35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

‘A FLAME OF FAITH’
We had to double back to Panjim if we wanted to get on the national
highway leading to Poona, our driver informed us. It was a puzzling
statement: since he knew we were going to Poona did he imagine
we’d object to taking the only possible route there?
Rusty barges carrying iron ore from the mines of Mapusa lurked
in the mouth of the Mandovi River, perhaps hesitant to risk the
open seas again. An ancient cross beneath a roofed enclosure stood
at the summit of a hill overlooking cashew plantations. A few people
seemed busy with spiritual activities around it; lighting candles,
placing flowers, praying.
I asked the driver if there was some special significance to the
place. He replied that travellers stopped at the cross to pray for a safe
journey. It was a tradition. I wondered if we, too, could stop. He said
something about being late and sped on past. This depressed me.
Seeing the shabby remnants of Panjim’s Portuguese past again, I
remembered one relic that I’d apparently missed when we were
first there. I walked alone to the little chapel of Saint Sebastian, a
man martyred by archers, set at the base of a small hill in the
Fountainhaus area of the city. The interior was gloomy, confined,
but illumined by multihued beams of light reflecting from a lifesized
and unusually realistic figure of Christ on the cross. It seemed
too large for the simple little building that housed it.
This was the cross that had once hung in the grand inquisitor’s
chamber, the authority by which he had judged the accused, and the
witness to the awful punishments that had followed his judgements.
Its authenticity and its removal from the institution of terror to where
it now hangs are amply recorded. Even old accounts of the torments
over which it once presided leave no doubt that the Christ in Saint
Sebastian’s is the one from the hall of judgement in the Big House:
experts claim there is not another like it in all of Christendom. The
head does not hang lifelessly, as others do; it is held upright, almost
stiffly erect. The eyes are not closed in death or agony, either. They
are open, almost painfully so, eternally staring, as if they had no choice
but to see all the ways of this world – like those men and women
whose eyelids were sliced away so that they could never shut out the
living nightmares acted out in front of them upon those they loved. I
wanted to believe it was tears, and not some trick of the light, that
glistened in Christ’s eyes, there in that dark chapel.
133