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The Devil Flower
EMIGDIO ALVAREZ ENRIQUEZ
The Devil Flower was originally published in 1959 by Hill and Wang, New York.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS 4
DEDICATION 5
« 1 » 6
« 2 » 16
« 3 » 30
« 4 » 38
« 5 » 58
« 6 » 80
« 7 » 95
« 8 » 110
REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 118
DEDICATION
To Marguerite Young
« 1 »
“GOOD-BY, ma’am,” the girls said lightly, trying to sound happy.
“Good-by—” Ercelia said lightly, also trying to sound happy, but her voice broke in her throat and fell to a whisper.
The girls Consuela and Luisa stopped at the door and looked at her strangely. She turned away from them and hurried into the room. Their eyes felt like water drops running along her back, making her shiver.
The girls had volunteered to stay after class and clean up the room because she had given them money to buy pineapple cloth for their embroidery, but she had decided to send them home. “Not today, perhaps tomorrow morning if you can come early enough. Your mothers will want you home before sunset to help with the rice. I’ll clean the blackboards myself. Now, go,” she had told them, pushing them a little on the shoulders.
She could see by their sensitive brown faces and small black eyes that she had hurt them, but she could not tell them why she wanted to be alone. They would not understand. She could not tell them that she wanted to be alone in the room to feel alone with the room, to hug its memories close because she was soon to leave it.
Beside her desk she stopped and listened to the girls picking their way carefully down the rain-scrubbed steps of the veranda. They were speaking in low voices—hush-hushing—as if they were in a house where someone was sick. Did they know she was sick? Their whispering made her angry. Perhaps they were saying she was a tubercular! Her throat itched. She pressed a nervous hand on the flannel scarf around her throat and swallowed hard without making a sound. When her throat eased, her anger had left her. After all, she was a tubercular. Alberto Solis, the doctor who had examined her last Saturday, had pronounced her so.
He had not said so in words, but his eyes had refused to meet hers as he said, “I wish you had come sooner; I wish you had not waited until today.” She had caught his eyes on the white cotton handkerchief in the sink. It was the handkerchief she had used to smother a fit of coughing, and there was a spray of tiny red dots on it.
“I—I had no idea—” she had said apologetically. “I never thought I—I was really sick. I had always felt well and strong. Except for an occasional cold—”
“I should think so,” Alberto had said. “You have always been active, and you have a body that is apparently as strong as it is shapely.”
Suddenly she had felt shy with the young man and laughed nervously to hide her embarrassment.
The doctor had been one of her first pupils in the fourth grade—the first class she had taught—and he had been very naughty. She had more than once caught him sticking a small round mirror on the end of his shoe between the legs of unsuspecting little girls—to see what color their panties were, he had told her. He was a married man now and had a little girl of his own. But she had noticed that his hair was as badly parted as when he was a boy. What naughty thoughts he must have been thinking while touching her body in her thin slip! But it had pleased her to know that her body was still shapely.
“I’m very sorry, ma’am,” he had said—he still called her ma’am—“but I am afraid you will have to take a much-needed rest.”
Of course, he had meant for her to resign, to leave the school, to stop being a teacher. Could she do otherwise? She had never considered the probability of ever leaving the school: all these years, these many, many years....Her mother used to say she was as indispensable to the school as a finger to the hand. But her mother had not really known. Her mother had belonged to a past generation, one that measured truths by the epigrams that spoke them. One that saw only birds in the saying “Birds of a feather flock together.” How unprepared she had made her daughter to meet reality!
She dropped weakly into her chair. Her ears followed the sounds of the wooden clogs down the pathway, clinging to the little sounds as they grew fainter and fainter. Click-clock, click-clock, heel and toe, beginning and end, two syllables of the word “Good-by.” Which was this, she thought, the beginning or the end? There was a beginning to the end, just as there was an end to the beginning. Like life and death. Or were they one after all, two facets of only one moment of eternity? Like life and death in death?
She did not hear the dull, metallic thuds that the loose wheel of a carabao cart was making as it labored down the gravel-and-sand road between the schoolhouse and the beach. But up in the grass roof, she caught the stealthy movements of a mouse burrowing. She wondered if it was not that way inside her body, if her sickness were not like a mouse nibbling on her lungs, gnawing away her vitality. She wondered how long it would be until her life was all eaten away. Time never stopped going, and it went a little too fast. She had a feeling she was always late—always falling behind.
She was twenty-one and had been teaching two years when she changed from the Philippine dress to the Western vestido. She had long wanted to put on a Western dress. Mrs. Brown, the red-haired wife of the American school superintendent, had given her one as a present to wear on the first day of her teaching. The dress was very pretty; it was shirred around the waist and the neckline was delicately embroidered. It made her look like a doll. But it was very thin and it clung very close to her breasts, showing conspicuously that at nineteen she was a full woman. She had felt like a full woman, and her father had said, “You are a teacher now—an ilustrada—and should know what dress best suits you.”
