Miguel lying there before her, with his body intimately showing under the wet, steaming towel, she could not have felt more uncomfortable. She groped hastily for the bed sheet and threw it clumsily over her father’s feverish body.
“If you will bring out his clothes, I’ll dress him myself,” Miguel said, understanding her predicament, but as she turned to the bureau, she suspected he was chuckling behind her.
Later in the day, pains racked Don Valentin in the chest. Don Miguel sent Sixto to Nora Pilar. If she could not come, she certainly could give instruction. And she did. Sixto fetched a green banana shoot, and Don Miguel, steeping it in hot coconut oil, applied it to Don Valentin’s chest; when Don Valentin began to have difficulty breathing, Don Miguel sat in bed and propped him up against his own chest, to help him. Watching Don Miguel’s patience and devotion, Ercelia was moved with profound feeling for Don Miguel. He was good and tender. Her mother had been so wrong about him. “I must compensate him for Mother’s mistake,” she told herself. “I must show him somehow that, like father himself, I have never shared my mother’s prejudice against him.”
Don Miguel watched over her father all night, and when he left the house in the morning, it was only to bring in the doctor. The river had lost some of its violence in the night and Don Miguel had driven his car to the foot of the bridge and then waded across. The doctor had come back with him with his pants rolled up to the knees, and barefoot.
Dr. Biel diagnosed the case as acute pneumonia, but refused to consider moving him to a hospital. Exposure to inclement weather would be fatal to a man in his condition.
Don Valentin had a better chance at home. With careful and responsible attention, there was every chance for him to recover. The doctor was disposed to answer a call at any time of the day or night, but “I am only starting in my profession, as you know,” he said apologetically to Ercelia, “and I don’t even have a car.”
Ercelia thought of sending for Ingo, but the flood had carried away many bridges and Sixto could not be spared to make the trip on foot.
“Don’t worry your little head, Ercelia,” Don Miguel told her with obvious fatherliness. “Agustinita can take care of my business at home, and I will take charge here myself until the crisis is over.”
Grandaunt Mariana, who came in a carromata as soon as word had been brought her by Sixto, made no secret of her disapproval when told of the arrangement.
“You cannot touch the pan without getting soot on your hands,” she told Ercelia when Miguel had left with the doctor. “Don Miguel has a reputation, and there are the neighbors.”
“But, Grandaunt, Don Miguel is now in the family. He is Agustinita’s husband, and he has even asked me to call him Uncle!”
“Yes, I know,” said the old lady in a hoarse, asthmatic voice, “but he is still a man, and the man that he is. You know how the jingle goes about such a man: ‘Hot is the sun, the moon too, but hotter than both—uh-hmm, uh-hmm.’ If I did not have this asthma to contend with, I would stay here myself.”
“I would not hear of it, Grandaunt,” Ercelia told her. “You are a sick woman. Besides, I really believe it is all right. He is father’s friend. You should have seen how he took care of father last night. And do you remember how he helped us with mother’s funeral? He made all the arrangements and spared Papa all the trouble.”
“Your father was not helpless then. Now he is. Besides, Don Miguel is not your father’s friend. What they have in common are not the virtues, but the vices. They are associates!”
“Why, Grandaunt,” Ercelia said, “I thought my father was your favorite nephew.”
“And indeed he is,” said the old lady, nodding her head emphatically. “Make no mistake about that. And, in a way”—she cocked her head as if to consider the matter—“I like Don Miguel, too. But there’s the devil in both. I know their kind—just like my deceased husband, may he rest in peace, a man of very healthy appetite!”
Agustinita, however, showed her approval readily. She came with Don Miguel in the evening. “This is one appointment with Valentin that I will approve of heartily. These are nights he will spend away from home that will not gnaw on my vitals,” she told Ercelia.
Ercelia had never had a chance to discuss Don Miguel with Agustinita. She had heard that Don Miguel had renewed his friendship with the Banegas women and that his life with Agustinita was as unhappy as before they had gone to live in Cotabato. She was very curious about Don Miguel.
