Late in the evening, long after the rigodon de honor had been danced by the officials and their wives, Don Paco stepped to the middle of the floor and with both arms extended hushed the orchestra imperiously like a policeman stopping traffic. Addressing his Excellency, the Governor General of the Philippines, his aide, his secretary, his secretary’s secretaries, and all the members of his entourage, in particular and in general, Don Paco announced in very carefully enunciated English that by popular demand, the enchanting songbird of the Eden of Mindanao, the admirable and laudable Miss Ercelia Fernandez, would entertain the company with a song. A burst of applause followed the announcement, flattering Ercelia to the tips of her toes. Her forehead had been damp all evening and there seemed to be a weight on her breast that pulled her shoulders in and raised a hump on her back, but rising sedately from her seat, she dropped the train of her skirt on the polished floor, took a few steps toward the orchestra, and bowed to the guests.
“Buencamino’s ‘The Land I Love,’” she whispered to the man on the podium, as she drew her hands to her bosom in a dramatic pose.
“Set in azure ocean like a sparkling jewel bright, lies the isle of my delight,” she sang, her voice unbelievably fresh, cool as a birdcall in the dawning. She saw the American governor smile his delight and appreciation, and her spirit swelled with pleasure. When she finished, the guests clapped spontaneously and loudly begged for an encore. Carried on a wave of exhilaration, Ercelia signaled to the orchestra leader, fluttering her fingers in a way he seemed to understand, and the orchestra struck up a lilting melody: the song of the open fields, the song of rapacious joy over the abundance of grain, the song of the ricebird.
Her voice came in brightly, catching the lower notes of the song with bell-like clearness, like nature awakening to morning light—but as she rose higher in the refrain, as the song drew her into a whirlpool of swift cadences, sending her climbing the steep cliffs of sheer ecstasy, her notes began to lose brilliance and power; her staccatos began to sound like the frantic wing-beats of an exhausted bird overtaken by a windstorm. Quickly she softened her tones, trying to clear her throat between bars, but the orchestra rose above her voice, muffing her singing. Mustering strength, she made a desperate effort to regain her former brilliance but her voice seemed to stick in her throat, and she ended her song in a hardly audible whisper punctuated with a paroxysm of coughing. A thunderous ovation was given her. The crowd applauded her as she had never been applauded before. Don Paco and the Governor General pressed forward and shook her hand warmly.
“I salute you for your artistry,” the Governor General said, smiling broadly. “The quality of your voice is as rare as your orchids, the waling-waling.”
The women embraced her, saying, “How well you have sung...truly our songbird,” and they kissed her; but behind their kind smiles and embraces Ercelia saw the pity shining in their eyes.
She would never forget the humiliation she suffered that night. It was as if she stood there naked in the middle of the hall, quivering under the raw stare of the men. Her mortification was complete, but her suffering was brief and swift. Soon she was numb: dead to pain, free of shame. Stripped of her one pride, her one last shining ornament, she felt a strange sense of freedom surge within her. Now there was nothing to conceal, there was nothing to guard against; she was free—utterly—in body as in spirit! There was nothing left but herself, her human body with its infirmities, her human spirit with its weaknesses. Her virtue, like her voice, had been an ornament of pride not indigenous to her being. She could be honest now, she could be herself: to herself as to the world. She would be herself!
The carabao cart came into view, and the sight brought her back to her schoolwork. It was getting late. Old man Anoy had emptied his load of fresh fish at the market place and was going home. Soon she would have to go home too, and she had yet to write on the board a drill in arithmetic. She would think about resigning later. She could not simply walk out on her pupils; she had to give notice to the superintendent.
