Love After Heaven

18 A heavenly smile

"We prepared merienda for you, Father," Julie said. It was customary to offer a guest speaker refreshments after a speech.

"I don't really have time," said Father Romy, following the Filipino formula for such invitations. You always first declined an invitation that you knew very well you would eventually have to honor.

"It's just a small merienda, Father," Julie said, continuing the prescribed social formula. "It won't take up too much of your time."

"All right," said Father Romy, finishing the prescribed dialogue.

They sat down to the small snack with five of the teachers. It was small by Philippine standards, just rice cakes and hot chocolate. Most "snacks" after a speech were full square meals.

Father Romy politely took a small rice cake. He was not hungry, at least not for food.

"Father," Julie said. "My teachers and I are worried about the spiritual lives of the children. We feel that they are growing up without the fear of God. They seem to spend all their time after school in the internet cafes around the corner or in the shopping mall. We don't see them carrying prayer books or rosaries or bibles or anything at all that seems religious. We force them to say grace before their meals during recess, but it's just mere routine for them."

Father Romy nodded. His mind was not on what Julie was saying, but on how her lips moved while she was saying it. They were well-formed lips, almost like the ones in lipstick ads. They reminded him of movies where the actresses always had their lips slightly open, asking to be kissed. He clenched his right fist and hoped that no one noticed. It was his way of reminding himself not to think unthinkable thoughts.

Julie kept speaking. "The Bible says, 'Suffer the little children,' but these little children, and I know that many of them are not little anymore, these children cannot recognize Jesus if He walked into this campus."

Father Romy was surprised, not only at Julie quoting a Bible verse, but at how low-pitched her voice was. On the stage, she was whispering and seemed to be in a panic. Her voice then was high-pitched, or what he thought was high-pitched. Now, she had what he and his friends in school called a "bedroom voice."

Father Romy was surprised, this time by his having a memory of something that happened before the birthday party, which he thought was his earliest memory. Yes, although he was agitated internally by something stirring in his groin, he was thinking not just of this woman, but of his classmates in his boys' high school. He was the youngest in his class. He had been accelerated four times in two years, because his teachers had found him too advanced intellectually for his grade level. He remembered how he had been teased all throughout high school by his classmates, who were at least four years older than him. He was still playing with toy trucks and toy soldiers, pretending to be a general in a land war, when his classmates were all talking about the girls in the neighboring girls' high school and already engaged in the war of the sexes.

Perhaps his memory was coming back?

Julie's "bedroom voice" made him stare at her well-formed nose. He remembered that, in high school, a priest had told him to look only at people's noses, not into their eyes or at any other part of their body. That maneuver was supposed to keep men from being attracted to persons of the opposite sex, as they used to call women then. Another memory!

"Father," Julie said, "is there anything wrong? You seem so far away."

"He's a priest," a male teacher said. "His mind is always on heaven."

There was subdued laughter. Father Romy noticed that Julie did not laugh. She just smiled, but almost imperceptibly. It was, Father Romy thought, forgiving himself the cliché, a heavenly smile.