It was May, and time for the sisters to build a fonda. They had not built a May stall since their poor Mamacita had passed away because the family had gone into deep mourning. Agustinita had felt that it was time they revived the quaint custom of holding a fonda because the town seemed to have lost love for the charming native traditions. Their Papa had not seen any harm in that and Don Miguel had come every night, every night. “I can tell you, he was as unwelcome as a fly to the pastry, but he simply would not stay away. He played checkers and dominoes with the young men, paying extravagant prices for the pastillas and pasteles that we made. And oh, how proper and polite he was to everyone! One would think he could not break a plate if he dropped it. Papa could find no excuse to ask him to discontinue his visits to the store.” She made a gesture of helplessness, throwing up her hands dramatically.
“Finally, one night when Papa was away at the plantation, poor Agustinita, from the goodness of her heart, I suppose—as what else could it have been?—consented to sit with Miguel for a cup of chocolate. And that was when”—she made a grimace of expressive pain—“the poor woman must have received the mosca.”
“The mosca?” Ercelia was incredulous.
“Why, yes, the mosca de España,” Romulita said matter-of-factly, holding up to the light from the window Ercelia’s new skirt and cocking her head critically at it. “Or haven’t you heard about it?”
Of course Ercelia had heard about it. The potion that the townsfolk knew as the fatal gayuma could simply have been Spanish fly, the sex stimulant that unscrupulous agents were selling undercover to the wasted and the old as a virility aid. Some white men had taken advantage of the credulity of the natives of Borneo and ascribed supernatural powers to gayuma to profit from its sale. But Don Miguel did not need the drug to win a bride. Could not the women see that Miguel was attractive and appealing, that it wouldn’t take very much for him with his gift of speech to persuade a woman to love him? Women, even if virtuous and carefully reared in the old conventions by the best of families, had the same weaknesses as men. She had seen life in an exclusive girls’ dormitory. She had seen right and proper girls go out in twos and threes to the church at Quiapo “to do a novena to the Black Christ” as they told the Mother Porter; and she had seen them meet their lovers and walk into the crowds with them. She had seen them come back in the evening looking like nuns in retreat, hugging their prayer books and rosaries to their breasts.
“But Don Miguel might not have used the mosca,” she ventured, somewhat provokingly.
“You don’t suppose that Agustinita, being the woman that she is and at her age, would have invited him of her own free will to come to her that night, do you?”
So, there was that night, Ercelia thought. And she felt rather than saw Romulita stiffen and stare at her. She felt like saying, “Yes, I do suppose she is just the type,” but she did not quite dare. “No, I suppose not,” she said.
“You see, it was I who saw him,” Romulita continued, looking quickly around the hall. “I myself came upon them on the porch.”
A tingling excitement of anticipation raced up Ercelia’s spine like a column of ants.
“The air was heavy and thick that night,” continued Romulita, “and I was suffocating from the heat. I rose about midnight to open the balustrade under the window, when suddenly I heard the floor of the house creaking.” Romulita got up and tested the floor with a foot. A loose board made a little squeak; she flicked her eyebrows. “I did not mind it. All houses creak in the night, you know—I remember Mama-Grandma saying houses have souls that weigh their secrets in the night—so I went back to bed. But sometime later I felt uncomfortable and uneasy. I seemed to feel a hand pulling me out of bed to go out and investigate. I am not an ordinarily suspicious person, but we had a new maid in the house then, and the first week she had been with us I missed a ring. I did not know, of course, that Agustinita was sleeping on the perezosa on the porch because of the heat, and I thought I would catch the maid in the act. And what an act I came upon!” She slapped a palm to her forehead with a smacking sound. “My flesh trembles at the recollection of it. I fainted, Ercelia! I tell you, I did!” she finished, dropping back into her seat.