She picked up an eraser and vigorously cleaned the blackboards. Opening her notebook to where she had written her lesson plan in red ink, she began to write on the board. But the letters on the page suddenly seemed to grow large and spill over. She was being sentimental, she told herself, as she dabbed at her eyes with a corner of her scarf. What did she want to stay in the school for, anyway? Within the four walls of the schoolroom today was as yesterday, and yesterday as the day before. Here the moments ticked off like a clock—dull and monotonous—her days must beat like her heart with its full rhythm and its strong cadences. All these years what had excited her in school? The folk dances she taught for programs, the spelling bee she had coached and won, the booths she had planned for the Garden Day celebrations, the excursions she had chaperoned, the Fourth of July parades she helped to organize, the little plays she directed annually? It was time she took the stage herself and stopped whispering lines to kids from behind the backdrop!
She let the chalk fall from her fingers. She threw the notebook to the table and fumbled in her handbag for a handkerchief. She blew her nose and staggered back to the chair at the desk. She was forever going back to her desk. As if it were there her fate was spun, as if it were there her life was lived. Yes, it was there her life was lived, for it was there she had been so-so close to Larry!
She wondered about him. Was he still free? Would he still want her? He said he would always want her, but that had been eleven years ago—a long, long time—and yet, as the old folks said, the world was round. He could be somewhere and still want her. She could tell him now. She could go with him now. She had not married him because she had not been able to disclose to him her secret guilt about Don Miguel. Don Miguel had been for her an experience so intensely searing that it had seemed to her his memory would smart forever. He had come into her life like the proverbial spider with brilliant colors on his back, weaving a tapestry so fascinating that it had covered her eyes and confused her. Larry might have forgiven her the guilt of Don Miguel, if she had stripped herself of her pride and told him. But she could not see the lovely image of herself—the image she so loved to see reflected in his eyes—go out like a candle flame in the dark, leaving only an acrid smell behind. To Larry, as to the townsfolk, Ercelia Fernandez was a Maria Clara, a paragon of virtue, a model of Filipino womanhood. Unlike other girls who, even as serpents, could slip off their skins and grow others, she was like the turtle, condemned to carry her shell upon her back.
She had sent Larry away but had never stopped loving him. She could not stop dreaming of him, could not stop picking her mind for little details about him to bring him back more vividly. She continued to tend the little flames that he had kindled in her flesh until they sparked to life again and spread upon her body like brushfire to consume her desire.
She remembered him so well: the tiny scar on his right eyelid that was left, he told her, by a cut he had suffered in a fight with a bigger boy who had called him “white monkey,” because he was half white; the right eyebrow, slightly shorter than the left—he had been burned firing a bamboo gun on a New Year’s Eve; the square, truculent chin he had inherited from his American father. It was so deceptive, that chin, looking so smooth and feeling like sandpaper against her cheeks. She had always felt her face smarting long after he had gone. And there was the trouble he had with his hair. It would not stay combed back; a lock always fell out of place and dropped across his forehead. She loved the way he tossed it back—with an impatient, jerky movement of the hand.
Once she had spied a gray hair on his temple. She had tried to pluck it out. She had told him to sit still while she caught it with her fingers, but his breath upon her elbow had affected her so that she pulled many dark ones instead. She had thrown the hairs away quickly.
“You are too young to have gray hairs,” she had said, laughing.
“That is because I do so much thinking,” he had said sheepishly. “I am a savant.”
“That is no
t what it means. If you ask the old women of the village, they will tell you that it means you have had a naughty past. In the young, each gray hair represents an evil step taken.”
“Oh.” He had laughed as if making an astounding discovery. “Now I see. You want to inquire into my past. But you need not have tried to scalp me for it. I had always meant to tell you.”
“Oh, no-”
“Oh, yes!”
“Well, to be frank, I will not be the least surprised if you have a very wicked one.”
He had looked at her speculatively, as if to prepare her for a shock. “I had my first woman when I was fourteen.” In spite of herself, she had gasped, “I don’t believe it, you couldn’t have!”
“But I did. I felt like a man—and—and the woman told me I was built better than most men.”
It would have disgusted her if he had bragged, but he had sounded very humble and apologetic. Her cheeks had become warm and she had not wanted to prod further, but he had wanted to explain.
