The Devil Flower

by Emigdio Alvarez Enriquez

  Don Paco stood by his car surveying the scene as the ladies, fixing their veils on their heads, sought their places in the procession now slowly winding out of the church patio. The church bells were making a noisy clangor. The band struck up a processional. The melancholy whine of the flutes and saxophones seemed eerie to Ercelia. The music sounded like a funeral march—slow, heavy, melancholy.

  The Virgin’s carriage, with its cotton doves and paper flowers, was passing through the main arch over the entrance to the patio, and little girls were strewing petals on the image, when a car slid slowly to a stop just across from where Don Paco’s car was parked. Ercelia’s heart stood still.

  In the car were Agustinita and Don Miguel! She could not tear her attention away from them. She could not see Don Miguel’s features, only his prominent mustache, but as he alighted from the car, she could see that there was something strange about his movements, something heavy and unsteady—as if he had been drinking. But he was dressed like a bridegroom, all in white. His native shirt was of embroidered silk. He had never looked more dashing.

  Agustinita seemed to be arguing with Don Miguel and trying to make him return to the car, but Don Miguel seemed adamant. Ercelia saw Agustinita clinging closely to him, her head tossing about fearfully. Then, Ercelia saw Agustinita leave Don Miguel and start pushing her way through the crowd toward the main entrance of the church where Don Paco and his bodyguard were. Ercelia followed Agustinita with her eyes for a moment. All at once a shrill scream cut above the noise, and suddenly Ercelia saw a gleaming blade swinging at Don Miguel.

  Ercelia’s scream died in her throat with horror and her legs became still and heavy like iron weights. She could not lift them. She felt planted into the ground, and she stood there with staring eyes. She saw Don Miguel throw himself bodily upon the Moro, and grappling with him, fall to the ground. Guns began to fire and bullets whizzed in the air; the streets and patio were in an instant a scrambled mass of frightened people, buffeting and bumping into one another.

  In the confusion, Ercelia felt pushed and carried along in a tide and finally dumped somewhere in a dark corner—and there she wanted to die. In her mesmerized state, she felt that she had been cut by a bolo or hit by a bullet and was dying. But after a time she began to feel alive again and, to her amazement, completely unhurt. Waking up to her surroundings, she found herself cramped against a cold tin wall in a dark hole. She felt the presence of many bodies around her. As she began to stir in the stillness that had suddenly come upon the place, she heard her name spoken by someone beside her. When her eyes became accustomed to the dark, she recognized her grandaunt Mariana huddled beside her.

  “How did we get here, Grandaunt?” she asked in a broken whisper. “Where are Romulita and Tia Choleng?”

  “I don’t know,” the old lady said in a quavering voice. “I don’t know where anyone is. Holy Mary, what a tragedy!” “How, how—did we get here?” Ercelia insisted.

  “I pushed and carried you in here. But where I got the strength I have no idea. The Virgin must have helped me. You stood there like a peg of wood in the street!”

  The building, Ercelia could now see, was a makeshift shed—one of several around the church patio that people had built as food stalls for the fiesta. The door was a sheet of corrugated iron held in place with a piece of wire. Suddenly it rattled and the world seemed to have come to an end. There was wild screaming and bodies fell upon one another.

  “Open up, stupid fools!” A voice came imperiously from outside. “You can come out now, the juramentado is dead.”

  There was a deathlike stillness, as if a hand had been clapped on their mouths. Then there were a snicker and a giggle, and then a chorus of voices talking all at the same time.

  Outside, people were issuing from houses and shacks and odd places like garbage boxes, ditches, hedges—wherever they had hidden themselves during the wild scramble. Men and women were filling the streets again and calling loudly for one another.

  The massive doors of the church creaked slowly open, letting out people like a box of assorted candies spilling its contents. The image of the Lady of the Pillar—abandoned in her carriage in the middle of the street—began to move back to the church. Many women followed behind it, sighing noisily and blowing their noses.

  Ercelia followed in the crowd, keeping close behind her grandaunt Mariana, who was carrying her high-heeled slippers in her hands as if ready to break into a run at the first indication of danger. Spying a policeman near the main entrance of the church, her grandaunt hastened to him as fast as her old knees would allow her.

