The Devil Flower

by Emigdio Alvarez Enriquez

  “They are going to call on Aunt Mariana for her blessing. The old lady is in bed with rheumatism and has asked to see the bride in her finery,” Romulita explained to the guests. “Give my love to the old lady,” she called after the couple, waving to them with a heavily braceleted arm, jingling the ornaments unnecessarily.

  Like two fugitive doves winging to a secret rendezvous, Ercelia was thinking, romanticizing, as she arranged little wine goblets on a Japanese teakwood tray to serve the men on the terrace. Adolfo was really engaging to look at and had a kind of quiet charm. He was like a young boy, smooth-skinned and hairless. His body would not be frightening to see. She wondered if there was truth in what the girls in the dormitory in Manila had said about the Chinese when they made love.

  “The fellow simply waters in the mouth at the very thought”—Don Paco’s voice rose above the din of desultory banter on the porch. The obscenity struck Ercelia full in the face and made her ashamed of her own thoughts. She was glad she was out of sight of the man behind the palm in the rococo pot. Staring at the sparkling red wine in the goblets, she waited for the wave of raucous laughter that followed the speech to hush. But after a while, she felt uncomfortable.

  Somebody was staring at her—somebody was touching her with eyes, feeling her features like a blind man feeling his way about with sensitive fingers. She raised her head and her heart fell out of beat as she found herself staring full into a pair of light brown eyes, deep set and alive, with quirks of amusement in the comers.

  If the goblets had lifted themselves from the tray and dashed their liquid fire in her face, she could not have felt more confused or embarrassed, for the eyes that were so intently gazing at her were those of a man, a young stranger, strikingly attractive.

  Without quite knowing what she was doing, she hastily lifted the tray and went among the men, who were now smothering to giggles and snickers the wild laughter in their mouths. Nervously clearing his throat like a mischievous boy surprised at one of his pranks, Don Paco picked up a goblet from the tray; then, suddenly smiling broadly past her, he took a step forward to meet the young man who had followed Ercelia to the group. “Ercelia, it is my pleasure to present the gentlemen from the Department of Education, Mr. Leyden. Miss Fernandez—Lawrence Leyden.”

  The name caught Ercelia unguarded, and she betrayed a flash of recognition and lively interest in her eyes. So this was he! The American mestizo! She should have known, by that poise, that confident, self-assured smile. She had heard about him. He was connected in some way with the central office in Manila and had arrived for a temporary assignment in their town to work on a collection of native myths and legends for a supplementary reader in the intermediate grades. He had caught the fancy of the schoolteachers of the town during a meeting in the division office that Ercelia had failed to attend. “So nonchalant,” one had said. “You can see from the way he holds his cigarette that he is a city-bred man. And how he speaks English—must have learned it from his American father.” “And how big he is,” said another. Ercelia thought it was disgraceful—shameless for women to be talking like that about a man. “How very conceited it must be making the man. If I have the chance, I will show him when I meet him that there are ladies in this town whose sense of propriety is of the finest,” she had told herself. And she had imagined herself snubbing him when he came to her school.

  “Forgive me for staring at you,” the man was saying to her now, “but you had been mentioned to me by so many that I felt as if we had already met. I did not quite realize what I was doing, until I saw that I had made you angry.” His voice was carefully modulated, but his tone lacked seriousness.

  She wished she had ready a witty response, but all she could say was, “Oh, I was not angry. Really, I was not. Think nothing of it.” And she felt very foolish.

  “Ercelia was our Maria Clara last Rizal Day,” Don Paco said proudly. “She studied in Manila. She is our jewel.”

  “Romulita is within earshot; you mustn’t say that, Don Paco,” she said spontaneously, feeling even more foolish afterward.

  Romulita had come up with a picture album to show a Spanish guest the family’s lineage; looking up with a studied shrug of indifference, she said, “His views are absolutely his concern, Ercelia.” Ercelia, in an effort to recover her poise, laughed softly and went about serving the other men in the group, leaving Lawrence Leyden and Don Paco to their goblets of wine.

