“But—but I want to hear the end of your story. I want to hear it all—from you!” she said.
She felt his tenseness in his hands as he gripped her arms, his eyes feeling her face in the dark.
“When?” she pleaded.
“Tonight, my child, I will be back tonight,” he said, his words between a groan and a whisper.
Sinforosa was at the window, peering out over the sash curtain, when Ercelia entered her father’s room. “Is he coming back?” the maid asked as the whine and sputter of Don Miguel’s car reached their ears from the road below.
“Later,” Ercelia said. Then, suddenly suspicious, “Why?”
“Nothing,” Sinforosa said in a low voice, eyeing Don Valentin in the bed. “He does not have to come any more. Don Valentin is well now.”
Ercelia watched the old spinster leave the room without a backward glance. Sinforosa had been with her mother’s family since her mother was a girl. Doña Isabel had been her idol, and Sinforosa had turned down more than one chance to marry to stay on with the family. Ercelia had no doubt that the old maid shared her late mistress’ prejudices against Don Miguel, but she had no doubt about her loyalty to the family, either.
Her body was still swollen with sensuousness as she took a chair by her father’s bed. How still and dead he looked under the gauzy fabric of the mosquito bar, yet what dreams, what adventures he must be having behind those closed lids, what thrills those limbs must be experiencing in their limpness! Dreams were so real to her that she could never quite tell when she was dreaming. She was the same woman in her dreams as she was when awake. Even when she saw herself as another—as Sister Claribel or Maria Clara—she was still the same: Ercelia. Whether for Don Miguel, for Larry, or for a shadow, the wanting in her body was always destroyed by something in her mind. If she could only be another person and finish a dream she started to dream—then she would not die when she awakened, but live!
It took her some time to quiet the tingling of her nerves, and she buried her face in her hands so as not to look at the body on the cross when she finally mustered courage enough to pray.
She prayed a long time: prayers for the dead and for the living, the novena to St. Vincent, to St. Joseph, and all the fifteen mysteries of the rosary; but repeating the litany of the Virgin after every five mysteries, she felt again the velvet touch of Don Miguel’s lips worshiping her cheeks, her chin, her lids, her mouth, sprinkling tiny living fires all along her limbs at the fall of each phrase—“morning star, house of gold, tower of ivory...
When the clock struck twelve and Don Miguel had not yet returned, she decided to retire for the night. “When Uncle Miguel comes,” she told Sinforosa, “tell him he needn’t sit up. You are right. I don’t think Papa needs to be watched any more. Uncle Miguel needs rest himself, Sinforosa, or he is going to be a sick man. Persuade him to go home.” Sinforosa breathed a deep sigh and brushed her hair with her open palms.
But Ercelia could not go to bed at once. She felt too alive. She did not put the light on in her room, but she threw open all the shutters and the curtains on the windows, bringing in all she could of the night: its smells of lemon leaves and unclean stables and muddy carabao water holes and copra kilns; its animal sounds and human voices; its heavy, sluggishly moving air; its murky light clammily dripping from a blurry moon. She loosened her hair, running her fingers through its tangled black mass. She took off her blouse and skirt, and she couldn’t stop at her petticoats or her slip. She took off even the little gold cross with the seven tiny pearls she wore around her neck, and the heavy gold bracelet with the gold tooth amulet. So close to the night she wanted to feel, so close that she had to have it touch her and fold over her completely. She threw herself on the bed without letting down the mosquito bar from the arched canopy of the bed, and she lay still with her arms flung over her head, feeling the mosquitoes gathering on her body drive their vicious needles into her flesh.
She did not hear the soft purr of Don Miguel’s car as it stopped in front of the house some time later. Nor did she hear him talking sternly with Sinforosa, sending the old spinster to bed. She felt only the thousand little stings, the urgent temptation to scratch, and the cold hand of the night running cold fingers on her body, and she fought the willful torture of her flesh in the deep recesses of her mind—as if she were not Ercelia, but somebody else watching her. And as she watched, she saw that her nude young body was lovely—excitingly lovely.
