LA VIRUELA

The girl appeared one afternoon as if by magic, like a wild hibiscus blossom where yesterday there had been rain. News of the Yanqui victory over the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay came to the household of Colonel Rafael Varga not with the blast of artillery shells, but with the unceremonious arrival of her father, Doctor Marcelino Fenol. The doctor had left home earlier than usual that morning for the colonel’s intelligence briefing. Wearing an ash grey sack jacket and peasant’s trousers, he had carried the leather satchel from the Magdalo executive committee across town with all the solemnity of a judge delivering a death sentence. He strolled into the colonel’s house with such an ethereal silence that the maid servants dusting the carpet in the foyer were convinced that a ghost had materialized before their eyes. The girls’ shrieks woke the whole house – even the colonel, who scrambled downstairs in his drawers with a revolver drawn.

“We’re at war,” the colonel fumed as he stomped back upstairs to retrieve his shirt and trousers. “Ghosts are the least of our problems.”

The dry season was coming to an end in the mountains of Cavite, but dampness from last night’s rain rose from the jungle floor like a breath from a furnace. Occasional gusts of wind stirred the leaves in the inner courtyard, where the colonel and Don Marcelino had sought refuge from the glare of the sun amid a profusion of bougainvillea vines and sampaguita blossoms. Eager for news from the outlands of Niebla del Albor, Pancho Varga had arranged wicker chairs beneath the young acacia tree for his father and the untimely house guest. The servants – not quite recovered from their discomfiture -- set out a pitcher of lemonade and some glasses on the wrought iron table between the two old widowers.

“There’s been movement in Manila,” Don Marcelino said. He pulled a fistful of folders from the satchel and laid them out on the table like a deck of cards. Inside the folders were copies of typewritten reports, dense blocks thick with names, dates, and events. There were maps, press clippings, photographs of American warships and naval officers, Spanish officials, portraits of wives and families, pictures of military units. The colonel scanned them hurriedly, but the doctor was already ahead of him, providing commentary. “The executive committee believes the Spanish are about to surrender the city. Our spies say Dewey’s flag officer is negotiating on behalf of the Gringos. They Americans have their marines controlling the port…” The colonel listened without speaking, his brows furrowed into a V, blinking at the photographs as though he were following Don Marcelino’s words in the shades of the albumen print. Looking over his father’s shoulder, Pancho Varga recognized the places, the various insignia and uniforms: recognized the emblems, weapons, and charms of the white man’s voracious tyranny.

The two old men then plunged into an enormous and earnest conversation, first about the scuttling of the Spanish warships in Manila, then about the secret negotiations between the Spanish colonial authorities and Washington. But as exasperated as he was about the machinations of the Gringos, the colonel found the medical bulletins from the coast even more unsettling. The ledgers contained reports of a bewildering contagion: a fever that drove people mad just before they succumbed to ravenous boils on their bodies. The colonel leafed through the mortuary photographs with a mixture of disbelief and recognition. Don Marcelino knew what the colonel was thinking, but neither said a word for fear of calling God’s attention. Finally, the doctor suggested restricting the entry of refugees into the town for a week or two just to avoid tempting fate. “Heaven knows we can’t afford bad luck,” Don Marcelino said, tapping the photographs with two fat fingers.

“Send someone to alert the scouts at the roadblock,” the colonel nodded in agreement. “No sooner have we rid these mountains of the Guardia Civil than we have to survive the newcomers and the whims of God himself.”

The year the Americans declared war on Spain marked a change which had long been coming to the lives of the people of Niebla del Albor. What the colonel feared would happen on the coast came to pass. The lowland towns rose against the Spanish colonial government and were quickly put down. As expected, great, deafening caravans of refugees headed for the mountains to escape the slaughter that ensued. The town was soon so swamped with migrants that the municipal hall couldn’t accommodate everyone. Some of the newcomers built houses in the town plaza and the cemetery, sparking an uproar among the locals.

