by Nick Joaquin
“Last night, when they began their abominations, I pretended to have fallen asleep. There were always two guards with me in that hut but one guard went off to join the rites and the other who stayed clung to the window, so absorbed in his lecherous watching he had forgotten that his gun lay on the table beside him. I crept up, grabbed the gun—I still have it—poked it in his back and made him lead me through the orchard to the wall. And there was Don Santiago waiting. Ask him what was the first thing I did. I kissed the cross on his breast.”
Sid listened as dead-pan as the thought of having been Father Lao’s guardian angel would allow. The priest looked so drained after his outpouring Adela bade him retire for the day. Santiago, however, still keyed up, could not be kept from going off to get the latest reports from the constabulary.
Sid rang up Sonya’s number. A maid replied, asked him to wait, then came back to say she was sorry, Mrs. Borja was out.
Then Santiago called up from constabulary headquarters. The captured Salemites had arrived but Guia refused to be separated from the group. Would Sid rush over and talk to the girl?
“Did they capture everyone?” asked Sid.
“If you mean that other thug who killed the taxi driver—yes.”
“Everyone then?”
“Except the prophet, cuñao. They could not find the prophet.”
Guia, in jeans and a black cardigan, sat in a room with the sisterhood. They were all there: the large female who had been in green at the airport, the girl with long hair who had been in a sweatshirt and stretch pants, the “distinguished businesswoman” who had been in Moro costume at Adela’s party, and a softly weeping Sister Juana. Doggedly wearing bafflement like veils, the grouped women might have been the Marys at the equinox, left with the vinegar of their lost Lord.
Sid strode up to his sister. She had been Steve, Ginny, Gigi, and Guiang, and had now come to the end of Sister Guia.
“Come on, baby. Let’s go home.”
She looked up at him, then rose without a word. He put an arm around her and walked her out of the room, down the hall of the military, and out to the cold December evening. In the car she lay quiet in his arms; and he remembered her as quiet in his arms, not weeping, a mere child, when they returned from their father’s funeral. He thought: I should never have left home.
Adela waited in her den: all their gatherings seemed to require their father’s tuxedo’d presence, hugely there on the wall.
The sisters touched cheeks, Adela flinging her arms around the girl.
“You poor thing. To have had to go through this at your age. Come and sit here beside me.”
The two of them occupied a sofa; Santiago enthroned himself on a high-backed antique; Sid took a rocking chair; their father remained standing on the wall.
“But it’s over now,” continued Adela, sitting sideways to face her sister. “We won’t even mention it again. From tonight you’re the debutante you weren’t. Carlota Jones is bringing her boy over for lunch tomorrow, and she’s only the starter.”
“Or,” said Santiago, “if you prefer a period of transition, Guia, there is this very nice religious community where you could stay for a time.”
“Guia and I have already decided,” said Sid. “She’s coming to New York with me.”
There was a pause, during which the three elders looked at one another while Guia sat still, hands folded on lap. Then Adela protested, Santiago opined, Sid refused to argue and then argued.
Guia abruptly stood up.
Sid hated himself for looking up at her, askance, like Adela and Santiago.
“Don’t haggle over me,” she said.
Adela threw her hands up.
“But, Guia baby, we’re only thinking of your own good.”
The girl looked around at the three of them.
“My own good, Adela? Or your spite? You think I don’t know? You envy me my angers and my passions. And you’d have me as trapped as you are. Poor Adelita’s revenge on life! Isn’t that why you want me married to that Jones boy? Everyone knows he’s incapable of marriage—”
She veered toward her brother-in-law.
“As incapable, Santiago, as you are. Ah, but you can hurdle mountains and climb walls for something else. Ad majorem Dei gloriam? Come on, Santiago. Why were you so frantic? Because you might lose my money, lose the corporation? And so you want me tucked safely away in this nice religious community that banks with you. Imagine what my dowry would be and you’d get to handle it all for them—”
“Guia,” cried Sid, springing up, “have you gone out of your mind?”
