Episode 7: Transaction
TOMMASO:February 21th, 2025. Custodia Ultimae Vocis. Isolation Chamber Three. Father Tommaso Lanza analyzing Case TM-1995-013.
The subject is Narciso Ilagan. Forty-four years old at time of death. The case was received by the Custodia in 1994, formally documented in 1995. Forty-five years between the event and my desk.
Narciso was born in 1935 in Santa Lucia barangay, in San Fernando, Pampanga province, in the Philippines. Third of six children. Father a rice farmer. Mother a seamstress. Both devout. He was educated at the local parish school, married in 1958, had three children.
But probably the most important thing about his life is that he began flagellation in 1961.
In Pampanga province, and in scattered towns across several others, Holy Week brings a tradition called the Maleldo. Its most intense expression is centered in the village of San Pedro Cutud in San Fernando City, though two other barangays, Santa Lucia and San Juan, stage their own Good Friday crucifixions the same day, smaller and less photographed but no less real. Penitents are called magdarame, a word that means, roughly, to volunteer to share in someone else's sorrow, and they take on the suffering of the Passion in the most literal way available. Some carry full wooden crosses through the streets under the April heat. Some flog their own backs with bamboo sticks called burilyos, opening the skin, walking the same blood-soaked path through town they walk every year, some of them for decades. And a small number, always a small number, undergo actual crucifixion.
Iron nails through the palms. Iron nails through the tops of the feet. The crossbeam lifted vertical. Ropes under the arms for safety, because the nails alone won't hold a man's weight. Five minutes on the cross, ten, sometimes fifteen, depending on the individual and the year and how long the organizers judge is appropriate. Then taken down, nails withdrawn, wounds pressed, the penitent carried to the medical station off to the side.
The Church does not endorse this. The local bishops issue statements discouraging it before Holy Week every year. It continues regardless.
Narciso participated as a flagellant from 1961. He first requested crucifixion in 1969 and was turned down. 1970, turned down again. 1971, granted. He was thirty-six years old. He underwent crucifixion seven times over the next eight years, always the same two men driving the nails, always the same spot in the same two palms, always the same footpath through scar tissue they'd opened and closed and opened again the year before.
The only account we have of "why" comes from Father Aurelio Gutierrez, parish priest at Santa Lucia from 1964 until his death in 1994. Gutierrez provided a forty-page statement to the Custodia in 1981, two years after Narciso died. He is an excellent witness. The kind who tells you what he didn't do and why, which I trust far more than someone who presents themselves as having reacted correctly at every turn.
Gutierrez writes that after the first crucifixion in 1971 he asked Narciso why he'd wanted it. Narciso told him he'd been reading the Passion accounts every year of his adult life and wanted to know what the nails felt like from the inside. He thought if he understood what the nails felt like, he might understand what came after more clearly.
Gutierrez told him this was not how understanding the Passion worked.
Narciso said: "I know. But I've tried every other way."
In 1975, Gutierrez wrote something in his private diary about the scar tissue in Narciso's palms. It never made it into any official report. He writes that during a regular Monday prayer session he noticed, when Narciso unfolded his hands on the table, that the scars had not flattened the way old scar tissue flattens. They'd remained raised at the center, with the surrounding skin pulling toward them. He described them as a lip around a drain.
He didn't say anything to Narciso. Didn't file a report. He told himself it was the repeated trauma. He was wrong to ignore it, he writes, and he knew that even then, but he didn't know what language existed for what he was seeing.
Three times between 1975 and 1979, Gutierrez pressed his fingertips against the center of each wound when examining Narciso before the annual crucifixion, checking for infection, checking the scar tissue would hold. And each time, the same finding: the tissue closed around his finger, slowly, and held. He writes that it wasn't a spasm and wasn't reflex. It felt like something gripping deliberately from the inside. He removed his finger and the tissue released and returned to what it had been.
And yet despite this, he said nothing. Performed the examination, noted his findings as normal, and said nothing.
He was a careful man, Gutierrez. The forty pages of his statement are the record of someone who watched something he couldn't stop, watched it with increasing precision, and chose to witness it exactly rather than intervene badly. I recognize that choice. Six months ago I wouldn't have understood it. But now I do.
