Fiesta

The bar was a table.

It was a long folding table, the kind that comes out of the back of a church hall for jumble sales, and it stood in the middle of the main street of San Isidro, which was the only street of San Isidro that was not a footpath, in front of the church, under a canopy of bamboo poles and paper flowers in pink and yellow and white, and it had a tablecloth on it, white, with lace at the edges, that had belonged, Mrs Dela Cruz said, to her grandmother, and on the tablecloth was a basin of ice the size of a child’s paddling pool with bottles in it, and a row of glasses, and a bottle opener tied to the table leg with a piece of red string so that nobody would walk off with it, and that was the bar.

“It’s not Eight Bars,” said Theo.

“No.”

“There’s no tap.”

“No.”

“There’s no cellar,” said Theo, with something like reverence, and looked at the basin of ice, and at the bottles, and at the bottle opener on its string, and said, “There’s nothing here you can flood.”

---

San Isidro was a town of about four thousand people in the rice country of Bulacan, an hour north of Manila up a road that ran between flat green paddies with white birds standing in them, and it had been chosen, the Household was told, out of three hundred towns that had written in, because it had sent a letter. The letter had been in the shoebox in the library at Columbia Palace on a Saturday in January, when Frederick had drawn the ten from the box, as he did every Saturday he was home, and Sergeant Cole of the gate had witnessed the draw on his form, and the letter had been one of the ten.

It had been written by a girl of eleven called Marisol Dela Cruz, in English, in pencil, on paper with lines, and it had said: Our fiesta is on 22 May. It is for San Isidro, who is a farmer, so he understands. We have a procession and a roast pig and a band. My mother is in charge of the drinks. She says the King will not come because we are too small. I said the King visits. It says so in my book at school. It is one of his jobs. Please come and prove her wrong. Love, Marisol.

So he had come.

He had flown into Manila on Thursday night, and been met at the airport by the Lakan, the elected head of the government, who had shaken his hand on the tarmac in the warm wet dark and said, in English, with great courtesy, that the Philippines was honoured, and that he had read the letter, and that he hoped the King knew that he was the first sovereign in the country’s history to attend a barrio fiesta on the strength of a child’s handwriting, and Frederick had said he did know, and the Lakan had looked at him and said, it is the most Filipino thing a King has ever done, and meant it, Frederick thought, as a compliment.

On Friday he had driven north with Mrs Dela Cruz’s letter in his pocket, and Marisol’s, and in the afternoon, at four, in the main street of San Isidro, in ninety-four degrees and a humidity that Theo described as like being licked by a cow, he had gone behind a folding table.

---

The whole town came.

Not to the table, at first. To the street. They came out of the houses, and down the footpaths between the paddies, and from the next barrio and the one after that, and by five o’clock the main street of San Isidro from the church to the bridge over the irrigation canal was full, end to end, with people, and children on people’s shoulders, and dogs, and a band, which was a brass band of eighteen men in white shirts and caps who played, Theo said, standing on a chair to see them, the same tune as the band in Ottawa, and it was, it was the theme from the film about the shark, and he never found out why.

And at the table, Mrs Dela Cruz.

She was about forty, small and quick and fierce, with her hair pulled back and a towel over her shoulder, and she had been in charge of the drinks at the fiesta of San Isidro for eleven years, and she had, Marisol told him in a whisper at four o’clock, not believed it until the cars came. She looked at the King behind her table, in a white shirt, because she had said on the telephone to the Household that the black T-shirt was for a bar, and this is a fiesta, and she put a bottle opener on its red string in his hand.

“You open,” she said. “You pour. If they want ice, you give ice. If they want lambanog,” she pointed at a row of clear bottles at the end of the table, “you ask me first.”

“Why?”

“Because it is from coconuts,” said Mrs Dela Cruz, “and it is very strong, and you are very young, and the King is the law but I am the drinks.”

---

The queue began at five.

