stood locked up by three decades of neglect. There She stood, a Divine Bobbin wound by centuries of distortion and sexual repression and discrimination; paralyzed and de-eroticized by a patriarchal religion that for centuries had robbed Her of Her femininity by bogus practices of sentimental and fatalistic and fanatical and pietistic rituals to hide Her True Nature. There She stood surviving centuries of unfairness and wife abuse and prostitution and rape and slaying. There She stood ready to be rediscovered and rearticulated by a world gone mad as it struggled clumsily towards the Third Millennium. Ross was right about the gender preference: it was no lapse in grammar. Suddenly he began to feel the strange effect produced on him by the face. All the doubts that had lodged in his brain started clearing up. It was as if the face communicated all the answers he needed to his satisfaction. All the troubles and pains that up to now had bothered him became so insignificant that he wondered how they had ever affected him in the first place. But most of all, he felt this strange, tingling sensation rising over him, loosening his bronchial tubes, enabling him to breathe freely and deeply as he had never done before. His wheezings had suddenly disappeared. Finally, She revealed Herself. He no longer saw a face, but a stream of faces—Venus and Isis and Astarte and Shakti and the Virgin Mary and Kwan Yin—all materializing and dematerializing, yet all appearing to be there at the same time: Christelle Roelandts and An-

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janette Abayari and the fig-leafed stripteaser in Naga Cabaret—and Cynthia Dee1, (so this was what she came here for)—all continually alternating and renewing themselves, flowing and merging and swimming with the next transfiguration of faces which were yet all one and the same stunningly ravishing and cuddly and arousingly divine and beauteous She, so that for the first time in thirty years he fell on his knees and poured his heart and soul to the figure of his childhood years that was his life, his sweetness, and his hope: Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that any one who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession, was left unaided. Inspired with this confidence, I fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins, my Mother1. To thee do I come, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but, in thy mercy, hear and answer me. Amen. DUSK was

settling quickly when he left the museum. In the patio, a brisk south wind from Mount Isarog stirred the bougainvillea stems, ticking them against the gritty surface of the sunburned walls. The closing ceremonies were over. He took a deep breath. The evening air filled his lungs to the brim, rushing in like it does to a diver's after surfacing from too long a time under the sea. He felt chilly in the sudden afterglow, but he liked the feeling this twilight time in Naga. His lungs were clear and strong and he felt a well-being he had not felt in thirty years. He stepped on dry leaves, crunching them like chicharon, as he negotiated the short-cut across the lawn towards the empty seminar room that smelled like a deserted stage after a play. Except for the muffled voices saying goodbye in the porteria, he felt alone. So that was what Cynthia Dee came here for. Never mind if he did not see her anymore. She had done her job, bless this Godsend, this unreachable star that had come down from the firmament to touch his life. That was good enough. To ask for more of Cynthia Dee would be too much importuning, and he vowed never to importune. The seminary was quiet now. Through the latticed windows, he noticed the electric light illumine the patio, bathing the lawns and brick-paved paths in golden yellow. It was time for him to go.

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He hurriedly picked up his folder and brown envelope on his chair and walked briskly towards the porteria that he might still catch Ross who had promised him last night the itinerary of the Papal visit. As he walked out of the room, a short-size pink envelope fell to the floor. He picked it up and looked at the address: To Mr. Caceres. He flipped open the unsealed envelope and pulled out a neatly folded pink Cattleya. How typical of Ross: not only had s/he not forgotten; but the compleat beautician had also given the Papal itinerary a special feminine touch. When he unfolded the sheet, however, he found out that it did not contain Ross' promised Papal itinerary, but a letter: Dear Mr. Caceres, I like your lecture very much. I am interested to know more about the Future Church. I like it very much when someone like you cares so much about our Catholic Faith. Miss Dizon assigned us to write a reaction paper on any of the topics here and I have chosen you. I wanted to ask you sana but I'm too dyahe to approach you. So I'm writing you na lang to invite you to join me for merienda at Carl's Diner this Saturday at 4 p.m. I invited Tita Ross too. Tita Ross will tell you where you can pick me up. Don't worry it's my treat. I sincerely hope you can make it, sir. Please don't Indian me. I really want to talk to you. See you Saturday. Bye. Luvlots, Chinita He read the letter again. He double-checked the signature once, twice. Then he read the letter again. And again. He was grinning from ear to ear. Ross, on entering the room with the Papal itinerary, asked if anything were the matter. But Mr. Caceres was reading the letter again. He gazed at the latticed window across the patio and swore he saw the Virgin inside wink at him. He wanted to make a dash to the porteria and run to the football field and shout and jump and kick his heels together. He pressed the letter to his chest, looked up the ceiling, and said Yesss. Are you all right, Mang Carding? Mr. Caceres felt his pockets. He wanted to give Ross something, anything, to show her/him how he felt, for he felt like spreading his hands out

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straight and whirling like a motor fan and spinning around and around the football grounds and soaring above the rooftops and weather vanes and church steeples of Naga and flying above the clouds and yodeling in Mount Isarog, his bronchial tubes clear and strong, his voice booming all over Naga, his heart pounding like mad, his fists punching the air—Yesss1. Mang Carding, are you all right, Mang Carding? The name's Rick, he said, Fig Newton in hand: Just call me Rick.

Sanctuary

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle; be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the enemy. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, cast into hell Satan and all the other evil spirits roaming around the world, seeking the ruin of souls. Amen. —Pre-Vatican II prayer of exorcism said by the priest at the foot of the altar after Mass, composed by Pope Leo XIII after he had seen a vision of the mortal battle between Satan and St. Michael over the Future Church. SWEETNESS and light—with a pinch of impishness—these to Rick Caceres were the ingredients that went into the irresistibility of the Bicolana; that is why when Cynthia Dee asked to interview him on the lecture he delivered during the seminar-workshop last Sunday at the Holy Rosary Seminary on the future of the Catholic Church (an interview garnished cum merienda in Carl's Diner in downtown Naga City), he walked on air. Until the Saturday afternoon he picked her up in Santa Cruz Street. It took only one word to bring him back to earth: gago. A

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group of tambays outside Cynthia's house called him that. He heard it twice: the first time when he entered the Dee compound, and the second when he and Cynthia left the gate on their way to Carl's. "Coffee, tea; or me?" she teased him as they stood in front of the neon-lighted counter. That would have tickled him. But not this time. Gago killed him. He pretended to look intently at the variety of choices on display up front—fish fillet, hamburger steak, crispy chicken, goto regular/special, tokwa't baboy—but could not take his mind off the tambays. Gago. The word lacerated him. Why did they lash at him like that? It was totally unprovoked. What right did these proto-humans have to call him that? They made sure he heard it, for the venom shot straight from their fangs despite the din of radio-cassette players turned full blast inside their Willys jeep—a stainless mean-looking four-cylinder canvass-topped four-wheel drive with a battery of decals, headlights, halogen lamps and fog lights familiar in the centro for its noise pollution. They spat the poison right smack at his face: gago. "Mr. Ca-ce-res," Cynthia Dee prompted him in teasing sing-song. Rick flushed horridly. A red-capped waiter in red-striped apron had already taken Cynthia Dee's order—pizza-—and he kept tapping his ballpen on the-order pad. A queue had built up behind them. "Tanguigue steak," he said quickly without thinking. He insisted on paying the bill, but Cynthia Dee beat him to it: "It's my treat, remember?" He did remember, but the reflex gesture was obligatory. She dished out a five hundred peso bill and handed it to the girl behind the cash register who pressed open the metal drawer that chimed with her rehearsed smile and loose change. No mean spending for Cynthia, thought Rick, considering that she could have spent more if Ross Alvarado, a third party to the treat, had not begged off at the last minute to attend to another engagement— something about lamierda—a cancellation that thrilled Rick to no small extent because that meant having Cynthia Dee all for himself— and in Carl's. Carl's Diner is a loud, technicolored luncheonette perched atop New England Bakery that guaranteed instant nostalgia even to the hardened postmodern. No other building in the vicinity flies in the

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face of its come-on look except perhaps Bichara Theater. Even then, a lawanit board strip (building permit no. 099205157) indicated renovation going on so that the cinema was no rival for attention for the time being. Carl's, however, draws attention not so much to its menus painted loudly outside the glass windows (cakes, fries, steaks, pancakes, tacos, chili, pizza) but the sight of a red vintage Cadillac crashing through a huge 45 rpm Beatles record, the car hovering precariously over the parking lot along Evangelista Street right in the area where the shoe shine boys and local newsmen congregated. Inside Carl's the ambiance is the fifties: black and white checkered floor tiles; huge posters of Brando, Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean; piped-in music of Nat King Cole's unforgettable songs— all these belonged to his age, all conducive to his style of romance. Cynthia would be in his territory. But all that excitement caved in over just one word: gago. The girl behind the cash register gave them their plastic number and her plastic smile. Rick pouted at the farthest corner across the room under the No Smoking sign and pushed Cynthia Dee's arm gently so that she could walk ahead while he followed, taking the opportunity to pat his temples and fill up his thinning crown. When they reached their table, he waited for her to sit first before he himself sucked in his belly and slid smugly into the cushioned red stool facing her. To Cynthia Dee, a sophomore coed at the Ateneo de Naga, getting Rick to talk was accomplishment enough. Everybody in Naga knew the old bachelor was not exactly the gregarious type. But after he had given that lecture last Sunday, Cynthia Dee thought his views on the Future Church were just perfect for her RS 3 class report on the Church and Philippine Society. Her problem was how to approach him. Rick Caceres, an ex-seminarian, was an expert in Church matters. Although he had left the seminary years ago, the Catholic imprint had never left him. He had spent his life reading up on anything and everything about the Catholic Church, from the Code of Canon Law to the latest Evangelium Vitae. The future of the Church concerned him. The Naga Archdiocese was celebrating its 400th year, but de-

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spite the celebrations, he worried about the millennium ending, because the post-Conciliar Church—the once solid, inert, geocentric, monolithic sanctuary that he knew—was changing so fast he wondered if there would be anything left of it to distinguish it from other religions by the time Naga entered the next millennium. The Archbishop, in recognition of Rick's concern, had invited him to speak in the seminar-workshop last Sunday on the occasion of the quadricentennial of the elevation of Naga into a diocese and the bicentennial of the canonical erection of the Holy Rosary Seminary. Cynthia Dee was among the student observers whom Rick instantly impressed by his mastery of Church history, but she was too timid to approach him. So she wrote him a note asking if it were possible to interview him at Carl's, and he wrote back and said yes why not—a gesture that flattered her, considering his senior position in the Naga community. What she did not know was the way Rick walked on air the whole week. She said he could choose any approach to the topic, but she had some ready questions just to get the ball rolling. She pulled out a pocket cassette recorder from her handbag. Rick stiffened. "May I?" she said. "Sure," he said in a falsetto voice, "go ahead." He did not like his pitch. "This is my favorite nook," he said quickly, trying to suppress a nervous tick. He needed to warm up his voice some more, to get it right. He looked through the slanting glass window. He wanted to say something more before going down to business, something informal like how he'd come here often and how he liked this raised corner table because it gave him a second floor view of downtown Naga not available elsewhere. But Cynthia Dee had already pressed the recorder on. "In your lecture," she began, "you said that despite its faults, many good things attract you to the Catholic Church." She read from her note pad. "Can you name one?" "Her comic narrative," he spoke to the recorder in his suddenly changed Eddie Rodriguez voice. He had two voices, one baritone and

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another falsetto. The former was conscious and came out well when he was in condition; the latter was his natural voice. "You mean cosmic." "No, comic—comic as opposed to tragic. Catholicism is a religion of stories with happy endings. The Catholic Church teaches that good always triumphs over evil. Hence, it is a joyful religion"—he ended that phrase with a hum—"that's what attracts me to the Church." He liked the way she looked at him intently. He shifted his weight to the other buttock and explained further: "The Son suffered and died, but on the third day He rose again— that's a happy ending. I think Catholics remain Catholics or return to the Church not because of the doctrines and laws but because of the comic narrative." "Number nine, please," the counter called out in the loudspeaker. "I'll take it," Cynthia said, and pressed off the recorder. Their knees brushed together when she stepped down the stool. He could not help ogling her behind as she walked towards the counter to pick up the order. He noticed the other customers follow her with their eyes when she walked back to him. He was sure it was more than her clothes: she wore an extra-large Naga Quadricentennial shirt over a pair of white shorts, but the shirt was extra long you'd think she wore nothing under it. No, he assured himself, it was more than that: it was the aura she exuded: sweet and light, with a pinch of impishness. Simply irresistible. She laid the tray on the table and allowed Rick to distribute the plates, as she pressed back on the recorder. "In your lecture," she read again from her note pad, "you mentioned that Vatican II took away the sacred and the mysterious from the Church." "That's right," he said, putting back his filled-up spoon on the plate. "They took away Latin, the Gregorian Chant—they even removed the statues of the saints from the side altars of the Naga Cathedral." He wondered if she really understood what that implied. "Ah, but you are too young to appreciate the past, you know, the loss of order and mystery."

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She held her crust to her lips: "I don't know about the loss, but I'm not too happy about the present, either." "What do you mean?" She continued holding the crust to her lips. "I think my generation is too mababaw. You know, if I could only have Doc Brown's time travel machine—you know, in the movie Back to the Future—I'd like to go back to the fifties, especially to the time you described in your lecture, you know, the years before Vatican II. I liked the way you described it so beautifully." The crust popped inside her mouth when she bit it. Now here was a girl who talked his language, he thought. Here was someone who could connect. "What was the world like before Vatican II?" she asked him. "See those cars over there?" He pointed to the glass-framed photos of vintage cars hanging on the wall. He told her to take note of the hardtop convertible automobiles of the fifties with their exaggerated body styles and outrageous fins—take particular note too of those sleek, bulky, chrome gas guzzlers that dated back to the days of the fifty-cent drive-in and cafe rendezvous one saw in old 16 mm black and white movies. "That's how the world was like before Vatican II: genuine, elegant, tough." "They don't make cars like that anymore, right?" "That's right," he said. "Car bodies now are as thin as sardine cans." Her eyes lost themselves in slits of laughter when he said that. How childlike, he thought, how easy to please. He liked her teeth: white and perfect. He liked the way she tamed her unruly pinned-up hair: how sassy, he thought. She kept swinging the revolving stool from side to side between bites on her crust, revealing those diminutive white shorts enticingly slit at the sides and gartered at the waist. How innocent to the ways of the world, he thought. "You also said they took away important prayers. Like what, for example?" The onion rings crackled as she bit them. "The prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel," he said. "Saint Michael? Why?" "Because there's so much evil in the world now."

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The word "evil" churned his stomach. It moved his mind again to the tambays. "Mind if I ask you something?" he said. "Course not. Ask anything." She held another crust to her lips. "Off the record." "Okay." She turned off the recorder with her free hand. "These guys, these tambays," he said very casually as he uncapped the Worcestershire sauce in front of her, "do they always bother you?" Suddenly her face dropped. She put the crust back to her plate and looked intently at the Orange Julius. Then she heaved a sigh and looked out into space. She seemed on the verge of making a confession. "I'm sorry," he said. "Let's continue with the interview." "No, no," she said. "I'm glad you brought it up. His name is Bhoy," she said spelling the "h." So that was his name. So that was the owner of that Willys jeep. He had seen that jeep several times in the centro. He recognized it by the PROGUN bumper sticker glued up in the fender right under the masking-taped paste-up letter strips of the owner's name: BHOY. He and his companions were the local untouchables who joy-rode downtown daily to jar the residents with shock waves of bass and cymbals wafting from the stainless steel's overhead stereo consoles, equalizers, and speakers. No Naga resident dared complain of the noise pollution. No concerned citizen dared tell Bhoy and company to their face to tone down the volume. They played as they pleased and parked as they pleased. Especially on Ateneo de Naga campus. Ever since the start of the semester, Cynthia said, Bhoy would park his jeep there and wait for her class to dismiss. Then he would offer to bring her home in his Willys, an offer she would nicely but firmly refuse. She knew what riding with him meant. Word had spread on campus that Bhoy picked up girls and raped them at the back of his jeep. Of course, that was just a rumor, like the rumor that he had something to do with the mysterious disappearance of a coed last year, although none had come out with convincing evidence to implicate him. But he did have a reputation for exposing parities in public. It was the group's little

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game, she said, a pustahan. First, they'd choose a girl with "removable" shorts; next, they'd bet on the color of her panties; then, Bhoy'd approach the girl and ask for directions, would she care to look up if this house were the right house; finally, as she looked up, he'd grab her shorts and pull them down. The guy who guessed the correct color won the game and collected the money he'd later spend to treat the group to a drinking spree. Last month, he did just that to a freshman student on her way to her P.E. class, and the girl, terribly embarrassed, was forced to drop all her subjects in Ateneo. Cynthia knew the girl because she belonged to the Chinese community. So she feared him and so she avoided him. Bhoy, however, was not the kind to take no for an answer—the word reject, he once bragged to his drinking buddies, was not found in his vocabulary—that is why the more Cynthia refused, the more he pressed on, confident he would wear her down by sheer persistence, just like he did the rest of them. In the meantime she would take the trimobile home. But the Willys jeep would follow, and when she reached home Bhoy would park in front of her house. She dared not tell her parents. They could not do anything anyway. Bhoy's two companions, a fat man and a ponytailed man, lived within a stone's throw from the Dee residence. Bhoy had one pet peeve though: sopot. Every tambay knew Bhoy had not been circumcised because years ago when the herbulario came to that street to circumcise the kanto boys, Bhoy had run away when his turn came as soon as he saw the razor blade. Cynthia felt guilty about asking Rick to pick her up at home. The tambays had been heckling even her groupmates who came to work on their projects there. She should have warned him about them and asked him to meet her instead in front of Robertson Department Store. She did not touch her pizza all the while she talked about Bhoy. "Don't mind them," she said. That was difficult, he thought. The more she talked about her problem, the more his thoughts moved towards Bhoy and company with resentment. He abhorred these tyrants. They stood for all the negative elements that infested Naga: these were the neighborhood

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drunks who sang loudly in the middle of the night, these were the sando-sporting movie-goers who put their smelly feet behind your back, these were the tambays who heckled you if they overheard you converse in English. Once upon a time he encountered these protohumans only in sari-sari stores and construction sites—verbal snipers who took pot shots at passing mestizas and colegialas. But this time they were all over the place and filled up every nook and cranny of Naga—zealots of pakikisama and utang na loob, secure in their being tunay na lalake, formidable by their sheer number in preying on the good, the meek, and the beautiful. What started as a simple desire to date Cynthia Dee now included a desire to find a meaning behind the grossness he saw in these tyrants. He was not too keen on granting interviews, but this time he thought he was lucky they talked because by articulating his thoughts about the problem of evil, he might be able to arrive at some answer to the question on why the Catholic Church was no longer capable of delivering the good from the bad. He had suffered long and alone from the tyranny of the strong. With no answer in sight, he thought what he needed now was dialogue: to talk to someone not so much to reveal ready-made thoughts but to discover for the first time solutions not accessible in solitary thinking but in dialogue. To communicate dialogically was to be clarified. And Cynthia Dee was willing to provide the company. "Turn on the recorder," he said. "I think I know what to talk about for your report." She pressed on the recorder. He moved it in front of him, took a deep breath, and talked directly to it: Why is there so much evil now? he began. Just read the papers: a man rapes a girl then slays her in the most gruesome manner, a motorist shoots a fellow motorist through the^chest over a parking space, a jobless bolo-wielding laid-off employee blames it on the boss and massacres the boss' whole family in their sleep, a laid-off driver walks into the house of his former employer and sprays bullets on the sleeping family members, a baker hacks his 65-year-old employer, his 65-year-old wife, and their 25year-old daughter because they would not lend him money for New Year's Eve, a houseboy stabs dead a live-in couple over an argument

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about money. And that is just the local news. What about that suicide cult in Cheiry, Switzerland, that what's his name Luc Jouret's Order of the Solar Temple, that cost the lives of 53 people; and what about that poison gas attack in a Japan subway, that bombing of a Federal building in Oklahoma City—how do I describe all these, these motiveless malignities of Iagos. What is going on in the world? You ask me why I think the prayer to Saint Michael should be recited again at the end of the Mass? This is my answer: Because Saint Michael is the Archangel divinely mandated to protect us against the malicious activities of Satan. I cannot understand why in the reform liturgy during the pontificate of Paul VI, they took away the recitation of this powerful prayer without taking into account the fact that we need the Archangel's protection especially now that the millennium is ending and the forces of evil are getting very powerful. Why did they remove it? Satan must be having a ball as the Church keeps disarming itself. Why has the Church ceased to be the refuge of the good, the meek, and the beautiful? he went on, all warmed up now. What has caused the Catholic Church in the Philippines to degenerate into an institution of arrogant and insecure clerics whose aim it seems is to gain political clout by heckling and insulting fellow Christians over a one-issue policy on birth control? You're taking Art Appreciation in Ateneo, right? Are you familiar with Raphael's fresco, Repulse of Attila? Or Alessandro Algardi's bas-relief also depicting the same theme? You know, hija, these works of art tell us that once upon a time the Church was genuine and apostolic. When Attila the Hun threatened the Holy City, the people of Rome ran to the Pope for protection. I'll tell you an interesting story: The year is 452 A.D. The Huns have razed Aquileia, and Western Europe has crumbled. Meanwhile the Vandals have taken North Africa, and the Suevi have captured Iberia. Britain has fallen too under the barbarians, and the Gauls sign a separate peace with the Goths and Burgundians. All these prepare the ground for the Huns to invade Northern Italy. Their intention is to lay it in ruins. And now we see the Huns thundering directly toward Rome, the heart of western civilization. The people of Rome, abandoned by their own rulers, run to Pope Leo the First for help. The

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Pope immediately orders his cardinals and archbishops to assemble together and lead the people in procession to Mincio in the vicinity of Mantua, there to meet the barbarian invaders. Vexilla Regis Prodeunt, he assures his flock. The Huns witness a long procession coming out of the city to meet them. Attila is awed by the strange pomp of incense and stately robes and the singing of sacred hymns led by an aging Pope holding aloft the processional crucifix. As soon as he is face to face with the invader, Leo, Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Christ, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Servant of the servants of God, successor of Peter who holds the keys of the kingdom of heaven, points the crucifix at Attila, the Scourge of God, and orders him in the name of Christ to depart from Rome. Attila, confused, turns back and retreats to the Danube, never to bother Rome again. That was glorious. That was an incident of a magnificent past when the Church was sanctuary of the good, the meek, and the beautiful—the Holy Ghost descending upon the Vicar of Christ. Why is the Church no longer like this? And why have they replaced the crucifix with a mere cross? What is wrong with the image of a crucified Christ? True it is that a crucifix accentuated the Passion, but the Passion won the victory over evil. Rick was in his element. To him, the crucifix was the Supreme Symbol. Cynthia was absorbed taking down as much notes as she could, as Rick asked and answered his own questions, argued, defended, and amplified his positions. He said he could not understand why the post-Conciliar Church saw an irreconcilable contradiction in the ignominity of a God crucified and a God triumphant. The crucifix was the ultimate comic narrative epitomized, he asserted, because through it, Christ had conquered death and sin—good had triumphed over evil. He knew of the apostolic indulgences attached to the crucifix. He himself carried a Latin crucifix everywhere he went, he said, and unzippered his shirt-jack to show it to her—a heavy Crux Immissa with a metal base stem longer than the other three arms. "This is no ordinary crucifix," he told her. "This was blessed before the Second Vatican Council." He zippered it back inside his shirt-jack. "A crucifix blessed before Vatican II is an effectual sanctuary against evil."

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Suddenly the glass doors swung open, and three men in sando and dirty slippers burst in. Rick's stomach churned. He immediately recognized the sun-burnt leader whose sharp looks darted at him. The guy wore a baseball cap with his name embossed in front all caps: BHOY. Cynthia's back was to the door, so she kept taking down notes, unaware of the group's arrival. "Hoy1." Bhoy yelled at her. "Seen-Cha!" Cynthia froze at the sound of the voice. "Why you hiding-hiding here?" Bhoy lunged from behind her. His two companions followed their leader. "Why you hiding-hiding here?" He fondled a greasy gasket as he faced her. Cynthia smiled meekly: "Hi, Bhoy." Rick felt the rapid pulsing in his veins. "We looking-looking for you in beer garden." The smell of his armpit and motor oil infected the area. "Well-well-well-well, so-o-o-o you dating-dating, ha?" Bhoy licked a rotten front tooth. "You no introducing your date?" He stabbed her side with a dirty finger. "You no introducing"—pointing the dirty finger at Rick—"him?" Rick burned. "S...sure, Bhoy. This is Mr. Caceres, my...adviser." The three men looked at each other with mock surprise. The fat companion made throat noises of the word "adviser." Bhoy lit a cigarette and sucked the smoke deeply. The red glow of the stick's tip caused the stubble of whiskers on his chin to appear like flax fiber before scutching. He crouched close to Cynthia's face and exhaled: "You no introducing your—Sugar Daddy?" A ripple of chuckles spread among the group. Cynthia begged Rick with her eyes to do something. "Brods, please lang," Rick begged them in his falsetto voice. He was blinking furiously. "Okay lang, p're," cut in the ponytailed companion who kept twisting a number 12 electric wire with a pair of pliers. He wore a basketball uniform with the words D' Bad Bhoys of Naga printed in front of the shirt. A rose tattoo quivered in his right forearm each time he squeezed the pliers. "Easy ka lang—gurang."

