A papal visit that pigs will never forget

Enrique Fernandez did not know that Pope John Paul II had visited his hometown Melo, in Uruguay, until 10 years after it had happened. He was working in Germany at the time and had no idea that on May 8 1988 his childhood home was playing host to the world's most charismatic Pole.
He found out about it many years later when he returned home and knew immediately that it had the potential to be made into a film. For the people of Melo did not remember the visit fondly. Many of them had risked all they had to make money out of the huge crowds the pope was expected to draw. But there were no huge crowds and the trip, for many people, was a disaster.
It was a strange place for John Paul to end up in. Uruguay is the least Catholic country in Latin America and the inhabitants of Melo a shabby town on the border with Brazil are particularly apathetic about their faith. "It was like a feast day, a day to celebrate," says Mr Fernandez. "But I think if George Clooney had been there that day the situation would have been more or less the same, in terms of people going to see a great personality from a world far away of famous and important people."
The crowd was much smaller than the 50,000 predicted by the media. According to Mr Fernandez, the pope even asked the local bishop why there were so few people. "If you see the pictures that were taken that day when the pope is passing by you don't see more than 10 or 20 people behind on the highway," he explains.
The day after Mr Femandez found out about the visit he walked around town listening to people's stories. One shopkeeper said he had hired "seven prostitutes" to cook food by the side of the road but in the end sold "almost nothing-. He had thousands of bread rolls left over and fed them to his pigs for a week afterwards. "Soon they couldn't eat any more so the pigs slept on the bread. It was like a huge white mattress with pigs sleeping on top of it."
The story, Mr Fernandez says, was typical of everything that he heard about that day: it was both "funny 'and tragic". People had "sold tools, or maybe a horse, or a cart anything that they had to turn into that money. They bought this huge amount of food and then lost everything." Even now, 20 years later, some locals still remembered the pope's visit with a "bitter taste", he says.
The film El Bali° del Papa ("The Pope's Toilet"), written and directed by Mr Fernandez along with fellow Uruguayan Cesar Charlone, re-lives this crushing disappointment. It focuses on a well-meaning but slightly helpless character called Beto, who plans to make his fortune by charging pilgrims for the use of a toilet.
Towards the end of the film there is actual footage of the pope delivering his address. We watch him, along with some of the locals, on television; we hear his voice booming over the loudspeakers. He is portrayed as a distant figure, seen or heard only inchreedy.
It is clear from talking to Fernandez that he's not quite forgiven John Paul II for the suffering of that day. The speech, he says, was directed at the 300 journalists there rather than the town's Catholics. The pope did not come "to give a word of hope or understanding"; instead he gave a general speech about the role that work should play in life and about the relationship between workers and bosses. Mr Fernandez suggests that in Melo where so many people were jobless this was not the most appropriate speech to give.
However, despite the intentions of the directors, the pope's address is inspiring. His call for work to be more than "earning a living" and his reminder that Uruguayan women deserve "recognition and respect" lend nobility and dignity to the film's characters.
At the climax of the film Beto is running through the crowd with a toilet hoisted on his shoulder. He is desperate, panicky and on the verge of collapsing, but he cannot stop because needs to get the toilet in place before all the pilgrims start to leave. Behind him a banner welcoming the pope says: "The working world salutes you."
It is Beto, and not John Paul, whom the film compels us to salute. More than anything else, El Ba no del Papa is a tribute to the tirelessness and indefatigability of the people of Melo. Mr Fernandez explains that people in the town cried when they first saw the film. "It brought that day to their minds very clearly," he says. "I remember a teacher of mine who is now about 65 years old and he was crying like hell, he couldn't speak to me. He came to me, hugged me, but he couldn't say a word. The next day I was returning to Montevideo and he came to the bus station and said he was proud of the picture. He said it was a homage to the people who worked so hard every day to bring the bread to the family's table."
John Paul II may be only a marginal figure in El Baiio del Papa but there's no doubt at all that he would have approved of the theme,
Mark Greaves