Ercelia could not ask for a description of the act. Her modesty would not permit it, and she would not have Romulita stage another fainting act. She allowed her to finish her story with a string of holy ejaculations admixed with abusive epithets. Ercelia was quite impressed with their emotional intensity. To complete the confused picture, Ercelia allowed the sensitive retina of her insight to develop and secretly print in the darkroom of her imagination the negatives of the episodes; and she caught a furtive glimpse of Miguel, naked as she had seen him in her dream, covering Agustinita with his hairy limbs. But surprisingly enough she found it difficult to divest Agustinita of her nightgown. Her skeletal thinness was too ungainly to see against his big healthy body. She allowed her to hide in the folds of her nightdress, and permitted her to keep the fat knot of hair on her head with her innumerable pins.
“She did not have to marry him against her will. She could have sued him for—for what they call trespass of dwelling,” she said nonchalantly.
“Oh, no. We cannot go to court. Our position, our honor—and the scandal!” Romulita had remonstrated. “And Papa—to this day he does not know! He was out on the plantation when it happened.”
Agustinita could not explain exactly what had affected her that night, Romulita said. Agustinita had been awake, watching the stars shooting across the sky, one by one, she had told Romulita. She had never seen so many. They were like rain. And she had felt a great loneliness in her heart watching them, thinking they were like tears of gold from the eyes of God. She had heard the weeping call of a night bird in the coconut grove—plaintive, pleading, tenderly pledging secrecy. It was like a call in a reverie. And then the call seemed to come from right below the kitchen window. She had felt as if she were walking in a dream. She suspected even then that she had been drugged, but already she was without power to act against it. There was a thin moon dripping light through the trees, and the night was moist with the sheen of the dew. It was as if she were staring at the world through a window curtained over with silver threads, and Miguel, down there under the window with the soft light in his hair, had looked so appealing. “As Romeo must have looked to his Juliet,” Romulita said in a voice suspiciously like a sigh. She had now left her seat and was pacing about the room, her hands fluttering about her like nervous birds when a hunter is near. “It was as if he were a fruit dangling before her mouth, and she could not get it between her teeth because her hands were tied behind her back,” she continued. “Her strong mind had become mesmerized, unable to reason, and there was only the feeling in her of her flesh warming in the night, swelling like the sea under a full moon!”
Agustinita had watched Miguel climb the linden tree that grew close to the back porch, and she had felt no will to make an outcry. And when he touched her, his hands were soft as kapok fluff, coaxing her blood to rise. A great weakness had suddenly come over her and she had lain down on the couch to rest. She seemed to have fallen asleep, and in her sleep, she had dreamed of the time when she was a little girl climbing a greased pole for a prize during the town fiesta. With clenched teeth and bated breath, she had strained and strained to reach the top of the pole where the prize money hung in a little cloth bag. The pole was so long and so slippery and the prize so far beyond reach, but she had worked her way up inch by inch, elbow over knees, until she had come within grasp of it. But suddenly the pole had snapped beneath her!—and she had awakened to find Miguel on the couch with her.
“I tell you, Ercelia, the mosca has the power of the devil!” Romulita concluded, without looking Ercelia in the face.
Ercelia wondered how Romulita could enjoy a vicarious experience so greatly by simply talking about it. To watch her one would think she was personally reminiscing.
“Why does not Agustinita destroy that jar of mosca de Espa
ña? Then Miguel would not be able to make other women—climb the greased pole,” Ercelia said, laughing to hide her embarrassment.
“Ay, that’s another thing, Ercelia. There are women who do not have to have the Spanish fly to do that. You have heard of the Banegas women, haven’t you?”
“Of course. Who hasn’t?”
Everybody in town and the suburbs had heard about the Banegas women. They were two sisters who lived in San Jose in a house that was like an umbrella because it had a veranda all around it with many little arches. As a little girl Ercelia had thought it was the most beautiful house in town because its roof was painted a brilliant red. The sisters were the common affliction of many wives, including her own mother. They were the comforters of the lonely, the love-denied, the insatiable, or the simply fun-loving husbands of the town. Although neither was pretty, both were magnanimous with their favors, dispensing them to their favorites with neither expectations nor obligations—giving the wives no reason to complain on that score. Father Anacleto had berated the wives from the pulpit for consenting to and abetting their husbands’ iniquities.
