by Nick Joaquin
“Do not ride with him, I tell you!” he screamed into her mouth, their hot breaths mingling.
“And what right have you to tell me what to do? I am not bound to you, my dear sir—nor to anybody else! I am free!”—and she laughed in his face, her jewels dancing.
“I shall tear you away from his side!” he yelled, maddened.
“Then come and try!” she spitefully taunted, and fled, her body atremble. “Esteban, wait! Wait, Esteban!” she cried as she flew down the stairs. “We are riding with you, Esteban! We are riding with you!” she shouted, shivering, glittering, with fury and hatred and love.
And she was still trembling as she fled in Esteban’s carriage, her scared aunt frantic beside her—for Mario had followed, Mario thundered behind them, and the crowded streets cleared in terror as the carriages roared past, one fleeing and the other pursuing. “Faster, faster!” prayed Natalia, clasping her swooning aunt to her breast. “Faster, Esteban!” (For at the first sign of the pursuit Esteban had clambered up beside the driver and had grabbed the reins himself.) And peering out the window, she saw the staggering Mario looming huge against the sky, the whip shrill in his hands as his horses leapt the air, his curls flying, his eyes wild—and it was her heart! her heart!—not the bells—that swung and swelled so loud in her ears. “Faster, Esteban!” she shouted, leaping up in the carriage. “Faster! Faster!”
• • •
“. . . and suddenly,” said Doña Pepita, “the wall reared up, the horses swerved, splitting the poles, and wrenched loose, sending the carriage hurtling and shattering against the wall—Josie! what is the matter!”
“Then she didn’t . . . Then she couldn’t . . .”
“Are you feeling ill?”
“She didn’t! she couldn’t! but oh, the gesture was enough, the effort was everything! And I can! I will!”—and the trembling girl drew herself up, glittering with more than emeralds, the cracked mirror gripped tight between her hands. “Mother,” she began, in a voice of agony, “there is something I must tell you.”
“Yes, Josie?”
“I have been deceiving you, mother.”
“I know.”
“You knew—and yet you gave me these emeralds!”
“I wanted to save you, Josefa.”
The mirror dropped from the girl’s hands and crashed to the floor. Her eyes bulged out and her face crumpled like paper. “Don’t say that, mother!” she screamed, and her hands shot out as though to stop her mother’s mouth.
“But I must say it,” said Doña Pepita, her thin face infinitely tired, “and you must listen.”
Sweat streamed on the girl’s face as she stared, fascinated, at her mother’s mouth.
“What makes the life of a Christian so hard,” that mouth was saying, “is that he must choose at every step, he must choose, choose, choose, at every moment; for good and evil have such confusing faces—evil may look good, good may look evil—until even the most sincere Christian may be deceived—unless he chooses. But that is one of his greatest glories too—that he chooses, and knows he can choose.”
“Oh stop, mother, stop! Don’t speak! Don’t speak!”
“I placed those emeralds in your hands,” wearily continued Doña Pepita, “because I wanted you to be free to choose. I know the crucial temptation that afflicts you, and I wish to help you, to save you, Josefa, by showing how deeply I still trust you—for you know what those emeralds mean to me. Whatever you choose to do now, you will choose deliberately, with full consciousness; knowing what you will do to me and to yourself.”
“Oh, it’s no use—no use at all! It just happens! IT’S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW!”
At this, Doña Pepita started and turned pale. “Why, did you feel it, too?” she asked, and with a dim smile: “Someone just stepped across my grave. I sensed a—JOSIE!”
But Josie had dropped to the floor.
Doña Pepita felt her every nerve straining as she stooped over her unconscious daughter. She tried to shout but her dry throat choked. The bells’ clangor seemed the noise her heart made.
• • •
“. . . And when that clangorous darkness stopped whirling, I found myself standing alone on a strange street—and yours was the first face I saw.”
“And the first thing you said to me was: ‘I have lost an earring.’”
“And then I looked around and saw what had happened and I flung myself on your breast and sobbed and you hushed me and lifted me away.”
