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I say this so you will remember that he did interrupt me. How odd, how odd the sexual co
Abigail kissed me this morning and I cupped a tiny breast fluttering like a baby chick in my hand. I strain in my bonds. Morning interrupts me again. I interrupt myself. Time is the interruption of space, or is it space, the interruption of time.
How silly I'm getting in my old age. How silly.
After Dagupan a strange uneasiness captured me. So much, so fast. The raid, then touching Teresita, and quickly now snips of rumor that the 721st might go to Vietnam, a persistent and persistently ignored rumor for the past months. I was ready to believe it, ready to go, ready for anything, I thought. I began staying apart from the Trick, spending my breaks and all my money in Manila. I soon squandered my savings. Teresita was lovely, long, and sweet, her body strong under placid skin, her pubic hair silken and straight, her love satisfying, and expensive. Moving once again away from commitments, as I had when I reenlisted, I made her take money for her love, made her eat the bitter grass. And when the money was gone, I wouldn't go to Manila. This is not counting the seven hundred or so I'd won on the long restriction. Not a pe
Haddad had really done well on the market. He was well-suited to the business of business, generally no better or no worse than the average American businessman, and probably better educated than most. He wouldn't cheat his friends; he was at least a political liberal, though economically he was of the buyer-beware school; and he was the only person I'd ever known who had read all of Proust. I think that may be the secret to his soul. He would work hard, and he saw the making of money the art one prepares his life for. God, he loved to make money, not for what it would buy, nor for power, but just for money. Plus he had imagination; and he never cheated me. If I could have convinced him to play the profit game, keep enough to live on and play again, and give the rest away, he would have been a better sort. But he said, very seriously, that the tax structure was such that… well, you know. But he was free with his money and when success laid half-ownership of a bar in Town in his hands, he pla
Good Friday, Karfreitag. Day of suffering, prelude to resurrection, day of judgment, epilogue of life. Good Friday?
We were on Break off a set of mids, in Town by 0730, drunk before 1000 and off to see the flagellants. Blood has always sickened me slightly, but I felt it was something I should see, or Morning convinced me it was something I should see.
They were at the edge of Town in a small and, as far as we knew, nameless barrio. Those flagellants who, during ordinary years, made their homes in Angeles made a point of arriving back home on Good Friday; they were joined by a few weekend worshippers. A year spent dragging a heavy ironwood cross around, across Luzon, had built a scum-brown callous on their shoulders, down across the blades. Pain, spiritual anguish, and living on the charity of their brothers had seeped away the flesh of their faces, swelled the bones of their bodies, mottled their eyes. And here they lay their crosses down, not on a significant, bald hill, but among scattered nipa huts, on a dry, dusty street thick with stray dogs, rooting pigs, occasional chickens, and watched by the vaguely religious, the curious, and the sick. The Lord, their Father, refused them even the relief of a single cloud to intercede with the dry, parched heat of the sun, refused a single drop of rain, even the tiniest breeze. But the sky was split asunder all the day by passing jets tearing their angry tails of thunder behind them. The three, for this year there were only three though Morning said there had been twice as many as the year before, arrived slowly, singly, denied even the friendship of suffering, stopped at the end of the snaking path marking their trail. The path, if followed backwards, would lead you across the plain, through the heat, into the jungles thick with steam where the sun sucked the very moisture from the leaves, and through the jungle to the mountains thrust up in the earth's time of agony, up trails which hung to the steep slopes with the uneasiness of mists. Up and across the highlands, past men with filed and betal-stained teeth who buried their dead sitting in clay beehive huts, past the missionaries who were telling these same men about Jesus' suffering, but these same men laughed at those foolish devils carrying about wood not even good for fires, laughed, and sometimes killed them, and the missionaries too, but always with a laugh. But these had made it, and except where the monsoon or the casual passing of other men erased their marks, you could follow them backwards. As they came and eased their burdens to the ground, their backs bent in habit, they took up branches and whips and, with the same patience and calm with which they lugged their crosses, began to beat themselves without pause for food or drink; striking the sinful flesh until welts, then blood, rose from their skin. An occasional onlooker would join the devotion, until his sins were washed away too.
And above, jets tolled the sky.
"Such peace, man, on their faces," Morning said as we watched, a basket of beer at our feet, shame in our eyes. "Wonder if it's the pain, something in the pain?"
"Inflicting or enduring?" I asked, but he didn't answer.
We watched and drank ourselves into a bright haze; watched until blood splattered in the dust at our feet. A single bright drop, as small as a tick, nestled in the sun-blond hairs on my arm. Almost without a word, we left. The word: Jesus Christ.
Before Haddad's party, we attended the middle-class Good Friday: all the suffering endured by statues. A long march of wax and wooden and plastic Christs, wooden pain, plastic blood, and little boys in white robes. Though the streets were thick with bodies, the only sound was breath, shuffle of feet, click of beads, a silence of shame more than reverence. Those other three, fools, yes, still out in the darkness, still bent under their own blows, wailing sinful flesh with enfeebled arms and enhanced determination, the blood syrupy and thick with flies against their wounds.
Haddad's party, had it been the end, would have been the perfect climax to this odd day. We ate a good di