Weddings in Town and Country
Filipino Brides, Their Weddings and Wedding Suppers—River Trip to a Rural Wedding—Our Late Arrival Delays the Ceremony Until Next Morning—The Ball—We Tramp Across the Fields to the Church—After the Marriage, Feasting and Dancing.
The composure with which a Filipino girl enters matrimony is astounding. There are no tears, no self-conscious blushes, none of the charming shyness that encompasses an American girl as a garment. It is a contradictory state of affairs, I must admit, for this same American girl is a self-reliant creature, accustomed to the widest range of action and liberty, while the matter-of-fact, self-possessed Filipina has been reared to find it impossible to step across the street without attendance. But the free, liberty-loving American yields shyly to her captor, while the sedateness of the prospective matron has already taken possession of the dusky sister.
Filipino marriages, among the upper class, are accompanied by receptions and feasts like our own, but differ greatly in the comparatively insignificant part played by the contracting parties. Whereas, in an American wedding, the whole object of calling all these people together seems to be a desire to silhouette the bride and groom against the festive background, one comes away from a Filipino celebration with a feeling that an excuse was needed for assembling a multitude and permitting them to enjoy themselves, and that the bridal pair unselfishly lent themselves to the occasion.
Most weddings take place about half-past six or seven in the evening; and immediately after the religious ceremony in the church, all the invited guests adjourn to the home of a relative (usually, but not necessarily, the nearest kinsman of the bride), where supper is served and is followed by a ball.
On these occasions, except for the candles on the altar, the church is unlighted, and in its cavernous darkness the footfalls of a gathering crowd ring on the stone floor, and the hum of voices rolls up into the arching gloom of the roof.
There are no pews, but two rows of benches, facing each other, up the middle length of the edifice, offer seats to the upper-class people, who seem chiefly interested in preserving the spotlessness of their gala attire. No attempt at exclusiveness is made, and a horde of babbling, gesticulating, lower-class natives surges to and fro at the rear, awaiting the bride.
Presently, to the clangor of half a dozen huge bells, she sweeps in, accompanied by her madrina, or chief witness. They take station at the back between the baptismal fonts and just in front of the overhanging choir gallery. Instantly they are hemmed in, mobbed, by that swarm of pobres, some speculating on the motive of the match and its probable outcome. Meanwhile the bridegroom is smoking a cigarette at one side, and chatting with a group of bachelor friends who are faithful to the last.
A Wedding Party Leaving the Church
Just as one begins to wonder how much longer these unfortunate women can endure the position, the barefooted acolytes shuffle in, bearing six-foot silver candlesticks, and preceding the padre, who is carrying his illumination with him—or rather, having it carried in front of him. The bridegroom throws away his cigarette, and shouldering his way through the press, takes his position at the side of the bride. The mob closes in again, not infrequently incommoding the padre, who is peering at his half-lighted missal. The aristocrats on the benches pay no attention and continue to guard their ropa and converse on chance topics.
To one standing on the edge of that wriggling throng with the yellow flare just lighting the impassive countenances of its chief personages, and hearing a low monotone, broken only by the clink of metal as gold pieces fall into the plate, it is difficult to believe that this is a wedding, just like those pictured and tableau effects that one is treated to at home.
At last the voice stops, the mob and the smoky candles surge forward to the altar, where the benediction is said. Another impeded progress to the rear (everybody gets up without waiting for the bride and bridegroom to pass), the sorely tried couple step into a waiting victoria, and we troop after them, getting our felicitations ready.
On arriving at the house we are received by the groom and some female relative of his, or, perchance, the bride’s papa. No opportunity of formally congratulating the young couple is offered. The bride retires into an inner room, where she removes her veil, and receives such of her lady friends as desire to kiss her on both cheeks. But by and by she comes out, self-possessed and unsmiling, to distribute the fragments of her artificial orange blossom wreath to her aspiring girl friends. This is a parallel to the distribution of wedding cake, which the American girl puts under her pillow and dreams upon.
By this time the orchestra has arrived and is playing triumphantly under the windows. Though engaged beforehand, it always accomplishes its appearance with a casual and unpremeditated air. The musicians are then (per contract) invited to enter, and strike up a rigadon. Generally, but not always, the most important man present invites the bride for this dance. But I have known brides to sit it out, for lack of a partner. The bridegroom chooseth as he listeth; when American women are present, the fathers of the bride and groom usually request the honor of leading them out.
After this first dance supper is served. If an important native official be present, it is a point of etiquette that he take the bride. Only a few men of high rank sit at the first table, which is given over to women. The service is not left to servants, but all male relatives of the family vie with each other in anticipating the wants of the guests.
It is a feast of solid and satisfying excellence. It begins usually with vermicelli soup (made from a lard stock) which is more than likely to have been dished a half-hour and to be stone cold. But Filipinos are not critical in this regard; and Americans, in view of all that is coming, may dispense with this one dish.