Before departing with the colonel’s dispatch, Don Marcelino had mentioned that Angelina might drop by to pick blackberries in the orchard that afternoon. The colonel’s expression softened as though the girl’s name was a salve against the imperious heat.

“It would be good to have your daughter around the house. I’m sure Pancho will be happy to keep her company. They have not seen each other since my son returned from Manila.”

The image Pancho Varga had summoned in his mind was of Angelina aged 11 –- the small, shy, round-faced girl who recited interminable poetry at the talent shows her father organized in the town plaza. He had not seen the girl since he left for Manila five years ago. When the girl appeared that afternoon with a basket in the crook of her arm, he was sure that the world had shifted on its axis.

Like him, she was now sixteen, but she was nothing like what he remembered. She was tall, like her father. She had the same oval face, the same small, pointed nose, the same prominent cheekbones. But the smoothness of her skin, the shape of her mouth, and her eyes, which were like two deep pools, as black as midnight -- all that she got from her mother, he thought. The late Señora Ursula was, in her youth, the most beautiful woman in Niebla del Albor. Now that her daughter had grown into the charms of womanhood, the young woman had surpassed her mother’s beauty.

Periwinkle blossoms fringed the trail that led to the orchard behind the colonel’s house. Pancho Varga followed half a step behind the girl, comforted by the thought that she could not see what he assumed was the look of astonishment on his face. She was even more beautiful up close. Her camisa was slightly wrinkled from the moist air, and the hem of her skirt was wet with the dampness of the grass. They spoke sparingly; both being embarrassed at being alone together.

“My father says you studied in Manila,” the girl said once she was sure they had walked deep enough into the woods that no one else heard.

“Yes, I did,” Pancho Varga said. He went on to explain that the colonel had arranged for him to study under the guidance of Jesuit teachers who were sympathetic to the indio cause. He learned a smattering of Latin, the arts of rhetoric and literature, history, and the beautiful complications of geometry, natural philosophy, and theology. He would have stayed another year, but with the rebellion advancing as it had in the past two years, the colonel decided that Manila had become a snake pit of treachery.

The girl listened without looking at him. Grasshoppers broke into flight along the trail, their wings whirring brilliantly where the sun touched them. She paused to watch them. “You’ve changed since I last saw you,” she said as she resumed walking. “You’re much taller.”

“You have changed, too. You have always looked like your mother, but now more so.”

“You remember her still?” the girl said, smiling over her shoulder. “They say she became very ill. My father sent me to live with an aunt in Silang at the time. I came home to a funeral one day and realized it was for her.”

“I remember the funeral,” said Pancho Varga. "My mother died a week after Señora Ursula was buried. Those were sad times for us all."

She nodded her head once and looked away, remembering. Then she told him how, in the years following her mother’s death, she had spent hours each day paying homage to her portrait. The painting had hung over the dining hall of their home for as long as she could remember. One day Don Marcelino grew so weary of her grief that he took the painting down and buried it in the backyard.

“Do you think we will go to war with the Yanquis?” she asked as she continued down the trail.

“Your father thinks we will have to fight them. If there is a war, I will join the Magdalo. I’m old enough to fight.”

“Do you think they will come to Niebla del Albor?”

She stopped and turned around to confront his eyes. Even the wind halted, spellbound by her beauty. They stood looking at each other for what seemed like a very long time.

“They won’t,” Pancho Varga reassured her. “There is nothing in this town that should be of interest to the Gringos.” He plucked a purple wildflower from the grass and held it out to her. The girl smiled and accepted.

“I hope you are right,” she said, twirling the flower in her hand. “The Americans frighten me more than the Guardia Civil.”

When they resumed walking, they were silent and formal again, minding the mud on the trail, tense as deer sensing hunters. A breeze blew uphill from the lake and the scent of ripening coffee fruits drifted through the jungle from the colonel’s farm. They had reached the top of a steep hill and emerged from a stand of agarwood trees into a meadow. The sky was bright blue, the bluest sky Pancho Varga had ever seen. The clouds were so precisely outlined that they looked like a picture in a book of fairy tales. Beyond the meadow lay the colonel’s olive orchard, where the wild blackberry shrubs grew. For now, Pancho Varga thought, the war, the Gringos, and everything else existed in some far-off universe. In the quiet, voluptuous blue of the afternoon, only the girl and picking blackberries with her mattered.

