©
All poems
and stories
© 1988,
1989, 1990,
1998 by
Advaeta.
All rights
reserved.
"Four Tragedies"
was first
published
by the
Women's
Journal
of
Manila.
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"My mind is a desert today. There's not a living thing in it except the guilt plants."
Rachel was drinking coffee. Her husband, Gary, didn't know what to say. He also looked discouraged.
They had only been in Manila six months. Their church back in the States was a small one, and, they had come to understand, really had no concrete program in the Philippines. They had grumbled to each other that the directors were just out to satisfy the various armchair missionaries in the congregation. They had tried some things "on their own." Now they didn't know what to try.
" 'How shall not the ministration of the spirit be rather glorious?' " Rachel quoted from Corinthians.
They were really wasting their time in Manila.
"You remember that guy that Dave wrote to us about?" Gary said. "Dave stayed at the guy's place in Paco, and he suggested that we look the guy up?"
"I remember something. What exactly did Dave say?"
"Let me see if I can find the letter." Gary went into the bedroom, the only other room of their little apartment, and began opening suitcases. "Basically I think this guy had gotten some kids together, organized them, and they were helping out in the neighborhood. Here it is -- hey, we forgot to get back to Dave about the vacuum cleaner -- guess by now he's worked that out somehow. He says,
Everyone calls this man Father John. John said something
to me about an Orthodox seminary in New York, but I'm not sure
whether he's ordained or not. Fifteen or twenty young Filipinos
stay at his place and conduct "massfeeding", as they call it, in all
the slums . . .
That's a fairly big operation! Fifteen or twenty working full time --
"Oh, it's not hard to collect fifteen or twenty standbys in Manila," Rachel said. "Standbys" was the local word for the large numbers of unemployed young. "What else?"
"He gets a bit poetic --
John never takes off his shoulder pads, he was born with them. But I
don't mean he was an athlete, I don't think he was ever inclined that
way. Just that when I used to see him coming down the hallway, I
always thought of that linebacker who convinced me never to play
football again. And his energy could knock over any obstacle . . ."
"So, if he doesn't scare you," Rachel said, "give him a call."
"Dave lost the phone number. Even the address he's not sure of. 'Go north from the Paco Church . . . it's well known . . .' Do you want to go?"
"No, you go. I'll see if I can finish this Saul Bellow. Bring back some cornflakes and cockroach spray."
Alone in the apartment, Rachel was looking in the mirror and remembering, as she increasingly did, her college days. At one time it had bothered her not to be pretty. The act of will with which she had shaken that off had been a victory for her. She had learned something about the power of the mind.
Then there were the years presiding over that corner table in the student union -- the table a control panel fixed with books and coffee saucers, charting the cultural future of the world. The amazing thing was that she had kept some of that coterie even after her conversion -- or reconversion -- though being born again was not the religion of Mom and Dad, certainly not . . . Here what she missed most was the movies, and talking about the movies. Here you could find only the worst American movies, never the good ones, not to mention European. If you wanted to see something serious, or even Charlie Chaplin, forget it. Once at the American Library they had shown 1000 Clowns, but even that had seemed like an accident.
Though she couldn't imagine a path to get from here to there, that was where her mind always ended its rovings -- studying filmmaking somewhere. A film about the real lives of young Christians. Something like Graham Greene, though not so doubt-ridden and of course not so Roman. And with Gary still there with her, somehow.
Their apartment was in Mandaluyong, not far from Camp Crame on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, where a huge crowd of Filipinos had shielded rebel troops from the Marcos forces in 1986. Even now, two years later, many kids still wore yellow T-shirts -- "People Power". Gary, as he drew near EDSA, was already coughing from the poisonous air. "A real pea soup smog," he thought. Not too accurately: the sky was blue overhead. It was only the diesel fumes at street level that were painful. Epiphany of the saints?
Manila at first had seemed quaint, as he imagined someplace in Southern California (maybe the beach communities?) to have been (but when was that -- in the forties?). Plank houses of box design, many trees -- but no lawns -- oldtime Coca-Cola signs. Though Manila had not changed in the six months he had known her, that impression, always elusive, was now gone entirely, like the effect of a song after hearing it dozens of times.
