Tree of Smoke (16 page)

“We can pray for each other,” Skip said.

“I don’t pray.”

“You don’t?”

“No, no, no. I don’t pray.”

T
he Joe liked tea. Insisted on getting it himself. Talking a great deal with Pilar about the other visitors.

Why these people kept coming was a mystery.

The Joe had seemed to enjoy riding his motorbike, bucking over the ruts into the yard, his belt strung through the handle of his cloth satchel and the satchel swinging at his side.

In the Joe’s absence the children materialized around the machine, openmouthed, touching it with their fingertips.

“Here he comes!” Carignan shouted in English, and the children scattered.

Why was his English coming back to him these last few weeks? Because he’d been thinking of the American missionary? The bones in a box, saying nothing, but in every language? Maybe because he’d opened a hole in his mind when he’d first spoken to the American visitor, the colonel, the first American in years. In decades.

This colonel had come twice. He’d come alone and had behaved respectfully. He was good, and the locals responded to him with enthusiasm. But good or bad, a strong man causes trouble.

With a sense how it all must look to the visitor’s eyes, Carignan regarded the red muddy path to the riverbank, the cracked cistern, the tarped roof, the mildew crawling the walls. The Joe was probably using the concrete chamber, the “facilities” downstairs—dark, grimy, separated only by a low wall from the kitchen, in which Pilar now cooked rice and sang a song. If she wanted, she could step over and stare into his face as he crouched over the hole. The Joe would want toilet paper. There was a roll of the stuff in the facilities, but it had been soaked and dried out by the weather and really couldn’t be used.

Pilar stopped singing in the kitchen and came out with another tray. Sliced mango and pineapple.

“Pilar, I told you: if the American comes again, tell him I’m not here.”

“It’s not the same one.”

“I don’t like so many Americans.”

“He’s Catholic.”

“So was the colonel.”

“Don’t you like the Catholic? You are Catholic. I am Catholic.”

“You’re being silly again.”

“No. You are silly.”

She resented him for failing to take advantage of her. And he understood. Who would mind if he did? It’s just that he was very ashamed of any kind of touching.

She said, “That old man is coming up the road to see you. I saw him just now from the kitchen. Don’t give him any food. He always comes back.”

“Where’s the American?”

She said in English: “Bathroom.”

The old man waited until Pilar went inside before he appeared around the corner of the church, walking sideways out of a kind of deference, dressed only in khaki shorts with the legs turned up to his crotch and the waist cinched around his belly with a rope. Carignan beckoned, and the old man came and sat. Like all of them he was shrunken and almost meatless, an animated mummy. He had the flat, weary features of a very wise Eskimo. He smiled a lot. He had hardly any teeth.

“Bless me, Padair, for I have sin,” he said in English without apparent comprehension, “bless me and I ask you forgiveness.”

“Te obsolvo. Have some pineapple.”

The old man scooped up several pieces in his hands and said, “Maraming salamat po,” thanking him in Tagalog, the dialect of Luzon. The old man’s preliminaries generally seemed to require statements in a variety of tongues.

“I had a visitor in my dreams last month,” he revealed to the old man. “I think he brought me a message.”

The old man said nothing, only concentrated on his food, his face as oblivious as a dog’s.

The American guest came back from the kitchen but brought no tea. This pilgrim Joe had a jaunty gait, his limbs moving freely around the great hot furnace in his middle, the fire of suffering he didn’t seem to know about.

As the Joe approached, the old man vacated the chair and squatted flat-footed beside them.

“I’m asking him about a dream I had. He can find out its message,” Carignan told the American.

“Hallo, Padair,” the old man said.

“He calls you Father,” said Carignan.

As the old man finished his fruit and licked his fingers, he said in Cebuano, “Why do you say your dream has a message?”

Carignan said, “It was a strong dream.”

“Did you wake up?”

“Yes.”

“Did you go back to sleep?”

“I stayed awake all night.”

“Then you had a strong dream.”

“A monk, a holy man, came to see me.”

“You are a holy man.”