It began at the table and went down the main street, past the church, past the arches of paper flowers, past the roast pig, which was turning very slowly on a spit by the bridge over an open fire with a man beside it who had been turning it since four in the morning, and over the bridge, and out along the road between the paddies, in the evening light, with the white birds in the water beside it, for about half a mile.

They did not want drinks. Not really. Frederick understood this by about half past five. They came to the table one at a time, or in families, and he opened a bottle for them, and poured it into a glass, and gave it to them, and they paid, in pesos, coins with his head on it, which every single one of them looked at, and then at him, and laughed, or did not laugh, and then they did not go away. They stood at the table for a moment. They looked at him. Some of them said something, in Filipino, which he did not speak, or in English, which most of them did, or in Spanish, which some of the old ones did, and he answered in whichever it was, and some of them shook his hand across the table, and some of them did not, and some of them, old women, mostly, reached across the table and touched his face, once, very lightly, on the cheek, with the backs of their fingers, the way you touch a child who has done something well.

Then they took their drink and went, and the next one came.

“They don’t want a drink,” he said to Theo, at six, between bottles.

“No,” said Theo, who had opened eleven bottles and dropped two, and was being stood next to by a boy of about seven who had attached himself to his leg at five o’clock and would not let go. “They want you to have visited.”

“What’s the difference?”

“A drink is something you get,” said Theo. “A visit is something that happened to you.” He opened a bottle. “Marisol’s book says it’s one of your jobs.”

---

The procession was at eight.

The band stopped, and the street went quiet, and down the main street from the far end, from the bridge, past the roast pig, under the arches of paper flowers, came the girls of San Isidro in white. They walked very slowly, in pairs, in long white dresses, each pair under an arch of bamboo covered in flowers that two boys carried on poles, and they carried candles, and some of them had crowns, and at the very end, under the biggest arch, walked Marisol Dela Cruz, who was eleven, and was, her mother said, behind the table, with her hands over her mouth, the reina, the queen of the procession, for the first time, and had not been told she would be until that morning.

She walked past the table. She did not look at it, because the reina did not look at anything but the church. But as she passed, under her arch, very slowly, in her white dress, with her candle, her eyes went sideways, for about half a second, and found the King behind her mother’s table, and he saw her see that he had come.

Then she looked back at the church, very straight, and walked on.

Mrs Dela Cruz, beside him, behind the table, took her hands away from her mouth.

“I was wrong,” she said.

“About what?”

“About the King.” She did not look at him. She was watching her daughter go into the church. “I said you would not come. Because we are small.” She wiped her eyes with the towel. “She said you visit. It is your job. It is in her book.” She put the towel back on her shoulder. “I will never hear the end of it.”

---

At half past nine, the queue came back.

It came back after the procession, and the pig, which had been cut up on a table by the bridge with a machete and passed out on banana leaves to four thousand people, and had been, Theo said, with his mouth full, the best thing I have ever eaten in my life, I want to live here, and the street was full again, and loud, and the band was playing again, and the queue for the folding table went down the street past the church and over the bridge and into the dark.

He was opening bottles. He had been opening bottles for five and a half hours. He opened one for a man in a vest, and one for a woman with a baby, and one for a very old man who had fought, he said, in Spanish, in the war against the Japanese in 1944, and was ninety-seven, and had walked from the next barrio, and wanted to shake the King’s hand because he had once shaken the hand of the King’s grandfather, in Manila, in 1946, and he did, and the old man held it.

The next person in the queue was wearing a hat.

It was a wide straw hat, the kind the farmers wore in the paddies, and it was pulled down low, and the person under it was tall, and was wearing a T-shirt that said SAN ISIDRO FIESTA 2032 that they sold from a stall by the church, and shorts, and was very sunburned on the backs of the legs, and was standing at the folding table with their hands in their pockets, not looking at him.

“What can I get you?” said Frederick, in English, and then, because it was the habit of nine months, in Spanish, and then he started to say it in Filipino, which he had learned that afternoon from Marisol, and then he stopped.

The person under the hat looked up.

