Feast of the Haunted

By Dioscoro Nuñez III

October slips away like a candle burning low. Its flame soft; its shadows long.  The air grows gentler as if the wind itself were remembering. Aling Rosa breathes in the air and gently mutters to herself, “the year is about to end.” 

“What have we gained? What have we accomplished? Are we in a better state than last year?” She does not want to delve into her heart or mind. 

“Not now; there are things that need immediate attention than to ruminate.”

 She goes inside and straight to a small corner in the house. She looks at it from the entrance.  It is more than a kitchen. It is a mute witness to their life. It is a rhythm. She begins to work.

Outside, the wind grows cooler, wiser now as if it has learned to speak in whispers. Today’s morning is draped in mist like veils over memory. November greets everyone with a task: to remember the departed. With so much to do today, she plans to attend to her duty at the cemetery after the 3:00 P.M. prayer.

The Himlayan ng Bayan was not a place of rest, but a mirror of the city beyond its walls: overcrowded, stratified, and choked with the refuse of its own survival.

This was Aling Rosa’s annual pilgrimage. She navigated the narrow, muddy pathways between the tombs, her hand gripping the plastic bag of esperma candles. This was Undas, the day the nation collectively agreed to remember. The question was, what did they remember?

She found her family’s plot, a modest, faded-white nitso stacked three high. Her husband, Efren, was on the bottom. Her son, Jun, was in the middle. The top slot remained empty, waiting for her.

Her daughter, Maritess, was already there, wiping down the grime from the small, tiled squares. Her son, Leo, stood off to the side, his crisp polo shirt stamped with a crocodile icon already damp with sweat. He was scrolling through his phone.

 "You're here, Ma," Maritess said, her voice tired. She kissed Rosa's hand. "Leo brought food. From the caterer."

 Rosa looked at the foil trays of oily pancit and machine-made pichi-pichi. She missed the days of bringing her own adobo, but her pension no longer stretched that far. "It's good," she lied, placing her candles on the tomb.

 "The traffic was hell, Ma," Leo said, not looking up. "They closed the main road for the De Villa convoy."

 As if summoned, a roar of a generator sputtered to life nearby, followed by the discordant blast of a karaoke machine. Just fifty meters away stood the De Villa mausoleum. It was not a tomb; it was a two-story, air-conditioned monolith of Italian marble and tinted glass, complete with its own security guards. An estate. 

 "They're singing 'My Way' again," Maritess muttered, scrubbing at a stubborn stain on Jun's grave. "As if they own the place."

 "They do, Tess," Leo said flatly. "They own this, they own the port, they own the new highway that floods, and they own the congressman I work for."

 "Leo," Rosa warned, her voice sharp. "Today is for the dead. Not for politics."

 "What's the difference, Ma?" Leo finally pocketed his phone, his face a mask of bitter exhaustion. "We're here for Kuya Jun, aren't we?"

 The name hung in the air, heavier than the humidity. Jun. Her eldest. A journalist. Silenced nine years ago. His killers, though widely known, were still "at large," which meant they were likely having lunch in a gated village somewhere.

 "We are here to pray for them," Rosa insisted, her hands trembling as she tried to light a match.

 "We scrubbed the cement yesterday, Ma," Leo said, his voice dropping. "It's a great Filipino tradition. A yearly ritual of polishing a surface while the rot remains deep in the foundations. We clean the tombstone, but the case files for Jun just gather dust. We light a candle that will burn out by morning, and we call it 'justice.' We call it 'remembrance.'"

He gestured to the sprawling cemetery, a microcosm of the nation itself. "Look at it. This is the Philippines."

He pointed to the De Villa palace, where servers in white were now bringing out lechon. 

"There's your Heaven. Air-conditioned, exclusive, above the law, built with 'unprogrammed funds.' They're so rich, they don't even have to die to be immortal."

His hand swept towards the nitsos they stood beside, the "apartment tombs" stacked high. "There's your middle class. Packed in tight, paying dues, just trying to keep their small, respectable square of cement clean."

Then he pointed to the far edge of the cemetery, to the sections of earth with no markers, just simple wooden crosses sinking into the mud. "And there's the rest. The forgotten. The 'nanlaban.' The ones Jun wrote about. No names, no dates. Their memory is just mud. We step over them to get to our own."

 The match in Rosa's hand finally caught. She lit the first candle, its flame a weak, flickering orange eye in the daylight.

 "And us, Ma?" Maritess asked, her voice small. "Where are we?"

 Leo let out a harsh laugh. "Us? We are the souls this day is really for. We are the ones in Purgatory."

Rosa stopped. She looked at her son, truly looked at him. She saw the expensive watch on his wrist, and the dark circles under his eyes.

 "We are the ones trapped, Tess," Leo continued, his voice reason running with a desperate, hollow confession. 

 "We are not clean enough for Heaven, and we are too afraid of Hell. I spend my days writing press releases that call journalists 'destabilizers'—journalists like Kuya Jun. I manage the 'community funds' that pay for the trolls and the hacks who drown out the truth. I do it so I can pay for Mama's hospital bills. So I can send your kids to a decent school. I am cleansing my 'sins' with the very fire that burns me."

He looked at the grave of his brother. "Jun is at peace. He's the lucky one. We are the ones who are haunted. We are haunted by the ghosts of what we could have been, what this country should have been."

 "We are here to pray for the dead, Leo," Rosa whispered, tears finally tracing paths through the dust on her cheeks. "It is a day of... of hope. That they may be cleansed."

 "No, Ma." Leo shook his head, the karaoke wail from the mausoleum rising in a crescendo. "You have it wrong. This day isn't for them. It's for us."

 He knelt, his expensive trousers brushing the grime, and touched the faded name: EFREN G. DELA CRUZ, JR.  BOLD. FEARLESS. BELOVED.

 "We are the ones who need cleansing," he said. "This whole country... it's a purgatory. We are all souls trapped here, scrubbing at the stains of our compromises, offering food to ghosts, and singing karaoke in the dark, pretending the noise is joy."

Rosa looked at the tomb, then at her two living children. One worn down by poverty, the other hollowed out by compromise.

She finally understood the day's true, terrible parallel. All Souls' Day was not about remembering the dead. It was a national reunion where the living came to visit their own decaying souls, to light a candle against the encroaching darkness of their own choices, and to pray, not for the dead, but that the dead might one day forgive them.

 She lit the second candle for Jun, its smoke rising thick and grey, indistinguishable from the haze of pollution and the barbecue pits, all of it trapped under the vast, unforgiving heat of the sky.

 Indeed, the heat of November second was a physical weight, a collective, unbreathed sigh pressing down on the living.