by Nick Joaquin
Our Archbishop was, therefore, not alone in practice when he retired into his tiny hut by the river to learn stillness; but the stillness he wooed, in many a trance and vigil, eluded him; uneasiness encumbered contemplation; and the soul that sought silence but shook with anxiety as the Archbishop grew more and more aware of eyes watching and feet following—of a something assaulting his solitude.
He was being haunted.
• • •
The intrusion was vaguely sensed at first as a whiteness hovering yonder, just before he looked up or over a shoulder, merely felt, not seen, though every day closer, and presently, from the corner of an eye, barely glimpsed as a flash of white vanishing in the foliage, if he paced his grove, or round a street corner, if he rode in his carriage through the city, or behind a pillar, if, while saying Mass at the Cathedral, he wheeled around fast enough from the altar; by which nervous whirlings, and still from the corner of an eye, he caught, oftener and oftener at last, haphazard views of his haunter, undulant fractions he could not, for a time, so dulled were his eyes, piece together into a human figure (since he espied no face, no arms, but only what seemed a headless whiteness) but which began to shape up, eventually, into something human enough, though whether man or woman, child or ancient, he was at a loss to say, until, from such repeated and increasingly longer glimpses, he made out his haunter to be a woman, a woman in white, and veiled in white from head to foot, her face hid in the white veil, and nothing other visible save a hand clutching the veil at the throat, and thus shrouded, when revealed to his eyes, evading them no more, standing still to suffer his regard on street corner or in church or even at his river retreat, where once, on a night of moon, squatting motionless and cross-legged at the water’s edge, he had looked up and beheld her on a rock above, white and faceless, and not moving till he moved, whereupon she seemed to dissolve into the moonlight.
Hitherto had he made no effort to apprehend her, not knowing if his haunter be an angel or the devil, but now bade his manservant Gaspar to lie in wait for her, who could only be a woman, though a most cunning one, for in vain did Gaspar set traps for this weird woman his master claimed to have seen, in vain did the King’s fort, when notified, send troops to scour the city for a trace of her, and in vain, so in vain, were even the inquiries about her that the Archbishop, who himself caught no glimpse of his haunter for a month, began to wonder if he was the sighter of an apparition or merely the dupe of a dream, since the woman he sought had dissolved, not now into moonlight but into the light of day.
Then, on the day he sat in his palace to hear all comers, he glanced up above the crowd and saw her at the end of the audience hall, veiled whitely as before; and he whispered to Gaspar to have a guard placed at the doors. Only when the last of the crowd had left did she move from where she waited, and came walking across the hall to the foot of his throne, but not lifting the veil from her face even when she bowed down before him.
“My lord bishop,” said she, on her knees, “I have a complaint.”
But he said to her: “So have I! Who are you, woman, and why have you been dogging me all this time?”
“If my lord bishop will hear me,” was the answer, “he will learn what he would know.”
So he motioned her to continue; and rising to her feet, standing shrouded before him, she said:
“Let me tell His Grace and this court a story, wherewith they can better judge my case. It is the story of a young man who pledged himself to a woman, vowing to love her forever. But this young man sailed away to seek his fortune and coming to an island in heathendom fell in love with the goddess that ruled over the island, and she with him. And when he told her that he was already betrothed she assured him that she, being a goddess, had power to cancel a vow and could release him from his, which she did. And so they were married, and the young man returned no more to the woman he had left in his own country. My lord bishop, was this most rightly done?”
“It was most wrongly done,” said the Archbishop, “for even were this a goddess with power to free the young man from his oath, she might not do so, until the other woman had been heard. A goddess would be bound by the justice of heaven to send this young man back to his country, to implore his sweetheart to annul their vows, which, unless he had a lawful charge against her, he dare not break without bringing down on himself the punishment of the gods.”
“But hear me, my lord bishop: would not a vow made to such a goddess supersede a vow made to a mere mortal?”
“The gods are law,” replied the Archbishop, “and if they themselves will not keep faith, why should mankind? Therefore is every vow between man and man sacred, not to be overthrown by a second vow, though this be made to hell or to heaven.”
“But hear me further, my lord bishop: what if this young man I speak of had wedded his goddess with deceit, not revealing to her his previous vow?”
“Then is the man not only false but sacrilegious, and must burn forever, he and all his kind, lest chaos befall the world; and his first vow stands, though he make twice a thousand more to repeal it.”
At this, the woman fell to her knees, and cried out in a loud voice:
“My lord bishop, let it be as you have said!”
“But what,” asked he in amazement, “is your complaint?”
“The complaint,” was her reply, as she rose again from the floor, “even of that woman abandoned by a lover who vowed to love her forever. I spoke in parable what is a true history. And I come to lay claim on the man, that he may at last make good his word.”
So earnest was her tone that the Archbishop felt compassion for her, and anger at her betrayer.
“Who is the man?” he thundered. “Can you locate him? For, on my oath, he shall keep his promise and make good his word, if you have found him and can produce him.”
“My lord bishop, I have and I can—though he had changed his name, and the manner of his dress, and even the look of his face.”
“And have you proof against him?”