And the fumes were painful in the lungs. Around him the office girls breathed through white handkerchiefs as they waited for their jeepneys.
Gary wedged himself onto one of the two benches in a jeepney. The little load of people, subdued amid deafening noises, each row avoiding the facing row of eyes, rode in jerks through the diesel fumes and the heat. With no other distraction from the suffering, the idiot songs blaring in the vehicle took over Gary's mind.
I'm saving all my love,
Saving all my love
Father John, when Gary got there, was big and fair-haired, with a lopsided face and a grin. His white shirt, square at the bottom, was presumably an adaptation to the environment -- from a distance it could have been the local barong tagalog. It was not particularly ecclesiastical. Only a small wooden cross pinned to his collar conferred any kind of distinction on him.
Gary had been met at the gate by a knot of boys, seemingly only fourteen or fifteen years old; but he had learned in the Philippines to add as much as five years to his calculations. Hardly stopping to ask "Father John?" over his shoulder, one of them had run to notify this person of renown; two others had escorted him down the disused driveway and up the stairs.
The first thing Gary had asked John about was the picture on the wall, as they sat on the skylit upstairs landing, which appeared to be the airiest room in the house.
"That's Andres Bonifacio. He organized an uprising against the Spanish. Of course you hear more about Rizal. Rizal was also a nationalist, but he didn't advocate violence. After American rule replaced the Spanish, naturally the Americans encouraged Rizal rather than Bonifacio being enshrined as the national hero. Rizal was a fine person, but Bonifacio inspires me more."
"But you don't yourself believe in violence, do you?"
"Nobody wants violence, of course," John had said. His eyes had for a moment focused inwardly, then come back to Gary. "If there is plenty of food in the world, yet twenty-four people a minute die of starvation, wouldn't you call that violence?"
Now John was saying, "We've lost most of our culture."
"We?"
"Filipinos. Filipinos have lost their own culture. Pseudo-cultural imports is all we have to nourish our minds on now. If we even want to smoke, so we are led to think, we have to go to Marlboro Country."
Finally Gary turned the subject toward what was an aggravating blackness in his mind. "What do you think -- I mean, can we actually accomplish anything in the end, whatever we do, trying to change everything that is so sick -- all the polluted zombies pushing the buttons -- how does Christ let this all go on?"
"Can we accomplish anything? We can accomplish everything!" John was emphatic. "Yes! We can change everything! We can have heaven on earth. Why not?"
Gary decided to put aside for a time the many doctrinal objections that sprang to his mind. "Well, I can't imagine an end to this suffering," he said. "Even every technical advance seems to bring problems as great as those it solves. Take personal computers. They seemed to offer so much hope -- "
"There you're right," John said. "Science is something we will have always to pursue. But sometimes it seems like running just to stay in the same place. That's as far as our material satisfaction. But I'm not talking about material satisfaction. I'm talking about something else."
"You're talking about grace, then?" Gary said. "Well, we all do get the grace of the Lord. I remember at first . . . but what I mean is, if that grace we feel on earth is enough, or can ever be enough, what do we need an actual heaven for?"
"That's my favorite question these days!" John said. Gary saw a remarkable gleam in him. "If you look at Luke 17 -- No, let me just ask you this. What do you experience when you pray?"
"Well, of course I try hard. But it always seems like Satan was just waiting for that moment, to turn my mind into a sandstorm. Actually, I have to clench my teeth even to start."
"But Saint Paul talks about 'the peace of God, which passeth all understanding.' That's the birthright of all Christians! It's not just for Saint Paul."
"Well tell me more."
"I was in the Makati Cemetery yesterday evening." Two days had passed, and now Gary and Rachel were both seated on the same rattan couch, on the upstairs landing in John's place. John went on, "It had just become dark. It was rush hour -- the noise and agony was still going on, not far away, but some turning point had come -- I was kneeling on one grave there, a child's grave. And not even closing my eyes, suddenly, I felt certain that I was right in God's heart. I felt that way -- it means I was."
