Sickbeds and Funerals
Customs in the Treatment of the Sick—Stately Funeral Processions—The Funeral of a Poor Man—Unsociableness of the Poor—Wakes and Burial of the Rich—A “Petrified” Man.
Filipinos are punctilious about many things concerning which we have passed the extremely punctilious stage. Some of their strictest observances are in the matters of sickness and death. The sick have what we would consider a hard time. To begin with, they are immured in rooms from which, as far as possible, all light and air are excluded. In a tropical climate, where the breeze is almost indispensable to comfort, the reader may imagine the result. Then all their relatives, near and far, flock to see them; they crowd the apartment, and insist on talking to keep the patient from becoming triste. When the sufferer finds this insupportable and gives up the struggle to live, the whole clan, out to the last connection, set about preparing their mourning.
Every woman makes a black dress, and every man ties a band of black cloth around his white coat sleeve. When there is a wake, it is noisy enough to be Irish. Our Eastern friends resemble the Irish also in their love of a fine funeral. To go to the last resting-place escorted by a band and with all possible ceremony seems to make even death acceptable to them.
Among the very poor this ambition is quite disproportionate to their resources. The percentage of infant mortality, owing to poor nutrition, is especially high; yet babe after babe whose mother unwittingly starved it to death is given a funeral in which the baby carriage hearse is preceded by a local band, and hired mourners stalk solemnly behind the little coffin in place of the mother, who is, in etiquette, required to remain at home.
In Manila funerals resemble our own, save that the hearse, be it white for a child or black for an adult, is drawn by stately caparisoned horses, at the bridles of which stalk men in eighteenth-century court costumes, which include huge shoe buckles, black silk stockings, and powdered wigs. The carriages flock behind with little pretence of order, and at a sharper pace than is customary with us. The populace are, however, most respectful; rich and poor alike remove their hats when the funeral cortege is passing.
In the provinces where there are no hearses, a funeral consists usually of a coffin carried on the shoulders of four men, and followed by a straggling concourse of mourners. If the corpse be that of a child, it not infrequently lies, gorgeously dressed, upon the blue-and-pink-beribboned cushions of a four-wheeled baby carriage. New-born babes are buried in tiny coffins covered with pink or blue cambric.
The Filipinos say that when a child dies its pure little soul goes straight to gloria, wherefore it is much to be congratulated on leaving this abode of sorrow for one of unending happiness, and only gay music is used at the funeral. The local bands play solely by ear, and make the most of whatever music they hear sung or whistled on the streets, with the result that strangely inappropriate selections are used on these occasions. At the first child’s funeral I ever saw, the band was playing “Hot Time,” and a friend to whom I related this fact, declared that at the first one he ever saw they were playing, “I don’t care if you never come back.” This sounds too fortuitously happy to be true, but it is quite within the possible.
A Funeral on Romblón Island
When I had lived in Capiz a year or two, my washerman, or lavandero, died, and his widow, pointing to a numerous progeny, besought for an advance of five pesos for necessary funeral expenses. She wanted ten, but I refused to countenance that extravagance. She did not seem overcome by grief, and her plea of numerous offspring was really valueless, for, if anything, they were all better off than before. Her lord had been only a sham washerman, collecting the garments for her to wash, delivering them, and pocketing the returns, of which he gave her as small a moiety as would sustain life, and spent the rest on the cockpit.
Funerals in a country where there are no preservatives take place very soon. The lavandero died at dawn, his widow made her levy on me before seven o’clock, and, coming home that afternoon, I met the funeral in a thickly shaded lane.
Local tradition disapproves of the appearance of near female relations at a funeral, so the dead man’s escort consisted only of the four bearers, and three small boys, all under eleven years of age. The coffin was one in general use—rented for the trip to the cemetery! Once there, the body, wrapped in its petate, or sleeping mat, would be rolled into a shallow grave.
The four bearers were dirty and were chewing betel-nut as they trudged along under their burden. Behind them came the dead man’s son, apparelled in a pair of blue denim trousers. His body, naked to the waist, was glistening brown after a bath, and he carried under one arm a fresh laundered camisa, or Chino shirt, of white muslin, to be put on when he reached the church.
His two supporters were the brothers of my muchacha, who lived in the same yard and who evidently had convictions about standing by a comrade in misfortune. The elder, a boy of seven, was fairly clean; but the younger, somewhere between three and five, was clad in a single low-necked slip of filthy pink cotton, which draped itself at a coquettish angle across his shoulders, and hung down two or three inches below his left knee. His smile, which was of a most engaging nature, occupied so much of his countenance that it was difficult to find traces of the pride which actually radiated from the other two.