April 13th, 1979. Good Friday. The annual crucifixion in Santa Lucia.
Narciso was nailed to the cross at nine-fifty in the morning. Eleven minutes, then taken down. The same two men who'd done it seven times before. The same hands. The same wounds.
The nurse on duty at the medical station was Mylene Navarro. She cleaned and dressed the wounds. Her incident report notes that the wounds closed faster than anything she'd seen in years of working these events, faster than the year before, faster than the years before that. The scar tissue around each wound contracted inward while she was still finishing the dressing.
She simply attributed it to repeated trauma thickening the tissue response. She gave him antiseptic and sent him home.
What she did not write in the incident report, but told Gutierrez two years later is that when she pressed the center of each wound to check for depth, the tissue tightened around her fingers. She said it was slow. It took two or three seconds to complete. It had the quality of intention.
She dressed the wounds and said nothing. She didn't have the words, and thought that if she didn't say anything, nothing would need to be true.
Gutierrez found Narciso at the family home three days later, on Wednesday of Holy Week. He hadn't come to Tuesday confession, which was very strange. Maria let the priest in and said her husband was in the other room.
He was sitting alone, hands folded in his lap. Maria was in the kitchen. She told Gutierrez later that her husband hadn't slept since Good Friday, but he wasn't tired. He seemed alert. Just sitting quietly with his hands folded.
Gutierrez sat across from him and they talked: the weather, the eldest son's examinations, the rice crop. Then Gutierrez asked about the hands.
Narciso put them on the table.
The dressings had been removed. The wounds were open.
He'd seen those wounds every year for eight years. He knew what they looked like. The scar tissue: the pale, thickened ring that formed after each crucifixion, the slightly sunken center where the nail had passed through. He knew the depth. He knew the diameter. He knew every stage of how they healed and what was on the table that day was not that.
The edges of each wound had changed in consistency, denser now, smoother, with no gradation between wound and skin. The transition was clean, as if the wound had been finished rather than formed by trauma, made to specification. When Gutierrez pressed his finger against the edge of the right palm to test it, the edge held firm. The tissue inside the wound was dry and dark and deeper than it should have been. He angled the nail of his thumb into the opening, expecting two, maybe three centimeters of healed tissue before hitting resistance. His thumbnail went past that depth. He stopped. He looked at Narciso, then back at the wound. The bottom was simply not there.
He writes: "I looked into them and I could not see the bottom".
He asked Narciso if he'd been picking at them.
Narciso said no.
He then asked if they hurt.
Narciso thought about it for a second, then he said: "They feel like they're waiting, like when you sleep on your arm."
Gutierrez wrote the entire conversation down that evening. He didn't ask why or what they were "waiting" for, even though it was a weird way to put the concept down. The mere act of questioning felt wrong, as if asking something would bring the answer into the room before he was ready to receive it.
The following weeks are mostly quiet in the record. Gutierrez visited weekly. The wounds remained open. Maria noted that her husband had started sitting outside at night. Just sitting in the yard in the dark, face turned up, completely still.
She came out late one night, in the weeks after Good Friday. Found him in the yard, face tilted up toward the sky, eyes open, not moving. She asked what he was doing.
He simply said: "Listening to a call."
She went inside and wept, not knowing why. She felt a great distress into her husband's words, even though he was apparently fine. She didn't tell Gutierrez for three weeks because she thought it was a crisis of faith, something that could be kept within the walls of the house. She was protecting him. People do this. They think the walls will hold.
Two weeks later, Narciso left a note for Maria and boarded the bus south to Manila. From Manila he took a propeller plane to Puerto Princesa in Palawan.
The note simply said: "I'm not afraid. I'm going to Palawan to finish listening. When I understand what God is saying, I'll come home."
He left no further explanation. He didn't think one was needed.
Where he went matters. The location is… unique.
The St. Paul Subterranean River in Palawan is one of the longest navigable underground rivers on earth. It enters the mountain through a cave mouth on the coast and runs eight kilometers through the interior before emerging into the South China Sea. The cave ceiling at the entrance is high, enormous limestone formations descending into the dark, but narrows progressively as you move inward. At approximately three kilometers from the entrance the ceiling drops to a point where a person in a boat must lie flat to pass through. After that it opens again into a wide chamber.