"Well is that how you always pray?"
"In cemeteries, you mean? Not always, but I like it when I get the chance. On the graves is a nice place to sit, I don't think anybody inside will mind. I used to like to go to cemeteries at midnight especially, that was very nice. But one yogi up in Nepal whom I respected told me that a person should have special training for that. I don't know if that training is alive among Christians now or not. Even the Philokalia doesn't mention it.
"One of these days I want to go to Russia and track some of these things down."
John spoke in answer to Rachel's question, but Rachel's attention was gone -- swept away even before her own words were fully out. There was something about the child's grave -- besides the propriety of it -- a wave of some frequency had hit her mind and dislodged something . . .
"All these techniques are no substitute for loving God. But if we love God, we'll try to learn the techniques that He has sent down to us. Try that cemetery, it's not far from your place. Then if you have time, the American Cemetery is even nicer. In fact you know, there's one tree there, I can draw you a map -- "
The phone rang, and John got up and entered the office.
In early high school, a refugee from some dark personal disaster which the world had little noticed, Rachel, wandering distraught in the little cemetery next to the local college, had stopped at one grave, the grave of an eight year-old, and read the inscription on the tombstone, a few lines by Wordsworth. Now, as she and Gary waited for Father John to come back out of the office -- Gary reclining, legs out, looking up at the ceiling, rapt, seemingly, in John's strange ideas -- Rachel took out her notebook, and after a few false starts was able to reconstruct fairly well that poem.
For he is safe, a quiet bed
Hath early found among the dead,
Harboured where none can be misled,
Wronged or distrest;
And surely here it may be said
That such are blest.
Not that she ever considered actively seeking safety in such a way; but for weeks it became her favorite form of play to go after school and lie next to that grave and imagine herself dead -- dead on such terms as the poem described.
The total complement of persons at John's place, at the time, was five orphaned children and sixteen teenaged boys, some of whom were attending school. Two were in college, subsidized by middle-class members of John's little congregation. These would come on Sundays. "Everybody here prays for an hour every morning," John said. "Even the kids pray for twenty minutes. And they like it. I recommend the Jesus Prayer. But the older ones can pray how they like. One even uses a mantra.
"After the prayer, we have an aikido instructor coming in.
"The biggest problem of kids in this town, or I should say the biggest symptom, is the drugs. Mostly glue, solvent, cough syrup. And of course dope. Other things they can't afford.
"Of course we also used to play around with different substances, at about their age, but at least in our case we took it as exploration. It wasn't just to make life more painless. When we faced the fact that it wasn't teaching us any more, if it ever had, that's when most of us quit."
"Why pray so much?" Rachel said. "Once you've accepted Jesus -- "
"That's when the work begins, it seems to me."
"One of them uses a mantra?" Gary said. "You think it's all just the same? Why did Jesus say, 'No man cometh unto the Father, but by me'?"
"Others have also said such things, but the question is, what did they mean? For instance Krishna, the guru of Arjuna. He said, 'Leave all else behind. Take refuge in me alone. I will save you.' But what did he mean?"
"Actually," John went on, "I think Jesus must have done part of his searching in other countries, and not only within the Hebrew tradition. There are so many sources telling a consistent story about that. And they seem to ring true. No, I don't think Jesus was the only Son of God. I don't think he meant that in a literal sense.
"There may be another Christ on earth now, somewhere. Or if not now, one may come at any time. I keep hoping. But I don't think you can call it the Second Coming. It'll be a new coming. But of the same spirit, of course.
"Have you heard of the Gospel of Thomas? Most churches don't accept it, but it just may be the only gospel written by one of Jesus's actual apostles. A community based on love and sacrifice, that's the main idea."
At this point three boys appeared on the stairs. Two acted as guides to the other, apparently a new person on the scene. "He wants to know, Father." But the newcomer moved confidently ahead of them onto the landing.
John slapped the chairseat next to him and the boy sat down. His head was back and a few fingers half covered his smile; yet he seemed ready to demand some account from the three foreigners towering around him.
