Bloodtide

Fiesta in the province is always a big affair. People prepare months for a single day of

revelry and merry-making. Lechon is a necessity so pigs needed to be fattened up for their meat to

be more delicious, their skin crispier, and their blood thicker. Chickens, too, are meticulously

prepared so that no part would go to waste—the dressed body would be roasted, the innards would

become pulutan, and part of the feet would garnish the lugaw. Streets are soon festooned with

rows and rows of colorful banderitas, like a makeshift rainbow on bamboo poles. There would be

brass bands rehearsing almost every day for a whole week before the fiesta, each member wearing

a brightly colored uniform—the guys covered up and looking every bit uncomfortable parading in

the summer heat with their heavy instruments, while the girls twirled their batons and did their

routines in skirts that barely covered any skin, smiling sweetly as if nothing could be more

wonderful than spinning half-clad under the glaring sun.

Every night there would be entertainment shows in the plaza—singing contests, dance

contests, beauty contests, you name it—and the evenings would be just as noisy and busy as the

days, only so much darker and cooler. The peals of laughter and the eager applause would tear the

velvet night’s silence, and the barangay would be filled with crisp human sounds—warm, musical,

and alive. The week would pass, and the big day would come; guests would arrive at each house

expecting to be fed good food for free; and mothers would knock on neighbors’ doors to borrow

money because the menudo needed more potatoes, the rice had run out, the buko pandan still

lacked gulaman. Beer bottles would be clinking at every corner as the men talked about their

temperamental, nagging wives and the termagants who were their bosses, and oh, did you see how

Maria’s behind jiggles as she walks, pare?

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 In our barangay, fiesta is not celebrated on the feast day of our parish’s patron saint, St.

Vincent Ferrer, but on Good Friday, that day every year when Jesus’ bloody walk to Calvary and

his sacrificial death on the cross are commemorated by millions of devout Catholics around the

globe. Sure, a house or two would serve a feast and invite some guests over on the fifth of April,

the barangay’s official fiesta date, but it is always during the somber week of Lent leading up to

Good Friday that our barangay really gets into the festive fiesta spirit. There would be stations-of-

the-cross set up everywhere, each with a group of at least three women singing the Pasyon from

six in the morning until eight at night—untiring and persistent in their post, unmindful of the siesta,

bathroom breaks, bingo, mahjong, and other banalities of common provincial life. On Maundy

Thursday night, at around seven or eight, people would eagerly wait outside of their homes to

watch men dressed as Roman soldiers, otherwise called Hudyo, reenact their search for Jesus. If

you were particularly lucky, these Roman-soldier-impersonators would even pay your house a

visit, aiming their papier mâché spears at you and the rest of your family and, with gruff voices,

demand that you hand Jesus over to them so that he could be arrested and punished. Each time a

group of Hudyo would barge into a home, the children would shriek with delight, while the adults

would happily invite them to stay a little longer for some simple dinner because, you know, the

lady of the house was not able to prepare anything too grand for the occasion, the visit was quite

unexpected, and with pork impermissible the fish prices skyrocketed susmaryosep santisima, but

would relyenong bangus and grilled tilapia be okay?

And each time, the Hudyo would come out of the houses loud with laughter, thanking

the kumpares and the kumares for the delectable dinner served to them while they held on to their

bulging bellies and carried a take-away plastic bag filled with what was left of the food they had

just enjoyed, some pasalubong for their waiting families. The task of arresting Jesus would

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eventually be forgotten and the Hudyo would go home for the night, peeling away their improvised

regalia and reverting to their usual selves. Tomorrow, they would put on the costume again,

sporting the bravado that goes with it. Tomorrow, they would put the costume on one last time

until next year, when they would again have to play the Roman soldiers, stop by the houses and

arrest Jesus, only to be stalled by a plate of relyenong bangus and a serving of grilled tilapia paired

with soy sauce and kalamansi.

On Good Friday itself, yards and yards of thick, sturdy braids of rope would be installed

on both sides of the streets, fencing in the Hudyo as they sat astride brown, white, and black horses,

coming down the asphalt street looking all grim and regal in their military uniforms. The crowd

would push, pull, and tug at each other just so they could hold on to the rope as it gets taut,

oblivious of the bleeding cuts on their hands, intent only on seeing the show put up for the

year’s Sinakulo. The blood was nothing. The heat was nothing. The long wait was nothing. There

were only Jesus and his penitential walk, and each person’s consuming desire to walk with him.