  “How many victims besides Don Miguel?” she asked breathlessly.

  “None, señora, only Don Miguel. And thanks to Don Miguel himself,” the policeman said. “You see”—he eyed Ercelia critically—“Don Miguel grappled with the Moro and the Moro could not get away.”

  “A man of real guts,” someone close by said.

  “Yes, and of strong stomach,” said another.

  A car rattled to a stop in front of the church and Don Paco leaped out with the chief of police. The chief spoke gruffly to the policeman and the group dispersed.

  “We took Don Miguel to the General Hospital,” Don Paco told the ladies. “Agustinita is with him—also Josefinita and Adolfo. I found Romulita with Doña Choleng in the Provincial Building, where most of the people took refuge. I have just come from taking Doña Choleng home.”

  “Poor Miguel,” exclaimed Doña Mariana, “he does not deserve such a terrible fate.”

  “Poor Miguel,” said Romulita, “he must have been born under an evil star!”

  Inside the church, Father Anacleto had ascended the pulpit and his voice resounded over the heads of the assembly: “My beloved brothers in Our Lord Jesus Christ, fall on your knees and repent your sins. The Lady of the Pillar has looked upon us with disfavor this unfortunate day. My brothers, we are passing through a test of faith—”

  “A faith that sometimes kills,” Don Paco muttered, eyeing Doña Mariana obliquely.

  Doña Mariana turned on him belligerently. “It is this carnival and its mundane pleasures that is at the root of all our sorrows.”

  Ercelia slipped away from the group and elbowed her way into the church. Before the image of the crucified Christ at the entrance to the baptistry, she fell on her knees and tried to pray.

  She tried to put her flustered mind in order, but she could see only Don Miguel raising his arm to ward off the sharp bolo from his face, the blade sinking into his flesh and leaping back in the air, drawing geysers of dark red blood after it. The blade seemed to sink into her own flesh, cutting into her bones, sending stinging pains throughout her body, and she closed trembling lids over her eyes and began to pray.

  The rosary slipped through her fingers mechanically, the words on her lips making sounds like the surface bubbles of a spring.

  The hand that touched her lightly on the shoulder startled her. Looking up, she saw Don Paco bending over her.

  “Don Miguel is asking for you. He begs you to come.”

  Her heart seemed to drop to the pit of her stomach. “What—what for?” she asked weakly.

  “To ask your forgiveness, I suppose. You cannot deny a dying man’s plea, Ercelia. Both your grandaunt and Agustinita want you to come.”

  As she sped through the streets of the town in Don Paco’s car, she braced herself for any contingency. Defiantly, she threw her face to the wind, but in the hospital, as she walked rapidly along the corridor to Don Miguel’s private room, she did not dare meet the curious eyes of the people who stepped aside to let her pass.

  At the door, Agustinita opened her arms to her. The misery in the woman’s eyes pleaded eloquently for sympathy. It brushed off the momentary embarrassment that Ercelia instinctively felt at facing her accuser. Sobbing softly, Agustinita took her to the bedside, where a nurse and a doctor stood in attendance.

  Long and still under the white cotton sheets, Don Miguel’s body looked like that of a dumm
y. Deprived of the animal sensuousness of his movements, his body appeared harmless and helpless. But his face was beautiful. Ercelia had never seen him so beautiful. He was like a stranger. His pale face was shaven clean, the trim mustache was gone, and his head, swathed in bandages, lay like a head sculptured in white marble. It was as if the mustache he had worn had been a mask to conceal a visage so beautiful that only death could reveal it.

  She gazed at him in fascination. The look in his eyes was cool, as with unburned fires, and his voice was a husky whisper. “Forgive me, Ercelia, forgive me—“ Suddenly her heart was in her throat and the blood was in her ears. The words had picked up a lost echo in her mind; she remembered the voice, and remembering the voice she remembered the face. It was the beautiful face of the man Don Miguel as he had come to her in her dream on a tongue of fire—the face of the fallen angel made man by sin—the face of the angel man with the wings of stone!