John spoke first. "What do you do?"
John had told Gary that the answer to this question was always either "studying" -- with remote hope of employment -- or simply, "Standby, Father." Cheap jeans and threadbare T-shirt attested that the boy did not do much. But his eyes lit with mischief at the question.
"I could say," he replied, "that I do the will of him that sent me."
John laughed, obviously delighted, and looked at Gary. The two altar-boys who had brought this newest seraph upstairs, and then stood back, also laughed. "Basically," the boy went on, hand still over his mouth, "I toil not, neither do I spin. That's me in all my glory."
Gary and Rachel were also doing double takes. If the boy Jesus discoursing in the temple had much astonished his elders, this little parody from the slums came as almost as much of a surprise.
"Why, we're also glorious like that!" Rachel exclaimed, adding a gesture in Gary's direction. "You can join our team." She immediately saw this newcomer as an urchin radiance, a pilgrim soul who needed only a mother.
The boy's name was Bobby. Authoritatively, he spoke to John. "I want to hear your ideas."
"Well," John said, "I have one idea that will solve everyone's problem here, if you're out of work. We're going this afternoon to feed some very nice champorado to all the kids in Bagong Barrio." Champorado was a mixture of rice, milk, chocolate, sugar and coconut. "They don't usually get a snack. And we have a nutrition slide show for the mothers. Do you want to come?"
In the upshot, Bobby did not go with them on that day. But he came the next day to talk to John, and soon became a regular visitor -- only during community projects and Sunday Service was he conspicuously absent. And he became the favorite dinner guest of Rachel and Gary.
"But it's important that he move in here," John said to Rachel and Gary one time. If he were from a good neighborhood I wouldn't say that. But I know what his friends are like where he is. If he stays there, he's sure to go back to drugs."
Gary had read all the sources John had suggested. By the end of two months, he was spending several hours daily in prayer. But Rachel, whom he had thought he knew, hardly seemed to admire these discoveries. She had become more and more impatient with him. And when he had tried to interest her in some of his new studies, she had snapped at him. She had quoted something about one man who "grew so broadminded, he was scatterbrained."
John and Gary were walking toward Memorial Park to pray as it grew dark. "Our landlady is almost eighty years old, but she may live for a long time," John said. "She has a lot of children and grandchildren, and they all want her to sell the place now and help them out in different ways." Gary already knew the near-miracle of the old house in Paco where John had established his mission: a big place with a tree-grown front yard, in a central location, only one thousand pesos a month. "Any buyer would undoubtedly be a developer who would tear the place down." John spoke in a low voice which Gary had to strain to hear. The traffic noise drifted some of John's words away completely. Gary was surprised to see John so worried. "Our members are already bleeding to keep us going. If we have to put their entire support just into rent, what will be left for our community work, and what will justify our keeping on?"
They were just entering the gate of the cemetery. "Well, we've come to pray," Gary said. "That's what we're here for."
But John laughed and clapped Gary on the back. "Prayer is for bigger things than that!" he exclaimed. "Are we going to suggest to God that He doesn't already know about the house? Let Him take away our house if He wants! It'll only mean that He has bigger plans for us."
On Sunday Gary arrived in Paco late for the service. John's sermon was still going on, though it was probably nearing the end. John spoke in Tagalog punctuated with English, just as would educated Filipinos themselves; in spite of Gary's ignorance of the language, it was obvious what John was now touching on in his sermon. Services were conducted in an open hall in front of the main house: and John would pause frequently to gesture toward that building. But far from the apprehension Gary had seen in John a few days before, John now seemed to find, in the threat to their home, only joy. "If we have to pound the streets day after day to find a new place, if we have to camp for months in the park, if we have to cook over open fires to carry on our feeding program, that struggle is God's gift to make us strong! Struggle is the essence of life!"
The landlady had left town the day before to visit her birthplace in the provinces. She had postponed any decision on the house until her return in a month or so. At that time she would meet with a delegation of John's people. Volunteers came forward now from the congregation to form a committee.
