The Breath of Night Read Online Free

closest thing to a metropolis. Manila is as remote from them as Moscow was from Chekhov’s Three Sisters, except that, instead of yearning for it, they view it with suspicion. I shall miss the theatre, along with bookshops, newspapers , electricity (I’m writing this by a kerosene lamp), the morning post (we have a weekly delivery on market day), and I won’t begin to mention the sanitary arrangements! But I do have a shortwave radio that picks up the BBC. And to live among such prayerful people makes up for it all.
    The parish is huge, with 6,000 souls scattered across 400 square kilometres. It consists of the
poblacion
, the town centre both administratively and geographically, and twenty-four
barrios
(hamlets? neighbourhoods?), each of which is home to between one and two hundred families: some are within walking distance of the centre; others are out on the
haciendas
and can only be reached by car. I’ve inherited an old jalopy, but I’m told that one of the managers gave my predecessor, Father Teodoro, a brand-new Mercedes, so I live in hope! The most remote
barrios
are high in the Cordilleras, the vast mountain range that marks the eastern limit of the parish, and are only accessible on foot. While I remember, would you please send me a pair of hiking boots? 10½ if they do half-sizes, since my feet tend to swell in the heat.
    So far I’ve barely strayed beyond the
poblacion
. Its heart is a large square, with the Church and
convento
(rectory) on the east side and the town hall on the west. Two rows of Spanish colonial houses, all cracked white stucco and fretwork shutters, half-hidden by thick-boughed frangipani and acacia trees, plus twosmall general stores, occupy the north and south. In the centre are a statue of the national hero, José Rizal, four weathered stone benches and a dried-up water trough.
    It’s no accident that the
convento
is the largest and best appointed residence in town. During the three centuries of Spanish rule, while the soldiers and bureaucrats were based in Manila, the country was effectively governed by a few hundred friars. There is of course an irony, which I’m sure you’ve not been slow to grasp, in my having become a missionary in order to take the gospel to places where it had never been heard, only to find myself in one where it can be heard more clearly than at home. I won’t pretend that I’m not relieved to have escaped all the babble and clatter of England, along with its fashionable clarion calls – how anything can be described as ‘liberation’ that leads you away from the Church is beyond me! Moreover, although the people here have long had Christ, they’re hungry for priests. I understand that, for perfectly valid reasons (age, ill health, pressure of work), Father Teodoro neglected to visit some parts of the parish from one year to the next. That’s an omission I propose to rectify.
    On second thoughts, please send me two pairs of boots.
    The laminated fact sheet in the porch, complete with charming misspellings (the ‘vaulted apes’!), describes the church as ‘earthquake baroque’ which, to my mind, fails to do it justice. It dates from the early 1600s when Philippine houses were flimsy wooden structures on stilts (many still are), the better to withstand wild animals and flooding. So it’s easy to see how this lofty stone building would have filled the locals with awe. I doubt that it would find favour in your Holy Redeemer-trained eyes, but I’m already learning to love it. The heavy grey exterior, more buttresses than walls, has a touch of the penitentiary about it and the functional interior still bears the scars of the Japanese invasion in 1942. Several of the clerestory windows are missing, leaving the nave at times like an aviary (perhaps it will come into its own at Pentecost?). The chief decorative features arethe
santos
– simple wooden figures dressed in garish robes that Agnes and Cora would have scorned to put on their least precious