The white flour-sack sheets on the stage built of petroleum crates parted and a masked clown came out with a megaphone.
“How long before?” Lawrence whispered loudly.
“Seven years,” she whispered back, falling into the same mood.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Ill be an old man then!” “That’s how long it took my father to win my mother,” she said half-seriously.
“All right,” he said, pulling a long face in mock sadness. “I’ll wait seven times seven years long.”
The lights had gone out, all but the footlights on the stage, and Ercelia’s hand sought the glass-bead handbag she had laid on the bench beside her to keep him from moving too close to her. Suddenly, her heart made an unexpected lurch, for his big hard hand was covering the bag, and her hand had fallen on his. The contact so startled her that she gasped quite audibly.
His laughter mingled with the words the clown was now speaking, and people toned around to look at them.
Aunt Choleng’s fingers leaped to her leg and a sharp sliver of pain shot up her whole frame. “Caraballa!” her aunt hissed in her ear.
Catching her lower lip between her teeth and looking straight ahead, she sought his hand again. Picking up a tiny bit of his flesh, she pressed two nails together, slowly and deliberately. As he gasped and squirmed with suppressed agony, she picked up her handbag, giggling.
Lawrence wanted to come to visit her in her house. He wanted to do the proper thing. But Ercelia found excuses. She had too much to do to receive him. When she did not have lesson plans to write, the family were holding prayers in honor of a patron saint or a dead relative. Sometimes Aunt Choleng and the kids from the hills were visiting, or her mother was ailing.
Her mother was always ailing, but her mother never needed her when she was ailing. Her mother’s sicknesses, coming suspiciously soon after emotional disturbances, were a private joke of the household. The lady had too much pride to fight with her husband over women such as the Banegases, or company such as Don Miguel’s, so she fell ill. She would feel constipated, or weak in the joints, or short of breath whenever she fancied her husband was neglecting her, or was indifferent to her pleasure. Strangely, the family physician’s prescriptions had no effect whatsoever on her, and the merits of such a simple household remedy as an enema of hot water with a solution of Chinese soap, when administered by Don Valentin himself, had become a source of one of Uncle Ingo’s most salacious jests. However, her mother’s complaints were growing more and more frequent, and her father was becoming seriously worried. Knowing how strongly her mother disapproved of Lawrence Leyden as a suitor, Ercelia could not upset her further by having him call at her house. Ercelia thought she would wait until her mother was better.
But one afternoon Lawrence Leyden came to the school-house after the last bell had rung. She was alone in the classroom, working at the blackboard, writing rapidly, racing against the dark, trying to catch all the light there was in the world before the sea swallowed the sun. There was a patch of yellow sunlight on the polished floor of the room and his shadow falling across it made a sharp silhouette like a gigantic paper cut-out on a slab of gold.
The apparition was so sudden that it startled her. “You frightened me,” she said reproachfully.
He did not speak, just stood there, the white of his teeth showing in greeting.
“Well,” she said, making an effort at nonchalance to suppress a mounting apprehension within her, “I have work to do, Mr. Leyden. Either you will come in, or you will stay out.”
“This is my first call,” he said. “You should be kinder.”
“Please, come in then.” Her voice changed to a plea. “I am alone. It is not proper that you be seen here by people passing by.”
“That,” he said, striding in with the ease that was so becoming to his long body, “is precisely why I am here. Because it is not proper.” He perched on the edge of her writing table, shoving a pile of books aside.
Her heart began a disquieting pace and she told herself she should be furious at his impertinence.
“I want to make it proper, I want to visit you at your house, but you will not let me. But I have to see you when I want to. I’m tired of lying in wait for you in public places. I want to be alone with you, like now.”
Black images crowded in her mind. Her breast was one big sound. Why couldn’t she be angry with him?
A white drill jacket hung on his arm. He wore a soiled French-cuffed shirt with the stiff collar undone and a little button dangling from one eyelet. He tossed his balichi straw hat on one of the desks and rolled up his cuffs to the elbows. His forearms, with the veins spreading around them like nets of mountain ridges on relief maps, showed muscularly strong against the white sleeves. She stared hard at those sweaty brown columns of flesh that were so strangely clean of hair.