In a slum in Sampaloc Bobby sat alone in the plywood shack of his brother and sister-in-law. That Sunday afternoon his brother had a temporary job at the pier; his sister-in-law was out selling cigarettes and holding her baby. Bobby was reading in the "living room," a room too low-ceilinged to stand up in, or even to sit in a chair -- had there been a chair. The main piece of furniture was a wire bookcase. The upper shelves were draped with crochet-work, and held: a few magazines and inspirational books, a ceramic Christ Child, a ceramic Garfield the Cat, some other bric-a-brac, and many 3½" x 5" color photos. The bottom shelf housed a timeworn TV set, and a cassette player patched with scotch tape.
The air in the lane did not smell as bad as that in the back or that which seeped up through the floorboards; so with the fan positioned on the sill of the front window, relaxed breathing was just possible.
Bobby's friend Ronnie entered, crouching at the low door. He entered very softly, a swirl of dust being swished in by the wind. He settled down, reclining against the wall just beside the door.
"Do you have any cough syrup?" Ronnie said.
"No," Bobby replied. "Did you go to Sunday Service?"
"Yes."
"What did Father John say?"
"He said struggle is the essence of life."
"Oh."
"Something to think about, I guess."
About two hours later Bobby reached the top of the stairs in Paco. The last straggling members of the congregation had just left, and John, Rachel and Gary were alone on the landing. They greeted Bobby happily. "Hey, you're here on Sunday," John said. "By accident you might make it to a service sometime."
"I thought you said there are no accidents."
"That's right, but I keep hoping for just that one."
"Well, I like to come and talk," Bobby said.
"You're a philosopher. Maybe you were Socrates in a past life."
"Do you believe in past lives?" Rachel said to John.
"Of course he does," Bobby said. "He thinks that last time around, we were the four horsemen of the Apocalypse."
Rachel wanted a serious answer.
"No, I don't know about these things." John apparently wanted to pacify her. "I only know that we are four souls on our way home to God."
"You say we're four souls on our way home to God," Bobby persisted. "Well, I say we're four tragedies set in Manila."
His voice had fallen a little. Some genuine commotion of mind had spun out of his grip.
"Am I also a tragedy?" John said. "Look, Bobby, tell me if I'm a tragedy."
"Yes, you are."
"Don't you think I'm happy?"
"You're happy, yes -- because of your belief system. But what happens to you when you lose that belief system?"
"What if I never do?"
"Then you're living in a fool's paradise."
"Yes, that's it. Power to the fools! Power to the fools!"
Bobby moved with his few belongings into the mission. "He's doing fantastic in the office! Things have never been so organized!" John said to Gary. "Time goes so fast here," Bobby marveled -- adding in a stage whisper, "You'd never guess it was so old." Gary found a used van and started to rehabilitate it. A mobile clinic to tour the poor neighborhoods was a longtime dream of John's congregation.
One time Gary worked late into the evening, stopping just fifteen minutes for supper, then going back to work. Bobby dangled a light bulb for him at the end of an extension cord that snaking back into the house. Around ten, seeing that Bobby was tired, Gary let him go to bed, and himself went upstairs and took leave of John. But at the gate he remembered an address John was supposed to give him, a parts supplier in Chinatown. Gary went back up.
As he reached the landing, a tall and thin Filipino, maybe fifty years old, burst with a lot of energy out of John's office. Gary had never seen him before. The man was laughing deeply at something John had just said; or perhaps at something he himself had just said. Gary realized that this visitor must have been in the building all that afternoon. There was only one entrance to the place.
"Who is he?" Gary asked after the man had skipped down the stairs and disappeared out the front door.
John was just looking blankly away. Gary thought, now he's learned even the Filipino way of saying "No comment." But finally John seemed to make up his mind. "He's NPA," he said. "He has a price on his head. He's a friend of mine -- in some ways an adviser."
"I admire him very much," John went on. "But they have no ideology. They call themselves communists, but at least they're more intelligent than that. They don't like the present government, but they don't know what they'll replace it with. If they took over, it would be just another flavor of disaster."
On a Friday afternoon the delegation from the mission was supposed to meet the landlady. The fate of the house would finally be settled.