“Well, Papa,” she had said, “the vestido is really more convenient for the working girl. It takes so little time to put on. Besides, a teacher plays games with the children, and the voluminous skirt and the innumerable pins in the camisa—“ She had finished with a helpless little gesture.
But after standing in front of the mirror a long time, she had finally changed back to the long skirt and gauzy butterfly-sleeved blouse. The look of relief on her parents’ faces had made her happy, but through the two years the idea of wearing a Western dress had continued to annoy her like a fly on the nose, coming again and again, until she finally gave in to the idea.
She had felt very daring the day she put on the dress. She had loosened her hair from the accustomed knot at the nape and let it fall in long spirals to her shoulders the way she had seen an American girl wear her hair in a picture in a magazine. Only the talajiangs, the women of horse faces that the ancients told about, who prowled on the beaches on moonlight nights luring lonely men to their beds, wore their hair let down. But her mother had said, “If you
must wear the vestido, you might as well dress your hair the Western way,” and her father had said, “I would like to see anyone dare to point a finger at my daughter and call her talajiang. Wear your hair any way you want to.” The short dress and sleeveless blouse had made her feel quite undressed, but she held her chin up proudly and even swung her hips a little as she went mincing down the street on her high-heeled and pointed shoes.
Two little girls sitting on a plank across a ditch, kicking the water with shoeless feet, had looked at her and giggled as she passed by. She had stared at them until they fell silent and looked away. In school she had pretended not to hear the children in her class whisper when her back was turned. And on her way home, she had smiled defiantly at the women peeking at her from their windows and their little porches.
Some bootblacks in front of the Chinese store near the bus station had looked up and whistled softly, but farther down the street in the drinking shed where the men were gathered around a demijohn of tuba, & man had lifted his hat to her with a flourish and said, “Good morning, Miss Fernandez,” and she had felt triumphant. She was after all the Miss Fernandez!
The greeting had sounded to her as sweet as when she heard it from the children on her first day in school. The principal had introduced her to the class, and the children had stood up together and said in chorus, “Good morning, Miss Fernandez!” “Good morning, children,” she had answered very cheerfully, feeling the morning was indeed good because she was at last Miss Fernandez. She had repeated the greeting in her mind many times during the day, almost savoring its sweetness in her mouth like a piece of caramel. It had helped calm her nerves while Mr. Baxter, the forbidding-looking principal with the bass voice and balding head, was covertly observing her from the porch. It was not the first time she had stood before a class, since she had practiced teaching in her last year at the Normal School in Manila, where she had studied for four years, but she was so anxious to impress Mr. Baxter that she felt shaky and unsure. She even forgot to give the class an assignment for the following day. However, the children’s admiring eyes following her every movement, and their half-shy, half-awed “Miss Fernandez” ringing in her ear had re-established her composure, and when the day was over, the principal had approached her and said quite seriously, “You are a born teacher, Miss Fernandez. I hope you will make teaching your life’s career.”
Her life? career! Had he never heard the hackneyed adage “Man proposes but God disposes”? Here she was, only—well, fifteen, sixteen—she counted in her mind—yes, sixteen years later, disposed of as a tubercular old maid! Why, she still had many many years ahead of her. She was not even an old maid, really. It did not matter that the silly girls of the town thought she was old, she was only thirty-five—she was young! She was tubercular, but a tubercular was not dead, nor dying. She could regain her health if she took good care of herself. If only she could find some interest to blow on the embers of her life! She must think, think!
Out the window, through the fronds of coconut palms, she looked at the sky and the sea. Where a moment ago a brilliant, dazzling sun had hurt her eyes, there now was only a white-yellow glow pushing long shadows across the beach. She also had been pushing long shadows all her life, she realized now. She had not been brave enough to face them. Disease ate up the body, even as sham ate up reality. Vanity—false pride—that was what had robbed her of fun in life. How foolish she had been. She had refused to recognize the symptoms of t.b. setting in, shutting her mind against the malady, as if by ignoring its presence, refusing to accept it, she could dissolve it into nothingness.
Her mirror had told her that her cheeks were sinking in, but she told herself that she was attaining full maturity—her flesh was settling more firmly on her bones. She poured some water into the hollows of her shoulders, and when the water rolled off, she decided that it was proof enough that she was not thin. When her skin was damp under the bedclothes at night, it was because the sky was thickly clouded, and because it was always warm before a rain. If her appetite was bad, the food was poorly seasoned, or lacked some necessary condiment. One day her seamstress pinched one inch from the waistline of an old dress she had ordered remodeled. The next day she returned the dress, complaining that it was too tight. When it came back she had to wear two petticoats under it, but that did not matter: her measurements at the dress shop had remained unchanged.
Although the rains did not often come in December, yet the air was damp and the evenings chilly. Her colds were taking longer to get rid of, but when the Hijas de Maria of the town invited her to go out caroling in the streets to raise funds for the destitutes, she went enthusiastically.
