The Devil Flower

by Emigdio Alvarez Enriquez

  Ercelia had tried to explain the feeling she had about the mirrors to her mother, but her mother had said, “Tonta, I don’t know what you are talking about.” The sisters would not know what she was talking about either, if she tried to tell them. They did not seem to share this feeling about the mirrors. They pirouetted between the looking glasses like gay butterflies showing off the colors of their flimsy wings. She did not realize, as she watched and wondered about the sisters, that she was even then gazing into still another mirror, a taller and wider mirror, one that had no frame and no face, but one that was more faithful because in its depths the present, the past, and the future were one, and time did not move. She did not know that she was gazing into the mirror of truth.

  As she helped the sisters with their face powder and pins, she only saw that as they recaptured their beauty and regained their poise, the proud furnishings of her mother’s parlor began to look disgracefully drab. The colored-bead curtains hanging across the bedroom doors in short strips like frozen rain drops in the path of a rainbow suddenly showed the coat of dust that had gathered on them over the years. The brass ornaments she had assiduously polished with the juice of the camia fruit reminded her by their dull, pallid sheen that she had failed to spread coconut oil over them. The ornate Spanish armchairs of black hardwood, grouped around a big round table, mocked her in her knowledge that under the velvet cushions and crocheted covers the rattan-mat seats and backrests were weak and gave easily under the lightest pressure. And the round table, inlaid though it was with mother-of-pearl, stood shakily on one intricately carved leg.

  Ercelia wished the sisters would not tarry in the hall. Apprehension grew steadily within her as the ladies moved about and looked about. When they finally picked up their basket, which they had left on the veranda, and stepped down the heavily waxed stairs, half lifting their skirts to keep them from catching on the huge sea shells on the comers of the steps, her relief was almost like happiness. However, when they reached the gate where the other guests were taking leave of her mother, the sisters seemed to have found something to say to everyone. They stood there talking and gesturing until everybody had left except Aunt Choleng and the children, who were staying for the night to help clean up the yard, and Ingo and Tasia, whose bus was not coming by until late in the afternoon. Even then, the sisters did not seem ready to go. They walked back to the house with their hostess, Josefinita and Romulita swinging the basket between them with as much watchfulness and care as if a baby were lying in it. Settling themselves in the squeaky Vienna chairs on the veranda, they talked on, their hands and faces speaking louder than their tongues. As they talked, it seemed to Ercelia that they were as aware of her as she was of them. Agustinita would turn around at the sound of a chuckle, would trace with her eyes the path of every glance. And once, when Ercelia turned to Ingo to say something, she felt as if Agustinita’s eyes had reached out and snatched at her hair.

  The talk they made was the kind that the barrio folks called “snaky,” because it slid slimily from one subject to another and back again, coiling and stretching and twisting back upon itself. But the talk was really snaky, Ercelia thought, because its sting was venomously fatal to its victims.

  The sisters knew the story of everybody who was important in the barrios and the town, as well as they knew their novenas to the saints and the litany of the rosary. They discussed people’s lives as if they were merchandise in the market place, appraising, depreciating, evaluating, devaluating, mostly devaluating. Had they not been the sisters, her mother would have called them gallinolas cackling over worms in a heap of rubbish. But because they were the sisters, the ladies of Santa Maria, they were simply being naughty—in much the same way as when good old Father Anacleto imbibed tuba, the native drink he loved so well, and then trudged home on wobbly legs humming under his breath a gay little tune. On such occasions the poor priest had not been drinking, only making merry.

  Among the many closets aired by the sisters that day was her own grandaunt Mariana’s. Ingo was wondering why the old lady had stood up against Father Anacleto, and Josefinita told him to stop wondering. “I can tell you,” she said, picking off needles of dead-love weeds that she had caught on her skirt while down in the yard. “Father Anacleto has reprimanded Aunt Mariana about her card playing. Aunt Mariana calls it diversion, and the padre calls it gambling. He threatened to take her catechism class away from her if she persisted. He said something about good examples teaching better than words. Now, of course, the old lady has a choking grip on the padre’s neck.”