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"We understanding/' Bhoy assured Rick. "Old carabao eat young grass." He grabbed Cynthia's arm. "Correct, Cynthia?" Cynthia winced at being gripped near her armpit. She felt ticklish. "Please, Bhoy, I'm not..." "Answer me1." Bhoy pressed the arm tighter, his middle finger ringed with a thick Greek-lettered ring pressing her arm-bones. "Answer meee! Correct, Cynthia?" Yes." "Speaking Inglis da puta," Bhoy applauded. Turning to Rick: "Suwerti mo, p're. After you pucking her, me next, ha?" Cynthia jerked her arm away. She stood up and glared at Bhoy, her eyes brimming with tears. The other customers stopped clicking their spoons and forks and watched them. Rick despised them for just staring at them, doing nothing. "Tara, p're," the fat, squat-stanced companion urged Bhoy. "SibatV' Bhoy ordered his two companions, as they pulled out of the table and stormed out of the room, slapping each other's backs and guffawing at their own spew of billingsgate, evaporating as abruptly as they had burst in. Cynthia shuddered in sobs. Rick's hands trembled uncontrollably as he helped her fix her notes and put back the tape recorder in her handbag. "Let's go," he said quietly. The walk to the exit seemed endless, for they negotiated their way through a swarm of eyes that scrutinized their every step all the way to the glass door. He made the sign of the cross when he descended the stairs. Cynthia kept blowing her nose in a paper napkin. He felt like saying something, anything to comfort her but could not find the right words. Midway, in the landing, he felt like putting one arm around her, but on second thought felt it not proper, so they descended the stairs in silence. When they stepped out of the arched exit downstairs into busy centro, he saw an uncaring city. Here he was, mortified and humiliated, but Naga went about its usual cadging self concerned only with its own vested interests: street urchins ganging up on him with outstretched palms as soon as they spotted him, shoe shine boys

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insisting to shine his shoes even if he had already said no a thousand times, strikers squatting in front of a padlocked store across Elias Angeles Street clanging their donation cans at every passing pedestrian while holding aloft a begrimed streamer that cautioned the military to back off 50 meters away—all insensitive to his feelings. They crossed General Luna Street to merge with the bottleneck of pedestrians funneling through the fruit stands under the Kevin Gold Pawnshop sign on the other side of the street. The roar of passing trimobiles exonerated him from saying something to break the uncomfortable silence between them. They kept pace with a rolling pison that jangled alongside them as they negotiated the length from Robertson Department Store to the PNB building. The racket was panacea—the sound reminded him of a tugboat berthing a freighter up the Bicol River—but short-lived, for when they turned left on P Burgos Street then right again on Igualdad, they lost the sound completely. Halfway in Igualdad, right in front of the Rizal Technical Institute, he heard another sound—this time a faint brass rhythm thumping out from behind. He looked at Cynthia: she heard it too—the familiar chunking and syncopating fracas of a car stereo wafting full blast from behind. Rick looked back. His nerves shot up. There it was, the lighted dragon of steel with clashing cymbals stalking from behind and leering at them through blinding halogen lamps. The fat man drove the jeep. Bhoy sat in the front seat while the ponytailed man hunched himself up at the back like a wolf salivating at a prey. Rick and Cynthia walked faster, but the mean machine whoomed once and took a cruising position alongside the walking couple. Bhoy kept repeating the word "sorry" above the din of equalizers and speakers, but Cynthia ignored him and walked straight ahead. "Sorry, Cynthia, okay?" Cynthia refused to look at him; she walked faster each time Bhoy mentioned the word. Rick kept up with her pace, but the couple were no match for the four-cylinder steel which had only to whoom again to catch up with them. "Sorry talaga, okay?" She pretended to talk to Rick.

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"Sigue na, sorry na, okay? You now riding-riding with me, okay?" Cynthia held Rick's hand and walked hurriedly on. "Buray ni ina mo}" Bhoy spat in front of her. The couple broke into a run. Rick heard them cursing behind. As soon as the couple reached the grotto at the end of Igualdad, they knocked and knocked at the door of the PNP Kabayan Center. Nobody answered. They rattled and twisted the locked doorknob. A burst of loud laughter wafted from the jeep. The couple turned right and ran the whole stretch of Santa Cruz Street, then turned left at Barlin, and left again at Iglesia Street and right at the guava-lined path towards the side entrance of the Holy Rosary Seminary. A rusty padlock locked the rusty iron gate. Rick rattled and rattled the bars. Cynthia tried to climb it, but the jeep had arrived and parked itself outside Judge Grageda's compound. Bhoy jumped out of the jeep and stalked towards her. Cynthia came down helplessly, unable to climb over the gate. "Why you so pakipot to me, ha? I said sorry na, okay? You riding-riding with me na, okay?" She tried to move away from him, but Bhoy would cut her off in whichever direction she moved into. He would not let her go, he said, unless she talked to him—face to face. Sensing her way blocked, Cynthia turned her back on him every time Bhoy spoke to her. Bhoy kept moving from side to side to get her to face him but each time he did she changed position. Rick watched lamely, especially when the fat man in the jeep caressed an aluminum baseball bat. After several tries, Bhoy stood still, apparently on the verge of giving up, and spoke to her from behind. Then he dropped on his knees and begged her to forgive him. He asked her to look at the skies. Rick noticed a faint smile in Bhoy's mouth. Suddenly, Bhoy grabbed both sides of her shorts and pulled them down, down to her knees, gripped them harder and pulled them further down to her ankles, exposing her panties. She squatted awkwardly and pulled up her shorts quickly. The jeep's occupants roared: pink! pink1. Bhoy walked back leisurely towards the jeep, snickering from ear to ear. The fat man turned on the engine.

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"Sopot!" Cynthia shouted at Bhoy as he boarded the jeep. Bhoy's mouth curled like a botete fished out of the Bicol River. He turned around. "What you say?"* Cynthia saw his eyes turn bloodshot. He charged at her and slapped her face. It made a dull, flat sound. "You no call me that, ha?" Cynthia cupped her face and screamed: "AraaayV' Bhoy grabbed her by the scruff and dragged her towards the guava tree. "Sopot, ha?" He grabbed her shorts and tried to pull them down again but she crouched her body and gripped her garter tight. When the other companions saw this, they jumped out of the jeep and grabbed her arms and legs, lifted her hip-high, dropped her torso to the ground, raised her legs high up in the air, and pulled, pulled her shorts off. Bhoy hid her shorts in his maong jacket. "Sopot, ha?" He started unfastening his belt. Rick pushed the ponytailed companion against the wall. "Run!" Rick yelled at her. "Run!" She sprang up to run, but the fat man caught her hair and shook and shook it, dragging her to the ground. She wobbled in sharp pain and kicked blindly, but the iron hand gripped tighter and towed her back to Bhoy. Rick lunged blindly at the fat man, but a fist from nowhere punched him in the face. The whack startled more than hurt him. Cynthia thrashed her body from side to side, but the ponytailed man joined the fat man drag and heave and push and pull her back to the guava tree where Bhoy stood rubbing his pants and groaning. Rick jumped at the ponytailed man, but another fist, this time from Bhoy, struck him squarely in the mouth and sent him reeling against the iron gates of the seminary side entrance. As soon as the two companions had delivered the girl back to Bhoy, the fat man released her, picked up the aluminum baseball bat, and sloped towards Rick for the coup de grace. Suddenly, Cynthia kicked herself free and rushed to Rick. But Bhoy ran after her and pulled her easily by the nape. Rick took advantage of the split-second distraction to kick the fat man in the groin. Then he ran towards Cynthia, punched Bhoy in the chest, and pulled her free.

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A flying kick from behind sent Rick thudding face flat on the ground. "Hold her!" Bhoy ordered his two men. Looming over Rick, Bhoy's face wrinkled up into a grimace of displeasure. "You hittinghitting me, ha? HA?" Then he punched and elbowed and kicked, kicked Rick wildly in the head and chest and nape and kidneys. The fat man passed the baseball bat on to Bhoy. Bhoy grabbed it, took aim, and struck, struck Rick in the chest and ribs and neck and mouth until Rick curled up in pain in the swath of uncut grass, his mouth salty with blood. Cynthia rushed up to Rick, but the fat man grabbed her ankles and yanked them up, up, throwing her violently, face first, against the ground. She turned about face quickly and kicked and kicked the air, but the ponytailed man ran up to her, grabbed her wrists and pinned them overhead. "Sigue na, sigue na," the ponytailed man said. "Ako muna, ako muna," Bhoy said, and he fell on her clumsily. His rubbery mouth stopped her cries. She twisted from side to side to avoid his mouth, but his weight pressed her ribs. Bhoy gripped her face to steady it, digging his long fingernails into her cheeks. The ring finger dug her jaws like a dentist's tool. When he steadied her head, he kissed and kissed her mouth. "Mmm, Cynthia, mmm, Cynthia, ahhh." His breath smelled like rotten egg. She opened her mouth to scream, but he gagged her mouth with his face towel. She whimpered and moaned when his hands searched under her shirt, pushed up her bra and cupped her breasts. "Oh Cynthia, I labing-labing you," he kept groaning, as she arched her back each time he released his weight to stroke her breasts. Then he grabbed the shirt and pushed it up and across her bare shoulders—up some more until the shirt covered her face. Her breasts popped out and swung like bells. "Take it off, take it off," the ponytailed man pinning her arms overhead said, pouting to her panties. Bhoy and the fat man grabbed both sides of the garters of her panties and yanked them off, slid them off one leg, and left them to dangle on the other. Then Bhoy knelt in front of her, between her legs, forced her knees apart, and smooched and smooched her pudenda. Finally Bhoy prepared himself for thrusting position, unzippered his pants, dug in, and pulled out his bloated member.

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Suddenly Rick lunged in from the side, unzippered his shirt-jack and pulled out his crucifix. "Satan1." he screamed, thrusting the crucifix at Bhoy's face: "Depart!" Bhoy pushed Cynthia to the ground with his left hand and used his right to parry Rick's arm but recoiled when he saw the crucifix in front of him. Rick stiffened his arm: "Blood of Christ, save us! Deliver us from evil, Lord, deliver us from evil!" A strange energy, like an electric current, surged up through his body. "The power of Christ commands you!" Bhoy jerked back and stood up. The crucifix seared him. His two companions released Cynthia's arms and legs when they saw their boss awkwardly parrying Rick's arm. Bhoy shunned the crucifix aimed directly at him, and waggled a finger in warning, but Rick kept jabbing it to his face. "Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in this battle—NOW!" Rick charged forward. "Pope Saint Leo the Great, help us—NOW!" Bhoy licked his rotten tooth. The unexpected defiance confused him he had forgotten to tuck in his shriveled sopot that peeped out of his unzippered trousers. "Jesus Christ!" Rick pressed forward, his stiff arm aimed at Bhoy's face, "Save us! Water from the side of Christ, save us!" Rick's entire body shuddered from the voltaic energy inside him: "Vexilla Regis Prodeunt! Vexilla Regis Prodeunt!" The trio kept backing off until they reached the jeep. The fat man fumbled with the ignition keys. "Depart!" Rick boomed, "Satanists!" "Sibat!" Bhoy snapped back in his falsetto voice. The jeep whined, backed up hurriedly and whoomed away. But Rick would not stop. "Vexilla Regis Prodeunt! Vexilla Regis Prodeunt!" he roared and roared. His voice echoed through Barlin Street, and his whole body shook in convulsions, unable to contain the surge of energy rising over him. But the power left him as soon as the jeep had turned right in the main street and disappeared. Exhausted, he dropped on his knees and pressed the crucifix to his lips and just knelt there in the tall grass and closed his eyes and bowed, sobbing his thanksgiving to the God represented by the crucified im-

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age he was clutching. When he opened his eyes, the surroundings were too dark to see the details of the crucifix. He went back to Cynthia and saw that she had already put on her panties. She was searching in the grass for her shorts, but Rick reminded her that Bhoy had inserted them in his maong jacket. "It's all right," she said, slipping in her sneakers. Evening had fallen, and besides the extra-large Naga Quadricentennial shirt was long enough to cover her down on their way home to Santa Cruz.

Flakes of Fire, Bodies of Light

In the beginning there were not coldness and darkness: there was the Fire. Teilhard de Chardin Hymn of the Universe TANYA agreed to allow her husband to die at home, but when he lost consciousness, she panicked: she phoned for an ambulance. "I can't do it, Sid," she kept telling him inside the ambulance. "I can't do it." The screaming wagon careened right and left as it weaved its way through the early streets of Naga City. When it reached the back door entrance of Mother Seton Hospital, Tanya disembarked first and supervised the transfer from stretcher to hospital carriage. She stood alongside her husband to make sure he reclined securely, steadied the carriage when the crew wheeled it noisily through the corridor, steadied the carriage some more when it turned a right angle, steadied it again as it rammed the swinging doors of the emergency room where Dr. Go, the resident physician, stood by waiting. The dizzying activity of hospital business confused her. She found herself signing papers, taking down instructions, buying vials from the pharmacy. When she returned to the room, a surgical nurse had already swabbed Sid's shaven head, neck, and chest with a disinfectant,

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then painted the entire area with tincture of iodine. Tanya was sure Sid had opened his eyes to protest what was going on, because at this moment the anesthesiologist lunged forward to knock him out with sodium thiopental. After doing this, the team transferred the patient to the nearby catheterization section where they inserted a rubber tube through his trachea down to his lungs. Then they attached the same tube to a flexible hose fastened to a machine. They punctured his body with intubated needles and drew long incisions in the legs and thighs, before they wheeled him into the operating room where the surgeon, his arms resting on green-draped armrests for maximum steadiness, gripped a scalpel, took aim, and slit open the patient's neck right under the jawbone so the team could work directly on the insides of the throat. The battle to save Sid's life lasted till noon. As soon as they closed him up, Dr. Go emerged from the operating room and announced to Tanya the success of the operation: after extensive mouth surgery, he said, they were able to save her husband's life. At the Intensive Care Unit, Tanya asked the surgical nurse who monitored Sid's vital signs why the shape of her husband's face had changed. The nurse assured her the disfigurement resulted from the removal of certain affected parts. Tanya asked what these affected parts were, and the nurse named over the tongue, the larynx, the jawbone, some tissues in the neck; but told her not to worry but be thankful her husband was alive. Why? Sid's eyes said it all when he came out of sedation. Why? His head throbbed and his nose bled from the nasal tubes. Why? "I'm sorry, darling," Tanya kept repeating. She stroked his arm to explain to him what had happened, but he lapsed back into unconsciousness. Ramon, the electrician at the telegraph office where Sid worked, arrived, carrying a vinyl chair for Tanya. He checked out the bottles and tubes while Tanya sat and stared blankly at the encephalogram. EARLY that year, after his biopsy had determined terminal cancer, Sid and Tanya had made up their minds to refuse surgery and further

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hospital treatment, and allow Sid to die at home. He told her he was ready: he'd lived a good life, and now that it was ending, like everything else must end, he accepted it and resigned himself to the inevitable. When the time came, he had entreated Tanya, his only favor from her was to promise him not to prolong his life unnecessarily—no surgery, no artificial gears—but to allow nature to take its course. He had no regrets, he had told her: the years they'd been together were the time of his life. "And to think everybody in Naga predicted our marriage would not last," he had quipped. "But look at us now—ten years and still very much in love." Nobody in Naga had approved of their relationship. Tanya's parents categorically opposed the idea of their daughter marrying a man older than they. Her sodalist friends were leery of the old goat (Has Naga run out of young, eligible bachelors?). The Sisters of Charity frowned on the mis-match not so much over the age-gap but over this lecher's wrecking the plans—better plans—they had laid out for her. Tanya had graduated magna cum laude from the Colegio de Santa Isabel, and the nuns had already groomed her up for the convent, an invitation she kept postponing even after graduation. In the meantime, she taught College Physics at the Colegio. None of the Ateneans her age dared court her. Not that she had a wallflower face (the boys chased her classmates whose faces, according to Dona Choleng of the CWL, could stop a clock). Far from it. She had a clean, freshened-up face that required no make-up—a cross between Marlene Dietrich and Saint Catherine Laboure—and a whistle-bait figure (firm turned-up breasts, deliriously huggable curves, straight long round legs) not even her Mary-like dress could conceal. The boys steered clear of her because she found them trivial and corny—and she showed it. She had a talent for wearing that long, sack-cloth-and-ashes face whenever the Ateneo boys were around, and a genius for compelling everyone to act medieval whenever she was around. She had built a wall around herself that was as impregnable as the Colegio's of the 50's no Ateneo braggadocio nor Jesuit jokes could break down. To enter her required an inside job. Even then, it was no guarantee of winning over Miss Manhid.

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They met because Sid's niece Margot became Tanya's student, and Margot had employed aggressive selling techniques to pressure her uncle dear to buy a sponsor ticket the nuns had dragooned each graduating student to dispose of for the school's presentation of Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I. Tanya herself led the usherettes on gala night. She welcomed him at the entrance (Margot's uncle? I'm very pleased to meet you, sir), praised his niece's class performance (Took after her uncle, right, sir?), inquired about his huge private library and collection of 75 rpm records (Margot told me a lot about you, sir), and escorted him all the way down the front row of the CSI Auditorium. When he went home that evening, Margot wondered why her usually caustic self-proclaimed opera expert critic uncle mentioned nothing of the musical but bombarded her instead with questions about her Physics teacher. Nobody in Naga had expected Sid to marry—including Sid himself. His former classmates in the Ateneo de Naga had all gotten married, many of them to each other, as evinced by the familiar pairs who attend AdeN Alumni Homecomings yearly. Marriage had never crossed his mind, not even during Fr. Bob Hogan's Marriage Guidance class in the old days. He gave three reasons: First, because as a student, the Jesuits had taught him that God and studies came first: Primum Regnum Dei. Second, after graduation, because Ignatius of Loyola, whose own hour of grace arrived late in mid-life, taught him that late vocations to the Order were not impossible. And third, after he passed the "Cape of Good Hope"—and Camus had replaced Ignatius—because marriage was an institution, and only absurd people lived in institutions. Tanya changed all that. Sid knew nothing of Physics but a lot about old-fashioned tactics: he opened doors, stood up every time she entered the room, walked on the outer curb of the sidewalk. He came from a different world. He courted her with roses and haranas of Sarung Banggui under her verandah. He comported himself like an Atenean of the fifties, an Alter Christus who did everything for the greater glory of God, exuding good manners and right conduct that showed even in the way

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he dressed—the white bucks of Pat Boone—differently but immaculately. This neatness in thought, word, and deed charmed her. He was different. He told her about the world where he came from, and it fascinated her. In the fifties, he said, they built houses in Naga with neither grills nor bars, and they slept with open doors and windows (this last one was beyond her). During their Saturday afternoon hiking paseos (the hell with Naga's chismosas) on their way to Mass at the old Penafrancia Shrine, he'd point out to her the areas where the old sites once stood: Bragais Studio, the Esso gasoline station (put a tiger in your tank), the Macandog dormitory, Radio wealth, Tolentino's barbershop, Bib's tailoring. None of them stood in their proper places anymore. Then he'd tell her about the Hula-Hoop, Sarsaparilla, monggo con hielo at K. Mori, the Queen Anne lollipop, Tootsie Roll, the Howdy Doody comic books, Sputnik, so she'd get an idea of Naga's past. More important, during these paseos, he'd sing to her the songs of Nat King Cole, then ask her, between songs, if it were true "as they say" that he sounded like the Unforgettable Cole himself (smooth as silk ba? soft as velvet ba?), and she'd say iyo nat sigue na emboldening him to sing to her in succession "Mona Lisa," "Pretend," "Once in a While," "The Very Thought of You," and "Quizas, Quizas, Quizas" all the way to the door of the Church. One day, he asked her why she never sang along with him, and she said she did not sound like Nat King Cole. So he told her he collected other records too like those of Jerry Vale and Vic Damone and The Platters and The Four Aces and Tony Bennett (ah, that King of Broken Hearts); but she said how about the women singers, and he said he knew their songs too, so he taught her the songs of Doris Day and Joni James and Sarah Vaughan and Patti Page and Patsy Cline and Dinah Shore, and before long she found herself singing along with him "Que Sera Sera," "Secret Love," "It's Magic," "Crazy," "I'll Be Seeing You," "Hi-Lilli, Hi-Lo," "Days of Wine and Roses" as they walked to Church. On the way home, however, their signature song was always "Walking My Baby Back Home."

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He sang and he lectured. He seemed to know everything about what he called the good old pre-Gonciliar Naga. Very soon she had in her fingertips names like Ingemar Johansson and Floyd Patterson, Rogelio de la Rosa and Carmen Rosales, Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue—all the way down to John F. Kennedy, the Peace Corps in Naga, Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson. His sense of history, however, ended in 1965, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, to be exact, when Vatican II came to a close and the Church started changing the liturgy. This intrigued her because he would not explain why he refused to update his history after that; and the more she asked him about this, the more he intrigued her. He was like sin: at first she resisted, next she yielded a bit, then she liked it, finally she embraced it. And so they got married and so they raised two daughters: Marlene and Lana. They rented an apartment in Barlin Street and designed the interior in the ambience of the fifties. He worked in the telegraph office and she held on to her teaching position at the Colegio. To augment their income, she threw Tupperware parties. Naga accepted the age-gap and allowed them to live as ciphers, but when they came home, they danced the Cha-Cha (move over Arthur and Kathryn Murray) and sang the songs of Sarah Vaughan and Nat King Cole and prayed the Rosary nightly—for thanksgiving, she'd insist, not for favors, for her cup runneth over. That was why the diagnosis caught her by surprise. It all started with a persistent sore throat and hoarseness. He relieved the sore throat by chewing lozenges in the office and gurgling warm water and salt at night. The hoarseness, however, would not go away. After a couple of months, Tanya noticed a swelling on the right side of his neck, but he paid no attention to it (just tonsillitis or mumps) until his nose started to bleed when he sang. When the lump increased in size, Tanya insisted they go see Dr. Go immediately. The physician looked at Sid's throat with a small mirror. When he used a laryngoscope to look deeper, Tanya's pulse quickened. Dr. Go suggested more tests. After a series of X-rays and scans, the physician advised a biopsy.

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When Sid awoke from the surgery, Dr. Go told him that the laboratory results would be in by next week. Meanwhile, he advised Sid not to worry because they had ascertained nothing yet, and besides, he assured the couple, most biopsies turn out to be benign. They braced themselves up for the longest week in their lives. More important, they doubled their prayers. By the end of the week Dr. Go rang them up and asked them to come to his clinic immediately. Dr. Go's facial expression said it all. Sid's condition was far more serious than he had feared: infiltrating squamous cell carcinoma, said Dr. Go. The leech had seized the epithelium of his jugular vein and slowly choked his carotid artery. The remedy: a series of cobalt radiations on his neck and head, and chemotherapy to contract the swelling, and later, within six to eight weeks, radical neck surgery to remove the malignancy. He also advised Sid to stop singing. The first thing Sid thought of were the children. What would happen to Marlene and Lana? They were only in elementary school. To leave them this early would be cruel. In fact, together they had already planned up their lives: Marlene, the bookworm, wanted to take up literature, and Lana medicine (although the younger looked forward more to her forthcoming birthday party with the usual barquillos and ice cream and balloons and games and Daddy's magic tricks). Apart from this anxiety of disappointing his little girls, Sid did not go through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression characteristic of the terminally ill, but accepted his condition in a spirit of total resignation that amazed everyone including Dr. Go himself who couldn't help admiring him for taking it all, in Sid's own word, philosophically. Tanya did not. The death sentence crushed her. Morbid thoughts plagued her. Was God punishing her for turning her back on the convent? What sin had she committed that God was now robbing her of the only happiness in her life? Eventually she lost her appetite and will to live. She avoided socials and canceled the Tupperware parties. She also stopped singing to her husband. One night, returning home from school, she felt a black veil drop over her face, shutting from her the sights and sounds of Naga.

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This numbness happened every night. Daytimes were normal, but as soon as evening fell, she experienced difficulty in seeing, as if she looked through a veil—darkly. Like night blindness. Like Naga's brownouts. On really bad nights, even her hearing suffered: she felt as if corks were plugging her ears, as if she were listening to their old phonograph with defective speakers. In the meantime, Sid. acquiesced to it all: he wore a plastic mask so he would not move when they bombarded him with radiation; he sat through every new fitting to re-adjust the mask; he closed the lead door docilely every time they gave him the signal. He put up with all the side effects of the treatment: diarrhea, fatigue, nausea, mouth and throat sores. The radiation burned one side of his face and dried up his saliva and caused his hair to fall out. His teeth decayed, and his skin peeled and changed color. He lost all appetite and vomited daily. After a month and a half, Dr. Go decided to open him up. Sid stared at the X-ray photos showing the shaded areas marking the tumor, as the doctor explained to him the details about the forthcoming surgery: he'd remove the tongue starting from here, yank out the jaw bone under that area there, slice off the inner parts of his throat from here to there. That was when Sid decided to die at home—in one piece. Tanya opposed the idea. It is suicide, she unleashed her grab-bag of arguments inside the trimobile on their way home, life is a gift from God, if you refuse treatment you are transgressing God's authority over life, the Church commands us to preserve life at all costs. The Church especially backed him up, Sid whispered back hoarsely when he reached home and found his reference books on the subject. He showed her Augustine's Confessions and let her read the part where the saint pleaded for a keener awareness of death; he showed her Pius XII's 1957 address to the International Congress of Anesthesiologists where the Pope said that although the physician had the obligation to use all ordinary means of preserving life, there was no obligation to use extraordinary means; he showed her the quotation from Paul VI who said that heroic measures were not indicated in hopeless situations; he showed her Iura et Bona and asked

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her to read aloud the last paragraph under "Due Proportion in the Use of Remedies": When inevitable death is imminent in spite of the means used, it is permitted in conscience to take the decision to refuse forms of treatment that would only secure a precarious and burdensome prolongation of life. But none of the above placated her: it is not for lay persons like us to interpret Church teachings, she insisted, no person has jurisdiction over his life, our dominion over it is one of stewardship only, nobody has the right to end his life on his own authority because that authority is God's alone who is the absolute author of life, and do not forget that Canon Law imposes Ecclesiastical penalties on those who practice euthanasia. And what about Evangelium Vitae? You did not show me Evangelium Vitae. "Then get Evangelium Vitae," he said in a barely audible whisper. So that afternoon, during her vacant period, she dropped by St. Paul's Bookstore to buy Evangelium Vitae, the Pope's latest and strongest encyclical so she could show to Sid how the Pope condemned the "culture of death" as a sign of the defeat of the culture of life. Sid read it avidly, then asked her to read aloud the second paragraph of section 65: Euthanasia must be distinguished from the decision to forego socalled "aggressive medical treatment," in other words, medical procedures which no longer correspond to the real situation of the patient, either because they are by now disproportionate to any expected results or because they impose an excessive burden on the patient and his family.... To forego extraordinary or disproportionate means is not the equivalent of suicide or euthanasia; it rather expresses acceptance of the human condition in the face of death. That silenced her. Her Church, the One Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, the Church that had promised to lead her back to heaven, had spoken through the Pope, and spoken out loud and bold. So he stayed home and refused all medication save the anodynes which a private nurse administered daily. The children, meanwhile, transferred temporarily to their maternal grandparents' home. Unlike Dylan Thomas, he whispered to the tearful Marlene

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who liked modern poetry, he would not rage against the dying of the light; instead, he would go gentle into that good night. Until that morning. Before the private nurse had reported for duty, he jerked and arched like a fish out of water. Tanya tried to stabilize him, but when he lost consciousness, she panicked and called for the ambulance. SHE stared at the encephalogram. The small, luminous objects darting on waves along the dark background reminded her of the measured cadences pf Sid's old songs. She knew Sid missed the music from the old phonograph, but she could not bring the thing here: even private radios were not allowed in the ward. She stared again at the encephalogram: the small, luminous objects darting on waves along the dark background hinted to her the transience of it all. How short life is, she mused, as each flake appeared and disappeared on the screen so fast it hardly had time to say hello. One flake entered her life ten years ago and now this one's going away so soon she wished she could hold on to it and stay its disappearance (for at least a few more years, perhaps? until the children were grown up, perhaps?). Sid was a flake all right, but a very special flake among the millions, could the Fates and Furies make an exception just this once to a special flake whom she loved without reserve, absolutely without reserve? Well, almost, she smiled amusedly. Two things she did not understand about him, two peccadilloes. The first was his sense of humor. Once in Farmacia Uy to buy alcohol, he had said to the saleslady in front of his wife: "Knock-knock. Who's there? Alcohol. Alcohol who? Don't call me, I'll call you." And he laughed out so loud Tanya looked sheepish trying to extricate herself from the embarrassing situation. In another instance, when Lana was doing her Biology homework, he asked his youngest daughter to use Anatomy in a sentence. None of her sentences pleased him, until she said "sirit" and he gave the "correct" answer: "Bring back my Anna to me." Tanya could not quite understand how a person his intelligence fussed over picayune jokes. He had a profusion of them. She could

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take Bob Hope or George Burns, but not this type of jokes. But nothing really puzzled her more than the ad he paraded in the sala one morning that showed a fair-skinned teen-aged girl inviting everyone to try this new skin whitener lotion because it had worked on her to the effect that she obtained dramatic results after only four weeks' application. He laughed out so loud when he showed the ad to her he almost tore up the newspaper. Exasperated, Tanya asked what on earth was so funny about it. He said he gave up on her, but if he died ahead, he wanted her to remember him for this particular ad, in fact he'd see to it, he said, his shoulders now shuddering in uncontrollable guffaws, that he'd come back to her in the form of that ad three days after his death—ha-ha-hala ka, Tanya—so she'd know he was alive and laughing on the other side and she'd stop all the silly mourning for him. That was the first time he mentioned death. The second thing that puzzled her was his attraction to Hinduism. Catholicism resembled Hinduism, he once said, in color, fire, and ritual—until the Second Vatican Council denatured it. Lucky Hindus, he said, who never had a Council. Then he told her the reason why he refused to update his history beyond 1965: He never quite got over the changes in the Church, he said. He believed that ritual was sacred, and anything sacred needed a special language—Latin for Roman Catholicism—and special music—Gregorian—and special vestments to express itself. He disagreed with the reformers' opinion that you had to understand every ritual in order to appreciate it. Do the Hindus understand their mantras? Latin was full of mantras, but it was not their meaning as much as the sound that mattered, for the idea was to raise one's consciousness to an altered state of worship and not reach out and shake hands like the way the Naga Lions Club members conduct their meetings. More important, he said, he liked Hinduism because, like Catholicism—and unlike Protestantism—it did not mind bringing God too close to nature, a tendency that made Paul Tillich very nervous. He likened Protestantism to Buddhism: pure, ineffable, simple, abstract, transcendent, dry. Pre-Conciliar Catholicism, on the other hand, with its fiestas and processions and angels and patron saints

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and stained glass windows, was baroque. So he was going to be faithful to Trent. That was fine to Tanya as far as it went—until he brought up the topic of the Hindu practice of cremation. Only then did she realize he was that interested. Sid himself designed the first crematorium in Naga. Ramon, Sid's electrician at the telegraph office, installed the wirings for the blowtorches. In an interview with local newsmen during the ribbon-cutting ceremonies, Sid had specified the shortage of land in Naga, the exorbitant prices of burial services, and the overcrowded cemeteries as the reasons why he built the Naga Crematorium. Cremation, he said, was not only economical but also swift and hygienic, because there was no slow process of decomposition to worry about. For starters, he said, he had written a will requesting that his body be cremated and his ashes scattered in the Bicol River. In spite of the fact that the crematorium had been completed months ago, no cremation had occurred in Naga. This surprised Sid especially when the local clergy had neither opposed nor encouraged the idea as a result of Vatican II's lifting its prohibition of the practice as intrinsically evil and incompatible with Church teaching. Later, he discovered the real reason behind Naga's reluctance: Naguenos feared that cremation might interfere with the resurrection of the body. Tanya herself never visited the place. She listened to him and backed him up on it, but crematoriums were not her cup of tea. At any rate, during one of their last paseos in the centro after the prognosis, he bought a cartolina canister in the Naga Supermarket, and told her that that was where he wanted his ashes to be placed. Then he led her to the Dagsaan, the concrete landing under the Tabuco bridge where the Virgin of Penafrancia begins her annual Fluvial Procession every September, and right under the ogee arch, as he hoisted her elbow to steady her steps, he told her where exactly to scatter his ashes before throwing everything, canister and all, into the river. And do not worry about the cartolina canister polluting the river, he joked, because it's biodegradable. Apart from this "morbid" side of his personality—and the jokes on the corncob—she considered herself lucky to have found the perfect husband in the world.