The water inside is tidal. The cave feeds from the sea at one end. Twice a day the tide moves through it, and when the tide runs in a certain direction the current inside reverses without warning, the boat drawn forward by water that has somewhere to be.
In 1979 this was not a tourist site. Getting there required a coastal boat, a guide who knew the trails, and the willingness to go somewhere nobody was expecting you to return from.
Narciso hired a man named Benigno Soriano in Puerto Princesa. Benigno worked as a guide for the researchers and naturalists who occasionally came to Palawan. He deposited Narciso at the cave entrance with the small pack he'd brought (water, dried fish, a thin blanket) and agreed to return in five days.
Before he left, Narciso asked him one question:" How far in does the ceiling come down?"
Benigno told him it was about three kilometers and then there was a section where you have to lie flat.
Narciso nodded, thanked him, and walked into the mouth of the cave.
Benigno stood at the entrance for a long time after Narciso disappeared into the dark. He told the search party, eleven days later, that the cave sounded different with someone inside it: the acoustic quality at the entrance changed when a body was in the system, as if the cave could tell.
Benigno returned on the fifth day to an empty entrance. He gave it two more days before contacting the local authorities. He told the search party he was not a man who panicked easily. The reason he contacted them when he did, rather than waiting longer, was what he'd heard the night before.
He was camped on the beach near the cave entrance. Close to three in the morning he woke to a sound.
He described it as coming from inside the cave, from within the mountain, traveling outward against the flow of air through the entrance. Four sounds at once. Four parts of one sound, the way a chord is multiple notes that are also, inseparably, one thing. Quiet enough to write off as the cave's own tidal hum, except he'd slept near this cave many times, and he knew that hum, and this was not it.
He lay in the dark with his eyes open and listened to it come, and fade, and come again. He did not go toward it.
He built his fire up and waited for sunrise, and he did not sleep again.
The search party was four men: two coast guard officers, Benigno as guide, and Father Gutierrez, who had been contacted by Maria when Narciso failed to return. Gutierrez flew from Manila to Puerto Princesa on the same day he received the call. He told the coast guard he was the family's representative. He did not tell them however he had a different reason for being there.
He'd read Narciso's note again on the plane. Many times. Gutierrez writes that he turned those sentences over the entire flight. He had been there, every Monday, for eight years. He had touched those wounds and felt them hold and he had said nothing. He had told himself it was God's business, and God was taking Narciso somewhere alone to finish the transaction. He writes: "I understood, on that plane, that I had been watching a man being prepared for something for eight years, and I had never let myself say the word. I trust in God's compassion."
They entered the cave on May 10th, at low tide, in a wooden boat. Two flashlights, one kerosene lantern at the prow. The entrance was tall, the limestone formations descending from thirty meters up into the light. The sound of the river inside was oceanic: the stone took the small sound of moving water and multiplied it from every surface until it filled the space the way a cathedral fills it with its own organ.
The cave smelled of salt water and wet limestone, and something underneath both, something harder to name. The smell of air that has had too long to stop being air.
They moved in silence, because sound in the cave did strange things. A word spoken at the front of the boat arrived at the back a half-second later, as if the stone was deciding whether to pass it on. The lantern light reached the nearest walls and stopped there. Above them was simply darkness.
The first kilometer passed easily. In the second, the ceiling began to descend. Formations came down from above and Benigno navigated by memory. The water below the boat was perfectly black: the lantern light did not penetrate it at all, even held directly above the surface. Gutierrez writes that he lowered his hand into the water at one point and his hand vanished the moment it passed below the surface. He could feel it. Cold. Colder than the air, colder than the sea temperature had any right to produce this far inland. He couldn't see it. Not yet. He pulled it out and did not put it in again.
The tidal pull began in the second kilometer. Without the current the boat would have been difficult to move: one paddle, no room to use it properly. With the tide the boat moved on its own, drawn inward. The sensation, Gutierrez writes, was of the cave deciding to accept them.
At three kilometers, the ceiling came down.