  Another closet Ercelia took a sniff at was the sisters’ own. She learned why Josefinita had never married Adolfo Kong. Ercelia’s father was saying in a jesting tone that he wished Adolfo were a carromata owner and therefore a fodder buyer, like Don Miguel. “Then I could have had an excuse to invite him to the family party,” he said looking teasingly at Josefinita. Adolfo owned extensive coconut lands between San Ramon and Labuan, but had no carromata.

  “We have all the coconuts we want in the family, Valentin, you know that,” Agustinita told him, “but if Josefinita should choose to become the Señola Kong of the town, one can never have too many,” and she laughed loudly, opening her mouth widely, without covering it with a fan or a handkerchief—like a bad woman, Ercelia thought; and when everybody joined her, she laughed even louder. Josefinita also laughed, but her face was like the face of one who has inadvertently bitten into the sour fruit of a tamarind tree.

  Adolfo was known by the town as Señol Kong. If Josefinita became his wife, she would eventually become Señola Kong. Adolfo used to have a Chinese name before Father Anacleto poured water on his head and put salt into his mouth to make him Christian, but Ercelia never knew what it was. She knew only that he had come from Hong Kong with Liam Sy, the oil merchant, and he spoke Spanish so badly he could never pronounce his r’s except as l’s; and because he was not a storekeeper, and had no scars on his head like the coolies who were smuggled into the country, but was a bookkeeper with considerable money, the people had not dubbed him Little One or Fat One or Shorty or Thin One but Señol Kong. It was very presumptuous indeed of Adolfo to reach so high up for the hand of one of the sisters even if he had made a big fortune, Ercelia thought, but Adolfo was a special specimen among the Chinese men of the town. She often saw him in church on Sundays. He wore his black hair long, and he carried his body erect. Anybody could tell by his straight long legs and the even set of his wide shoulders that he had never carried a load on a lever, nor a basket on his head. Too, his nose was high on the bridge, as high as Josefinita’s, one would say, and his eyes were not mere slits on his face, but large openings, like the cat-eye nuts the children used for chips in their card games. People did not find it strange that a woman like Josefinita could find him attractive. While they would not encourage her to insist on a marriage her family did not approve of, yet they felt sorry for her, and Josefinita walked about with the romantic aura of a Maria Clara around her head. Ercelia did not know whether Josefinita loved Adolfo or was merely using his love as a shield to ward off pity for an unmarried woman, but as she heard the sisters’ laughter and watched their faces then, she wondered if there was not something as different from the truth about Josefinita’s love story as Maria Clara’s virtues or Agustinita’s hair.

  Ercelia had been anxious to hear about Don Miguel and his nun, but did not know how to steer the conversation in that direction. Ingo seemed determined to annoy the sisters with delicate subjects like love and age and marriage. He was like a gadfly around the women, threatening to get in their hair, and the women were taking swats at him, trying not to lose their tempers.

  But it was Ingo who finally gave Ercelia the occasion to talk about Don Miguel. Hearing the hum of a bus coming down the road, he reached hurriedly for his hat on the stag’s antlers on the wall. “There’s the bus; come, Tasia,” he called to his wife. Then, taking the stairs two at a time and dragging the heavy coir mat down after him, he shouted back: “Watch M
iguel tonight, Agustinita. He’s a fine cock. I’ve seen the scales of his legs.” Running to the gate, waving his arms wildly, he called the bus to stop as it appeared at the bend of the road. Tasia straggled to the gate after Ingo, wiping her sweaty brow with the end of her train. As the couple clambered into the already overloaded vehicle, the sisters broke out in shrill laughter, but a kind of laughter, it seemed to Ercelia, expressing much relief and little humor.

  “I don’t see what there is to watch Don Miguel about. Why? How is he dangerous?” Ercelia said, quickly picking up the cue that her Uncle Ingo had let fall, her heart strangely feeling very full.

  “Your girl is very innocent, Isabel. Don’t you think she should now be informed? She is soon to be released alone among the hounds in the city,” Agustinita said, carrying the cat to a corner of the veranda, and setting it in a hammock where there was a splotch of sunlight.