***

That night, there were torches and volunteers armed with shotguns and spears in the street corners of the town. Up in his room, Pancho Varga dreamt a dream of light. He contemplated its brightness before he surfaced for air. Then he became aware of dogs barking along the lakeshore. He opened his eyes in the dark. There were torches and men shouting outside the window. He got up, pushed the curtain aside, and peered out. Soldiers were straining to hold back the colonel’s hunting dogs from a crowd of volunteers in front of the house. The volunteers were shouting, shaking their shotguns and spears in the air. There was a gunfight at the roadblock, they were saying. The scouts have killed refugees, they were shouting.

Pancho Varga fetched his trousers from under the sleeping mat and pulled them on. He rolled the mat into a corner, felt for his shoes on the floor, and rushed down the hall to wake the colonel.

“There is trouble at the roadblock, Papa.”

“Caramba,” the colonel groaned under the mosquito net. “Prepare the horses.”

The roadblock was little more than a makeshift arrangement of scrap wood nailed together to form an improbable barricade on a hill. The colonel had commanded its construction when the Spaniards first declared war on the province. Halfway up the hill, Pancho Varga and the colonel could see the orange glow of torches at the roadblock. By the time they rode up on their horses, a crowd had already gathered, and the road was jammed with carabaos, horses, carts, and carriages. Many of the curious, roused from their sleeping mats by the uproar of livestock, had emerged from their homes wrapped in blankets. The crowd was thickest where pinstriped uniforms and torches declared the presence of Magdalo scouts.

The dead –Pancho Varga counted four of them – were lined up in a row on the roadside, covered in sackcloth. The prisoners – men with murky faces and faded clothes -- stood in a line on the other side of the road with ropes around their necks. The colonel, who always wore a Sevastopol hat with his pinstriped uniform, dismounted and looked around, his head thrown forward, his hands clasped behind him, his lips trembling with what might have been rage. “Who is the highest-ranking officer here?” he said to the scouts.

One of the uniformed men stepped forward -- a sergeant, Pancho Varga judged from his uniform. “I am, Señor Colonel,” the scout saluted.

“What happened here, sergeant?”

The scouts had arrived to relieve the previous watch at sundown, the sergeant said. During the night, they had stopped a caravan of refugees from the lowlands – several families and their chickens, carabaos, and horses -- hurrying into town. The men in the caravan said some of their women and children had been taken ill. Someone had told them there was a doctor in Niebla del Albor.

“Although we were sympathetic, I had to insist that we inspect the caravan, including those who were sick, before we allowed them to proceed,” the sergeant said.

The scouts had begun to inspect the carts and carriages when an argument erupted. One of the men from the caravan attacked a scout with an axe, wounding him. The scouts had no choice but to shoot the man. Then two other men from the caravan pulled out pistols from their waist bands. That was when all hell broke loose, said the sergeant. The scouts opened fire. Two men, a woman, and a child were killed in the confusion.

“Some of the men escaped into the jungle,” the sergeant continued. “We could not pursue them. We needed all our rifles to contain the rest of the caravan, Señor Colonel.”

The sergeant was about to say more, but the colonel cut him off with a pointed finger. “Clear this road. Double the patrols around the town. No more refugees. I want depositions. I want statements from everybody. Do you understand, sergeant?”

“Yes, Señor Colonel.”

The colonel dismissed the scout and summoned Pancho Varga with a nod of his head. Leaning in, he said, “Check the bodies. We need to write a report for the Magdalo executive committee.”