Every year, the fiesta in our laid-back barangay would be celebrated in the same

paradoxical manner. As each household reflected on the death and resurrection of Jesus through

prayer, there would always be on the sidelines the excesses of festivity and gastronomic pleasures.

As the person playing the role of Jesus “dies” on the cross erected in the plaza at exactly three in

the afternoon, after all the characters had uttered their lines according to script, the crowd would

disperse to go home so they could entertain their guests with food and gossip. The celebration

would last until the evening, with videokes blaring at every block and platters of food being shared

from one neighbor to another, like a never-ending serial barter. At nine in the evening, there would

be a procession of carved statues of saints dressed in beaded silks and satin that shimmered brighter

than the flickering candle lights. A statue of Jesus would be paraded last—pulled after the

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mourning statue of the Virgin Mary arrayed in all black with hints of gold and glittering crystals—

lying so dead in a glass coffin adorned with bouquets of roses, forget-me-nots, and

chrysanthemums.

But as much as the festivity of the Sinakulo always drew hundreds of tourists to our

tiny barangay every year, I had not really found anything remarkable about the strange irony in

the way we celebrated our fiesta. It was just the same script every single year after all, the same

people playing Jesus and Mary and Satan and Pilate, the same rendition of the Pasyon whose lyrics

I never really understood, the same lechon, menudo, and palabok, the same tedious procession of

cold-eyed and stiff-nosed saints.

The only thing that was of interest to me was the padugo.

As Holy Monday approached, several men from our barangay would start doing

their penitensya, or penance for all the sins they had committed in the past year. They would cover

their faces with cloth, only leaving holes for their eyes, and a thorny bougainvillea branch would

crown their heads. Their backs would be incised with shards of glass and covered all over by tiny,

bleeding cuts. They would be given a flogger made of pieces of wood with which they would

repeatedly beat the cuts on their backs. For sustenance, they would drink a mixture of cola and raw

egg before walking on the streets—barefooted, half-naked, and bleeding—their blood and sweat

congealing on their sunburnt skins. They would enact penance for an entire week, from early dawn

to late dusk, and the click-click-clacking of the flogger would herald their parade each time.

Whenever I would hear the flogger hitting human flesh, I would run to our window

overlooking the streets. I would watch the men as they walked with their bloody backs, wondering

if their faces cringed with pain behind the cloth cover, or whether they felt a physical lightening

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of their burdens as they suffered. Sometimes, I wondered what sins they were doing penance for,

and how big a sin it had to be for one to bleed for it. Other times, I wondered if they cried behind

the cloth, if they uttered a little prayer, if they actually believed that padugo would truly save them

from damnation.

And I had always wondered, too, why only the men did the padugo. Did that mean that

women do not sin? But the priest and the catechism teacher in Sunday school said that all people

sin, and that Jesus had to die on the cross to save us all from our sins. But if the men could hedge

afterlife judgment and secure their salvation by repeatedly flogging their backs bleeding with cuts,

why couldn’t the women? Did that mean only Jesus, a man, could save them? Why could women

not save themselves?

But I never dared to ask those questions aloud. Growing up in a deeply religious family, I

was not permitted to question my faith, even if I was not so sure whether “my faith” was truly my

own or just my family’s or my barangay’s. The questions remained in my head, unasked and

unanswered. Eventually, I grew up and got tired of watching the spectacle of

the padugo altogether, the same way that I got tired of watching the Sinakulo years before, telling

myself that it was just one of those crazy Filipino traditions that did not really have logical bases,

and were done simply for the drama and the entertainment.

It did not save anyone, especially when those same men who had just finished their bloody

walk would always go straight to the nearest sari-sari store to buy brandy or beer or gin—

depending on how tight the budget was, the missus took all the salary for this cut-off to prepare

for the fiesta, pards—then set up a table by the pavement and, with their kumpares who had also

just done padugo, start a drinking session for all the people to see. After a round of drinks, each

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man would become rowdy and overconfident, sometimes even troublesome. In most cases, the

drinking sessions would start out all friendly and end up with the men punching each other on the

face because you also got to learn how to share money for the gin, pare, nothing’s for free in this

world anymore. The same men who had just done penance for their sins earlier in the day would

be detained in the barangay hall by night, making a new list of sins to do penance for come next

year’s fiesta.

***

On the dry and humid Good Friday of my thirteenth year, when everything to me was a

mixture of old and new and confusing, I saw a bleeding man with a thorny crown of bougainvillea

on his head stagger towards me as he held a wooden flogger in one hand and a bloody mess of his

own intestines with the other.

