Ercelia had never seen the picture of a more distraught woman than Romulita presented when she came into the house. Her eyes, swollen puffs, had a frightened, despairing look; her forehead was damp with stray wisps of hair sticking to it, making her look like the illustration of a witch in a fairy-tale book. She had not changed her costume but carried a bundle of clothes wrapped in a shawl under her arm.
“I ran away from them. I had to get away from that miserable house tonight, Isabel. You should have heard Agustinita and Miguel fight as soon as they arrived home. How terrible! How terrible! They had not changed at all!” She stumbled to a sofa in the parlor.
“Calm yourself, woman. Your nerves are all in pieces! Choleng, get the agua florida, she is going to faint,” Doña Isabel cried.
“No, I won’t faint. I’m all right,” Romulita said, sitting up. “Valentin, where is he? I want to talk to him.”
Don Valentin had gone to the bathroom to nurse his bruises.
“I suspect he had some unflattering marks on his person, the big hero. He will not let me attend to him,” Doña Isabel said.
“I want to talk to him about Josefinita,” Romulita said, and suddenly her face began to tremble, and she broke into weeping.
“Josefinita? By Santa Blasa, what has happened to her?” Choleng demanded.
Romulita blew her nose loudly and was silent for a time. Then she took a long breath, struggling for composure, and said: “I want to talk to Valentin about her. He must come with me to speak to Papa. I cannot face the old man alone. Josefinita has run away with Adolfo.”
Silence fell like a triple period after the announcement. The impact was almost audible.
“Blessed is misfortune when it comes without company!” Doña Isabel recited commiseratingly, and Choleng, as if taking a cue, turned her attention to the gaping children around Romulita. Making a big show of indignation to frighten them into obedience, she sent them back to their beds in the one room they all shared.
“The moment I saw Miguel and Agustinita arrive at the dance without her, I knew in my heart that evil had befallen us again,” Romulita said. She suppressed a sigh.
“But—have we not all understood that Josefinita had given up Adolfo?” Choleng asked, coming back to the hall.
“You were all deceived but me,” Romulita shook her head, a half-smile of contempt crooking her face. “I knew what was going on. Really very little escapes this old cat. We met
Paco Toribio at every social function we attended these last few months, and always his loyal Adolfo kept him company.” “Social functions? Ridiculous! How, how”—Choleng put her hand to her mouth as if to suppress a laugh—“how did he become so important?”
“You have been too long in the hills, Choleng,” Doña Isabel said reprovingly. “Don Paco Toribio, the presidente, and Adolfo are like this,” and she illustrated pointedly with two fingers pressed together, one twined over the other. “Don Paco’s father became Adolfo’s godfather at baptism; they are spiritual brothers. But more than that, a rich Chinese landowner does need a government official for a sponsor to oil up his interests, and to a government official, as the saying goes, he who gives chicoy is always a good Chinese. Why, you know, Adolfo practically fed and clothed Paco during the campaign!”
“Now, I know why Josefinita was assigned to the reviewing stand,” Romulita said thoughtfully. “I can see the hand of Paco Toribio—to give Adolfo an opportunity with Josefinita.” Suddenly there was a gleam of interest in her eyes. “The man has not forgotten. And this he has done to spite Papa for refusing to give me to him. Remember?” she said, searching their faces.
Ercelia well remembered. It had also happened when she was in the city but this matter her mother had relayed to her with a flare of pride. Don Paco Toribio, after his election as president, confident of the dignity of his newly acquired position, had set his eyes on Romulita; and believing himself to have found favor in her eyes, had been intrepid enough to ask for her hand in marriage.
Don Paco had sent up a letter announcing his intentions to call on Don Pipong, and Don Pipong had replied that he would receive him. Don Paco had ordered drinks and a lechon made ready to celebrate the occasion of the pedimento. He had been careful to observe all particulars of the ancient ritual. He had taken with him an elderly spokesman. He had entered the house only when he was bidden, sat when he was invited, and spoken only when spoken to. But Don Pipong had opened up the interview by asking him how many hectares of land there were to his name, and how much money there was to his credit in the bank. “It is for my daughter’s sake that I ask,” Don Pipong had said, “inasmuch as I would not want my progeny swathed in banana leaves.”
