A Short Story by Gabriel Almirol (they/them)
Twitter: @dekolonisasyson
Tumblr: arimoanga
TW: Immolation and Sexual Abuse
Summary: A 19th century colonial town in the Philippines lays the ruination of a deacon’s wife, told from the eyes of the dead. Loosely inspired by the Salem Witch Trials (1692-1693) & the Philippine nation’s widely read period piece Noli me Tángere (transl. touch me not). December 2019.
If you look loosely, you will not hear the earthen loam of a man bed his unsatisfied wife. Turn, and you will not feel the carnal crave of a pregnant woman. Walk away, and you will not turn a blind eye to a pastor with smoker’s teeth. Run, and fare lost into the emulsion of pyres and purgatory, to which it will be your undoing.
If you choose to, by any chance, look closely, you will see the moon drape lavishly like milk teeth on baby-gums, from the sanctuary of an antiquated, Castilian man’s, or rather an old boy on the cusp of death, villa. Let your gaze pierce through the silky epoch of smog and vanilla threshold of frowning vines. There, on the backbone of the garden entrance, you will see the mulch break, something that is barely an arm shooting up. It twists, it screams, it childishly dances to a pantomime we cannot hear. We should wonder, amidst the cavity that our palpitations have dug into our ribcage, who buried it? It is dead as much as it is alive and feels as much as it doesn’t. Why should it dig itself out? What does it have to prove? Why have its hands been dirtied while others have been stainless? Who will it point to?
Simply, follow the trail of chirped flesh across the disposed, virus ridden bodies sunken bone-deep in road tar used to shroud them like a sacrilegious burial. The untarnished roads to mark an embryo colony. The arteries, sewerage as such, croaks and ligates beneath native feet, drinking, swallowing, as much of the blood it can hold until its blue. It will lead to the old money sinners, the macabre of tropical suburbs, and eventually, the epicenter: the church of Maynila.
It is unfair to say that she is a woman. Perhaps she is the ink on her marriage parchment. Perhaps she is the uncaged native from the zoo her ancestors had become, saved for the eyes of one. Perhaps she is just a child. Maybe Austronesian; her husband, to whom she will start addressing as savior, prescribes her as Malaysian more than Philippine. She is a cure in progress; when Julio Anonuevo scalds her mother tongue off muscle memory, Castilian is to be her love language. She is a drug, as the chaplain would enunciate opium, almost as if it was a ward, to the Chinese conflict. For the purpose of losing herself, she is to remain unnamed. Or, if you hate that, you may force the name Ergot onto her. It is truly not a name more than it is a curse.
Ergot resides in land that is hers and not hers. Is and once was. From the vanilla balcony of cement lacerated with Spanish bricks, the prairie is a rice-terrace field waiting to be ploughed. The molten sky eyes her, a cloudy cavern of stifled wails. The junction from where the red yolk smeared onto it shyly kisses her nose, to which sampaguitas groan and whine to, bending its spine of stems toward. The townscape, pictured by Capiz shell windowpanes, was rid and robbed off banks of egg-white sand and overspilling throat of turquoise water, rather washed into the dreary cornerstone of forts and looming, uneven streets that resembled crevices more than houses. The distant, almost speck-in-an-eye neck of Quezon city languorously stretches across bustling and bumbling auctions, menagerie and magisteriums; Ergot, with clumpy hands fondling her bosom from behind, wants to slit it whole.
You see, her husband is a boy playing in a sandbox like a throne. His status was cheap barley and arson of stone huts; lovingly immolating natives, claiming the body of the townscape as his own. As he pulls her to bed, realize how he is like an anchor, and she is a drowning mother vessel—down, down, down, she goes, vermilion silk thrashing beneath fingerpads as they scurry to find a rough patch of embroidery to hold from as she falls. She is pontificated by his tongue, more of a snake than a man’s, and stifled, bedded, by his saggy limbs like a beast wedging into captivity. Here the air is taut with wine and market vinegar, echoing the rhythm of Julio’s panting. But as his gaze shuttered with his own viceful pleasure, Ergot is consumed by the image of her own breasts: they seemed almost displaced, undone, and pinched, like empty hut roofs against the dying man’s chicken claws for fingers. With rattled breath and whitened elbows from being eaten alive, the aperture of her shoulder-blades resonates with a crack!, and she shoots up from the bed, keeling over, gesticulating a stop motion.
Pink stretch marks and finger marks like waning moons embed onto him. He ploughs through, marveling at her play. He ploughs, like a titan carabao squandering in mud, and ploughs and ploughs. Her diaphragm closes in on itself.