I don’t really remember much of what happened after I saw him trying to keep his intestines

from spilling onto the dirt road. All I could remember was before I saw him, I had been tasked by

Mama to buy an extra bottle of soda for the guests. Suddenly, the man was there! I don’t even

remember going home. All was a blur, and the story I pieced together from what Lola and Mama

told me was that I came home running and screaming, my arms flailing wildly and frantically like

a madman, my whole body shaking with fright. They forgot to tell me what happened to the soda

I bought.

It felt like time had momentarily stopped. There was only the flogger soaked and dripping

with blood. There was only the mushy coil of intestines clutched by a bloodied hand. There was

only the thorny bougainvillea branch askew on top of a sweaty mound of hair matted with blood.

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There was only the man and his wild, desperate eyes. Between us were a few feet of dry, unmoving

air.

The man’s name was Bito. From what Lola told me afterwards—when I had calmed down

and all the guests had gone home, when the barangay captain and two police officers with

holstered guns had finished asking me questions—the kagawads came to investigate when they

heard me screaming, and they found Bito covered in blood and kneeling on the street clutching the

flogger and his intestines. He was dead even before the barangay jeep could make it to the town

hospital. No one could figure out what truly happened to Bito, how his belly got slashed or why,

except that he had just finished his penitensya for the year’s fiesta. Despite police investigation,

Bito’s death remained a mystery. No one was apprehended. No suspect was named. No motive

ever surfaced. It was as if Bito decided to cleanse his soul that Friday morning, and ended up dead

in the afternoon.

I never knew Bito personally. All I knew was that he lived across our street, and that he

was a laborer. He was somewhere around seventeen or eighteen or nineteen, and his mother was a

laundrywoman. She used to come to our house once a week to wash our clothes, and Mama would

pay her two hundred pesos for a whole day’s work. She never talked about Bito, or any of her other

children. She never talked about her husband or where he was or why he left. She never talked

about herself, either. She never really talked about anything at all, save for that one time when she

shared with me the secret to white spotless shirts: kula, or laying the fabric out on sheets of clear

plastic directly under the sun.

The procession was cancelled that night. Instead, the parish offered mass for the peace of

Bito’s soul. It was a solemn mass, and most of the parishioners who attended were teary-eyed. Had

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Bito’s family made it to church that evening, they would have been moved by the priest’s homily

dedicated just for Bito, of how the people who wouldn’t normally notice him or his brothers

suddenly became his grieving childhood friends in their eulogies for him, of how neighbors who

would often gossip about Bito’s mom in bingo tables suddenly became sympathetic of her pains.

But Bito’s family didn’t make it to church that night. For two nights, they held a wake for him in

their dilapidated shack of blackened lumber and used tarpaulins, his white wooden casket closed

tight, his lifeless body hidden from the world forever. They buried him the next Monday, and then

they were all gone by Tuesday, the shack abandoned and preserved with the heaviness of death

and decay and defeat.

When we came home after the Good Friday mass, I felt something vaguely viscous coming

out of me, the feeling soon lost in the uncomfortable air. I went to my room to check. When I saw

specks of blood, I knew then and there that I just had what my science teacher had called the

“menses”. I didn’t know what to do, or how to react. I did not scream for Lola or Mama. For a

while that seemed to stretch into a million silent minutes, I just sat on the edge of my bed and

stared at the crimson stains. I saw then that not only men bleed, but I wondered why it seemed that

theirs was the only bleeding that mattered.

Then, I cried.

I cried not because of my bloodstained panties. I cried not because of Bito’s death. I cried

not because I never saw Bito’s mother ever again.

As I cried and stared at my bloodied underpants, I felt as if both Bito and I died together.

He had spilled his guts, and died; I had lost a part of me I couldn’t quite name, and felt that I also

died. Bito’s death would always be an enigma, and, even years later, people would still talk about

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it and remember it. My death, on the other hand, would always be a secret I would keep to myself.

I was thirteen one hot Good Friday night, and I had bled and cried by myself. I would always

remember it.

In those moments, crying was the only way I could express the bewilderment that came

with my becoming a woman for the first time, even though I did not really understand what being

a woman was. I felt confused and afraid, much more confused and afraid than when I saw Bito

clutching his intestines and dying in front of me. I felt afraid of the inevitability of my breasts

getting bigger, and the possibility that I could already be a mother at thirteen, like what my science

teacher had warned us in class. Back then, I felt the resolve not to get too close with boys other

than my brothers because I was too naïve to believe that a touch or, more scandalously, a kiss from

a boy was already enough to make me pregnant. And I was afraid that, becoming pregnant at such

a young age, I would end up like Bito’s mother—a laundrywoman who was left by her husband to

raise more children than she could possibly afford, washing clothes for an entire day for a meager

pay of two hundred pesos and, eventually, mourning the murder of a child she wouldn’t have the

means to redeem with justice.