He caught her stare and, thinking she was offended, said apologetically, “I have been playing tennis at the hospital courts. I had no time to change, Ercelia.”
She had never given him leave to call her by her first name, and the sound of it from his lips was a challenge to her sense of propriety. She knew that she should properly draw herself up and say, “I beg your pardon, Mr. Leyden!” but without recoiling from the comic aspect of the action, which she then would not have recognized, she somehow felt neither the will nor the courage to do so. The first suggestive sign she had seen of his body’s hairlessness, which she had not expected in a mestizo, had somehow shaken her composure, and a sense of guilt at being caught staring at his forearms filled her with confusion. Nervously, she turned to the board and worked rapidly.
It was a numerical ladder she had on the blackboard, and she numbered the lowest rung 1, the one over it 2, the next above it 3, and so on.
She had never been alone like this with a man who wanted her, and she felt his presence close behind her acutely. His eyes were like fingers working their way up her arms and cheeks, making the little hairs on her nape stand on end.
“What is the little game?” His voice sounded husky, like a guitar string that was badly tuned.
“This is to help make children understand the relative importance of numbers,” she said, trying to make her voice sound solid. “I will have them count the steps as they climb the ladder, and they will realize that 2 cannot be reached without taking in 1, and 3 cannot be reached without taking in both 1 and 2, and so on until 10.”
“And what happens when they get up to 10?”
“Well, they will retrace their steps down. The children will learn that 9 is one rung below 10, and 8 is one rung below 9 and two below 10.”
“Suppose there’s some naughty one among them who decides to take a leap?” he teased her.
“Oh, no, he won’t, or I’ll punish him. He must never do anything rashly. He should learn from his elders. Young people may think they know everything but there’s very much wisdom in the Spanish proverb that says, ‘Whose ears do not lend to the sage, do not live to a ripe old age.’”
Ercelia pressed the chalk to the blackboard, as if to prove her point. The piece broke and skipped from her fingers. Hastily picking up another piece from the chalk rack she began to write again, but the new piece squeaked protestingly as it slid along the smooth surface of the board without leaving a trace. Suddenly his hand closed over hers, pressing the chalk to the board to break the tip off. The touch of his big palm lit a low fire in her limbs and her heart seemed to grow big, stopping her breathing. She felt his other hand creeping around her waist, digging eager fingers into her soft flesh, drawing her to him gently but firmly, and she made no protest. But as her body came in contact with his rigid frame, the momentary torpor that possessed her snapped, and realizing at the instant what was happening, she turned around against him, frantically beat at his chest, and pushed him away.
But his broad shoulders, his hard-fleshed chest, his big long arms seemed to envelop her so completely that she felt helpless. A strong hand grabbed the back of her neck, holding her
head still, and as his breath swept into her breath, his mouth clapped on hers with passion. Instinctively, she clenched her teeth and pressed her lips together, drawing her body up in a tight little knot of defiance; but his mouth slipped to her cheek, and her ear, and on to her neck, and behind her ear, very lightly, very gently, almost fearfully—and his voice came huskily whispering, pleading, “I love you, Ercelia, so—so—so—let me marry you, Ercelia—“ And her teeth unclenched, her body relaxed—and when his mouth came back to her mouth, her lips were trembling and soft.
When he released her, however, she could not look at him, and she could not speak. Her cheeks felt like glass lamps where the flames had just died out. She had been kissed. She had been taken in a man’s arms. She had been held so closely that she had felt his maleness intimately, and desire had flowed into her body. It did not matter that the glass urn of her chastity was unshattered. She had sinned with him and she was defiled—she, the Maria Clara of her generation, the image in a mirror, the pupil in somebody’s eye!
His hand touched her chin gently, lifting it, but she swung around and covered her face with her hands. “Oh, Larry,” she said, calling him by his nickname for the first time, “I am so ashamed—so ashamed.” Her composure in shreds, feeling more miserable than on the night of her coronation when her costume hung in pieces about her, she could not look him in the face.