“But when we buried her and I knelt sobbing at her grave, it was you who raised me up and comforted me.”
“You loved her very much, Andong?”
“And I still love her, Natalia,” smiled Andong Ferrero at his wife, “because she brought us together.”
“Ah, but we did not know it then!” she cried, gathering up her great veil. “You went away abroad, never to come back, it seemed; and I stayed here, alone for years; mother dead; father dead; my own life dead. . . . But whenever I thought of that afternoon it was your face I saw—and I felt your arms lifting me up again from the ruins. And I wondered: how did he know it would happen? what made him follow?”
“Being a lover, I had a lover’s premonition.”
“Like mine?”
“What was yours?”
“When no one asks, I know. When someone asks, I find I have forgotten.” And Natalia Ferrero smiled at the mirror as she shrouded herself in the black veil, as she crowned her veiled head with the comb.
“And you never saw Mario again?” he asked, clasping the necklace round her neck.
“Only once. When father died. Father was a Tertiary: and when the Franciscans came to wash and clothe his body I saw Mario among them—very thin and altered, and so strange in that coarse brown smock: he who used to be so elegant. Ah, but I had altered, too; it was years and years since that fatal afternoon; the eyes that shone from under the dark hood did not know me at all. Those eyes had found their true love, they were the eyes of a spirit. He is a man caught into God’s heart, Andong—a holy man.”
He said, bemused: “Yes, God is a cunning hunter. . . . And what strange things have come out of that wild ride of yours!”
She laughed and mocked: “Oh some very very strange things indeed! Listen!”
And listening side by side, they heard, above the gay noise of bells and band music, boys’ voices downstairs, furious with impatience. “We had better hurry down to the rogues,” he laughed.
“But I shall have a daughter too,” said Natalia, offering him on her palm the earring shaped like a chandelier. “And I have vowed to the Virgin of the Rosary,” she continued as he clasped the jewel to her ear, “that my daughter, too, shall march as a guardia in her procession.”
“—wearing this one earring?”
“And may she never, never lose it!” whispered Natalia Ferrero, her eyes suddenly bright with tears as she stood arrayed in her emeralds: a bowed old woman now, heavy with child—but feeling herself for a moment the young Natalia Godoy again, dancing in this room that afternoon her father gave her these emeralds, the afternoon she first told him she loved . . .
And yes! she should wear that earring as a trophy, as a trophy of battle—thought Andong Ferrero, seeing in the tranced figure bowed before him—heavy with the past, heavy with the future—a Guard of Honor indeed, a warrior scarred but unconquered—for the Fates had won nothing from her save an earring. Tonight she would walk hieratic among hieratic women—women equally scarred and equally jeweled: priestesses bearing the tribe’s talisman, the clan’s hearthfire. And because of her lost jewel (a jewel dissolving now into myth and the earth’s mist), the moss would be greener on the walls; the leaves brighter on the trees; the fine air more silver; and the heart’s pang of happiness more poignant, more complex, when, at the city’s core, the city’s Virgin rode radiant against this cold wind singing with bells.
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br /> October in Manila!
