“Dear Ercelia,” the letter read, “I tried not to write to you, but you are forever in my mind. I love you and want you. I cannot go to America without you. I know you love me—else you would not have suffered me in your arms the way you did. I’ll wait, Ercelia—as long as you want me to—seven months, seven years, seven centuries. I want you so much it is torture even to think of you. But I’ll wait—I’ll wait till it breaks me. Only promise to let me know if I’m wrong, if the waiting cannot help me! Please, Ercelia...” She seemed to hear his voice loudly pushing, like a wave gathering in the open sea, moving in upon the beach, and breaking desperately against the flat, bald face of a rock.
The letter instantly washed her mind of the thoughts that had settled on it during the week. She was not despised and unloved. If Mr. Climaco, like Agustinita, was ready to believe the worst of her, Larry was not. He would not. He had reason to believe in her strength of character. The impure desire that she had felt for Don Miguel had left no marks on her soul to betray her, and her vessel had not been ruptured. She would marry Larry. She would be his wife and cut herself free of all entanglements with the town—her father, the sisters, Don Miguel, Sister Claribel, Maria Clara. She would uproot herself—transplant herself—breathe a foreign air. She would escape, she would be free!
And breaking away from her troubled world, she transported herself to a house of dreams. She recreated Larry as he was the last time she saw him, and tried to reclaim the moments of rapture in his arms. She now realized that it was really the urgent desire for fulfillment with Larry that had driven her into Don Miguel’s arms. She had seen and touched Larry’s hard male body, and desire for him had compelled her to smother her conscience with the blanket of illusion which Don Miguel had offered in his arms. She could never again take Don Miguel in her dreams. He had now become to her only a man. The brutal reality of his hairy body against hers and the ridiculous sight he presented struggling into his shorts had blown to smithereens his wings of stone. And no longer was she the reincarnate Claribel. She had tom free of the holy habiliments of this phantom. She was now—Ercelia. She was free!
But even as she exulted, she was conscious of an almost imperceptible tugging at a corner of her mind. In her ear there was a little voice, clamoring to be heard above the beating of her heart—“What about the tryst with your angel man? Can you escape its memory? Can you, ever?”
As if afraid to listen to the voice and change her mind, she answered Larry’s letter immediately.
“Dear Larry,” she wrote, “I received your letter today and I am filled with undefinable joy and sadness. I had hoped to hear from you sooner, and your long silence has made me believe that after all my mother was right, and indeed I had been spared a great misfortune...I shall not tell you how hurt I have been lest it flatter you too much and make you proud, but I can tell you, now that my poor mother has passed away, as you doubtless knew one day soon she would, now that I am free to give my heart as I wish, without reserve, without stint, because I would not hurt a dear one—now, you may come. The family will be in mourning until March, but then, Larry dearest—April, May, or June: each is as beautiful as the other. We shall discuss it in my parlor, dearest Larry....”
She made a big moment of the sealing of the letter. She told herself she was sealing her fate. She was irrevocably committing herself to a future with Larry. She was closing the door on an unpleasant experience and was now ready to enter a pleasurable one.
But life would not be guided by the will, or by the hand, as a pen. The little voice of her conscience would not be muffled inside the flimsy confines of a paper envelope.
Her father continued to be ill. He seemed to have lost his desire to live. His waking hours were a dream sequence, a suspension of time in flights between empty worlds. Ingo, who had come down with Sixto the following day, watched over his brother patiently, rubbing oil on his hands and feet, calling his name repeatedly. But Don Valentin would not heed even his brother. He was afraid to come out of his valley; he was happy among the shadows. After a week, before the sun was out of the coconut grove across the rice fields, Don Valentin was dead.
His passing set a stamp of indelibility on Ercelia’s one night of painful memory. It set the pillars of her hopes shaking, threatening to bring the roof of her dream world down upon her head. Frantic with despair, she refused to accept her father’s death. With mesmerizing intensity, she refused to sorrow over him. Unless she mourned for him, he was not dead, and the phantasmagoric incidents that had succeeded one another before her eyes would not destroy her promised happiness.