Dr. Aguilar, who was to drive them all to the old woman's house, arrived on time. Gary washed the grime from his hands and got ready. John neatly dressed the two youngest and cutest of his kids and told them to wait in the back seat. Only Rachel was not there. She had taken Bobby and Boy, Bobby's closest friend at the mission, to the planetarium. Finally John decided they could not wait any longer for her.
What an occasion for her to be late, Gary thought. If she doesn't care about this mission, she shouldn't make promises. Gary was finding it difficult to speak to her about such things, however.
Mrs. Velarde sat small and dignified, and remained adamant about the house. She had greeted them hospitably. She had served them cold buko, sweetened coconut water. John and Dr. Aguilar had spoken in Tagalog with what seemed to Gary considerable eloquence. The two children were getting restless on their seats. But the answer seemed to be no. Some of the stricken look that John had showed that day at Memorial Park was beginning to return.
Mrs. Velarde's maid went to answer the door, and a moment later ushered in Rachel. Rachel said some word of apology for her lateness. Bobby was with her. More buko was served.
"Where are you from?" Mrs. Velarde asked Bobby.
The answer was something that seemed to amuse her. Bobby went on talking. Mrs. Velarde listened increasingly rapt. Finally, she said something to which John and Dr. Aguilar broke out in big smiles!
Once on the sidewalk, John explained to Gary, "In essence he just said, 'The children whom we are trying to help are also your children, they also need you.' But it wasn't what he said, it was how he said it."
They were in the car. "Hey, we'll celebrate," John said. "Get on the phone and call everybody." This to nobody in particular. "Bobby, you and Boy go to market. I'll write a shopping list -- here's three hundred pesos."
John himself took on most of the burden of calling, and in two hours' euphoric talk, not neglecting a promise of pizza each time, managed to collect half the congregation.
"Filipinos love Italian food," John mentioned as he organized some of the boys to make dough in the kitchen. "Have you ever seen Italians and Filipinos get together? It's the same wavelength." The oven was a metal box resting directly on the two-burner stove. Inside the box were bricks to support the baking sheets. "It's hard to find real cheese here," he hastened to explain as the product came out. "This stuff -- you could put it in a nuclear reactor and it wouldn't melt, to say nothing of baking it in this little contraption."
Supplemented by a few dishes brought by the members, however, nobody objected to it. Gary discussed at length with Dr. Aguilar his ideas for outfitting the van. Why not a mobile X-ray? Manila was such a hive of tuberculosis and emphysema. "Sure sure sure!" John said. Go ahead with the idea, worry later about the money. It was an evening of food and talk and plans.
But what, Gary wondered, was Rachel thinking about, alone and reading, or not even really reading. Obviously she wanted to go home. Things were going to be tense back in the apartment if this dragged on.
If she's bored, she should say so, he thought. Nevertheless, he looked for a chance to get away. Together with a reduced number of guests, he and John and Rachel had gone upstairs to escape the mosquitoes. John was really in peak form tonight. He was talking now about the Essene communities and their lingering influence in this and that obscure subculture. With Rachel in and out of his mind, Gary couldn't assimilate everything. But neither could he get away.
The last guest left, and now John directed his sparkling flow at Gary alone. "You already know about the Essenes' concept of Jesus as physician. Sometimes I take classes in ayurvedic medicine from one Indian doctor here -- it's almost the same thing." Rachel said that she would go flag a taxi at the corner. She went down.
"This doctor likes to say: whatever the disease, the prescription is the same -- half the food, twice the water, four times the laughter."
John and Gary started down the stairs. As Gary opened the door, he noticed Bobby and Boy behind him in the ground-floor hallway. Gary proceeded out, only to realize that John was no longer with him. What it was about the two boys that had caught John's eye, Gary didn't know, but John had gone back and was facing them.
"Bobby!" John said. "What the hell did you take?"
Gary went back to look at them. They had indeed taken something. They had had their own celebration that evening. Their faces were like clown masks. Neither of them could speak.
"Nothing," Bobby said.