“I still keep the material token of his pledge, which he gave to me on the riverbank when he swore eternal love.”
And drawing closer, she held out a ring to the man on the throne.
The Archbishop glanced at the signet ring that lay in the palm of her hand and, reading the superscription, turned pale and picked up the ring to study it more closely, his breath quickening, staring with startled eyes from ring to woman and from woman to ring, while she stood shrouded before him, her open hand stretched out till he had put back the ring there, dropping it there with a trembling hand and falling back on his throne, pale and panting, his eyes starting out of his head.
But noting the rising murmur of the people in the hall, he ordered that the hall be cleared and the doors closed. When he and she were alone in the room he pushed himself up from his throne and stepped down to where she was; and the two of them stood face to face, she rigid, he shivering.
“Who are you?” he whispered in dread.
“Am I not,” she lightly replied, “the woman whom you lately sought?”
“Where did you get the ring?” he pursued.
“A young man gave it to me on the riverbank saying: ‘Let this ring be the pledge that, on my knees, I swear to love you forever and ever; and let the river yonder be the witness to my vow!’”
“The river?” said he. “Where are you from on the river?”
“I come from the woods and hills upriver, my lord, where the river flows from the lake.”
“Bats’ land!” cried he, more to himself than to her.
“Yes, my lord; they hang thick like fruit from the trees and like clouds from the air.”
“And dawn is the clangor of their wings flying homeward.”
“The lovers of that woodland, my lord, know it is time to part when the great bats rumble overhead. The bats there are the friends of lovers, announcing the approach of ni
ght no less than its end, and hiding with their wings the trysts on the riverbank. The lovers lie all night in each other’s arms until the bats warn of the daylight. How many lovers have cursed and blessed them! Such horrid huge creatures, black and vile. But O they were love’s angels to me, and the canopy of love, as many a time said I to my lover when the wings rumbled. Has my lord heard the dawn on the riverbank there?”
With a catch of his breath he softly cried out:
“Jerónima!”
At that word, she seemed to falter a moment and her proud head drooped.
Shaking, he lifted his hands as though to touch her, but could not, and the stopped hands rose higher, over his head, in a gesture of despair, as, sobbing, he cried out again, louder:
“Jerónima!”
She lifted her bowed head at his call and slowly drew the veil from her face; and the sob choked in the old man’s throat with astonishment as he beheld a face of the most radiant youthfulness and beauty.
Seeing his unbelief, she smiled grimly and said:
“Yes, my lord, it is I—Jerónima. All these years have I kept my grievance fresh, and it has done no less for me. Did I not promise to wait until you returned, promising also not to alter, not to change? Look on me, my lord, and say if Jerónima has not kept her promise! But where, my lord, is yours? These many years have I waited, waited, waited, with no word from you, not knowing where you were, or whether you be dead or alive, until one day, at a fair, I saw the picture of a man who might be the man I awaited; and therefore came to the city and found him, and followed him, and assured myself it was he.”
“But I am not he!” cried the Archbishop. “Look on me in turn, Jerónima, and say if this be the young man who vowed to love you. That young man died long, long ago, Jerónima, and whatever hurt he did you I shall atone for. But I bear, as you say, not his name nor his clothes nor his face. I am not he, Jerónima!”
But she thrust the ring in his face.
“Is this not your signet and superscription?” she cried. “Is not this ring yours, and the pledge of a vow you made?”
Shutting his eyes to the ring, he groaned: “Who can keep that pledge who wears the skirts of a man wedded to Holy Church?”
“What,” she countered, “did you say a while ago: that the gods are law and must themselves keep faith; and that a vow to them can in no manner supersede a vow made to a mortal? You were vowed to me long before you were vowed to Holy Church; and therefore your first vow stands, though you may have made twice a thousand more to repeal it! Thus you decreed in front of your council. So have them summoned back to this hall to say how you judged my case. Let them decide if I have not a lawful claim on you. And let them testify if you did not say to me: ‘On my oath, the man shall keep his promise and make good his word, if you have found him and can produce him.’ I have located the man, my lord; shall I call in your councillors?”
“No! No!” cried he.
“Then come and keep your promise and make good your word!” said she.
“But what can you want with me,” moaned the prelate, “who am old and dying and weary of life, and incapable of passion? What can this carcass give you, Jerónima?”
“If you cannot give me love,” said she, “you shall give me justice!”
“Then give me time to study this matter thoroughly, till I find how the law may requite you.”
“I shall,” she replied, “give you time, but only to put your affairs in order, before you lay down this office. A month shall I give you, my lord, from tonight’s new moon. But when this moon darkens, I shall return to claim what is mine, and to fetch what was pledged to me, and to carry away what I possess.”
As he gazed dumbstruck at her fearful beauty, she smiled and bowed down before him, saying:
“I kneel at your feet, my lord bishop, not for your blessing, which is mine already by right, like all else from your heart, but to remind myself of the years in which I lived on my knees, in hope and bewilderment, in heartbreak and humiliation, till my knees be sore as this heart I nurse. But when next we meet you shall kneel as my lover, even as you swore you would, forever and ever, on the banks of the Pasig!”