But her heart was honest. It knew only how to feel. It would not be beguiled. The numbness that had knotted its core in resentment, began to loosen, giving way to pain—a pain sinking deep in the flesh like a festering wound-measuring the rupture of her closeness with her father, fathoming the depth of her frustration.
In the cemetery, she showed no emotion as she watched her uncle Ingo fall upon her father’s corpse, weeping aloud and kissing the cheeks like a child. Her face was set as a face cut from wood when the women, wailing in their handkerchiefs, began to remove little mementoes from the coffin, but when the men slapped the lid closed over her father’s corpse and began to hammer the nails into place, her knees gave way and she fell in a swoon.
That night the old house was like a gaping hole on the side of a mountain from which a big boulder has rolled off. It was awesome in its emptiness. Loneliness clutched at her with cold fingers, causing her to be afraid of the empty house—of her empty heart.
When the Requiem Mass had been said, the big dinner tendered, the acknowledgments for contributions of money and candles and flowers written and delivered—when there was nothing more to keep her at home, Ercelia made ready to go back to school. The substitute teacher would have been very willing to allow her another two weeks of absence, but Ercelia had to come out from the cloud she was under. She had to show that she was not afraid to look the world in the face—that she had nothing to conceal.
Uncle Ingo, who had fumed and raved and threatened to avenge his brother and beat up Don Miguel, had been finally subdued by her grandaunt Mariana’s matriarchal preaching: “For your own brother’s sake and for your niece’s, reflect, man, reflect! Use a finger’s breadth of brains. A girl’s reputation is like a piece of crochet: one stitch undone and the whole piece unravels.”
And Aunt Choleng had warned: “True, Ingo, we cannot have people look too closely into the matter. We cannot even take it to court. The family linen must not he washed in public, you know. You have to learn how to clench your fists and bite your tongue!”
The school authorities, Ercelia had learned from Sinforosa, who had learned it from the school principal’s laundry-woman, had made an inquiry into the scandal. The principal himself had questioned some of the neighbors, but after an interview with Don Miguel had quickly dropped the case.
Don Miguel, Ercelia surmised, had once again proven himself a hero, and she could not help feeling grateful. She wished she could see him. She watched and waited for him in church, in the streets, at the market place, in the cemetery at her father’s grave—where Sixto told her he sometimes went to visit late evenings—but, like the will-o’-the-wisp that would not show up when watched for, Don Miguel did not come into sight again. It was as if he had never come into her life, or as if the ugly jaws of her nightmare had swallowed him whole and entire.
The principal and the Misses Dapdap and Tomasol were very kind to Ercelia when she reported back to school, and the children looked at her with bright, welcoming faces. But every time she turned she felt eyes on her back like flies on a plate of syrup. She was suspicious of all side glances, overt coughings, or suddenly hushed conversations.
To assert her virtue and re-establish her character in the community, she practiced her religious devotions with marked fervor. She heard two Masses on Sundays. “One for Mother and one for Father,” she would say. She went to confession every Saturday and did the via cruci
s every Friday. She had herself invested with the order of the Lady of Lourdes and changed her mourning clothes to the habit that the devotees of the Lady wore—a long-sleeved white dress and a blue sash. In blue and white, she felt virginal, immaculate.
The opening of the town carnival late in September as a prelude to the town fiesta in October turned people’s minds away from the tragedy of Don Valentin. The June harvest had been plentiful. No rats had dug trenches in the rice fields, no beetles had bored holes in the coconut trees, no locusts had set upon the com and sugar-cane fields, and, above all, all year long no juramentado had threatened to shatter the peace of the little town with his fatal blade. There had not been a carnival in the town as far back as anyone could remember. The town was agog.
The front part of the public-school lot was the site, and admission was charged for entry into the fenced-in grounds. People talked only of the carnival and the town fiesta in October. But Sinforosa, who raked up people’s secrets as adeptly as she cleaned rice in a flat basket, reported that there was no peace between Don Miguel and Agustinita; that Agustinita was often seen on the road to her father’s house in Santa Maria with a pile of clothes baskets and suitcases; and that every time Agustinita swore she would never make the trip back; but that when Don Miguel moved in with the Banegas women, she flew back to her house like a mad hen after a hawk.
