THE VIRGIN by Kerima Polotan Tuvera
holding in her hands the tiny, pulsing body, what thoughts
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,
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, 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.
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.
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.

"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 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.

In her secret heart, Miss Mijares' young dreams fluttered

faintly to life, seeming monstrous in the rain, near this