Having said which, she rose, flung the veil over her face, and swept out of the room, leaving the Archbishop to his throne.
• • •
The moon that was then on the wax too fast increased for his comfort, who counted the days with a sinking heart—a heart that pulsed, painfully, to the words Forever and ever! And he shuddered to think how himself when young craved the infinite, from a greed that saw no end to youth, love, appetite, pleasure. Yet that juvenile voracity had, in one matter at least, been glutted soon enough. Carnal concupiscence fast wilted in the larger heat of the power lust; and the young man that on the riverbank prayed for nights without end disappeared so completely with his itches he had left not even the memory of a memory, he that was so fond of crying Forever and ever! But he had, it seemed, not died; had been only hiding elsewhere, biding the hour of return, now hovering close, and all the hot past with him. And the Archbishop found the old man he was imperiled by the young man he had been.
The son of a minor conquistador, he had grown up on the tract of bats’ land upriver that was his father’s prize, that was his father’s plight, that ate up the unhappy old soldier who farmed too little, drank too much, and mined in vain, vengefully trapping him drunk in one of its steaming swamps and boiling him so clean only his bones were recovered by his young son, who, all alone in the world, now learned that the King had reclaimed the estate, and therefore thought of seeking his fortune in the city. No affections did he leave in the jungle save one: the girl who dwelt on the opposite bank of the river, to whom he rowed in the evenings, when the bats rumbled overhead, and from whom he slipped away before daybreak, when again the bats rumbled. Parting from her for the last time, promising to return, bidding her wait, he had left her a vow and his ring and rowed away, in tears, gallant in hose and doublet and a plumed hat, all the while glancing back at her seated on a rock on the riverbank, as he had so often seen her, glimmering in the half-dark of dawn, her lovely face grave and her unloosed hair all about her, blowing in the wind and spilling the flowers he had stuck there, while overhead the dark rumble of batwings echoed his cry of Forever and ever! But in the city, entranced by the glut of trulls and stews, and deeply indulging, he had fast forgotten what faster fused into profusion, into a confusion of nameless, faceless female flesh, a vague litter of bodies merging into one huge hump of pure venery; and all this to be kicked over into oblivion when, coming up at last from the long orgy of pubescence, realizing how mere lechery could not appease his hungers, he had sought to sate himself elsewhere; and so had sized up the cloth, picked a patron, donned a habit, and started the climb up the cloister to the Archbishop’s throne, having discarded the young rake along the way.
Discarded, buried, forgotten utterly, that young rake in whom burned all the fevers of the world had survived in one other person’s consciousness, had persisted and endured, and now pressed back, who had power to effect in the present what he had willed in the past, and the ability to unbury himself. And the Archbishop reflected that he feared not so much the young woman out of his past as the young man emerging from there, and all his fevered vitality. It was not that he feared to feel the young man in his old flesh: not from there could he emerge, which had been quelled, by one discipline or another, in the years of continence, its itches discarded along with youth’s hose and doublet, and its fires quenched. No, the Archbishop feared no revolt of the senses; and he recalled how, when the woman unveiled her face and he beheld her radiant youthfulness and beauty, he had felt no movement in his body except of surprise.
What he feared was not failure of flesh but of faith. Which was the reality: the temporal or the spiritual realm? What if the world’s masks, images, ghosts, were not the illusions they were despised as being? Might not the senses a
nd their transient pleasures be the one permanence after all in a flux of thought and creed? Had he been reading the lesson in reverse? What if the itches of the flesh, its greeds and ambitions, were the true fire that gave off as mere smoke and vapor the sciences of the mind and the metaphysics of the spirit?
He thought in dismay of the woman in the veil, kept hard and fresh by her passions. He recalled his image in youth of the world as a vague heap of bodies forming one huge hump of venery. Yet this vile hump it was that spewed gods and goddesses, arts and cultures, and the other spiritualities that waxed and waned on it, while itself remained constant. Mortal man was not mortal save in the things of the spirit, which sensual man survived. This or that body died; but flesh, and the heats of the flesh, outliving its gods, persisted and endured forever: the bush that burned unconsumed.
The young man in hose and doublet who went sailing downriver had seemed as transitory as his fevers; yet he was still somewhere on the river, still on the move and still fevered with appetite, and therefore more actual now (thought the Archbishop) than this hollow old man in bishop’s robes, all his appetites stilled, on whom the woman gazed without seeing, seizing at the young man she saw there instead.
On the desert isle had started his pursuit of the reality at the heart of the stillness, which he now feared to pursue—for what if, upon reaching the core of the stillness, he should find that unstill-ness was forever, and flesh the only reality?
His mind gagged at the thought. If in youth he had lusted for the never-ending—the story without a stop; food and drink that never gave out; embraces unlocked by no dawn’s batwings—he now recoiled in horror from infinites. And his very vitals cried that no hell could be worse than this, which was, when young, his notion of paradise, but now soured his soul with nausea: to be young forever, steaming in youth’s heats and sweats; and to love forever, rooting in perfumed carcass after carcass. That would indeed be damnation! But the young lover knew not what he said when he cried Forever and ever!