Travel notes

Church of Saints John and Paul, Venice, April 2004. There are few tourists inside the church, and they’re all craning their necks at the paintings. I’ve stepped inside many Venetian churches, and I’ve never actually seen anyone praying. Except once, when I wandered in during mass, and the service was in Italian but everyone in the pews was Filipino. Not that everyone who goes inside a church should drop to her knees and recite 10 Hail Marys. It might actually be better for everybody to go to church to look at the art. No sermons, no condemnation, no cringe-making attempts to woo back the strays. Just look at the art. Let the pictures blast your eyeballs and pierce right through to your soul. What three-hour homily is more effective than, say, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?

You can’t say this aloud because "good people" are required to adopt pious poses. Politicians are always being photographed in church with their hands clasped together and their eyes closed. Ten to one they’re trying to cut deals with God: Make these corruption charges go away and I’ll donate 10 hectares of prime land to a religious order. Even movie stars have to be religious. In awards ceremonies the winner thanks everyone from her producer to her manicurist, "And of course, the Lord God Almighty." Don’t forget to give a shout-out to the Heavenly Father. Good for you if you really believe, but if you’re only doing it to perfume your reputation, then you should be struck by lightning.

Inside that tomb are the mortal remains of Marcantonio Bragadin, the governor of Famagusta. Famagusta was in Cyprus, the edge of the Venetian Empire. In 1570 the Turks laid siege to the city. Bragadin and his men held their defenses for months, waiting for reinforcements from Venice. Help never arrived, and the fort surrendered. The Turks offered him terms, and when Bragadin and his officers came to deliver the keys to the fort, the officers were all hacked to pieces. Bragadin was forced to kneel. Three times the executioner raised his sword to cut off Bragadin’s head, but the death blow never came. Instead, Bragadin’s ears were lopped off. Then a basket of stones was strapped onto his back and he was paraded around the city. He was made to carry baskets packed with earth for 10 days, and each time he passed in front of the Pasha’s tent he had to grovel and kiss the ground. Then he was hoisted up on a ship for everyone to jeer at. Finally, he was tied to a stake and flayed alive. His skin was stuffed with straw and mounted on a cow. The cow was led through the streets of Famagusta bearing its grisly trophy. Bragadin had been turned into his own scarecrow. Inside this monument is his skin, which was retrieved in a raid and presented to his family. What were they thinking as they viewed the sheet of human leather? Their pain could not be worse than his. No matter what poets and artists say, there is no pain greater than physical pain. There is no unrequited love, betrayal or grief more excruciating than a migraine or an abscessed tooth.

In religion class we were taught that martyrdom is a kind of fast track to sainthood – the highest goal we can aspire to, the nun reminded us as she measured the distance between our skirts and our kneecaps to ensure that it did not exceed three inches. Every other day she repeated the tale of the martyrdom of Maria Gorretti. Maria was an innocent peasant girl. One day a neighbor attempted to rape her. She looked at the knife he was holding and told him she’d rather die than lose her virginity. So he stabbed her dead. With her dying breath she forgave him, and she was canonized by the church. Every other day we heard it.

Another, more complex road to sainthood is to be a Marian visionary. Complex because you can’t volunteer, you are chosen, and because lots of visionaries also happen to be nuts. Which doesn’t automatically disqualify them from sainthood, but still muddles the issue. In the early 1990s a young boy named Judiel Nieva in La Union claimed that he was getting regular visits from the Blessed Virgin Mary. These visits coincided with the "dancing sun" phenomenon in which the sun appeared to swirl and change color in the sky. The media descended on his town, closely followed by Marian devotees, apocalyptic cults and assorted kibitzers. In an interview the boy declared that his dream was to be in the cast of the daily teen variety show, That’s Entertainment. He was filmed in an apparent state of ecstasy, kneeling before an unseen entity and sticking out his tongue to receive the holy host. Witnesses claimed that the wafer materialized on the boy’s tongue just before he swallowed it. Then he listened in rapt silence as the unseen figure spoke. Sometimes he took dictation. Meanwhile the faithful swore that the sun did indeed dance in the sky, which tends to happen when you stare at the sun too long. Every weekend for months the road to La Union was jammed with cars. Eventually the divine visits were declared a hoax. Apparently the messages dictated by the Mother of God contained grammatical errors inconsistent with omniscience. Also, people were warned about seared retinas. Judiel was forgotten, displaced from the tabloids by a woman who gave birth to a fish, who was herself displaced by a hermaphrodite who claimed to be pregnant (I don’t recall whether he had knocked himself up). Judiel reappeared some years ago as an aspiring singer slash actress who looks and sounds like a woman. He/she would not directly answer questions about sexual reassignment surgery, but he/she still plays the role of the Virgin Mary in Lenten passion plays. It’s kind of like Vertigo if James Stewart had played both the acrophobic detective and the mysterious blonde.

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