“I would not take that friendship with the Banegas women seriously, Agustinita,” she said testily. “I hear he goes there only to drink.”
Agustinita collected her wide skirt around her and, dumping the folds between her legs with an impatient gesture, dropped herself into a chair. “To drink? Ha! I know, Ercelia. Never mind how I know, but I know!”
“How would you know, Agustinita?” Ercelia challenged her with a taunting look of disbelief.
“Well, if you must know, I know because it is when I am indisposed that he goes to them.” She said “indisposed” so succinctly that there was no mistaking her meaning, but Ercelia met her eyes frankly, and did not blush.
“Not that I condone, exactly,” Ercelia said, “but Agustinita, what a husband cannot get at home, he will try to get somewhere else.”
Agustinita appraised her studiously. “I must say, Romulita is right. You are a woman now. But Ercelia, at his age, he ought to practice a little continence. After all he did to that poor little nun, one would think he would want to make some mortification. But no, he is insatiable—even on Sundays and holy days of obligation, Ercelia! Barbarity! And those Banegas women! I came back from Cotabato believing that he had forgotten them! Why, I can’t have him touch me when he comes from them—can I?” She made an ugly grimace. “It is like putting on a soiled slip that either of them has just taken off. Disgusting!”
By the end of the second week, the weather had cleared considerably. The sky was not a very clean slate, and the moon peeking through the clouds was like a sickly eye, but the winds came only in puffs, raking the eaves of the house like troublesome rats, and the yellow waters had slunk away from the streets and the yards and were neatly collected in ditches and carabao water holes. The chill had left the air, and with it Don Valentin’s fever had gone. The neighbors and the tenants had been calling the whole day, and the visits had made Don Valentin very tired. Dr. Biel had said definitely not to let visitors in, but Don Valentin had told Ercelia not to turn anyone away and Ercelia had not dared to disobey. It was a Saturday and she had relieved Don Miguel of his responsibility to watch over her father, but faithful to his charge, Don Miguel called again in the evening.
Ercelia took his arm and walked him out to the parlor. “Papa is very much better, I think we should let him rest,” she told him.
Don Miguel gave her his coat as he dropped down on a rocking chair. Then loosening his tie at the collar, he leaned back with a tired groan. Ercelia called Sinforosa to bring in some coffee, then picked up a cushion and tucked it under his head. When the coffee came she poured him a cup herself and watched him drink it. There were circles under his eyes, she noticed, and his cheeks were deep hollows. Strangely, however, he was handsomer, in a grand and tragic way. She felt an impulse to touch him.
When he finished his drink, she bent over him and pushed him back to the cushion. “You must he down,” she told him. Her hair fell on his face, and she brushed it away very slowly, touching his face tenderly. She felt his breath stop suddenly and saw him close his eyes. She fought an urge to lift up his face and cover it with kisses. It was not as if he were her father. But she could stroke his broad brow and his beautiful hair, perhaps, if nobody were looking.
“Come on out to the porch,” she said. “You will be more comfortable in the hammock.”
He took some time following her to the dark end of the porch where the hammock was, but he breathed a contented sigh as he settled himself among the pillows that she had made ready for him. “You are such a sweet child, Ercelia,” he s
aid, as if to himself. “Valentin is most fortunate to have you for a daughter.”
“And he is most fortunate to have you for a friend. You are so good to him, Uncle Miguel,” she said, dropping to her heels on a floor-mat by the hammock, leaning between his legs like a trusting little girl.
“Uncle is right, Ercelia. Always call me Uncle; don’t ever let me forget.”
“You told me to—at the dance, remember? Anyway, you are like a brother to my father,” she said, willfully ignoring the implication of his words.
His hands touched her hair lightly. “Yes, yes, Ercelia. I love your father like a brother. Until your father befriended me, I was a lonely man.”
Suddenly her heart dropped a beat. Now she was to know. Now was her chance to hear the story that had so long intrigued her. Now she was to hear the bald truth about the nun from Don Miguel himself.
“Why, Uncle Miguel? Why were you a lonely man?”