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And now this perfect husband lay dying. DAY in and day out she'd sit in front of the encephalogram, preparing her Physics lessons. Next week she would be lecturing on Feynman's diagrams. The chapter had always intrigued her. She would always start by looking at the reaction of one collision—a K-meson and a proton coming together: K" + p -> p + K" 4- 7t+ + 71" + n° Not much problem there, she would muse, because then she could work out what she did not find— K- + p —> p + K- + 7t+ —using Feynman's conservation of charge. Then she looked at one diagram: an electron and a positron collide, mutually annihilating each other. Instead of disappearing, however, the impact created two photons traveling at the speed of light. Where did they come from? She looked at the other diagrams in the book. All of them followed the same process: the annihilation of initial particles in a subatomic event resulted in the creation of new ones. But where did these new ones come from? How she wished Sid could talk to her again and give her his usual "philosophic" answers. How she missed his lectures. One morning, Ramon brought into the hospital the old buzzer set they used for practice in the telegraph office. He slid it under Sid's right hand. Sid recognized it immediately. His middle finger pressed the key: di-di-di-dit dit di-dah-di-dit di-dah-di-dit dah-dahdah. Ramon deciphered it: H-E-L-L-O. Tanya's eyes lit up. In the following days, Sid communicated to her via the buzzer. He asked about the kids, informed her where it hurt, and advised her what to do. Very soon, both of them cobbled their own "shorthand" conversation with Ramon acting as interpreter. It was like receiving telegraph messages over a long distance. But the conversations always ended up with P-L-S P-U-L-L P-LU-G. It was during these "conversations" that Sid amplified his reasons why he remained faithful to Trent: Vatican II had denatured Catholicism. And he meant not just the sight of nuns in mufti or priests in

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civvies. His grievance went deeper than the cloying sentimentality or the brainless homilies by boy-priests, deeper even than Humanae Vitae or the Mass in shopping malls or Liberation Theology with its emphasis on social justice that substituted for genuine Catholic doctrine. The whole issue, he said, was the loss of order. Because of the Council, Roman Catholic Naga suffered a sea change from order to disorder. In the past, he said, the riddles of life posed no major problems for Naguenos, for the Church gave purpose and meaning to everything. Even if they did not understand its complexities, Naguenos lived in a universe as children lived in their parents' home, secure that the cosmos was in good hands. The Church was monolithic and the way to salvation lay not in ordering the world to one's purposes but through aligning one's purposes to Rome. If the Naga faithful hearkened to their duties—The Commandments, Mass and Communion, evening processions—they would reap eternal reward; but those who refused to do so would perish. But suddenly this monolithic, inert, geocentric Church had changed. Suddenly the universe no longer pivoted around the liturgical cycle but around social activism and politically correct histories on one hand and upraised arms in Evangelical-charismatic emotionalism on the other. Speaking in tongues had replaced Tantum Ergo. Suddenly the Church had deconstructed itself. He wanted none of this. He believed that if the Catholic Church were to survive, it had to sift the lessons from Vatican II and commix them with the best of Trent. Otherwise it would die a natural death as it crossed over into the next millennium. Post-Conciliar Catholics keep forgetting, he complained, that Christianity is more than social activism or group dynamics. Christianity, he added, is more than "Amen-Amen" or hand-clapping or tearful testimonies or peace-bewith-you greetings during Mass. More, he believed that the Church went deeper than doctrines and laws. The enduring appeal and strength of Catholicism was its sacramental experience, not dogma. Catholics remained Catholics not so much because of the Church's doctrines and laws but because of its imagination and intellectual consistency, its mystery and rituals. If the Church went back to its

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roots, it could survive. He said he believed this because the Church was for spirituality, and not expression of community or Lacanian psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, affirmative action, semiotics, hermeneutics, or other lintiks. Tanya belonged to the future, not his past. Her job was to bring the richness of his past into the new century. He had given her a list of must read books—the best ever that have been written—to nourish her as she crossed over into the next millennium, for nothing beats a good book to plumb life's impasses, he said. But she had to release him and let him go, because he was dragging her down by his unwillingness to change. If Vatican II was not for him, he reasoned out, the next century would even be less so. If he were going to heaven, he was going there now as a pre-Conciliar Catholic or not at all. His work was done. He'd given her a first-hand experience of how it was like to live in pre-Conciliar times so she'd appreciate the past's importance as the Church moved towards the future. If she did not release him, she'd never be able to bring his past into the new century. That was the way it went: Moses had to fade out so that Joshua could lead the people to the Promised Land, Anchises had to die so Aeneas could realize his pietas and found a new Troy, the Precursor had to diminish so the Messiah could begin His Work. So P-L-S P-U-L-L P-L-U-G. But still, she could not do it. In the days that followed, she agonized more than her husband did just watching him decline and transform flab to skin and bones. His independent nature rebelled against any form of assistance, and this time he could not even go to the bathroom or dress himself up. They had stuck tubes all over his body so that the slightest motion even to slide in the bedpan was torture. To sensor arterial pressure, they had attached an arterial transducer to his calf to make sure blood reached his toes so that he would not develop gangrene. In addition, wall-hung machines monitored his lung and blood and brain activities. Because he was unable to swallow solid foods, the glucose and fats and amino acids and vitamins and medicine from hanging plastic-

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packed colored liquids entered his system via a catheterized large wrist vein. Meanwhile, the duty visits grew more and more stilted (You're looking better, buddy. Back on your feet in no time.) and brief. After a month, except for Ramon who did the errands and scut work, nobody bothered to come. Ramon and Tanya took turns watching the patient. Ramon remained in the hospital while Tanya checked out the house. Last week, three nights in a row, Ramon stood vigil because Tanya attended to Marlene, who had fever, at her lola's house. Every time her temperature rose, she kept calling for her dad. Tanya stared at the encephalogram: luminous objects darting on waves along the dark background. She greeted each object as it appeared and bid it goodbye as it disappeared. She tried to acquaint herself with each object to ask where it came from and where it was going, but they all moved on without pausing—darting in view and disappearing, darting in view and disappearing. They reminded her of the Venerable Bede's stray sparrow that swiftly flew through a house, entering one door and passing out through another. As she stared at the encephalogram pondering on these things, she noticed something familiar: the luminous objects darting on waves resembled the shape and movement of the wriggling sperms of life. Life is a flake of fire, she thought. So ephemeral. Where it came from and wither it will go she did not know. But it is there, she thought, surely it comes from somewhere and surely it has to go somewhere. What if it disappeared completely? No. The Feynman diagrams disproved this. Sid's old songs disproved this. Perhaps, not by holding on but by letting go lay the secret of life, she reflected, surprised by her sudden insight. Whatever she possessed she needed not cling to, for she could have it again and again: perhaps the eternal became possible only if she released the temporal. Or perhaps, she should not grieve too much over passing things as a singer should grieve over the vanishing notes of a song, for she could always recreate them whenever she wished. Death was just the pause within the melody, the silence and apparent emptiness that each song needed to express itself with greater panache.

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She looked at her husband. He had been gazing at her. She nodded at him and smiled. He smiled back. She did not have to tell him: he knew. He pressed the buzzer key. Ramon deciphered it: T-Y. She rearranged Sid's pillows and guided his head to sink back into them. Dr. Go had informed her Sid would live for a few more days, give or take a few, after she'd have withdrawn the life supports. Because it was evening already, the hospital would give permission to discharge the patient early the next day, as soon as Dr. Go arrived to sign the walking papers. Once home, however, a private nurse was to continue administering a narcotic painkiller. That was the arrangement with Dr. Go as soon as she decided to make up her mind. She held Sid's left hand, while her other hand felt the chord. Ramon deciphered the rapid di-dah's in the buzzer set: A-M G-OI-N-G H-O-M-E T-Y F-O-R E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G L-O-V-E Y-O-U. "I love you too, darling," she said. And then she pulled the plug. That night, at home, Tanya sorted out Sid's bedside books from the heap of pajamas and shirts that lay at the foot of the bed. Tomorrow, when the hospital discharged him, she wanted to be prepared to read to him his favorite classics. She busied herself fixing up the bedroom. She dusted the cabinets, mopped the floor, deodorized the bathroom. She was playing Nat King Cole's "Red Sails in the Sunset" in the old phonograph when the telephone rang in the sala. "This is Mother Seton Hospital," the voice said. THE necrological services started about mid-afternoon, three days after Sid's remains had lain in state in the old Penafrancia Shrine. During those three days, the casket rested on a wooden bier at the side altar, but Father Itos Caceres ordered it transferred to the main altar for the final rites. Two office mates delivered impromptu eulogies to a rarefied audience composed of Tanya's parents, her two daughters, Margot and her husband, Dona Choleng of the CWL, some nuns, and Tanya's sodalist friends. Tanya herself conveyed her brief thank you's to all those who helped Sid in life.

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After Father Itos had finished the rites for the dead, the mourners queued up to file past the open casket for one last look at the dead. Tanya stood by her husband while the rest passed by to bid him goodbye. She looked at Sid inside his satin-quilted bed. The cadaver looked prim in Barong Tagalog. His cosmeticized face reminded her of the sun-tanned look of the groom ten years ago she caught catnapping after the hectic wedding reception, except this time the wrong shade of lipstick gave him away. The pallbearers shut the lid and carried the casket to the funeral coach outside the Church. Tanya and her two daughters walked the whole length of the funeral procession along Penafrancia Avenue. The others rode on a rented passenger jeepney. Along the way, Tanya remembered the areas Sid had pointed out to her during the times they had walked together to Church where once stood the old landmarks of Naga, and she wept uncontrollably each time she remembered the "Walking My Baby Back Home" Saturday afternoons. The funeral coach played Schubert's Ave Maria until the procession arrived at the Naga Crematorium. The funeral director, in a gray-cum-dark-stripes uniform, unlocked the Cadillac's tail end and lifted its humpbacked stern—his cue for the staff to move in and steady the casket that was now gliding easily toward the coach's exterior ridge where a hydrolically operated porto-lift receiver caught the casket for the pallbearers who transferred it to an accordion-shaped, balloon-tired carriage which they wheeled noisily from the foyer to the center of the hall where Ramon and his office mates stood by waiting. It was the first time that Tanya had seen the crematorium. The austerity of the building exterior would have provided her no relief if those narra trees at the back did not soften the architecture. She walked carefully as she entered the unfamiliar portico with its unrelieved uprights and horizontals. But her uncertainty quickly turned to awe and comfort as soon as she passed through the waiting room and entered the chapel that was both sanctuary and room with a view of a large crucifix outside standing as a beacon on a mound isolated from the building.

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The tiled walls inside the Naga Crematorium proper exuded a spruce and sterile look—a cross between an operating room and an undertaker's morgue, except that this place smelled neither of alcohol nor formaldehyde. Tanya noticed the absence of the usual scalpels and needles and tubes and congers and scissors and forceps and pumps she associated with unpleasant rooms. Ramon had obviously looked after Sid's work and maintained it as instructed. In the middle of the hall loomed the oven-shaped dome of the incinerator. The pallbearers pried off the coffin's lid and lifted the stiff cadaver from its narrow bed. The two office mates helped support the corpse descend and lie down in the flat metal sheet facing the mouth of the incinerator. Ramon opened the iron door. The mortician positioned the body by turning it slightly to the right so that it would not roll down the metal bed. Tanya came forward to check out on last minute preparations. She held her husband's stiff arm. Sid appeared more like a gigantic wax-doll than a corpse, even if the right shoulder pressed down exaggeratedly to reveal the suture incisions in the carotid artery. A portable tape recorder kept playing "Immaculate Mother," pre-taped for the occasion by the sodalists. Tanya checked out the Rosary in Sid's left hand. On his right hand rested The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. When she gave the signal, the men inserted Sid's body in the retort. Tanya took one last glance at her husband inside the chamber before Ramon clamped the iron door and bolted it, the solid clank sounding like a street manhole cover when a car runs over it. Ramon pushed up the switch-bar. The cracked petroleum whooshed out of the chamber's interior ducts. Through the tiny observation vent Ramon checked the flame inside and saw the overhead blowtorch strike Sid head first burning all his hair. The side flames fanned out and enveloped the body. The crematorium worked exactly as Sid had intended it, Ramon thought. Then, his face aching from trying to hold back his sniffles, Ramon worked on more gadgetry. The plastic gauge above the machine sloped up as the heat kept rising inside the chamber.

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Tanya peeped in the observation vent. The overhead blowtorch had bored a hole through Sid's cranium, while tongues of flames clung tenaciously over the rest of the body. Fire consumed, fire purified, and fire lighted up one's journey, she mused, as the chamber hummed. She looked up at the plastic gauge: 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. When she peeped in again, Sid's torso had cracked open, exposing a luminous interior. From the depths of the pylorus, a swarm of glowing red spots, like burning red ants, lit up the blooming entrails and disgorged itself along the pelt-like furrows of the body. Suddenly Tanya saw flakes of fire jet out of the flame and dart out in all directions, spawning a conflagration of pyrotechnical objects that reminded her of the luminous objects that darted on waves along the hospital encephalogram. The sight fascinated her. She felt strangely drawn to it, as if an unseen hand held her in place. The longer she observed, the more the darting flakes reminded her of something else even more familiar: they left trails similar to the vapor trails of particle collisions in the bubble chamber photographs of her Physics textbook. A surge of strong emotion rose from inside her. She could hardly believe her eyes. Right in front of her unfolded an intricate sequence of particle collisions and decays. She saw negative pions dart out from Sid's body of light, collide with the flying protons, and annihilate each other on impact. But instead of a vacuum, the explosion created a shower of positive kaons, negative kaons, and neutrons. The neutrons flitted off without a trace, but the positive kaons decayed into three pions each1 Where did they come from? Then the negative kaons jetted out once more and collided with the flying protons, annihilating each other on impact. Again, instead of a vacuum, the explosion created new photons and lambdas which decayed into—again!—new photons and new negative pions. But that's impossible! she thought. Until that moment she "believed" in the mathematical truth of Feynman's diagrams in theory only. But right before her eyes the diagrams repeated themselves over and over in sweeping curves of anti protons shooting up from Sid's luminous body and colliding with the flying protons and creating positive pions flying off clockwise and negative pions flying off counterclockwise and pairs of photons ere-

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ating electron-positron pairs of electrons curving counterclockwise and positrons curving clockwise. How is this possible? She stared in disbelief. Stunned, she returned to her bench. After two hours, Ramon turned off the heat. Then he unbolted the iron door to fast-cool the retort. Using iron pincers, he tugged out the hot metal sheet. The fire had reduced Sid's remains to bone fragments. Ramon used the same pincers to segregate the burnt up shards of clothing from the bone fragments. The ribs caved in at the pincers' slightest tap. He picked up a wooden bush hammer and pulverized the larger fragments into chalk-like pieces, then pulverized these geometric-shaped bits further until they evened off into a heap of powdery ash and white gravel which he swept into the mouth of the cartolina canister Tanya had provided him earlier. Only a few visitors remained. Tanya's parents had gone ahead to bring the others to the house for the novena. Tanya said she'd follow later, as soon as she had disposed of the ashes. Her friends respected her wish to do this alone. Cradling the canister in her arms, Tanya flagged a trimobile and instructed the driver to conduct her to the Tabuco bridge. A certain apathy in her brain caused her to allow the trimobile to take its own route, blurring everything in view. The driver dropped her right in front of the arched Dagsaan, the concrete landing under the bridge Sid and she had visited during their last paseo. She descended the concrete steps of the ghat, but teetered precariously when the high tide swept past the middle aisle and moistened her moccasins. The habit of counting upon his hand to hoist her elbow to steady her steps lingered. A gust of wind from up the river chilled her sodden feet, causing her whole body to feel prickly inside her husband's bulky jacket she was wearing. She uncovered the canister's lid. This was the way he had wanted it: no tomb, no spot, no cinerarium, no marker to bind him to a focal point of sorrow. She poured out the contents in a scattering motion. The ashes gushed out and floated, then forked out in V-shaped formation. One prong journeyed toward a promontory of dune that jut-

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ted near the scree, while another lengthened toward the water lilies before a freak wave whirlpooled its crest down the river-floor. She patted the canister's bottom to release the clinging residue. The chalky particles flew off and blanketed the coruscating pebbles along the banks. A passing banca sliced through the now elongated bands of ashes and forced the nicked parts to wend their way under the houses on stilts until they crossed inlets where fingers of narrow gorges daubed them in mud. She bent low and pushed the empty canister, mouth first, in the water. The vessel resisted. She tilted it, then thrust it deeper, causing it to gurgle and belch forth shampoo-like bubbles. After water had rushed inside the canister, she released her pressure and allowed the vessel to sink in its own weight. Won't pollute river. Biodegradable. Sid's words. Meanwhile, the breeze had puffed the remaining ashes up the river. She watched the waves carry the chalky particles past swaths of grass and round the bends curving around marshes glutted with industrial debris. She watched them appear and disappear in the rows of sand dunes that tried to deflect their paths. Soon they were out in the open river, free at last. The rim of the horizon shimmered like lit gunpowder, causing the distant ashes to emit a mineral glow. The brightness induced vitality globules to dance before her eyes, reminding her of the white dots in the encephalogram and the flakes in the crematorium. They danced to and fro as the afternoon sun hit the waters, forcing her to close her eyes. When she opened her eyes, she felt as if the black veil had been lifted from her face. But the place did not look familiar. The surroundings had suddenly changed in appearance. Everything throbbed with life. The stones, the river, the trees, the air, all pulsated with life. She saw the sun's rays spritz the earth's atmosphere with a shower of energy. When they collided with the nuclei of the air molecules, they refracted in smithereens of secondary particles that sprinkled the earth and descended in powdery mist upon the river. She saw subatomic particles oscillate and flow through dee-like cloud-formations in the sky, and spin and spin inside the cyclotron-shaped

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cloud-accelerator very much like the collision experiments of high energy physics in her textbook. Then she heard what sounded like the faint tweedle of sitars. The diacoustics came from the sky and sounded like the playing of a shringar Hindu raga. The sound grew louder and louder until the sympathetic effect of double violins enveloped all Naga. As she gazed up, she saw forming up the faint outlines of a strange figure with four hands and two feet tiptoeing in space. One hand held a drum. She could not look directly at the other hand because it held a flaming torch as glaring as the sun with flakes of fire jetting out across space. Then, half-squatting on balanced hips in what seemed like the motions of a dance, it slapped the drum with its third hand: the primordial sound stirred the figure to sway gracefully in rhythmic motion, its limbs moving like those of a giant centipede. The figure vanished as quickly as it appeared, but before it did, it looked at Tanya, smiled softly, and raised its fourth hand in a gesture of "Do not fear, all is well." When her surroundings returned to normal, she felt that all her fears had disappeared. With their disappearance came a strange understanding how simple and obvious the analogues for life have been. Why she had not seen all these before, like the illusion of death, for example, which was no different from the sun sinking in the horizon only to shine brightly in another part of the world, she did not know. All she knew was she needed not fear anymore because the God of Death was also the God of Life who never ceased Her/His dance of destruction and creation from subatomic particles to spiral galaxies millions of light years away. The soft smile from the dancing figure in the sky thrilled every atom of her body that she just stood there breathless with bliss, gazing at the river and the sky until the distant coconut trees darkened and the sun disappeared on the horizon. WHEN she turned around, she saw that evening had fallen in Naga. She also noticed that her night blindness had disappeared. For the first time in weeks, she saw the centro light up for the night. First flashed out the headlights of private cars, next the street lights, then the electric yellow bulbs of vendors along the sidewalks. Finally,

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one by one, other lights followed. She saw fluorescent lights peer out of the shops, kerosene lamps light up the second floor of the Naga Supermarket, glints of silver streaks perk up like tinfoil the dark facades of distant apartments—all blending with the suddenly switched on neon lights of Zenco Footstep and New South Star Drug and flood the centro with a motley of colors that looked like Christmas lights reflecting on polished vinyl table covers. This sudden conflagration of light and color of early evening in Naga cuddled her and stirred her to stare off into space in wordless joy. The sky had changed from red to violet, like a priest changing his liturgical vestments. Suddenly, the flapping of wings from a flock of salampati blocked her view. The cacophony of rush hour traffic had driven them from the mezzanine window of Fiesta Hotel to perch in single file onto the relative safety of the telephone cable in front of Benito Commercial. She walked past Pacific and Atlantic bakeries, occasionally scraping the mud-packed soles of her moccasins against the gritty stretch of the side road. When she crossed Padian Street she felt as if the corks of her senses had popped off, leaving her vulnerable to the sights and sounds and smell of the city. She picked up the minutest details: the click of billiard balls two blocks away across the din of traffic, casserole lids clanging inside Cosmos Restaurant, a toothpickchewing man coming out of New China Restaurant and shredding a piece of napkin into tiny pieces. In the sidewalk intersection, a clutch of vendors compared wares. A tubercular-looking man butted in, flashing a broad grin, but he changed it into a frown when he realized his "wrong entrance." A woman in Allied Bank uniform pushed herself through the slow-moving crowd and dragged along a reluctant Naga Parochial School boy on one hand and a roller of groceries on the other. The smell of freshly baked mamon wafting from Madame Poon reminded Tanya to hurry home. She remembered that tonight the neighbors were joining the Sodality of Our Lady in reciting the Rosary and prayers for the dead. Her sodalist friends promised to bring the viands for supper, but Tanya said she would cook the rice. She thought of dropping by Naga Restaurant to buy wrapped pancit canton and

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toasted siopao in case more visitors arrived. After all, this was the first day of the cremation and some friends might stay late to keep her company during her first night alone. Tomorrow, first thing in the morning, she'd give his clothes away to the Penafrancia parish. In the afternoon, the Tamaraw from the Holy Rosary Minor Seminary was coming over to pick up the two balikbayan boxes of books Sid had set aside for donation to the library. All these, she promised him, would go. All except the must read books. And the old 75 rpm records. She had asked to keep the records. She'd asked to hold on to them so she could play them over and over in the old phonograph: the cool and reassuring voices of Nat King Cole and Vic Damone and The Platters and The Four Aces and Jerry Vale and Patsy Cline and Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Shore and Doris Day and Tony Bennett. She'd asked to keep them because she'd need their company in the coming years and evenings ahead when she'd be reading, batch by batch, Sid's must read classics beginning, this month, with Augustine's Confessions and Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua and Teilhard de Chardin's Future of Man and Cervantes' Don Quixote and the other classics Sid had lined up for her to stand her in good stead as Naga crossed the fjord towards the Third Millennium—for she'd need the background voices, while she read, of the Four Aces singing "Three Coins in the Fountain" or Doris Day's "Que Sera, Sera" to bring her back to the kinder years that Sid had stood for to give her strength: the Naga years before the Internet and CATV and the Big Mac, the pre-Conciliar years when Naga was young and easy as the Underwood typewriter and carbon paper and mimeograph machines and stencils and bingo parties in the parish hall—those days of wine and roses so essential for the sudden epiphanies of Bicol exiles, in or out of Naga, who, like her, had put their faith in a Church that promised to lead them safely into the next millennium and, after this exile, all the way to the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body... A burst of loud laughter broke off her train of thought. Outside Boning's Trading a group of girls in UNC high school uniform were gawking at some poster the harried saleslady kept smoothing back in

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place at the glass display window, but the breeze kept flapping it off the masking tape. As draconian remedy, she drew out a long strip of Scotch tape and plastered it across the poster, there. The students' fits were contagious. One girl, patently the class comedian, approached the poster and pointed a chubby finger at the printed testimonial. Then she twisted her rubbery face and mimicked the poster's model's come-on smile, causing the whole barkada to roll up and shake in uncontrollable guffaws. Tanya moved in closer to examine the butt of such irresistible hilarity. The poster showed a fair-skinned teen-aged girl inviting everyone to try this new skin whitener lotion because it had worked on her to the effect that she obtained dramatic results after only four weeks' application.

