Friday, May 18, 2007

fic :: hypocrisy

It began with the phrase ego te absolvo, in nomini patri, et filli et espiritu sancti…

She could’ve answered it with Amen, but for no apparent reason she didn’t. Just a muffled noise, a pursed lip, bloodied and swollen. She lay there bleeding, tears welled in her eyes, asking for a crumb of forgiveness, but at the same time she was unusually adamant.

A victim of unyielding pride. Stubborness that went the fatal distance.

The priest remained calm despite his knowledge that the crumpled heap of flesh and bone in front of him was a lost cause. He knew that, in fact he was the one who attempted to plug the puncture holes in her frail carcass. He lost count on the knife wounds, and was simply there in case there’s something he could do—perhaps to administer the last rites. The small white cloth under the neck collar served as a calming presence, the evidence of God, merciful and forgiving.

However from the way he mustered this incident, she was becoming exceedingly resilient.

Death was never distant, he mused. She merely didn’t want to accept that reality. He waited, watching her as she gasped, like a candle on the slow process of mortal depletion.

* * * * *

Manang Linda was her name, or what they assumed her name to be. She was a prey of a planned reprisal that ended in senseless violence. Nobody saw what happened and the majority simply decided it was her own doing. A good riddance case, the police might call it—same thing that normally happen to drug addicts and other social menaces—exterminated for causes unknown, possibly of vigilante doing. In her case, it was different. She was stabbed not because she wasn’t a disease that plagued the perimeter of her residence, but there were other specific reasons.

They claimed she possessed stern religious convictions. A member of a charismatic organization that didn’t want her. She was neither a believer nor a follower, but she joined anyway in the belief that it could somehow redeeem her from all the shortcomings she had done in the past. Likewise, she believed that she could use the stringency of religion as the impeccable weapon to counteract any vice in her surrounding. Probably one that reaped her sufficient number of people who despised her. Beneath all the `goody-two-shoes’ façade she exuded in her daily lifestyle, Manang Linda was the perfect vestige of character deception: she has a terrible penchance for backstabbing while engaged in routine Wednesday novenas; her tongue could pierce through the thickest barrier of personal censors, often at the pole position of rumor-proliferation.

Albeit it was how people saw her, but the flaws in her attitude compensated for a heart opened to a selected few. Perhaps that maybe a number of her neighbors felt bad about her stabbing; she was a kind human being, and merely a product of probably an uncontented childhood or a family broken by whatever force one could muster. She may not be the perfect example of an ephemeral structure, yet she did what she thought could change the world she once attempted to recreate. All the while the failure was anything but it abruptly molded her into someone a lot started to express outright derision.

It was her appropriate retribution to the surge of misgivings that went before.

* * * * *

Fr. Eliseo Lara was supposedly on his way to a congregation meet at Tagaytay when the news of the stabbing precluded him from pushing through his journey.

He never knew Manang Linda, but he was aware she knew him. Perhaps one of the usual ten people who attend his daily 5 PM mass. Since his transfer from a rural assignment in the provinces, life in the slums nevertheless posed a challenge to his capacity to renew their faith. It should be a difficult task, the monsignor in the area had once confided in him, but Fr. Lara assumed otherwise. Slum people are mainly blind in the ways of God, he remarked, and the fact that negligence on our part also contributed to that realization. When he first celebrated mass in a decrepit chapel that the people there called their parish, only five people attended. He didn’t blame them to their blatant ignorance of God, however rebuilding the entire parish was worth a certain magnitude of sacrifice anyway.

Certain sacrifice? He mused as he grasped the sweat-drenched palms of the dying woman, her fingers searching for his. He had administered the last rites, the only thing he could do except to wait for the paramedics to arrive. When he absolved her, Fr. Lara noticed the hesitation on Manang Linda’s part, only a muffed sound, inaudible for him to construe an approval.

Fr. Lara saw this as practically a blessing in disguise for most people. He heard of everything about the person lay bloodied on his lap, multiple perforations on her lavender-colored blouse, now drenched in dark crimson. He attempted to plug the wounds with a wet towel, but she continued to moan and lose blood. In a sudden influx of panic, he turned the woman over and while her stomach was ripped apart by the brutality of the attack, her intestines spilled out. He nearly vomitted, nevertheless his presence somehow contributed an aura of comfort to the dying.

He forced a deep swallow and skillfully with both hands, he lifted her head towards his lap. She gurgled blood, the only sound she could produce at that moment. Fr. Lara slowly shook his head, apparently aware that the woman would die anytime soon. He noticed a pool of tears in her eyes, now half-closed, waiting for death to come and take whatever life has upon the battered structure. As she coughed, he felt God had punished him for allowing a human being to die on his hands, and he could hear the soft wheezes of air spraying from a contracted windpipe. A gasp, a moan, emanating from a small knife hole in her chest.

She has to die. Father Lara mercifully prayed. God please let her find her peace.

He looked for someone he knew, the people stood above him, eyed him with remarkable admiration. Nobody lifted a finger to help him, knowing how Manang Linda had sullied them in the past. Just because I’m a priest? He thought, that I should accept whatever punishment God has in store for me? And the dying woman wasn’t what he could consider as a punishment for any previous mistakes he committed. More of a corporeal mortification in anyway, his mind revolted at that statement. The degree of weight such incident had imposed upon him was tantamount to the flesh-penetrating lashes those people from Opus Dei use for their daily sacrifices.

Finally, he questioned himself, why should they deserve such kind of treatment? As life drifted out freely from a multitude of stab wounds, Fr. Lara could only stare in helpless disbelief.

Labels: fiction, writing