Her hair against the white pillow was like a cataract of black swirling waters miraculously brought to a standstill. Her tanned face, with its dimpled cheeks and its mango-bottomed chin, was like a tropical fairy’s sleeping in some conch or sea shell. And as she ran her eyes along the tapering columns of her legs, she saw with a kind of holy awe that she was a house of gold lavish with treasures: her arms were towers of David, the pillar of her neck was a tower of ivory; two cups of gold full with luscious grapes her breasts were; and on the eider cushion, under a dark, feathery veil, her vessel was virginal and dripping with honey. “Most chaste, most pure, most inviolate, most immaculate”—she heard his husky whisper in her ear and her body burned with vestal fires.
And suddenly it was as if Don Miguel was in the room, and his eyes were appraising her intently, intensely, peeking at every pore and line of her body, lingering over her hips, climbing across her thighs, tracking around her navel, delving into the valley between her breasts. Her body seemed to burst all over with many little mouths crying one big cry—“This is the dream, the only beautiful dream!” And she would have it. She would not stir, she would not move, she would not wake until it was over.
She felt the bed sagging beside her. She felt the hot breath of his nostrils on her face as he gathered her in his arms and kissed her. The blood rushed up to her ears and temples, and she felt her head growing bigger and yet bigger. Her heart began a frenzied beating like a beast in panic, her ears were full of a strange humming sound, her throat was dry. But she kept her eyes shut—not stirring, not moving, repeating in her mind, as if the words were responses to a communal prayer, “I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming.”
Don Miguel left the bed stealthily, moving very cautiously, but the stillness of the room was as taut as the face of a drum and the hardly audible sounds he made were savage beats in her ears. She followed his movements with invisible feelers and it was as if she were seeing him with eyes. His shoes thumped cautiously as he set them under the bed where he might not trip on them. His shirt made indiscreet noises as he pulled it out of his pants, and the chair scraped the floor as he pulled it from the desk to drape the shirt on its back. The sound of his pants sliding down his legs raised goose pimples on her skin, and when he dropped his shorts to his feet, she drew her feelers away not to look upon his nakedness.
The bed made tight little squeaks under his bulk as he lay down beside her; her eyelids trembled as she waited for his kisses. But when his arms slid across her waist, his palm seeking her breasts, the feel of his hair made his nakedness stark reality. Her lids flew open and she saw him as he was, a man—naked and without wings. And his body became as a serpent stretched out of its coil, rearing its full-spread head against her. Violent shudders shook her, and hoarse little cries broke from her lips as she struggled to free herself from his arms.
“Ercelia, it is I, my child,” Don Miguel whispered pleadingly, clapping a hand across her mouth and pinning her down with a leg. “I—I thought you wanted me to come—”
Under the dead weight of his husky body, she suddenly saw with a full eye all that had led up to this moment of reality. She fought her feelings, tried to collect her senses—to think, to think—but too late. There was the clatter of slippers on the bare waxed floor, and voices. The curtain on the door was swept aside and Sinforosa was peering into the room.
A paralyzing split second of silence, and then a hysterical scream—“Help! It is Don Miguel!—the devil Miguel! Help!”
Don Miguel leaped for his shorts, but Erc
elia was too overcome to reach for her negligee.
The next moment for Ercelia was a moment of horror scooped out of hell, for there at the door—his gaunt figure wrapped in a cotton bed sheet, looking like a corpse in cerements that had risen from the dead—was her father. His face was in the dark, the light behind him. His voice held the fury of the whirlwind. “Cursed be the womb that bore you, whelp of a she-dog!” And she knew that his face was as the face of Moses come down from the mountain with the tablets of stone!
Naked as she was, she flung herself on him, begging, “Papa! Papa!”
But her father swung a violent hand across her face. “Harlot!” he cried. The sound of his voice was like the firing of a gun, and his hand cut at her like a whiplash, making her numb.
“Intin! Intin! For your sake, Intin! You are sick, you will kill yourself!” Don Miguel pleaded, throwing his arms around his friend, but Don Valentin shook him off with a cry full of anger. “Traitor! Traitor!” he shouted, then leaped after him with swinging fists.
