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Kerima Polotan-Tuvera (December 16,
1925 – August 19, 2011) was a Filipino fiction
writer, essayist, and journalist. Some of her
stories were published under the pseudonym
"Patricia S. Torres".
Born in Jolo, Sulu, she was christened Putli
Kerima. Her father was an army colonel, and
her mother taught home economics. Due to
her father's frequent transfers in assignment,
she lived in various places and studied in the
public schools
of Pangasinan, Tarlac, Laguna, Nueva
Ecija and Rizal.
She graduated from the Far Eastern
University Girls' High School. In 1944, she
enrolled in the University of the
Philippines School of Nursing, but the Battle
of Manila put a halt to her studies. In 1945,
she transferred schools to Arellano University,
where she attended the writing classes of
Teodoro M. Locsin and edited the first issue of
the Arellano Literary Review. She worked
with Your Magazine, This Week and
the Junior Red Cross Magazine.
In 1949, she married newsman Juan
Capiendo Tuvera, a childhood friend and
fellow writer,[3] with whom she had 10
children, among them the fictionist Katrina
Tuvera.
Between the years 1966 and 1986, her
husband served as the executive
assistant and speechwriter of
then-President Ferdinand Marcos. Her
husband's work drew her into the charmed
circle of the Marcoses. It was during this time
(1969) that Polotan-Tuvera penned the only
officially approved biography of the First
Lady Imelda Marcos, Imelda Romualdez
Marcos: a biography of the First Lady of the
Philippines.
During the years of martial law in the
Philippines, she founded and edited the
officially approved FOCUS Magazine, as well
as the Evening Post newspaper.
THE VIRGIN by Kerima Polotan Tuvera
He went to where Miss Mijares sat, a tall, big
man, walking with an economy of movement,
graceful and light, a man who knew his body
and used it well. He sat in the low chair worn
decrepit by countless other interviewers and
laid all ten fingerprints carefully on the edge
of her desk. She pushed a sheet towards him,
rolling a pencil along with it. While he read the
question and wrote down his answers, she
glanced at her watch and saw that it was ten.
"I shall be coming back quickly," she said,
speaking distinctly in the dialect (you were
never sure about these people on their first
visit, if they could speak English, or even write
at all, the poor were always proud and to use
the dialect with them was an act of charity),
"you will wait for me."
As she walked to the cafeteria, Miss Mijares
thought how she could easily have said,
Please wait for me, or will you wait for me?
But years of working for the placement
section had dulled the edges of her instinct for
courtesy. She spoke now peremtorily, with an
abruptness she knew annoyed the people
about her.
When she talked with the jobless across her
desk, asking them the damning questions
that completed their humiliation, watching
pale tongues run over dry lips, dirt crusted
handkerchiefs flutter in trembling hands, she
was filled with an impatience she could not
understand. Sign here, she had said
thousands of times, pushing the familiar form
across, her finger held to a line, feeling the
impatience grow at sight of the man or
woman tracing a wavering "X" or laying the
impress of a thumb. Invariably, Miss Mijares
would turn away to touch the delicate edge of
the handkerchief she wore on her breast.
Where she sat alone at one of the cafeteria
tables, Miss Mijares did not look 34. She was
slight, almost bony, but she had learned early
how to dress herself to achieve an illusion of
hips and bosom. She liked poufs and shirrings
and little girlish pastel colors. On her bodice,
astride or lengthwise, there sat an inevitable
row of thick camouflaging ruffles that made
her look almost as though she had a bosom, if
she bent her shoulders slightly and

inconspicuously drew her neckline open to
puff some air into her bodice.
Her brow was smooth and clear and she was
always pushing off it the hair she kept in tight
curls at night. She had thin cheeks, small and
angular, falling down to what would have
been a nondescript, receding chin, but
Nature's hand had erred and given her a jaw
instead. When displeased, she had a lippy,
almost sensual pout, surprising on such a
small face.
So while not exactly an ugly woman, she was
no beauty. She teetered precariously on the
border line to which belonged countless
others who you found, if they were not
working at some job, in the kitchen of some
married sister's house shushing a brood of
devilish little nephews.
And yet Miss Mijares did think of love. Secret,
short-lived thoughts flitted through her mind
in the jeepneys she took to work when a man
pressed down beside her and through her
dress she felt the curve of his thigh; when she
held a baby in her arms, a married friend's
baby or a relative's, holding in her hands the
tiny, pulsing body, what thoughts did she not
think, her eyes straying against her will to the
bedroom door and then to her friend's
laughing, talking face, to think: how did it look
now, spread upon a pillow, unmasked of the
little wayward coquetries, how went the lines
about the mouth and beneath the eyes: (did
they close? did they open?) in the one final,
fatal coquetry of all? to finally, miserably bury
her face in the baby's hair. And in the movies,
to sink into a seat as into an embrace, in the
darkness with a hundred shadowy figures
about her and high on the screen, a man
kissing a woman's mouth while her own
fingers stole unconsciously to her unbruised
lips.
