The Wedding Dance
A Short Story
The dream was older than anything he possessed – older than the few articles of worn clothing that lay in a pile in the corner of his bamboo hut; older than most any memory of his family; and certainly older than his vocation to the priesthood. In a way, the dream seemed to define Father Clement Becherelle’s very being, even as his life – through his own volition – confined this dream to the chambers of his imagination nunc et semper et in saecula saeculorum. Yet, in spite of its perpetual confinement – or perhaps because of it – the dream was his constant companion.
Father Clement, even as a child, had not told anyone about this dream, for it’s not the type of dream that little boys are supposed to dream – little boys are supposed to dream of glory and honor, heroic virtue, guns and wars, espionage and deception, and, after puberty, the repertoire of reverie ought expand to include the suave sensuality of Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, and Cary Grant, occasionally mixed with the dashing flair of debonair that Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan brought to the screen. Shaken, not stirred. Yet from ages young and tender through tricky and teenage, it was a different dream that occupied Clement’s nights – it was the dream of a dance, and not a tantalizing tango, but a slow dance, a wedding dance.
A hundred candles lit the dim room, while the faint purple and orange of a summer sunset drifted in through the floor-length windows. The beginning of the song parted dancers as Moses parted the Red Sea, until only the bride and groom were visible. They walked hand in hand to the center of the red oak floor, and then he pulled her close to his chest. She, in her dazzling beguilement, spun away from him and he was forced into a provocative pursuit. Eventually, they came together and his hand slid down her side and she smiled. Their eyes locked and no words needed to be said as they glided through their enchanting choreography, the perfect dance, ending in the perfect kiss.
Yet it wasn’t the performance of the dance that made this moment of trance so mesmerizing – it was, rather, the loosening of his body as they danced. Each time this dream visited him, his heart raced as the camera focused on the couple, and he was sure that everyone would see him trip and fall or, worse yet, step on his bride’s feet. As she spun away from him, fear and fate intertwined and, for a moment, he was sure that they would never clasp hands again. Yet, as his hand slid down her side and she smiled at his touch, his soul came to rest, his body became fluid and he lost himself in the dance. If the two expressions can be said to differ, the kiss at the end might have been more of a ‘thank you’ than an ‘I love you.’
As the dream ended, Father Clement was forced to grapple with the harsh mistress of reality. There was a day, many moons ago, when excitement pumped through his veins as he would wake up in the morning and think about being a missionary. Now, three years into his mission in a village in Sarangani, as the crowing of cocks signified that his hour to rise from sleep was at hand, he was painfully aware that simply getting out of bed with the will to live another day was a near miraculous manifestation of the grace of God. That awareness was probably the only thing that allowed the cleric’s first words of the day to be, “O God, come to my assistance,” and not, simply, “fuck.”
As he opened his eyes, he saw a tear in the mosquito net. When he had first arrived in Sarangani, he had been told about the mosquitos: the malaria mosquitos came out in early morning and the dengue mosquitos came out at night – or was it the other way around? He couldn’t remember. When he had first arrived, as his body started the painful process of adjusting to the water and food, he would discover mosquito bites around his ankles and become convinced that he was deathly ill, or he would cut his hand open with a machete while trying to chop wood and – after finding out that there was no soap with which to wash his cut and watching one of the local T’boli women offer only some strange plant as a makeshift bandage – be convinced that he had contracted tetanus. Secretly, he held some hope that he actually would contract one of those diseases and his name be remembered in the necrology as one of those who had heroically given his life in the missions, before succumbing to the local diseases. That would mask, in perpetuity, both his fear and his failure, at least on the earthly realm. In the heavenly realm, well, God is all-merciful and would certainly forgive him his shortcomings. But alas, no heroic or redemptive suffering would lead him to an early death; his task – that of trying to let redemption overcome his embarrassingly ordinary vices and failures – left something to be desired both in matters of romance and interest.
Today was Saturday. After picking through some cold rice and leftover fish, racing through his breviary, and splashing a little water on his face, he grabbed his rucksack and started walking. Out of habit, the words of the rosary found their way out of his mouth as he walked. After about twenty minutes, he found a motorbike that would take him to the village by the sea where he was to say Mass this morning. He enjoyed Saturdays for the simple reason that, after Mass, he was afforded with an opportunity to drink alongside some of the local men. As commonplace as it is to say, drinking numbed the pain. What exactly that pain was, Father Clement couldn’t say. It sat on the palette the way loneliness does, alongside nodes of culture shock and an aftertaste of depression or anxiety. Moreover, there did not seem to be an obvious way to cure it – sure, he could have left the missions, or even the priesthood, but he knew deep down that this would not solve his problem. No, the solution was something more complicated and, given that he couldn’t even identify the problem, he knew that the solution wasn’t going to be knocking on his door anytime soon. And so, he drank; mundane as it was, it was a fact of life and, as such, it was something over which Father Clement Becherelle did not seem to have any real power.