DOÑA JERÓNIMA
In the days of the galleons, a certain Archbishop of Manila was called to a council in Mexico but on the way there fell in with pirates who seized his ship, looted the holds, slew the crew, and were stringing up the Archbishop to a mast when a sudden storm ripped up and wrecked both pirate craft and Philippine galleon, drowning all that were on board, save only the Archbishop, who, being bound to the cross of the mast, was borne safely over the wrath of the waters and thus reached the shores of a desert isle, a dry isle that was but a tip of reef in the sea, where, for a burning year, he lived on fish and prayer, on rain water and meditation, crouched day and night in deep thought at the foot of the cross of the mast he had set up on the shore, all alone in that waste of ocean, until a passing ship, mystified by a reflection as of a giant cross shining in the air, tracked the mirage to the horizon and came upon the desert isle, and upon the cross of mast planted on the shore, and upon the bowed, mute, shriveled old man squatting motionless and cross-legged there, stark naked and half-blind and burned black as coal, all his hair turned white and his white beard trailing down to his navel, and hardly able to stand or move or speak or grasp, in which dismal condition he was carried back to his city, arriving there some two years after he had left in glory, having departed a fine blaze of a man, handsome and vigorous, and bidden farewell by all the city to a tumult of bells, banners, fireworks, and music, and returning now in decay, terribly altered, terribly aged, mere skin and bone and wild eye, but still amid bells, banners, fireworks, music, and the tumult of the city, for news of his rescue had preceded him, the marvel of his sojourn on the island had grown into legend in the retelling, and he himself had become such a figure of miracle—the man twice saved by the Sign of the Cross; and fed on the desert isle, ’twas said, by ravens, like Elijah, and with manna from heaven, like the Israelites—that the folk who poured forth to welcome him dropped to their knees with a shudder as he was borne past, a frail wraith that, however, had power to stun the eye and seize the soul, that would, indeed, in those days, possess the popular mind, every traveling bard having but this one ballad to sing, and no print hawked at the fairs but carried the Archbishop’s picture and a relation of his adventures, by which diverse manners the fame of him spread as a holy man on whom God had showered such mystical favors that when the Archbishop at last emerged from a long convalescence, firmer in fabric but never again to be in his prime, it was to find himself being revered in the land as a saint.
For the Archbishop there was irony in this: that he should be honored as holy who now knew himself to be hollow. Naked on the naked isle, he had, for a Lenten year, pondered upon himself and had seen what a vanity, what a fraud his life had been. Youthful ambition had probed where lay advancement and had picked the Church as the quickest avenue to the high places of the world; and he had entered religion craving not piety but power. In the Order whose friar’s habit his young shoulders assumed, he had fawned and fought, steering a pull here and a push there, to hoist himself up the rungs of authority, which he, whose energies found cloister politics too cramped a field, had used merely to vault higher, ever higher, until a height long pursued as goal upheld him, and he sat on the See of Manila. Anointed, crowned, enthroned, the Archbishop of Manila at last, he had, however, come to no end of his aspiring but rather found himself more ravenous, more insatiate, reaching out still farther, hungering still for heights, and therefore making a most turbulent Lord Spiritual, his days spent in noisy and incessant quarreling, now with the grandees of the land, now with the merchants of the galleons, now with the canons of the Cathedral or the friars in the field or the officials of his own Order, but oftenest and loudest with the viceroys. Time and again had he led a march on the Palace; and governor after governor had cowered or been broken into submission or been dragged out fighting and chastised and sent yelping back to Madrid, while in Manila the Archbishop seized the reins of government and relished, till a new King’s man ventured over, the fullness of a power that fused the spiritual and the temporal. At such times did the Archbishop feel his destiny most fulfilled, being kin in spirit to the medieval prince-bishops. Then did he show himself as mighty a warrior on the field of battle as in the field of politics. Were Moro pirates pillaging some shoreline of his See? The Archbishop rode posthaste to the site, to lead the faithful against the infidel. Had the Chinese in Manila risen in revolt? The Archbishop could be seen on the walls of the city, cassock stuffed into boots, rallying the defenders or manning a canon himself. Were English or Dutch heretics threatening the Bay of Manila? The Archbishop was on the instant at the mouth of the bay, drawing up the battle plans, organizing the armies, sending out the ships, and watching from a campfire at the shore’s edge, the progress of the sea battle. Well did he know, when called to that council in Mexico, how far his name had resounded; and he had taken ship with a vision of new horizons unfolding before him. Beyond Mexico lay Madrid; and beyond Madrid—who knew?—waited Rome. Could a man of his kidney be allowed to stay a mere colonial bishop? But God had answered the question with a desert isle, where, for a stark year, stripped of more than his purple, the Archbishop had reigned over a few feet of barren rock. Wherefore, never but with a shudder could he wear the red robes again; and restored to his city, restored to his feet, after having had to learn, like a baby, to walk again, and to talk, and to unlock his eyes, he moved in shame through the crowds that clamored to touch him, asking himself what holy man they thought to reach under the robes. No holy man but the shell of a man, back in spiritual infancy. Yet he suffered the popular veneration, being moved with pity for these folk that came from so far and wide to behold the living icon of a miracle; and knowing also that in time the fervor would wane and the crowds thin; and this latest masquerade ended—himself as miracle man, as saint—he could resume the quest for reality that had started on the desert isle.