“He wore a hood. His face was a silver cloud.”

“A man?”

“Yes.”

“From your family?”

“No.”

“Did you see his face?”

“No.”

“Did you see his hands?”

“No.”

“Did he show you his feet?”

“No.”

The old man began speaking to Skip Sands very earnestly and a little too loudly.

“Yes. How do you do,” Sands said.

The old man gripped the American’s wrist. He spoke. Paused. The priest translated: “He says that in sleep, when you sleep, the spirit leaves your body. And the shepherd or herdsman of the spirits takes them up and”—he consulted with the teller—“the herdsman of the spirits chases the spirits, herds them, like sheep, down to the shore, to the seaside.”

The man spoke, the priest queried him, the man tugged at the American’s arm, and Carignan pieced together the tale: Herded to the shore, the spirits sink into the sea, and down there they find the world of dreams. A yellow snake guards the border to the sea of dreams. Anyone who tries to go back and forth between the two worlds will be suffocated in its coils and will die in his sleep. Carignan couldn’t find the English to get it across. “He’s telling a complicated story. He’s a little crazy, I think.”

“This world holds no memory of the before-life, and the afterlife holds no memory of our sorrows. So be happy that death is coming.”

Saying this, the old man rose and departed.

“Wait. Wait. What is the prophecy of my dream?”

“Didn’t you hear me?” the old man said.

F
ather Carignan insisted on spending the night in a hammock in the church while Sands slept with the Blessed Host in Carignan’s room, that is, the Host sat sleepless on the priest’s dresser, and Sands tried to sleep on his bed of wooden slats and straw mat under a gauzy net. A monk’s cell, perfectly appropriate to his pilgrimage. He lay in the dark. A mosquito whined outside the netting. He made a mental note to ask Carignan about something the colonel had cited from the Bible—something about there being one God but many administrations. The idea appealed to a government man. A cosmological bureaucracy…Now worry flooded him. The colonel, Eddie Aguinaldo, the German. They’d traveled here, and no one had told him. It wouldn’t do if the colonel withheld things. It prodded at a spot of doubt he harbored, doubt in the colonel’s competence, his judgment, the power of his perception. The colonel was a little crazy. But who wasn’t? The problem was that the colonel might not trust his nephew’s talents, might have sent him on a phony errand. He woke at one point from a dream of biblical force, a prophetic dream, assured that the island of Mindanao held no interest for the United States, that this Catholic priest couldn’t possibly be running guns to Muslims, that life had called him—Skip Sands the Quiet American, the Ugly American—to this place only to enlarge his understanding in aid of his future work. Because here there lay no present work. Not one particular of the dream remained. Only this certainty.

C
arignan explained to the Joe that maybe some people would come to the morning liturgy because today they celebrated a saint close to their hearts, Dionysia.

The Joe had never heard of Saint Dionysia. Nobody had. “Yes, she’s very powerful here. Based on her miracles along the river she’d be canonized a saint, if she wasn’t already a saint. She was martyred in the fifth century in North Africa. A stirring martyrdom.”

In a homily decades before, in all innocence, Carignan had made a graphic presentation of Dionysia’s last agonies to an uncharacteristically large gathering of celebrants, and now up and down the river she enjoyed a legendary status, and the people attributed to her many healings and claimed many sightings and visitations, many signs and messages. “So I try to remind people when her feast day comes. But it’s not always easy for the river people to find out what the date is. They don’t have calendars.”

Only a few folks came to the service. Beforehand the priest baptized a newborn on the riverbank, dribbling the muddy water over its forehead. “We don’t have holy water as such,” he explained to the Joe. “So the bishop made a decree that all the river is holy. That’s what I tell them.”

Wrapped in a scarf, the child was limp, eyes shut, mouth open, blowing bubbles of phlegm. The mother was only a child herself.

The Joe said, “This baby looks very sick.”

“You’d be surprised which ones die and which ones live,” he told the Joe. “It’s always a surprise.”