  Aunt Choleng’s Celerina came in with a platter of rice cakes. Her mother made no sign that she had heard and began to pour coffee from a porcelain pot into the little Chinese teacups, which on this rare occasion she had ordered the maid to bring in from the dining room.

  Her father had left to feed his gamecocks in the coops under the kitchen, and there were only Choleng and the sisters and her mother in the circle, but it seemed to Ercelia that the veranda was full of people, and that all their eyes were riveted on her.

  Aunt Choleng told Celerina to take coffee and cakes to her grandmother on the back porch—to “clear the coast of Moros,” Ercelia thought. When Celerina had left, her mother said, “Oh, I suppose my daughter is old enough to hear what you have to say, Agustinita.”

  “Why don’t you behave?” Romulita asked Agustinita, as if addressing a naughty child.

  “It is life,” Agustinita said pertly. “Better sooner than later. Ercelia is bound to hear it anyway.” Then, coming back to the table, sipping coffee, and taking little bites of rice cake, Agustinita told the story.

  Nobody really knew Don Miguel’s origin. He could have sprung from an ant hill or broken out of a stalk of bamboo, as the barrio folk would say it. He did not really deserve to be called Don. He was not from the town either. If he had a little money, he could have come by it in one of several ways, but what did it matter?—he was not really rich: all he had were a few carromatas, and a coconut plantation in Cotabato, if there was anything to the rumor. The sisters had never met him socially. He had never been seen at the governor’s annual banquets, to which the town’s elite were always invited. How he had managed to go and study in Spain, no one knew for certain. He could have sailed as a cabin boy in a merchant ship like many she had heard of. People were saying, with the back of their hands to their mouths, that he was the illegitimate son of Father Herrera, the Father Superior of Cotabato, and that the padre had slipped money to him in small sums to save up; he had lived in the convent as the head sexton. But he could also have been the son of a woman of the streets whom the padre had taken pity on. Well, anyway—and this was a recorded fact—he abducted a nun from the adjacent convent! He ran away with her! “A nun, Ercelia, a nun,” Agustinita said with an emphatic nod of the head and gleams of excitement in her eyes.

  “Was she beautiful?” Ercelia asked.

  “We saw pictures of her at the Gonzaleses’ when we spent a vacation in Cotabato. Very pretty, Ercelia, and her name was Claribel,” Agustinita assured her.

  Ercelia thought it was a beautiful name, a name tinkling like a bell.

  “It was such a scandal,” Romulita said. “The people were so angry. They would have stoned Don Miguel if they had found him that day. They said that to seduce the poor nun, he had used gayuma.”

  “Gayuma!” Aunt Choleng said, turning a little pale.

  “Gayuma!” her mother said. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”

  Ercelia did not understand.

  “Gayuma,” Josefinita spoke up, noting the puzzled expression on her face, “is a kind of sap from a certain tree mixed with the semen of a certain animal found only in Sandakan. It puts the body in heat. All that it takes to make a woman, however virtuous, respond to a man’s lust is one tiny drop of it,” and she took the finger of one hand between the thumb and forefinger of the other, pressing it at the tip slowly and deliberately as if to squeeze out a drop of something from it. The gesture made Ercelia warm in the face.

  “He must have dropped it in her coffee, or melted it in the wax of some candle the poor sister was sure to inhale,” Agustinita said, “because it seems that the first embrace was consummated in Don Miguel’s own room—for how could that sweet and modest girl have left her cell if she had not been bewitched? Tell me!” There was a challenge in her tone, but before anyone could accept it she continued in a hurry. “After the damage was done, the unfortunate girl could do no less than go with him to mend her honor.”

  “I am sure that was it,” Ercelia’s mother said, speaking more to her daughter than to anyone else. “That is Don Miguel for you.” And turning to Agustinita, “What was that matter of the prayer book discovered in Sister Claribel’s cell?”

  “Oh, yes, Isabel,” Agustinita said. “Miguel was as cunning as the devil. He laid the trap, and Sister Claribel simply walked into it. Don Miguel had stolen her book and then returned it after underlining certain words in the prayers to speak for him.”

