WHEN the temperature began to rise so high that it threatened to make the thermometer explode, trust that Holy Week was here. I turned 11 years old that Holy Week. My birthday fell either before, during or after the Holy Week when Jesus Christ suffered, died and rose again during the resurrection.
When I turned 11, I suddenly had a spurt of growth, reaching a height of 5 feet and 4 inches, my arms and limbs as long and as thin as bamboo stalks. But my head remained the same. It was as big as a watermelon, my eyes like the black seeds of this rotund fruit.
That morning, my mother gave me a “palaspas,” the young leaves of coconut folded and woven to form small globes and arcs, even fingers tapering to the sky. The palaspas would always be yellow green, the color of the ylang-ylang flowers that perfumed our backyard.
We all went to Mass. The churchgoers were more hushed than usual, striking dutiful poses of piety. A woman was worrying her rosary beads behind me, her eyes tightly closed. Her eyelashes seemed to flutter, like the wings of a butterfly coming out of the cocoon, and I controlled the impulse to touch her trembling eyelashes. My classmate Mariani was standing on the next pew, her fingers forming a steeple.
The long sermon of the now white-haired and semi-senile Padre Pelagio made the men look at their watches, to check if their timepieces were dead again. One or two even took off their watches, put them to their ears, and then shook them with vigor. The other men slowly walked out of the chapel, out onto the big garden with its bright bursts of santan flowers, to smoke.
When the Mass was finally over, Padre Pelagio descended from his pulpit, holding a bowl full of holy water. He dipped the censer that picked up the holy water, then sprinkled the water all over the palaspas we had earlier raised for him. Droplets of the holy water would fall on us, “like manna from Heaven,” I remembered my catechism teacher saying, morsels of white and edible substance falling from the sky to feed the Israelites during their travels in the inhospitable desert for 40 years, following the Exodus.
Suddenly, the color of the air turned lemony green, humming.
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday... the countdown began. My grandmother forbade us from taking a bath until Jesus Christ come back to life. In the coma-inducing heat of summer, not taking a bath would be an act enough to pay for all your sins mortal, venial and in-between; done in the past, present and future; whether committed in your waking life or in your dreams.
* * *
We usually stayed home on Good Friday, listening to the Seven Last Words on the transistor radio with flowery explanations from the politicians, their voices grainy with sorrow. Or we would go to chapel. While there, I would pretend to listen as the seven generals of the military air base explain to us Jesus Christ’s Seven Last Words before He was nailed to the cross.
They would all be there:
– The general who had a mistress in every town within a radius of 50 kilometers from the military air base.
– The general who wore all the medals (spurious or not) he had won, gleaming like bottle caps on his chest.
– The general who had cornered the forest concession for the still-virginal forest on the edge of town, on the slopes of the Zambales mountains.
– The general who was so turned on by the smell of gunpowder that he led military operations in the South.
– The general who said he did not intend to die. Thus, the main road was named after him, the park after his wife, and the three commissary buildings after each of his sons.
But enough of this Game of the Generals!
And so one Holy Week, we spent Good Friday in San Fernando, the capital city of the province. My father was driving our jeep. My mother sat beside him, determined to be poised even if the wind blasting from the window was strong enough to crumple her red bandana. I sat at the back, eating lanzones from a plastic bag, peeling and popping into my mouth the fruit the color of pearl, careful not to bite into the seed which was bitter.
I looked outside — sugarcane fields stretching into infinity, nipa huts and wooden houses roasting in the sun, a warm hush falling over everything. It is Good Friday, after all, when the whole archipelago was burdened with the death of the Savior. I went with my parents because there was nothing else to do. If only I had a lot of friends, I could play Scrabble with them, or climb trees when our parents had gone away. And incorrigible kibitzer that I was, I also wanted to see Daniel Rexroth Jr. have himself nailed on the cross.
As my father put it, Daniel had a yearly vow to have himself “crucified” until his American G.I. father, who had returned to the United States just before Daniel was born, would return to the P.I., the Philippine Islands of old. And like the great Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the father would return and spring Daniel from the nails of poverty with an immigrant visa, and then on to the Kingdom of Citizenhood. Daniel said in media interviews that his persistence would trump the naysayers; he would reach his dreams.
The ritual nailing was held in the middle of the barren rice fields in Barangay Pedro Cutud, San Fernando, in the insane heat of summer. Gathered around Daniel were similarly shirtless men, their faces covered with white cloth. Earlier, they had asked other people to use broken glass to make small wounds on their backs.
Then, they deepened the wounds by flagellating their backs with a whip made of rope tipped with split bamboo. Glittering shards of glass were also glued to the ropes. The whoosh of the whiplashes biting against the skin, the flagellants’ backs turning into a merthiolate color, the blood even splattering on the shirts and faces of the spectators.
And then there was Daniel. He winced as the nails were driven into the palms of his hands. Rivulets of blood dripped down his hands, and he looked at the sky with agony in his eyes. The Americans recorded everything with their video cameras; the reporters spoke into their microphones.
But I walked away from the rice field toward our jeep, telling myself that when I grew older, I would spend my Holy Week in the mountain town of Sagada and watch the fog erase everything, hut, hill and mountain, or walk on the calm beaches of Palawan, as the sun drowned.
Danton Remoto’s books of fiction and translations are on sale at Fully Booked, National Bookstore, Shopee and Lazada; Kinokuniya in Asia; and Amazon globally.
