by Nick Joaquin
No more could the Archbishop resume his quest for the heart of the stillness, being doubtful, nor his solitude in the hut by the river, being troubled; and he fled from there at the full of the moon, returned to his palace, resumed the labors of his office, but, finding nothing to his satisfaction, fell into wrangling with his canons, and with the friars, and with the grandees, and with the governor, till all the city laughed that the miracle was over and the old devil back again.
But when the moon darkened he returned to the retreat by the river, stern and fierce, as though again on a battlement, manning a gun against a foe. And peering into the hut, where he had spent so many hours of contemplation, he felt no nostalgia for his time here but rather a deep embarrassment, knowing that the contemplative had been no less an absurdity than the popular holy man—one more masquerade, one more disguise. The fleer from illusion was himself an illusion; and this hut but one more shell to be shed, like desert isle or cloister or hose and doublet.
Unable to bear the sight of the cell that now seemed a prison, he went out to the grove, and down to the edge of the river, the benevolent river, the brown river that had played with him in childhood and proffered the first love of youth. The water was a mere gleam of ripple to the wind in the dark of the moon. The night was as black as bats’ land upriver; and he thought how wise the bats were to shun daylight and choose darkness, when the world drops its mask and lies unguarded, in the innocence of sleep. But he had prayed for light, which disguises, and not for darkness, which unclothes, revealing secrets in lovers’ bed or dreamer’s cry. Only the bats saw the world naked.
As he pondered the conceit he became aware that the woman stood beside him and, looking up, saw her unveiled and gravely watching him, her unloosed hair all about her, blowing in the wind, and flowers stuck in her hair.
“Is my lord ready?” she asked softly, after their wistful greeting of silence.
“Yes, Jerónima, I am ready,” he returned, as soft and hard even as she was.
She waited, baffled, but he said no more, and it was he that now smiled at her.
“Shall we go then?” said she.
“You shall go, Jerónima,” replied the prelate, “when you have handed me the ring.”
But now she, too, began to smile, and drew closer, lifting her lovely face to his cold face.
“The ring, my lord?”
“In this garden, Jerónima, are troops waiting to arrest you. I have but to give the signal.”
“Troops, my lord?” she laughed. “Are the King’s troops called out for one weak woman and one small ring?”
“So give it to me, Jerónima, for, willing or not, you shall yield it.”
“Is this,” said she, holding out the ring, “what so troubles His Grace?”
“Jerónima,” he groaned, “I beg you to face the facts. There is nothing I can do to requite you, nor aught you can do to force me. But if you give me the ring, you shall depart in peace.”
“And if I refuse?”
“It shall be wrested from you.”
“And what would become of me afterward?”
“There are houses here of holy women, where I shall place you, with a dowry, and make sure you are cared for all your life.”
“Jerónima in a nunnery!”
“Is that not better than bats’ land?”
“Oh, my lord, have I not told you how I love those bats and their river?”
“Will you yield the ring?”
“Is it my lover who begs me?”
“This is your bishop who commands you, Jerónima, who must save you from yourself.”
“I cannot yield him the ring, my lord, nor should I keep it, who am straitened on all sides. But yonder is the witness to our vows. Let it take the ring—and if it yield it up again, then shall you be quit of your vow.”
And before he could stop her she flung the ring into the river.
He saw it drop with a tiny splash into the water, and he staggered backward, as white as a sheet, his knees buckling under him.
“What have you done, Jerónima!” he wailed as he sank. “Oh, Jerónima, what have you done!”
Horrified, she bent over the falling man.
“My lord, my lord, are you ill?”
But he turned his face from her, as he lay, collapsed, on the riverbank.
“Go, go, Jerónima!” he gasped. “Flee, make your escape! The soldiers come! Hasten from here, Jerónima!”
She hesitated, casting a wild look at his agonized face; then ran up the bank and into the woods, the flowers spilling from her hair as she fled.
When Gaspar came upon his master, the old man was hot with fever.
