A Penitent's Blood

All the way from prep to college I spent all of my summer breaks and long holidays at our ancestral home in San Fernando, Pampanga. I was a child long before tourists flocked to Cutod in the Lenten season to gawk at the self-flaggelants on Good Friday. There were no crucifixions then.

During this time self-flaggelants trudged down the streets, their heads and faces covered with cloth and crowned with weeds, whipping themselves with thongs to which were glued bits of broken glass to induce bleeding. Once in a while they would drop face down on the sandy earth, then rise and trudge on, resuming their whipping. I watched them from the balcony of our house. Some of them were escorted by boys and men who guided them through the streets and occasionally kicked and pushed them. My aunts told me that many of the self-flaggelants were actually our neighbors.

Despite all of those years in Pampanga I actually visited Cutod only twice. The first time was with my sisters and her friends, and I was terrified at the sight of seeing all the bleeding self-flaggelants en masse; the second was to accompany my cousin Manding, who lived in Manila, who wanted a closer look at everything, and who dragged me to the front lines to observe, at close view, the self-flaggelants passing by. One of the self-flaggelants wielded his thongs near me and accidentally streaked my body with his blood. The droplets were like a skyscape of red comets on my clothes and legs. Manding thought that I was upset, but I wasn't. I said nothing then because I was nine and unable to process the incident. Much later, upon reflection, I realized that the self-flaggelant's blood on my body functioned as a kind of baptism. In that moment I was one with the self-flaggelant. I bore what he bore, I asked forgiveness for what he was asking forgiveness, I partook of the joy of enduring pain to eventually take off the face cloth and emerge a new person.

When I was in my teens I considered the possibility that that "baptism" implied that, someday, I would walk up the hills of Cutod and be a self-flaggelant too. However, I am now 64 and that has not yet happened.