Then follow meats innumerable, each with its own garnish, but without separate vegetables. There is goat’s flesh stewed with garbanzos, onions, potatoes, and peppers; chicken minced with garlic, and green peas; chicken boned and made to look and taste like breaded cutlet; boiled ham; a fat capon, boned, stuffed, and seasoned with garlic, his erstwhile proud head rolling in scarified humility; breaded pork chops; roast pork, with unlimited crackling; cold turkey; baked duck, and several kinds of fish.
There are no salads, but plenty of relishes, including the canned red peppers of Spain; olives, pickles, cheese, and green mango pickles. At intervals along the table are alluring glass dishes, filled with crystallized fruits.
After this come the sweets. There is no cake, as we know it, but meringues (French kisses), baked custard coated with caramel sauce, which they call flaon; a kind of cocoanut macaroon, the little gelatinous seeds of the nipa palm, boiled in sugar syrup, and half a dozen kinds of preserves and candied fruits. Tinto accompanies the supper, and possibly champagne.
As two or three hundred people are served on such an occasion, the intermission for supper is a long one, and dancing is not resumed till half-past nine or ten o’clock. It may then continue till midnight or dawn, just as the actions of a few important guests may determine. Filipinos are very quick to follow a lead; and if, owing perhaps to a concurrence of events which may be perfectly foreign to the occasion, a number of prominent people leave early, the rest soon take flight.
In one of the later years of my stay my good fortune led me to witness a wedding of another type, which differed from the class I have described as the simple rural gathering at home differs from the exotic atmosphere of a fashionable reception. It was just after my return from vacation that one morning a group of my pupils burst in, accompanying a middle-aged Filipina who hesitatingly made known her errand. Her niece, who lived some five or six miles up the river, was to be married that night, and a large number of people from town were going up. Could I accompany them, and would I act as one of the three madrinas for the occasion? As the bride was of an insurrecto family, whose name was familiar through bygone military acquaintances, I snapped at an opportunity to view the insurrecto upon his own (pacified) hearth, and after consuming a hasty lunch and packing a valise, I set out for the river bank where we were to rendezvous.
Our craft, a catamaran made by securing three barotos side by side and flooring them with bamboo, was the centre of great public excitement. It had a walk dutrigged at each side for the men who were to punt, or pole us up the river. It was roofed with a framework of bamboo, which was covered with palm, leaves and wreathed in bonoc-bonoc vines, and from this green bower were suspended the fruits of the season.—bananas, the scarlet sagin-sagin, and even succulent ears of sweet corn.
Cane stools were provided for a few, but many of the young people sat flat on the floor. When we were embarked, to the number of about forty, the barotos were so deep in the water that the swirling current was within an inch of their gunwales. A tilt to one side or a wave in the river would have sunk us.
The baggage and a few supernumerary young men and a mandolin orchestra were loaded into an enormous baroto, and ten sturdy brown backs bent forward as the boatmen pushed with all their strength against the great bamboo poles, which looked as if they would snap under the strain.
The river was swollen with three days’ tropical downpour and running out resistlessly in the teeth of a high tide. As we slipped out of the shallow water at the bank, the current caught us and hurled us fifty feet down stream. The baroto left apparently for the port, which was four miles away. Our valiant punters were useless against the river; but amid a hubbub in which every man, woman, and babe aboard, except one American man and myself, appeared to be giving orders, we got back to the bank and shipped an additional crew. This consumed time, because the spectators, who had seen what work it was going to be, were coy of enlisting. But at last we got away, eight men to a side, and the water perceptibly nearer the gunwales, and with infinite labor we succeeded in poling around a bend and leaving the town behind us.
But there we stuck again in a swift reach, and there were time and opportunity to marvel at the impenetrable green and silence of the nipa swamps. The banks—or rather limits of the current—were thickets of water grass six feet high, its roots sunk in ooze. Here and there a rise of ground betrayed itself in a few cocoanuts, the ragged fans of tall bouri palms, or a plume-like clump of bamboo and the hospitable shade of a magnificent mango tree.
The atmosphere was close and muggy, and now and then a shower pattered down on us. Suddenly, through the strange desolation of this alien landscape, the familiar thump of guitars and mandolins assailed the stillness. The music carried me back to half-forgotten experiences—red sunsets between the cathedral bluffs of the Mississippi, and sad-eyed negroes twanging the strings on the forward deck of a nosing steamboat; crisp July afternoons on the Straits of Mackinac when the wind swept in from froth-capped blue Huron, and the little excursion steamer from St. Ignace rollicked her way homeward to the cottage-crowned heights of the island.