Pancho Varga took a torch from one of the scouts and picked his way through the crowd, edging sideways. He lifted the sackcloth from one of the corpses, and a smell rose to his nostrils. The boy was probably eight or nine years old. He looked weightless, more like a skeleton in dingy rags than a boy. He knelt to examine the corpse more closely. He could see where the bullet tore a hole in the boy’s shirt. The round had entered the ribcage, but the diabolic smell came from the pus dripping from the blisters on the boy’s face. He replaced the sackcloth on the body and lifted the shroud from the next corpse. The boy’s mother had the same blisters. The smell was worse.

Pancho Varga wiped the blood off his hands on the grass and stood up, sweating and nauseated. A scout offered him a cigarette. He accepted with trembling fingers. He lit the cigarette with the torch flame and inhaled the harsh, strong smoke as he walked back across the road to report to the colonel. He had seen blisters like those before. He had seen them on his mother face years ago, just before she died.

***

Pancho Varga was too young to remember much about the first outbreak. But he learned early on that the people of Niebla del Albor loathed the word death and attributed to it powers beyond its meaning. Death was a spiteful deity. Or at least, it was as spiteful as any of the old gods the Augustinians had banished into the jungle in the days before roads and carriages. When his mother died, people didn’t ask what had killed her, but why. Why her? What could she have done to deserve this? Even his father evaded the subject of death in conversations. Perhaps that was why nobody spoke about the suspicious boils on the little boy’s body, he thought, as though the mere mention of it was apt to lift the edges of a secret, and people would see something they were not meant to see. Indeed, the first market Sunday of May arrived in Niebla del Albor with such lively exclamation that talk of the incident at the roadblock soon dissipated among the flags and patriotic buntings that festooned the streets. In the plaza, the fair booths were open with displays of houseware and toys, and the children were playing.

Heard merely as a rumor, four dead refugees on the road into town were just like the dozens of other dead bodies the town had seen along the same road since the insurrection began. These things happen in war, Father Florante said in his homily. God and the revolution will set us free, make our souls unfettered, free us from the dogma and oppression of Castille and Washington, said the priest. These troubles will pass. Peace will return to Niebla del Albor. Even the girl seemed to take comfort in his words.

Pancho Varga sat two pews behind her. She looked even lovelier than she did yesterday – like a young bride in her white camisa and her veil. He spoke to her briefly when the mass ended and the congregation began to file out of the chapel into the glare of the morning. They were shoulder to shoulder but careful not to touch.

“You’re so beautiful it breaks my heart to look at you,” he whispered in her ear. His heart raced when he saw a blush bloom on her cheeks.

"“I heard about what happened at the roadblock,” she said, not daring to look at him. “When I first heard about it, I was worried that you were hurt.”

She was about to say something else, but the clanging of the church bells interrupted her. The crowd began to move again. Pancho Varga tried not to lose sight of her, but she disappeared into the crowd. When he saw her again a few minutes later, she was leaving with her father.

That afternoon the soldiers posted at the colonel’s house slaughtered a goat to celebrate the harvest season. They were drinking gin around the cooking fire when Don Marcelino arrived with his daughter. The doctor carried an envelope containing the autopsy reports he had prepared on the deceased refugees. The documents required the colonel’s signature before he could send them to the Magdalo executive committee. The two old widowers conferred in the inner courtyard, where the servants had set out the colonel’s portable writing table.

The girl was standing by the flowerbeds at the edge of the courtyard when Pancho Varga came downstairs. She was wearing the same celestial white camisa she wore at church. There was a warm wind in the sampaguita blossoms and palm fronds. She seemed pleased to see him.

This time they talked as friends. They laughed and joked about things they remembered as children together. They talked about the strange purple color of Taal Lake in the late afternoon. They talked about the mist that hung over the lake and the mountains in the evenings; and how wet and cold the early mornings were just before sunrise. He told her about the afternoons he had spent on the promenade along Manila Bay, watching the cargo schooners and steamships arrive from Europe and the Americas. She told him about the poems of Jose Rizal and Gustavo Bécquer.