“And how about Siddie boy? What’s your cut here, brod? Am I on to your nik? What’s this about me and you holing up in Manhattan? With me as what? The baby you wouldn’t have, the wife you couldn’t keep, the mistresses who have to rape you?”
Sid shook: “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Ah, but I do, brod. I’m the one girl you can be sure will have to love you always, and the perfect partner in solitude because I’m almost not another person, I’m almost only you again. Picture the two of us so nicely becoming old maids together—”
Sid moved a hand toward the girl but she backed away.
“Don’t touch me, don’t any of you touch me!”
She backed out of the family circle.
“I’ll make you sorry you stopped me!” she cried, then turned on her heels and ran to the doorway, but halted there and looked around again.
“Remember,” she smiled, “there will be nine-ten months of this, nine-ten months of us being together like this, before I let go of you!”
It was then they saw a figure looming up from the dusk beyond the doorway, saw a face glittering into the light of the doorway: Father Lao, in a tremble, popeyed at the girl.
Seeing their stare shift, she whirled about and saw the man in the doorway.
“You!” he cried, and now trembled in every limb.
Still standing by the rocking chair, Sid rather leaned forward to catch the words—witch? scarlet? whore?—that the man was so wildly mumbling as he lifted his right arm.
The instant of seeing what he had in his hand was the same instant they heard the gun howl once, howl a second time, to his twin shrieks of “Evil! Evil!”
Then, the gun dropping from his hands, he clung to a side of the doorway, trying to hold on but sliding down to his knees.
Santiago sat petrified, a stone image enthroned. Adela, collapsed on her side on the sofa, helplessly shudderingly moaned. Conscious of their father leering down at all this from his wall, Sid stiffly walked to where Guia lay prone on the floor.
He turned her over in his arms: the parted lips were breathless.
• • •
New Year’s Day was cold, almost arctic in the office where Sid had been staying since the funeral. It had been quick, the funeral, with only himself in attendance. Adela was in a nursing home with a nervous breakdown; Santiago had retreated into a monastery. Sid had had to take over at the office, sleeping there too and having his meals sent up. Far below, the holidays had danced by unheard, their mirth muffled by the drapes at the windows.
• • •
He stood at the windows, in a bulky sweater, holding aside a weight of cloth to look at afternoon sunshine aslant on the cliff below. Practically no traffic down there, whether human on the sidewalk or vehicular on the street. They were all at home recuperating. He let the drape fall back, extinguishing a streak of pink afternoon. Wintry dusk settled back in the large room, save at his desk, where a lamp floodlit a sheet of paper on the glass top.
He returned to his seat at the table and reread Mrs. Borja’s letter, from Baguio.
“My son is at military school here and instead of him going down for the holidays I came up. I couldn’t very well have stayed there. However, I owe you an explanation. You must have
been wondering why I did what I did; maybe you’ve even thought I was one of them?
“No, I’m not and I wasn’t; but after Mrs. Banaag called up that afternoon I had a visitor. Yes, the prophet. He knew I had information; he told me it shouldn’t reach you. We talked only a quarter of an hour or so, but in that short time I knew that this thing of his must not be stopped. No, not from any persuasion of his. This was, as Mrs. Banaag would say, instinctive on my part, something I felt quite strongly. How strongly you can guess when I tell you that what Mrs. Banaag had particularly impressed on me—that a man’s life was in danger—suddenly seemed unimportant. I was prepared to be ruthless—or something in me was. Maybe Lawrence’s dark gods of the blood? We were theirs that night.
“Afterward, of course, I was horrified. One doesn’t chuck mind that fast. My husband said he could hear my mind at work even when he was making love to me; so he ran away. Now it’s I who am running away. What I do now seems so silly. We play with the past, making chi-chi fashions out of it, or décor for a party. Maybe I’m being punished for having used it so frivolously, as mere bric-a-brac.