When she was younger, there had been other
things to do--- college to finish, a niece to put
through school, a mother to care for.
She had gone through all these with singular
patience, for it had seemed to her that love
stood behind her, biding her time, a quiet
hand upon her shoulder (I wait. Do not
despair) so that if she wished she had but to
turn from her mother's bed to see the man
and all her timid, pure dreams would burst
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into glory. But it had taken her parent many
years to die. Towards the end, it had become
a thankless chore, kneading her mother's
loose flesh, hour after hour, struggling to
awaken the cold, sluggish blood in her drying
body. In the end, she had died --- her
toothless, thin-haired, flabby-fleshed mother
--- and Miss Mijares had pushed against the
bed in grief and also in gratitude. But neither
love nor glory stood behind her, only the
empty shadows, and nine years gone, nine
years. In the room for her unburied dead, she
had held up her hands to the light, noting the
thick, durable fingers, thinking in a mixture of
shame and bitterness and guilt that they had
never touched a man.
When she returned to the bleak replacement
office, the man stood by a window, his back to
her, half-bending over something he held in
his hands. "Here," she said, approaching,
"have you signed this?"
"Yes," he replied, facing her.
In his hands, he held her paperweight, an old
gift from long ago, a heavy wooden block on
which stood, as though poised for flight, an
undistinguished, badly done bird. It had come
apart recently. The screws beneath the block
had loosened so that lately it had stood upon
her desk with one wing tilted unevenly, a
miniature eagle or swallow? felled by time
before it could spread its wings. She had
laughed and laughed that day it had fallen on
her desk, plop! "What happened? What
happened?" they had asked her, beginning to
laugh, and she had said, caught between
amusement and sharp despair, "Some one
shot it," and she had laughed and laughed till
faces turned and eyebrows rose and she told
herself, whoa, get a hold, a hold, a hold!
He had turned it and with a penknife tightened
the screws and dusted it. In this man's hands,
cupped like that, it looked suddenly like a
dove.
She took it away from him and put it down on
her table. Then she picked up his paper and
read it.
He was a high school graduate. He was also a
carpenter.
He was not starved, like the rest. His clothes,

though old, were pressed and she could see
the cuffs of his shirt buttoned and wrapped
about big, strong wrists.
"I heard about this place," he said, "from a
friend you got a job at the pier." Seated, he
towered over her, "I'm not starving yet," he
said with a quick smile. "I still got some
money from that last job, but my team broke
up after that and you got too many jobs if
you're working alone. You know
carpentering," he continued, "you can't finish
a job quickly enough if you got to do the
planing and sawing and nailing all by your
lone self. You got to be on a team."
Perhaps he was not meaning to be impolite?
But for a jobseeker, Miss Mijares thought, he
talked too much and without call. He was
bursting all over with an obtruding insolence
that at once disarmed and annoyed her.
So then she drew a slip and wrote his name on
it. "Since you are not starving yet," she said,
speaking in English now, wanting to put him in
his place, "you will not mind working in our
woodcraft section, three times a week at
two-fifty to four a day, depending on your skill
and the foreman's discretion, for two or three
months after which there might be a call from
outside we may hold for you."
"Thank you," he said.
He came on the odd days, Tuesday, Thursday,
Sunday.
She was often down at the shanty that housed
their bureau's woodcraft, talking with Ato, his
foreman, going over with him the list of old
hands due for release. They hired their men
on a rotation basis and three months was the
longest one could stay.
"The new one there, hey," Ato said once.
"We're breaking him in proper." And he
looked across several shirted backs to where
he stopped, planing what was to become the
side of a bookcase.
How much was he going to get? Miss Mijares
asked Ato on Wednesday. "Three," the old
man said, chewing away on a cud. She looked
at the list in her hands, quickly running a
pencil down. "But he's filling a four-peso
vacancy," she said. "Come now," surprised
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that she should wheedle so, "give him the
extra peso." "Only a half," the stubborn
foreman shook his head, "three-fifty."
"Ato says I have you to thank," he said,
stopping Miss Mijares along a pathway in the
compound.
It was noon, that unhappy hour of the day
when she was oldest, tiredest, when it
seemed the sun put forth cruel fingers to
search out the signs of age on her thin,
pinched face. The crow's feet showed
unmistakably beneath her eyes and she
smiled widely to cover them up and aquinting
a little, said, "Only a half-peso --- Ato would
have given it to you eventually."
