EVANGELISTA, Herielle E.
UST BSN III-4
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 into glory. But it had
taken her parent many years to die. Towards the end,
EVANGELISTA, Herielle E.
UST BSN III-4
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 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.
EVANGELISTA, Herielle E.
UST BSN III-4
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 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
EVANGELISTA, Herielle E.
UST BSN III-4

the thick, black, rainy curtain continued to fall. She turned to him with her ruffles wet and wilted, in the
stood on the curb, telling herself she must not lose her dark she turned to him.
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.

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