by Nick Joaquin
“Oh, I assure you: I have been real for a long, long time!”
“But how could you be?”
“You see this white frock? Well, I bought it a week ago, shopping downtown with mommy. We got caught in the rain, and that old taxi we took leaked. And a year ago, I was graduating from high school; a month ago, I met a man at the movies; yesterday, I was having lunch with him; and this afternoon, I received a letter. . . . Are you and I happening at the same time, Natalia?”
“Maybe this explains that odd feeling I sometimes have—”
“—that what is happening has happened before?”
“But you are still in the future, Josie. Everything has still to happen to you all over again.”
Josie’s eyes grew wide at this. “Oh, no!” she gasped, white-lipped.
Natalia felt embarrassed. “Is it so terrible?” she asked, cautiously.
“Where I am?”
“—and what happens to you.”
Pushing the hair off her brow, Josie traveled uncurious eyes round the archaic room. “Terrible or not,” she said, “things have to happen. I try not to feel about them too much. I just let them happen.”
“But you look so worried, Josie.”
“These emeralds—”
“Do they frighten you?”
Josie smiled. “Nothing,” she said, twisting the ring round and round her finger, “frightens me anymore.”
“But I heard you say they scare you.”
“As emeralds, no. As emblems, yes.”
“And so you accept them only as emeralds?”
“I accept only their market value,” said Josie, twisting the ring round and round.
“I feel as if you were wringing me out of those jewels, Josie!”
“And I am!” cried Josie between her teeth, “—wringing and squeezing and straining you out of them; and not only you but mommy also, and everything else they mean. Nothing must be left except a price tag!”
“But why should you want to do that?”
“Because I have to, because I must. I have gone in too deep; there is no turning back now, and no use struggling: the pressure is terrific! But when was life ever a question of one’s wanting or not wanting? Life is just one pressure after another. Whatever one does one was always bound to do, like it or not.”
“Oh, nonsense. One can always stop, or do something else.”
“If I did something else, it would still be Josie. If I stopped, Josie would still go on. What is impossible is not to be Josie.”
“Well, is Josie not good enough?”
“Oh, poor Josie is not good at all, Natalia—and what happens to her should not happen to a dog!”
“Happen, happen, always happen! Why let things just happen?”
“What else can you do?”
“You could make them happen.”
“How young you are, Natalia! But today you have two earrings, tomorrow you will have only one, and then you will be as old as I am.”
Her hands flying up to touch the earrings: “I mean to keep both of these,” announced Natalia, smiling, and she turned away, glittering with more than jewels, her chin tossed up.
“There is nothing you can do!” gasped Josie, clasping her hands. “I know the fate that awaits you!”
“Well, I know nothing of this fate of yours; but I do know that people call me a very stubborn girl! Do you know what it is to love?”
“Oh, God, yes. Who is that coming?”
“My aunt Elisa. She is in love, too—with Andong Ferrero. And she is not going to die, Josie!”
“But how can you stop something that has happened already?”
“And where have I put my veil? . . . Oh auntie, auntie—what a long time you were, coming!”
“But I ran up the moment your father told me—”
“Are they still down there?”
“The family?”
“Esteban and Mario.”
“Yes, both of them.”
“Then please run down at once and tell Esteban that I am very sorry, but I have changed my mind: we are not riding with him. And ask Mario if he will be kind enough to take us to the church.”
“Whatever has happened?”
“I have had a premonition.”
“What premonition?”
Natalia opened her mouth to speak—and found nothing to say. What, indeed? Baffled, she whirled around, her skirts flying, and found it nowhere. But something fled her round and round the dim fringes of the room; something always just escaped her eye as she spun round and round—until her eyes fell on the cracked hand mirror lying on the floor.
“I broke my small mirror,” she said, and listened. The something still hovered, uncaptured.
“And is that all?” asked the aunt, smiling.
“NO!” cried Natalia, and she grasped her aunt’s hands. “There was something else, Aunt Elisa—something terrible, a feeling of something terrible about to happen! We cannot ride with Esteban—we must not ride with Esteban! Oh hurry, Auntie, and tell him so—but hurry! hurry!”
When she heard her aunt scurrying downstairs the pressure on her heart eased; she smiled and thrust her chin up again; and returned before the mirror, where, as she shrouded herself in the black veil and crowned her veiled head with the comb, she kept glancing thoughtfully about her, this way and that, searching (although she did not know that she was searching) for Josie, and finding Josie nowhere; although Josie was just beside her, was standing right there by the mirror, pale and frightened, and growing more frightened still as she watched how Natalia’s eyes continually sought and failed to find her, until, numb with terror, she would have leaned forward and shouted, when Natalia, having collected fan, beads, and prayerbook from a table, turned away and strode off to the door; pausing a moment in the doorway to look back; making a gay little defiant gesture with her fan at the darkening room before she stepped out, closing the door behind her, and leaving the bewildered Josie alone in the past.
But was this really the past? Or merely her dream of it?