The older of the sisters was Charito. She was smallish and had a face shaped like a heart, and eyes that were always smiling, but she was very dark, and when she powdered herself she turned the color of ashes. And her nose had a very low bridge. Ercelia had heard Uncle Ingo aver that a buffalo road-roller had passed over it.
The younger one, Monona, was almost pretty, with long-lashed eyes and a mole on the tear path of one eye, but her mouth was full of gold teeth, and she was too large and angular for a woman. Standing on wood-heeled slippers, she was almost as tall as a man. She had breasts that showed so conspicuously in the tight blouses she wore that Ingo swore they would hang down to her waist if she released them from their props; and that if she had a baby and wearied of nursing it in front, she could swing them over her shoulders and nurse the baby from behind.
Both were widows of American veterans who had come to Mindanao with General Pershing. They were living on pensions from the American Government. They had a cabinet-model Brunswick phonograph that loaded twelve records all at one time. Promptly every month, on the Sunday after their pensions arrived, they threw a party in their house and the native coconut drink flowed freely. Fantastic stories of the vulgarity of these parties had been told by the men, stories that Ercelia had heard only by employing ingenious means like crawling under the table in search of her slippers or falling asleep in a corner or hiding behind a door.
Charito and Monona were not really named Banegas. Their maiden name was Spiritu Santo, but some people said Father Anacleto had said—although the padre had always denied it—that the women were a disgrace to the Holy Ghost and should be called by some other name.
“But why Banegas?” Ercelia had asked her father.
“Oh, you know how it is in this town,” her father had told her. “Every family must have a name other than the one he takes at baptism. I am Valentin Mira-que-te-mato because I felled a Spaniard, your Granduncle Pipong is Pipong Hacha because he threatened one of his men with a hatchet, and Don Briccio Herrera is Briccio Puerco de monte because his father was killed by a wild boar. Well, Monona and Charito are Banegas because they eat no bananas except the kind that’s called banegas.”
“Oh, the big red ones you said little girls could not eat because they upset the stomach?”
“Yes,” he had told her. “They are too big and too sweet.” “Will my stomach ever be strong enough to eat them? I’d like to taste them!” she had said.
And her father had laughed even louder, and her mother had looked very much annoyed.
“Of course,” Romulita told Ercelia, “Miguel says he goes to the Banegas place only to drink—as if a thief would call himself a thief. And you should see him when he is drunk!”
Romulita was about to enter into an explanation of Don Miguel’s other iniquity when Don Valentin walked into the room. Flicking her eyebrows, Romulita once more returned to the subject of fashions. Her father never left the hall after that, as if to protect his unpopular friend’s reputation, and Ercelia was fortunately spared the ordeal of listening to the caustic disparagement.
Ercelia did not see Don Miguel all that vacation. Her father saw him often, she knew, but he would not bring him to the house. Don Miguel’s alliance with the family had not brought the man any closer to the heart of her mother.
During the next summer vacation Ercelia was persuaded to stay in Manila to take a course in voice culture. Sister Sobrepeña, the choir soloist of the order and voice teacher at the Sacred Heart of Mary Academy, had heard Ercelia sing at Sister Ursula’s birthday party and had told her the angels in heaven would cry bitterly if she neglected to develop her lovely gift. “Just write to your father, my dear child, and tell him what I told you. He will not spend very much. Only a little fee to help our St. Cecila Club, as I will teach you myself. You know I could have become a great singer if I had wanted to,” she had said. Ercelia’s mother had been reluctant, but her father had said it was all right, and so she had stayed. When Ercelia came home the following summer Don Miguel Santa Romana and his wife Doña Agustinita had moved to Miguel’s plantation in Cotabato, to save his coconut trees from the recurrent attacks of beetles, her father said—to be closer to the Datu of Pikit, his supply of mosca de España, Romulita and Josefinita said. And so a curtain seemed to fall between Don Miguel and Ercelia, and Ercelia had begun to see the face of Don Miguel less vividly than in her first dreams, a little remote and indistinct.