When it was to his convenience, he stands up from satin covers, heaving toward his whiskey decanter, muttering skeleton of phrases like she is not young enough. But Ergot was a shell of a chest, raking through pockets of air, head spiraling from shots of sweating skies and clouds hauntingly reminiscent of a labia. Uncontrolled, her stomach bowels and guts spill onto a stringy spit bucket she had kept aside for lovemaking. The bile juice slips out, cascading mercifully, stringing along the remnants of his taste.
The ricochet of her gagging echoes into Julio’s disgusted winces, meaty hands cueing the handmaids to subdue her. He leaves, and they flutter in; holding up her hair and her jewelry. The pulling of her scalp, the burning of her throat, keeps reminding her of the sex. Ergot gags and gags until she saw the outline of her own esophagus, until she falls on her hind, eardrums and putrid smell collapsing on itself.
What surprises her, though, is not the emaciated toil of her body but the shape of her vomit; after patting down, disrobing, redressing, and sliding the windowpane for clusters or air to worm in, she looks at it as it swashbuckles in the bucket. Oddly, the handmaids had not taken it away. So, she peers onto it; its rippling character like an herbal premonition, its ocherous clumps gnarl, pull apart, shred like cheese; until it forms something like a zygote, something like a foetus, something that is both alive and unliving. Ergot does not know this as she is not a scholar; but when her hands clasp the rim of the bucket, and the something flits a supposed to be eye-lid open.
She knocks it over. Joints squelching and scrambling, her voice-box forgot to scream, her eyes forgot to see.
We cannot divulge the horror in her visage by describing, tediously, the rattle her wrists made, the rat-like noises that squeaked from her larynx, the mousy droop of her black, beetle eyes against the tipped bucket. Instead, the true horror—read closely—unravels itself from the spinster himself. Remember that she is a marionette; you cannot pity her, you cannot feel her, you cannot touch her. But you can harp her strings, unwind her muscles, finger her expressions. If you cease the meek terror of a woman, turn your head to men of religion instead.
Padre Samuel is a Paschal mystery; bug-eyed, gray-browed, a hollow man resurrected. On Sundays, he is charitable; baptizing newborn slaves, pleaser of the archbishops, commander of deacons. The fabled missionary of young girls and war orphans; he is often seen applauding himself with a jaded pipe or two, scabbing his nostrils with a psychedelic high.
He is not inherently a bad man. On other days, he is simply just another person—or so as he’d like to think.
The starting point: dreary was the backbone of mists from the pyres. Smog of suspects, convulsing, writhing, agonizing over innocence off paganism. The village of Siquijor, a good few miles away from the Anonuevo estate. Here, witchcraft, soldiers whisper, was a spiritual plague—a ruination of hymns and liturgies. Others whisper that Puritans let this disease, one that does not fear God, run amok like sewer rats, untangling women from graces of childbirth to their rebirth as filthy monsters. In reply, Padre Samuel shakes his head at this, the chain of rosary dangling from his neck. In practice, Padre Samuel knots a whore’s ankles, peeling her skin like a ritual. He pats his robes clean from her sins; she kicks at him, but Samuel digs at her thighs and slowly unspools her muscles, tearing limb from kneecap to tendons to what he entices of salmon-pink mush of a god-fearer. This is a woman to be burned on the pyre—caught red-handed with needles, hay, bead-eyed dolls, swindling toward a bonfire for the mythical deity Mayari.
Under his hold, she does not stop writhing. Padre Samuel thinks of the howling bitch’s absence of mercy for his ears, then signals gunpowder arrows to wiggle through the air toward her abdomen. And, like a dying coyote, she whimpers, cackling flames teething her to death.
When her eyes have sunken to its bones and when the plasma off her slicks off like wax, Padre Samuel departs. To him, this is an even-handed justice—as a missionary of young, foolish, empty-headed natives—it is the rule to burn and burn untempered, not the exception, but merely the gospel. The gastric tang indulges him, invitingly. One could say that, on other days, he may be tempted, but on Sundays, he is as rigid as chapel pews.
If the moon shone blue-light on Padre Samuel, the smear of blotched, butchered and bitten skin would have shown, how would you feel knowing that the one who absolves you is the one who can’t absolve their very self?
What if, instead of the blue-light dawning on one man, it dawns on the rest of Maynila; the chaplain, the prison-guards, the men in helmets who don’t know the difference between cavalry and child’s play?