No, this wasn’t the past, and it wasn’t a dream either: it was simply, actually “today.” Everything here was real, was solid—this awful pair of canopy beds; these funny rocking chairs; those preposterous pedestals bearing lamps and flower pots; the quaint harp poised beneath a framed lithograph of St. Cecilia. . . . At the balconies, the round courtyard coldly welled up, brimming with blue dusk, wheeling with pigeons. Down there: silence, stillness—but not a ghostly silence; not a dead stillness. Life there had merely paused, and the pause was part of a ritual. Emptied of their folk this festive evening, the city’s houses waited, as they had waited year after year, generation after generation, while at the city’s core, the city’s Virgin rode radiant through a cold wind singing with bells. But the procession would end; the crowds would scatter; courtyards would bustle with horses; fires would be lighted; pots and pans would clatter; sleepy children would be carried up crying; families would gather round festive boards—for this is the real today, said Josie—wandering through the dusky room, fingering the room’s surfaces—but that other today was only a dream. And she told herself that Natalia had been right: It is I who am the ghost here—I and these emeralds and this white frock, and shopping downtown with mommy, and the leaking taxi, and graduating from high school, and meeting him at the movies, and yesterday’s grim lunch, this afternoon’s letter. . . . As she thought how all those things that were herself still lay in the distant future a fierce relief consumed her—not the terror she had felt as Natalia’s eyes looked through her “as though I did not exist”—but a relief intense and immediate, a bliss of liberation. No more pressures; no more tensions; and ages and ages, yet, before she would awake and anguish, before this cluttered room would be stripped to provide her a streamlined setting: the modishly bare, coyly hygienic chamber where her flesh would
writhe and her young tears flow. But the reality now and “Creep slowly, Time,” she prayed: “creep slowly, slowly!” was this harp, these pedestals, these rocking chairs, these huge beds; and she moved among them, a detached ghost; unconcerned, uninvolved, absolved—and if I look in the mirror, she gloated, I will see nothing. But when she looked in the mirror she saw her pale self staring; emeralds smoldering on her breast and flashing in her hair; and on a cheek, the one earring burning like a goblin’s chandelier. But that’s my room in there! she gasped, seeing in the mirror her own streamlined room: modishly bare, coyly hygienic, and aglare with morning sunshine. As she stood puzzling at the sunshine she heard, with a quick chill at the heart, two voices—instantly recognized: her two brothers—speaking just behind her.
—Have you looked through these drawers, Tommy?
—But we ought to go and stay with mother.
—Take it easy, the doctor’s not expecting any change yet. How about those boxes in her closet?
—Oh, what’s the use, Ted? Those emeralds are probably in some Hong Kong hock shop by now. She was seen at the airport last night.
—Was he with her?
—Hell, no; he left Saturday. I found the letter she got from him. He said he was sorry he couldn’t take her along, but if she wanted to follow—well, he couldn’t stop her.
—And he won’t stop her from following as long as she’s got some money.
—Oh, we’ll soon be hearing about her, one more local dame with an international reputation.
—Our dear little sister, Tommy.
—The slut.
—Well, she started early.
—You know his wife, Ted?
I wouldn’t worry about that one either; she’ll take care of herself. He’s got some very young kids though.
—It’s poor mother I’m worried about.
—Yes, dammit; but she had no business letting Josie make an old fool of her.
—Oh, mother wasn’t fooled, Ted. She knew Josie meant to steal those emeralds.
—Did she tell you, Tommy?
—I heard her say so. Saturday morning, mother called me up asking me to get her emeralds from the bank. When I brought them over I asked her was she thinking of walking in the Naval procession, because she never wears those jewels except when she joins that procession, and she hasn’t been able to since her heart began to trouble her. When she told me that Josie had offered to take her place as guardia I got suspicious right away. Josie has been thick with that guy this last month, and I felt she was up to something. So, yesterday afternoon, I dropped around again. Mother and Josie were in here, dressing for the procession; I stood just outside the door, it was open a little, and I could hear them talking. I heard mother say: “I wanted to save you, Josefa.” And Josie said, very loud: “Don’t say that, mother.” But mother said she had to say it and that Josie should listen; and then she began to talk about the Christian life and choosing between good and evil and about glory and all that piety stuff, and Josie kept telling her to stop and not to speak. Then I heard mother say: “I placed those emeralds in your hands because I wanted you to be free to choose.” She said that she knew about Josie’s crucial temptation and that she was trying to save Josie by trusting her. “Whatever you choose to do now,” mother said, “you will choose deliberately, with full consciousness; knowing what you will do to me and to yourself.” But Josie said it was no use at all, it just happened, and was happening even then; and I heard mother say: “Did you feel it too? Someone just stepped across my grave.” Then I heard a thud, and I listened but there was only silence and at last I got frightened and pushed open the door and went in. Josie was lying on the floor and mother was bending over her, crying very weakly and trying to call out. I lifted Josie and laid her in bed and she really looked as if she had fainted: she was limp and cold all over, and very pale and sweating. Of course it was all a damned fake. Oh, she had it all planned out—this fainting act, so she could stay behind, in bed, with the jewels, while mother went off to the procession. She had me fooled all right; she did look ill; I stopped being suspicious—and mother kept whispering: “Maybe I’ve saved her, maybe I’ve saved her,” and wouldn’t let Josie be disturbed. I took mother to the procession and it was past nine when we came back. I dropped mother at the door and drove on home. Mother went right up to see how Josie was—but Josie was gone already. She had left a note, just one line: “Dear Mother, I have chosen. Goodbye.” When I reached home, mother’s maid was on the phone, frantic: mother had collapsed.