Pancho Varga was smitten. He felt at once exhilarated and terrified, as though a whirlwind had burst from the jungle, scooped up his heart, and flown away with it. Love must be a form of lunacy, he thought as he listened to her. There must be some remote corner in the soul where love is indistinguishable from madness. How else could he explain the joy that tormented him? He asked her if he might borrow her copy of Rimas y Leyendas, and she promised to bring it the next time they went blackberry picking in the colonel’s orchard. Her smile reminded him of a field of wildflowers.

I’m in love with you, he could have said before she left with her father, but he did not. He would tell her next time they saw each other, he told himself.

***

But Pancho Varga did not see her at mass the following Sunday, nor the Sunday after that. He looked for her at the plaza. He looked for her in the alleys between the houses of the refugees. He looked for her among the market stalls of butchered game and vegetables. The more he looked, the sicker he felt -- sick with the huge, insane love that was raging inside him desperately and dearly. No one had seen her. He had hoped to ask Don Marcelino where she was when the doctor came to see the colonel that afternoon. But the doctor had come bearing gloomy news: a mounted patrol found three men dead men in a thatched lean-to shelter at the edge of the jungle. The scouts were sure that two of the corpses belonged to men from the caravan they stopped two weeks ago. The third body was that of a firewood gatherer who sold neatly corded bundles of firewood in the market on Sundays.

The soldiers refused to touch the bodies. They sent for Don Marcelino, instead. The doctor arrived sweating and slapping at mosquitoes on his neck. He did not have to stay long. Wild boar had fed on the bodies in the night, but the smell of the pustules on the corpses was unmistakable.

“Grief has returned to Niebla del Albor,” Don Marcelino told the colonel. “God have mercy on us all.”

***

Nobody believed it. Many thought it was probably nonsense the Americans had devised to scare the indios into submission. Even the colonel found the doctor’s pronouncement difficult to fathom. Niebla del Albor had always moved to the rhythm of its own heart. The future and all its troubles were never real. The march of time happened elsewhere. It happened in other towns, in valleys below other mountains, in cities people spoke about but never visited. When people started to fall ill, the town’s self-imposed inertia dissolved into a pitiless silence. The future had arrived, finally, and death rode with it. Some waited alone in their houses. Some shared their homes with others. The streets lay empty. Even the church bells ceased to toll. The town was so quiet Pancho Varga wondered if he hadn’t gone deaf. Only the sound of birdsong convinced him otherwise.

The congregation at Sunday mass was sparse and placid: a few old people, a few women, and a handful of silent veterans. “You didn’t think God would save us, did you?” he heard someone say as people filed out. “God was never going to take the trouble.”

All the while his anxiousness to see the girl so gnawed at his heart that he could hardly think of anything else. Every quiet moment he spent walking the empty streets reminded him of her absence. What it was that finally drove him to seek her out, he could not have said. Perhaps it was the notion that he might never see her again. Or perhaps it was the ferocious fever that had shook him for three days and three nights, setting his thighs and armpits on fire. He woke up in the middle of the third night trembling, his heart drumming with dread, his face burning. He could hardly move from the pain that twisted his muscles. He sat up, stuck his fingers into his mouth, and twirled them into a nausea that was so violent he thought he would vomit his soul.

Downstairs, he slipped across the backyard and led a horse out of the stable. The soldiers at the gate looked up but took no notice. Riding past the plaza and the houses of the refugees, he tracked an old grass-grown trail that followed the course of a shallow wash where a stream flowed. The stream held to a straight bearing for about a mile under the starlight. Then began a heightening of the trees and a deepening of the jungle floor.

He had seen the light in the window from a long way out. He dismounted and hitched the horse to a tree. The light guided him through the vines and the bamboo. He had been to the house before, years ago, as a boy, when Don Marcelino snatched him from the death grip of typhoid fever with camphor oil and willow bark potion. Now he stood at the gate of bamboo slats, calling her name. Once. Twice. Three times.

He was about to walk away when he heard her voice. “Pancho?” He looked up and saw her shape silhouetted against the light. “Come upstairs,” she said. “The door is open.”