"Yes, but you spoke for me," he said, his big
body heaving before her. "Thank you, though
I don't need it as badly as the rest, for to look
at me, you would knew I have no wife --- yet."
She looked at him sharply, feeling the malice
in his voice. "I'd do it for any one," she said
and turned away, angry and also ashamed, as
though he had found out suddenly that the
ruffles on her dress rested on a flat chest.
The following week, something happened to
her: she lost her way home.
Miss Mijares was quite sure she had boarded
the right jeepneys but the driver, hoping to
beat traffic, had detoured down a side alley,
and then seeing he was low on gas, he took
still another shortcut to a filling station. After
that, he rode through alien country.
The houses were low and dark, the people
shadowy, and even the driver, who earlier had
been an amiable, talkative fellow, now
loomed like a sinister stranger over the wheel.
Through it all, she sat tightly, feeling oddly
that she had dreamed of this, that some night
not very long ago, she had taken a ride in her
sleep and lost her way. Again and again, in
that dream, she had changed direction, losing
her way each time, for something huge and
bewildering stood blocking the old, familiar
road home.
But that evening, she was lost only for a while.
The driver stopped at a corner that looked like
a little known part of the boulevard she

passed each day and she alighted and stood
on a street island, the passing headlights
playing on her, a tired, shaken woman, the
ruffles on her skirt crumpled, the hemline of
her skirt awry.
The new hand was absent for a week. Miss
Mijares waited on that Tuesday he first failed
to report for some word from him sent to Ato
and then to her. That was regulation. Briefly
though they were held, the bureau jobs were
not ones to take chances with. When a man
was absent and he sent no word, it upset the
system. In the absence of a definite notice,
someone else who needed a job badly was
kept away from it.
"I went to the province, ma'am," he said, on
his return.
"You could have sent someone to tell us," she
said.
"It was an emergency, ma'am," he said. "My
son died."
"How so?"
A slow bitter anger began to form inside her.
"But you said you were not married!"
"No, ma'am," he said gesturing.
"Are you married?" she asked loudly.
"No, ma'am."
"But you have -- you had a son!" she said.
"I am not married to his mother," he said,
grinning stupidly, and for the first time she
noticed his two front teeth were set widely
apart. A flush had climbed to his face,
suffusing it, and two large throbbing veins
crawled along his temples.
She looked away, sick all at once.
"You should told us everything," she said and
she put forth hands to restrain her anger but it
slipped away she stood shaking despite
herself.
"I did not think," he said.
"Your lives are our business here," she
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shouted.
It rained that afternoon in one of the city's
fierce, unexpected thunder-storms. Without
warning, it seemed to shine outside Miss
Mijares' window a gray, unhappy look.
It was past six when Miss Mijares, ventured
outside the office. Night had come swiftly and
from the dark sky the thick, black, rainy
curtain continued to fall. She stood on the
curb, telling herself she must not lose her way
tonight. When she flagged a jeepney and got
in, somebody jumped in after her. She looked
up into the carpenter's faintly smiling eyes.
She nodded her head once in recognition and
then turned away.
The cold tight fear of the old dream was upon
her. Before she had time to think, the driver
had swerved his vehicle and swung into a side
street. Perhaps it was a different alley this
time. But it wound itself in the same tortuous
manner as before, now by the banks of
overflowing esteros, again behind faintly
familiar buildings. She bent her tiny,
distraught face, conjuring in her heart the
lonely safety of the street island she had
stood on for an hour that night of her
confusion.
"Only this far, folks," the driver spoke,
stopping his vehicle. "Main street's a block
straight ahead."
"But it's raining," someone protested.
"Sorry. But if I got into a traffic, I won't come
out of it in a year. Sorry."
One by one the passengers got off, walking
swiftly, disappearing in the night.
Miss Mijares stepped down to a sidewalk in
front of a boarded store. The wind had begun
again and she could hear it whipping in the
eaves above her head. "Ma'am," the man's
voice sounded at her shoulders, "I am sorry if
you thought I lied."
She gestured, bestowing pardon.
Up and down the empty, rain-beaten street
she looked. It was as though all at once
everyone else had died and they were alone in
the world, in the dark.
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In her secret heart, Miss Mijares' young

dreams fluttered faintly to life, seeming
monstrous in the rain, near this man ---
seeming monstrous but sweet overwhelming.
I must get away, she thought wildly, but he
had moved and brushed against her, and
where his touch had fallen, her flesh leaped,
and she recalled how his hands had looked
that first day, lain tenderly on the edge of her
desk and about the wooden bird (that had
looked like a moving, shining dove) and she
turned to him with her ruffles wet and wilted,
in the dark she turned to him.