Once she had locked herself in her room and Don Miguel had broken the door down. When she had started screaming the servants had run for the police. But the police—Sinforosa said with signs of embarrassment—had shrugged their shoulders and explained that they could not interfere since a man was not breaking the law in taking his wife to bed. And it was just as well, because when the servants returned to the house Agustinita had stopped screaming.
From Romulita and Josefinita, Ercelia had learned that Don Miguel’s business was failing. He had mortgaged his house and taken to gambling very heavily. He had demanded all Agustinita’s share of Don Pipong’s property and then had gambled most of it away.
Then one day, Sixto came home with appalling news. Warning had been posted in town that a Moro had taken oath to run amok and it was rumored that Don Miguel was in some way responsible for it.
A cold hand seemed to grip Ercelia by the throat.
“The juramentado may run amok any time, but it is probable he will choose the fiesta,” Sixto said.
“Jesusmariosep!” wailed Sinforosa, “the devil of a Don Miguel again. Maldito sea, maldito sea!”
“Shut up, Sinforosa, shut up!” Ercelia snapped at her. “You don’t know who it is who is really responsible. Sixto, what—what is the story?” The calamity falling on the town dining the fiesta was terrible enough, but for Don Miguel to be responsible for it was more than Ercelia could accept.
“Well,” Sixto said nervously, “it seems that the Moro lost all his money on a gamecock that threw the fight too easily, and Don Miguel, who won all the money, was suspected of having drugged the Moro’s rooster.” And he went on to tell that the Moro was a follower of the Datu of Pikit, who was in town to await a ship for Mecca. The Moro had lost all the money he had saved up to make the pilgrimage with the datu and was ashamed to go back to his village.
The juramentado menace had haunted the people since the days of the first Spanish soldiers who had built the town. In the old days, a Moro was thought to run amok because of a fanatical belief that Allah looked with favor on the faithful who killed the Christians and rewarded him with a white horse for a trip to heaven—Ercelia had been told this as a child—but now, as everybody knew, a Moro ran amok because he was desperate and wanted to die, or because he wanted to avenge himself on others for a grievance. In recent years, juramentado alarms had proven false.
The juramentado was somehow always apprehended before he had a chance to carry out his macabre intentions. But this time the sworn one had vanished from the villages outside the town, and was eluding the hand of the law like an eel. The town could only wait for the fateful hour of his appearance, or hope that, as sometimes happened, he would change his mind. The newspapers carried warnings to citizens to be wary of suspicious-looking persons among the crowds. Policemen in khaki, swinging clubs and wearing guns, posted themselves conspicuously at market places, churches, plazas, the docks, the carnival grounds. At the school where Ercelia taught, men walked their children to their classrooms and lingered on the porches and about the school grounds carrying big sticks and with bolo knives strapped to their waists.
As the days dragged by, Ercelia felt more and more concerned for Don Miguel. She had learned that Don Miguel had refused Don Paco’s offer of a special bodyguard. Don Miguel had consistently denied poisoning the bird at the cockpit, and he had tried to see the Datu of Pikit; but the datu had heard of his betrayal of Don Valentin and had warned him not to come to him. Giving up his journey to Mecca, the datu had immediately left for Cotabato.
Unlike Sinforosa and the sisters, who seemed to gloat over Don Miguel’s misfortune, Ercelia feared for him as she feared for herself. She felt responsible for his downfall. In her dream she had lashed at him and had watched him squirming, the livid welts rising on his broad bare back. And gradually, there came over her a feeling, a premonition that something awful was going to happen, like the sea rising, or a cliff falling, or the earth pulling apart. She tried to get rid of the feeling, but it stuck to her like a gecko.