Wings

terrifies me, that is why I have never taken a plane ride in my life. But last week I dragged myself by the ears to buy a one-way plane ticket from Manila to Naga for two reasons: first, because my mother is celebrating her seventieth birthday today (next to the Penafrancia fiesta, I do not miss my mother's birthdays); and second, because landslides have blocked off the South Road again. You heard me right: I have never been on a plane. I have never seen the inside of a plane except in the movies. In fact, I have never been higher than the top storey of the Naga PNB building. Even that experience made me airsick for a week. I know what you're thinking. But let me tell you this: sitting on a plane that soars at 16,000 feet is not exactly my idea of travel. Even a bird does not fly that high. Maybe heaven is up there somewhere; but I'm in no hurry to go to heaven yet. What's all this big deal about air travel, anyway? All the great men and women before Kitty Hawk never got a few feet off the ground—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cleopatra, Taras Bulba—and they got where they were going. But today, if you say you haven't been on a plane, people snicker. I have watched commercials of contented passengers dancing and dining in the "friendly skies"—the airlines would do anything to entice you to fly—but to me, they don't mean a thing. The bus or train it is. So what if you call me a coward. I'd rather look foolish than dead. FLYING

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So what if I never enjoyed a fellowship for overseas study because none of those silly, smirking exchange program directors approved of my special requests to travel by sea. So what if I'm fifty years old! Flying is unnatural, chico. It defies the laws of nature. It goes against God's will. It is suicide, and suicide is a mortal sin. If God intended us to fly, He'd have given us wings. Until today, there was no way anybody could do to get me on a plane because I have vowed to myself I'd never fly unless it was a matter of life and death and the pilot's family and the Pope were on board the same plane with me. Why did I change my mind? Like I said, it's my mother's birthday. The second reason, however, is a lie: the South Road's passable already. So why am I flying? It's the South Road. You see, for years I always kidded myself that the South Road, however long it took (the longer, the better, I'd chime), was fun. The bus trip is a vacation itself, I'd convince my friends. Your vacation starts the very minute you board the bus. You meet interesting people on the bus. The food at the stop-overs is great, and you get the chance to treat yourself to the roadside lanzones stands. Besides, what's the hurry? I don't want to arrive at my destination that fast. The brutal reality, however, is that the fifteen-hour South Road trips (if you're lucky) mean detours, zigzags, lunar craters, smashed up concrete blocks that cause broken transmissions and flat tires, if not from your bus, from cargo trucks stuck up in the middle of oneway roads under repair. And since Bicolanos, when they travel, bring the whole house with them, the brutal reality also means traveling under overhead racks loaded with sacks of laundry and copra and cans of biscuits and boxes of leaking fish sauce. For years I'd arrive at my destination weary, bleary-eyed, unkempt, foul-smelling, beat up from being jammed up for so many hours, my buttocks flattened, my feet swollen; but I kept kidding myself it was fun all the way. Perhaps I got special delight in torturing myself. What about the train? Once upon a time I took the train, but I stopped it because the toilets were very dirty—as dirty as our national

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elections. I think they deliberately make the toilets dirty so passengers would not use them. I also stopped taking the train because on one night trip while I was trying to open a window (before they permanently grilled them up) to let in some fresh air, somebody out there— a dead shot—threw shit at the train, and the passengers (who were asleep at that time) woke up and thereafter kept their aesthetic distances from me. I love coming home because my mother lives in Naga and refuses to move in to Manila. Not that I have to. But I'd take every opportunity to come home no matter how long it took because I, too, love everything about Naga. Well, almost everything. I dread Monico's Naga jokes. Monico is our family driver and a self-anointed wit and positive thinker (if you're a driver, don't say you're a driver; say you're in the transportation business). He's going to meet me at the airport and "educate" me on his "music lesson" quizzes I heard a thousand times already: Does music make you happy? No, it makes Marvin Gay. Does music make you think? No, it makes Stevie Wonder. Kurnel Anyway, my strongest reason for flying eclipses all others: I want to conquer my fear—no, not of flying—of beautiful girls. You heard me right. I'm fifty years old and I'm still a bachelor. My friends envy my single-blessedness; they admire my talent in eschewing the tender trap. What they don't know is I'm single because courting girls terrifies me as much as flying. What's the connection? Everything. You see, when I was in elementary school, I admitted my fear of flying to my crush. She guffawed and hooted at my face so lustily I saw her tonsils vibrate. Then she turned to her barkadas, and they too bent over and howled and shrieked their lungs out the uproar shook the walls of the Colegio de Santa Isabel. I don't know, but since then, every time I'd approach a girl with the intention of courting, my knees would wobble, my voice would quiver, my jaws would tighten, my eyes would blink furiously. I'm afraid my fear of flying is inextricably linked with my fear of beautiful girls. I'm sure that if I conquered my fear of flying, I'd conquer my fear of courting girls. This is the reason why I bought this ticket. Imagine the sea-change I'd experience, the self-confidence I'd exude. For once, I want to feel

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like a hero. I want to be self-confident like, well, Arnold Schwarzenegger. I once watched a movie where Arnold Schwarzenegger grabbed the horizontal bars of a plane's landing gears and hung on there in midair. Boy, did he impress the girls in Emily Theater! I want the girls to call me a hero, too, but how can they when I'm riddled with phobias? Somebody jostles me in SM Cubao and I quickly check out my wallet. I hear a rustle and I'm sure there's a burglar downstairs. I'm afraid of black cats, open spaces, computers, ladders, the number 13. I'm allergic to dust, tall buildings, English teachers, bridges, elevators, born-against Christians, Opposite Dei Catholics, Cardinal Ratzinger, underwriters, work. I'm also a hypochondriac. I'm afraid my shortness of breath is a symptom of a heart attack. I'm afraid my migraine is a symptom of a brain tumor. I'm afraid these contortions in my stomach are symptoms of cancer. I'm afraid of being buried alive. I'm afraid the Graphic literary editor would sneeze at this short story and advise me instead to plant camote. To think that all these grew out of my fear of flying. But the die is cast. I am going to cross the Rubicon and I'm going to conquer these silly fears once and for all. I can hardly wait for the thrill of triumph once this ordeal is over. For fear, wrote Cardinal Newman, is the lengthened shadow of ignorance; and I scoff at the face of superstition. For starters, I refused to mail those chain letters this morning. I'm going to fly and that's it, let the fears be damned. Besides, this is no way a fifty-year-old man should behave. So I unplugged all the cords in the office, cleaned up my desk, donated eggs to the Carmelite Monastery, paid up my water and electric bills, picked up my clothes from the washer-woman, returned all phone calls, returned the empty softdrink bottles to the sari-sari store that did not charge me for deposit, and, for good measure, made a quick pilgrimage to Agoo. I also bought myself a brand new Ray-Ban sunglasses for the heroic look. Despite the heavy traffic jam, I finally make it to the Manila Domestic Airport, so here I am, Ray-Ban and all, standing in front of the Departure Area, in two minds whether or not I should cross the Rubicon. I look around for reassuring sights, but two things im-

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mediately attract my attention: a sign that tells me to beware of low-flying aircraft (as if I can do something about it) and an insurance counter that reminds me'there is something unsafe about flying (why aren't there insurance counters in bus or train terminals?). I want to turn back. But a baggage boy appears from nowhere and threatens to carry my maleta (where were you when I was carrying my burden from the gasoline station to this place?), and I avoid him by entering the main door of the passenger terminal. As soon as I'm in, I show my ticket to the guard (all right, all right, I'll place my luggage on the belt of the X-ray machine, and my attache case too, you don't have to repeat it, I'm not from Libmanan, you know). I walk towards the check-in area and weigh-in my maleta. A uniformed lady attaches a tag around the handle and adheres a baggage claim stub on my ticket. I tell her, as confidentially, as discreetly as possible, that I want a seat as near the emergency exit as possible, and that I want a window side seat, you know, the ustial, I tell her, to impress her that I'm a regular flyer here. I need to look out the window so that I can anticipate the impact of the crash. A uniformed male attendant behind her lifts my bag from the weigh-in counter and throws it at the back. I worry that these guys might load it in the wrong plane. Before entering the pre-departure lounge, I show my I.D. and ticket to the two officers at the counter. While they're busy scrutinizing my photo sans the sun glasses, I drop a twenty peso bill in the Red Cross can, and the nice round lady behind it beams at me and says thank you. A Jesuit priest once told us that no harm could possibly come to a traveler who donates to the Red Cross. Once inside the pre-departure lounge, the first thing I notice is the profusion of No Smoking signs. This is the airport's subtle way of warning us of danger, I assure myself to slow down my palpitations. I walk past the doughnut stand but I restrain myself from eating because fasting is good for the soul. At the magazine stand, I buy myself the latest copy of Graphic to relax myself, and, boy, do I relax when I read this well-written feature by a Jesuit-educated, brilliant Catholic thinker who's telling me, true to the spirit characteristic of that Society, that the mysteries of Agoo were not so joyful after all . 1

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Boarding for Naga passengers is on Gate One 1, but I sit in front of Gate 5 outside the medical clinic because I want to have a better view of the framed picture of the Divine Mercy (Jesus, I trust in You, I keep repeating the prayer below the picture). Five minutes before boarding time, I go to the men's room even if I do not feel like it so I won't have to use the plane's lavatory. The pressure up there is so great you could get sucked out of the toilet bowl, you know. Suddenly, the yellow light with NAGA written on it and the green light beside it start blinking. My eyes start blinking along with it as I solemnly rise to join the queue on Gate 1, my head bowed in resignation. I take off my Ray-Ban and put on the viernes santo look. You don't feel like a hero when you're in Death Row. I pull out my boarding pass, hand it to the uniformed lady at the door, and with feet of clay, trek my last mile towards the waiting Fokker 50. I feel like Longinus of Marinduque on his way to decapitation, my attache case on one hand and a photo of John Paul II on the other. I see tow tractors pulling baggage trailers and I worry again if those guys loaded my maleta in the wrong plane. I see water trucks, refueler trucks, boom trucks—how keen our senses become when we're dying—until I walk past the huge wings of my plane. What's this fire extinguisher doing under the steps of the ramp? My heart is in my throat. I look at the wings and the wheels and I wonder admiringly how Arnold Schwarzenegger did it. We are welcomed by a heavily made up stewardess, and my knees start wobbling again, so I wear a deadpan face to appear businesslike, and besides, this is not the time to entertain impure thoughts and desires. Once inside, I see the other stewardess, similarly made up, assist the other passengers in finding their seats. I look at one stewardess and the other and I get this impression that they spend more time on grooming trying to look like Dolores Hart instead of checking out the safety devices. I don't like this idea of sitting in this enclosed cabin, all strapped in. I feel as if I'm inside a giant metal toothpaste tube before they screw the cap on and seal us in. I scan the passengers as they come in. This guy looks like a mad bomber. Here's a guy who looks like

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that fiend in that Texas chain saw massacre movie. A family of four pops in and my blood pressure shoots up because their faces remind me of the Addams Family. Ah, a young mother with her infant, a Madonna and Child, thank God, I hope she sits beside me. She does not. Instead I have this matron who looks like a steroid-addled bodybuilder for company. I see a foreign-looking guy embark. He's carrying an attache case like mine. Did they check his hand-carried luggage for plastic explosives? His eyes appear cloudy. I think he has something else in mind besides flying to Naga—like forcing this plane to fly to Libya. There is a lapse in security around here . More passengers come in, and I'm annoyed by the fact that they are all male. That's fine, so long as they don't look like terrorists on a suicide mission. Oh, they look harmless enough; they only remind me of Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Peter Lore, Boris Karloff, Peter Cushing, Lon Chaney Jr., Vincent Price, Max Schreck... Now that they have locked us in, I guess this is it. No way to back out now. That's the main difference between air and land travel. When you're on a bus, you can get off anytime, but when you're on a plane, once the exit door is locked and you're up there, that's it. You can't change your mind in mid-air. By the way, did she lock the door properly? Both propellers are whirring, and our plane is now taxiing towards the runway. The captain introduces himself and welcomes us on board over the public address system. His voice is calm and reassuring. He says we'll be cruising at an altitude of 16,000 feet. Our flying time is 45 minutes. The weather is fine in Naga which has a temperature of 32 degrees centigrade today. He reminds us that this is a No Smoking flight and requests that we fasten our seat belts and refrain from operating any electronic device lest it interfere with the aircraft's electronic navigational equipment. For our own safety and convenience, he says, we must observe all safety regulations. Otherwise we may sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight. Some comedian. A sweet, reassuring, but impersonal lady's voice takes over the microphone and repeats the captain's instructions about the No Smoking and fasten seat belt signs. Then she gives her own instructions over the microphone. As she's doing this, her companion appears 1

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in front to demonstrate the safety procedures by pointing out the location of the emergency exits. I like the way this girl moves as she demonstrates the use of the inflatable life vest and flotation device. She reminds me of Jean Harlow in Red Dust. Pull tab, the voice says, to activate the light, and this pretty girl does just that with all the sensuousness of an ecdysiast. Vanish the thought, you lecher, how can you think of that at a time like this! Think about saving your soul instead. And stop imagining her wearing only a smile. Think of something cerebral. Ask a philosophical question: Does she or doesn't she? Lecherous goat! I need help with this seat belt. Is this properly fastened? I'll talk to the stewardess. I still don't have the guts to do that. I rehearse an approach befitting a refined, well-bred, formal, disinterested gentleman. Are you a Bicolana? I'll ask her first. I think she'll smile and say yes sir, and I'll say what a coincidence, hija, I'm a Bicolano too, from Naga, and she'll say, really? and then we'd be in thick with each other. How does this seat belt work? Easy does it, sir, just pull this and insert this, here, let me do it for you, and her hands would slide down, no, not down there, not below the seat belt, ahay, not below my belt, not that low, not in there, ohhh, not inside there, ahaaay, hi-hi-hi-hi. Lecherous goat! The engines roar. The noise sears my eardrums despite the pressurized interior. I sit tense and feverish and my palpitations reach up to my temples. I look out the window. The plane has stopped moving and is now aiming itself for take-off. The engines roar again. Then the plane rolls off and accelerates at breakneck speed. This is too fast, chico, I protest, as I watch the runway side strip markings out the window flit like arrows. Suddenly the plane leaps into the air, climbing steeply at a tilted angle. The airport buildings sink away. I see shimmering rooftops, arteries-like roads, Lego-shaped toy cars. The plane keeps climbing. I keep forcing myself to yawn to ease the pressure in my eardrums. I see rivulets twisting like arrested snakes. I see fish pens in Laguna lake. I see canoes and sandbanks. My God, we're high over Metro Manila in every sense of the word! The plane turns over the harbor and heads toward the open sea.

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The seat belt light is off but I do not unfasten mine. A hundred possibilities invade my mind. What if we're on a collision course with another plane? What if the coffee burner catches fire? What if there's a leak in the fuel tank? What if my seat falls out and ejects me into space? What if the pilot fought with his wife this morning? What if he is not on speaking terms with his co-pilot? What if his mortgage payments are due? What if... I look out the window to check if the wings are still attached to the plane, but the stewardess is offering me a bundle of today's newspapers. How beautiful she is up close. No, thank you, is all I tell her without looking at her eyes or at the headlines. Air disasters always occupy the front pages, you know. Don't worry, chico, tomorrow, my name will be all over the papers. I'll be famous, you'll see, with a little help from the tabloids. O will they have a field day showing pictures of my corpse, or what remains of it, all charred up and mutilated and blown up into tiny pieces. They will show pictures of me in a plastic bag all zipped up and ready to go. No, thank you, senorita, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Is this all the airline can feed us? A measly muffin and a tetrapacked juice? I paid a fortune for this ticket and this is all I get? This is highway robbery] Boy, am I in a blue funk today. The minutes pass. The matron beside me is snoring. I look around me and see a couple more sleeping. I don't understand how people can sleep in critical situations like this. If I sleep, something will go wrong, I just know it. The young mother opens her bag and takes out a feeding bottle, a jar of baby food, a bowl, a spoon, a diaper. I press open the clasps of my attache case and look at the contents: Band-Aid, White Flower, a tourniquet, Salonpas, a first aid kit, AlkaSeltzer, tranquilizers, Dramamine, aspirin, an extra brown scapular, a miraculous medal. I look out the window to check if the propellers are still working. I think there's an abnormal sputter in the whirring. I should have mailed those chain letters. Suddenly, the plane drops. The Fasten Seat Belt light is on. This is it. The captain's voice mentions something about turbulence but his warning comes a bit late. Looks like he himself cannot detect air pockets. I bet he can't even tell us if we're moving towards a giant

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air pocket reaching all the way to the ground. I close my eyes and will the ordeal to go away. Visualize, OOOM, visualize. The air pockets worsen and the plane jounces all over the place. Lord, I'm heartily sorry for all my sins against the Sixth and Ninth Commandments. I feel as if I'm inside an elevator making sudden descents and ascents. Lord, I'm too young to die. Lord, I donated to the Red Cross. Lord, I'll do anything religious if you spare my life— anything. I'll take the Singles for Christ course for nine consecutive Saturdays and Sundays. I promise to laugh at Monico's jokes from now on. I promise to give up dreaming of Amanda Page alone on an island with me. I'll make a panata to walk on my knees this Holy Week until they bleed. I'll even wear a crown of barbed wire, Lord. I'll have my bare back cut by a magkakadlit. I'll whip myself with a home-made whip with ends tied to glass shards. I'll prostrate myself right across the street in front of the Naga Cabaret so that all Naga will know what a regular customer I am. I'll have myself nailed to the cross, if that's what you want. It will be a passion play to end all passion plays, Lord, as convincing as the pagtaltal of Jordan, Guimaras. I'll... The plane stops jouncing. We float beautifully in midair for some time. But just as I'm sitting here grateful for my reprieve, this cloudyeyed, foreign-looking guy appears from behind us and starts stalking in the aisle right in the direction of the cockpit. It's just my imagination, really now, he's going to the lavatory. Wait, he's not going there. He's heading for the cockpit! I told you there's a lapse in security around here. Should I alert the stewardess before it's too late? This guy looks nervous. He's not a pro. All the more dangerous. I don't think the stewardess can handle him. Now where are those stewardesses? He must have gagged and hog tied them up already. That means I'll have to grab his revolver myself and subdue him. What if he's not alone? He's going to force this plane to fly to Libya. This is a hostage situation! Now he's knocking at the captain's door. The cockpit door opens and out comes a guy dressed like a pilot. Is that the captain? They greet each other then burst out laughing. They chat for a few minutes then burst out again in uncontrollable guffaws before parting. I learn

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a valuable lesson today. Looks can indeed be deceiving. No, not that cloudy-eyed guy. I mean the captain. He doesn't look a whit like Charlton Heston. Or Gregory Peck. The plane begins to descend. The captain informs us that we are now approaching the Naga Airport. He instructs us to fasten our seat belts and return our seat backs and folding tables to upright position. I look out the window and see Mount Isarog. I look down below and sigh at the panoramic view of the green sea with her islets and coral reefs. How beautiful thou art, Bicolandia, now and at the hour of our death. Don't cry for me, Filipinas. Now we're over shorelines and sandy beaches. I see mountain lakes—natural swimming pools— nourish the lush and wild vegetation of mangroves and trees dotting the Bicol jungles, like Seurat's dots, down their flanks. I see jagged rocks with their pointed spots that appear like Madonna's pointed bustiers, while I, dying, sigh my last farewell to the beauty of Madonna, este, Bicolandia. I hear hangings under the floor. They sound like gasoline drums tied to the rear of a speeding car. Something's terribly wrong around there. Why doesn't the stewardess tell us what's going on? I look out the window to check if the engines are on fire, and I find out that the buffering sound is coming from the wing flaps which are supposed to slow us down during our descent. I think the captain is in a jam targeting the runway because I hear loud flapping sounds—he's jumbling up the controls!—right inside the plane, right beside me! I close my eyes—the end is near—and then open them again because I have just traced the sounds to my seatmate's clicking open her makeup kit, her lash comb case, her lip liner and eyeliner boxes. Caramba, she's snapped open all of them, and now she's frantically re-making her eyebrows, powder-brushing her face, affixing her false eyelashes, combing her hair and flicking her dandruff in my direction—pweh! The plane lowers its landing gears and locks them into place. The landscape below magnifies as we descend. I see billiard table green rice fields, coconut trees, carabaos, farmers planting rice, electric power lines, rusty rooftops, palay on the roadside, the provincial capitol, the Naga Airport.

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Our plane touches down with a screech and a roar. I think We have just touched the ground. I hope. I pray. I wonder. I look out the window. It looks like we made it. Good heavens, we made it. I can't believe we made it. Hallelujah, we made it. Pucha, we made it. The captain's voice advises us to maintain our seat belts and remain in our positions until the plane has come to a full stop, but I yank off my seat belt in bravado. What seat belt? A hero needs no seat belt. I put back on my brand new Ray-Ban sun glasses. The eagle has landed. We file past the stewardess at the exit who smiles and chimes thank you to every passenger leaving the plane. When my turn comes, I pause and look at her behind my brand new Ray-Ban sun glasses. Then I flash her my megawatt, Arnold Schwarzenegger smile: Hasta la vista, baby. I walk with my head in the clouds. Then, I step aside, turn around, and wave at the smiling stewardess. She waves back at me and I feel my testosterone rising to the max. How postcard pretty she glows just standing there: tall and tan and young and lovely, this girl from Filipinas. Suddenly, I feel all my fears have disappeared. I size up the plane's wing span and wheels, now locked up by chocks, and I feel I can easily hang out here in midair, just like what Arnold Schwarzenegger had done in the movies. Piece of cake. Want a demo? Are those pretty stewardesses watching? If only I weren't in a hurry... At the arrival area I see my mother herself, all of her seventy years but looking ten years younger, waiting to meet her fifty-year-old fearless adolescent bachelor son. I kiss her happy birthday and begin to narrate my great sky adventure, but Monico reaches out for my attache case, takes my ticket, looks at the baggage claim stub, and exclaims, VAT is this? We were JUETENG for you. EVAT are you JUETENG for? I feel like going back to the plane. I greet my mother's friends at the parking lot. They are all talking animatedly in the characteristic Naga way—everybody speaking, nobody listening. I excuse myself and go up the flight of stairs to the second floor of the passenger terminal building to see if my maleta is among those being unloaded. When I reach the top, I catch the tail end of the tow tractor pulling the luggage trailer towards the

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baggage claim area. I spot my own maleta by its unmistakable red gonfalons, and I heave a sigh of relief. I take one last look at the plane before I leave, but suddenly out comes through the exit door one of the stewardesses, pauses to fix her flowing hair, then descends the ramp in agile, delicious, elegant, delicate steps. How gorgeous, how ravishingly pretty, how body beautiful, how symmetrical: Nude Descending a Staircase. Then she starts walking as if she were doing the "Margarita." I follow her every move every step of the way until she disappears in the personnel quarters, as I catch myself committing again all the sins against the Ninth Commandment. I hurry downstairs towards the waiting car. Monico has claimed my luggage and we are all ready to drive to the Carmelite Monastery for thanksgiving Mass and merienda. It is a balmy day. The eggs have worked. Monico slips in the car stereo his favorite Bee-Cool cha-cha medley cassette tape. We all sing along "Babaeng Taga Bicol." I think of my triumph and of the two pretty flight stewardesses walking back to the plane, their beauty shining through, their smiles flying high, but Monico suddenly turns down the volume, grins from ear to ear, and asks us, Does music make you think? Does music make you happy? Does music...

The Late C o m e r

T H E hotel management had reserved the lobby for the patrons and guests, but the sudden outburst of evening rain drove pedestrians along P. Burgos Street to dash to the foyer. The wind blasted spritzes of drizzle through the jammed-up glass doors, forcing the crowd to press inward and shove the guests through the side door leading to the Karihan Fastfood restaurant. Epifanio Bagting sat in his usual corner of the restaurant, indifferent to the crowd pouring in. It was the second heavy downpour that early evening. The first had caught him along Igualdad Street earlier, but he snuggled safe in his favorite nook now drinking the drab of a rainy evening, browsing a new book he had just bought at Master Square, and mentally going over the short talk he was delivering before the Ateneo de Naga alumni fellowship on Easter Sunday. He fished for an appropriate approach to his topic while watching the strips of paper flutter in the louvers of the Koppel air conditioning unit. He felt his attache case. The cool air made the leather smooth to the touch. As his fingers slid past the square corners of the frame, however, he noticed the sides water-logged. After setting up the combination lock, he snapped open the clasps of his case and checked out the contents inside. When he saw some papers slightly drenched, he ransacked the folders, worrying over ruined documents so that he did not hear the girl's voice calling him until she tugged at his elbow:

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"Kuya Panol" The timbre in her voice startled him. He stood up on reflex and gawked at the girl, but his mind remained in the attache case. He examined her from head to foot as though she were a specimen under a microscope before the face registered in his brain: "Suzette? Suzette Uy?" She put on a flippant expression of reproach: "I kept calling you from the door, ano ba talaga, Kuya." "Naku, Suzette, I'm so sorry, hija." He did not recognize her in semi-braided hair. He was used to seeing her in bangs. "What are you doing here?" "We're usherettes." "Oh?" His thoughts lingered in the wet papers. "We're closing our art exhibit of Bicol artists in the lobby," she said. He took a worried peek inside the divider of his open attache case. "What are you reading, Kuya Pano?" "This one?" He handed her George D. Moffet's Critical Masses: The Global Population Challenge. "I just bought this today." "Interesting. What's that other book inside?" "The Sensuous...I mean, Crossing the Threshold of Hope," he said quickly closing the attache case. "My, my, how you have grown." He simpered sheepishly, trying to suppress a facial tic. "How's Kring-Kring, Kuya?" She handed him back the Moffet book. "She's fine." Kring-Kring was his eldest daughter, Suzette's high school classmate. Both girls had been barkadas since elementary school, but Suzette moved to the Ateneo de Naga after high school whereas Kring-Kring remained in the Colegio de Santa Isabel. They still kept in touch by phone even though Suzette no longer dropped by Kring-Kring's house. "So you two have resolved who the national hero should be?" Her eyes lost themselves in slits as she giggled. "You still remember that, Kuya?" "Of course I do. How can I forget those endless debates."