His mallet blows made cracking sounds on Don Miguel’s face and body, throwing the man against the wall, knocking him to the floor. Don Miguel made no attempt to defend himself or return the blows. He stood at the pillory, as it were, with hands and feet held in tethers by his guilt. But his penitent submission seemed only to rouse Don Valentin’s fury all the more. “Fight, fight back, you coward, you traitor!” he screamed at Don Miguel as he pommeled and kicked him. Then, throwing himself upon the man’s chest, he grabbed his thick neck with his big stubby fingers, trying to choke the breath out of him—but his quickly ebbing strength soon forsook him completely and he fell beside Don Miguel, a limp and panting heap.
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LIKE a fly on sun-dried meats, the story of the night’s incident leaped from tongue to tongue about the town. In the market place it was the prize commodity as it was minced in the stalls. The neighbors had heard Sinforosa screaming and had come running into the yard. They had not seen Ercelia in her stark nudity—a crumpled and discarded flower on the floor—nor Don Miguel picking himself up like a wounded animal and dragging himself across the hall with Don Valentin in his arms. Sinforosa had not opened the door to the neighbors until Don Miguel had slipped into his clothes and left the house by the back stairs. But the neighbors had heard Don Valentin’s throaty curses, Ercelia’s suppressed sobs, and Don Miguel’s pleading groans. They had seen Don Miguel’s car parked at the gate and had heard it drive away. There was wild conjecturing over what actually had happened.
After the women had fussed over Don Valentin with emergency remedies and one of the men had gone for the doctor, Sinforosa had told a firm and colorful story. Might her deceased mistress who watched from heaven pluck her tongue off if she lied. When the don had asked for coffee early in the evening, she could tell there was an itch in his wicked tail. She had heard about the gayuma or the mosca that he had administered to the nun and Agustinita, and when he came back after midnight and urged her to go to bed, she knew the devil was beginning to retch. The very first sounds of alarm from Ercelia had brought her instantly to the room. The fiend had wagged his tail, but Sinforosa had spoiled his fun!
Yet there were those who thought they saw some chinks in her story. Old woman Pilar, for one, had puckered her brow and said, “But the potion either makes the body soft and yielding like wax or puts it in heat. How was it that Ercelia resisted the man’s advances?”
“Because she is virtuous, because she is young and has never known man,” Sinforosa had tried to explain, speaking glibly.
“But the nun, the nun,” the old woman had persisted, “surely she too was a rosebud.”
“But one whose petals were easy to pick,” Sinforosa had said, glowering at her, and the woman had dropped the argument.
When Dr. Biel had left Don Valentin later that night, the neighbors stayed on, wheedling details of the episode from the maid, and in the morning relatives came, commiserating, and denouncing Don Miguel vociferously. Ercelia listened to their mouthings and hissings but added no particulars to Sinforosa’s version.
Her feelings were numb. It was as if she was past caring. For her there was only her father’s hand searing her face, his voice cutting into her ears—“harlot!” Her mind fumbled about as in a dream, making her actions and gestures meaningless.
She listened impassively to Josefinita’s triumphant cackle: “Now, you see, it is as plain as the shadow in the moon. Miguel seduced Agustinita by foul means. Anyone can see that now!”
She accepted without visible emotion Romulita’s enigmatic assertion: “Now you can tell, now you know him for the devil that he is. You cannot deny it.”
Only Agustinita momentarily shook her out of her apathy.
Agustinita came alone after dark in her uncle Oñong’s carromata. The plain black shawl on her head made her look like the mater dolorosa in the Holy Week procession, but her eyes were strangely animated as she faced Ercelia: “I must say you are more woman than I gave you credit for. You have a woman’s best accessories—youth and beauty—and you know how to use them. Yet I cannot say you are to blame. Miguel is very much a man. But I cannot leave him, Ercelia. He is mine. It does not matter how I won him. All that matters is that he is my husband, and I know that the love potion he uses on a woman is not the devil’s but his own!” The defiant accusation in her eyes denied the humility of the confession on her lips.