The woman was twenty-six, the wife of a sailor who was always away. She was a good cook and did the family’s laundry. Once his mother had to go to the country and had asked the woman to come and stay in the house in her absence. He had broken his ankle falling out of a tree and his foot was in a cast. He had taken a shower and he needed a towel in the bathroom. The woman was very pretty and lush with life, and very kind to him. In the bathroom he had been shy and self-conscious, but she had made him feel proud of his body. He had not even thought it possible that he could go so far with a woman—he had never even kissed a girl—but the woman had made him feel like a man. For a long time after he had been tormented by the belief that he had seduced a married woman.
Condemnation for the woman poured out tremblingly from Ercelia’s lips: “Shameless—utterly, utterly shameless and disgraceful,” she had said, shaking with emotion. And when Larry had tried to assuage her and excuse the woman, she had flayed him with her eyes.
But now she wished she had had the woman’s daring to take what she wanted when she could. She wished she had been in her place, in Larry’s arms, although she could never imagine Larry as the boy he had been but as the man he was the last time she had been with him.
Yes, she remembered him so well: the way his lips parted when he kissed, the way he ran his tongue on her lower Up, making her feel as if she were a piece of pastry. She had sent him away but she kept hugging the memory of him so closely, wanting always to give herself to him as a wife, wholly and utterly, wanting to share in the urgency of his passion, in the frenzied moment of his rapture, in the ebb tide of his complete gratification.
Her dreams of him were almost real—she wondered if she could make a mental image of him real. Anyway, what was real? That which had substance? She could never tell what images had substance, what were merely shadows. Only after images had dissolved before her eyes could she tell whether they had had substance. There were the three sisters from Santa Maria, the three women whose lives had so strangely affected her own. There was Miguel who had captured her fancy and confused her. Her parents who had understood her so little and whom she so little had understood. Her grandaunt Mariana, Father Anacleto, Ingo and Tasia. All of these had composed her society and had evoked for her a spirit of many shapes and many shades, a spirit that had held her prisoner even as the hub was to the spokes of a wheel. What was real? The lived moment, the felt emotion, the burning passion were real; all else was film in the eye, all else illusion, like sunrise and sunset, like rainbow and moonlight.
Had her life been real? Or had it all been shadow?
Where had it begun? How? She rolled her mind back, back, back, groping as for a forgotten song hanging on the tip of the tongue, teasing the memory. All she had wanted to he was a teacher. She could not remember why exactly—maybe because there were so few teachers and she felt she could be one; maybe to be different, to earn her own living, to be a leader in the community; maybe merely to be an ilustrada, a polished, cultured lady, admired by her community; maybe only to feel important, and to go to the far-off big city of Manila where the Normal School was, and see what there was to see. She had heard very much about the big city where everybody was important for merely being there. She had heard tell of tall houses and wide streets and electric cars and big movie houses.
She had timidly mentioned the idea to Mrs. Brown, the wife of the superintendent, when she had come to visit the school one day, and had congratulated her on her proficiency in reading English. Mrs. Brown had gone to see her mother immediately. Her mother had mentioned the idea to her father and her father—after scratching his head and studying his pipe—had said, “Well, if that is what you want, Ercelia, Daughter, to the big city you will go.”
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THE older townsfolk did not believe in sending girls out to the far-off big city. “They will learn to paint their faces. They will make smoke rings with cigarettes and sit with the men in the bars and the clubs,” they said, shaking their heads and looking sad, as when their rice fields were yellow and heavy with grain, and the locusts came and set upon them. Ercelia’s grandaunt Mariana, the oldest catechism teacher in town, was sententious: “It will be a royal feast for the young to use a tongue their parents do not understand. The pullets will be laying eggs before the cockerel is discovered in the hen house!”
But Ercelia’s father was not intimidated. “No cockerel is going to peck at my pullet,” he declared.