  That evening at the dinner-dansant in the town club, Ercelia was better prepared for Lawrence Leyden. She touched herself with a little make-up, a shade of rouge and a dash of lipstick, to bring out her natural color, and to show Mr. Leyden from the big city that the women of the town did know about such things! She wore her Philippine terno—the full-length skirt with the pointed train and the blouse with the gauzy sleeves. There was something about the dress that brought out a Filipino girl’s charms as no Western vestido could do.

  The Misses Tomasol and Dapdap, teachers from the Visayas, were in a dither with their bobbed hair and short dresses, looking like birds without tails, and neighing like fillies. It was suspected that these women smoked and they were under observation by the American superintendent. The first thing they said to Ercelia when she came in was, “Have you met him, yet, Miss Fernandez?” She knew whom they meant, but even if her mother had not been present, she would have given them the same cold reply: “I do not know whom you are talking about and I do not care.”

  She saw him as soon as he came in and she almost betrayed her excitement by an impulse to touch up her hair and straighten her skirt. How well he carried himself! He could have stepped out of the pages of the Noli, itself, except that Ibarra could not have been an American mestizo as Mr. Leyden obviously was. But he carried his heavily embroidered native shirt so well, Ibarra, she was sure, could not have looked better in his barong Tagalog. And somehow there was a certain something about him that made him so easy to like.

  From the tail of an eye she saw Josefinita, who was making him welcome at the head of the stairs, turn in her direction as if to indicate where she was, and Ercelia suddenly found something interesting to watch out the wide bay windows overlooking the wharf. “The Nuestra Señora del Alba and the Macleod are in port, Mama,” she said excitedly, as if the interisland ships were Pacific liners bringing in tourists. And when Mr. Leyden greeted her, claiming her attention, she looked up but was slow in smiling, as if trying to place him in her memory. And when she presented him to her mother, she tripped slightly over the name: “La—Leyden, Mother,” she said.

  “With pleasure,” Doña Isabel said, unsmilingly acknowledging the introduction. “How long is the señor going to stay on our shores?”

  “I am very sorry, I speak no Spanish at all.” He smiled at her, shaking his head.

  “Oh,” said Doña Isabel. “How unfortunate not to speak the language of the gentility.”

  “With your permission, madam?” The man bowed to both ladies as the orchestra struck up a fox trot.

  Ercelia took a long time getting up, as if to make clear she was not eager.

  Later in the evening when he claimed her for a fourth time, she said succinctly, “Could it be that you have not been introduced to other ladies, Mr. Leyden?”

  “Oh, to be sure. Let us say I find you as good a dancer as you are beautiful.”

  “Flatterer!” she told him, tapping him on the shoulder with her feather fan, but suddenly feeling very light. His hand felt big and strong at her waist as he chuckled and pressed her closer. She was a little frightened, but she yielded, allowing her stiff scarf to brush against his solid chest. Her head leaned toward him coquettishly, brushing the carefully puffed-up hair over her right ear against his hard chin while her feet kept time with the music. The orchestra was playing “Moonlight and Roses.”

  When she came back to her seat, her mother slipped a hand under her beaded tulle apron and pinched her hard. “You were dancing too close,” she said. “You will not dance with him any more.”


  Suddenly, she felt angry. Her mother’s pinch sent shivers up her spine. She bit her lip and closed her eyes, hiding her face behind her fan to hold back the tears. “You don’t like him, Mama!” she said when she was better composed. “He is very wellmannered.”

  “He does not even speak Spanish.”

  “He comes from the Bicol regions, Mama. And his father must be American.”

  “An ex-soldier, I am sure, who married his Tiruray cook?” “The Tirurays are the natives of Cotabato, Mama.”

  “The Bagobo, then.”

  “Neither, Mama. The Bagobos are in Davao.” She could not hide the impatience in her voice.

  “Oh, now I know—the Igorot!”

  Ercelia could not help chuckling. “Those are from the Mountain Provinces. Mr. Leyden is from the Bicol Peninsula in Luzon. Mr. Leyden is a writer. He is very clever.”

