St. Peter’s cock

The folk understanding of chicken lore requires a clear distinction made between a rooster and a cock. A rooster is only a male chicken. Cock suggests always the possibility of fighting represented always by its ideally regal form. The complete term is, fighting cock. Which is the type of rooster one brings to the fighting arena. One risks being laughed at if one brings here a rooster.

The cockpit is reserved only for Sunday when the Easter day finally comes to its festive conclusion. Before that there will be Wednesday. Which day is devoted to the Stations of the Cross, the ritual remembering of Christ’s passion. This procession is led ideally by the carroza of St. Peter.

St. Peter’s traditional partner in his carroza is invariably a cock. Whether carved or stuffed, the cock is there to remind us of how Peter denied Christ three times even before the sun rose on that fateful day of Christ’s death. In traditional representations of St. Peter, tears carve a visible canal downwards from his eyes to tell us of his perpetual regret for this denial.

In Dumanjug town, St. Peter’s cock has seen better days. It shows obvious wear and tear reminiscent of its long and sometimes comic history. It was lost many years ago. To this day it is still an unsolved mystery how it was taken from its cabinet in the old Lozada ancestral house in Ylaya. But the story is told of how the town’s resident homeless-crazy-drunk kept it for a pet taking it all over town wherever he went for several weeks before Semana Santa. It was returned by an anonymous finder just in time for the Wednesday procession.

By then, it had lost its wooden base, cotton stuffing coming out of it at some parts. It looked very much like an old worn-out teddy bear. Which might have been how the town’s resident homeless person was using it. One imagines him using it for a pillow on some warm sleepless night lying as he would have on the hard walkways of the town plaza. He might have hugged it to his chest blanketing it and him from the nippy cold of early mornings. Or perhaps lovingly laying a thigh over it as one would do an extra pillow, in these parts called tanday, which fittingly is always a surrogate representation of friend and companion.

And that might be why no one blames him for his slight indiscretion with the cock. Nobody remembers him for the potential sacrilege of his act. One might even be tempted to congratulate him for the health of his imaginative faculties that he could still derive solace from such a sorry-looking thing. Though it is by all means an essential part of the San Pedro carroza, the cock is an icon valued more for its secular rather than religious meanings. Would the story have been that much different if the drunk had taken about with him the San Pedro statue itself?

But the cock is only a cock, pointing us, somewhat as a side note, to the local love for the sabong, the cockfight. Which affinity is not by any means confined only to the Filipino culture.

They also fight cocks in Ayuthaya, Thailand, where you will find a Buddhist temple whose grounds are encircled by its numerous representations, cock statues of all sorts of sizes and colors. Here, the cock is not venerated either. It is only a sign of thanksgiving endorsed to the temple of Buddha by people for prayers answered and graces received. Which graces might possibly include a significant victory at the cockpits.

Lest one finds these juxtapositions demeaning of religious faith, one should remember that for the Asean spirit these are necessary interplay. There is a local obsession with death, not just Christ’s death but also of our own and of those close to us; perhaps a parent, or a late younger brother whom we remember also for one unexpected happy day at the cockpit; once, when we won significantly more than we lost.

Death and suffering are as inevitable as taxes. We are certain of it. We contemplate our deepest fears with flowers. We deck the carroza very much the same way we deck our faith, by covering everything with an explosion of colors and scents. We remember by forgetting, blanketing our deepest sorrows with a dark translucent veil of whispered laughter.

By Wednesday, the statue of St. Peter will be wiped lovingly and thoroughly cleaned bringing out the best of its soft satin patina of age. All around him, flowers. And there with him, his little companion, which for its moth-bitten, bedraggled countenance gives us what might perhaps be the truer picture of the state of things, our religiosity, our peculiar understanding of faith.