He had been warned. He lay flat in the bottom of the boat on his back and the stone ceiling was 3 centimeters from his face. He turned his head to one side and the stone was almost touching his nose. He could feel it. The lantern had been lowered to the floor of the boat and the light it cast was wrong. Too close to the water surface. It threw shadows upward against the stone immediately above them, shadows that shifted with the movement of the boat and the water beneath it, until the ceiling seemed to change shape, contracting and relaxing, the way tissue pulses.
He could feel both surfaces at once: the stone above him, close enough to smell the mineral cold of it and the water below him, moving, with no visible depth, no bottom he could confirm. Both surfaces pressing toward the body between them. Like a mouth, slowly closing, until there is no space left.
He writes: "I have been in narrow places before. I have crawled through mine shafts in mission territories in Mindanao. I have been in spaces where the walls were close enough to touch on both sides and the ceiling close enough to graze my back. I have never felt, in any of those places, what I felt in that passage. In those places, I was in a confined space. In that passage I understood for the first time that a confined space and the inside of something alive are not the same experience."
The passage was forty meters. Then the ceiling rose. The boat cleared the low section and the chamber beyond opened. The ceiling lifted to a height Gutierrez couldn't measure. The walls drew back on both sides. The river widened into still water the lantern couldn't reach across.
But even before that, even before eyes could perceive that sudden change, the smell changed in the chamber. Still salt and stone, but something added: the smell of a room that has been closed for a long time and not disturbed. The smell of air in which something has been happening for eleven days without witnesses.
They heard it as soon as the boat entered the chamber.
All four stopped moving. Benigno held the paddle motionless. The two officers looked at each other. Gutierrez looked straight ahead.
The sound came from everywhere at once. The chamber's stone took it and returned it from every surface simultaneously: from above, from both sides, from the water below them and from behind them. Four components. Distinct but inseparable. A chord, low and high and the same time. It was in the air and in the walls and in the water and in the wood of the boat itself. And for a moment Gutierrez thought it was in the skin of every participant of that mission at the same time. He writes that he could feel it through the hull against his spine.
He knew, at that moment, with no doubt, that Narciso was alive.
The lantern light found something in the water ahead of them. Twenty meters away, maybe a little more. A pale shape, face up, in the center of the channel.
They paddled toward it.
The distance closed: fifteen meters, twelve, and then the boat slowed. They were paddling. The water moved under the hull. The boat was moving. But the pale shape in the center of the channel was not getting closer. One of the coast guard officers stood and drove the paddle hard into the water. The boat lurched forward. The distance between them and the pale shape held at about ten meters.
The officer tied off the paddle and took the coiled rope from the stern and threw it. It fell into the water to the left of the pale shape, a meter short. He threw again, putting his whole back into it. It fell shorter than the first throw. There was no wind in the cave. No current that should have redirected it. The rope simply did not reach. Could not reach.
They held position, ten meters back from the shape that was now clearly Narciso.
He was face up, arms at his sides, in the center of the underground river. His clothes were dry. After eleven days in a cave with a tidal river that flooded and receded twice a day, Narciso Ilagan's clothes were dry. The fabric of his shirt caught the lantern light and there was no moisture in it, no tide stain, no river damage. It looked as if he had lain down in bed an hour ago.
His back was not resting on the water though. The water's surface was below him by a distance Gutierrez estimated, from the angle of the lantern light on the river, at about the width of a hand. He was held at that height by nothing visible. The water moved in the slow tidal patterns of the cave below him yet did not touch him, and he floated at the same height regardless.
His chest rose and fell. Very slowly. Gutierrez counted, in his statement, one breath approximately every sixty seconds.
His eyes were open, looking up at the cave ceiling.
One of the coast guard officers, Elmer Santos, had the flashlight. Gutierrez asked him to angle it at Narciso's hands.
The hands were open, palms facing the ceiling. And the wounds were open, as they had been since Good Friday. But the movement in them was new. Each wound was moving in and out: edges drawing inward, then relaxing outward, slowly, in a rhythm that had nothing to do with breathing. Like something testing its own range. Each of the four wounds doing this independently, in its own time, at its own pace. And the sound was coming from them. Each component of the chord corresponded to one of the wounds. When an opening contracted, the component it produced shifted in frequency. When it relaxed, it shifted back. Four simultaneous motions producing four simultaneous sounds that the cave received and amplified and returned from every direction until the air in the chamber was completely saturated with it.