  “How utterly profane of him to use a holy article for a mundane purpose,” Aunt Choleng exclaimed, also looking at her as if she had not yet been warned enough.

  “If Sister Claribel had reported this evil man’s conduct to the Mother Superior,” her mother said, “he would have been flayed alive, and justifiably so!”

  “Sister Claribel could not do that—not Sister Claribel,” rejoined Agustinita. “We were told she had too much charity. She could not have exposed him. Besides, she thought she had lost the book and was very grateful to Miguel for returning it.”

  “And she comes from the best of families in Cotabato too, Isabel. Her paternal grandfather had been governor and her father was president of the Sons of the Nation,” Romulita said in a tone of authority.

  “So it was, Ercelia,” Josefinita said.

  However, the sisters did not agree on how Don Miguel had acquired the love potion. Sandakan was a port in British North Borneo, and gayuma (if there was such a thing) would be contraband in the Philippines. Of course the numberless little islets strung between the two countries in the one sea between them drew the two countries together like next-door neighbors with a common back yard; and when one was not looking, the other would dump his garbage in the other’s can. As the villagers on the coast would swear, it was as impossible to keep contraband out of the country as it was to carry water in a basket. However, contraband was contraband, and it required a knowledge of contacts and go-betweens to bring the goods in; it did not seem likely that Don Miguel, then a sexton in the convent, would have known how to go about the matter. People would never have suspected the truth if Doña Lucila Ponticarpio had not been arrested and charged with smuggling one week before the incident. “You see,” Agustinita said, slapping Ercelia on the lap with one hand, “Doña Lucila used to tip Don Miguel generously for lighting candles for her before the statue of Our Lady of the Pillar. This was for every day Doña Lucila was away visiting her husband who was head of a dye factory in Borneo.”

  “Not so, not so.” Josefinita shook her head emphatically. “Doña Lucila was never arrested. She was only warned that she would be inspected personally by a woman inspector the next time she would make the trip. You see”—she looked fixedly at her cousin Isabel—“there were rumors that the doña carried diamonds into the country inside her own—“ and arching her eyebrows, she looked meaningfully down at her lap. The company broke into raucous laughter. “And we ought to know we can’t accommodate very much there,” she continued when the laughter died down. “Besides, knowing Lucila as I do, I don’t believe she would sacrifice a diamond to make room for a love potion. I am inclined to believe the water-carrier was
right. Don Miguel had obtained it from the Datu of Pikit.”

  The Datu of Pikit! Even Ercelia had heard of that fabulous Moro chieftain. The brass ornaments in the parlor were the work of the people of his village. They were the datu’s gifts to her father in return for a gamecock of redoubtable reputation that her father had given him for a present. Her father had met the datu in Cotabato after the earthquake of 1910 when the town had been reduced to rubble and her father and his brother Ingo had hastened over to help their uncle Marcelo rebuild his fallen house. Her granduncle Marcelo and his family had taken refuge in the datu’s village and the chief had been kind to them. But it was neither the brass ornaments nor the gamecock for which the datu was famous, but his household, which comprised a whole village because all the women were his wives and all the boys and girls were his children.

  “I know that the Datu of Pikit is not a stranger to you,” Josefinita was saying, “but have you ever wondered how he has managed to keep all those women happy?”

  “Well,” Aunt Choleng said, “some men are so vigorous. My husband Ambrosio—”

  “That is enough, Choleng,” Josefinita said. “I know what you are going to say. But your husband Ambrosio had only one hen and one coop, and”—lowering her voice to a whisper—“the datu has a whole village for a seraglio! If he did not stop in Borneo for the love potion every time he made a pilgrimage to Mecca, he would never have been able to keep them.”

  “And what has all this to do with Don Miguel?” Ercelia asked impatiently.

  “Nothing, Ercelia,” Agustinita said, “except that the water-carrier of the Gonzaleses, who was also the water-carrier of the convent, had seen Miguel talking with the datu at the cockpit on a Sunday—”