• • •
In the days that followed, the Archbishop lay ill in his palace, burning and delirious, and believed to be dying; and public prayers were offered for him, who screamed in delirium of a wild river he must pass over. But he crossed the crisis, and rose again from his bed, though so gaunt and grim even his foes felt, in pity, that they would rather have had him bellowing than thus bitterly mute.
His physicians advised a vacation in the country; the Archbishop dismissed them. With a vehemence as cold as desperation, he worked all day, prayed all night, though neither activity brought relief. The river that he could no longer bear to see, that had roared through his delirium, now rushed through his mind, through his despair, never still, never stopping, until it seemed the hemorrhage of the unstaunched wound of his life. The river that was childhood’s friend and youth’s matchmaker had become the old man’s fiend.
Late one night, he was praying alone in the Cathedral, swaying in anguish as usual to the enraged rushing of the river, the malevolent river, when he heard, through the surge of pain in the darkness within him, a sob of pain in the darkness behind him. Picking up his taper, he searched through the aisles and, behind the pillar, came upon a form huddled on the floor, sobbing. As he bent down with his light, the griever lifted face from the floor and the prelate saw it was the woman.
Her first words echoed his wail on the riverbank:
“What have I done, my lord bishop! Oh, my lord, what have I done!”
“Jerónima!” was all he could say.
Grief had dimmed her young lovely face; and she had doffed bridal white for penitential mauve, a white cord round her waist, a black shroud on her head.
“I have dared come,” said she, kneeling up to his crouched figure, “to beg you shrive me, though well I know this be another outrage I do you, who should curse and not forgive.”
“No, Jerónima,” said he very sadly, as they thus knelt to each other. “To forgive: it is all we can do for one another in the world. So do you say you forgive me and I shall reply I forgive you, and may God have mercy on the both of us.”
As she gazed on his gaunt face, the tears sprang unsobbed to her eyes.
“Oh, how my lord bishop has suffered!”
“But I cherish the thought, Jerónima, that although all the world should loathe me, who have lived most hatefully, one heart has loved me all these years.”
At that, she wrung her hands and rocked her head, wailing:
“No, no, I never loved you, I never loved you! Nothing do you owe me, my lord bishop, for it was not you I loved but my own pride! You were as the river that pleased me because I saw myself in it. God has granted me the grace to see the truth at last of this time when we thought we loved, and thought falsely. For what were you to me but comb and brush and mirror, the tools of my vanity? Being young, I loved the laughter you stirred in me. Being fair, I loved the admiration you mirrored for me. Being proud, I loved the power you revealed in me. And being woman, I loved the pleasure you gave me.
“And when you left, my lord, and did not return, was it my heart that wept or only my pride? When I waited, waited, waited, was it not my own patience I loved, and my own faithfulness, and my
own strength? But I thought it was you I continued to love when I but admired myself. This is the truth, my lord bishop, and the love I boasted to have kept through the years is as shallow an illusion as the youngness of my face. For grieving, I have loved my grief; betrayed, I have loved my resentments; humiliated, I have loved my injured pride. On these have I lived and thrived; on these has my young beauty persisted and endured, like a rose growing on charnel ground. Love’s passions cloy, my lord, but not these others.
“Ah, if I loved you true, when I found you, when I followed you, when I saw for myself what you were, I would have departed unknown and unavenged, but unresentful. For I saw a holy man that would storm heaven. I saw him weeping, fasting, praying, on his hard bed, in his hairshirt. And I saw him in unearthly rapture. How could any child of God disturb such a labor? But because it was not you I loved but my pride, nothing would do but I must flush you out, to be haled, to be claimed, to be fetched, to be carried away, as though you were a weight of meat I had bought at the market, or property that bore my brand.
“The gods are law, you said; but were they only that, then pettier would they be than men, who know how to wed, rule, and ruth, and to mix maxim with mercy. For to read only the letter of the law, as I did, is not justice but spitefulness. Therefore do I beg your forgiveness, my lord bishop, who prized you as a thing to be possessed, in the name of justice, and not as a soul to love, in the name of charity.”