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A voice from the crowd called her. She raised her hand at the group in an exaggerated manner—wait—then turned to Epifanio: "I want to show you the paintings, Kuya. Don't leave yet. I'll be right back." He sat down as soon as she had left to join her group. He noticed how different she looked in her evening attire. No wonder, he thought, he did not recognize her. He was used to seeing her dressed up differently. To him, Suzette was the beatle-mopped little girl in back pack with her faded maong jeans and Hush Puppies Bounce shoes who fetched his daughter on weekends to work on their algebra. He opened the attache case but slammed it shut when he saw her coming, her eyebrows furrowed in the middle. "We have a guest from the Archbishop's palace. Can you wait, Kuya? I'll be right back, promise. Oh I'm so praning already." "Relax, hija." Her mock frantic motions amused him. "I'm in no hurry." "Talaga, ha? Just stay here, Kuya. You should see the paintings." "Take your time," he said smiling. "I'll wait here." As soon as Suzette had disappeared in the lobby, Epifanio rapidly opened his attache case. No documents ruined. Relieved, he shut the case immediately. He could wait. He was in no hurry to go home. He had come to Karihan Fastfood to order take-home food, but Margie and the children were still in the prayer meeting. Besides, even if they came home and found him there, nobody would notice, since everyone would be busy doing her/his own thing. So he sat in his favorite corner browsing his new book, rehearsing in his head what he would say before the Ateneo alumni, and relishing every drop of his usual "two for the road," since he'd not be touching the stuff until next Sunday, for tomorrow was Holy Monday. The last thought depressed him. Every year he would bring the family to the Cathedral for Lenten services that bored him: Holy Thursday for the via cruris, the Chrism Mass, the washing of the feet; Good Friday for the Seven Last Words, the veneration of the cross, the Tenebrae; Black Saturday for the blessing of the new fire, the renewal of baptismal vows, the Easter Vigil. Not that he detested his Church. The services had just lost their meaning. He felt that

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everything had degenerated into mindless, maudlin routine. After two millennia of intellectual consistency, he thought the Catholic religion had calcified its spirituality into dogma, virtue into adherence to rigid rules, devotion into ritualism, wisdom into legalism, mysticism into catechism, paradox into moral formulations, the spirit of inquiry into emotionalism, priesthood into priestcraft. He wondered if his beloved Church could still return to those best moments during her High Ages when everything was a revelation, everyday life a wonder. Epifanio looked at the young ones and noticed how fashions had changed. Like his Naga. He felt uneasy about the external changes: familiar landmarks disappearing, new buildings rising, parks and playgrounds yielding to shopping malls, old edifices changing names. This hotel, for example, once known all over Bicol as Hotel Lindez, was now Grand Imperial Plaza; in the corner, across the street, what once used to be the Bicol Mail building was nowr Baker's Plaza. He wondered why Naga had suddenly hurried to change. It was very un-Naga. In the old days, the city had moved very slowly, if at all, and if changes had occurred, they were nondescript that nobody noticed nor minded them. It was easy, for instance, to connect the transition from Saint Francis Xavier to Xavier Cugat. But how did one connect John Wayne to John Wayne Bobbitt? Not that he disapproved of change per se. On the contrary, he welcomed many last-minute changes of the century: the collapse of communism, the dismantling of apartheid, the end of the Cold War. With these global changes, he thought, it was but natural for Naga to refuse to remain in the past. But that was not the point. If the city had chosen to ride the crest of material progress with its attendant brownouts and water shortages and massive layoffs, the least she could have done was to see to it that material progress went hand in hand with spiritual progress. Perhaps he was just blaming his own moral paralysis on the city, he thought; the millennium was ending and he felt he had not progressed spiritually at all since he graduated from the Ateneo de Naga. This feeling of emptiness started lately when he met a couple of his former Jesuit professors at the Ateneo de Naga chapel one afternoon and started attending the alumni Masses. Suddenly he started feeling

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again the Atenean's sense of urgency to change inwardly for the greater glory of God. Suddenly he felt this need for a qualitative change, a dramatic change, something akin to Saint Ignatius' sitting by the stream and watching the running water before the spirit moved him, anything that would mean an alteration of his whole spiritual life. He did not know exactly why—perhaps it was the millennium ending—but so determined was he to progress spiritually that he did not care how the means came about so long as he grew spiritually, so long as he improved morally; and he was willing to endure anything, even a self-abnegation or a reversal of some of his most cherished fantasies to achieve it. He had prayed to the miraculous Virgin of Penafrancia and importuned Her to change him before the end of the millennium. Despite the mass exodus of many Catholics to other faiths, he did not leave the Church, for he felt that this touch of grace would come through the conduit of the Roman Catholic Church. But lately, after he had started seeing the Jesuits again, he began doubting this possibility because of one reason: the Vatican refused to change its stand on birth control. He suspected something intrinsically wrong about Humanae Vitae. But he had kept his views to himself because of his reputation in the Naga community. Even if he were an Atenean, it was not easy to disturb the Parish of Saint John the Evangelist which looked up to him for living what it thought was the ideal Catholic conservative life: Mr. Bagting the respectable, churchgoer who practiced monogamy and did not practice contraception but bore as many children as God wanted; Mr. Bagting the proud father of six children all involved in Catholic activities from Kids for Christ to Youth for Christ, from Singles for Christ to the Handmaids of the Lord. The Bagtings centered their lives on the parish. This year, his wife acted as facilitator and he as resource speaker in the renewal and strengthening of the local Catholic charismatic group's family life. Last year, husband and wife spearheaded the Marriage Encounter seminar in Naga. The year before that, it was the Life in the Spirit seminar; and before that, the Tipanan, the Panayam, the Suyuan, the Couples for Christ. And this month, the Ateneo de Naga Alumni Association invited him to talk on marriage at its monthly fellowship.

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Last month, the parish priest awarded him a plaque that started his depression: a model family plaque awarded to the Bagtings for no special reason other than their having bred so many children. The citation read that Mr. Bagting, in raising a large family, all serving the parish, proved that Humanae Vitae was right. In the days that followed, his depression plunged deeper. He worried over every ache and pain, he imagined enemies, and he found himself bored and bitter with Naga. He thought of Matisse whose paintings brightened the older he grew, then he thought of himself and wondered why the older he grew, the darker grew the insomnia, the palpitations, the anxiety attacks, the irritability, the loss of illusions, the despair. His life was a gaffe; he had reached a cul-de-sac. He felt as if everyone had taken the train ride towards the twentyfirst century while he stood behind at the old MRR station watching the train get smaller and smaller. His only contact with sanity was the old fashioned belief that a bottle of beer was the better anti-depressant than Prozac. That was why he liked this corner at Karihan. He wondered what he would talk about during the alumni fellowship. Suzette arrived. "Sorry to keep you waiting." "Naaah. I'm enjoying myself." "7am," she said. "I'll show you the paintings." The first thing that grabbed his attention were the nudes. His facial tic resumed. He looked at the nudes, then looked at Suzette. She did not look a whit scandalized. In fact, she was animatedly explaining to him the plethora of colors, lines, textures, although he did not quite follow the niceties of her lecture because his eyes flitted back and forth from the nudes to her plunging evening slip: a stark, slip-style see-through seaming silk chiffon supported by a pair of precarious straps which accentuated her cleavage. He thought the clingy stretch fabric of her mini skirt restricted rather than facilitated her freedom of movement. He looked at her face: chinky eyes, chiseled cheekbones, a knowing grin. He observed her lips and how they parted perfectly. He looked at her eyes and observed how they thinned prettily when she smiled. Like Amanda Page, he thought. Her braids glowed under the overhead lamps, framing her face like a little girl's. She also wore a graphically decorated technicolored

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Swatch which to Epifanio provided the cutest contrast to her evening formal wear. She stopped talking and stared blankly at him, but he quickly looked away, guilty of the dark thoughts she must have read on his twitching face. Then she resumed talking. He was alert to her scent: anxious, innocent, inviting. His mind moved to Margie with resentment. She never smelled like this anymore. Once, on their seventeenth anniversary he'd bought her a bottle of Blue Grass, but she said she didn't like it, he should have saved the money to pay for the insurance premium instead. "We have more paintings upstairs," she said, patting the handrail of the white staircase. "Tara, I'll show you." She preceded him up the flight of stairs because he paused in front of the mirror at the counter to pat his toupee: narrow eyelids, musty eyes, haggard face. I am passe, he breathed wearily. He glanced up the stairs and noticed how long and straight her legs were. When she moved farther up, he caught himself ogling the firm round cheeks of her buttocks. The attraction surprised him. The unexpected intrusion of a physical desire for a girl young enough to be his daughter caught him off guard. He tried his best not to entertain impure thoughts and desires. It was Palm Sunday, he reminded himself. Besides, she was his daughter's former classmate, period. He deliberately lowered his eyes, but the sight of her shoes—a pair of two-inch-heeled black satin evening shoes—deepened his inhalation. When they reached the second floor, he saw paintings of old Bicol churches hung on the walls. An elderly couple upstairs approached Suzette and asked questions about the paintings. She led Epifanio and the couple by their arms towards the corner between the nest of serving tables and the hassock, and began her lecture. She pointed out details found on baroque facades, arched doors, brass grills, pointed gable columns, central bell towers, cupolas. She pointed to sculptured figures in niches between columns, to white plaster cusp arcs in scalloped ruffles. She told them to notice the earth-brown walls under the Bicol sun, the mango trees in the background, the distant hills. But still, Epifanio could not concentrate. The intensity of her bodily attraction disturbed him. He thought these feelings be-

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longed downstairs: the nudes understandably stirred his baser instincts. But old Bicol churches? The elderly couple thanked her for her time and walked towards the stairs. "I love old churches," Epifanio said. She smiled. The distant voices of an ongoing pabasa, magnified by microphones, rode in the wind blowing in from Barlin Street. "I want to know more about them," he said quickly. "You see, there's this research I'm doing about Bicol..." "That's great, Kuya Pano. I'll call Miss Dizon downstairs." "No! You're more interesting, I mean, you're doing a fine job yourself." He did not like to be taken by surprise. It exacerbated his Freudian slips. "I am?" "Of course you are. Why don't you tell me more about elongated stones and arched doors in there?" He blinked uncontrollably. He did not like it when he blinked. It always gave him away. He pushed the swinging door leading to the bar and filled his lungs with the cool air inside. The bar was empty of customers. It was too early. "Groo-vie!" she said when she saw the interior. "Where do we sit?" "Over there, beside the window." He eagerly pulled her a chair. She sat down while he stood behind her, unable to decide where to settle his eyes: in her low V neckline or in the diminutive mini skirt that shrunk as she sat. "Miss Uy," a waiter called in from the main door. "Miss Dizon calling downstairs." "Coming." She carelessly spread her legs to stand up. Old habits in maong jeans die hard, he thought, elated by the lucky glimpse of heaven. If old goats were natural voyeurs, he thought, nineteen-yearold girls are natural exhibitionists. "Wait here, Kuya Pano. I'll just give her the keys." Before leaving the room, she called out, "How's auntie?" "Oh fine, fine."

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T i l be back/' she said hurrying through the door, almost bumping into the bartender who came in with a kettle of water. Epifanio ordered a pitcher of beer. Twenty years, Epifanio moaned to himself, twenty long, boring years. Once upon a time Margie had been as fresh and sprightly as this girl. They'd had a good deal of loving and romancing in the beginning, but it didn't last very long. The children came along: first he begot Kring-Kring, then he begot Bing-Bing, then he begot Jun-Jun, then he begot Bek-Bek, then he begot Pot-Pot, then he begot Lot-Lot. Suzette returned immediately. Epifanio stood up and pulled her chair. "Miss Dizon wants me to entertain some guests downstairs," she said, catching her breath, "but I told her I'm entertaining a guest upstairs. How's that." "I like that." • "Good. Anyway, I'll rush downstairs every now and then, and come back here so we can talk, okay?" "Great. I want to know more about your private parts, este, private life, I mean, what have you been doing lately besides interpreting paintings?" "I'm into mountain climbing, hang gliding, bungie jump." "Aren't those dangerous?" She laughed out loud, tilting her head backward. He saw her two front teeth crammed together and nudged slightly forward—the secret of her cute smile, he thought. "I'm just joking, Kuya Pano." He liked the way she kidded him. "Let me guess: you're also into solar energy, the total log ban, a nuclear free world." "And tattoos." "What do you mean?" "I'm going to have myself tattooed." "Where? I mean, why?" "Why not? "I think it's ugly." "I think it's groovy. It's just another form of body adornment, like jewelry. Besides, it freaks out the oldies—like you."

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"I'm not old." "Aminin. Uuuy." Her flippancy tickled his loins. "You asked where? Right down here, in my buttocks." His face twitched at the last word. "You'll disfigure your, er, buttocks." "Sabagay. Hey, did you know one of my friends had his nipples pierced last week?" "He had—what? That's terrible." "Not if you found out that nipple piercing is an ancient tradition. We're just reviving it." "So you're going to have your, er, nipples pierced too?" "Yikes, no. I like to breastfeed my future children." "I'm glad the world hasn't changed that much." "It hasn't. You're just very conservative, Kuya Pano." "I'm not conservative." "Aminin. Uuuy." Her flippancy aroused the fire in his loins. "All right, I'm conservative—but only in the sense that I advocate a return to angels and saints and miraculous medals and good manners and right conduct. But I'm not conservative in the sense that I don't agree with the Church's stand on birth control." He suddenly said it. He should not have said it but he just did. Was it the beer—or her? The ease in which he expressed his opinion openly on the subject surprised him. "You don't agree?" Her pitch soared falsetto in shock. "Talaga?" She saw him as all Naguenos saw him—as the local champion of Humanae Vitae—so the remark bowled her over. "You do not agree with the Church's teaching on birth control?" "That's right, I don't." "You mean, you're not catolico cerrado after all?" "I'm not catolico cerrado, excuse me." "Kuya Pano!" She relished the revelation. The bartender arrived with the pitcher of beer and two mugs, distracting them temporarily. "Can't drink," she said. "On duty. Going back to our topic..."

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"I'm actually a closet cultural Catholic," he said. "You know, a Catholic on my own terms." "Right on!" she said. "Why don't you tell me more about your views on birth control. We'll discuss old churches later, okay?" "All right." The mug of beer filled the bar with a mist, and he felt a surge of joy that drove him to speak boldly. He began by admitting to her how he had tried to leave the Church in 1968, when Paul VI issued his controversial encyclical, but he said he did not do so because he had hoped the Pope would reverse his unrealistic decision. After all, he said, didn't the Church change her stand in the past every time she realized that a new understanding of human nature had surfaced? Didn't Suzette know, for example, that for centuries after Christ's Ascension, priests were married? Then the Church changed its stand. Didn't she know that Canon Law forbade usury and held it sinful to profit from the needs of others? Then the Vatican went into banking. Veritatis Splendor condemns slavery as intrinsically evil, but didn't she know that until 1890, the Church defended the right to own slaves, including the right of victors of war to enslave their captured enemies? Leo XIII condemned slavery in 1890, but only because every civilized nation had abolished it and the Protestant Churches had condemned it. He said he did not question papal infallibility, for he believed in the infallibility of other papal teachings formularized ex cathedra, like the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. But the birth control issue, like the issue of celibacy or slavery, was not inert. He said he did not understand why Paul VI formed a special advisory commission only to repudiate its recommendations and issue the inane encyclical. He said his hopes had soared when John Paul 1 ascended the throne but his hopes had died with that Pope's mysterious death within thirty-three days of his papacy. He said that the present Pope, for all the media hype, was nothing but a dictator, an arch-conservative, a showman, and a tourist who thought it right to impose his religious beliefs on the rest of the world. "Kuya Pano!" Her eyebrows arched upward. "You really mean that? Talaga? Wow! Why?"

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"Because we're reproducing more than we're producing/' he said, shaking with emotion. "Because population explosion is driving Naguenos to poverty, to child prostitution, to crime, to mendicancy, to enslavement in foreign lands. Go around Naga's slum areas and what do you see? Infants crippled by severe malnutrition, babies twisting from hunger, children disabled by disease, parents distraught by unemployment. And yet the Church cries out more, more. This policy is not only irresponsible; it is wicked, cruel. How can the Church go on encouraging us to reproduce more and more babies with no future except pain and suffering. How can the Church go on kidding us when we all know the rhythm method does not check population growth. This is not the Church I know. These pharisees should bear in mind that they have a moral responsibility to answer for the consequences of their irresponsible decrees!" "Miss Uy, telephone call downstairs," a waiter called in. "Coming. I'll be right back, Kuya Pano. Wow, you're groo-vie." He gulped his mug of beer to the lees; then, his hands still shaking, he poured more into the mug from the pitcher. He liked the way she listened to him. Nobody encouraged him to talk like this anymore. She did not humor him like Margie did. She seemed very concerned about his feelings. Would he tell her about his wife, too? He sipped from the mug. Yes, he would. He'd tell her it was Margie and not he who was the fanatic of Humanae Vitae. He'd tell her how he urged Margie to follow her conscience and practice birth control like many Catholics did. He'd tell her how Margie regarded all artificial means of contraception as pregnancy termination. He wondered if the resentment he felt for his wife correlated with the resentment he felt for his Church. Margie was his cross. They had practiced the rhythm method because Margie's conscience would not accept anything else. Even then, she treated rhythm as a concession. He had given up all arguments in favor of the pill. The mere mention of it provoked her to reach her grab bag of arguments in favor of natural law and the Bible's command to go and multiply. To her, love was dependent on the thermometer and the calendar. If he put his arm around her during unsafe days, even when they were only watching TV, she'd mutter "and lead us not into temptation."

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On these days, too, only the beso-beso was allowed. If he kissed her longer than usual on his return from work, she would push him away. The pill was out of the question. If they had six children now because each of the last four was "Our Mistake," she said they should praise God instead and sing "the more the merrier" even if it meant more hospital bills to pay, more mouths to feed, more clothes to wash. He conceded to her caprices for a time. He agreed to watch the Family Rosary Crusade on TV to take his mind off sex. He agreed to join her in praying to Him who is more than enough in an AmenAmen euphoria that disgusted him. He agreed to read aloud Breakfast with the Pope every morning even if it gave him LBM. He agreed to listen to the two I Am Sending You cassette tapes back to back every night before going to bed. One night, when she hissed Yesss tonight, dah-ling, with a breath powerful enough to deflect a guided missile, he found out he could no longer get the thing to stand up. They tried everything. They even stopped listening to I Am Sending You, but even that did not help. She suggested he consult Dr. Macatangay in Pasig for ErecAid, but Epifanio would have none of it. To admit it, he said, was worse than admitting to a case of STD. When Suzette returned, she handed a bunch of cassette tapes to the bartender and instructed him briefly which pieces to play on the room stereo. Then she went over to Epifanio's table. "So who was that?" "Rex." "Your boyfriend?" "Ngeee." "An admirer, then." "Freak out. I'm not that gaga over him. He's so nerdy." "What do you mean? Why did he call?" "He wants to bring me to his office tonight." "He wants to bring you where?" "To his private office. He wants me to be his company's promo girl and he wants us to do a taping session." "At night? Just the two of you?" "He's a very busy person."

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"Really. What does he do?" She gave him Rex's bio-sketch. He was in his mid-twenties, she began, who worked ten hours a day. He was restless, assertive, ambitious, and abreast with the latest trends in the Wall Street Journal. He was an infonaut, a Netsurfer. He worked on a Pentium processor. He had stock options and extra life insurance. He decided the finances of his company's budgets (in millions, take note, Kuya Pano) allocated for data processing. He read Datamation, Fortune, and the Free Press. He drove a BMW Last year, he broke into mainstream corporate management when two of Naga's major corporations entered into a joint venture and elected him CEO. He was a "techie" who started as a computer specialist but because he was an Atenean he was also a generalist, so he moved upward into senior management. She described him as sharp, clean-cut, very eligible and very sexy. Epifanio crossed and uncrossed his legs as she talked. "Let's not talk about him," she said. "Tell me, if the Church would not change its stand on birth control, would you leave it?" "I don't think so." "Why not?" "No Nagueno ever leaves the Catholic Church. If you studied in the Naga Parochial School or the Colegio de Santa Isabel or the Ateneo de Naga, the odds are overwhelming that the Catholic imprint will remain with you for good." "It's permanent then." "I guess so. I did think of leaving it once or twice, though, but I kept putting it off until I just grew too old to care. When you get to be my age, hija, you'll understand what I mean. It's called manyakis habit, este, manana habit. "Another question, Kuya Pano." "By the way, stop calling me Kuya Pano. It makes me much older than I already am." "How do I call you, then?" "Just call me—Eppie." She tried to suppress her giggles, but she lost her poise as her body shook in guffaws, causing her breasts to heave and quiver inside the low V neckline.

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Epifanio liked the way she loosened up to him. In a while, he found himself laughing at her jokes, although he laughed not so much because he understood them—how different the postmodern innuendoes were—but to camouflage the stiffness that kept raising the napkin on his lap. He pretended to adjust his napkin several times, but the looseness of his low-waist gabardine pair of pants only helped the thing to rise prominently. A frisson of rapture rose over him. Good Lord, he thought, this girl's better than Dr. Macatangay! But he did not like her to read his unedited thoughts. He tried to think of something else. He looked out the glass windows and noticed that evening had fallen in Naga. The rain spattered on the glass outside in receding rivulets. "Is it, Kuya? I mean, Eppie?" "Yes, it is." he said laughing. "No, I said it isn't fair, is it?" He flushed horridly. He wasn't paying attention to her tale of woe. "That's right, it isn't fair," he said without knowing exactly what world-shaking thing it was that needed instant reassurance. She smiled. He felt silly but he smiled along with her. He groped for a topic. "Nice perfume you're having on." "Thank you. It's Safari." "Oh?" "Ralph Lauren." "You know, hija, I'm so gross I can hardly distinguish one perfume from another. In fact, the only smell I can recognize is white slavery, este, White Flower." "Miss Uy," a waiter called in from the door. "Another telephone call—from your admirer again?" Epifanio's blood pressure shot up. "Miss Dizon calling you," said the waiter. Epifanio's blood pressure returned to normal. "Excuse me, I'll be right back." She rushed back downstairs. Epifanio looked at his present life and cogitated how it had paralyzed him. Then he thought of Suzette and cogitated how much she had resuscitated him. Would she consent to have an affair with him? He smiled to himself and looked at his life: a stable home, a squeaky-

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clean reputation, a secure job. Would he be willing to disturb the universe in exchange for many nights of romancing Suzette? Was he prepared to mess up the future of his children, his wife, Suzette herself? But why in the world was he suddenly, desperately, crazily, hungering and thirsting for Suzette? He heard the kettle whistle at the bar. He watched the steam gush from the kettle's mouth, as the bartender turned off the heat. He tried a jesuitic analogy: a while ago, when the bartender laid that kettle on the electric stove, the water was just water. It did not produce any qualitative change—like himself—only quantitative change, a change in degree. The water just became warmer and warmer. But then came the boiling point. When the water reached a hundred degrees centigrade, suddenly it transformed itself into steam and then it hissed and whistled and gushed forth and refused to remain confined in the kettle. Suddenly it underwent a radical, qualitative change, a complete transformation of characteristics opposite that of water, a terrific shock: Paul blinded for three days by the shaft of light, Augustine reeling before the City of God. You're waxing jesuitic again, Eppie, you jejune Jesuit. But he pursued the thought: Was he at that critical point in his life where unless he took a deliberate step in overcoming his lower nature, he could not progress further? He remembered his novenas to the Virgin of Penafrancia importuning Her to change his life. Was this his opportunity? Could he, by overcoming this temptation, strengthen his character and, like Ignatius, grow spiritually in leaps and bounds he'd never imagined? Was this his soul's chance to immolate its old self in the burning ground, so that the new self might resurrect? Still, nobody was forcing him to do anything against his will. That was the hard part—the freedom to choose, to work out his salvation. But was this attraction to Suzette a yank from his lower nature? What if she were a godsend, the real answer to his novenas? What if she came down to save him from spiritual aridity so that through her he might know God more? Didn't Ignatius tell us to find God in all things? Didn't Teilhard try to bring about a plainer disclosing of God in the world?

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Furthermore, what if the process of self-immolation was not for him, not yet, at least? The burning ground, said the Jesuits, came only to those who had answered every call of the flesh and, rich in experience but poor in attachment, were willing to renounce everything. He was still poor in experience. Nevertheless, he felt that sooner or later he'd have to face up to the challenge. If he didn't meet it at this point in his life, he'd have to wait for another opportunity and that opportunity might never come. And the millennium was nearly over. While he imagined himself giving up Suzette with all the sorrows attendant to the renunciation—especially that extremely difficult renunciation of many nights of love with a nineteen-year-old girl wearing only a smile—he also imagined himself winning over his lower self and gaining a new conversion of consciousness, like the steam gushing upwards from the kettle's mouth, a radical spiritual transformation attendant to the renunciation. Wasn't this the better desire? Wasn't passion a fluke? Didn't he feel the same passion with Margie when she was this age before she ballooned? When Suzette returned, she signaled the bartender to turn on the stereo. A mellow saxophone filled the air. It was a song he liked best, something about the way you looked tonight. "Do you still dance, Eppie? Miss Dizon tells me you were one of Naga's best dancers." "It's been ages." "Sample naman, Eppie, sigue na," she teased him. "But this is a slow-drag." "So? Teach me the slow-drag." She took his hand. She giggled and pulled him up towards the dance floor. It really had been ages since Epifanio had danced. He felt clumsy at first but she held onto him eagerly, trustingly, and allowed him and the music to guide her steps. "Do you mind? I mean, dancing with a married man?" "Course not. You're my kuya. So how's auntie?" There she goes again, he thought. Did she always have to ask about Margie? He said her auntie was fine and all that, but in his

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mind, as he talked, he thought of overdue house bills, torn up screen windows, mosquito bites, cockroaches, Katol fumes which made him dizzy. When Suzette's turn came to talk, he thought: could he not, just for tonight, forget that self-pitying fool back home who never gurgled off her bad breath in the mornings and never did anything to remove the ugly corns in her feet—that bear in curlers on the breakfast table who sipped her cup of black coffee so noisily until his scalp itched; who drank with the serving spoon in the cup; who preferred her toenails pointed; who forgot all taste for clothes by mismatching every color of the spectrum when she dressed up for Sunday Mass that she gave an overall effect of a primitive who had salvaged the wreckage of a sunken ship in an offshore island? When the music ended, he walked her back to the door, because she said she had to go back downstairs to entertain the guests. "I'll be right back." Alone in his table again, he looked out the glass window. The rain sprayed the glass into irregular crystal shapes before allowing the water to slue to the sides. From under the table flowed the stream of evening traffic. He liked the psychedelic effect of headlights as they came in a steady flow down the rain-swept street. It felt like the strange illusion of falling forward while watching the Bicol River flow from under the Colgante bridge. For all the girl, the night, and the music, Epifanio still felt hollow. To succumb to Suzette was too easy. Wouldn't every normal male in the street have fallen into the same trap? Perhaps this aversion to his wife was good for his soul. Perhaps this was the challenge. He thought how much he would learn if he overcame this aversion. Deep within, he knew he could progress spiritually not by loving somebody he already loved but by learning to love again somebody he had ceased to love. Perhaps this renunciation demanded of him pointed towards the true meaning of Lent—a passion and death to self as prerequisite to a new life. Wouldn't an excellent Lenten penance include a renewal of romance with a spouse one has ceased to find attractive? But rekindling a love affair with a spouse like Margie was the most arduous of tasks. It would require from him all the humility, the vulnerability,

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the patience, the courage, the determination, the patience, the forgiveness he could muster. Few enterprises were more difficult, few deaths more painful. He wondered why the Church would not rejuvenate her concept of sanctity to include more married saints, saints who were neither virgins nor martyrs, who did not have to suffer corporeal pains for the Faith, but saints who bore the storms and stresses of married life and emerged spiritually victorious. Wasn't this more in line with the carrying of one's cross? Wasn't this the true imitation of Christ? He wondered when the flagellantes would stop taking things literally and flog their old selves instead so the old self would no longer enslave the new. Would he scourge his old self? Would he crucify it so that it no longer enslaved him? He thought of the candle plunging into the holy water during the coming Easter Vigil symbolizing the marriage of Christ and His Church, and he thought that perhaps that would be the perfect time for him to renew his married vows. That would be a good time because then he would be in the heart of one of the Church's most passionate phases. Would he do it? Suzette returned and stopped by the bar and instructed the bartender to play one piece from each of the two cassette tapes she handed him. Then she went over to Epifanio and asked him to dance with her again. It was another song he liked very much, something about having eyes only for you. She allowed him to press his firm eager hand about her lower back, and feel his chin against her hair that smelled of youth and warmth and eagerness. He lavished his body and soul to her clinch. Suddenly the music stopped, and the jumpy, catchy number of "Macarena" crossfaded with the song. The bartender had connived with her. He released her and headed for the table, but she broke into joyous little shrieks and begged him to try this one, sigue na, be a sport. He said he had no idea how to dance this thing. She said just move with the beat. He tried the steps of the Charleston, the Foxtrot. She said no, not that way, follow me. He aped her jerking, slithering motions, her little jumps and shakings, but he felt awkward

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and sought the safety of the table. She jumped ninety degrees to the right and blocked his way, grinning naughtily. Before he could move away, she stretched out her arms and swung her hips, and, clenching the cheeks of her buttocks, lifted her hips in forward upward thrusts as if she were riding a bronco. He watched her shake and stomp to the tribal beat—hey, Macarena, whooo!—her chin lifted slightly, her braids flying, her breasts heaving, her trunk muscles swaying from side to side. His eyeglasses fogged up. She spread her legs and favored him with a generous view of her thighs: how firm, how round, he thought. He started fixing his deformed pants. He said he'd prefer to watch her dance from the sidelines, preferably from the table, but she said no, and facing him squarely, she contracted her diaphragm and thrust and thrust her hips at him, her tongue touching her upper lip, her small mouth half-open and moistened, her fingers running down her breasts and massaging her nipples, before she slid her hands down in the area between her thighs and slid them farther down all the way to the anus and back up again. Her pumping motion fueled a conflagration in his loins. The moaning look on her face dared his stiffness to come out, to charge at her, to penetrate her, to feel her warmth and softness, to pump and pump her in standing position—he going deeper, she getting tighter—until he released his pent up energies inside her. Suddenly he improvised—that's it, Eppie, right on, Eppie, whooo!—and Epifanio found himself young again, and wild and daring, jumping and shaking with abandon, forgetting the kids and the wife waiting for him back home. "I like this—whooo!" "Sigue, Eppie, lira. "I like you, Suzette," he said, wiggling his shoulders and patting his toupee in place. "Same here," she grinned prettily. He surged here, he jerked there, then he hopped and hopped in reckless delight. "I'm having so much fun I can't stop." "Don't stop, Eppie, sigue, tira."