So, I cried. I bled. I cried. And the moonlit, velvet night continued on.

At that time, I never really knew the exact reason why I cried. There were too many reasons,

and they were all too confusing and murky. Eventually, though, I pulled my pants up, wiped my

tears, and accepted the fact that, like all women before me, I would bleed every month. And

whenever I do, I would remember Bito and the Good Friday we died together. With time, however,

even those memories would fade and they wouldn’t be as vivid as before, the same way that my

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monthly bleeding would fade after a week or so. There would only be a pale trace of blood left

each time, and then it would be gone, too.

***

It was only when I was already in the city and doing my own laundry one hot summer night

that I remembered Bito’s mother and how she shared with me that the secret to white, spotless

shirts is pagkukula. I sniggered at the memory—you couldn’t actually do kula in the city. The

polluted air of the metro and its lingering smell of rot are no cleaning agents. It was the first time

in many years that I actually thought of Bito and his mother again. Of course, I would always be

reminded of that fateful Good Friday afternoon when I saw him dying in front of me whenever I

would bleed every month, but the remembrance would merely be in passing, and I would

eventually forget again. But at that instance, I wondered deeply whatever happened to Bito’s

mother and his brothers when they left our barangay after they buried him. I wondered where they

live now, and if the people in their new barangay also talk about them in bingo tables—like the

people in our barangay did—because their family lacked a father and one of their sons was

murdered. I wondered, too, whether they still mourn for Bito, and if they ever found peace after

his death. I wondered whether Bito’s mother still does kula to make shirts white and spotless, or if

she, too, like me, realized that there was no place for pagkukula in the harsh, unforgiving city.

As I trudged along my remembrances, I realized that at thirteen and without fully

understanding everything, one of the many reasons I cried was because I just knew that I had

become a woman, and that had scared me. The answers to the question I never dared ask came to

me in an epiphany. Now, years after I first bled, I finally understood that men and women bleed

and die differently. Men, like Jesus and Bito and all the others who flog themselves for the ablution

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of their sins and of others’, bleed, and the world notices. They die, and the world remembers. On

the other hand, women, like me and Bito’s mom, bleed, and the world doesn’t give a care. We die,

and the world moves on.

I also understood why, at thirteen, I was so afraid to end up like the woman Bito’s mother

was. I was afraid that to be a woman, I could only watch the world from a window. I was afraid

that to become a woman, I could only ask questions in my head, that I could only scream and run

in the face of despair—that I would be invisible. I was afraid to become a woman and—like the

robotically smiling majorettes twirling their batons under the harsh glaring of the sun—to always

be mercilessly ogled at, constantly in performance and half-clad, while the men around me

command the music and lead the parade. I was afraid that, like Bito’s mother, the only legacy I

could leave the world would be how to make white, spotless shirts as I pack my bags to grieve for

the death of my child elsewhere, creeping quietly so as not to disturb the neighbors and the night.

Yet as I watched my clothes spin in the washing machine, I realized, too, that unlike my

thirteen-year-old naïve self, I am no longer afraid to be marked a woman. True, I would bleed and

the world might shrug an indifferent shoulder, but that doesn’t mean that my bleeding and my

pains would be irrelevant. Bleeding would be my strength for, unlike men who die when they

bleed, I would live and give life in spite of it. As I regain that part of me I thought I had lost when

I bled for the first time, I would find my individuality, and I would shun the muted existence of a

woman watching the world through a window. I would despair but I wouldn’t run; I would be

scared, but I wouldn’t be invisible. I would lose and I would mourn, but I wouldn’t fade to let

others lead my parade for me. I would know the secret to white, spotless shirts, and I would also

know how to ask questions out loud, how to voice out my dissent, how to defy the eyes that ogle

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at my body. I would know that I could be a woman, and still be able to achieve my afterlife

salvation, without a wooden flogger or a bloody man.

As I thought of all these and all the things I wished I could have told Bito’s mother, like

how Bito's death was not her own and that I still remember how to do kula despite the years and

the city, my clothes kept spinning and spinning in the tub until they finally stopped.

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