  Her mother’s frown made her realize that now she was protecting him.

  “That I do not doubt,” her mother’s voice hissed out in suppressed agitation. “All strangers are clever. They are bachelors even when they are married and have more mistresses than would fill the harem of a Moro chief. Ay hija, cuidao! Remember the unfortunate daughter of Iking Bello!” There was finality in her tone.

  The daughter of Iking Bello was the town’s grass widow. Ercelia had heard the story from her uncle Ingo. Manolita, he said, was as white and fragrant as upland rice and the local boys who smelled of mud and carabao could not come near her. But an intrepid stranger from a distant island with the title of doctor before his name had come and married her with pomp and circumstance. Three years later, Manolita was back with her parents, no longer with the fragrance of upland rice, but smelling of grass fodder and the sweat of horses. Dr. Velarde was a veterinarian, and worse than that, he had a living wife and three children.

  When Mr. Leyden came a fifth time to claim Ercelia for a dance, she told him she was tired, and Doña Isabel closed her fan with a loud snap to express her pleasure.

  That night, tossing among the covers, Ercelia’s thoughts rose all about her, tall and monstrous, spinning her about in a chaotic whirl. Could Mr. Leyden perhaps be someone like the doctor? One could never tell about people. There was Don Miguel, whom the town suspected of all evil and wickedness, and yet, what was he really like? She had always felt he was not as they said he was. In her dreams she had seen him self-accusing, humble, penitent. A glimpse of him kneeling naked before her flashed through her mind again; her body shivered. He would have been beautiful, if only he was not so hairy! Hairs were like weeds on the body. They made the flesh dirty like the flesh of beasts. Must all men’s bodies be hairy? The figure on the cross was beautiful and smooth-shavenly clean. There must be men with bodies one might embrace without disgust, without compunction, as one would the body of a child freshly bathed and powdered and scented.

  She wondered how Mr. Leyden’s body was. Like the one or like the other? She could not see him on a cross. He would hang too heavily and too clumsily. He would tear his hands and feet free of the nails—he would try to break away even if bound with ropes like the bad, impenitent thief. She tried to see him on his knees before her and he looked ridiculous. There was not the faintest glimmer of sainthood in his personality and the halo looked askew on his shaggy head.

  She tossed under her covers, grappling with her thoughts, until huge waves of darkness washed over her, dragging her down into the deepest depths of sleep.

  Lawrence Leyden chanced upon Ercelia in many places. Loitering at the town hall, waiting for the cashier’s window to open on a pay day; promenading at the wharf with friends to watch the sunset or to send off a friend; listening to the band of Don Tato at the Plaza Pershing on Sundays; or watching a baseball game when the Navy was in town.

  He came casually, but always with some expensive something in his hands—a bag of Kong Melong peanuts, a box of assorted candies, some apples or grapes—which he passed to her and her companion while he took the seat beside her. “I come like the Chinese,” he would say, “bringing gifts to ask for favors the tongue is afraid to speak.” He seemed to be always joking in a serious way. At first she decided she would find him forward and bold and tell him politely, yet very firmly, that his company was annoying and unwelcome. But somehow the timbre of his voice, the sparkle of his eyes, or the white of his smile disarmed her, and she told herself it was of no avail. He would probably say just as politely and just as firmly that he was free to come and go as he pleased, and if she did not like his company she could move away. It seemed to her that although he made no real travesty of the social amenities, he was inwardly laughing at the world that made them, as if he conformed with them only to amuse himself. She found him very different from the elegant formal gentleman of her illusions—a man like Don Miguel.

  She was always holding him up beside Miguel and he was always the less handsome, the less polished, the less matured. He was like something a little underdone, something that had just missed being what it should be by just a little. Ercelia could not see that Lawrence’s colors were uninteresting because Miguel’s colors were in her eyes, that she could not fit Lawrence into the ornate frame of her own design to decorate the drab room of her reality because a picture was already there, fitted into the frame, and there was no room for another.