Ah, if aught had been learned on that island, it was how he himself ought to learn. For the vivid figures that he had taken for a self (the ambitious youth, the nimble friar, the turbulent archbishop, the unbowed warrior) were, he had realized on the island, but masks, images, ghosts of himself: vapors released by the fires of the flesh—by ambition, by the lust for power, by the craving for glory. On the island, all his appetites stilled, he had, from day to day, moved deeper into the heart of stillness, where must reside the reality that was himself, a being undisturbed by the shifts in feeling and fortune of a man’s life, as the island’s rock endured, unchanged, amid the flux of the waters and the alternation of day and night, no transient green to disguise its essential bone, but always itself in very bleakness and bareness, as hard and fixed (thought the Archbishop) as must be the being waiting to be revealed at the core of the stillness, the mysterious being he hunted and pursued unceasingly, day and night, even as he squatted motionless and cross-legged at the foot of the cross on the edge of the rock. The rescuing ship had interrupted the epiphany; had returned him, alas, to the disguises of a man in the process of becoming—to the robes of a bishop, the aureole of an icon, the sheets of a ghost; in which absurd apparel, appearance became authority, illusion became truth, and was hailed as holy in the marketplace, where the mobs jostled to touch hand to the costume. But the absurdity was part of the self-knowing (for what’s accepted as reality must be experienced as absurd to be exposed as unreal) and he had therefore suffered the hollow man to be taken for holy man, waiting patiently to resume the stillness, the interrupted epiphany toward which he had moved on the island, knowing that the way inward lay no less through marketplace than desert isle and that the interruption was itself part of the movement.
Even his old foes were, however warily, ready to cry miracle when, as time passed, the change all noted in him itself remained unchanged, and there was, with the return of health, no return of the furious old fellow and his turbulencies: no reappearance of the Archbishop leading a march on the Palace, or raging up and down the wharves while a galleon outwaited
the tide, or leaping out of his carriage to whack some grandee who had haughtily turned his back on the episcopal entourage. Rather, as time passed, did the Archbishop withdraw more and more from public function, delegating the affairs of the See to his coadjutor and to the Cathedral chapter, while he gradually vanished from view. For when, as he had expected, the curiosity of the populace waned and the crowds thinned, he felt under no more obligation to show himself in public and at liberty to withdraw into the retreat he had prepared: a small palm hut in the native style, on the banks of the Pasig, just outside the city walls, but hid in a grove and distant from any suburb.
Into this hermitage he took along a single companion, his manservant Gaspar, who was also his cook, nurse, driver, courier, and Mass server. On great feast days, the Archbishop celebrated Mass at the Cathedral; and when the duties of his office required it, he made an appearance at his old palace inside the walls; but all the rest of his time was spent in the hut by the Pasig, where, pacing round the deep grove, or squatted on the riverbank, or lying in bed by the window that overlooked the water, he strove to recover the stillness that had been his on the desert isle, and to resume the quest for what was permanent under the flux, being in this a child of his age, the septimocento, stunned and stricken (like many another in that city at the end of the world) by metaphysical hungers.
In this Manila of the seventeenth century, folk but a father away from paganism, but a baptism away from the Conquista, were (like their more sophisticated brethren in Europe) already exploring mystical ground, already knew of the dark night whereof St. John of the Cross speaks, already craved a total illumination, probing their souls alone, in self-imposed solitude, or together, in experimental communities, with an anguish that was yet an ecstasy, being (though mostly simple and unlettered folk) informed by the high style of their century: changelings that, in the prime of life or beauty or fortune, abruptly fled the carnival and shut the world out, impelled to a quest for something firmer by a fever in the soul.