He rested a hand upon her head. “Because I had no friends, Ercelia. Everybody seemed to look at me with suspicion. Until your father took up with me nobody accepted me in this town.”
“Why, why was that?”
He sat up and held her face up to him. “You have heard my story. Don’t pretend you haven’t, my child. Everybody in town has. I am a wicked man. You should be afraid of me.” She could not see his features distinctly in the gloom, but his breath was warm on her face, and he smelled faintly of some expensive kind of liquor. She closed her eyes, wishing he would kiss her. There was no harm in a kiss. She had been kissed before.
“I’m not afraid of you, Uncle Miguel,” she said as he slowly took his hands from her face. “You must have been weak, and what man is not weak? But surely you are not wicked. I am sure you did not take advantage of Sister Claribel with gayuma or mosca or anything like that.”
“And what makes you think a nun, a virtuous woman like she was, would give herself to me without the aid of such deviltry?”
“Your good looks. You are as handsome as a saint, Uncle.”
“A saint!” He laughed softly, drawing her body gently to him. “Ah, you are a sweet child, Ercelia. Let me love you like a daughter,” and he brushed his lips slowly across her forehead. A thrill ran through her at the tender caress. She reached up for his face; her fingers followed the grooves of his long dimples, brushing nervously across his full mouth and his little mustache.
His body hardened on his bones and his hands clutched her shoulders tightly. Then he rose from the hammock and walked away from her to the devil plant on the railing. The plant’s big-veined bud was beginning to open to the night’s breath.
But Ercelia would not let him run away with his story. She had to hear it. Now. She followed him to the railing. Circling his waist with an arm, she whispered coaxingly, pleadingly, “Tell me, Uncle Miguel, tell me about the mm,
With a sudden movement, he took her in his arms and held her close, and for a time, there was only the ominous beating of his heart against her face. Then his voice came, low and broken, as if with effort: “She was a lovely girl, Ercelia, very lovely—with eyes full of the darkness of sleep, and skin an alloy of gold and olive and old ivory—a delicate kayumanggi. But more than a mere beauty of features, hers was the beauty of the nacre—a beauty that suggests a light within”—his voice caught in his throat—“a beauty like yours, Ercelia, a beauty of deeper depth, more strongly felt than seen.” His hand was on her face, following its contours, kissing with his finger tips her cheeks, her chin, her lips, the soft curve of her throat, the hollow beneath it.
“I well remember where I first noticed her. By the statue of St. Francis near the holy-water font at the side entrance of the church—a quaint old church in Cotabato it was—it had walls of corrugated iron and a bell that sounded like a huge cracked pan...” His words trailed off as if to reach far, far back to retrieve something almost forgotten in the hazy past. “I had just lighted a candle in the baptistry, which was always dark, even in the morning, when I came upon her. Her face was in the shadow of her veil, but I could see that she had been startled. She blessed herself hastily and stared at me as if I were a ghost or something evil that she was exorcising. Even like you, she told me later, she thought I was the apparition of a saint.” There was the suspicion of amusement in his tone.
He kissed the top of her head, the breath of his mouth sinking into the roots of her hair as he spoke: “Love is a curious thing, Ercelia. Sometimes it springs up with the rain after a night of storm, like the mushroom; sometimes it takes a little time to show some roots, like the bean sprout. But both are frail and abundant.”
“And both are delicious to the palate,” Ercelia added.
“And both are delicious to the palate,” he agreed.
In the beginning he had simply found her amusing. He would watch for the nuns entering the church in a long line at cock’s crow for the morning Mass, and when Sister Claribel came along, he would suddenly appear from behind the water font to annoy her. Then one morning they had dipped their fingers into the font at the same time, and their fingers had touched. The little nun had flicked up her lashes and looked at him fixedly, and he had felt flustered and confused. Touching the person of a nun had been an experience that was strange, almost magical. A nun was a vessel of holiness, a receptacle of all the virtues. He had never thought of a nun as a woman, but as a face without a body—such as the famous Veronica that appeared in the town procession during Holy Week. This famous image, with face of ivory and tears of diamonds and costly garments encrusted with jewels, was the most beautiful icon he had ever seen, but he would never forget the feeling he had the first time he looked under its garments, for it had no body. A wooden peg held up its head, and a frame of bamboo strips, its garments. Touching the fingers of the nun made him feel as if he had discovered a body under the statue’s garments, and the feeling was unholy.