I shut my eyes and tried to “make believe” that they would open on far-off, familiar scenes. Nothing could have been more weird and incongruous than the American air with this alien soil and people. It was “Hiawatha,” and to the inspiring strains of “Let the women do the work, let the men take it easy,” our forgotten baroto swept into sight in the easy water under the opposite bank. We made a herculean effort, inspired by envy, and got away. Space forbids me to enumerate the hairbreadth escapes of that journey. We put men ashore when the banks permitted and were towed like a canal boat. Once we were swept into mid-stream, where the poles were useless on account of the great depth, and had to drift back till the water shoaled again. In late afternoon we took on a supply of sugar cane, and chewed affably all the rest of the way.
At first I had been nervous, but my native friends were quite unconcerned. So remembering that Heaven protects the insane and the imbecile, and regarding them as the former and myself as the latter, I ceased to speculate on the probabilities of another incarnation.
We consumed six hours in a journey normally accomplished in two, and night overtook us in a labyrinth of water lanes above whose forested swamps the outlines of a stern old church were magnified in the gloom. One by one the stars sprang mysteriously into view in the soft void overhead, and somehow—marvellously—we found our destination. A group of friends and servants flared their torches on the bank, and we dragged our stiffened limbs to them. It was too dark to see where we were going, until we stumbled almost into a lighted doorway and found the company awaiting us. Owing to the delay in our arrival, the wedding was deferred till the next morning, but the ball was about to open.
Food was given us, and after a freshening up and a change of raiment we joined the reunion, which was in full swing. The prospective husband and wife were enjoying their usual state of effacement, but I discovered them finally. I talked with the insurrecto and found him a man of ability.
I left the ball, exhausted, at one o’clock, but those indefatigable people kept it up all night. I awoke at dawn to find the floor occupied by about twenty yawning maidens who were merely resting, for there was no time for a nap. We dressed in the cool dawn breeze and went out in time to see the morning mists rise from a broad oval of rice and maize fields, and hang themselves in ever-changing folds on the sides of the purple mountains beyond.
But for the character of the vegetation that rimmed the arable land, and the bare green shoulders of the hills, streaked here and there with pink clayey ravines, it might have been a peaceful sunrise in middle America. The homelike atmosphere was accentuated by the roofs of a town and by a church spire, still silvered with mist, half a mile away. We tramped across the fields to our objective point. As madrina, I walked with the bride, but conversation did not thrive because she spoke little Spanish, and I less Visayan.
Carabaos sniffed at us as we passed, and people crowded their windows to look. We crossed a slough upon a bridge of quaint and ancient architecture on the thither side of which were a grassy plaza and the stern lines of the church. The wedding bells broke forth in a furious joy and flung their notes to the distant hill flanks, which in turn flung them back to the blue, sparkling sea.
The church was tiled in black and white marble, and inhabited by a lusty family of goats. Their innate perversity and an apparent curiosity led them to resent exclusion; but after a lively pursuit they were ejected, and the bride and I sat on a bench to rest. The bridegroom took a last smoke, and the strangers deciphered obituary notices on the mural tombstones.
The padre came along finally, smelling of a matutinal appetizer, and they distributed pillows and candles to the madrinas and padrinos. As evidence of change of heart in the late insurrecto, the pillows were some of red, some of white, and some of blue cloth.
It was over at last, when I was stiff with kneeling and had ornamented myself with much candle grease. I went up to congratulate the bride, but felt that the handshake was not coming off properly. Finally I discovered that I was resisting an effort on her part to bring my hand to her lips. So I succumbed and submitted to the distinction, and she then proceeded to salute the other madrinas.
There was nothing coy or sentimental about that bride. She needed no support, moral or other. Sweet sixteen, “plump as a partridge,” she gathered up her white silk skirt with its blue ribbons and struck out for home. Her husband made no attempt to follow her. She beat us all home by a quarter of a mile. When we arrived, she had changed her gown and was supervising breakfast preparations.
I was tired, and when a native sled drawn by a carabao came along, was glad enough to seat myself on its flat bottom, together with one or two wearied maidens, and be drawn back in slow dignity. We intercepted a boy with roasting ears, and the wedding guests sat about, nibbling like rodents while we waited breakfast.
After that meal dancing began again and continued until dinner. Once the floor was cleared, and the bridal pair danced one waltz together. They did not glance once at each other, and seemed bored.
Dinner was another feast, and afterwards we sought our state barge and the perils of the return journey. The newly married couple came down to see us off, still bearing themselves with a preoccupied and listless air. The orchestra remained until the next day, and we threaded the water lanes in quiet, emerging at last on the full-breasted river. The home journey consumed only three hours, and was comparatively uneventful. The wife of the Presidente gathered her family about her and artlessly searched their raven pates for inhabitants which pay no taxes, and most of the young people drooped with weariness. We rounded the bend at five o’clock; and thankful I was to put foot on terra firma once more. I was tired, but glad that I had gone.