“I should be ashamed, not you,” he told her. “I took you in my arms by force. I stole those kisses.” There was some bitterness in his tone, and her face grew cold in her hands. “But I am not ashamed. I planned it deliberately, because I love you, and I want you, and I don’t have seven years in this town.”
“Please, please, go now,” she said, dropping her hands from her face but without turning around.
“I’m sorry I have become so repulsive to you, you cannot even look at me,” he said sulkily, “but I mean it about loving you and wanting to marry you. If you should change your mind, send me word.”
She did not move until she heard his footsteps on the gravel path.
That night, in the narrow confines of her bed, under a hand-carved and lace-hung canopy of an age gone by, protected by the folds of a mosquito bar through which all the world outside looked remote and misty, feeling the soft, resilient native matting of rattan beneath her body, Ercelia lay nursing her dreams, fighting desperately to revive them. How was she to tell her parents? What would happen to her mother? And her father—how was a daughter to tell her father about a man she had to marry? Marriage was her only redemption. She was now like a flower without fragrance, like a firefly without a light, like a pearl—yes, she was a pearl—Don Miguel had called her that! What would Don Miguel say, if he knew? Would he say she had betrayed his high thoughts about her? She had been taken against her will—yes, she had surrendered, but what flesh could touch fire and not be seared? God made the flesh tender—Don Miguel should be able to understand that. He had rubbed the luster off another pearl himself. But why was she thinking of Don Miguel? It was not for her to think of him. Her purity was not for his palate—this fruit was forbidden him. In any case, he would never know. No, no one need ever know, least of all, her father. What her father would do to Larry if he knew! It was enough that she wanted to marry. But how explain her choice to her mother? How?
Her head felt heavy and began to throb at the temples and at the base of the skull. She would take one of the white tablets her mother kept in her clothes cabinet. Getting out of bed, she threw a wrap over her nightgown and tiptoed carefully across the waxed floor to her parents’ room. No door or window of this ancient house, except the main door at the head of the staircase, was ever closed at night. “A wind may spring up in the night and carry the house away, if the house is shut up like a box,” her father always said. “With the doors and windows open, the wind would go through it as through a sieve.”
But at her parents’ door Ercelia paused for a moment. The curtain was drawn all the way across the door. The light of the Aladdin lamp in the hall, spreading a gloss over it, made it look like a metal sheet. As she lifted the curtain to let herself in, the light fell briefly on her father’s bed, a small iron bed against the window across the room from her mother’s huge four-poster, and Ercelia saw that his mosquito bar was half-raised. Her ever-vigilant father, she thought. He was out walking the yard again, keeping watch over the house. Petty thieving had broken loose in the town lately, and neighbors were losing clothes from their lines, chickens and eggs from their hen houses, rare orchids from their back porches. Her father had made a habit of getting up in the night and roaming about the yard, stalking the shadows with a sheathed bolo knife strapped to his waist.
Stealthily, Ercelia crept into the dark room. Even with the light still in her eyes, she knew where to find her mother’s clothes cabinet. It was an old and ornate piece of furniture that could not be opened without squeaking. Ercelia took a long time muffling the noise of the door. She found the tablets easily, but as she pulled the bottle from under a pile of shawls and scarves, a small vial of perfume tumbled out to the bare wooden floor. Ercelia stood still and tense, waiting to hear her mother’s querulous voice, but it did not come. When she bent down and picked up the vial, there was a sudden rustle of cotton sheets and frantic sounds of intimate whispering. Then as she turned around, her eyes caught a quick movement of bodies coming apart under the filmy mosquito bar. In the same sweep of sight, she took in the hazy but unmistakable shape of her father’s trusty weapon strapped to the iron bedstead, its leaf-shaped blade buried full in its scabbard. Then, as if mesmerized, she stared at her father’s long cotton trousers lying grotesquely on the floor with the strings untied. Her feet became unfeeling. The room seemed to tilt, the floor boards became uneven. She was thankful for the dark that covered her face. In confusion, she put the bottle back in the cabinet and stumbled out of the room, averting her eyes from her mother’s bed.