“Por vida!” her aunt Choleng, meeting her on the streets one night, had exclaimed. “You may not know it, Ercelia, but you are killing yourself. Whatever are you doing it for? Anyone would think you are expiating a secret sin!”
She had winced a little as under a whip, but she had looked at her aunt steadily as she said, “It is not fair to judge by one’s looks, Aunt. I really feel very well—and I am only helping a worthy cause.”
She sang herself hoarse all through Christmas season, and when Lent came around, she joined a group of old women who chanted the Passion of the Lord nightly in a little chapel in the barrio of Gusu.
But last week the long shadows would not be held back any longer. They reached out for her with angry fingers, stifling the he in her throat, tearing through her defenses. Reality caught up with her spectacularly on the day the American Governor General of the Islands arrived at the quaint little town for a visit.
All week long the town had been dressing up for the big day. Sanitary inspectors had gone about the villages and suburbs ordering cesspools and stagnant waterholes filled up, stray pigs caught and put in pens, weeds in vacant lots cut and burned; carromatas were ordered to carry pails for their horses’ droppings, and garbage boxes were emptied of dead rats and cats. Special committees had raised arches, hung welcome streamers across the streets, giving the town a festive atmosphere.
Earlier in the week, a blood-curdling threat, “Juramentado!”—which meant that a Moro fanatic had sworn before a village chief to kill people in the streets-had been whispered around town, putting a damper on the preparations. The threat meant that a Moro religious fanatic had sworn before a village chief to kill Christians in the streets. The civil authorities were sure that there was no cause for alarm. To reassure the townspeople, the reception committee appealed to the big Moro chiefs to issue statements to the papers denying the rumor. The datus and imams, responding to the appeal, not only denied the rumor, but made elaborate preparations of their own—“to impress the white chief with our good will,” as they said good-humoredly. Ornate vintas, beautiful dancing girls, and agong players were picked from among all the villages to form a welcoming delegation to the American chief executive.
The day was an exciting one for Ercelia. The ladies’ reception committee at the wharf was in her charge, and she had carefully chosen twenty-four of the prettiest young girls of the town to compose her committee. She had drawn the girls from market places, the schools, the barrios, and the fields—wherever youth and beauty had caught her eye. To the chagrin of the important ladies of the town who were ambitious for their daughters, most of the girls were part white, and some were offsprings—or offsprings of offsprings—of wandering American or Spanish adventurers who had seeded the native stock without benefit of ritual.
“There is really nothing wrong with the girls,” Ercelia explained to the irate ladies. “They did not choose the manner of their birth any more than any of us did. They are really our most beautiful. The town is famous for its beautiful girls, and all that our visitors will see is that they are beautiful.”
She had the same explanation of her choice of flowers. The fragrant sampaguitas and ylang-ylang were not in season, but the calachuchis hung profusely in huge clusters from the trees around the walls of the nearby cemetery. “Why cannot the calachuchis do? They are too pretty f
or the dead alone. Let us put them to new uses. Besides, would the Americans know they were looking like corpses with their wreathes hanging around their necks? All they will know is that we have welcomed them with flowers.”
Dressed in a striped balintawak dress of many colors and carrying an armful of milk-and-butter calachuchis, Ercelia felt as young and pretty as any of the girls around her, and the tropical morning sun never shone more cheerfully on her than when she walked past the school cadets, the Army scouts from Pettick Barracks, the schoolchildren with their little flags, the labor groups with their placards, to the place of honor reserved for her girls at the end of the wharf where the governor’s yacht would dock. But the yacht took so long in coming. The time of arrival had been announced as nine in the morning but the sun had already slipped past its zenith when the white ship rose out of the horizon—first like a tiny white egg against the blue sky, then like a gigantic sea gull scouring the waves. Ercelia was withering in her clothes as her flowers were withering, when the American party came down the gangplank, followed by the local government officials who had been taken aboard the ship by a flock of Moro vintas with full-spread sails rivaling the colors of a sunset. Ercelia felt faint and short of breath as she led the girls with the flowers to the men, but she laughed brightly and chatted gaily with the guests as she walked with them all the way to the Provincial Building at the foot of the wharf.
When she arrived home that afternoon she was ready to drop, but when the telephone rang and Don Paco, the Provincial Governor, inquired if he might send the car to pick her up for the evening reception at the rest house at Pasonanca Park, all her weariness seemed suddenly to vanish.
The trees in the park blossomed with colored lights and the walks were bordered with candle-lit lanterns of various shapes. The hall was hung with cadena de amor vines intertwined with champacas and azucenas, filling the air with subtle odors. There was a fountain of shells in the center of the dance floor too, and a fisherman’s net spread above it on the ceiling. The women were aglitter with sequins, and carried long trains and feather fans; the men were dashing in black tuxedo trousers and white mess jackets. The little town had never been more elegant.
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