—And she hasn’t regained consciousness since then?
—No, but she still might. We really ought to go and stay with her, Ted.
—What worries me is that Josie didn’t say she took the emeralds along.
—But of course she did. That’s what her note meant. And they’re probably in hock by now.
—Sure they’re not in your pockets, Tommy?
—I wish I was as sure of your pockets, Teddie-boy. Your wife was in here, at two o’clock in the morning, and ransacking like mad.
—Well, look who’s talking! She tells me you and your wife were in here ahead of all the ransackers, and that you weren’t very nice when she offered to help you.
—She would barge in here, sarcastic as all hell, and starting to screech and scream, and mother lying in the next room—
—Shut up, someone’s coming!
—Only that charming wife of yours, Junior, I can smell her from here.
—You stop that!
—Who’ll make me?
—Tommy, Ted! how can you be screaming at a time like this! Come quick, both of you!
—Is she dying?
—She’s dead!
—Oh no.
—Oh, no, no. Oh mother, mother!
—Control yourself, Tommy!
—It wasn’t Josie only. . . . We’ve all killed her! Oh mother, mother, mother!
—Control yourself, I tell you! Tommy, control yourself!
Moveless before the mirror, Josie heard the wild sobs growing fainter and fainter, as though a radio dial were being turned off, until there was only silence, and the sun-bright room mocking her from the glass. But it wasn’t tomorrow yet, she doggedly told herself, fingernails digging into her clenched fists, and “No! No! It’s not tomorrow yet!” she cried out at the glass and whirled around—and here was her own room, modishly bare, coyly hygienic; and there, at the windows, was today’s late afternoon light still glowing, today’s feast bells still calling; and here, where she had left it on her desk, was his letter: she snatched it and tore it and crumpled it and flung it away. And there on the floor was the hand mirror she had dropped; as she picked it up she heard the door opening and ran toward it.
“Oh mommy, mommy—it’s not true, it’s not true!”
“Stop shouting, Josie. Mother of God, you still have not finished dressing, and the procession will start in an hour! Come, start powdering that nose of yours.” And Doña Pepita, herself already arrayed and veiled, pulled her daughter back to the mirror.
“But it’s not true, mommy—not true at all! You are here and you look so lovely—and she defied the fates, she made things happen!”
“What on earth are you talking about, Josie?” asked Doña Pepita, combing her daughter’s hair.
“—about Natalia. She changed her mind, mommy—she changed her mind! She did intend to ride with Esteban but she decided to ride with Mario instead.”
“Why, who told you?”
“Then she did change her mind, mommy?”
“Well, the legend goes that way. They say that on that fatal afternoon Natalia broke a mirror, and felt it to be an omen. Years afterward, Natalia said that it was more than the mirror, that she had had a strange vision she could not remember—but later generations have embroidered on her story until now it is full of phantoms and portents and heavenly monitors. Any
way, Natalia had some kind of a premonition; so, she sent her aunt to tell this Mario that she had decided to ride with him instead. Unfortunately, the aunt did not find Mario, because Mario, unable to bear his disappointment, had stolen upstairs; and when Natalia came out of her room she found him waiting in the hall . . .”
• • •
. . . She stepped out of her room (having made her gesture of defiance at the dark) and when she turned around and saw him standing there before her, his dark curls dangling and his eyes wild, she felt her heart go fluid with love and tenderness, felt herself melting and flowing toward him.
“Mario—!”
“Why do you treat me like this, Natalia?”
“Did you see my aunt?”
“She passed by a moment ago; I hid myself: I had to see you, Natalia!”
“Then she has not told you—”
“It is you who must tell me something, Natalia. Why do you torture me so?”
“But do I torture you?”
“Why should you ride with Esteban this afternoon—”
“Listen, Mario—”
“No! No! It is you who shall listen! You do not love him, you only want to make me suffer! You are cruel, cruel!”
“Will you listen to me!”
“Why have you chosen to ride with him, ha? Tell me that!”
“And why should I tell you, ha? Why should I give you reasons for what I do, ha?”
“Because I love you, because you love me!”
“Oh, indeed?”
“And you are not going to ride with him this afternoon—”
“Oh, truly?”
“—or ever again!
“I shall ride with whom I please, sir!”
“You shall ride with me, Natalia!” he pronounced imperiously.
“And who are you to give me orders? Mother of God! Am I this man’s slave?”
“I warn you, Natalia—”
“What, do you think to frighten me!”—and she thrust into his face her own face terrible with ire and emeralds.