  It unnerved her. It smote her like a strong hand. She fell weakly to her knees, sobbing softly, and picking up his hand, she touched it with her lips.

  The night was all but gone when Don Paco finally took her home. But sleep would not come to rest her mind. Her head was like a big box, too full to close without breaking the hinges. The picture that Don Miguel made as he lay there in his hospital bed, so pitiful and helpless, came again and again to her mind.

  Tasia was going about the house making a big noise because Ingo had not yet come home from the procession. “He is dead,” she wailed over and over, and cursed Sixto who would not go out in search for him.

  “There was only one victim, Tasia,” Ercelia told her. But Tasia was sure her husband was dead.

  The cocks under the house had flapped their wings and crowed twice and the sky had brought out its morning star when Ercelia heard the dogs in the neighborhood barking with ferocious hostility.

  “Damned be the wombs that bore you, canine imbeciles!” Ercelia heard Ingo calling, and instantly she was out of bed.

  Tasia’s screams could have awakened the dead: “He is dying, the Lady of the Pillar has punished him!” she wailed.

  “He is only drunk. He is reeking of tuba.” Sixto, who had met him at the gate to help him, called out hoarsely.

  Ercelia had never seen Ingo drunk before. She thought he looked tragic with a red face and bloodshot eyes as Sixto heaved him up the stairs and onto the porch. As if reading her thoughts, Ingo turned his face away and reeled to the sofa in the hall, throwing his legs apart in utter abandon. Ercelia sent Sinforosa to the kitchen to make strong coffee, as Tasia, moaning and scolding, began to pick at her husband’s shoestrings.

  In the light of the Aladdin lamp, Ingo resembled Ercelia’s father, almost as one cuff link to another, and suddenly Ercelia could not look at him.

  “Don’t turn away from me!” Ingo pleaded, digging his head into the pillow. “I love you, Ercelia, I love you very much.” He pulled her close to him. “You are all I have of my brother Valentin. Miguel killed him, remember? He killed him-”

  Suddenly, Ercelia’s cross seemed too heavy to bear. “Stop it! Stop it!” she screamed. Then, grabbing her hair at the roots, she began to pull at herself like a woman out of her mind.

  Tasia stared at her and started to cry. “I—I told him not to do it, Ercelia. I told him to be wary of the Moros, but he would not listen to me.”

  “What is all this about?” Choleng asked, coming in with a cup of black coffee. “Will somebody tell me?”

  “What is Tasia talking about, Sinforosa?” Ercelia demanded, pushing Ingo away from her, and passing her hand across her face to brush the smell of tuba from it.

  Sinforosa looked at Ingo. “Ask him,” she said.

  “You will hate me, Ercelia, you will despise me for doing it,” Ingo said, breaking into sobs. “But I did not mean for him to be killed. I only meant for him to lose the friendship of the datu. By the heavens above that hear me, may the lightning strike me if I he! I had no thought of killing even the cock with the bit of kernel I slipped into its beak—I swear, I swear!”

  Ercelia felt limp—as if she had not one drop of blood left in her limbs. Ingo had poisoned the Moro’s cock himself and had imputed the deed to Don Miguel! Could anyone imagine a more horrible deed? But Ingo had done it to avenge his brother who had been killed, as he believed, by Don Miguel, and it was she, Ercelia—it was she who had killed her father! And it was she who had killed Don Miguel!

  “My God!” she moaned, feeling the mailed fist of God descending upon her head. Now she could not deny her guilt. It stared her in the face too starkly. As hers was the hand that had gripped the whip with the coarse, grainy scales that had lashed Don Miguel in her dream, and as hers were the fists her father had swung at him on that night of painful and bitter memory, so also was hers the hand that had held the blade that cut his body and drew his blood.

  And hers was the hand that had smitten her father to the heart. Suddenly, she was crying, crying bitterly, loudly, violently. All the resentment she had felt against her father for believing her wicked and calling her harlot seemed carried away on the tide of her tears. How evil, how wicked she had been! How sinful and hypocritical! If she could only undo what she had done—live her life over again) But deeds are forever driven by the winds of time and time never rests. She could never hope to recapture the past and amend it—she could only atone. She could only punish herself to expiate her guilt!