It brought the blood to Ercelia’s cheeks. “Why—why you can have him, Agustinita,” she said unsteadily. “I—I do not want him.”
The look of disbelief that swept across Agustinita’s face made her angry. It made her breast feel heavy and her breath come short. She fought an impulse to slap her accuser.
“I did not make an outcry, Agustinita,” she said, controlling herself with great effort, “but not because I desired him. I did not want to awaken my father, and cause to happen what Sinforosa in her stupidity caused to happen. I could have resisted your husband without calling for assistance.”
“You mistake me, Ercelia, of course, of course,” Agustinita said, “I did not accuse you!” The triumphant look in her eyes and her exultant tone struck Ercelia like closed fists. They made her wince inwardly. Her lower lip trembled as she struggled to compose herself. It was as if there were mirrors in front of her and behind her, and Ercelia was seeing her face staring back at her from over her own shoulder. She had been trapped—trapped by her own conscience—trapped between the image of herself in another woman’s eyes and the reflection of herself in her own. Even as between the mirrors in the hall of her mother’s house, where her person was exposed to view in front and behind, she was now held prisoner between the panels of truth; there was no escape for her except in dissimulation. She fumbled for her handkerchief in her bosom and blew her nose to hide her face.
Monday morning dawned too soon for Ercelia. The nightmare still hung over her mind, making her spirit heavy and sluggish. She had to have time to clear her mind, to pick up her courage to confront the world. Her pattern of behavior, so neatly laid out, had been badly shaken; she had to have time to put the pieces in place. She was yet in no condition to teach class. She decided to write to the school principal and request an indeterminate leave of absence.
She was frantically searching her mind for the right words to explain her father’s relapse when Sinforosa handed her a letter. “It is from Mr. Climaco,” Sinforosa said. “A boy on a bicycle brought it.” Mr. Climaco was the school principal who had relieved Mr. Baxter a year before.
“Dear Miss Fernandez,” the letter read. “I believe that, under the circumstances, it is best that you stay with your father. I shall arrange a leave of absence of two weeks for you, and have a substitute teacher handle your classes. I sympathize with you in your present predicament and wish your father speedy recovery.”
The letter disturbed Ercelia. The principal was a punctilious elderly gentleman from the Visayas who had been educated in an American mission school. His morals were puritanical. I
t was obvious that the scandal had already reached him. One might sooner hope to stop the mouths of rivers than the mouths of women, as the old saying went, but what had he heard? Mr. Climaco was like an old woman, quoting maxims as if they were Biblical truths, like “Where there is smoke, there is fire.” He must think there had been a fire! He must think she had been burned, consumed, completely ruined!
All day the thought nibbled on her mind like a beetle. It pricked her pride, making her now indignant, now scornfully indifferent, now falsely humble, now full of self-pity. It made her doubly resentful toward her father. He who should have been her first defender had been her first accuser! He had become to her a symbol of reproach. To his mind she was a sensual, designing woman, a hypocritical seductress disguising herself in an appearance of innocence. Attending to him, once a sweet and happy task, was now an awkward and embarrassing duty. She could not nurse his body impersonally—her every look, her every touch was suspect!
As the days of the first week passed, Ercelia slipped deeper and deeper into a bog of abasement and self-recrimination, and when Larry Leyden’s letter came to her, she recoiled almost as from a deadly snake.
The letter, addressed to her at the schoolhouse, was brought to her by one of her students. The envelope was soiled and smudged, as if it had gone through much handling, as if the writer had carried it with him for some time before finally releasing it to the mail. She stared at the letter for a long while before tearing it open.
Larry had not written to her after leaving town. At first she had been confident that he would, and very soon. She could not believe that his need for her was only of the body, or that he would relinquish her so easily. Eventually, however, she had had to surrender up her hopes. Had he written now to reproach her too? Her hand moved unsteadily as she drew the single sheet of paper out of the envelope and unfolded it. But as she read, her face seemed to take color, and something like an inner glow suffused it. It was as if she were seeing visions denied to other eyes.
The Devil Flower Page 15