The sound was loud. Gutierrez writes that he didn't register how loud until he noticed his jaw was aching, clenched tight, as if bracing for impact. Santos covered his ears with both hands. The sound came through his palms anyway. They were all submerged in it. And they were drowning.
Gutierrez held up the lantern to see Narciso's face clearly.
He writes that whatever was wrong with the face took him some time to identify. The eyes were open he said, the general arrangement of features familiar. He looked at it for several seconds with the growing sense that something was different and the inability to locate what. Then he found it.
Narciso's mouth was gone.
That is not the right word, but it is the nearest word. The mouth had not simply closed. The lips had grown together from the corners inward, the skin of the upper and lower lip fusing into one continuous surface, leaving only a narrow seam at the very center, a dark vertical line the width of a finger, where the two sides had not quite met. Through this seam, just visible by lantern light at ten meters, something branched. Something that had been the tongue, dark and dense and forked, each branch curling in a different direction.
Narciso did not look afraid. That is the thing Gutierrez returns to most in his statement, the thing he writes about and then circles back to and writes about again. Narciso looked comfortable. He looked like a man who had spent a great deal of effort searching for a position and finally found it. In eleven days alone in a cave with no food and almost no water and no light, whatever had been happening to him had brought him to this state and he was at ease within it, floating at exactly the height he needed to be at, looking up at the ceiling of the cave with the patience of someone who has nowhere else to be.
The sound continued for fourteen seconds and then it stopped.
A few moments later, a skin-piercing scream came from all wounds at the same time, while the floating man limbs were snapping into position with a bone cracking sound still hearable under the scream, snapping into a familiar position Narciso had taken for eight years: crucifixion. The wounds were slightly bleeding during this whole process and, when Narciso was in position, a fifth wound suddenly appeared between his fifth and sixth ribs, like an invisible claw ripping apart a piece of cloth.
The sound became even louder, the wounds were bleeding like an open drain for a few seconds, until there was no more blood, no more water, no more liquids into the floating man.
Narciso's body descended. Slowly, the way a leaf settles onto still water. The river received him. He lay on it. It wasn't even a body anymore, only bones with a layer of skin covering them.
Gutierrez later told the Custodia that when the sound stopped, the silence that replaced it was the most frightening thing he had ever experienced. As if something that had been in the cave for eleven days was no longer there. He was feeling extremely dizzy and it took a whole minute to register what happened, not even the water was making a single sound, so he turned around to see how the others were doing.
There wasn't anyone on the boat. He was alone now, in that cave.
He put his hands on his mouth and that's when a tactile feeling distracted him for a moment: his hands were moving on his face, but it didn't feel like it. It was like moving your hands on deep grooves, parallel ridges running along the skin, sunken, compressed into the flesh. Deep grooves, following the length of his face, spaced at irregular intervals like the grain of old wood. When he reached his ears, he felt something wet, then checked his hands: blood. The scream was so loud it pierced his eardrums. Maybe that's what happened to the other men and they all fell into the water?
There was no way to know, the water was pitch black and even if they were screaming he couldn't hear them. Not anymore.
Aurelio Gutierrez survived the encounter with Narciso, but couldn't save him nor retrieve the body. He said the current pushed the boat back at the cave entrance, before submerging the cave completely. Three squads were sent back there to explore the cave and retrieve the bodies, with no luck.
When Gutierrez talked with the Custodia, they reached an important agreement that helped me today: he agreed to have his body preserved here when he died, so that we may study him. No major discoveries were made in these years, until earlier I filed a report to get his body sent to the laser vibrometry division. If they managed to analyze faint traces on objects, like Lucia's crucifix, they should have an easy time with Gutierrez.
And now I must wait. How much I despise this moment. Waiting for results, waiting for the next word, waiting for more knowledge. We are almost there Elena, we just have to wait a bit more.
UNKNOWN VOICE: "Oh, do you really believe that, Father?"