The Breath of Night (11 page)

17 August 1975

My dear Mother and Father,

I trust you’ve recovered from the funeral. No doubt you’re swamped with paperwork. There are advantages to death among people whose only effects are a rice jar and some scraps of bedding. I’ve been living in my memory all week. By a strange coincidence I caught the tail end of a play on the World Service. A boy (I couldn’t work out whether he were at boarding school or borstal) was describing his family. ‘Everyone loves his
grandmother
,’ he said. I wept. Whatever our differences, Greg, Agnes, Cora and I were as one in our devotion to Granny. I’m sure that the same goes for Nancy, Ann, Portland and all the cousins. She never made us feel small – even as children – but always
supported
us in everything we did. For me, of course, that was
following
my vocation.

Whether she truly believed that my vow had been an
integral
factor in Father’s return from Burma, she encouraged me to do so. Long gone were the days when the Tremaynes aimed to produce a priest every generation, but while the rest of you were insisting that God wouldn’t hold me to a vow made as a five-year-old, she realised that it was what I wanted. Had I simply wished to convince Him of my sincerity, I could have promised to sweep the paths or share my sweet ration or run more errands for the convalescent soldiers; I would never have pledged myself to the priesthood if the idea hadn’t already been in my mind.

There’s nothing I’d have liked more than to have been with you for the service but, even if the Regional had given me
permission
, I couldn’t have left the parish. Tensions are running
high right now. I’m one of the few links between the military and the people. If I’d gone, who’s to say what horrors would have awaited me on my return?

Running high is an understatement. After three years of Martial Law, it’s plainly not the temporary remedy we were promised. Our hopes of President Marcos have faded as fast as his pledges. Far from tackling corruption, the government has institutionalised it. In Britain, party leaders identify the national interest with that of their class; here they narrow it down to their clan. We supposed that our distance from the capital would protect us from sustained scrutiny, but the
poblacion
is as closely monitored as Manila. There’s nothing subtle about it. Armed men swagger through the streets, intimidating, arresting, raping and torturing. Some are from the army, some the police and some the constabulary (forget any notion of PC Simon Freeman, it’s a particularly ruthless special unit). They attack each other almost as often as they do us, so that our only hope of redress lies in their increasingly brutal turf wars.

It’s the young men who, inevitably, feel their oppression most keenly and, in a bid to avoid friction, I’ve reverted to my
Ampleforth
training, seeking to settle their differences on the field – or, in this case, the court. I fear that, given your respective aversion to balls that are neither bowled at a wicket nor knitted into socks, you’ll already have lost patience with my basketball stories. But I trust you’ll permit me my increasingly rare moments of triumph. Having hit my head on so many door frames that it’s now as dented as Consolacion’s, I deserve some recompense for being 6’4” in a country where the average male is 5’3”. Indeed, I suspect that my unlikely athletic prowess – I write as the free throw champion of the region – has been a more effective recruiting tool for the Church among a certain sort of disaffected teenager than the most colourful fiesta. By deploying all my negotiating skill, I managed to set up a game between the constabulary and the parish. I thought it wise to confine my presence to the
sidelines
and to call on don Bernardo Arriola to act as referee. In
spite of his blatant bias towards the constabulary, we trounced them 88 – 57. That’s when my public-school code let me down. Instead of sportsmanlike handshakes as they left the court, the losers stormed through the crowd and into their jeeps. A few days later, two of our star players went missing. One was found castrated by the roadside and the other strangled in a ditch.

I should have played. At least they’d have had no need to geld me. I’m sorry; that was a remark in execrable taste. Horses are gelded; men are impotent; priests are set apart. But you’ll
understand
my bitterness when I tell you that I was the one left to console their parents and preach forgiveness; I was the one left to consign their corpses to the earth.