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"Whooo!" "Enjoy." "Suzette," he croaked from a dry throat. "Suzette." "Yes?" "I want to tell you something. Don't get mad, okay?" "Of course I won't get mad," she said, tossing back her braids. He lurched to the left, then leaned to the right. "I like you very much." "Talaga?" "Corny, no?" "I like you too." "Really? " "Uuuy." He felt the pounding in his temples. "What I'm trying to say is, can we...would you like to..." Suddenly the glass door swung open and a tall silhouette sporting a men's pompadour hair style walked right in and moved towards the dancing pair. The bartender turned off the stereo. "Suzettel" the figure called out. Both of them froze up as the figure stalked towards them. When the overhead lamp lit the face, Epifanio knew that this guy was obviously not a waiter. "I kept looking for you downstairs." "Rex!" she screamed. "It's you!" Epifanio blinked furiously when he heard the name. "Am I interrupting anything?" Rex said. "Oh no, no! Oh not at all. Ep—, Kuya Pano, this is Rex. Rex, this is Mr. Bagting, my, er, uncle. He's teaching me how to dance, Rex, you know, for my P.E. class." Rex held out his hand. Epifanio could not control his facial tic. He shook the hand but cowered at the way Rex towered over him. "Mr. Bagting? Mang Pano? I'm sure you know my mom and dad, sir. I'm the son of Alberto." At least the boy is diplomatic, thought Epifanio. He could have gone alboroto. "Berting?" "Yes, sir."

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"Of course I know your dad. He's an Atenista. He was ahead of me. Your mother, yes, she was my bedmate, este, classmate." Epifanio's face twitched wildly. "How's your dad?" "Fine, sir. Much better now after his prostate operation. Look, I can come back later." "Oh no-no-no. Suzette here was just about to leave." Epifanio aspirated the last word through his teeth. His facial tic persisted annoyingly. "Suzette here was just telling me about your raping session, este, taping session." "So, can we drop you off somewhere, sir?" This jerk wastes no time, thought Epifanio. He's in such a hurry to drop me off so he can romance the girl. "No, that's all right." "Really, Kuya Pano, we don't mind," said Suzette. Rex's black leather case started buzzing. "Excuse me," he said and pulled out a cellular phone. Epifanio observed the young CEO in action. He heard him give instructions regarding spreadsheets, faxes, e-mail. The guy's assertive, self-assured, he thought, wired since birth, just like she said, and yet this local Kevin Mitnick betrays no earnestness in his voice—a product, alas, of Ateneo de Naga's academic rigor. He wondered what this guy possessed—and what Epifanio, the once and future Pol Salcedo of Naga, did not possess—that made this denizen of the online world irresistible to Suzette. Epifanio examined his own shirt-jack (wide lapels, unpadded pockets, lotto tickets sticking out of oversized flap pockets) and looked at Rex's white Belmondo turtleneck (saddle shoulders, waffle-knit collar). He looked at his own gabardine pair of pants (bell-bottomed, lowwaisted, tailored by Bib's Naga) then looked at Rex's dark Vercelli slacks (superb fit, double-pleated, lean, sharp, balanced, tapering down to narrow, defined ankles). He looked at his own chukka boots (wrinkled tips from too much kneeling in church, curved like the bows of two bancas dry-docked on the banks of the Bicol River, made in Marikina) and looked at Rex's shiny, jet-black Brazilian wingtip shoes (calfskin-handcrafted and overlaid with embossed crocodile accents). He looked at his own Casio quartz (bought at the watch repair

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shop in front of Lacerna's Pawnshop, assembled in Cubao) then looked at Rex's Patek Philippe. "You sure you don't want us to drop you off somewhere?" Rex tucked up his cell phone. "Naaah. You guys go ahead and enjoy yourselves. I'll stay." T i l leave the tapes with the bartender," she told Epifanio, "so you can listen to them. I'll have the driver pick them up tomorrow." "Let's go, Suzette," Rex said. "Goodnight, Kuya," Suzette said as she leaned forward to plant a peck on Epifanio's cheek. When her cheek touched his, she whispered "Eppie" directly to his ear, then moved back tittering. It was their naughty secret, and she assured him with her eyes that she would not betray him, promise. Epifanio's jaws tightened to restrain the facial twitches. "You'll make a good porno girl, este, promo girl." Rex extended his hand. "I'm very glad to meet you, sir." Epifanio reached out and shook it. An old fogy is a good sport, he thought, and besides, the guy's an Atenean, leave him be for the greater glory of God. "Give my regards to your dad. Tell him to come to our monthly alumni Masses, okay?" "I'll tell him that, sir. Goodnight, sir. Let's go, Suzette." "Goodnight, Kuya Pano. Thanks for the nice evening." "Goodnight, hija," Epifanio said, trying to sound very casual. "Have fun with sex, este, Rex." His face twitched crazily. The couple walked towards the door. Rex opened it for her and guided her through it with one possessive arm around her waist. Epifanio's scalp started itching. The iiberhacker can hardly wait, he thought. Before Rex could close the door, Suzette held it for a while, turned around, looked at Epifanio, and flashed him that testosterone-raising Amanda Page smile. The overhead lamps illumined her face with a glow very much like the mist in old photographs, but in a second she allowed the door to swing shut by itself. Take good care of her, Rex. You have the strength and she has the warmth. You'll blend. Take good care of yourself, Suzette. Don't worry about me. I can manage.

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He collapsed in his chair as soon as the bartender had started replaying the only-have-eyes-for-you song in the stereo. He would manage. Wasn't this what he wanted? Did he not pray to the Virgin of Penafrancia to assist him in his spiritual life? Did he not pray for a dramatic qualitative change so earnestly that he cared not how it came about even if the means arrived in the form of a self-abnegation or a reversal of his most cherished fantasies? No, he would not leave his Church. On the contrary, he would live it now that he had suffered passion and death. Then, as a bona fide member of that mystical body, he would use his new consciousness, his talents and his energies to persuade her to reconsider her deleterious position on birth control. The stupor he was feeling tonight, he assured himself, was normal and symptomatic of the paradigm shift following every critical point: Paul blinded for three days by the shaft of light, Augustine reeling before the City of God. There you go waxing jesuitic again, Eppie, you domsat. What matter. On Holy Thursday, when he would bring the family to the Cathedral for the Chrism Mass, the kids would notice a sudden change in him as he would explain to them the special meanings behind the consecration of the oils and the washing of the feet—a dramatic change even as they walked the streets of Naga for the visita altares. That change would even be more marked the next day, Good Friday, when he would bring them back to the Cathedral for the Seven Last Words and the veneration of the cross—although during the Tenebrae, as they watched the seminarians extinguish the candles, he would think of his own candle extinguished again, and this time he would pray that it remained that way until the Church reconsidered its stand. That Saturday evening, they would go back to the Cathedral to experi§$jp& the total darkness in preparation for the blessing of the new fire. After the priest had lighted the Paschal candle, blessed it, and taken it in solemn procession throughout the church, lighting all the candles of the faithful inside the now luminous Cathedral, he would tell his family of the genius of Catholicism and how during her High Ages she had codified through this ancient ceremony all

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the mysteries contained in the triumph of light over ignorance. Later in the night, during the singing of the Exsultet, as they renewed their baptismal vows to prepare themselves for the most awaited celebration of the greatest miracle commemorated in the liturgical year, at the very moment the candle plunged into the holy water, he would renew his vows to his wife. This Easter Vigil, these last minutes of the Season of Lent, albeit late, he would tell Margie, were still the best opportunity to renew his marriage vows. He imagined himself delivering his address to the Ateneo alumni fellowship and telling his fellow Ateneans that marriage was not a smooth line drawn on the chart, but a series of ups and downs, of second chances, of cycles of deaths and rebirths, of old endings and new beginnings. He imagined telling them that marriage was a string of love affairs with the same person, and to experience this, it was sometimes necessary to suffer passion and death to the wrong notion of love so that love's potential might resurrect from the dead to reveal to those who have ears that the Risen Christ was committed to the Church as a lover was committed to the beloved—for he understood that the strain between himself and his wife correlated with the strain between himself and his Church who was trying her best to strive towards the formation of a future Catholicism that was more compassionate and universal and humble and capable of repeated renewals. The Church would change its stand, he was sure of it, as it had done so in the past each time she realized that a new understanding of human nature had surfaced. She would change her stand when an enlightened and less legalistic clergy, resonating better with the Church's intellectual consistency, would appear. The Church would change its stand as sure as the Mater Dolorosa would meet the Risen Son in the salubong of the two carrozas at the Galilea, as sure as the angelito, descending from above, would lift the mother's veil amidst the singing of halleluiah's. For these reasons and convictions—and a host of other intimations—he would remain a Roman Catholic. But he would not go and see Dr. Macatangay. He walked towards the window to watch the street below, hoping to catch a last glimpse of Suzette entering Rex's car, but he only saw a blur. The weather must be warm outside despite the showers, he

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thought, because the Koppel air conditioning unit began to fog the glass, causing the moisture to condense until it became difficult to determine whether the shapes he saw were reflections of neon lights from Baker's Plaza on Naga's rain-swept streets or the frosted textures of warm air as it congealed on the pane.

Typhoon

M Y parishioners call me Father Itos. But after today, you may drop the "Father" and just call me Itos. You see, this afternoon, after the Fluvial Procession, I am leaving the priesthood. No, I do not intend to marry. I love the priesthood more than the married state. Or better still, I love the priesthood more than any state. But I'm leaving because of a woman. Her name is Rosing. I am leaving because I do not agree with the way the Church has treated her. Rosing left my parish nine days ago. She told me she was leaving to spare me from further trouble with my superiors. Rosing's case scandalized our parish. You see, I gave her Holy Communion knowing full well she was a married woman who lived-in with another man. And she practiced contraception. Now that's two counts for refusing her the Sacraments. Yet I gave her Holy Communion. You can just imagine how my parishioners kicked up a fuss, so to speak, and complained to my superiors who summoned me and threatened to discipline me. But I knew her story, and I explained it to the tribunal, and they would not listen. To them, Rosing lived in sin and the CBCP said this was ground enough to refuse her the Sacraments. They ordered me to "inflict spiritual penalty" on her for adultery and for practicing birth control. They warned me that if I went ahead and gave her Holy Communion, they would defrock me. All my arguments fell on deaf ears. They even insulted me. They

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said that for a secular priest I intellectualized too much I should have been a Jesuit. It is now nine days since she left. During this time I have prayed to the Virgin of Penafrancia to help me decide: Should I remain a priest and change the Church from within the corpus doctrinnae, as Assisi and Dominic had done, or should I nail my proverbial ninetyfive theses on the door of the Naga Cathedral and change the Church from without? Where would I be more effective? I had entreated the Virgin for a sign—a blue handkerchief, as blue as the one I gave Rosing on the night she left, as a sign that I should remain a priest— and gave Her until the Fluvial Procession to answer me. It seems now that even She has abandoned me. So I take this as a sign that I should leave. In my youth the Virgin had always answered my prayers with giveaway signs, whether they be white roses or blue handkerchiefs. I don't know why I'm not getting those signals anymore. Is it because those were childish things that belonged to pre-Conciliar times? Or is it because She is telling me that now that I have become a man I should put away childish things? I don't know. V/hat I'm certain is that it is not easy to leave the priesthood. Modesty aside, I have always taken my vocation seriously. As parish priest I am volleyball coach, choir director, organist, bazaar organizer, school organ adviser, fund raiser, raffle ticket salesman, and last minute guest speaker in case the invited guest speaker does not arrive. You can say I am a devoted priest. As far as I know, not once have I turned down a house or office blessing, a baptism, a marriage, a burial, you name it. Did you know that at one time, my parishioners said I could hold a candle to the Cure d' Ars when they noticed the marathon Confessions I would hear every month interrupted only by Breviary and meals. That's how much I love my vocation. Not only that. When I became parish priest here, I saw to it that my church was not only a religious center, but a social, recreational, and cultural center as well. I thought that the youth, by seeing a basketball-playing priest on the parish court, for example, would not only stay away from drugs but also develop positive attitudes towards

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the Catholic Church. Parents knew their children were safe in my parish. You see, despite Cable TV and CNN and the Internet in Naga that globalize the Vatican's significance in the lives of Naguenos, Rome to my parishioners still means the local parish. To Bicol Catholics, the Church is the priest, and vice versa: Christ Himself speaks through the priest, because the priest, as the Baltimore Catechism has taught us, is an Alter Christus. Few Catholics I know leave the Church because of the Pope or the Archbishop, but many leave it because of a certain parish priest. But tonight, after the Fluvial Procession, I am leaving the priesthood. Believe me, it is not easy. I shall miss many faces: from the kindergarten-school kids to the teen-agers, from the young-marrieds to the senior citizens—all of them with their ready smiles everytime they meet "Father." And I think I shall also miss the homes that reserve the best cookies and coffee for me, the CWL matrons who laugh out loud at my slightest jokes, the Rotarians who frown and nod seriously at every word I say even if I myself don't know what I'm talking about. Right now I am waiting for the Virgin's Image to come out of the Naga Cathedral. I am to accompany it in procession to the Basilica via the Bicol River. Since it is still early, I decided a while ago to come up here to the second floor of the Holy Rosary Minor Seminary (where I studied for twelve years) overlooking this mammoth crowd outside the patio so I can type my resignation letter to the Archbishop. I look out the window. Suddenly, it is September again, and Naga awakens once more to the noise and celebrations of the Penafrancia season. All the sights and sounds of the fiesta are here: from processions to parades and from novenas to carnivals. Come to think of it: I have never broken my promise, not even when I was in Spain, to attend all the Penafrancia fiestas during my lifetime. Indeed, even when I was in Spain, I celebrated the fiesta right at the very shrine of Nuesta Senora de la Pena de Francia, on top of that sacred mountain in Salamanca, so determined was I to keep my promise.

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But oh to be in Naga in September. So here I am again watching from beyond my room in the seminary the patio swell with devotees waiting for the Image to come out of the Cathedral. What a festive afternoon this Saturday of the Fluvial Procession is. Even the monsoon winds have come to Naga to stir the teeming flames of votive candles on the church grounds. Aha, the dust gyrates, forcing our beatas to cover their heads and faces with red and yellow bandanas. I think those schoolchildren over there especially celebrate the fiesta best because I see them continuously screaming as they play daracupan, trailing a clutch of fidgety yayas on the lookout for calesas and jeepneys and trimobiles and mini-buses. Look at those little rascals ramming themselves against the crowd, then squeeze themselves in, and—careful—throw an old woman off balance. The poor old lady. She was in the act of offering her right hand to a young man (an Atenean, no doubt) who has just caught the hand in time to bring it to his forehead. Roman Catholic Naga! A city of parades and processions, of estampitas and barajas, of pharisees and publicans, of faith and superstition, of daily communicants and chismosas, of beatas and mahjonggeras, of saints and sinners. Then my mind moves to last Friday's Traslacion, and suddenly my mood changes. I flinch at the way they disrobed the Image and tore away the crown. I squirm at the way they allowed a naked, crownless, hairless Virgin to stand in front of all those men. I fear the consequences of this sacrilege, for I know that no desecration is without its aftermath. How could they have done this to Her? Especially, the incident disturbed me because it reminded me of the way we treated Rosing. Rosing was a very pretty girl—the prettiest girl in my parish. I saw her grow up from childhood to young womanhood because she was among the children from the orphanage who were brought in by the Daughters of Charity to the parish home. I do not know exactly where she came from or who her parents were, and I did not bother to listen to Dona Choleng's CWL version of her "mysterious conception."

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When Rosing was sixteen, she married somebody in my parish. I thought she was too young, but the couple insisted they had to get married. I had no choice. Anyway, I knew the boy's family, so I officiated the marriage. Six months later, after her child was born, she was living in hell. The husband resigned from his job and refused to work. She supported him by quitting school and working full-time in the parish while he played billiards and drank. I took this as a period of adjustment. Then one day her husband stormed into my office screaming that Rosing had left him to live with another man. I raised hell. I summoned Rosing and rebuked her in front of her husband. I reminded her of the sanctity of her marriage vows and ordered her to return to her husband immediately or lose her soul. As soon as the husband had left the room, I asked her why in God's name she had done such a thing. She told me her husband would beat her up daily. She complained of cruelty and of how much pain she had suffered. Because of my training, these things meant nothing to me. Then she told me of this other man, Jose, who had rescued her from this hellish life and how much they loved each other. Now that meant something to me. She begged me to understand. I said I could not help her. I quoted Sirach and Leviticus. I told her God hath permanently joined her to her husband, period. I told her that marriage was a sacrifice to test her love for God. I told her she had no right to complain because her suffering could not match Jesus' suffering on the Cross. I told her I would have to refuse her Holy Communion if she persisted in living with this other man. Her contumacy was a defiance of Church authority, and her open disregard of penalty invoked automatic censure. My duty, I said, was to deter her from committing sin further because her sin threatened the common good of the Church and its members. I said my purpose in punishing her was to correct her, and unless she made reparation for the harm she had done to the Catholic community, I had no choice but to exclude her from the community of the faithful, and that meant barring her not only from participating in liturgical activities but also from receiving the Sacraments. I told her that absolution

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could be obtained so long as she desisted from obstinacy and so long as she repented. As penance for her sin, I suspended her from her job for a month. I did not hear from her for three weeks, until one late night, as I was praying in the sacristy, she appeared, limping barefoot, wearing only a bathrobe. Her face swelled and her nose bled. I asked her what had happened. She shook in sobs and said her husband had tried to kill her. I asked why, for crying out loud. She said he returned home drunk and demanded a stick of cigarette, but she said she didn't have any in the house, so he ordered her to go out and buy some in the sari-sari store. She refused because of the late hour, and besides she feared the tambays might molest her. So he grabbed her by the throat and twisted her arm behind her back and forced her through the main door. She resisted, so he wrapped his arm across her throat until she went blue in the face and passed out. When she recovered, she found out that she had no clothes on, and her husband was raping her. She pushed him away. This enraged him so he punched and punched her until she thought he would kill her. When he sat down to rest from exhaustion between punches, she escaped, grabbing only a bathrobe to cover her nakedness. She begged me to rescue her baby that lay in the bed while her Neanderthal husband seethed. I advised her to wait in the sacristy while I drove down in my jeep to their house only to find the father dead drunk so that I was able to snatch the baby easily and bring it back to the mother. I invited mother and child to rest in my room while I finished my prayers. After she had put the baby to sleep, I asked her to lay it on my bed so she could tell me everything her husband had done to her. I could not believe what I heard. She said her husband would force her to dance naked in front of him every Saturday night (he called these his Sabado Nights Special), then he would slap her face because he demanded to know where she learned to dance like that. She said he'd force her to look at> pornographic pictures, then compel her to try the new positions, only to throw her down the stairs because she would not squeal prop-

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erly, with feeling, he'd insist, like a pig—oink! oinkl—when he entered her from behind and pulled her ears as he thrusted. She said she did not understand his moodswings from violence to tenderness. After having made a punching bag out of her, he'd vow not to do it again, and in the next few days he would behave like an angel. But before the bruises went away, his irritation would build up. Minor things would displease him: the coffee was too sweet, the rice too soft. He'd complain she did not serve him enough, or he'd resent her suggestion that he help wash the dishes because he insisted he wore the pants in the house. Then, without warning, he would smash the household ornaments. His favorite pastime, however, was the hair-pulling sessions. For no reason at all—what had she done or not done again?—he'd grab her hair and drag her across the sala then bang and bang her head against the wall. And then he'd say sorry. It was a cycle, she said: after the violence, the forgiveness, then back to the violence. She said he would beat her up so fiercely that he would sleep afterwards from exhaustion. But as soon as he woke up in the dead of night, he would strangle her while she slept. What was I to do with her? She was married in my parish. She exchanged her vows before me. She had knelt at the foot of the altar and received Holy Communion with her groom after she heard me describe the sanctity of matrimony. Her resolutions were intent, her love honest, her hopes high. In less than a year, she was in my sacristy all back and blue. Was I going to send her back to her husband like I did the last time? She obeyed me as she obeyed her Church. I remember the words I told her the time after her husband had stormed into my office: No Rosing, no can do, I said through my pursed lips. The Church condemns adultery, you know that, you are a Colegiala. I knew my rebuke chagrined her, but in my lexicon, she broke the law. I remember walking her to the front door as I kept looking at my watch to drive home the message that I would have none of her silly excuses even if she groused how much she suffered from her husband. My law and my heart were set. I told her she did not understand the Church's concept of suffering. I told her that suffering was not

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all negative, that it had a religious and spiritual value too because it provided a means of purification, especially for sinners like her. I told her she deserved to suffer because she had sinned, and I counseled her to accept her suffering in a spirit of penance. Like I said earlier, I suspended her and ordered her to return to her husband immediately or else I would have to deny her the Sacraments, and if she died in that state, I warned her I would have to deny her Christian burial too. That night she came to me three weeks later I knew she drowned in distress and grasped at the Church for help. She came to me because she had nobody else to turn to. She came to me to find the Christ Who could not be contained in the fetters of rigid laws. And what did I do? I, the coward, let her listen to my stilted arguments—it is a period of adjustment, a lovers' quarrel—and to my laws. I quoted Paul and Genesis. The passages did not honestly convince her—nor myself—but I mouthed them in loyalty to my Church. Then, as the "most unkindest" cut of all, I told her I doubted if her husband was capable of doing all that violence she was telling me about because I knew the boy and in public he was the perfect gentleman and everybody said he was such a nice boy I even thought he was going to enter the seminary and besides I did not see evidence of those body bruises she was talking about for all I knew she had none of them. I demanded to see those bruises. So she untied her waistband and took off her bathrobe, allowing it to drop to the floor. I tried to stop her, realizing what I had just said, and forgetting what she had told me earlier that she had no underwear, but it was too late. Suddenly, she stood completely naked before me to allow me to see for myself the lesions, the welts, the gashes, the cigarette burns all over her body. I gaped in disbelief. I could not understand how a husband could have done this to a beautiful body like hers—for she was breathtakingly beautiful despite the lacerations, more beautiful than anything I had ever laid my eyes on or ever imagined. Indeed, as she stood unclad before me, with all that strange frailty and wraithlike incorporeality and ethereal purity that were not of this world—the embodiment of Ficino's idea of Beauty—I could not help thinking she was Botticelli's Venus Herself

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blown ashore, to my room, by the wind gods so that I could catch a glimpse of the beauty of God standing weightless upon a shell, trying to cover her sacred pudenda with one of her pretty hands— albeit unsuccessfully—before Pomona hid her with a brocaded mantle. How a husband could desecrate a body like that was beyond me. Then, without saying a word, she put back on her bathrobe, picked up her baby, and limped out of my room into the night. I do not know how long I stood there after she left. All I know is I could not take my mind off her body and the bruises her husband had inflicted on it—and my Church's indirect hand in causing them. I do not know why, but the experience laid bare the cause of the hardening of my organ, I mean, my heart: I suddenly realized I did not know Theology. Yes, I studied twelve years in the seminary, but that night I realized for the first time that in all those twelve years we never studied Theology. Theology teaches us how we can better love God. Theology makes the words of Christ alive in every age. But in the seminary, what they called Theology was boxed thought, dead-ended definitions, narrow rules. I memorized doctrines and laws without understanding them. I knew all the guidelines concerning Christian burial, the penalties for contraception, the conditions for excommunication. I learned to package grace and measure God's gifts. I classified sins into mortal or venial, and I saw sin everywhere. I learned the meaning of fear and cringed at God's .ficklemindedness: a single Mass missed because of weariness was a mortal sin and if a person died in that state s/he would go to hell as surely as the rest of the murderers and the criminals. No, we had no Theology. Instead, we had an education without sympathy, a training without compassion. Seldom did we talk of life's complexities save only about what was right and what was wrong. "Canon Law says" outlined every debate, "That's heresy" ended all arguments. Doubts found no voice there. In philosophy, for example, we took up Kant and Kierkegaard and Hume all in one meeting. We dismissed Camus as palpably confused. We laughed at Nietzsche for his madness. I studied only what my professors told me to study, and accepted only what they told me to accept even if I did not understand, for example,

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how some prayers could be made more effective than ten years' penance if they involved some motion of the lips to make them public as required by Canon Law They discouraged poetry writing unless our poems conformed to the literary standards of Mary's Army. They trained us to memorize, not to reflect; to defend, not to think. We studied the Bible to defend the Church from the Protestants; we studied John to defend Confession; we studied Paul to defend the superiority of husbands over their wives. In effect, we ended up as staunch defenders of the Faith, but we learned nothing of human weaknesses or the limits of a person's capacity to obey. When I became a priest, I knew nothing about psychology or counseling. I only knew the law and how to enforce it. Imagine I, a boy-priest, who had neither lived nor hurt in the world, out there enforcing Church laws to men and women who, unlike myself, did not see the world in black and white. Fortified by cubed formulas, I refused the sacraments to the divorced; blind to human frailties, I called my lack of feeling "saintliness," and my unreasonable advises as expressions of "God's will." In a word, I was ridiculously sincere. No one with an original and independent mind could become a priest. The seminary weeds him out long before ordination, leaving only the docile, the naive, the legalistic, the sanctimonious, the pharisaical, the mediocre to serve God. These are the arch-conservatives on one side, and the social activists on the other, that make up the fabric of today's postmodern Church. These are the young monsignors with their confident smiles and ambitious eyes: they who have earned their purple stripes by right connections and one-pointed devotion to the law which they guard from honest dialogue. From such a group can never come a Horacio de la Costa or a Teilhard de Chardin or a Bernard Lonergan. I welcomed the winds of change of Vatican II, hoping it would heal our clerical hatred and fear of women. My euphoria was shortlived. Humanae Vitae canceled out the positive results of the Council. Today, three decades later and on the threshold of the Third Millennium, we still treat women's bodies as painted tombstones—or quicksands ready to suck men into hell. Because my Church does not

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understand the mysteries of sexuality and female reproduction, all the Pope's hullabaloo notwithstanding, it continues to reject woman's personhood without realizing that by doing so, it also turns a blind eye to the fullness of God Who is mirrored in all creatures, male and female, made in God's image. Rosing came to me as she came to Christ. When a Bicolana has a marital problem, she does not go to the Women's Crisis Center or to Lorena or to Gabriela. She comes to the priest. She came to me because the law had bound her and frightened her. She came to me because she could not make a moral decision without my priestly advice. Yet all I did was quote Genesis and Paul to fortify the Decretum of archaic laws commanding women to fear their husbands. Then I sent her away. I agonize over what I had done to her. She believed in me as she believed in her Church. When she was a little girl, I taught her how good God was. She listened to me speak of God's angels and saints. I told her Bible stories, blessed her rosaries and estampitas, held relics for her to kiss, taught her how to pray in Latin and Spanish, gave her First Communion, brought her to the Archbishop for Confirmation, enrolled her to the miraculous medal apostolate, scolded her for her childish mistakes, urged her to pray for the poor souls in purgatory, make the nine First Fridays devotion, honor the Sacred Heart. All these and more. In a word, I made the Roman Catholic Church the center of her life, her reason for living. I assured her the Catholic universe was ordered and promised her the reward of heaven when she died. But when she grew up, I abandoned her. Realizing my most grievous fault, I hurried downstairs to my jeep to go after her lest she reach her house before I did. But I found her in the corner of the church's door, crouched and shivering, with her baby fast asleep in her arms. I told her to board the jeep. Then I brought her to the home of Jose who received mother and child with all the kindness and the gentleness and the love that I have ever seen in a man's eyes. Before I left them, I gave them my blessing and told them that if they went to Mass that Sunday I would give them Holy Communion.

