The Devil Flower by Emigdio Alvarez Enriquez

Author:Emigdio Alvarez Enriquez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Phocion Publishing
Published: 2019-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

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THE world was drooping under a heavy rain on the day of her mother’s funeral. The parched earth was avidly soaking up all the water the heavens were letting fall. The world had been without rain for months, and like a big heart that had stored up its grief, it was now breaking and making a spectacular display of its sorrows. It wept the tears that Ercelia could not weep, for Ercelia’s was a dry-eyed grief, a choking, dry grief, a grief that rose and fell, that gathered and whirled about itself but would not flow.

Ercelia had not been with her mother when she passed away. She had been in school. The day was late in March and the school term was coming to an end within the week and she was working on the closing exercises of the elementary school. Doña Isabel had been lingering for so long...when the end came, it came swiftly. Don Valentin had sent Sixto to fetch Ercelia home when Doña Isabel began to complain that the room was dark and her feet were numb. When Ercelia arrived, the family were on their knees around the bed, praying loudly. There had been no parting word between them to cut the knot that somewhere far back in her mind was clogging the grief in her heart. As she looked at her mother stretched out on the bed before her, she felt as if she were looking at herself—the carcass of a stillborn dream. And her grief was not as much for her mother as for herself—for the part she was supposed to play and would not play, for the song she was supposed to sing and would not sing.

The rain, following behind a stiff wind, caught the funeral procession between the church and the cemetery. Father Anacleto, clapping his book under an arm and muttering his annoyance at the two acolytes with the censer and the holy water who did not seem to mind the sudden downpour, accepted the shelter of Don Miguel’s car readily; everybody else on foot scampered into houses along the road or clambered into the buses and carromatas following in the procession, but Ercelia, with her fathers arm around her, followed calmly behind the hearse—a closed, horse-drawn carriage hung with black velvet—turning up her face to the rain. She welcomed the rain on her face, stinging her cheeks like cold needles, running chill streams down her neck and bosom, soaking her clothes, bathing her body wholly, for she must grieve, as Maria Clara must grieve, with tears for everybody to see. Leaning on her father’s arm, mingling her sobs with the clopping lament of the horses’ hoofs on the stony road, she felt relieved that her whole body was weeping the tears that her eyes were refusing to shed.

In the little chapel, under the outflung arms of a hundred-year-old tree, when the lid was lifted from the coffin for the family’s last glimpse of the stilled face, she fought the

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