They assembled for the evening Mass. He saw it all anew through the visitor’s eyes: the small gray room, the warped wooden benches, the moldy earthen floor, and the congregation, an ignorant handful, ten, eleven—fourteen celebrants, the Joe included. A few old women, a few old men, some dark-eyed runny-nosed infants. The babies didn’t bawl. Once in a while one or another of them hacked or made a croaking sound. The old women bleated the responses, the old men muttered evasively.

The visitor, sitting on the bench among them in his khaki pants, his dirty white T-shirt, shone forth as if he were the last American, sincere, friendly, a close listener, but at the very center of his eyes a terrified loneliness.

What were today’s readings? He’d lost the book again, the schedule of liturgy. He hadn’t actually consulted it for years, just read what he wanted, whatever verses the Book opened to. “Here’s something.” He read in English: “
If there be therefore any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels and mercies
…” He tried to explain in the local dialect what he thought might be meant by “bowels and mercies,” and ended by saying, “I’m not sure what it means. Maybe how we feel toward our families.”

He sought Matthew 27:5—
And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself
.

And now the homily. “In English today.” He gave no reason why. Maybe it went without saying that the Joe’s presence suggested this courtesy. Not that any of them would understand his thoughts in any language. Superstitious vampire-worshippers. But he himself had once seen the aswang flying with a child’s bloody limb between her jaws.

“I’ve told them I’m going to do the homily in English. I don’t really have anything prepared. We speak of our reading today, about Judas Iscariot the traitor:
And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself.

“He goes back to the temple, to the ones who paid him to betray his Master. He wants to give back their dirty silver but they won’t take it. Ever think why? Why they turn down perfectly good money? Why is that? ‘And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went out and hanged himself.’

“I’ve made my last confession. Who’s the person in the Bible most like me—who am I most like? Judas. Judas the betrayer—that’s me. What else is there to confess? Nobody paid me to betray Jesus, but what does it matter, eh? I could never pay them back. They would never take back their dirty money.”

In over thirty years he hadn’t spoken at such length in his native language. He let it run on, the English coming out of his head as out of a loudspeaker. “My grandmother used to use that expression, ‘bowels and mercies.’ I never asked her about what it meant.

“I remember how I rejected my grandmother. I loved her very much, I was her favorite, but then, when I came to my early teens, twelve, thirteen, she came to live with us, and I was very unkind to her. She was just some old woman, and I was very unkind.

“I don’t like to remember that. The memory is very bitter. My grandmother loved me, and I treated her with disrespect. I felt no love for anyone.

“Here, of course, where the people are so poor, so sick, you can’t love them. It would pull you under. You would go under. Everyone here knows how to love, but love them back—it’s quicksand. I’m not the Christ. No man is the Christ.

“Other times we’re the thief on the cross, the one who got crucified next to Jesus, the thief who turned to Jesus and said, ‘Remember me when you get to your Kingdom.’ And Jesus had mercy and said, ‘This day you shall be with me in Paradise.’ I really think we have to be one or the other. We’re either the betrayer, or we’re the thief.

“I look around me and I think: How did I get here to Nasaday? How did I get here? This is just a corner in the maze. Island in the swamp. Judas jumped down a hole and God knows, God knows if he’s ever coming up, huh? It’s entirely up to God. Who are we? We’re Judas sometimes. But Judas…Judas went out and hanged himself.

“These thirty years, and more, that I’ve spent living with barbarians, living with their powerful gods and goddesses, taking inside me the traditions, you know, which aren’t fairy tales, they’re real, they’re real once you take them inside you, and taking inside my mind all the pictures of their tales and living in the adventures of the ancestors, and the years I’ve spent meeting face-to-face with their dangerous demons and saints, saints who have the names of the Catholic saints, but only to disguise themselves…How many times I almost got completely lost forever, how many times I almost wandered into the part of the maze where you can never come back…but always comes the touch of the Holy Spirit at the last moment, before the gods and goddesses destroyed me, always at the last moment I received the reminder of who I am, and why I came here. Only a glimpse, you know, only a reminder of who I really am. And then back down into the tunnel.”