Don Paco did not have land the size of a man’s palm. His father had pushed a cart for people’s baggage at the docks, and his mother had washed for the neighbors. He was poor enough to have been swathed in banana leaves, and he had used his condition to appeal to the barrio folk for their votes to win the election against a second cousin of Don Pipong’s. Don Paco, a man of wit and pride, if not of wisdom, had risen to the occasion.
“While I might have been swathed in banana leaves, Don Pipong, I regret that I did not have the honor of a horse’s trough for a crib, which was the lot of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour! However, permit me to remind you that freak storms are sometimes sent by God to upset the human condition. The male half of the coconut shell, as you well know, does not always stay with its mouth to the ground!” Then he had hustled out of the house grunting like a wild boar, ordering all the food and drinks carried to the Banegas house, where, it was later learned, he had caroused with the women until daylight.
“Wicked, wicked man!” Romulita wailed. “Oh, how I hate him, how I hate him!” And she fell into renewed weeping.
Suddenly, Ercelia could not stand it any longer. Picking up her loose nightgown about her, and without saying good night, she fled to the sanctuary of her room and locked herself in.
The hours had deepened to midnight when the household finally quieted down to sleep, leaving Ercelia alone with her thinking. The picture the sisters had made in her mind, once enchantingly bright with color, was now a mass of stains and smudges. She had seen the sisters as common women at the fish market—bickering, fighting, squabbling. She would never see them again as women molded of better clay. There entered her heart a sadness as of nostalgia, as of something long lost and unrecoverable, like the something she had left behind with the fireflies when she was little.
The fireflies had come to the orange tree outside her window every night. They came about the time her father put her to bed and she told herself they came to put dreams into her eyes. Through the netting of the mosquito bar, she would watch and wonder about them: why they did not bum their wings, where they hid their lanterns when it rained. Then one night she wanted to look at them closer. She went out with her father and caught a handful. She put them in an empty fruit jar and carried them triumphantly into the house. But under the strong radiance of the gas lamps, the strange little creatures lost their lights and were no longer pretty. She cried and cried. Her father said some things were beautiful only in the dark, as some were beautiful only in the light. He showed her how to bring their lights back by cupping her hands around the jar and moving into the shadows. But she still had cried and cried.
She felt like crying now. Was enchantment impermanent?—and was disenchantment a necessary process of growing up? Did the ideal have to destroy the idealist to escape fulfillment? No, she did not think so. The sisters had disenchanted her because they had not known they had been enchanting her, and had not cared to keep the enchantment. But the mirror of enchantment need not be smitten to prove that the image is not in the glass but in the gazer’s eye.
In some eye, she, Ercelia Fernandez y de los Reyes, was the model girl of the town—the image of the mythical Maria Clara. What did it matter what Maria Clara was like? If she was as Grandaunt Mariana saw her, or as Father Anacleto did? What mattered was that there was a
Maria Clara, someone to emulate, someone to reflect as an image: and the town had elected her, Ercelia, as that image. The people needed to see something tangible—something of themselves—to link the ideal past with the realistic present, to assure them that the new culture setting in was not destroying but supplementing the old. They did not know this, but this was what they felt. This was what they needed. She was going to meet this need. She would be strong and hold their little dreams together, as it were, strung on the strong native fiber of their faith. She would give to enchantment form, color, light.
She threw open the shell-paned shutters of her bedroom window and the moonlight splashed in, as from a silver basin, washing her loosened hair with a warm glow, drenching her white cotton gown with clinging transparency. There were no fires in the orange tree now but there was a crisp wind throwing ylang-ylang odors in her face, and she breathed deeply.
