“I know,” he muttered huskily, his voice drying. “But my father was built big too, and my mother was very small beside him—yet they were very happy together. My mother used to call him Monino—after a beautiful horse her father had owned. And he called her Palomita, because she was like a little dove, always cooing. But he loved her and was very gentle with her. Love makes the fiercest gentlest, Ercelia. It has a magic salve that makes the fiercest pains become the fiercest joys. Love can conquer even death, it can make its agony sweet.”
“Yes, yes, I know,” she said, clutching at his body, breathing heavily in his face, feeling a wanting to die.
Larry’s hands fumbled among her skirts, feeling among the soft silk flounces and ribbons about her legs. His clumsy fingers caught on some frail, dainty lace, tearing the delicate fabric with a little rip.
In the intimate silence of the room the little tearing noise rose above the sound of their breathing sharply. It lashed at Ercelia like a whip. It startled her, and made her wince and recoil inside. It cut at her soul, and—as in her dream—she felt her garments falling off her body in pieces, her skin lifting in fragments—in long thin strips—bit by bit, leaving her cold and naked to the bone! Her father’s voice seemed almost real, shouting angrily at her, “Harlot! Harlot!” and she broke from Larry’s arms like a frightened animal, her hands flying protectingly to her skirts and her blouse.
There were tears in her eyes as she looked at Larry pleadingly. She turned away from him as he covered himself, and the tinkle of a metal buckle was all that hung in the silence between them.
“You are angry with me?” She found her voice at last. “No, not with you,” he said, “only at myself. And I’m the one ashamed now, Ercelia. I shouldn’t even have tried. You have every right to despise me.”
“I do not despise you, Larry,” she said, still with her back to him. “Only you must wait. It is not holy!”
“I am not a holy man, Ercelia. I just want you, and I thought that if—if I had you, you would not want to leave me. You would want to come with me—now!”
She heard him move to the door and open it. “I’m going, Ercelia,” she heard him say, his voice like the sound of a tree breaking in the wind. “Try to forgive me.”
He stood there a long time. She could feel his eyes on her even in the thickening dark. She wanted to say, “There is nothing to forgive, Larry, I want you, too, I do, I do—“ but there was a weight on her mouth that would not lift, and she just stood there—unthinking, unmoving, hanging her heart beats on the seconds—and when she finally turned around to look at him, there was only the door that was like an empty mouth echoing the accents of his footsteps on the gravel path—good-by!
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THE world was drooping under a heavy rain on the day of her mother’s funeral. The parched earth was avidly soaking up all the water the heavens were letting fall. The world had been without rain for months, and like a big heart that had stored up its grief, it was now breaking and making a spectacular display of its sorrows. It wept the tears that Ercelia could not weep, for Ercelia’s was a dry-eyed grief, a choking, dry grief, a grief that rose and fell, that gathered and whirled about itself but would not flow.
Ercelia had not been with her mother when she passed away. She had been in school. The day was late in March and the school term was coming to an end within the week and she was working on the closing exercises of the elementary school. Doña Isabel had been lingering for so long...when the end came, it came swiftly. Don Valentin had sent Sixto to fetch Ercelia home when Doña Isabel began to complain that the room was dark and her feet were numb. When Ercelia arrived, the family were on their knees around the bed, praying loudly. There had been no parting word between them to cut the knot that somewhere far back in her mind was clogging the grief in her heart. As she looked at her mother stretched out on the bed before her, she felt as if she were looking at herself—the carcass of a stillborn dream. And her grief was not as much for her mother as for herself—for the part she was supposed to play and would not play, for the song she was supposed to sing and would not sing.