  And yet she found him engaging. His youthfulness and vigor seemed to wrap all around her when he was with her, and his easy, teasing banter was delightful; she surprised herself many times looking forward to meeting him again, and she resolved to watch him carefully. “Bring not a flower too close to the nose, a bee may he hidden in the calyx,” was an old saying that one could learn from. Besides, Larry was part American, a mestizo, and as the old women of the village said: “Naku, mestizo? See that you have on seven skirts!”

  And her mother was zealously watching her too. Very subtly Doña Isabel would drop crumbs for her daughter’s mind to pick up so she could follow the course of her thinking. “Men? A girl can never be too careful. There are always other Miguels and other doctors of horses!” Sometimes not so subtly. “Particularly, the American mestizos! They are all of the same ilk. I hear last Sunday the police chased them away from Baliwasan Beach, where they were swimming with their women without any clothes on. But what can one expect of such, whose fathers were soldiers and whose mothers were their fathers’ cooks or laundry-women?”

  The American mestizos were the Johnsons and the Sudlows, who were scandalizing the town with unconventional behavior. They were fathered by James Johnson and Pete Sudlow, former soldiers who turned coconut planters and married their housekeepers.

  “But there are other mestizos who come from a better caste,” Ercelia reminded her mother. “There are American fathers like Mr. Brown, the superintendent. You yourself said he was so irreproachable and elegant.”

  “Well, yes,” Doña Isabel admitted in a dubious voice. Then suddenly, very firmly, “But even Mr. Brown is a Protestant. Have you heard what Sudlow did to the image of St. Anthony one night when he was drunk? Well, may the Lord forgive me for repeating it, he flung the beautiful image into the carabao watering hole. And do you know why?” She took a deep breath, then turned away, beating her feather duster furiously. “His wife Boriang was taking long at her prayers before the image, and he was impatient to get her to bed! God preserve me from Americans!”

  And so it was with a sinking feeling inside her that Ercelia heard Lawrence Leyden tell her one night that his father was an ex-soldier, and his mother a cabaret hostess. “My father’s from Colorado. He came down with General Pershing,” he told her. “The first night he met my mother, he bought all her tickets and she couldn’t dance with anybody eke. That’s how he fell for her, just like that,” he said, snapping his fingers.

  “You like him very much?” she said in a peculiar half-question, half-statement tone, as if she were afraid to prod him to speak about him.

  “Sure. We had great times together. I am all he has,” he said, his voice lowering a tri
fle, eyes shying away with a softness Ercelia had not seen before. “But he had to go back to the States. He was lonely here after my mother died, and my work kept us apart. My mother’s relatives didn’t get along with him, never did. He kept away from them. He couldn’t speak their language and they couldn’t speak his. One day,” he said, and for the first time Ercelia noticed a real seriousness in his voice, “I’ll go over and join him.” “Oh, you will like being there,” she said in a tone to cheer him. “After all you look American, except that you are dark.” “Which makes me very attractive.” Again he was jocular. “My father says I am more attractive than he is, which is true. I am a beautiful blend of East and West.”

  “Hai!” Ercelia’s surprise was genuine, but somehow she was not angry. He was looking at her so frankly, as if opening up his face for inspection. He was attractive, truly attractive. “Yes,” she said, “except for the ears that are a little too large and the nose that is a little too broad and the mouth that is a little too wide, you would be handsome.”

  “I know,” he said, playing sulky. “Everybody thinks I am but you—and your mother.” Then suddenly, “Why doesn’t your mother like me? I try to be very nice to her.” “Oh, it is not that she does not like you,” she said, lying foolishly, she realized, “it is only that she does not know you yet. We met hardly two months ago. It is not proper to be familiar so soon.”

  “Oh, I see. How long do you have to know me before—?” He looked at her so like a little boy, his brown eyes dancing with mischief.

  “Shhh!”—this from Aunt Choleng, who was chaperoning Ercelia that evening.

  They were in the town’s improvised outdoor theater—the cockpit—to watch a vaudeville performance.