“But it was madness to come up here. This is their country, their terrain, the dark gods. I was in Bontoc and Sagada and up to Ifugao country and they were all about me. Remember telling me how, as you ran from those goons, you felt your naked body had become pure movement, without a mind, every limb thinking for itself? That’s how I feel now, as I run and run but always find myself where I would run away from. . . .”
Sid dropped the letter, made aware by a movement of air of a presence in the room. At the farthest end of the dusk the door had opened. Someone stood there looking in, someone closed the door, someone slowly crossed the darkness toward the circle of light where Sid sat.
Father Melchor stood before the table, a bundle in his hands, a sadness in his droop, the mark dark on his brow.
“Here I am, Mr. Estiva, if you want to call the police.”
Sid had risen to his feet: “You get the hell out.”
“As soon as I have returned your things, Mr. Estiva, as I promised.” He placed the bundle on the table. “Your clothes, Mr. Estiva.” He put a hand into his pocket and what he drew out he laid one by one on the table. “Your passport. Your plane ticket. And your toothbrush. I think everything is there now?”
Sid was staring at the things on the table. Then, ruefully, he picked up the green Prophylactic with the frayed bristles.
“My symbol of non-involvement . . .” he murmured.
“We made it mean the means to deepest commitment.”
“But what a coincidence that I—”
“There are no coincidences, Mr. Estiva. When you called us back years ago you set in motion certain forces that made inevitable, not only that you should come home but that you should come home bearing a sign aloft to proclaim a connection you were unaware of; and that, like magnet or lodestone, or the smell of blood that attracts the creatures of the deep, you should draw all about you the other participants in this drama that you initiated. It was no coincidence when they—But why do you stare at me so, Mr. Estiva?”
It seemed to Sid that he was noticing for the first time the stripes of white in the man’s hair, the fine lines that webbed his face, the stoop to the shoulders, the tired eyes.
“You think I have changed, Mr. Estiva? Yes, the weariness comes when one fails and has to hide again. But I have come back before, I shall come back again. A faith thrives on the blood of its witnesses. And we have a new one. Saint Guia, virgin and martyr.”
He put a hand in his pocket, pulled out a bunch of keys and dropped it on the table, upon the plane tickets. “The Salem House keys, Mr. Estiva. I want you to take care of the place until I come back.”
“That is a round-trip ticket, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“Oh, I did.”
“And I’m leaving soon.”
“No. Mr. Estiva, you are not going away again. You have come home.”
He stood quiet for a moment and seemed to be smiling through his melancholy. Then he turned and moved away, and Sid noticed that the limp was heavier: the man seemed to be dragging his right foot as he hobbled into the darkness. Sid heard the knob turn, the door open, and the cold rush of air in the moment before the door closed again.
His jacket hung on the chair. He pulled it on, over the sweater; pocketed passport, plane ticket, keys, and toothbrush; then turned the light off on Sonya’s letter.
It was sunset when he stopped the car before the door of Salem house. He found the right key, opened the door, and stepped into the stone-flagged hall. The archaic furniture stood as he had last seen it but no light burned before the pregnant Virgin. He walked through the passage into the cloister, where sunlight lay level with the roof, past the rows of shut doors and into the second passage at the back. He unbolted the door there and stepped out into the angle of back yard. Behind the high wall throbbed a final blush of light. The rising of ruins stood half in shadow, peaks bathed in light.
He stood in a gap in the ring, the evening sun on his face. Not a breath of wind stirred the air. The adobe blocks were gone from the center; they had been found piled up again into a table in the Antipolo orchard. He crossed the ring toward the shrine in the stone facing east. Gone from the ledge were the scatter of flowers, the sheaf of grain, the tall glass of light. But a gap showed between the rounded metal door and one side of the niche. He slipped a hand into the gap and pushed. The door swung around into the niche that now stood open.