  A feeling akin to panic seized her as she remembered Larry. What was she going to do about Larry? She could not have him now—or ever. She had to send him away. She did not deserve a happiness with him. She could not come to him until she had expiated, until she was washed clean; she could not look into his eyes and feel worthy of the admiration reflected there.

  It took her some time to word the letter she wrote him. She wasted much paper framing reasons that would sound convincing. The letter she finally sent him read:

  “Dearest Larry—My mind is in a whirl, and I do not know how best to say what I have to tell you. I want you to know that it grieves me very much to do this, but I know that it must be done. Since the time I wrote you inviting you to come for me, many thoughts have entered my mind. I must confess that the sudden joy of knowing that you still loved me and that I was free to love you had shut my mind completely against all the consequences of my decision. I love you, Larry. That I will not retract. But America is at the other end of the earth, and I belong here. Could you transplant a full-grown tree and expect it to thrive, Larry? I have my roots here, and I am a full-grown tree. As your father needs you in America, and as you need America to give fulfillment to your talents, so also does the school here need me and my humble services. I cannot turn my back on those who need me even more than you. I cannot ask you to stay—to give up your trip to America—nor will I accept it if you offer to. We belong to different settings and together we cannot be completely happy. In your beautiful America, the women are very lovely, Larry. Their skin is of ivory, and they have eyes and hair like the goddesses of Olympus of the Roman myths. It tears my heart to say this, but you will soon forget me in them. I love you and will always cherish your love as my fondest memory—but I would rather have a beautiful memory than live our love and watch it wither and die. My decision on the matter is irrevocable, Larry. You told me once that if your waiting would not help you, to tell you so. I am telling you so, Larry. Good-by.”

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  DON MIGUEL’S innocence in the incident at the cockpit was never established, the family having kept silent, fearing for Ingo’s safety. Anyway, the don had vindicated himself completely with his bravery in grappling heroically with the juramentado. So Doña Mariana decreed. During Don Miguel’s funeral, the Banegas sisters wore black dresses and followed behind the hearse on foot, giving the memorable occasion a romantic touch. And Agustinita, as if to atone for having denied him so often in life, could not give enough of herself to him after his death. Besides visiting him at his grave every day, she made a funeral pyre of her har
p and her victrola, declaring that her heart was stilled to music forever, and closing the house, she presently went to live with her father in Santa Maria for a whole year of mourning.

  October days flew past Ercelia like bats from an old balete tree, heavy and black and reeking with foulness. Their eerie screeching grated on her nerves through the somber days of November when she visited her dead in the cemetery. December was solemn and devoid of laughter.

  Early in January Don Paco once again made a pilgrimage to the house of Don Pipong de los Reyes for the hand of Romulita and was eagerly received. Ercelia sang at the wedding. The ceremony was followed by a quiet luncheon at the Plaza Hotel. There was no fuss and feathers, the sisters having been sobered by the tragedy of Don Miguel.

  February passed uneventfully, but March brought the closing program and graduation exercises, plunging Ercelia into a pool of activity. Except for her fear that Larry might come to claim her, she forgot there was a world going speedily past her door.

  Larry had not answered her letter. He had sent her a Christmas card and a heavily embroidered Spanish shawl for a present but had not written a word about his trip to America. Every strange footstep on the porch during the last few days of March would frighten her; and on late afternoons she would watch the pale yellow patch of sunlight on the floor at the door of her classroom, half expecting to see his shadow fall upon it again.

  April brought Holy Week and her first opportunity for mortification and atonement. Avidly she joined a group of penitents chanting the passion of the Lord from Holy Monday to Good Friday. Her strong lyric voice, with its mellow sweetness, rose in the evening air like a lament. And on Maundy Thursday she put on a purple dress, the habit of the devotees of the Nazarene, and walked on her knees from the main door of the church to the Communion rail, as the penitents of Quiapo did in Manila.