The Breath of Night by Michael Arditti

Author:Michael Arditti [Michael Arditti]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908129888
Publisher: Arcadia Books Limited
Published: 2013-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

Seven

12 April 1980

My dear Mother and Father,

So Easter is over for another year. I trust that all went well at Whitlock. Do you still get up at dawn on Sunday to watch the sun dance on Beedles lake, Mother, or do you prefer to wait for High Mass? Our Holy Week traditions here are very different. There are some I’d happily dispense with: not taking a bath on Good Friday for a start! On the other hand, I’m still charmed to see Consolacion’s granddaughters standing beneath our banana tree, waiting for one of the heart-shaped bunches to fall. And, in church, I can scarcely make myself heard over the noise of the children jumping up and down on the seats. At first I was amazed to see mothers, who normally stifle the slightest murmur, encouraging such unruliness, but when I challenged one she replied without a hint of self-consciousness that it was ‘so they can grow up as tall as you, Father’. Enough said!

Elsewhere, the week was less of an opportunity to reflect on Christ’s Passion than a focus for the mounting tensions in the parish. It began on Palm Sunday when the hermanas refused to lay their cloaks down at my feet as I approached the church. On one level I was relieved, since I’d long been embarrassed by a display that smacked more of Sir Walter Raleigh and Elizabeth I than Our Lord’s entry into Jerusalem. On another I was aware that the girls, bitter rivals among themselves but ever quick to close ranks against outsiders, were acting on their fathers’ orders to protest against my agenda. But they’d misjudged both the man and the moment. The gospel reading was Christ’s throwing the money changers out of the temple and I’d prepared a sermon on the danger of placing the profit motive at the heart of society, but in response to the provocation I scrapped it and launched a blistering attack on usury in all its forms, particularly that of landlords who drove their tenants into debt and then charged them extortionate rates of interest.

The following Monday I received an invitation (for which read summons) to the Arriola hacienda. As if to emphasise its urgency, don Bernardo sent his car. ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ might well be his watchword, since he holds me personally responsible for the radicalism sweeping through the estate. I suspect that he hankers for the bad old days of the Tridentine Mass, when the gospel was concealed in a fog of incense and incomprehensibility. He looks on the Church as an agent of social control, its wafers and fiestas a modern equivalent of bread and circuses. From the start, he bitterly objected to the BCCs and responded by raising the rents of any tenant who joined. On one occasion he sent his security guards to break up a meeting, which was being held in a school on his estate. That they used excessive force (you might regard the use

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