A Cochero's Christmas Eve — El Filibusterismo

Basilio reaches San Diego on Christmas Eve just as the procession blocks the street, hours late because Sinong the cochero forgot his cedula and the Civil Guard jogged his memory with rifle butts before the commandant. Sinong still doffs his hat and mutters a paternoster to Methuselah cooking at the edge of a grave, then decides the age of saints knew no guards who shorten life with beatings. He watches Melchior caper beside Gaspar and Balthazar and whispers to Basilio whether King Bernardo's right foot is loose yet, promising his horses to the chained king in San Mateo who will someday free the people from the Civil Guard.

St Joseph follows between two civil guards like a prisoner, so Sinong withholds his requiem; boys shout rosaries while paper rabbits leap, catch fire, and collapse like the plague-year horses the curate blessed for ten pesos that died anyway. The Virgin closes the parade stuffed with rags under her skirt so no one can doubt her condition, ashamed like every Filipino image the curate arranges, while singers and musicians march with guards and the curate himself stays home, having called townspeople filibusters for resisting thirty-peso Christmas masses instead of twenty. When the floats pass, neither man sees the carromata lamp has gone out until a guard at the barracks halts them with insults; Basilio walks on with his valise through a town where paper stars grow fewer each year, sugar and rice fail, livestock dies, taxes rise, and kitchen noise thins though guard abuses multiply.

Only Capitan Basilio's house still roars, hens dying to the rhythm of the chopping-block while grease scents the street. Basilio glimpses Sinang rounded by marriage and Simoun in blue goggles selling jewels to the alferez and curate as Capitan Basilio refuses the soldier's coin now and names it a Christmas gift to settle later, then vows to buy first-class earrings the Church could punish him for refusing. Basilio mutters that the jeweler does business everywhere while students like him prosper nowhere.

At Capitan Tiago's house the steward greets him with prisoners, a deportation, and dead carabaos until Basilio snaps at the same old ledger and asks for Sagpang. Tandang Selo died of old age, but the curate will not bury the woodsman as a pauper because his master is rich; then the steward names Cabesang Tales taken by bandits, and Basilio falls silent as his appetite goes. Sinong still watches the parade for Bernardo's last chain while Juli serves a mistress and Tales waits on ransom. Who at this feast will notice the medical student who cannot eat?