Death of Fray Salvador Montano, Conquistador of Negros
THE DEATH OF FRAY SALVADOR MONTANO, CONQUISTADOR OF NEGROS by Rosario Cruz Lucero
—Bisan ano ka lawig sang prusisyon
Sa simbahan man guihapon padulong. IT was a plague of locusts. Fray Montano should have seen the signs. There had been three weeks of an unusually dry spell during the locusts’ mating season, and the rains that might have controlled the size of their population had not fallen. Then just when the locusts should have come swarming into the kaingin fields, they had not and he should have known why. They were making love like locusts. The people were coming into his church and confessing that they had made love like locusts the night before and the night before that. They had, in fact, been making love like locusts every night for the past week.
Once, many years ago, when he was new to this mission village, there had been a pestilence of frogs but it had stopped with what seemed to him inexplicable suddenness, until he discovered why when the whole village started coming to him for absolution because they were making love like frogs.
He had admonished them over and over again that there was only one position that God had intended human beings to do it in. So what if the summer months would go on well into what should have been the rainy months of June and July? If such vagaries of the weather would bring in a horde of bayawaks to attack the village chickens, that would be God’s will and nature was not to be tampered with, certainly not with perversions like the bayawak position or the frog position and now this-the locust position!
The silence that followed his counsel told him that it had come too late. They had already made love like bayawaks. They had done the mating dance, navel to navel and pelvis to pelvis, before he had come and this was probably the reason why he had been sent here. These people had driven his predecessor Fray Duertas desperate with loneliness and suffocating with envy with all the hopping around they were doing all
—Bisan ano ka lawig sang prusisyon
Sa simbahan man guihapon padulong. IT was a plague of locusts. Fray Montano should have seen the signs. There had been three weeks of an unusually dry spell during the locusts’ mating season, and the rains that might have controlled the size of their population had not fallen. Then just when the locusts should have come swarming into the kaingin fields, they had not and he should have known why. They were making love like locusts. The people were coming into his church and confessing that they had made love like locusts the night before and the night before that. They had, in fact, been making love like locusts every night for the past week.
Once, many years ago, when he was new to this mission village, there had been a pestilence of frogs but it had stopped with what seemed to him inexplicable suddenness, until he discovered why when the whole village started coming to him for absolution because they were making love like frogs.
He had admonished them over and over again that there was only one position that God had intended human beings to do it in. So what if the summer months would go on well into what should have been the rainy months of June and July? If such vagaries of the weather would bring in a horde of bayawaks to attack the village chickens, that would be God’s will and nature was not to be tampered with, certainly not with perversions like the bayawak position or the frog position and now this-the locust position!
The silence that followed his counsel told him that it had come too late. They had already made love like bayawaks. They had done the mating dance, navel to navel and pelvis to pelvis, before he had come and this was probably the reason why he had been sent here. These people had driven his predecessor Fray Duertas desperate with loneliness and suffocating with envy with all the hopping around they were doing all