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So the following Sunday I gave them Holy Communion. And like I said, the whole community took up arms against me. Many avoided me. Lay leaders threatened to picket the church premises. Moral crusaders called me consentidor. But I held my ground. I told Rosing to return the next Sunday and receive Holy Communion. I disagreed with the CBCP, but this time I was not going to suffer for the truth in silence and in prayer. I was going to fight back, as Christ had fought the Pharisees. I believed that the CBCP no longer represented true Catholicism. It had strayed from it. They and their followers are not the Catholics of Good Pope John XXIII's Aggiornamento, but Wojtyla's unthinking conservatives, first cousins of Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, and Pat Boone. Then I thought of my decision and its consequences. I thought of Hans Kting and Charles Curran and Edward Schillebeekx and Bernard Haring and Yves Congar and of many other sincere and deep-thinking Catholics who no longer allow themselves to be bullied by a Church grown arrogant and inhumane, a Church that caricatures Catholicism, and I took comfort in the thought that I wasn't exactly in bad company. I was ready. That Sunday never arrived. On Thursday night, the eve of the Traslacion, she came to the rectory to say goodbye. I did not quite understand where she said she was going, for she kept mentioning the word Traslacion. It did not make sense to me. In fact, none of the things she told me that last night made much sense to me. For example, when I asked her if she was coming back, she said yes, but in another form. I asked her what she meant by that, and she answered by talking of deaths, strong winds, floods, famine, epidemic. I started to worry about her mental health, especially when she kept describing ripped off roofs, drownings, brownouts, stranded passengers. For a while, she would not let me talk. She advised me to fix my generator, gird my windows, lay up foodstuffs and candles, and prepare the sacristy as a refugee center. I tried to figure out what she meant when she said that unless men stopped abusing her, she could not help coming back in a different form. She said she had come to help us take away our sense of separateness in the gentlest of ways, but men's hearts were hard so she

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had to return in a different form to teach us the hard way so that through pain we would realize our mistakes. Too, I could not understand why she kept talking of trees and how we have denuded our forests then shift the topic to her hair, as if the trees and her hair were one and the same thing. She wept as she complained of so much hair pulled from her head that I gave her my blue handkerchief, a souvenir I had bought in Salamanca, with my name—Padre Itos—embossed in lemon lace, to wipe away her tears. I told her to keep it as my going away present. She tucked it between her breasts and said she was returning it someday so I would know who she was. Then she kissed my hand and mentioned again the Traslacion and begged me to pray hard to the Virgin for forgiveness for the harm men had done to nature and to women, before she disappeared in the night. That was nine days ago. My mind moves again to the desecration of the Image. How similar to the way we treated Rosing. How comparable to the way we have denuded our forests. My soul cringes at the questions I have held back all these years: Why is my Church so prejudiced against women? Why does my Church lump together abortion, contraception, divorce, and fornication as if they were all equally reprehensible? Why is it quick to jump the gun on women abortionists yet silent on rape-slayers and mass-murderers? Why does it avoid honest dialogue on the birth control issue and instead assert ecclesiastical discipline and authority? Is my Church interested in the truth or in politics? If the Second Vatican Council called for collegiality, then why is Ratzinger's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith still behaving like the Holy Inquisition? Why does the Church drag its feet for years on petitions for marriage annulments yet grant them easily to the rich and the influential, especially if one of them happens to be the Princess Caroline of Monaco, whose case no less than the Pope himself personally handled? Why did the Pope hurry to beatify a controversial arch-conservative just fifteen years after the latter's death despite fierce opposition from clergy and laity? What are the Neocatechumenate, the Focolare, and the Communion and Liberation doing inside the Church? Why did the Pope grant a papal award to Kurt Waldheim, an ex-Nazi known for his anti-semitic activities

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in the Wehmacht during World War II? Why is the Church run according to Polish Catholic, German, and personal prelature standards? Why does my religion teach nature to be inferior and contaminated with evil? Why do we teach that spirituality is in opposition to nature? If we follow the line of reasoning that nature is evil, then it follows that women, whom we associate with nature, are evil too. Is there a connection between man's violence against nature and his violence against women? Suddenly fireworks swish up and explode. Then the Cathedral starts ringing with bells. I wonder what's going on, for it is too early, so I rush downstairs to find out. When I reach the patio, however, I see the Image already being brought out of the side exit of the Cathedral, then loaded onto an open van. I hurry towards the Image, forcing myself through the crowd, waving at the other priests to wait for me to board the van, before we plow our way through Naga's main street all the way to the banks of the Bicol River for the Fluvial Procession. As soon as we transfer the Image to the Pagoda, a bogador calls out my name. He is waving a blue handkerchief. He hands it to me and tells me he saw this thing jutting from the Image's bosom, and he pulled it off because he thought it was one of those banners caught up in the procession. He asks me if it's mine because my name is on it. I read the embossed name: Padre Itos. Yes1. I tell him, it is mine! Then I look at the Virgin and recognize that face. To my amazement and shock, a great sweetness I cannot put into words suddenly floods my heart. The fullness overwhelms me so that I can do nothing save to flow with this stream of consciousness cascading with the clash of the cymbals from this band beside me now playing a religious march to signal the start of our cruise down the river amidst the clapping of hands and the explosion of fireworks and the splashing of paddles that spray the skies with blinding sparkles of millions of waterbursts in a spasm of joy spritzing the hoarse shouts of Viva la Virgen! exploding on both banks of the river all the way to the hillsides now dotted with votive candles that look like dancing fireflies from our Pagoda that is beginning to wobble as a result of the weight of

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bogadores who are bobbing and weaving in the waters below and clinging to the raft and bearing it down forcing it to half-sink and graze on one side of the bank of the river close enough for us to see the swarm of eyes peep through the clusters of leaves before we cleave the waters again in the direction of the distant sound of churchbells and the loudspeaker leading the raft and the faithful to prayer and a song we have known all our lives: Resuene vibrante el himno de amor Que entona tu pueblo con grata emocion. Resuene vibrante el himno de amor Que entona tu pueblo con grata emocion. Patrona del Bicol, gran Madre de Dios Se siempre la Reina de nuestra region. Patrona del Bicol, gran Madre de Dios Se siempre la Reina de nuestra region. I sing as I have never sung before, pouring my heart and soul to the Virgin of Penafrancia who wants me to help Her rebuild the Church. And I wave and wave my blue handkerchief as I sing till I choke in tears. Yes, I shall remain the Virgin's priest. What matter if the gender-chauvinists jeer at Her; what matter if the Amen-Amen fanatics ignore Her. The Virgin is alive and well in the Roman Catholic Church, and the sooner we recognize that, the better for us. She stands for the Power behind the Church, the Woman we need to survive the turbulent years ahead; and when She is rediscovered, everything else will be rediscovered, for She is more radiant than the sun, gentle as the summer rain, Nuestra Senora de Penafrancia, Patrona del Bicol, Mother of God, Holy Virgin of virgins, Mother of Christ, Mother of divine grace, Mother most pure, Mother most chaste, Mother inviolate, Mother undefiled, Mother immaculate, Mother most amiable, Mother most admirable, Mother of good counsel, Mother of our Creator, Mother of our Savior, Virgin most prudent, Virgin most venerable, Virgin most renowned, Virgin most powerful, Virgin most merciful, Virgin most faithful, Mirror of justice, Seat of wisdom, Cause of our joy, Spiritual vessel, Vessel of

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honor, Singular vessel of devotion, Mystical rose, Tower of David, Tower of ivory, House of gold, Ark of the covenant, Gate of heaven, Morning star, Health of the sick, Refuge of sinners, Comforter of the afflicted, Help of Christians, Queen of angels, Queen of patriarchs, Queen of prophets, Queen of apostles, Queen of martyrs, Queen of confessors, Queen of virgins, Queen of all saints, Queen conceived without original sin, Queen assumed into heaven, Queen of the most holy Rosary, Queen of peace, Queen of my heart: Viva la Virgen!

The N i g h t Express Does N o t Stop H e r e A n y m o r e

And if the sufferings of children go to make up the sum of sufferings which is necessary for the purchase of truth, then I say beforehand that the entire truth is not worth such a price.... I do not want a mother to embrace the torturer who had her child torn to pieces by his dogs1. She has no right to forgive him1. Fyodor Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov

^^IATY

ANGELES was a devout Roman Catholic, but when her

only son died in a hazing incident, she refused to go to Church. She threw away her rosaries, tore up her prayer books and novenas, and smashed up the statuettes and sacred images in her apartment. She had every reason to blame God. She raised her son in the best Catholic way. She taught him to obey the Ten Commandments, to observe the theological virtues, to avoid occasions of sin. In fact, so O. A. was she, as Naty's neighbors were wont to describe her, that her son grew up praying the Rosary nightly, visiting the Blessed Sacrament daily, singing in the parish choir weekly, joining processions

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regularly, and performing spiritual and corporal works of mercy at the drop of a hat. Yet her son died just the same—and died violently. Naty trusted Catholic schools. She sent her son to the Naga Parochial School and the Ateneo de Naga because she believed that all Catholic schools belonged to a tradition of quality education dating back to Europe's medieval universities which fashioned boys and girls into Christlike and Marylike individuals. Indeed, both the NPS and the AdeN did not disappoint her, for hardly had the boy learned to spell, when he already knew by heart basic Catholic doctrine. For example, he knew the difference between actual and sanctifying grace,' and explained each of the seven sacraments, as well as the gifts of the Holy Spirit, to a delighted mother who attributed these achievements to the superiority of Catholic education. What's more, not only did her son reap spiritual fruits, but also, in the words of Dona Choleng of the CWL, temporal "fringe benefits" as well: Naga's prominent families sent their children to Catholic schools; ergo, if you sent your children there, Dona Choleng would chime, they'd have classmates belonging to Naga's upper crust—an edge so imperative to every mother's son's future career. That, of course, was Dona Choleng's point of view. Naty's was different, albeit no less pragmatic: she sent her only son to Catholic schools because these schools taught Theology, and Theology pleased God who showed His approval by watching over the students. In other words, she chose Catholic schools because God protected the students from evil. Yet her son died in a Catholic law school in Manila—a victim of fraternity initiation rites. He died in the middle of his studies. When Naty arrived at the hospital, her son still breathed, but his kidneys had ruptured beyond repair the physicians had to attach the boy to a dialysis machine to keep him alive. The attending physician informed her that the hazing had been so brutal that he listed down, among the major injuries, a severed spinal column, a cracked skull, a burst right lung, and a series of internal hemorrhages resulting from injuries sustained in the vital

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organs. They had paddled him, the physician said lifting the bedsheet to show the patient's distended thighs, until his legs had turned purple as eggplants. They had whipped him with belt buckles, the physician added, lifting the bedsheet farther up, until the blue and violet welts showed up all over the body. Three times in a row after Naty had arrived, her son complained of severe abdominal pains and vomited blood, the effect of the times his initiation masters had jumped on his stomach while he slept; and three times in a row, the boy's heart stopped beating, forcing the doctors to revive him twice. The boy's heart stopped beating permanently on the third attempt, barely three hours after his mother had arrived from the airport. To Naty Angeles, a public school teacher turned OCW, her son's death drew only one conclusion: an indifferent God. She did not understand. She had prayed and prayed. She had lived the Faith to the letter. How none of these things had done her any good devastated her. Only last year her son had throbbed with life. She remembered how he had traveled the Naga-Manila South Road just to meet his mother at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport even if she had written to him it was not necessary because she was proceeding to Naga anyway. But he went there just the same to surprise her. How her heart leapt in the arrival area when she saw him among the crowd. The first thing he noticed were his mother's bandaged hands. But when he asked her about them, she glossed over the subject by leading the boy through OCWs and balikbayans and tourists and returning residents towards the Duty Free Shop and telling her wide-eyed son to choose anything he wanted that he forgot about the bandages. They went to Naga that same day via Sarkies Tours to spend Christmas in the apartment where he grew up. Once home, the boy went off his head hollering Yeyyyl as he unpacked the two Pullman cases, and sliced layers of masking tapes off the balikbayan box to wrench out the tape recorder and the Walkman she had promised him so he could tape his lessons and review them in his Walkman. Then he pulled out the set of Christmas lights and decorations which they both unwrapped and assembled with sporadic mock screams of

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glee and zest. Sometimes the boy stood back to direct his mother, grave in concentration, where to hang the paper lanterns and the silver bells. Most of the time, however, the mother let him stand on the chair to load the upper lights and decorations, including the topmost star, while he arranged the tinfoil-wrapped presents at the foot of the tree. The belen took a longer time to set up, so when they finished the job, they gave themselves a break by eating out—what tapsilog? filet mignonl—and later sitting in Plaza Quince Martires, in the same spot they always sat, fronting San Francisco Church, to wait for the afternoon Mass. This was their usual practice before she left for abroad, and they were doing a replay "as scheduled." When the Mass ended, they did their groceries and returned to the plaza to eat their toasted siopao and talk—and sometimes sing Christmas carols a cappella—until evening fell and sent them back to the apartment. The next day, they woke up early to attend the Misa de Aguinaldo, then hurried back home to eat their puto bungbong and bibingka and their slices of queso de bola and french baguettes, downed by sips of hot salabat, and wrapped up by postres of pastillas de pili, bucayo, and mazapan cakes. It was the first time mother and son had reunited after six months, and they promised each other to cash in on the Christmas break to the max before she left again for abroad. NATY had not planned to work abroad. She had neither the wherewithal nor the desire to leave Naga. But when her son had expressed his desire to take up law in a Catholic school in Manila after graduation, she changed her mind. Her minuscule salary could not put him through law school, especially when no husband stood by. The boy never really knew a dad. Naty had met her son's father during a sports fest in downtown Naga during a precarious phase in her life—that age when many a lady schoolteacher panics when she finds herself poised on the precipice of spinsterhood. Despite his being ten years her junior—or rather because of it—he impressed her by his athletic prowess, his boyish charm, and his Van Damme looks, that is why when he invited her to a resort in Carolina for a two-day live-in sports-awareness seminar that weekend, she said yes without

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demur. As the saying goes, one thing led to another—the night swimming, the jamming sessions, the private cottages, the air-conditioned rooms, the Jakuzi baths—until she found herself yielding to Van Damme's chutzpah. In those days, she forgave him when he apologized because he "got carried away." But these days, as she looked back at the incident through politically correct eyes, she called it "date rape." If only she were wiser. But she was not. In fact, she was worse than not wise: she consented to a series of encores until one day she discovered that she was in the family way. To placate querulous Naga, she allowed herself to be married to a man she hardly knew. Her former teacher, Mr. Caceres, gave the bride away, for Naty's parents had long separated and acquired new spouses. They had also left Naga for good. She lived with her in-laws for a while, but insisted, after barely a month, that she and her husband transfer, to the apartment—her former home—when her aging widowed diabetic aunt-inlaw vacated it to return to Tugatog, Malabon, where a younger sister, a retired nurse, attended to the insulin shots. Naty said she and her husband needed privacy if they were to take their married life seriously. Her husband turned out to be a mama's boy, a spoiled brat, and a bum. He refused to finish college or go to work, so Naty supported him by teaching overload. He complained to his drinking buddies that he had married too soon; he complained to his parents that Naty had seduced him; he complained to his wife, when their child was born, that the baby was not his. He refused to do any work in the house because he said it was menial stuff, and besides his mother had said only sissies washed dishes or changed babies' diapers. So Naty hired a part-time yaya—a working student—to babysit while Naty taught, went to market, cooked the food, and scrubbed the floor. The yaya left two months later because Naty's husband caressed the yaya more than the baby. Despite this, Naty neither confronted nor blamed her husband. Instead, she promised to look for another yaya. Bothered by a rare streak of guilt, he agreed to babysit temporarily while Naty went to work. One late afternoon, however, Naty

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arrived home to find the baby crying alone in the crib. Her husband was nowhere in the house. She waited for him until supper became cold, but he did not come home. The next day she looked for him around Naga. She went to his usual hangouts in the centro, but none of his drinking buddies knew where he was. She checked out his parents' house. They, too, had no idea where he was albeit they did not invite her in. A week later, she heard conflicting rumors of his whereabouts. Some said he had left for abroad; others, that he was in Legazpi living-in with a former Agnesian. His sudden disappearance baffled her. She saw no reason why he should leave. There was no altercation, no disagreement, no warning. He just walked out of the house and never returned. At first the experience crushed her. But as time went by, she eschewed the self-pity and shifted her attention from her husband to her son. And to prayers. Naty had not been that religiosa to start with. Her piety stemmed from the belief that she deserved all her problems because she was remiss of her duties as a Catholic and this was God's way of "reminding" her. So she started to pray. Surprisingly, her life improved. First, she won a one-step promotion; second, she convinced her landlady not to raise the rent. The bugbear of losing her son impelled her to herd the boy to Mass and Communion every afternoon at San Francisco Church. Their "regular schedule" consisted of Mass every afternoon, groceries after Mass, and long chats in Plaza Quince Martires where they sat to eat their toasted siopao while facing the church's facade. Her prayers paid off. The boy never gave her any trouble. The more they prayed and went to church, the more she felt secure. If only people realized how good God was, she would often tell her students. God created an ordered universe; if we only followed His laws, blessings would pour forth into our lives. Especially, she liked her son's sense of humor. She liked the way he mimicked the Yeyyy! of that local TV commercial (Mommy, are we going to go to Sampaguita Department Store today? Yes, we are. Yeyyy1.). That nasal

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voice and quaint smirk on his rubbery face never failed to drive her crazy with laughter. Of course, once in a while the boy would ask about his father, but she filled that gap by teaching him how to dribble, block and pass a ball so that by the time he had grown taller and she would be cheering for his basketball team from the bleachers instead, he would ask less and less about his dad. The boy stopped asking about his father when he went to the Ateneo de Naga. This time he found substitute dads in the Jesuits. Their slightest notice took up every conversation topic at the plaza. He said he'd read up the Jesuits in the Ateneo library. He especially admired Ignatius, Francis Xavier, Teilhard de Chardin, and Horacio de la Costa. He sought her advice which campus org he would join—the Ateneo Forensic Society, the Apostleship of Prayer, the Sanctuary Society, the Glee Club, the Adoracion Nocturna, the Kabonyogan Bicolnon—for he liked them all. His mother suggested the ACIL. When he rose to platoon leader of the ROTC, he asked his mother if he could join the Saint Francis Xavier Cross and Saber Fraternity. The word "fraternity" alarmed her. But her son reminded her this was a Xavierian fraternity to the effect that members proved their manliness not by inflicting pain but by removing pain, and where freedom meant the Xavierian freedom to do good. She granted permission. Again, her son's decision did not disappoint her. Henceforth, the word "fraternity" lost its negative connotation. He said you could tell he was an Atenean because of the three things he carried in his backpack—a glow-in-the-dark Rosary, a Roman Missal, and Horacio de la Costa's Jesuits Today—so much so that his mother thought her son would join the Order. He did not. Instead, he told her he wanted to be a lawyer. It happened one evening in the plaza while they were discussing Teilhard de Chardin's interpretation of the problem of evil, when suddenly they saw a shooting star. Its bright streak, like a particle from fireworks, lasted only a second, as it flashed briefly across the sky, but the sight lifted his heart. How timely, he said. She did not see the connection. Let me explain, he said in mock sophistry characteristic of Ateneans: meteors followed no law. Because they took

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no definite paths as planets did, they would often hurl themselves at us. But they could not harm us because the earth's atmosphere burned them up before they reached our surface. The evils in this world were like meteors, he went on, stray fragments that refused to follow the law. They existed because the universe was evolving, and Father Teilhard said there was no order under formation. Whatever was evolving was incomplete, unfinished, defective. Evil was part of our evolving universe. The best defense against evil, however, was to follow the example of law-abiding planets. Their faith in an ordered universe dissipated meteors. With the help of Francis Xavier's "holy cunning," he was going to hasten Teilhard's vision about the future of man. He was going to be a good lawyer for the greater glory of God. The motive inspired the mother. That was why none of the horror stories she'd heard about Filipina OCWs dissuaded her from going abroad: the Filipina who was forced to kill her employer in order to save her honor, the maid who jumped to her death from a high-rise apartment to escape her employer's brutality, the woman who arrived home in a box, the girl who came home insane after having been held as a sex slave, the neighborhood lass who was forced to sell her body, the domestic helper pinched, punched, and singed with hot iron—all these she would face rather than stymie her son's ambition. So in June of that year, after her son had enrolled in senior college, she left Naga to work abroad. Except the time she attended her aunt's burial in Tugatog, Naty had not left her son longer than three days. That was why on the eve of her departure, in the plaza, they asked themselves over and over if she really had to leave. But it was too late to back out. Her recruiter had assured her of his legal connections and promised she'd get her travel papers so long as she paid the placement fee—an amount she had raised by selling the sala set and borrowing at interest rates that, in her son's opinion, cried to heaven for vengeance. Meanwhile, the boy would stay in the apartment. She would send him money every month. She told him not to worry because she'd be back in December.

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True to her recruiter's promise, he not only processed her travel papers but also got her a service staff passport which allowed her to slip past immigration and the NAIA labor assistance center with "no sweat." So smooth was her departure that she wondered where the horror stories came from, because as far as she was concerned, no problem cropped up. Her problems began the moment she arrived at her destination. First, she found out that her salary was much lower than what they had stipulated in the contract. Her recruiters promised her a starting salary three times her pay back home but she ended up barely doubling it. Next, her employer informed her she had no day-offs unlike other countries that allowed Filipinas to get together and pollute the public parks once a week. Finally, she was not to leave the house except to go to market or unless her employer loaned her to other families. Even if she did menial work back home, she found her present job back-breaking. To please her employers, she worked conscientiously: she not only washed the dishes, but meticulously scrubbed off the grease from the pans. In return, her employers rewarded her with more elbow grease. They saw to it that she worked all the time. If they caught her sitting down to rest, they'd let her do anything— like re-wash the cars or re-arrange the furniture. She slept past midnight, and only after she had tutored her employer's son who slapped her face every time he committed a mistake in grammar. She bore all these. Three things gave her strength: her nightly prayers, the satisfaction of seeing her son finish law, and the letters. The boy kept her posted on everything, from academic work to extra-curricular activities. Among his latest triumphs: head catechist of the ACIL. His indispensable learning tools: the tape recorder and the Walkman. On the sour side: he failed to grab the ANSCO first vice presidency. This disappointment over what he considered his first important defeat drove him to brood in the plaza. Other matters: the meteor shower he saw one clear night. The phenomenon frightened him. What would happen, he wrote, if all these meteors directed at us the whole extent of their malice? Could the earth protect herself? He wrote her every week, every letter counting down on Christ-

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mas (three months more, two months...) and planned the thousand and one things they would both do when she returned. That was why last year, when she came home finally, they celebrated and maximized every moment of her vacation. And when the time came for her to leave again, her son asked if she really had to go back. He hated to mention it, he said, but he could not help noticing the deep hand wounds each time she changed the bandages— wounds, she admitted, caused by the many hours of manually washing clothes abroad. He said he did not mind pursuing law in Naga, he would even work part-time, just don't leave, mother. But she told him they had already made up their minds that he study in a prestigious Catholic school in Manila. He was graduating that March from the Ateneo de Naga but he told his mother not to attend that anymore so she could save her home leave for next Christmas. He would be in Manila by then, a freshman law student, but they would both go home and spend Christmas in Naga just like old times. Then she asked him what he thought about her plan of setting up a small business in Naga—no, not their planned lechon manok—a shawarma stand, how's that. She said she had seen a new, shiny A1 Jalabbi silver roasting machine abroad and thought about bringing it home next December. God willing, if their shawarma business clicked, then she wouldn't have to go back abroad. The proposition appealed to the boy that he closed the deal with a mock handshake: Yeyyy! Know what, she said, we'll serve the best pita bread and cook the best marinated meat and strew in the most garlic and tomatoes and onions and hot sauce and what have you. And let's put colorful banners, he chipped in, to entice the customers: Sauding saudi ang lasa—Yeyyy! He kept bleating Yeyyy! until his mother begged him to stop because he was such a card and she found it hard holding her sides to suppress her mirth until thunder growled in the distance and reminded them it was time to go home and pick up her luggage and bring them to the bus terminal. A few minutes before she boarded the bus, she reminded him to pray, to study hard, to take his vitamins regularly, and to stop worrying because before he knew it they'd be back in the plaza again with their toasted siopao and their stories about life, meteors, the Jesuits, when suddenly the boy broke into tears, buried

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his face in his mother's embrace, and promised her fiercely that when he became a lawyer, she would never have to work a single day in her life again ever. The next December he was dead. At the funeral home, two young men approached her and introduced themselves as fellow neophytes. They gave their names— Henry I. Vargas and Salvador T. Diaz—and phone numbers. They came to her, they said, because they disagreed with the hazing, and volunteered to expose their frat brods. She probed them: what really happened? They said, okay, we'll mince no words. What they narrated smothered her. First, they said, they were blindfolded and herded to a private compound where they sat on the cement floor and listened to their initiation master mouth platitudes about honor and brotherhood. Then suddenly, without warning, several frat brods started jumping on their legs. It was only the beginning. Kicks and blows marked the initiation rites, the two went on. When their masters were not busy beating them up, they were forcing them to do things to take the wind out of their sails. Between indoctrinations, for example, the initiation masters forced the neophytes to lick the soles of their shoes and then order them to french kiss each other. They said her son bore the brunt of the hazing for three reasons: first, because he showed disappointment over the way their master— A.I. Damian Sr.—introduced himself by jesting that he added the "senior" after he had sired a "junior," courtesy of a sorority sis; second, because her son could not make the audience laugh in the comedy skit; and third, because her son never raised his voice to scream in pain. To teach him, therefore, to truckle to them, they stripped him from the waist down and ordered him to march like an ROTC cadet around the compound carrying a block of stone attached to his testicles by a short thread. Next, they ordered him to walk on his knees in the servants' toilet's cement floor mucky with vomit and feces and globs of phlegm. Then they shaved his pubic hair and anointed his penis with oil of wintergreen. Finally, he squirmed in pain. The master held a glass of water and asked if he wanted it poured over the area.