The crossroad: Julio Anonuevo and his whiskey decanter. On Thursdays, Julio the deacon is Samuel the priest’s right-hand man—they play many roles with so little mask, tucked into the safety of an old man’s money. The mansion, strongly it stood, was breathing—it is hard to point fingers on it, and as to why, but it does. It lives. It eats and it sleeps. Pastor Samuel acknowledges this when the halls churn and loom over the tidbits of his walking shadow, at the flickerbeat of candle-lamps, and at the ringing of dinner bells. Lines of crucifixes, from different wood abroad—timber, mahogany, oakwood—embellish every wallpaper, disrupting every stolen Mexican motifs. God’s omniscience at your beg and call, it seems to say. Samuel almost wonders if this is a sort of arousal for the deacon.
Danse macabre wafts into the Anonuevo manor, closely knit with the backdoor of the Maynila parish. At the heart, baroque, yellow lighted chandeliers flummox handmaids and
home-cooks bumble alike. Although Pastor Samuel visits Julio on a basis, Senor Anonuevo tirelessly tours him around the mansion: avaricious in property, deficit in properness.
“Samuel,” Julio hoarsely chuckles at his recount, to which the pastor had missed. “I can no longer fund the church as much as I use to. The plantations are dropping, now that the Americanos,” he hisses this sharply, like a dog-whistle, like a curse, “have become warmongers.”
Pastor Samuel’s expression is hard to describe. It contorts, but to what we are unsure,
as his face turns from our view. His back, wingbones clenched and tense, tells us he is disgruntled. In reply, “I thought we’ve contracted the financing. A lot of diocese brothers will lose their rectory.”
“Well,” Again, Julio chuckles, swinging his decanter, to which the pastor thinks of it as a pendulum; a poor attempt to tame him. “I have rescinded a fine amount of percentage. Don’t let me be misunderstood, good friend! Clean midwives are scarce here, even more so to fund.”
Padre Samuel’s fingers stop jittering. He calmly turns, with the precision of a killer, and eyes the man. “Your wife is bearing a child?”
Julio Anonuevo’s beet-coloured, vein popping face precedes him. Now, from the contours of his emaciated cheekbones, we can tell that a slit of a grin slashes across the pastor’s face. We do not know what it means—only that his face, shifting rabidly like tectonic plates—brutally grinds out a ‘Congratulations, you are a blessed man’.
“Second to that!” Julio takes an ungodly swig off his decanter. “Of course, you will be the one to baptize the kid, Samuel.”
Near the Virgin Mary mosaics in the main-hall, Padre Samuel rests gaze on a painting of Julio’s child-wife, drudged and cornered to the edge of the grandiose room of ballroom lights and rose-tinted shelves. Almost like a spider spinning its web.
Did you see it? Did you look closely enough? At the crook of the hallway, on the third crucifix varnished with Italian wood. The nailed Christ. The chipping of his face with wired, spiny laurels—and there. His stomach bolsters. It gargles giddily, rippling in waves of his wooden skin. Brown polish gilds in sweat and blood, wiggling from the troughs of his morose face. Oh, how the cavern his flesh has made, splotches of red underneath, revel in the umbilical cord still tied to Mary. Her very womb, from the mosaic across him, sharing its sorrows to him. Bodies, skin conjoining, on the painting and the sculpture’s hips, something moves. Something moves within.
Ergot did not know when it began and when it was to end. But teetering midsummer dusk, something—it—slips between her thighs, bruising in its wake. She can feel it tumble and wedge between her limbs, snaking from her lower half and into the furling of her intestines. At times she ignores it. But on long nights, when the moon waxes and wanes hungrily, she claws at the expanse of her skin with inflamed eyelids. It leaves her raw, ruined, as she slaps, pulls, stretches the softness of her being to find the stone, the unnamed thing underneath. Lungs wrenching, she claws and claws, scratch marks festering like a virus, nails caked with dry, dry, dry remnants of flesh.
Her flesh starts to chunk out like spoiled milk. The worn-down crucifixes, like a hundred eyes, watch her rot, decompose, turn to ferment. The churning within her abdomen watches her too.
This becomes an ongoing procession—the purgatory sun, splattering its guts against her maddened face. Something moves within her she is unknowing of. A cat and mouse game—the hunting ground is her own body. When she is asleep, it is awake. When her breaths shudder, it is placid. When she is unmoving, it ebbs, near, observing; learning her arms, mapping out her chest and the dip of her thighs, the gap in her teeth, the symmetry of her skull.
