poetry

The saint was a high-fidelity man
by Ramil Digal Gulle

The saint was just a high-fidelity man before they made him a saint. The first sign of his sanctity, the records eventually showed, was that he never drank, smoked nor cheated on his wife. And when he spoke, oh, such a marvel of clarity would arise, like music waterfalling from an orchestra of light, seraphim in the soprano section.

You heard the saint speak and you got hard and/or wet yourself silly. You suddenly got high on the Ten Commandments—them commandments started to feel good, invisibly stroking from your navel to your tongue and back down your deliciously shivering knees. The commandments felt good and you wanted them, baby.

But there was a downside to the saint, too. Trust me. You see, the saint never wanted to be a saint. He wanted to be an accountant. To stay in a small room in an obscure office of a not really famous company. To enjoy his plain crackers and numbers, and his black sugarless coffee from the coffee-machine.

Still, God’s ways are mysterious. “I want you to be a saint. My saint, as a matter of fact,” God told the high-fidelity man one day. The man said no and went home to his wife and made slow love to her while valiantly trying to think of someone else, several women naked and heavy-breathing, trying to commit adultery in his thoughts, so that God would get angry and leave him alone.

By morning, he was a changed man. He stubbed his toe, the left big toe with the ingrown nail, on the edge of a chair’s leg and the fiery explosion of pain caused tiny flashes of light in his eyes. He wanted to yell “Fucking shit!” but what came out instead was “Praise the Lord, hallelujah!” His wife and four children looked at him in shock, then awe. Later, they all swore they saw a divine light from his eyes.

The new saint was much-too bewildered to even think about his situation. Inside the train on his way to work, he ogled a young woman in a tight pink shirt that said “You Wish” in big, bold print over her large, well-formed breasts. The new saint was too confused to worry whether he looked like some sex offender.

The she saw him staring at her boobs. He panicked, sure she would slap him hard and cause a ruckus. But the young woman got down on her knees and started wailing, tears flooding from her eyes. She began wiping, shining his cheap leather shoes with her long, black, leave-on conditioner-ed hair. She was asking forgiveness for her many sins the entire time she was doing all this.

Later, the woman went on television, saying she saw the beautiful, radiant and eternally loving face of Jesus Christ when she looked at the saint’s face. She said she asked forgiveness for blowing her last semester’s tuition—during a moment of weakness—on a brand-new cellular phone. Later, she agreed to have paid sex with a congressman, her dad’s kumpare, to get her tuition money back.
The congressman could not react to these allegations of congress with a minor, because his secretary said he was in the United States.

In a few months, news of the new, living saint was all over the world. The saint tried and failed to avoid his fans, shouting “Go away! It’s all a big mistake!” but God would change the words from his mouth, turning them into something like “God’s way! It’s the only one to take!” And the faithful would fall on their knees, roll on the ground in religious, soul-shaking frenzy.

Many religious groups, including the Philippine Catholic Church, tried to discredit the saint. After all, he was taking their flocks away from them. The saint never gave interviews, never made friends with any of the faithful, and all the time tried to get away from them. But still the faithful came and increased in number.

Getting his job back was impossible, so he lived on the move. He kept moving and running and hiding, never going hungry because manna would fall from the sky at regular intervals throughout the day.

The miracles were the saint’s biggest problem. He never preached. He never tried to heal anybody. But sick people got healed anyway, just by being near him. There are unconfirmed reports of the recently dead coming back to life after the saint, as usual trying to escape his fans, ran through Araneta Avenue, which is lined with funeral homes side by side. His sainthood was solidly established.

The Vatican, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons and Baptists, Born-Again Christians and the Iglesia ni Kristo, even Moslems and Jews, gradually joined forces against the saint. The Buddhists didn’t care: to them the saint was, like everything else, an illusion.

After a year of this forced role-playing, the saint tried to kill himself. He jumped off Mount Arayat, but then an angel swooped by, catching him lest he bruise his heel against a single stone. The saint wept with rage and frustration, beating the angel with his fists. Angelic feathers and scales flew, shimmering and fragrant.

Then one day, the saint disappeared. His wife and children remain, extremely wealthy after profiting from the saint’s fame and the holy insanity of his fans, who willingly gave money and possessions to the saint’s family, for one reason or another. The saint’s family is trying to build either a church or a foundation, to perpetuate his divine legacy. They say the saint vanished in a blinding flash of celestial glory, God sweeping him into His presence at the end of the appointed mission on Earth.

It’s all a lie, of course. I know because the saint grabbed my shoulder, hard, one day while I was walking through the overpass of the Quezon Avenue MRT station. The saint fell and I had to catch him. He looked very tired.

“It’s God,” the saint said. “God…is following me again,” the saint finally blurted out, expelling hot breath and spit. He told me, haltingly, about his life.

And then I heard the loudest crash of thunder I have ever heard in my life. The bright summer sky darkened with storm-clouds. It rained. A whole lot of rain. A monsoon with a vengeance, with winds that whipped sheets of rain into the overpass. There was so much thunder, so much lightning that I really began to get scared.

“What was it all for?” I heard the saint ask, weakly. I realized he wasn’t asking me. He was asking God, who I presumed was speaking to him. The saint’s voice was getting weaker and weaker as the conversation dragged on. It occurred to me that God was speaking to the saint through the thunder and lightning, which seemed to crash, boom and flash, after the saint mumbled something. But I could be wrong.

Then, I heard God. Yes, it’s hard to believe, and even I reject the idea outright from time to time. My ears only heard the boom of thunder and the crack of lightning, but a voice inside my head—and it wasn’t a God-like voice at all, though, just a friendly FM radio jock’s voice—asked a question that could only have been for the saint.

“If you could live your life over again, would you live it differently from what I turned your life into?” the voice that I think was God’s asked.

The saint’s eyes flew open, and something that could have been joy, horror or surprise shone from them. It was hard to tell because I was really scared and sopping wet. The saint mumbled something in reply, then died. I still have no idea what his reply was. I left his body on the flooded overpass. Something told me it was dangerous to stick around. What if some jerk thinks I killed the saint?

The saint was a high-fidelity man. I do my best, unlike him, to cheat on my wife. But I can’t. Every single time I try to, even when a yawning, spread-eagled opportunity presents itself, I can’t bring myself to do it. And then I become very, very afraid, indeed.

first published in TOMAS

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