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Her son begged him yes, yes. It was a trick. The water spread the oil and singed him until he yelped and hopped and skipped and leaped in pain to the delight and the approval of the audience composed of senior frat brods some of whom were now in government, business, and law firms in the country. But why, she shuddered as she asked, why all the violence. Malebonding, they said. When you join a fraternity, you just do not fill up an application form. You have to pass a ritual that separates the boys from the men. Becoming a man does not happen automatically, they said. To prove you are a man, you must meet the challenge of violence and humiliation. She insisted they tell her who recruited her son. They said nobody recruited him; he applied. She did not buy that. She knew her son. They said she probably did not. She demanded one good reason why her son would join. They enumerated many: brotherhood, honor, the basic need to belong to a group, emotional support in a hostile surrounding, access to teachers' examination questions, assistance all the way to the bar exams, choice jobs after passing the bar—the contacts, they emphasized. What about hard work, merit, honesty, Christian virtues, knowledge, she asked. No dice, they said. In this society, it was not what you knew that mattered. Lines were drawn by personalism, barkadahan, exclusive clubs, old classmates, palakasan, lusot, you know what we mean, ma'am. They said our culture prized connections rather than merit, so if you gave your body and soul to a fraternity, wow pare, you're made. She looked at their simian features and thought: so young, so smart, so corrupt. The next day, she called up Henry. The voice at the other end of the line said he had thought about it and decided not to testify, sorry. She then called Salvador. He was "out of town." The code of silence had won again, she thought. Fear of retaliation from frat brods had sealed their lips. So she herself went to the campus to talk to the school authorities. In a tambayan, she saw handshakes characteristic of frat brods. She mentioned this to the school authorities. Yes, they admitted, A.I. Damian Sr. and his brods went to school as usual since no formal charges had been filed against them. Nevertheless, they assured her, the school did not sanction hazing. Her indig-

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nation, however, rose when they advised her, before she left, to avoid jumping to conclusions because "it's really hard to judge." Why did the school authorities refuse to crack the whip on the suspects? she squirmed in silent rage, as she left the building. Why did they play everything down? Was the fraternity so powerful it controlled even the school authorities? How could they have allowed murderers to go to school "as usual" in their sleek cars and all, thumbing their noses at everyone? Including the law, she thought, as she flagged a taxi. Coccooned behind the sealed up windows of the air-conditioned cab, she cursed the heavy traffic. How inconsiderate, how rotten, how reflective of the frat mentality of Filipinos—a culture where frat brods twisted everyone round their dirty fingers, where might was right, where loyalty to frat brods superseded loyalty to law and order. And they were all over the place, shielded by well-paid legal corps who could bring anybody to her/his knees anytime. They were metastatic moving targets, like the AIDS virus, outsmarting everyone by mutating and transforming themselves into different strains and building swift resistance to all therapies. She despaired as she thought of the judicial system that would try her son's case—for that body crept with frat brods who had hides like a rhinoceros. For the first time in her life, she felt the power of the evil force that killed her only child. HER son died on the second Sunday of Advent. His remains were brought to Naga via the Philippine National Railways the next night, the feast of the Immaculate Conception. At the Tutuban terminal, a woman's voice interrupted the Christmas songs over the loudspeakers to page her for a telephone call. In the counter, a man's voice at the other end of the line conveyed his condolences, then advised her to desist from pursuing the case if she did not want to join her son six feet below the ground. Fear and anger numbed her body. Here she was, down, out, and alone with her dead son, yet evil men would not leave her alone. She squirmed in imploding rage and prepared to scream, but a woman approached her and introduced herself (Gaia Crisostomo, a former teacher turned health educator, she described herself) and her three-

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year-old son Joshua. Their emaciated appearance struck Naty as curious since they dressed up neatly. Gaia said she was from Naga. She had heard what happened to Naty's son. She approached her when she heard Naty's name over the loudspeaker. They were on their way to Naga for the holy days but all tickets had been sold out, would Naty care to let them join her in the special coach? They could keep her company. Naty normally kept herself at arm's length with first acquaintances, having learned the folly of wearing her heart on her sleeve; but something in Gaia's soft smile touched her that she not only said yes once but said it several times. The long night trip allowed Naty to pour her grief on Gaia. They sat beside the coffin. Would a civilized person beat you up, Naty said, make you rest, then beat you up again? She averred her disappointment with Catholic schools. Weren't fraternities of Masonic origin? Naty asked. Then what were they doing in Catholic schools? She said she insisted on a Catholic school and not U.P. because anomie prevailed there: U.P. was the school where frat rumbles and hazing had long blotted its escutcheon, and besides, U.P. was the school of hoodlums and crooks in government. But Catholic schools? If the Church were that powerful, how come it did not condemn fraternities as it condemned fornication and divorce and contraception and abortion? Why did it not excommunicate members of fraternities involved in satanic initiation rites? Naty paused as the train rumbled over a bridge. Then she continued: Was the Church really pro-life? Then why was it not consistent? The revised Code of Canon Law automatically excommunicated a woman who has had an abortion. But if a man raped a minor or butchered a helpless girl or bombed a building with nursery kids in it or robbed the people blind or tortured or killed or beheaded a neophyte in sadistic initiation rites—these were not considered grave enough offenses to deserve excommunication. Why? The night train's wheels clicked like castanets. When the clatter faded away, Naty said gravely: The Church was not really concerned with our spiritual welfare. It was too busy politicking and lobbying against gambling and divorce and adultery and pornography and prostitution to attend to religion's chief concern which was spirituality.

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Naty's words smarted, but Gaia neither interrupted nor contradicted her. She listened. Occasionally she proffered words of comfort, but most of the time she just listened, cautious not to break in on Naty's grief. Naty looked at Joshua's pallid face. He neither fretted nor nettled his mother, but comported himself punctiliously. To amuse himself, he loped a rubber band over his fingers and transferred it back and forth to form a star. Naty wondered if the boy's emaciation were fortuitous or genetic, for Gaia likewise looked pale and wan. When they arrived in Naga, Gaia helped Naty negotiate the body's transfer from the Naga station to San Francisco Church's annex for the wake. Naty said that was as far as she would go. She would not enter the church. On the wall, outside the church, between the two huge stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, the words THY WILL BE DONE, all caps and painted blue, affronted Naty's grief. She held her temper, but as soon as she went to the apartment, she threw away her rosaries, tore up her prayer books and novenas, and smashed up the statuettes and sacred images in the home altar. When she returned to the wake, Gaia had everything in order. Something in Gaia made Naty trust her. She touched Naty more than the priests and the moral guardians of Naga. Gaia was different. She cared—in her voice, manner, and actions—unlike the nuns who came in and condoled her with their formulated "I know how you feel" or "he's in heaven" or "his problems are over." How could his problems be over when he died before he was fully born? But then, what could she expect from nuns who spent more time in the picket lines than in prayer and contemplation? An Amen-Amen convert dropped in and quoted Paul to the Romans urging her to rejoice in her suffering and be grateful for her grief, for suffering was good. She disagreed. People were destroyed, not strengthened, by suffering. But Gaia was different. She accompanied Naty every day and night of the wake. She received well-wishers, did the groceries, cashed the cheques, listed down the names of those who sent flowers and donations, and made the final arrangements for the burial plot. During the last night of the wake, however, Gaia bid Naty goodbye. Joshua had fallen ill and lay alone in bed. Gaia said not to worry

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because everything was in order for the burial services tomorrow. She had asked a seminarian to do the Readings, invited the Ateneo Glee Club to provide the music, and contracted a mini bus to provide the transportation for the cortege. For all these gestures, however, Naty forgot to thank Gaia, because before the latter left, Naty smarted from a suggestion Gaia had made to solve Naty's confusion: forgiveness. The suggestion angered Naty. How could Gaia have dared to advise forgiveness at a time like this. Didn't she understand the circumstances? If she were in Naty's shoes, would she forgive those who killed her son and threatened to kill her too? Wasn't contrition a prerequisite to forgiveness? Gaia paused and, in all gentleness, explained to her the benefits of forgiveness—the freedom, the clarity, the peace of mind that went with the change of heart. She said the word came from the Hebrew —shuv—to turn—whose meaning was no different from the Earth's rotation on its axis or its revolution around the sun. If she did not forgive, she would not "turn." So she would not be able to dissipate the meteors her son talked about, for she would not follow the law. So the past would imprison her and evil would catch up with her. She said forgiveness stood at the heart of the Faith, and remained the best armor we could use to fight evil as we crossed the dangerous fjords towards the next millennium. Naty did not agree. She said it was easy for Gaia to talk of forgiveness because she was not directly involved. Even God was not directly involved here; these frat thugs did not sin against God but against her. And besides, God did not practice what He preached. God commanded us to forgive but He Himself was quick to revenge. Naty's last words still stung: If this God were all powerful, why did He let her only son die? Gaia's last words to Naty before she embraced her and disappeared in the streets: Why did God let His only Son die? The question roused Naty. Why was suffering a mystery—even to Jesus Himself who prayed if it were possible to let the cup pass away from Him? Indeed, why did God let His own Son die?

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Her son was buried the next day, the third Sunday of Advent. At the Santo Nino Memorial Park, her son's former Ateneo classmates eulogized him in a way that surprised the mother. She did not realize how much her son had touched others' lives. The cell leader of the Ateneo de Naga Sanctuary Society summed up her son's life in one sentence that sent Naty bawling in gratitude: He was a man for others, a true Atenean. Before she closed the coffin's lid, she double-checked the three things her son would have wanted to bring along with him: his glowin-the-dark Rosary, his Roman Missal, and his copy of Horacio de la Costa's Jesuits Today. When she saw them safely tucked inside the coffin, she calmly shut the lid and allowed the mechanical device to lower the casket into the ground. After the ritual scattering of earth and flowers, she stayed behind and waited until the workers filled up the grave and concealed the sky which would not be visible until the resurrection of the body. Then she placed the slab of ready grass mat over the fresh grave and walked away. The next day, at dawn, the bells clanged in San Francisco Church, inviting the faithful to the first day of Aguinaldo. Naty covered her ears and groaned in agony. Every peal gored her. She dreaded the dawns. Because he was all the world to her, old habits died hard. For example, she prepared breakfast for two. One afternoon, riding a trimobile downtown, she thought she saw her son sitting in the plaza, only to discover the figure to be somebody else. Two days later, in the centro, she heard her son's familiar Yeyyy! among the pedestrian crowd behind her, but when she turned around, none of them looked like him. One morning, as she polished the pedals of her son's rusty bicycle, she thought she heard his footsteps at the gate. It was the postman. The two cards bore no return addresses. She opened the first and read the typewritten greeting: "Dear Mrs. Angeles, shut up and live; talk and you're dead. Merry X mas." A skull appeared above the "X" crossbones beside the Greek-lettered signature. A frisson of horror gripped her. Evil had stalked her all the way to Naga. She careered to her room and took out the box of padlocks and bolts, and installed them on the windows and doors.

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She lived in fear. Christmas eve was just three days away, but her apartment stood out as the only house in the neighborhood without lights. Most of all, she dreaded opening the other Christmas card. This stress plus the dread of Christmas without her son altered her appearance that even the neighbors mistook her for a tubercular house guest, were it not for her widow's weeds. As the unopened card lay on-the table, she thought how evil had overcome the world. Nobody was safe. There was no security in goodness. The good as well as the wicked suffered. You could be in a jeepney on your way home and be robbed, stabbed, or shot by holduppers. You could be jogging inside your subdivision and find yourself forced inside a car and kidnapped for ransom. You could be driving your own car and find it blocked by another with heavily armed men inside. No place was safe. She had heard of babies seized from carriages, necklaces and bags snatched from matrons, salesgirls raped and mutilated in broad daylight. Even the homes were not safe. The Vizcondes and the Payumos and the Kehs bore out the hard reality that anybody could be butchered right inside one's own house. Her brain swirled in a flurry of images she had watched on TV just the past week—the akyat bahay gangs, the hostage-takings, the massacres, the rapes, the Uzis, the machetes, the fan knives, the jailbreaks, the whitewash—and she thought of the victims and the widows and the orphans and the mothers whose prayers went unanswered while their own lives crumbled under a silent heaven. She felt duped, conned. She had put all her faith in God, and this God cared not a brass farthing whether her son lived or died. If God were all powerful as He claimed himself to be, how could He not have prevented her son's death? A powerless God indeed, this Chauvinist who hid in His heaven, if not dead—or evil: a demented Parent who believed in beating His children to death to prove how much He loved them. Gaia was naive. It was one thing to give counsel and another to directly experience the pain. Because Gaia was not directly involved, she did not understand Naty's grief. It was easy for her to give advice. Gaia had her son, so she trusted the Church. If she had suffered like Naty, she would have damned the Church for bamboozling her.

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The Church was based on a lie. All things did not work together for good. No happy endings existed here or elsewhere. Granted that heaven existed, what heavenly reward, for crying out loud, could heal the scars of this suffering? No, it was a malevolent universe. Life was too ambiguous, too contradictory, too treacherous. Christmas was meaningless. Crime paid and evil won. For three days she wallowed in these dark thoughts. On the third night, Christmas eve, about ten o'clock, an image—the most hideous —invaded her thoughts. She remembered Tugatog cemetery and the sight she saw there of Saint Michael and Satan locked up in battle inside a cage on top of a tomb, with the soot-coated Satan on top of the fallen Archangel! She remembered the crypts below the cage where lay buried a mother and her daughter raped and murdered in 1983 by still unidentified men, and the mother's wish, as she lay dying, to plant the cage on top of her tomb, for the day would come, she had prophesied, when evil would overcome good. Today that prophecy had come true. Meanwhile, the unopened card lay on the table. She had to choose between two things: get sucked up in the whirlpool of fear—or face the menace. She realized her powerlessness, but she also saw the foolhardiness of burying her face in the sand like the ostrich. Whether she knew it or not, evil stalked her. Since she could not count on God, she would have to face the menace herself. Better to burn, prepared by knowledge, than to burn unprepared by self-inflicted ignorance. So she picked up the unopened envelope. Her heart pounded in her ears. She ripped the flap open. It was a UNICEF card. Naty read the scrawl: "Dear Tita Naty Merry Christmas God Loves You Love Joshua." A star capped the signature. A frisson of relief overwhelmed her. The return address inside the card drove her to rush out of the house, as she grabbed whatever presents she could bring—a Nintendo set, her son's Walkman, boxes of Pretzels, bon bons—for the boy. When Naty reached the address, however, Gaia had gone. A female lodger told her Gaia had returned to Manila after the burial of Joshua. The word "burial" took some time to sink in. Naty asked again: Joshua? burial? The lodger said yes. Gaia's son? Yes. When?

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Last week. Of what? The lodger told her. The answer stunned Naty. But didn't she know? the lodger said. Contracted it from her seaman husband. Tried to protect herself at first, but, you know, wouldn't want to hurt his feelings. Also, Catholic bishops said use of condoms immoral, and also not effective protection. At first, diagnosis showed pulmonary infection. But after the blood samples were taken.... Joshua tested positive at birth. The boy's strong. Took a long time for the virus to finish him off. No, the lodger didn't know where Joshua was buried. Somewhere in the rinconada area. A pauper's cemetery, perhaps. Gaia returned to Manila after the burial. Works as a health educator at Pinoy Plus, you know, Bahay Lingap. Came here for the holy days to help a friend, a certain Mrs. Angeles. Her plan was—excuse me, are you all right? Yes, I'm okay, sorry. Would you like to come in? No. Thanks for your time. I really have to go. Merry Christmas. Same to you. IN the centro, Naty saw a city marking time for midnight. A brigade of carolers scooted towards the half-open shops, importuning the occupants with clamorous noels and percussive sound effects. A lone saleslady struggled with a stubborn set of lights inside the glass display window of Naga Optical. Naty swam in a stream of mixed emotions. She did not know. She was too engrossed with her own loss to notice Gaia and Joshua. She shuffled along the streets like an intoxicated man with no particular place to go. She did not feel like going home. She just walked and walked. The streets of Naga were a labyrinth. One moment she was in Zamora Street, listening to the high tension wires emit a buzzing sound; the next, she was in Sabang Street where the estero gurgled like sandpaper scraping the sides of teak until they gleamed smooth as glass. She walked past the barking dispatchers at the mini bus terminal, then made her way back to General Luna Street to walk past the Pugad Lawin Sa Isarog, the OPAC center, the rush passport/ID stalls and Xerox stands alongside Concepcion Building, Venancio Hardware, Roland's Supermart, Rose Pharmacy, and Universal Hopia, making no effort to guide her legs but allowing them to lead her where they chose.

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In Prieto Street, she paused to watch the crumbling ceilings of old buildings droop like bedsheets strung over clotheslines. Further up on the left, shovel-shaped figurines camouflaged the upside down bear mugs inside a carinderia. In the blackboard, resting against a piece of scrap iron outside, in letters of irregular geometric sizes, the chalk scrawled today's menu: tokwa't baboy, goto regular/special. On the door hung the sign CLOSED. Naty stared at it blankly, then went on walking. When she reached Plaza Rizal, she paused beside the skating rink to allow the array of lights to swallow her up. But the ruckus in the recreation grounds aggravated her interior chaos that she glanced up at the sky for comfort—only to see a blur caused by the bright lights of Plaza Rizal. So she crossed Elias Angeles Street, turned left at the Naga Optical, then walked straight towards the corner of Crown Hotel where she paused again to quell her raging emotions. When this failed, she crossed P. Burgos Street and ended up in Plaza Quince Martires. The soft lights of the plaza soothed her nerves. A mist had shrouded the hedges of the flower beds. She walked past the Rotary wheel and the white stone faces of Bicol's fifteen martyrs to make for the spot fronting San Francisco Church. In the familiar dim lights of the plaza she realized it had been a year since she and her son had last sat in their usual place. A tidal wave of memories overwhelmed her, forcing her to sit, as she started shaking again in loud sobs. Then she noticed the plastic bag she was carrying. She looked at the things she had put in there for Joshua. She took out her son's Walkman. A tape inside tempted her to try on the earphones. She turned on the tape. Her son's voice reviewed his science exams way back in the Ateneo de Naga. The voice measured space and time in terms of the speed of light which her son amplified by comparing it to seven Earth circumferences per second which was incredibly fast albeit not fast enough to travel from one place of the universe to another considering that even if a quantum of electromagnetic radiation traveled at this breakneck speed from the Earth's trajectory and flitted past Neptune and Pluto and the Oort cloud of comets at the wink of an eye so to speak

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before it plunged into interstellar space still it would reach Proxima Centauri only after 1.32 parallax seconds or 4.29 light years which was nothing compared to the vast amount of space and time necessary to reach the other heavenly bodies like Altair in the constellation Auriga which was 16.5 light years away or Betelgeuse at Orion's head which was 520 or Rigel at Orion's foot which was 900 to name only those nearest this speck of dust called Earth in a galaxy that contained no less than 300 billion stars occupying space equivalent to 100,000 light years iri diameter which again was nothing because other galaxies like the large and small Magellanic Clouds or the M31 (the galaxy which Hubble saw to confirm his hypothesis that some nebulae actually existed outside the Milky Way and are in fact galaxies themselves) to name only three of the twenty galaxies in the Local Group orbiting near the Virgo Cluster occupying a diameter of ten million light years occupied a territory too vast for our poor quantum of electromagnetic radiation to negotiate because even if it traveled its length and breadth the feat amounted to nothing compared to the length and breadth of the Coma Cluster and farther on to the Cluster of Clusters or the Supercluster looming in Hercules which again was nothing compared to the Supercluster Coma-A1367 that swam in a region of Dark Matter of undetected subatomic particles where myriad galaxies gyrated like concentric shells disappearing in Deep Space where no galaxies existed but a vast Void of total darkness grounded upon an abyss with no end in sight as her mind reeled at the endlessly receding horizon where neither edge nor sign of leveling off nor thinning out existed in any direction save more space and time plunging deeper and deeper into range after range and world after world and island universe after island universe of darkness until her brain spun and cried out for a halt because from the vantage of her puny self in the plaza under the December midnight skies of Naga she said that the space-time distances could not possibly be true for they were absolutely utterly completely mind-boggling. Except, of course, they were true. Now along would come this God-Babe whose birth the whole world awaited tonight, and He would teach her truths equally mindboggling about the universe in its spiritual continuum, like if she loved

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her enemies and did good to those that hated her and prayed for those who persecuted her; then she might plumb the riddle of the universe which, for all its vastness, as this Child would teach her, orbited around and actually existed because of Love. Now that was mind-boggling, for when she looked at what had happened to her or at the daily newspapers, with the rapes and murders and wars and kidnappings and hatred and violence and corruption, she thought that this could not possibly be, that this was impossible. Yet in the dim lights of the plaza, as she turned off the Walkman, she asked herself if these truths were after all more mind-boggling than what she had heard in the Walkman about the universe in its space-time dimensions. What's more, if the physical universe were not evident to ordinary senses unless it were perceived through an appropriate instrument like the telescope, she wondered if there were any reason why the same principle should not apply to the spiritual universe as well. Two pairs of naked eyes see a faint, fuzzy smudge in the sky. One formulates a nebular hypothesis; the other, an island universe theory. But no amount of speculating could prove either observer right as could direct knowledge arrived at through the aid of a telescope, a spectroscope, a radio telescope. Perhaps the same held for spiritual perception as well. Perhaps the original and unadulterated teachings of the Roman Catholic Church were the instruments she needed to see an implicate order behind the chaos of the world. Suddenly, a panoply of lights blazoned the church's fagade, irradiating the stained glass rose window outside like a huge mandala, signaling the start of Midnight Mass. She resisted the invitation to enter the church by ignoring the lights and gazing up at the midnight sky, clearly visible now from the half-lights of the plaza. The swarm of stars over Naga reminded her of her son's shooting stars and the power of law-abiding planets to burn them up. As her emotions simmered, she felt something rise over her, something unexpressed, at the tip of her tongue, but the words slipped off like the rarefied midnight air on her face, so unspecific—like the roar of distant generators, like the promise of life after death—yet sustained, like the rubber band stars of Joshua, like the faith of Gaia who lightened

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Naty's burden despite the calvary of her own spiritual adventure. She thought of her son who, like Saint Stephen, forgave his enemies even as they bashed him to death. And then her thoughts moved to a God who gave His only begotten Son to the world knowing full well that He would suffer'and die, and her brain reeled at the puzzle of it all. She wiped her Wet cheeks. Perhaps there was no answer but the acceptance. Yet how difficult that was. For wouldn't this Child later pray if it would be possible to let the cup pass away from Him? But then, when He saw that death was unavoidable, He would accept it, face it, and defeat it by rising again. Perhaps this was the only way. Perhaps it was precisely because evil was so victorious that the world stood in such urgent need for no less than the Lamb of God Himself to die so He could take away the sins of the world. Perhaps the Apostle was right when he advised the Thessalonians to grieve not as people who have no hope but as people of hope and faith; for the Child to be born a heartbeat from now would suffer and die, but on the third day would rise again to pave the way for those who believed in Him so that they too would rise and never die—a creed she believed through faith, even as she struggled with her unbelief; for she needed more time to think things over before she re-entered Naga's church, time to decide whether she should see the universe again through Roman Catholic eyes, time to quell this voice crying in the wilderness, time to wait for more Gaias and Joshuas to populate the earth and burn the meteors of these dark ages and usher in a new millennium of peace on earth and goodwill to men—but the hum of the Hammond organ accompanying the crescendo of voices singing the Gloria reminded her that the Season of Advent was over, that a new liturgical year had arrived, inviting her to step out of the shadows, and take one last glance at the darkness of the plaza, before she crossed the street to enter the luminous interior of San Francisco Church now clanging with bells.

A b o u t the A u t h o r

Caloy Aureus, an ex-seminarian and an old bachelor, was born in Naga City. He was educated at the Naga Parochial School, the Holy Rosary Seminary, the Ateneo de Naga, Silliman University, the University of the Philippines in Diliman, the Universidad Central de Madrid in Spain, and Fordham University in New York. He held the Diamond Jubilee Professorial Chair in English and Comparative Literature in UP Diliman. He also taught Latin and Spanish at UP's Department of European Languages. He holds the record of having been the first and only UP post-graduate student to finish a Ph.D. (Anglo-American Literature) in less than one year and a half. Now on leave from the UP English Department, he is writing his second dissertation (on postmodern physics and poetry) leading to a second Ph.D. degree after finishing all academic requirements with a grade of 1.0 in all subjects.... Extremely shy and reclusive, he dislikes socials, public speaking, and politics. He belongs to no organization, fraternity, or association. His hobbies are cooking, reading, and going to market. A celibate Roman Catholic who neither smokes nor drinks, he spends most of his quiet, semi-retired life with his mother in Naga City. (From the Philippine Graphic)