She is performing for the eyes of others, with her own blinded.
Laying in dust motes, a copy of Apollodorus’s Bibliothecca has been curated by the Anonuevo estate. There is a blasphemous tale in this—arduous, heretic. I will carry this by word of mouth to maintain its mythical illusion.
The Argonauts, with the brevity of brawn than wit, sail across the Aegean sea to the hospitable, cultured coast of Cyzicene. They were happily hosted by the Doliones—even daring to solicit their festivities, mooch their crop, swig their wine. After all, they were heroes on a conquest history will never undo.
Come their departure, when they have rescinded their anchors. Here, they are unknowing of the tempest about to devour them. Thunders, lightning, the sound of the sky’s spine snapping push their sails—moving backwards instead of moving forward. They are pushed back by the tempest until the Argo clashes onto banks of sand that were familiar, but the sun never shone to provide them the clarity.
The inhabitants of the island, unable to see, indulged them as Pelasgian invaders. Then, they mantle an attack. Of course, in the lieu of heroics, the Argonauts retaliate.
Nothing with heroes ends at stalemate: for historians could repaint, readdress, contour their victories and bury their losses. At the end, when blood had stuttered, wiped against mens’ foreheads like laurels against bronze helmets, light sputters across the land they have subdued.
In the end, they had not known that the ones they have murdered were the same people who nurtured them, who has hosted them. They have killed the Doliones people, simply because of the trick of light.
In its likeness, Ergot is in the dark of the aberration, of the parasite in her. Her consciousness both shrivels and is lucid; she floats above her own body, grounded by the itch of her toes and the pain that christens her. Dazingly rounding the knob of Julio’s closet, her hands weren’t and were her own, twisting and bending and curling up like unironed cloth. Like a wet rug unwrung. Blood dripping, squelching out of her. Her mouth separates from the balm of her cheeks—gaping like tilapia out of water, foggy eyes bulging. She was every and no object to be touched and devoured.
She finds a scarce hanger, wood chirping at the edges. She takes it by its neck, volcanic heat weaving through her biceps. About to combust. She nulls it, pries it, pulled it apart until her own thumbs feel sliced. She tears at it with a hunger.
It snaps. Ergot quickly takes an uncoiled strand; pinching two slippery fingers against an edge, straightening it. She then puts it up to the ocherous chandelier grimacing at her; deeming it was sharp enough, she lifts her draping saya up. She pulls at the layer of cotton undergarments—sharply pushing it down to her legs, feet stomping on it—she kneels down and shoves the make-shift scraper between the thighs.
She screams like a forlorn widow. Her ribcage like prison racks, air-sacks jostling and bursting against its bluntness, inching toward the lower end of her torso. Ave Maria lives and dies on her lips, hands pushing the hanger further, further to scrape her innards. The poison of the unborn thing will not touch her, will not condemn her, she wildly thinks, pushing and blistering and dripping fuchsia until the wretched churn swelters on a newer pain, a newer sedative. Ergot is living when she feels she is undying and the thing, the monster inside of her is frightened of the charred flesh she has become.
If you must know, she gives it a burial. Like a clump of sugar, or a block of gelatin, she pops it into dirt for the earth to eat. It will be buried alive.
A measly, inane dog picks at it. This is shortly before a punishment that fitted her crime was delivered.
Padre Samuel is a green-faced man. He barters men’s sins for a comfortable life; laced with vignettes and delectable refurbishment, it is a pitiful seat he reigns on. More so that Julio retrieved his assets. He is an apex predator; nearly jumping on himself when he hears of the child-wife’s abhorrent miscarriage, ready to for reimbursements.
His role in this was not simply to act as a divine punisher. No, it cannot be put simply. Padre Samuel was the orchestrator of men, destroyer of leylines, the conductor of a heavenly choir. He does not come to sinners, but sinners come to him, clambering onto his robes whilst pig-faced and kneeling. In this and with this, here is another purgatory: purgatory is the pyre, ravenous and licking at chalk-cheeked victims.
As if clips held the corner of his lips, his mouth splits. This will ordain him to bishop, and to think, what a fine day it was.
Ergot convulses. She convulses: eye-lids violet with swollenness, mouth sewn tight. Mouth sewn tight. She tried to wedge her chin and upper lip apart; but the sew did not budge. The heftiness of her eye-lids shackled the strength of her sight. She looks down, being skinned awake and chopped like a wild beast.