The rain, following behind a stiff wind, caught the funeral procession between the church and the cemetery. Father Anacleto, clapping his book under an arm and muttering his annoyance at the two acolytes with the censer and the holy water who did not seem to mind the sudden downpour, accepted the shelter of Don Miguel’s car readily; everybody else on foot scampered into houses along the road or clambered into the buses and carromatas following in the procession, but Ercelia, with her fathers arm around her, followed calmly behind the hearse—a closed, horse-drawn carriage hung with black velvet—turning up her face to the rain. She welcomed the rain on her face, stinging her cheeks like cold needles, running chill streams down her neck and bosom, soaking her clothes, bathing her body wholly, for she must grieve, as Maria Clara must grieve, with tears for everybody to see. Leaning on her father’s arm, mingling her sobs with the clopping lament of the horses’ hoofs on the stony road, she felt relieved that her whole body was weeping the tears that her eyes were refusing to shed.
In the little chapel, under the outflung arms of a hundred-year-old tree, when the lid was lifted from the coffin for the family’s last glimpse of the stilled face, she fought the stifling odor of death and did not fall into a swoon with a long despairing wail, as her aunt Choleng and Sinforosa and Celerina did. Feeling her father’s arm tighten around her shoulder, she could not surrender to a weakness and she abandoned him to his grief—alone.
She stood by him at the stone tomb under a leaning cross while her mother’s body was laid to rest in a vault with the bones of her parents, and she clung to her father there in the rain, in the wind, with the thunder in her ears, pressing her face to his chest, as she watched the workmen seal the vault upon her mother, brick by brick, locking her out of the world forever.
But in the weeks that followed, Ercelia realized that not only her mother was buried there at the foot of the leaning cross, but also her father, for her father had become as a stranger to his old self. His steps were heavy, without eagerness. His shoulders took on a slump, as if with age. And Ercelia missed the ready laughter on his lips when his brother Ingo came down and visited with him.
He had always treated his brother Ingo like a boy, pinching his nose when Ingo kissed his hand in greeting, or tickling him in the ribs when Ingo was not looking, and there was always banter between them, particularly about women. Once, Ercelia had picked up a fragment of talk between them: “Women are such fools, Ingo,” her father had said. “Not that they are, but that they want to be. Whatever you do, don’t tell them about the other woman. Don’t insult them with the truth. They will forgive you for lying, even love you for it, but the truth they cannot stand. Take my Isabel, for instance. When she makes her spiritual retreat, and I saddle my pony and tell her I’m going into town for a drink—“ Here he had lowered his voice and Ingo had bent closer. Then they had broken apart, slapping at each other, laughing uproariously. But these days there was only quiet talk between them with an occasional grunt or a chuckle, while they sipped drinks or smoked on the porch.
The first glimpse she had really had of her father as the hero of a romantic past was on the day before the funeral. The women were gathered on the back porch weaving leaves and flowers into wreaths for the funeral coach, and the men were putting a silk lining in the wooden coffin on the front porch. The sisters had just arrived with some copper-plated candelabra and silver vases borrowed from the church, and were improvising a catafalque in the hall for the wake, when Enemena Barrios, the town modiste, asked Ercelia what the funeral garb of Doña Isabel was going to be.
“Father wants her dressed in her wedding clothes,” Ercelia told her. “Mother was going to wear them on their silver anniversary a year from now.”
“Oh—well, I suppose that is all right,” Enemena said. “Would you suggest something else?” Ercelia asked. “Well, I would not suggest it—it would look as if I were se
lling my services—but I should think some kind of a habit would be more appropriate.”
“Yes, like the habit of the Carmelites, I would say,” Choleng interposed. “Isabel was devoted to the Lady of Carmel, and she had wanted to become a nun—until Valentin came along.”
Ercelia had never heard this mentioned before and it made her excited. Since the story of Don Miguel, nuns had become romantic figures to her, and as she had already suspected there was something exciting about her mother.
“Is it really true?” she asked, not quite able to suppress her eagerness.
“Yes, Ercelia. In our day, a girl was always going to be either of two things—a mother, or a nun. And Isabel was going to be a nun.”
“As everybody else, until a man came along,” declared her grandaunt Mariana.
“But in Isabel’s case, Aunt Mariana, as you know, Mon-signor Amalot had come to the house and discussed the matter with Father and Mother. Arrangements were already made for her to enter a convent in Manila when she changed her mind.”