Looking the moon in the face, she recalled what Father Anacleto had said about Maria Clara. Clad in her nightdress, she had walked the roof top of the convent, giving herself into the arms of her lover! Ercelia seemed to see her now, vividly, and as she watched, she felt the wind picking up her hair, dipping sensuous fingers into the neckline and the wide sleeves of her nightdress. A little fire started at the base of the warm mounds of her breasts and the wind began to fan it, spreading it to her soft smooth belly and her long firm thighs below—where earlier in the evening Don Miguel’s hard knees had touched and rubbed.
Suddenly her hands went to her cheeks and grabbed them hard. She turned to the room, her eyes eagerly searching the little shrine against the wall in the shadows away from the moon. “Please, St. Joseph,” she pleaded anxiously at the black bulk of the saint, “chaste spouse of Our Lady, please, give me a lover very good and very handsome!” She stilled an impulse to say “like Don Miguel.” “Help me be a woman of rose and flesh!”
As she tugged at the shutters to close the window, she wondered vaguely who it was who had said Maria Clara was a woman of rose and flesh. Not Rizal. She had never heard it until tonight, and it was a little too poetic for the governor’s own invention.
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ERCELIA’s world closed about her that night much as the devil flower in the porcelain pot on the porch closed its petals against the first touch of sunlight—dropping its head onto the long pulpy leaf from which it sprang. Rebuilding her world-in-shambles, she tripped into the bottomless pit of sleep without dreams, missing the spectacle of the live world unreeling with laughter and tears outside the walls of her bedroom.
She did not hear her father leave the house, strapping the bolo knife to his waist, nor did she hear her mother caution him in a voice heavy with fear, “Be prudent; Valentin, be prudent with the bolo!” She did not see Josefinita come to the house with Don Valentin in the early light of dawn, looking defiantly calm—“shamelessly happy,” in the words of her nervous and distraught sister—and she was spared the painful scene between the sisters.
Don Valentin had sought out Don Paco, and together they had trailed the fugitive lovers to their rendezvous—a little nipa hut that Adolfo had rented for the occasion in the barrio of Lunzuran. The house was in darkness and Adolfo had not wanted to open the door to the pursuers, but Don Valentin had threatened to chop down the bamboo posts of the house, and Adolfo had opened a window and called out his submission. Don Valentin had burst into the house and, muttering a curse, delivered the avenging blows for the family—a swing at Adolfo’s belly that doubled the man over and another at his jaw that straightened him up. Adolfo suffered heroically without lifting a hand. Don Paco had then taken the gallant and daring lover in custody to his house to talk about arrangements for the pedimento that soon had to follow.
The wedding talk was held on the evening of the following day with Don Paco and Don Valentin acting as spokesmen for Adolfo. Don Pipong had pulled at his nose and talked pure Spanish, lisping in the approved Castilian manner, to impress Adolfo and Don Paco. He had knocked his cane on the floor imperiously, raising it several times as if to strike Adolfo, but he was an old man, and although it was whispered that his frequent trips to his coconut plantation in Labuan were really visits to prove his virility, the don was easily exhausted by emotional exertions; dropping wearily into his rattan rocking chair he had asked Adolfo what reparations he could offer for the insult to the family.
If Adolfo had hoped to avoid the expenses of a big wedding by eloping with Josefinita, he was much disappointed. “A daughter of Don Pipong is a very expensive item in the list of any suitor,” Romulita declared, and after indulging in histrionic lamentations on the family disgrace, began to make preparations for the wedding with a vengeance.
These preparations made Adolfo feel some alarm. He confided to Don Valentin that his property was not in his name because he was not a citizen of the country; it was in a salaried dummy’s name and could not be disposed of readily to raise money. Would he have to borrow?
“Borrow, by all means,” Don Valentin told him. “Soon everything will be fine for you because you will be able to transfer all your property to your wife’s name.”
And Don Paco, who was anxious to please Romulita, said, “Yo cuidao!” Don Paco had used the phrase as a slogan in his political campaign, making it, to his host of friends, a symbol of support and reassurance.
Romulita achieved a complete victory. The celebration was a frantic effort to recapture the dying glow of Don Pipong’s family glory, a panicky attempt to strengthen the sisters’ position in the social hierarchy of the town. But Ercelia thought the spectacle was pitiful. She saw the sisters as women at the fish market, slipping fresh aprons over their soiled skirts and spraying themselves with perfume to hide the intimate odors of their under things.