My curiosity was enough to make me turn and follow them to the church. There the body was deposited on the floor at the rear, just below a door in the gallery which led to the priest’s house, or convento. The bearers squatted on their heels and fell to wrapping up pieces of betel-nut in lime paste and buya leaf, while a sacristan went to call the priest. The dead man’s son reverently put on his clean shirt, and the youngest urchin sucked his thumb and continued to grin at me.
Presently a priest came through the door and leaned over the gallery, followed by two sacristans, one bearing a censer and the other a bell. The censer-bearer swung his implement vindictively in the direction of the corpse, while the other rang a melodious chime on the bell. At this all the babies fell on their knees. The priest muttered a few lines of Latin, made the sign of the cross, and disappeared to another chime of the bells and a last toss of the censer. The bearers picked up the coffin, and the little procession went on its way to the cemetery. The ceremony lasted about one minute and a half, and consumed three out of my five pesos.
This incident illustrates neatly the friendless condition in which most Filipino poor live. Filipino lower-class people are gregarious, but not sociable. They are averse to solitary rural life and tend everywhere to live in villages, but they visit little with each other, and seem very indifferent to the cordial relations which bind our own laboring classes together.
In the same yard with the dead lavandero lived at least ten or twelve other families, yet no one could be found to accompany him to his grave save two play-mates of his son.
If the poor are fond of display, the rich outvie them. The pomp of a rich man’s obsequies finds its beginning while he is yet on earth, when the padre goes in state to administer extreme unction. His vehicle, a gilt coach which looks like the pictures of those of the seventeenth century, is often preceded by a band, while the priest within is arrayed in embroidered vestments. When the surra, or horse disease, had made a scarcity of those animals, the padre’s gilded equipage had to be drawn by a cebu, or very small and weary-looking cow, imported from Indo-China. The spectacle of this yoke animal, the gilt coach, and the padre in all his vestments was one not to be forgotten.
When the rich man dies, there is generally a wake, noisy enough, as before stated, to be Irish, and a pretentious funeral. Five o’clock in the afternoon seems to be a favorite hour for this. In the rainy season, with sodden clouds hanging low in the sky, with almond trees dripping down, and the great church starred with candles which do not illuminate but which dot the gloom, the occasion is lugubrious indeed. Fresh flowers are little used, but immortelles and set designs accompanied by long streamers of gilt-lettered ribbon attest the courtesy of friends.
They bury the dead—that is, all the upper-class dead—in nichos, or ovens, such as are found in the old cemeteries of New Orleans. The cemetery, which is usually owned, not by the municipality but by the church, is surrounded by a brick or stone wall six or eight feet high surmounted by a balustrade of red baked clay in an urn design. The ovens form their back walls against this, and are arranged in tiers of four or five, so that the top of the ovens makes a fine promenade around three sides of the enclosure. In the centre there is generally a mortuary chapel, where the final words are said. From the chapel tiled walks lead out to the ovens. The plan is a very pretty one, and if the cemeteries were kept in good condition, it would be beautiful. But they are nearly always dirty and neglected.
In the open ground between the chapel and the sides, the poor people are rolled into graves so shallow that a little digging would soon exhume the body.
The nichos, or ovens, are rented by the year; if the tenant’s surviving family are not prompt with the annual payment, the body is taken out, the bones cast ruthlessly over the back fence, and the premises once more declared vacant.
When we first came, there used to be a great heap of these bones at the back of the Paco Cemetery in Manila, but so much was said about them that the Church grew sensitive and removed them. Our cemetery at Capiz also had its bone heap.
An American negress, a dressmaker who was working for me, told me that there was a petrified man, an American, in the Paco Cemetery, and that the body was on exhibition. She had been to see it, and it was wonderful. I had my doubts about the petrifying, but as I had to pass the cemetery on leaving her house, I asked the custodian at the gate if there was such a body there. He said that the body had just been removed by the city authorities to be placed in the “Cemeterio del Norte,” where there is a plot for paupers. The body was that of an American, buried in the cemetery five years before. His rent, five pesos a year, had been prepaid for five years, but his time had run out. When they came to take out the body, which had been embalmed, it was found in a remarkable state of preservation. The custodian said, with an irreligious grin, that in the old days the condition of the body would have been called a miracle, and a patron saint would have been made responsible, and all the people would have come, bearing lighted candles, to do honor to the saint; and he added regretfully that it was no good in these days. The Americans would say that it was because of their superior embalming process. “But what a chance missed!” he said, “and what a pity to let it go with no demonstration!” There are many ways of looking at the same thing. I could not help laughing, thinking of the negress. She said, “He’s sittin’ up there by the little church, lookin’ as handsome as life—and him petrified!”