The conflict, as ever, centres on land: who owns it; who works it; and who covets it. It affects the whole parish, from the farmers to the Ibaloi. Don’t bother racking your brains; I haven’t mentioned them before, at any rate not by name. For four years I’ve been calling them the Igorot, a blanket term coined by the Spanish for all the Mountain People, and they’ve been too polite to correct me. Can you imagine Alasdair McLeod or Ewan Dalgliesh showing similar forbearance if a blundering Filipino had described them as English? It was only when I was
studying
some legal documents that I realised my mistake. The Ibaloi have lived in the Cordilleras since antiquity. Unlike more recent settlers, they have no property deeds since they hold that land comes from God – a view that you’d think would find favour in an ostensibly Christian country. You’d be wrong. The President has earmarked the Ibaloi territory to recompense his cronies. So first, he passed a law designating all land with a slope of more than 18 degrees – which pretty much covers the entire area – as a forestry reserve on which no one is permitted to live, farm or hunt. Then, he gave the logging concession to Miguel Arriola, don Bernardo’s cousin.

Arriola, who’s been felling trees so fast that he’s already caused several landslides, needs a reliable road to transport the wood. Don Bernardo has offered to build one through his estate.
I’ve no wish to impugn what may be genuine family feeling, but I can’t help thinking that the huge government subsidies for the future national highway have played a part. What do you suppose the IMF and the other international agencies who are funding the project would say if they knew that it would result in hundreds of people being thrown off the land? Would they display the same chilling indifference as when they demanded the institution of Martial Law in the first place, or would they start to question the nature of their aid? The only good to have emerged from this sorry story is that it has prompted the Ibaloi and the lowlanders to set aside their long-standing antagonism and make common cause.

So, when don Bernardo brought in bulldozers to raze the crops and demolish houses, the Ibaloi came down from the mountains to join the farmers in forming a human barricade as, for that matter, did I, Father Benito, the Daughters of St Paul, and hundreds of members of BCCs from across the province. Not that it made any difference. The following day he called in the constabulary, who more than repaid his favours on the
basketball
court as they dispersed the protesters at gunpoint. For a moment I feared that there might be a massacre, especially when some of our more hot-headed youths started to stone the soldiers in a bid to avenge their friends and teammates, but Benito and I succeeded in calming them. At the end of the day, the physical wounds were light but, as people contemplated the devastation of their homes and livelihoods, the emotional scars ran deep. Don Bernardo has offered compensation but, so far, it’s amounted to nothing more than a few sacks of rice.

Benito and I drove to Baguio to solicit help from the Bishop who, while assuring us of his concern and promising to speak to don Bernardo, was at pains to emphasise the danger of his taking too public a stance. He played his usual trick of hinting that he was constantly grappling with forces beyond our ken and that it was only by the most adroit balancing act that he kept the entire diocese from plunging into chaos. Benito, who despises
the Bishop’s fawning on his political masters, maintained that his real fear is of losing the friendship of the
haciendos
, with their invitations to lunch, golf and weekends on their private yachts. I prefer to think that his motives are pure, as was borne out when he authorised us to brief church lawyers on behalf of the dispossessed farmers and tribesmen. They’ve lodged papers with the judge, but it may yet be months before the preliminary hearing and years before the case is resolved. This doesn’t stem from any Jarndyce v Jarndyce-like tangle but from the relentless pressures on the courts.

Don Bernardo resents our involvement, which he regards as particularly unjust since he’s one of the few landowners to have embraced the spirit of reform and turned his shared tenancies into leaseholds. The trouble, as he well knows, is that this doesn’t necessarily work to the farmers’ advantage. Indeed, it’s a moot point as to which system is the more inequitous (don’t reach for your dictionary; I realise as I write that I’ve hit on a handy amalgam of inequitable and iniquitous). The share tenant is vulnerable to the proportion of his harvest due to the landlord, and the leasehold tenant to a fixed rent that takes no account of the all too frequent crop failures. Meanwhile, American
agronomists
have been pressing for the introduction of high-yield rice hybrids, which make far more sense on paper than on the ground. The additional expenditure on pesticides and fertilisers leaves the small farmers in even greater debt.

