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Death of Fray Salvador Montano, Conquistador of Negros

Decent Essays

THE DEATH OF FRAY SALVADOR MONTANO, CONQUISTADOR OF NEGROS by Rosario Cruz Lucero —Bisan ano ka lawig sang prusisyon Sa simbahan man guihapon padulong. IT was a plague of locusts. Fray Montano should have seen the signs. There had been three weeks of an unusually dry spell during the locusts’ mating season, and the rains that might have controlled the size of their population had not fallen. Then just when the locusts should have come swarming into the kaingin fields, they had not and he should have known why. They were making love like locusts. The people were coming into his church and confessing that they had made love like locusts the night before and the night before that. They had, in fact, been making love like locusts every …show more content…

There was much work to be done on himself before he would even deem himself worthy of saving other people’s souls. “Laziness, drunkenness and lust,” Fray Duertas stressed to him, ticking each off with his finger. “These are your Enemies. Never let Them take over these indios’ souls, although I must warn you they are so easily afflicted. So keep them busy, keep them working. Next thing you know they’ll be doing it like snails. Then where will your mission be? Clear the forests, build roads and bridges, plant fruit trees. That church still needs a nave and a taller belfry. I tell you, if that last pestilence hadn’t weakened my heart...” And his voice trailed off, leaving in its wake dreams of stone houses standing in colonial splendor around a magnificent church with buttresses, apses and spires soaring to the sky, defying the typhoons and earthquakes that were this island’s curse. Fray Montano had no desire to match Duertas’ nervous energy, for it would have been a futile ambition. Already, composos of this stone fortress that Fray Duertas had just completed, which would house the most powerful Poon in the world, were being sung around the island, from the coastal village of Hunob-Hunob in the north to the mountain fastness of Kanlaon in the south. When a traveling manugcomposo took it to a tabuan, where the people converged to barter their goods, another one

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