“But the little nun gave me a smile so full of sweetness that I forgot to feel ashamed of my feelings. I’ll never forget that smile. I saw it wherever I went. I saw it even in my sleep. I lived only for the mornings when I met her by the door and touched fingers with her and saw that smile. At first we touched fingers. Then we touched hands. And then we brushed against each other.
“And then one morning she was the last in the long black line, and when she had passed me, her prayer book was on the floor. It was a beautiful prayer book—white velvet, I remember, with a gleaming cross of gold on the cover. That was what caught my eye, the cross, for it had made no sound in dropping.”
Suddenly he held her away, peering at her face. “Tell me, Ercelia, what do you see when you look at the cross?”
“Jesus—God, salvation, eternal life—”
“Ah, you are good; you see good in the cross. I see evil! I see cruelty, cynicism, hate, man as animal. When I picked up that book and read the message in it, I did not see the good in it, only the evil behind it. And I pursued what I saw relentlessly.”
“I will not let you crucify yourself,” Ercelia protested. “You are not evil. You just want to appear so because people say you are. But go on with your story. What was in the book?”
She heard him heave a deep sigh.
“A line of prayer was underlined in that book, Ercelia. ‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil!’ But when I returned the book to her in the morning I led her into temptation and delivered her to evil. I picked out the most beautiful words in the book, the most sacred, the most holy and divine, and underlined them all to speak for me.” He drew her slowly back into his arms. His heart was beating so loud, and his breath was hot in her ears. “I called her mystical rose, morning star, house of gold, tower of ivory”—his lips came down on her cheeks, on her eyes, on the tip of her nose—brushing them lightly, very lightly, like the tips of feathers—“and I called her most chaste, most pure, most inviolate, most immaculate.” His heart felt so alive, it was like a little wild beast seeking to feed on her virgin breasts. “I was profane, Ercelia—may the Mother of G
od forgive me—I was wicked, I was evil!” But Ercelia was no longer hearing. His words had set up a roaring in her ears that was like a flood of fire, his touches had covered her mind with gossamer sensuousness, and she was not Ercelia, daughter of Don Valentin Fernandez, any more—but Claribel, creature of Ercelia’s dreams, in the arms of the angelic Miguel.
And she clung to him, pressing her body closer and closer, sensing the tight knot of his desire loosening its full length along his limbs. Her hands found the wings of stone on his strong, graceful back, and gripping them with eager fingers, she caused the life to flow back into them. And he began to quiver and to move—at first, cautiously, circumspectly, almost reverently, and then boldly, fiercely, and without care. But even as he made ready to carry her all the way into the higher spaces—the dull metallic note of a bell reached into her consciousness and pulled her back to herself. It was only the old grandfather clock in the dining room striking eight, but it had broken the delicate, sensitive filament that had sprung up and bound her to her dream, and she was back on the ground in Ercelia’s world, instantly mindful of the many duties of the household at that hour.
Many things started after eight. Prayers for the dead—for her mother, in particular—which her father would not allow her to forgo a single night, the daily rosary, and the novena to St. Vincent for her father’s speedy recovery. She did not expect callers, but anyone might show up after eight, unless she closed the house—and Sinforosa was doing all the chores alone, for Sixto had made the trip on foot to Ingo’s place and was not expected until morning.
The ancient clock had brought her back to herself but it could not make cold the ashes of her dream, and even then a fierce longing to recapture the dream was building within her.
“I have to go, Uncle Miguel—I have things to look after,” she whispered against his throbbing throat, her voice husky with emotion. There was the sound of wet skins coming apart as her face lifted away from his sweating neck and chin.
Don Miguel unlocked his arms from around her with a deep sigh.
The Devil Flower Page 14