But he said to her:
“I have been the tool of God for your illumination, Jerónima—comb and brush and mirror in his hand to put your soul in order, that it may shine as brightly as your beauty.”
But she replied to him:
“I am weary of my beauty, that is the parent of my pride; and this flesh I wear hurts me worse than a hairshirt. Now do I think no curse more terrible than to be young and fair forever. Who shall deliver me from the bondage of this life?”
Wincing a little, the Archbishop spoke again of a possible placement in a house of holy women.
And she, echoing herself, laughed: “Jerónima in a nunnery!”
“Then what is to become of you?” asked the prelate.
And she said to him:
“Let me live again on the opposite bank from you. In a village outside the city, on the east riverbank, is a cave where I could go. Give me leave to dwell there, as a penitent, as an anchorite, to expiate my sins and to grope my way to heaven.”
“You have my leave,” said the Archbishop, “and I shall order that none may touch you in your cave.”
“Then bless me, my lord bishop,” said she, “and give me absolution.”
Shriving, and shriven as well, the Archbishop, on his knees, heard the rushing river pause in his mind and, wondering over this, listening for the torrent, waiting for its roar, grew bemused and becalmed, unconscious of all around him, as the moment’s hush widened into an eternity’s rolling chant of I forgive you, you forgive me, until, a bell tolling, he started from his trance, from this rapture of forgiving and, looking about him, found the woman gone and himself kneeling alone in the Cathedral, his candle guttering on the floor.
A new phase began for the Archbishop, a meanwhile of serenity, not the cored stillness he had craved but a resigned, relaxed repose in the peripheries of being, where he worked without compulsion, prayed with no greed for epiphanies, and relearned the enjoyment of hot chocolate in the afternoon, a glass of wine at night. He doffed his hairshirt, called on the governor. The river raged no more through him; he was somewhere on its banks, watching and waiting.
He knew this quiet was but a respite. Presently he must descend again into the stream, this time forever, and learn if forever be indeed hell, or heaven—or purgatory? The soul appalled by the vanity of the world and the transience of flesh swung to the other extreme and, in turn dizzied by thought of infinity, rebounded to a cynical acceptance of flesh as the first, the final, the only truth. He had, thought the Archbishop, swung up and swung back, and now waited for, without pressing toward, a further revelation. Whatever that might be, it would not be alien but of himself, something he had willed, caused, created by being this man with these passions—not light dropped from above but light grown below: the light from the burning bush when smoke and vapor had cleared.
Of his penitent in her cave on the Pasig, he heard disturbing rumors but lifted no hand to aid her, knowing these ordeals were stages in her passion. When she took up abode in the cave, wondrous things happened to the villages nearby. The river that had been niggard now gave fish in abundance; rain fell in its season and fell prodigally; field and orchard flowed with fruit; cattle fattened and multiplied; barren women suddenly quickened. But the villagers, instead of exulting, shook with superstitious dread and murmured how all this was too good to be true, and therefore could not be good, since what but evil could spring from the illusions of witchcraft? In no one’s memory existed a time when bats haunted this region, but now a swarm of them flocked round the cave of the woman on the riverbank; they came at her call; she had been spied talking to them and fondling the black beasts; and the villagers whispered that the woman herself turned into a bat at night and roamed the countryside, sucking the blood of sleepers. Therefore was her cave shunned by the villagers, and stoned by children; and she dared set no foot outside her grove on the riverbank.
Barely a year had she been in the cave when the villagers seized her. One day, Gaspar came running to his master to say how a great crowd of country folk were marching on the Cathedral, bringing the woman with them. The Archbishop strode out to the Cathedral square and there faced the delegation. The rustics were led by their curate; and the woman they dragged was, with much shouting, flung to the ground at the prelate’s feet. She was in the filthiest of rags, her head and face shrouded in sacking; and she was bound all over with ropes, like a pig.
As the Archbishop gazed on her his heart wept, but the face he turned to the peasants and their priest was stern.