“A pint,” said Jack Fennell. “Please. Hanover.”

---

Frederick stood behind the folding table with the bottle opener in his hand on its red string.

He did not say anything. He could not think of anything to say. He looked at Jack, sunburned, in a farmer’s hat and a fiesta T-shirt, in the main street of a town of four thousand people in the rice country of Bulacan, ten thousand miles from Coln, at half past nine at night, and Jack looked back at him.

“There aren’t any pints,” said Frederick at last. “There’s bottles.”

“I know. I’ve been in the queue an hour and twenty minutes. I’ve seen what you’ve got.” Jack took his hands out of his pockets. “I’ll have a bottle.”

“How did you get here?”

“Aeroplane. Three of them. Bristol to Amsterdam to Dubai to Manila.” Jack looked at the basin of ice. “Then a bus. Then another bus. Then a man with a motorbike with a sort of shed on the side of it, who wouldn’t take money when I told him where I was going, and drove me the last six miles and gave me this hat.” He touched the hat. “I’ve been saving since March. Mum gave me the rest. She said it was a birthday present. It’s not my birthday till August.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Jack looked at him under the hat.

“Because it’s a surprise, you idiot,” he said. “That’s what a surprise is. You don’t tell people.” He paused. “Kimura knew.”

Frederick turned round.

At the end of the folding table, on a plastic chair that Mrs Dela Cruz had brought out of her house at four o’clock, sat Kimura, with a bottle of something that Frederick had opened for a woman at seven and that the woman had not wanted, because she had wanted the other kind. Kimura did not look round.

“Since April, sir,” she said. “He wrote to me. I said yes. It’s on the list. It’s been on the list for five weeks.” She drank. “You didn’t read the list.”

“I always read the list.”

“Not that page,” said Kimura. “I put it at the back.”

---

He opened a bottle for Jack.

He poured it into a glass, at forty-five degrees, the side not the bottom, because even though it was a bottle and not a tap, and there was no head to speak of, and it did not matter in the slightest, it was Jack, and Jack would know, and he straightened it as it filled, and put it on the folding table on Mrs Dela Cruz’s grandmother’s tablecloth, in front of him.

Jack picked it up and looked at it in the light from the paper lanterns.

“Six,” he said. “Too straight at the end.”

“It’s a bottle.”

“It’s still too straight at the end,” said Jack, and drank about half of it, and put it down, and looked at the King across the folding table, and then down the main street of San Isidro, at the arches of paper flowers and the church and the band and the remains of the pig and four thousand people and the queue going back over the bridge into the dark, and said, in a different voice:

“So this is what you do.”

“This is what I do.”

“Every month.”

“Every month.”

Jack was quiet for a moment.

“It’s not a bar, is it,” he said. “None of them are. Not really. I thought it was a bar. I thought you’d gone off and done my thing for a year. Behind a bar.” He looked at the queue. “It’s not that. You’re just standing there. So they can come up.”

Frederick did not say anything.

“Mum says that’s the trick,” said Jack. “Standing there.” He finished the bottle. “Until it happens.”

Behind him, in the queue, a woman with a baby was waiting, and behind her a man in a vest, and behind him half a mile of people, in the dark, between the paddies, with the white birds asleep in the water, and Jack looked round at them, and then back at the King, and grinned, the whole of the grin, from the bottom up.

“Right,” he said. “I’m holding up your queue.” He pushed the empty glass back across the table. “Shift up. I’ll do the other end.”

And he lifted the end of Mrs Dela Cruz’s grandmother’s tablecloth, which was the nearest thing a folding table had to a flap, and came round behind it, and stood at the other end, by the lambanog, and Mrs Dela Cruz looked at him, a tall sunburned boy from Gloucestershire in a farmer’s hat, and said, “Who are you?”, and Jack said, “Four years behind a bar,” and she looked at him for a moment longer, and then gave him a towel, and he put it over his shoulder, and turned to the queue, and said, very loudly, “Next,” and the woman with the baby came up.