In powerlessness, though, lies strength. When Father Clement had the eyes to see, he recognized that there was some dark and mysterious grace at work here which brought him face to face with a manifestation of truth. The truth, as the now-humbled Father Clement understood it, was that people sinned because creation groaned under the weight of sin and humans were that weight become conscious of itself. Yet, of course, the truth did not end there; humans rose above this sinfulness in both ordinary and extraordinary moments, not because of their virtue, but because of the extraordinary gift of God that saw fit, every now and again, to poke its head out of the ground, not see its shadow, and signal that a new springtime was nearer than anyone would imagine. Some might have seen the humbled priest as a fatalist, but the truth was that his melancholy-bordering-on-depression had convinced him, far beyond any intellectual argument, of the Resurrection and the love of God.
Meanwhile, the cup of Red Horse had circled back to him and he downed it in a single gulp. This being somewhere in the neighborhood of his third cup, euphoria announced her presence. He could not help but smile at his drinking buddies debating how they might repair some motorcycle part that they had disassembled in the comforting presence of sobriety. During moments like these, he wondered whether some of those distinctions between ens and esse that they teach in the seminary might ought to be replaced by classes like small engine repair. After all, life is just applied theology and what good is it to be able to explain the distinction between existence and essence if, when your motorbike breaks on your way to celebrate Mass, you can neither draw a new motorbike into existence nor restore the essence of your current motorbike to its prelapsarian state? Round four found its way into his stomach as he observed someone making a makeshift grill on which to cook some sardines. As a chorus of laughter erupted around him, he noticed one young man whose cool smile never seemed to expand beyond control and Father Clement began to wonder whether it might be pried into laughter with a little fishhook. This is a fishing village, isn’t it? After the fifth round, his inhibitions were sufficiently lowered that one of the women managed to entice him to sing karaoke. His level of drunkenness at this point is perhaps best exhibited by his song choice: Elton John’s “Daniel.”
As he staggered back to the purok to rejoin the other men, he felt a tug at his shirt – a boy who couldn’t have been more than 12 years old. The child’s lips were twisted into a slight smile and his voice indicated no room for compromise: “Pari, basketball – we play.” The boy’s name, Father Clement remembered after a moment, was Raychee. His dad was in jail for drugs and his mom was an angry woman with little time for her son. Raychee though, Father Clement remembered – miraculously given his state – was one of those kids who could go either way: one day, he would talk about becoming an altar boy, and maybe even a priest; the next day, he was the cool kid who wanted to pick up girls and stay as far away from church as possible. For precisely this reason, Father Clement had formed a friendship with the boy: they’d play a couple games of basketball and then, as they caught their breath and cooled off in the creek, they’d talk. Every now and again, Raychee might lower his defenses and the good priest could offer him a word of encouragement, a listening ear, a Bible verse, or a reassurance that God loved him. Never one to let his own vices get in the way of his duties, Father Clement made his way, slowly, to the basketball court.
Given the reverend Father’s state, the game wasn’t especially competitive – Raychee led 8-0 after just a couple minutes. After Raychee’s ninth consecutive basket, Father Clement closed his eyes and offered a silent Ave Maria for both his soul and his body while Raychee missed and the ball miraculously ended up Father Clement’s hands. Father Clement took a couple of slow dribbles towards the top of the key and saw Raychee’s smile widen. Father Clement’s eyes narrowed and he switched hands and attempted a spin move to escape Raychee’s defense, but lost the ball half-way through and, before he could realize it, Raychee had picked his pocket and put in another lay-up for a 10-0 lead. Raychee’s howling laughter was contagious and a smile broke across the priest’s face as he checked him at the top of the key. Raychee dribbled between his legs and faked a drive to the left. The priest caught the fake just in time to slide back to the right and block his drive and the laughter continued. The priest was awkward and always a step behind, but the laughter was so damn infectious. As the score got even worse – 12-0 now – Father Clement noticed that his inhibitions were gone, though his drunkenness remained. All of a sudden, as the priest made his first basket and checked back and forth with Raychee on the next possession, reality began to shift. His movements started to come from his hips, his heart stopped racing, his confidence grew, and he realized he was having fun. The basketball court started to look less like a court and more like a dancefloor. The purple and orange sunset was returning and the court lights started to resemble candles. Raychee stole the ball from him and he wondered if he’d ever get it back and yet the only thing that seemed to matter was pursuit. He no longer cared about the score, or about whether he might step on anybody’s feet, he just wanted to dance. When the game finally ended at 15-1, the priest walked back to the chapel and fell on his knees in prayer: the perfect dance, ending in the perfect kiss.
#OnTheThirdDay: To help us all get through coronavirus quarantine with our humanity intact, I will be releasing new works of art every three days and invite all artists to participate.