After she was buried once more among the sheets of her bed, the throbbing in her head seemed to spill into her body, swelling it with feeling—a feeling indelicate and shameful. She wished she could pluck it off as she would the crisp skin of a roast pig that crackled and lifted easily in pieces from the delicious meat, but the feeling clung all too closely, more closely than silk stocking to the legs, or the rind of an orange to its flesh. It was enmeshed in the tissues of her body, it permeated all her being like a fever.
The fire, that for a brief instant had brushed against her in Larry’s arms, was at this very moment consuming her mother fully in her father’s embrace. She had never seen them kiss; they hardly ever touched, almost as if there was no love between them. “Isabel,” he called her, “Valentin,” she called him—without endearment, without caress, without ornament or symbol. And yet they lay dying together, wrapped in a single shroud, seeking the death together, living the death together, breathing the one last cleaving, agonizing breath!—and slowly, the fire crept into her body, filling her with a big flame, and she too lay dying, wrapped with a shadow in a single shroud, seeking the death with a shadow, living the death with a shadow, breathing the one last cleaving, agonizing breath! When the fire had consumed her body and the shadow had gone up in smoke, sleep gathered her in its arms and modestly covered her with a dream. But her father’s shadowy form broke from the death and walked truculently into her dream. Wrapped in cerements and with a face like the face of Moses coming down from the mountain with the tablets of stone, he ripped the light silk gown from her body and seized her by the hair. “Harlot! Harlot!” he cried. “Your flesh is unclean!” And she felt his hands fall violently upon her, tearing the flesh from her frame in chunks, in long thin strips, piece by piece, bit by bit, until she was naked to the bone.
In the morning there was rain, and a furious wind stirred the family to unusual activity. Doña Isabel, her hair heavy on her shoulders and enveloped in a flannel shawl, frantically ordered the servants about. The orchids had to be taken down from the porch and hung in the dining room away from the
wind. The rain was slapping in from the sides, flooding the porch, and the heavily waxed floor needed mopping, while the flapping bamboo screens had to be tied and held fast to the railing. Don Valentin was out in the chicken coop, helping Sixto, the house boy, hang up jute sacks and canvas to protect the gamecocks from the draft. Ercelia drank her coffee and ate her breakfast of toasted rice and eggs hurriedly in the kitchen, and when the carromata that took her to the school clanged its bell in front of the house, she grabbed a black umbrella and rushed to the waiting vehicle. No wind and rain, not even the east monsoon that came after a long drought, was ever more welcome to Ercelia than these that spared her the ordeal of meeting her parents’ eyes across the breakfast table that morning.
In the evening, although the lamp lights were candid, the shadows were gentle and discreet; still, she could not bring herself to broach the subject to her parents. It was like confessing to prurience, to love of the flesh—a confession, even in the light of the experience of the night before, she was not yet ready to make. Tenaciously she clung to the safe and comforting attitude that a modest girl would accept love from a man only as a flower would the morning dew, or the oyster the pearl. She would talk to her father about Larry tomorrow. But tomorrow succeeded tomorrow and many tomorrows until a full moon had gone, and the appalling idea that she was a girl who had already been kissed began to be less and less appalling. What began to disturb her mind now was Larry. He had not come to the schoolhouse again. And she had not heard from him. Somehow, she began to miss his banter, his laughter, his compliments and flatteries, and even his self-assurance and conceit.
First, she was concerned, then she was anxious, then she was piqued. She should have known that what Larry had said had not come from the heart. Whoever had said, “Man will promise woman a piece of heaven for her favor, but words of the tongue the mouth cannot savor,” knew exactly what he was talking about. Did Lawrence Leyden perhaps believe that she, Ercelia Fernandez y de los Reyes, would send for him? As well might he wish for black crows to turn white!
The Devil Flower Page 11