“Did I not order that this woman was not to be touched?” he thundered.
“No one touched her,” replied the friar, “until her cave became a scandal.”
“What wrong has she done?”
“She is a damned witch!” cried the friar; and at that, the crowd behind him clamored: “Witch! Witch! Burn the witch!”
The Archbishop stilled the uproar with a look of wrath and a raised hand.
“This woman,” said he, “is a holy recluse praying for all sinners and doing penance for the world.”
“She is no holy recluse,” spat the friar, “but a witch and a harlot!”
“Can you prove your words, friar?” said the prelate.
The priest gestured toward the crowd behind him:
“Here are honest folk to testify how they have seen a young man come to this woman at night and stay with her all night in her cave, even till the break of dawn.”
Again the crowd grew riotous, screaming:
“Burn the witch! Burn the harlot!”
The Archbishop had turned pale. But he said to Gaspar, who stood at his elbow: “Have the woman unbound and brought into the Cathedral, that I may question her privately.”
At the altar, on his throne, the Archbishop confronted the woman, who knelt before him in her foul rags, her face shrouded in the sacking.
“Jerónima,” said he in anguish, “what is this they report against you? Eyewitnesses have denounced the offense. Do you dare deny it?”
“Oh, my lord bishop,” moaned the penitent, “the guiltiest of sinners am I—but not in this matter of their imputation. Before God, here in God’s house, I swear no man has come to me, nor have I used the cave for aught save spiritual commerce. Seven times do I rise each day to pray; on my knees am I at midnight and at dawn. I fast, I scourge my flesh, I comb my conscience. What time or what appetite can Jerónima have for venery? But if you will not take my word,” said she, “then look on my fac
e and say if it be bait for harlotry!”
Whereupon she wrenched the sacking off her face; and the Archbishop gasped to see what a change had been wrought there in one year. For the face he saw was of an old hag—wan, wasted, withered, woeful; no radiance in it and no beauty; mere skin and bone and wild eye; and smelling of death.
“What young man,” said she, “would lie with this foul carcass which can only lust for the grave? But let my lord see the rest of the rot.”
And ripping the rags from her back, she bowed down to the floor, and he saw indeed the welts of the discipline on her flesh.
“Are these,” sobbed the woman, “the marks of love’s caresses?”
But he said:
“Rise up, Jerónima, and give glory to God that has released you from bondage. Your own flesh has testified to the truth of your word. Return to your cave and pray for us sinners.”
But she could not rise from the floor.
And going down to her, he said:
“Have they used you so ill you cannot stand on your feet? Take my hand, Jerónima, and rise!”
“Oh, my lord bishop, it is another hand that should lift me, who am weary unto death! But I take your hand in greeting, I take your hand in farewell.”
So he called to his men and bade them take the woman back to her cave; and to the peasants and their priest he said: “Let no one touch the woman in her cave till I myself have looked into this mystery.”
And he said to Gaspar:
“Have horse and carriage ready; we ride forth tonight.”
• • •
Riding forth from the city at twilight, the Archbishop shivered with senseless excitement and wondered if revelation was at hand. On the desert isle and in the retreat on the riverbank, he had pressed with might and main for an answer; had stormed (as the woman put it) heaven; and heaven had stalled him, stopped him, staved him off—the heaven that kept its secrets from the wise and mighty and revealed them to little ones. Children accepted the earth with frank pleasure, and lost innocence only in the grief of knowing themselves exiles from elsewhere. Was the quest, then, a relearning of this frank pleasure—and of reverence for the despised flesh, astonishment for the scorned world? Was it this quest which, extending beyond this life, made flesh and its fevers, even if they be forever and ever, not hell but, at worst, a purgatory, a school for lovers? “I never loved you!” the woman had cried; and never indeed had she, who needed more than youth’s season or life’s term to learn the prizing of the body, not as a minute to possess, in the rush of time, but as a being to love, in the light of eternity. Was this not the awful fate that lovers did not know they embraced when they cried Forever and ever? But their vows would stand—“lest chaos befall the world.”