Besides killing a cow and opening up the ancestral house in Santa Maria to the barrio folks, Romulita insisted on all the ceremonial trimmings of a fashionable wedding for her sister. A special dispensation was secured from the bishop to solemnize the wedding without the required period of waiting. Another special dispensation was obtained to withhold the usual series of announcements from the pulpit.
“There is no likelihood that either of the parties is married, anyway,” Romulita had told the monsignor, and Ercelia thought it was a clever way of withholding from the public Josefinita’s correct age, which she supposed was at least five years more than Adolfo’s.
For the ceremony, Josefinita trailed to the altar a veil ten yards long. She passed between a row of white candles from the main door to the altar, carried colored wax flowers from Hong Kong, and wore elbow-length silk lace gloves. The gloves were the gift of the wife of the proprietor of the Plaza Hotel, the most exclusive guest house in town—gloves, the lady said, that she had bought in Madrid on her last trip to the Peninsula—gloves, according to the hotel cook, that an American tourist had left behind in one of the hotel rooms.
Concesa Fuentebella, who had had a year of voice culture in the Manila Conservatory of Music and was acknowledged professor of music of the town, sang Gounod’s “Ave Maria”—to the disappointment of Doña Isabel, who said Ercelia could have sung it from memory.
Adolfo had thought about giving a lauriat supper at the town club, to climax the affair, but Romulita had said, “It cannot be done!” She was going to have the town’s elite at the evening affair. “There will be Europeans and Americans coming, and you cannot have them eating with chopsticks.”
“But not everybody eats with chopsticks at a lauriat,” Adolfo had remonstrated. “We can get enough silver for everybody.”
“Then it would not be a lauriat,” Romulita had said, turning her back to him.
“I cannot have his guests embarrass us with their table manners,” she explained to Ercelia later. “They make sucking sounds with their mouths when they drink and they can never talk one at a time. The buffet dinner is the thing.” Ercelia had once attended a Chinese social at the consulate in Manila with her father’s lawyer-cousin, and she knew how elegant the Chinese could be, bu
t fearing that Romulita would think she was trying to impress her with her Manila education, she held her peace.
Two concessions were made to Adolfo, however. One was to permit a long rope of firecrackers hung from the church tower to be set off when the church ceremony was over. Adolfo had sought the favor from Don Paco, Don Paco from Don Valentin, and Don Valentin from Romulita. The other concession was for the bride and groom to make a secret visit to the Chinese temple to make offerings to the god of Adolfo’s fathers. The secret visit needed no sponsor. On the contrary it was carefully planned by Romulita herself. Romulita knew that Father Anacleto would denounce them as heretics and her father would knock his cane on the ground and say, “Que peste!” But the sisters had heard the story of the boy Tonio and would not take the chance of offending the Chinese god.
What happened to the boy Tonio was a subject of speculation and mystery, but the elders used it to scare the children off the premises of the Chinese temple. It seemed that the boy Tonio had followed Tiki, the storekeeper who lived on the ground floor of their house, and had watched him put on the altar a tray of big ripe mangoes. Tiki burned incense sticks and—as it seemed to Tonio—played leapfrog before the statue on the altar. When Tiki left, Tonio played leapfrog before the statue on the altar—then, laughing to himself, went away with the tray. Not long after, Tonio had fallen ill with a high fever that had twisted his mouth and had swelled up his stomach, and nobody could divine the cause and make him well. It was only after Tonio had disclosed in delirium what he had done at the temple, and his mother had offered three chickens with their heads off to the ant-hill dwellers to intercede for her with the Chinese god, that the malady had left him.
So after the wedding breakfast had been served, and the guests were idling in the garden telling jokes about earthquakes to be expected in the night, Adolfo and Josefinita, carrying food and fruit in a basket decorated with ribbons and flowers, drove off in the family carromata to the temple of the Chinese god.
The Devil Flower Page 9