“Well, she was not called to the life,” said the old lady with a frown at Choleng, as if annoyed that the subject was brought up at all.
But, avoiding her eyes, Choleng insisted, “Only because Valentin”—and she slowly brought a bunch of flowers on a stick to her mouth to break the thread, as if to stall for time—“who had been courting her for years, had threatened to steal her away—and Isabel believed him. You know what Valentin’s reputation was as a young man.”
“Then it would be best to dress her up to look like a Carmelite,” Ercelia decided.
But when she spoke to her father about the matter, Don Valentin became violently angry.
“She is mine, Ercelia, mine—not Christ’s! I married her, not He!” he thundered possessively. “She shall go to Him in the clothes I took her in—in the dress in which she came to me, so He shall know she’s mine!” His voice stilled the noisy hammering on the porch and closed every mouth. For a moment the silence hurt.
The profanity on her father’s mouth unnerved her, and her knees threatened to give beneath her as she realized that her father had actually been jealous of her mother’s piety to her God—was openly accusing himself of having robbed her of a religious life. Like a picture coming clear under a newly washed glass, she now saw the reason for his affinity with Don Miguel; she now appreciated his tolerance of her mother’s prejudice against his friend.
But if her father had never really possessed his wife completely, there was not one shred of doubt that his wife had possessed him completely, and never more so in life than after death. For now he made nocturnal visits to her grave, and not only on Monday evenings, when the town, following an ancient custom, turned out to visit the dead. He would go to the cemetery, it seemed, whenever he felt lonely and needed her. He would bring a long candle and light it on her tomb. Breaking dry twigs in his hands, he would watch the yellow taper bum itself slowly out, his eyes gleaming with a strange fascination. If some wind stole away his little fire, he would strike up another, and he would sit there staring at his votive offering as it sank slowly, slowly down into the socket of the bronze candle holder. And he never knelt before the tomb, never took an attitude of prayer. It was as if there was no need for him to pray—as if his candle did all the talking to his God for him.
One evening Ercelia had gone to the cemetery with him, and when the chill air had begun to stir, she tried to take him away. “You don’t have to watch the candle, Papa,” she had told him. “Even if the wind should snuff it, God will accept it whole, because you have offered it whole. The candle is only a token, a sacrificial symbol.”
But Don Valentin had said, his voice trembling with feeling, “It is not to God I am lighting the candle, Ercelia! It is to her I am burning it, and I want her to have it all—all. It is the only way I can reach her now.”
Ercelia never tried to interfere again. All through the summer months she watched him make his curious pilgrimage with his votive offering, and she never spoke a word. Then one Saturday evening in June, just a week after the opening of school, when the rains were beginning to come again, she saw him saddle his pony for the cemetery under an overcast sky. He had been out in the field the whole day helping his men drive logs into the dam to hold the river back from the rice fields beyond, and he looked tired. Ercelia suspected he had a pain in the chest from the way he breathed, but she did not try to stop him. She said only, “The sky to the north is in a bad mood, Papa,” and pleaded with him with her eyes.
“What is a little rain to a man like me, Ercelia?” he said, straightening up like a young boy throwing his shoulders back to show he had a chest. “Did you think I was made of sugar?” And he flexed an arm before her, even as he used to when she was little. He would come to her bed in the morning, crook his arm to her, and she would cling to his forearm, trying to unbend it. Then he would swing her over his shoulder and carry her pickaback to the breakfast table. A proud smile was on his lips now as Ercelia touched his balled bicep testingly with her fingers, and she could not tell him his iron had grown softer.
Don Valentin took a glass lamp with him to bum his candle in. As he straddled his pony, making sucking sounds with his lips to drive the beast on, Ercelia began to wonder—disloyally, she realized—which don in the ancient stories her father was: Don Juan Tenorio or Don Quijote de la Mancha?