He crossed the front yard, his shoes crunching in the gravel. He pushed open the heavy door and slipped quietly into the house. The air inside was thick with the smell of aged wood and damp plaster. He moved toward the staircase, his hands probing the darkness ahead of him. Finding the banister, he ascended the stairs. The wooden boards squeaked softly under his weight. Shadows moved across the floor below.

“I’m here,” she said when he reached the top of the stairs. “Come to me.”

Making his way to her voice, he found the open door to her bedroom. “Why have you extinguished the lamp?” he said. “I want to see you.”

“I don’t want you to see me the way I am,” Angelina told him.

The only light in the room came from the night outside—a square of starlit sky framed by a rectangular window. His eyes were fixed on the white mass of mosquito netting that hung from the ceiling. He could see Angelina’s shape behind the gauze. She was sitting on the bed. “Why won’t you let me see you?” he asked her.

“I want you to remember me as I was when you said I was beautiful.”

“You’ll always be beautiful,” he told her. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” Angelina said. “I’ve loved you since we were children. But I’m sick, and I’m dying.”

“What do you mean you are sick?” he said. Dread – sudden and crushing – landed on him like a boulder. “You will not die,” he told her. “We will run away together.”

“I’m dying,” she said. “I wanted to see you one last time. Now I have. Now you must go.”

“I can’t. I will not leave you.”

“You must go before this sickness finds you, too.”

“I don’t care,” Pancho Varga said, stepping closer to the bed. “I have to kiss you. I will leave only if you let me kiss you.”

He lifted the mosquito net and moved toward her until he felt her breath on his cheeks. Then he kissed her, tasting her tears up and down the pale salt reach of her skin. His heart broke for what could have been.

“Go now, for me,” Angelina whispered in his ear. “Quickly, before you catch your death.”

Stumbling away, dazed, he tottered out of the room and tumbled down the stairs in the darkness. When he rose, the world rose with him, and his knees buckled under the weight of its mountains and rivers.

Outside he sprang into the night-cooled darkness, his hair raised into the free, lonely air. He ran into the jungle, and the jungle reached out to catch his fall, plunging him deep into its maw. He emerged on the other side of the woods. The horse whinnied at the shadows moving in the trees. He freed it the from its hitch, climbed onto its back, and rode down the side of the mountain, following a light along the rim of the sky down into the choral chatter of the day’s first birds. Was that daylight or something else? He thought it was strange that, for all his wanderings, he had never been to this part of the jungle before. But he could see light past the trees ahead. Emerging from beneath the leaves and the vines, the horse burst across the prairie along the lakeshore, the sound of iron-shod hooves deadened and dying away in the grey light, and clouds of yellow dust drifted up from under the giant myrtle thickets out over the grass. High above him, deep in the cavernous grey sky, a hawk peered into the cold blackness of the lake and came face-to-face with giant catfish, a surprise of irony and mud.

“He is burning with fever,” Don Marcelino told the colonel, who sat by the bed, inconsolable. The maidservants were weeping out in the hallway. “He is God’s hands now.”

“My poor boy,” the colonel said. “My poor, poor boy.”

He wanted to tell the colonel not to worry. He wanted to say he would return. But the horse reared on its hind legs, loosening his grip on the mane and throwing him to the ground in a slam of dust. A heavy hoof came back down on his leg. He caught the yowl before it escaped his mouth. The pain tasted like blood. He curled himself into a ball, knowing he must not allow them to hurt him there. Now comes the pain I will not forget, he thought to himself. Now there will be no mercy, he thought, clenching himself against the thrust of their spears. He said her name once, twice, three times, and around him grey men without faces wheeled in a tumult of dust and horses.

Carlos Castillo studied English literature and creative writing at the University of Santo Tomas, in the Republic of the Philippines. He published poetry and fiction while in college and has since written for various digital marketing companies and websites. He is presently a speech and policy writer for the Philippine Department of Agriculture.