"What did you take?" John was shouting now. The happy energy that had emanated from him upstairs was washed totally away.
"Nothing."
"Did you have to take that stuff?" John shouted. "Look what you did to Boy. You know what it means. Both of you get out! Get out now!"
Bobby still wanted to deny it. John would not let him say "nothing" again. He grabbed Bobby by both his arms and picked him up and shook him, shook him in a rage of frustration.
When he finally set him down, with the same violence, the pain on John's face was too much for Gary, who turned away. Bobby's face showed neither repentance nor resistance. He looked as if he wanted to sleep.
On the corner, Gary said something to Rachel about his delay, then asked, "Did you see Bobby? Did Bobby come out?" Gary had seen Bobby and Boy, with hunched shoulders and belongings in plastic bags, pass through the gate; what he wanted to know was whether his wife had seen them. If not, he wasn't going to mention that subject right away. He sensed that something in Rachel was already winding up to pitch some hard object.
"No," she replied to his question. After a short jeep ride, while waiting for the next jeep, she began to speak. "Are we part of this movement now?" she wanted to know of Gary. "It seems now we've signed on for this whole expedition. Here's a Christian with his own ideas -- isn't that more or less how Satan comes? And how do you relate to someone who can only talk about his favorite cemeteries? And who thinks he's Filipino? If he's Filipino, I'm from the south pole of Jupiter! It's too much! Who does he think he is?"
"What do you really want to do?" she went on. "Do you consider yourself one of his disciples?"
"It's not a question of disciples," Gary said. "He's looking for disciples, yes, but for fellow disciples, not disciples of himself. I don't agree with everything he says. He doesn't even agree with everything he says! Actually I've never seen anyone who inquires so much -- "
"Inquires!"
By Monday, Rachel was already packed to leave. Gary would stay. "Let's say I feel called," he had said to her. "I'll continue along this line and see where it leads." They would keep in touch; that much they had promised.
Boy had found his way back to Paco the day after his expulsion, had asked Father John for forgiveness, and been taken in again. And Rachel had gone to Sampaloc. She had located the shack of Bobby's brother. Bobby had been out; she had been invited to wait. But she couldn't wait in a place like that. She decided that it was no use anyway. Bobby would sink or swim for himself. Who was she, what could she do? Did she think she was that Catholic saint -- what was her name -- the one whose limpid eyes would awake pangs of remorse in the most sin-blackened heart? Whose merest utterance would cause monsters of depravity to smash their cough-syrup bottles in the gutter, put on their best T-shirts, and read the help-wanted ads?
Gary rode with Rachel in a taxi to the airport. Neither knew whether they would see each other again.
All day long a sick feeling in Gary had switched off and on, a kind of thermostat. The trough of each wave was a purple-black depth, lit only by flickers of pain. But when he came up each time, there was something that actually filled him with joy. Now, before going to Paco, before going to his now-solitary apartment, before going any farther in any direction, he got off the bus to sit on a bench along the bay and try to understand what that strange joy was.
Manila Bay had once been famous for its sunsets. The sun was long down now, but he hadn't really missed anything. The sun might not have changed in the last decades, but the polluted bay was now a pathetic thing. It was nicer with only the stars out.
A vendor was passing by, going home with a few unsold green coconuts still over his shoulder. Gary stopped him and asked him to open one. The man was a bit surprised, though he did not hesitate to comply. Gary fished in his pocket for four pesos. He remembered that Filipinos would not drink coconut water after sunset. Why is that? he thought. Well, John could probably tell him.
So now, what was that thing, there in his mind, redeeming all the blackness and garbage? Garbage represented the process of life. There was no escaping that process. But underlying the process was eternity, nothing less. Eternity was freedom. And freedom, he thought, would never be far from reach in his heart.
Though much is taken, much abides -- so one of Rachel's poets had said. But really, Gary thought, though much is taken, everything abides. The happiness that had once come to the two of them from the idea of a life together -- that happiness is still there in some room of this rambling cosmic mansion. He could even find that same room if he wanted. But the whole place could now be his, if he did not feel afraid.
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