“The Virgin” is a short story that is centered on two characters namely Miss Mijares and The Carpenter. The title “The Virgin” reflects the subject virginity which is an important and cherished value for Filipinos.
Characters:
Characters:
- Miss Mijares- a 34-year old woman who works in the placement section of an agency.
- The carpenter- described as “a tall, big man, walking with an economy of movement”.
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, 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.
"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 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.
********
In a world that is full of sorrow and loneliness, there is always someone whom you can thought that is not a good companion to be but he really is. Just don't be afraid to try yourself to be open with someone. I learned that being alone in this world that is full of hatred, disrespect, and war you need someone to lean on so that you can protect each other.
********
In a world that is full of sorrow and loneliness, there is always someone whom you can thought that is not a good companion to be but he really is. Just don't be afraid to try yourself to be open with someone. I learned that being alone in this world that is full of hatred, disrespect, and war you need someone to lean on so that you can protect each other.
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