He was soaked to the skin when he came home that night; his shoes left pools of water on the back stairs. He tried to enter the house quietly to elude his daughter, but Ercelia was ready for him with towels and soap and wooden clogs; she shoved him straight to the bathroom and called Sinforosa to bring up the hot water. But later, when she ordered him to bed, he grunted his protest.
“There is an old saying, hija, that the brains dry up when one goes to bed with his head wet,” he said.
“Nonsense, Papa, and you know so,” she said.
“No, I don’t,” he told her. “I was told as a child that unless I plucked a hair from the crown of my head, tied it to the whisker of a shrimp, and threw the shrimp back into the water, my brains would dry up if I went to sleep on a wet head. I believe that!” There was quiet humor in his tone; Ercelia was happy to hear it, but she did not prod him further lest she break the thin goblet of his contentment.
She did not know how much longer her father stayed up that night, for she went promptly to bed; but the following morning he did not come to breakfast, and when she went to him, she found him with a raging fever.
Immediately she sent Sixto out to summon Dr. Biel. But the river that cut across the town had lifted out of its bed during the night, flooding the low lands, covering the macadam roads with yellow water, and the young doctor lived on the other side of town. The rain had ceased to fall but the frogs were croaking in rhythmic unison, beating up a throaty symphony of sounds, and the world, it seemed to Ercelia, was one large dismal pond.
She thought of sending for Nora Pilar, but the old woman, she knew from Sinforosa, was a sufferer from arthritis, although she would never be made to admit it. She could not be expected to wade in the rough, muddy water.
When an hour had passed and Sixto had not returned, Ercelia decided to do something. She had seen one of the nuns in the dormitory in Manila help bring down a girls fever with steaming hot towels. The matter of stripping a man, particularly her own father, was very indelicate, but looking at his red eyes, and dead dry lips, she overcame her scruples and had Sinforosa heat up a big pot of water.
She closed all the windows and hung heavy flannel blankets over them to keep the cold air out of the room. Then, spreading a light cotton sheet over her father so that she might not look upon his nakedness, she began to undress him.
He made no protest as her hands fumbled nervously with his shirt. His flesh was hot as baking clay and his muscled limbs were limp—without strength: he seemed without care or will. She watched his face carefully as she began to pick at the fly of his pajamas. When his eyes flicked open her heart caught in her t
hroat, but before she could find her voice to explain, he said huskily, “Are you going to scald me like a pig, Ercelia?”
His pitiful attempt at humor instantly put her at ease. His body became as a baby’s body to her hands. In his physical collapse, in his utter defenselessness, in his childlike submission to her ministrations he seemed to have lost his maleness: even the coarse hairs of his body were as the curly locks of an angel’s head to her fingers.
“You will not believe me,” she could not help scolding him. “You want to die and leave me.”
He raised a hand weakly and laid a finger on her lips. At his burning touch, the tears sprang to her eyes, and gathering his head in her hands, she covered his face with kisses. She had never kissed him with such feeling since she had first come home from the city. Her mother had repeated in her hearing that a marriageable girl, a dalaga, must not be liberal with her caresses even to a father “because a father is a man, and a man is a man,” but now her mother was not watching.
She was rubbing him with dry towels when the door squeaked slowly behind her, and she turned to see Sixto and Don Miguel slipping stealthily into the room.
“I could not get to Dr. Biel’s. The footbridge has been washed away and the river is sweeping too strong over the road bridge,” Sixto said in a whisper.
“Sixto stopped by,” murmured Don Miguel over her shoulders. “I thought I’d come and see how Intin was.”
Don Valentin raised heavy lids and his face showed the ghost of a smile.
“How do you feel, Intin?” said Don Miguel with much spirit.
Ercelia felt Don Miguel’s eyes drop on her fathers form, and suddenly, she was very much embarrassed. Don Miguel’s own maleness seemed instantly projected to her consciousness through her father’s body. The light cotton bed sheet had slipped down to his legs; except for a towel across his loins, her father was completely naked. If it had been Don 160
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