Whatever their lasting benefits, the pesticides and fertilisers have had a devastating short-term impact. Not only have they killed off many of the rodents and crustaceans that families forage to supplement their diet, but they’ve led to the deaths of several babies. I don’t know if it’s a practice unique to Luzon or if it even occurs in darkest Durham, but for centuries mothers here have weaned their children by rubbing soil on their nipples and well, you can fill in the rest. The BCCs are struggling to educate women about the dangers of herbicides, but the lesson has come too late for Maricel Solito and Joel Quizon.

How does one honour the death of a child in the midst of such high infant mortality? I feel like a chaplain on the Somme, feebly reiterating that the value of a life bears no relation to its length. Was Granny Tremayne a worthier person than Granny Courtenay because she outlived her by two decades? Of course not. Just as some of us are tall and some short, some fat and some thin, some black and some white (I’ve omitted ‘some rich and some poor’, which I no longer regard as part of the natural order), so some die young and others live to a ripe old age. And the grieving parents listen respectfully while I spout my
platitudes
. Do you think that may be why priests are required to be celibate, not because of compromised loyalties, let alone the need to safeguard church property, but to shield us from
everyday
emotion? It takes a measure of inhumanity to interpret the will of God.

I don’t want to give you the impression that I’m lonely. These people aren’t just my parishioners but my friends. Nevertheless, there are moments when I long to be with someone who shares my background as well as my beliefs. So I welcomed the chance to spend a few days last month with Hendrik. After his success in Cabanatuan, he has been rewarded – if that’s the right word – with a new parish in Angeles City, which he was eager for me to visit. I can only suppose that he was trying to test my resilience. In which case, I failed dismally. You’ve heard of wool towns and mining villages? Well, this is a sex city. That’s its entire
raison d’être.
We walked through streets that resembled the corridors of a giant brothel. Every depravity – that’s no exaggeration – was on offer, the one variable being the price. After fifteen minutes I began to think more kindly of the
haciendos.
They at least only steal their tenants’ livelihoods; they allow them to keep their souls.

Hendrik remains undaunted. He brushes off the regular death threats he receives from pimps and bar owners as if he were one of the Ibaloi trusting in talismans. He’s befriended several of the prostitutes, helping them to obtain medical checks and
treatment, and even, in a few cases, to rebuild their lives, but he concedes that it’s a Sisyphean task. For every woman who leaves the streets, two more arrive to take her place. His main concern is to provide a refuge for the children, some no older than five or six: children who should be playing in the fields, not
flaunting
themselves in doorways. What kind of men take pleasure in such perversion? What force of collective amnesia allows them to bury their own innocence? As I watched little girls hitch up their skirts at the first glimpse of trouser, I understood what led revolutionaries to take up arms.

Righteous indignation is all too easy at one remove, so I’ll stick to asking questions. Is it any accident that Angeles City with its 80,000 prostitutes (no, I haven’t added a nought for effect) sprang up on the perimeter of one of the two largest US bases in the country? What do you suppose Uncle Sam would say if he knew how his favourite nephews were spending their well-earned Rest and Relaxation? Would that fierce-looking white-haired man raise one of his bushy eyebrows at the nightly rape of women and children by his servicemen, or would he turn a blind eye to the regrettable fallout from saving the free world?

The Philippines has, of course, borne the brunt of US
imperialism
throughout the twentieth century. I’m aware that I’m treading on delicate ground here and that you, Father, have every reason to be grateful for the American presence in the Pacific in 1945. But we’ve moved on, at least on the face of it. Please bear in mind that I never adopted the blanket anti-Americanism of my contemporaries. I was in Roosendaal at the time of Grosvenor Square but, even had I been in London, I wouldn’t have marched. Shameful as it is to admit, I supported the war in Vietnam. Now, after three years in the Philippines, I see Communism less as a universal threat than as a secular version of the gospel. What’s more, I’ve discovered the true story of the American invasion of the Philippines: how they freed the country from the Spanish only to annex it for themselves, reneging on their promises and killing 600,000 Filipinos along the way. Is it any wonder that
Benito refers to it as the first Vietnam and berates his
countrymen
for celebrating independence from Spain every 12 June and then following it with Filipino-American Friendship Day every 4 July?