He was not a big man, her father. He could hardly look over the back of a native pony without standing on his toes, but like the native pony, he was strong in the limbs and wiry. He had felled a big Spaniard when he was younger by tripping him in a fight at the cockpit. He had sat on the big man’s chest and pummeled at him until the proud man had stopped raving “Mira que te mato.” A Spaniard always threatened “I will kill you,” even when he was down.
The people of the town never forgot the incident. Later, when they spoke about her father, they would say, “Valentin? Ah, you mean Valentin Mira-que-te-mato!” And often they would laugh. But never to his face. He had a good face—a face the color of coffee before it is roasted, with thin lips and even teeth and a square chin—a face that laughed often, but a face one did not laugh at. Not even when one noticed that the nostrils opened up and shook a little when they took big breaths in. And so, when her father made the announcement that he had decided to send his daughter to the city to study, no one cared to stand against him. On the contrary, his relatives pressed him to make it an occasion and give a roast-pig party.
The day of the party was vivid in Ercelia’s memory. It was the day the gateway to a new life had swung open before her, the day she had first become aware of people and had begun to wonder about them seriously. That day she had become conscious of herself as a woman with the complex responsibility of keeping herself virtuous, of sorting out, along the way to maturity, truth from half-truth, illusion from reality. Like the proverbial shrimp swimming with the current that her mother used to sing about, life had been to her a stream that was easy to follow. There had been no realities because there had been no illusions to see them against—even as the shrimp felt no current because there was no will to move against it. But at the time she did not know what the day was to mean to her. She remembered it only as a day of much eating and laughing.
Ingo and his wife Tasia were the first sparkle of fun she saw at the party. The couple rarely came to town. They lived across the river in Curuan where the dirt road out of town went no farther. Ingo was her father’s brother, but she could never call him Uncle. He was the simpleton of the family—the guachinango. His name should have been Juan, Ercelia had always thought, like the boy in the story the old folks loved to tell: the boy who went to the butcher’s shed and picked up all the cows’ eyes and threw them one by one at the girls who passed by because his mother had told him he was old enough to “cast eyes around for a wife.”
“If Ingo had a little more meat in his coconut,” her father would say, ta
pping a knuckle to his head, “I would have him join the circus.” And Ercelia never doubted Ingo would do as his brother would have him do. To make his wife Tasia marry him, he carried her bodily to his house when he found her bathing in the river, because Brother Valentin had told him to.
Ingo began to talk even before he reached the foot of the stairs to the house. He had received the message his brother had sent him through a bus conductor to come to the party without fail. “Without fail,” he said, gesticulating emphatically. He wore a high-necked, starched-stiff white coat over blue denim pants and walked barefoot. His shoes were at the shoemaker’s to be patched for the town fiesta the following week, he explained, “But here I am, Brother Valentin. Without fail!”
It was Tasia, however, who made Ercelia laugh. Tasia had on a flowered-silk skirt and a camisa all spangled with sequins. She had been queen at a barrio fiesta, and the camisa was a proud and cherished possession. She wore the long train of her skirt well tucked in at the waist, raising the hem of the glossy garment high enough to show her lace underskirts and beaded slippers. She explained a little demurely, a little deprecatingly, that a cousin had borrowed her clothes for street wear, and she had no choice but to don her coronation robes. She did not want to do so, but Ingo had insisted that the robes were all right for a party if she did not wear the crown.
There were children at the party, her aunt Choleng’s children. Tia Choleng, as Ercelia called her, was her mother’s widowed sister. She lived in Lumayang, on the rubber plantation two hills and one stream behind Campana Hill, across the river from the lanzon orchards. She had a large brood-four girls and three boys—and the eldest, Celerina, was only twelve. When her husband, Ambrosio, lived, she bore a child almost every year. One day Ercelia had heard her mother say rather unkindly that her sister was as prolific as a sow. “It is God’s will, Isabel,” her father had said.
The Devil Flower Page 2