Her studies were becoming more complex, claiming all her waking moments. Methods and techniques of teaching were exciting and absorbing. Her marks had been exceptionally good from the first year of her study. Her pride had been terribly hurt when she was asked to repeat her first year of high school in normal school because she had finished it in the province in the general course. She had studied very hard to salve her pride all through the four-year course, and when she graduated valedictorian, she felt like the heroine of a play or a book who had vindicated a national dishonor.
The town was wilting like a banana leaf over a low fire when Ercelia came home from the big city with her teacher’s diploma. It was late in the month of April and the rains that watered the crops just before the harvest had not yet come. Even the loud-mouthed river that ran through the town had shriveled up into a querulous little brook, and Don Valentin’s fodder fields along its banks were turning slowly into a kindling patch. The farmers were looking anxiously to the north where the mountain raised its head of stone high against the sky, for there no clouds passed unbroken. “Oh, San Isidro, Lent is over, and we have kept the fast—bring on the rains,” they said. It was not a time for fiestas. But Ercelia had graduated valedictorian—had brought pride and honor to the little town. Don Paco Toribio, the municipal president, had received a letter of congratulations from the American superintendent of schools for Mindanao and Sulu. A celebration was in order.
“After all,” said Don Paco, who had won his election partly on the merits of his ribbon-and-lace oratory, “the carabao watering holes are not yet entirely dry, and truly as the sun will rise tomorrow, the ylang-ylang and sampaguita will be flowering soon. Let us have a dance!”
He imported a string orchestra from the neighboring island of Basilan to alternate with the brass band of the town. He delivered Ercelia her diploma in public with the dignity of a bishop ordaining a priest, and asked Ercelia to repeat her valedictory address. Ercelia had forgotten most of her speech, so she began in the middle, but she stomped her foot and clenched her fist when she came to the end, quoting faithfully the class motto, “To strive, to seek, to find and never to yield,” and everybody said she was very good.
Ercelia never forgot that dance. The women raised their eyeglasses to see her better when she came into the kerosene-lighted hall on the arm of her father. She used no lipstick as the girls did in the big city when they attended parties, but had crushed instead an amapola and stained her mouth with
its red petals. To perfume herself she had strung sampaguitas together in a garland around the fat knot of her hair. She allowed her nose to shine like an unripe tomato so all the town could see that she had daubed no powder on her face. The long skirt and the stiff pañuelo and the butterfly-sleeved camisa that she had put on made her look like a young queen. When she smiled, she covered the lower part of her face with a fan. She reminded herself constantly not to cross her legs like a Westernized city girl; she sat with both heels on the floor, her knees touching in the tradition of the modest Filipina.
Before the dance was over, people asked her to sing. She did not leap at the opportunity to show off her voice. She asked to be excused, confident that they would insist. And when she finally allowed herself to be persuaded, she sang the song of Maria Clara, feeling, as she did, like Maria Clara. “Sweet are the hours in one’s native land...” She intoned Rizal’s plaintive song of lovely tenderness. The men elbowed their way around her swearing to one another that she had bells in her throat, and the women declared her mother must have surely fed her with the pearl of a night bird. “The pillu-pillu is singing within her,” they said. “The pearl is flowing in her blood stream.”
The idea was ridiculous, she knew. A pearl in her blood stream could very well kill her. But this was the way the townsfolk explained any kind of skill or ability that was beyond their comprehension. Doring, the tuba gatherer who could climb a coconut tree in the fiercest wind, had the pearl of a lizard; Tiburcio, the diminutive mountain bandit who had wriggled out of his ropes and slipped past the sleepy guards of the town jail in the middle of the day, had the pearl of the ant-hill dwellers and could reduce himself to the size of a dwarf. And so she felt flattered that they thought she was supernaturally endowed.
The Devil Flower Page 7
