The bleating woke me up. We had spent the night at Cabo San Miguel, a beach resort in Owak, Asturias, Cebu, and in the morning I heard a goat cry. I got up and opened the door of our room.
Both the sunshine and the breeze rushed at me, at once causing my eyes to squint and the sleeves of my shirt to flap – just what I had expected of the morning.
And the goat? There, not five meters away, digging its feet in, resisting Fredo as he pulled the rope. Our man had the advantage in the tug-of-war and would soon drag the goat over an imaginary central line.
I tucked the scene away and strolled around in the general direction of the sea. I saw souls similar to mine walking near the water’s edge chewing the cud – what an endless fodder vastness or infinity offers.
After a while, I thought of breakfast and turned around to fetch the wife. As I neared our room, a sight on the left latitude caught my attention.
From a tree, the goat hung headless, the same goat whose bleat I had heard earlier, its hind legs bound with a rope to a springy branch.
Fredo, the beach resort’s all-around man, had butchered it, and in the buff had begun to strip it of its fleece.
I knew that its meat would reappear on the table that evening at my brother-in-law’s birthday party, the reason why I did not feel disgust at the sight, and somehow liked the way two men on their haunches watched Fredo going about his work.
Typical country folk, they just watched in silence and now and then spat on the ground.
Of course, how the goat ended that day did not reflect on how the “goats” that Jesus mentions in the Gospel of Matthew would end.
There Jesus uses “goats” as a metaphor for the damned, those whom the Son of Man, when he comes with all the angels in his glory, will put to his left, and “sheep” for the saved, those whom he will assign to his right.
To those at his right, the king will say, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”
And when the righteous will ask him where they saw him hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, he will answer, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”
To those at his left, he will say, “You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.”
And again, when they ask him when did this happen, the king will say, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” Jesus concludes, “And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
Somehow it might help to know that, on the annual Day of Atonement of the Hebrew religious calendar, the priest picked one of two goats to offer as sacrifice and the other he sent away into the wilderness carrying the sins of the people.
At least on that day of my brother-in-law’s birthday, Fredo put the goat, whatever sins it might have carried, to good purpose.
And I liked the way that he stewed it, together with potatoes and bananas, both quartered and fried, and carrots and green and red sweet peppers – in which mix I suspected a furtive, last-minute incorporation of a generous spurt of rum.
The reason why, rather than infernal, I found the flavor heavenly.
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