On the day of the fiesta the town fought the gloom that hung over it. At cockcrow, la vieja, as the people called the old bell in the church tower, began to call the people to Mass with its cracked-pan voice. Then the bands began to play in the streets, and soon Ercelia heard the clatter of wooden slippers, the clanking of cartwheels, and the clop-clop of rigs going past the house in a huge tide toward the church. And the gloom that had been cast over the day seemed to have suddenly cleared—erased from the face of the day as chalk marks from a blackboard.
Resolving to overcome her morbid fears, Ercelia left her bed and made ready for early-morning Mass. As she dressed, there came to her ears the shrill squealings of pigs; the neighborhood was going to celebrate the fiesta with roast pigs and was slaughtering the pigs before daybreak. The squealings grated on her nerves and made her hair stand on end.
When she was eight, she had almost fallen ill watching a pig die with a knife in its throat. She had watched her father lay the helpless pig on a bench with its four legs tied together; she had watched him straddle the beast, grab its snout firmly with one hand, jab a kitchen knife into its hairy throat. She had watched the life blood leap in spurts, splattering her father’s hairy forearm. She had watched her father’s face, with the sweat on his upper lip and forehead and the large vein rising on his neck, as he jabbed the knife deeper and deeper into the pig’s throat. As the pig struggled spasmodically between his legs, she saw the whole gleaming leaf of steel disappear into its tender flesh. She had uttered a cry of horror and had run away in tears.
Listening now to the eerie squealing, Ercelia wondered if after all it was Don Miguel’s hairy body that had repelled her on that night of her bitter experience. Was it not, instead, the memory of her father’s cruelty as he had driven the blade into the helpless animal’s throat? The memory of that terrible scene was haunting her now, threatening to smother her spirits.
At noon at the festive luncheon in the house of Adolfo, where the family had gathered for the day, Ercelia’s spirits were high, almost gay. The tables were set in the yard under the customary shed of palms hung with lanterns and festooned with flowers, but the women were evidently restless and nervous and the men a little too spry and alert. The yard was enclosed by walls that were lined on top with fragments of broken glass and secured from intrusion by huge iron gates; but her uncle Ingo, in particular, kept throwing his head about at the slightest sounds—like the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, Ercelia thought.
“I should think the walls are high enough, Ingo,” she told him, laughing a little nervously. “What are you afraid of?”
> “Losing my head, of course, Ercelia,” her uncle said. “I like mine on my shoulders. I know you think I am a coward, but as the saying goes, ‘Better a live cow than a dead hero.’”
“Oh, but of course,” Ercelia assented emphatically, “but juramentados do not scale walls for their victims. They run amok in the open street—under the sun that they swear by—as you know. Besides, today is the Feast of the Lady of the Pillar. Have you so little faith?”
“It is not a question of faith, Ercelia,” her grandaunt Mariana interposed. “Some people are so steeped in sin, they are afraid to die.”
At the mention of death, a sliver of chill shot fiercely through Ercelia, but with a toss of the head she said, laughing a little too loudly, “To die is to rest. Rizal said so in ‘My Last Farewell.’ I was crowned Maria Clara, you must not forget.”
When the rockets began bursting in the distance, marking the end of the ribbon races and time to make ready for the procession, a clammy feeling began to push into her again, and not even the presence of Don Paco, whose handsome and impressive looks were emphasized this particular afternoon by a forty-five caliber gun under his arm, helped to dissolve her fears.
The procession was forming in the church patio when Ercelia, her grandaunt Mariana, her aunt Choleng, and Romulita arrived in Don Paco’s car. The plaza was filled with people: the town bands hugging battered copper-colored instruments, school girls in blue and white jumpers distributing candles and hymn sheets, little girls in long white robes, nuns and priests dangling rosaries from their hands, fat matrons flapping their long trains...But Ercelia missed the pretty Moro girls from the villages who should be standing on the street corners. They always came to watch the great Christian spectacle, adding color to the occasion with their costumes. She loved to watch them watching, clustered under silk umbrellas, their costumes brighter than the colors of the sunset, the gold ornaments in their hair like bugs and insects arrested by the touch of Midas. Their absence was like a bony finger shaking in her face!
The Devil Flower Page 16
