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What is the topography of the human heart? How does one map its peaks, valleys, tributaries? How measure its ebb and flow, its undertow?
Kerima Polotan shows us one way to plot the shifts of the heart. In her short story, “The Virgin,” Polotan introduces us to the character of Miss Mijares by indirect means:
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. (Polotan)
We get a sense of who Miss Mijares is through what she notices of the people around her, in the details that are highlighted in the description that — while told in the third person — apparently are seen through her eyes.
We ask, why does Miss Mijares notice these details? Well, the story’s title is “The Virgin” after all, and the main character’s civil status is foregrounded by the title “Miss.” So we get an inkling of how she might feel, and understand why she imperiously “pushed a sheet towards him, rolling a pencil along with it” and commands him:
“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.” (Polotan)
And we understand why she has to justify her peremptory tone or the supercilious attitude she takes toward her clients at the placement agency. We can feel her loneliness as we see her sitting by her lonesome at a cafeteria table. And as Polotan turns to a more objective but still sympathetic description of Miss Mijares, we feel the desperation in the “poufs and shirrings and little girlish pastel colors” and “the thick camouflaging ruffles” that the 34-year-old Miss Mijares wears to soften and prettify her bony and angular and plain self.
And buried somewhere underneath her defensive ruffles and behind her haughty attitude lay a coquettish heart that would, perhaps in a moviehouse, allow itself “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” (Polotan).
But this heart had gone unpracticed and bitter through all the years Miss Mijares had to care for her mother. When her mother died, the love she thought was just around the corner was nowhere to be found. And then she meets this carpenter who, when she got back from her break, had fixed 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…. ¶ [But he had fixed it.] 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. (Polotan)
And in the succeeding paragraphs, we see an apparently “giddy” Miss Mijares going out of her usual way to check on the carpenter’s progress and even bargaining with Ato the foreman to increase the carpenter’s wages. Lighthearted enough to lose her way the following week. And agitated enough when the carpenter doesn’t show up for a week.
When he does show up, she goes stern on the carpenter while asking him for reasons about his whereabouts. And she feels anger and bitterness upon learning that he had just lost a son, a son he had with a woman he was not married to.
At the end of that day of confrontation, a sudden thunderstorm brings redemption. On her way home, the carpenter boards the same jeepney she hops into. When the jeepney takes the same route of sidestreets just like the week when she lost her way, Miss Mijares finds herself on the dark sidewalk alone with the carpenter who followed her to give his apologies. And …
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. (Polotan)
And it would seem that Miss Mijares would be journeying to another country, but a country familiar to her “secret heart.”
Would it matter what future lay there for Miss Mijares? And would she now call the carpenter by his name,* and how would her future be determined by such action?
How to map the human heart? This is just one way. Another story by Polotan or some other writer would be plotted differently. And your own experience would reveal its unique path, pulsing away its pattern of heartbeats on your life’s chart.
[*Notice how Polotan uses the pronoun to refer to the man, while she gives Ato the foreman a proper name. Why so?]
Jasper Nikki de la Cruz, senior UP Mindanao Creative Writing student, treated us to several rounds of beer to celebrate his Best Thesis award for his collection “The Spider Dealers and Other Stories.” He was hands down the unanimous choice among the panelists. Fictionist Timothy Montes said that his is a unique voice in Philippine fiction.
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