Masked men in white cloth slaked furious torches, footsteps like cavalry, galloping to set fire on to her abdomen. The churning and crumbling of the ground from above reminded Ergot much of the thing that was inside of her; she thought of how she still mothers this, how her painted nails and mellow flesh nurtured this rage, this adversity, this blue-black beating of God’s people. People—whom crouched like vipers, ran like rats, pedaled oars and rudders against the sea of blood they leak.
A hybrid of wail and an itch in her throat tears from her battered vessel. She is the same as them; a province pig, awaiting to be roasted. They are different mammals, same kind. She was, also, an insect to them; easy to go after, to prey on. The roof of the sound bellows, undesirable and munching on eardrums.
The body of death, like spilled wine, holds onto the nape of her neck, the flush of its heat flowering from the gaunt of her bones. It presses against her, lovingly; grabbing her torso, along with its hand, ripples an incendiary ocean, its fingers dips between her thighs. Ergot’s breath hitches; orange-yellow, white flames singe and flutters and flirts with her pubic hair, smoking raw. The masked men have bore the torch against her lower half.
Laughter, sobbing, screaming: the holy trinity of women. Ergot burns doing all three; as the scorching clambers up, her head tussles and atones with pride, with peeve, with fury. Her dead, dead eyes laying coolly onto Padre Samuel’s creed—she, buck-naked, stripped off her marriage, an undressed corpse, almost nothing to be seen. She looks until her skin bubbles; a mixture of velvet and blood, of whiskey and anger. Like broasted pork skin market vendors sold and made Spaniard men chatter, she was embalmed. Soon, the odour of cracked cranium and the dead cells ebbs and slices native nostrils. Ergot was slowly cooked, a blob, a clump of barely flesh against the pyre, nailed and tied as Christ was to the mercy of immolation—the scapegoat, the sun, the sin carver.
We may say Padre Samuel committed arson once more, pinning a mule’s tail on the
burning woman. Or better yet, the undertaking of her life to protect the Anonuevo estate. It is barely soon that Julio Anonuevo, the widowed man he was, polishes a younger wife—this time, hardly on the cusp of ten, newly menstruated.
The girl is doe-eyed, soft-spoken, less resistant, more meat and muscle. She is often seen, from the Capiz shell terrace, wagging her flat bosom at the deacon. Still, she is unnamed, eyes too young to see the bulging stomachs of crucifixes, and the cord that extends the womb of Mary to their own. As she remains identity-less—you may force the Tituba on her. And for the embryo she unknowingly bears, it is too resilient not to be named. We will name it Ergot.
References
Luisa A. Gloria, Goldwasser
“to burn, and burn untempered—"
2. Sylvia Plath, The Courage of Shutting Up
“how about the eyes, the eyes, the eyes?
mirrors can kill and talk, they are terrible rooms
in which a torture goes on one can only watch.
the face that lived in this mirror is the face of a dead man”
About the concept: "I wanted to write about the hypocrisy of the Spanish chaplain in their occupation of the Philippines, but through the lens of gothic-historical horror. References to pan-Euro heritage are often made and written to overpower the Filipino voice in the story; which takes form of the woman, who is violated and subjugated. This story is mainly inspired by Nick Joaquin's tropical gothic tales and Rizal's essays."
Context
The Spanish Empire, from their 16th century conquest, purposed the archipelago of the Philippines as a theological, christened capital (Cebu City). This has led to intensive assimilation of Spaniards, to hybridize Filipinos, to manufacture a biracial utopia, weakening the Philippines’ inferior genotype—yet also acting as a symbol of civilizing them. Pre-colonial names were wiped out by a consensus, leaving us as European chattel. Forts, militarization, deployment of Filipino men, even occasionally in indigenous attire, kept us at their watch and their empirical hyperopia (in Jose Rizal’s “Sobre La Indolencia De Los Filipinas”—transl. The Laziness of the Philippine People—the Spanish educational system and military had only brought Philippines destabilization). And, most of all, the very purpose of their Christian colonization rotted—church hierarchies were extensively corrupt. Hence, the very spark of nationhood from Jose Rizal’s novel, Noli Me Tangere, had become the Philippines’ Independence saving grace, as it dissected the malaise, dualism and dramatization of the country’s social landscape. Here, Padre Samuel is alike of Padre Damaso—who was deceitful, spiteful and classist.
By any means, Ergot is not Maria Clara (the hero’s lover)—but in a way she might be. Raped, disdained, owned to signify a colonized body. At its core, this is a story of possession.