The Breath of Night Read Online Free Page B

sermon and simply adapted one on Loving Your Neighbour that I’d preached before last year’s Liverpool- Everton derby. But it seemed to go down well, with so many people shaking my hand at the end that I stopped worrying about thesweat. I even received a compliment – and a lunch invitation – from don Florante Pineda, our foremost local landowner. ‘An excellent sermon, Father, I approve,’ he said, as though the parish were his private domain.
    After mass I had a chance to unwind, strolling through town and introducing myself to the people before the procession, which was due to start at three. Having adjusted my mind as well as my watch to Filipino time, I was expecting a half-hour delay, but not the ninety minutes in the hallucinogenic heat that it took for everyone to assemble. That said, I did as I was told and waited patiently (don’t laugh, Father), until it finally set off, taking its pace from the lumbering water buffalo that pulled San Isidro’s carosse, looking as incongruous in its sampaguita garland as Hector in Cora’s Christmas Day crown. The carosse was covered with carrots, corn, cucumber and lettuce, the saint’s early life as a farmer making him a particularly fitting patron for an agricultural parish. Our Lord, Our Lady, St Francis Xavier, St Charles Borromeo and a host of angels followed in slow succession , each attended by the family who’d taken charge of its care and adornment over the previous year. Then came a parade of
barrio
groups, among them a pack of
Gigantes
, ten-foot-high stilt-walkers with Humpty-Dumpty heads, and twenty youths performing a tribal dance, wearing loin cloths and flip-flops, and brandishing spears.
    A band of ten girls, in floral crowns and white dresses (which had withstood the heat far better than my cassock), brought the procession to a close. Each represented a different facet of Our Lady: Divine Shepherdess; Immaculate Conception; Queen of Prophets; Mystical Rose and so forth. With one exception, each was escorted by a young man, looking at once proud and bashful. The exception was a remarkably pretty girl, whose radiant smile as she walked beside her mother made her the perfect representation of the Queen of Peace. The poise and excitement of the girls and the anxiety of the boys suggested that, for all the religious panoply, Mary wasn’t the only virgin being venerated.As they filed past, I wondered how many of the couples might be standing before me at the altar in the forthcoming months.
    My hosts – no, I must call them my neighbours and soon, I hope, my friends – assured me that every Filipino loves a fiesta. At any given moment, somewhere across the country there’ll be a festival to celebrate something, be it fruit, flowers or even fish, although the majority are in honour of saints. Some might see it as overkill, but I see it as the essence of incarnational theology: the communal expression of a world suffused with God.
    Now I must go to bed. Their hot coconut toddy (think very rough gin) is lethal. And I’ve a busy day tomorrow: lunch with the civic auditor; followed by my first catechism class; then, in the evening, a film. The nearest cinema is in Baguio City where, from what I can gather, the presiding genius is Bruce Lee, but every once in a while a travelling company comes to town and sets up a makeshift (bed-sheet) screen in the square. Tomorrow night they’re showing Yul Brynner and Gina Lollobrigida in
Solomon and Sheba
which, being a Hollywood epic from the fifties, contains the perfect mix of religiosity, romance, exoticism and violence for a Filipino audience today. They handed out publicity flyers at the fiesta. I enclose one just in case you think I’m making it up: ‘They came from different worlds. He was a Catholic. She was a Protestant. Yet they dared to fall in love.’
    I can see that I have my work cut out.
     
    Your loving son,
    Julian

     
    Applause rippled through the plane as it glided on to the tarmac. Philip,