But the niche was empty.
The niche was the void where night had begun, though it was another night he heard.
—When do you celebrate it?
—New Year’s Day, you donkey. Now shut up and let’s go.
—Why New Year’s Day? That’s not liturgical. Oh yes, it is. Feast of the Circumcision.
—And you’re cordially invited to our patronal festivities, donkey. Now, let’s go in. I’m cold.
It didn’t seem right to go without making a gesture. He put hand to pocket, fetched out the toothbrush, and stood it up in the niche, sticking the handle in a crack of rock.
But something else was needed. He pulled out the plane ticket, crumpled it into a wad, placed it in the niche, and lit a match to it. He waited for it to burn before walking away.
At the edge of the ring he paused to look back, looking back across the still evening at the wedge of wall where the wad of plane ticket burned, a flame tall in the void, steady before the standing toothbrush.
CÁNDIDO’S APOCALYPSE
Telephones are latest in a house to wake up, which they do only after breakfast or in the forenoon. A household is in trouble whose telephone rings before breakfast.
Hearing in her half-sleep her telephone’s start of surprise, Ineng Heredia rolled over in bed, on her face, sinking back, back, deeper, deeper, into quicksand—but felt herself yanked up and pulled around by the shoulder.
“Mommy! I’ve shouted and shouted. The telephone.”
She groped, stubbornly blind, for the nape of the girl at her ear.
“Happy birthday, darling.”
But the girl bridled loose.
“It’s Mr. Henson. He’s Pete’s father.”
“Who? Ask what he wants.”
“I have. You.”
“Where O where’s your father . . .”
“Shaving. Mommy, I think it’s about Bobby.”
Mrs. Heredia opened her eyes but her daughter had run out of the room. Day was a dazzle of grilled window, faceted, like a great diamond. With a toss of legs into air, she swung herself up and over the bed’s edge, dragging sheet along, stepped into panties, vainly toed the floor for slippers and, winding the sheet tighter over her breasts, scampered on bare feet to the corridor outside.
This house was split level; and the banistered corridor, three steps up from the living room i
t overlooked, ran past three doors, two of which were open, revealing books and shoes on the beds, pillows and clothes on the floor. The third door, by looking so shut, looked bereaved. At the other end of the corridor, which here had a wall siding instead of banisters, Totong Heredia was shaving in the bathroom, with the door open, in his pajama trousers, leaning toward the washbowl mirror with exaggerated attention. His pretending to be unaware of everything else made his wife click angry heels as she ran down the three steps and across the parlor to the side table where the telephone lived, among pencils and pad paper.
“Hello? Yes? Mr. Henson? He where?”
Her daughter and younger boy, having breakfast standing, refused, by not listening, to be included in whatever crisis the telephone was creating. They were having their own crisis.
“You can sleep at grandmother’s!” screamed Sophie, who was fifteen today. “I won’t have stupid babies at my party! It’s my party!”
“Dad said I could invite Marilu Pérez.”
“Junior, if you bring that stupid Marilu Perez to my party—”
Glass of milk in hand, Junior was leaning sideways at the table, an elbow on the edge, a foot upon his satchel on the floor, like a tippler at a bar. He was not quite eleven. He scoffed without looking at his sister, who stooped over the other side of the table, disdainfully pinching off, with thumb and finger, pieces of omelet and bread, her other hand spread protectingly over the fresh blouse of her school uniform.
“Besides,” she said, licking her fingers and beginning a smile, “she’s old enough to be your nurse.”
He tossed off the milk as though it were a swig of booze, plunked the glass down, and, his eyes narrowing, now deigned to turn his head slightly to scan his relative.
“You’re just jealous of Marilu Perez because she can judo and you can’t.”
“And I’ll bet she teaches you, boy.”
“What kinda party you having anyway? Beer party? Gin party? Sioktong? But your boy friends would pass out on coke. You having dog meat?”