The Trap
Kerima Polotan Tuvera

I was fourteen when we moved to Cabuyao. We reached the town at night and though it was not quite seven, the streets were empty. I had hoped we would get to it before dark, while there was light enough for people to see us come. We knew no one, of course – “We’ll make friends,” my father had said – and expected no welcome, but having left Tayug with reluctance, I had urged my father during the trip to drive faster so that we might arrive in Cabuyao early enough for someone to see us drive in.

That was important to me.

“Why, Elisa?” my mother asked, and I could not tell her why, except that I had left behind in Tayug one friend very dear to me. When the day came for us to go, we could not leave soon enough. I wanted the pain of missing Salud to start quickly. She said goodbye to me that morning by the plaza, asking, “Are you taking everything, Elisa? You’re sure?” When Mother frowned, I hated Salud for betraying me.

Several times that past year I had told Salud I felt that something was happening to me. I felt I was growing to be another person entirely. “Something’s wrong, Salud,” I said one day – “I’m going crazy.” She had laughed and looked pointedly at my breasts and said. “They’re growing like mine, Elisa.” She had a way of saying things like that, that angered and also disarmed me; she was 18 and the four years between us yawned like an abyss. During all that time I had watched her turn into a lovely, graceful girl, unfazed by adolescence, leaving me far behind, eaten with envy and yearning. When she laughed at me that morning, I refused to be shaken off. I dogged her all the way along Calle Santa, round the corner to Del Pilar, and catching up with her a few coconut trees from their steps. I said something that made her pull up and look at me gravely. “Help me, Salud,” I said.

That past September I had come home one Monday from school, my dress with a stain. Since then I had lived with the terrible feeling that I stood on the brink of something. I had dreams about this too, unhappy, frightened nights when my dreams took me to an unknown precipice and I watched helplessly as my body dropped over the edge.

It was of this that Salud spoke when she asked, that morning we got ready to drive away, if I was leaving something behind with her. Some books I had given her, and tears, and a girlish promise I would write faithfully. She stood beside the car, saying, “Goodbye,” over and over; she would not cry before me. Her eyes, though bright, were dry. I held her arms tightly, wanting to see her tears, but my father said, “All right, all right,” and I let her go. She blew her fingers at me and we drove away.

We live near the church, I wrote Salud, in a house that is all sawali, except for the roof which is nipa, and the floor which is bamboo. The toilet is at the back, outside the house. It is an outhouse set on posts and connected to the kitchen by a bamboo bridge. You will not believe me but the bridge is the part I like best – it swings when I walk on it. There are sugarcane stalks on both sides of the bridge and I never hurry to the outhouse. It is beautiful when there is a moon up.

I believe you, Elisa, Salud wrote back. But don’t jump off.

The first day I resumed schooling, my father came with me. We saw the principal together. She was an elderly spinster who wore tight rimless glasses on her nose. She rarely smiled and when she did, it was to show big false teeth that clicked noisily when she spoke – “How old are you, Elisa?” she asked. “Fourteen,” I replied respectfully. “Only?” she remarked, and it was the wrong thing to say. I had scrubbed myself that day and put on my best dress but at Miss Ramos’ remark, I felt my knees grow rough and dark, my breasts start to swell. I wondered if she knew about my new condition. My days were full of bodily pain and a mysterious sense of growing; I moved about carefully, waiting for some bit of womanly knowledge to dawn on me, a grace, a manner of self, but I fumbled as before and dropped things and was miserable before people. Only the unnerving dreams persisted, the nightly journeys that took me through the labyrinths of my mind to emerge always on the sharp rim of some mountainside from which I flung myself even as I called for help.

Miss Ramos stood up, took me by the hand, not companionably, not with palm about my wrist, but with index finger and thumb, with clear distaste, and led me thus, a sullen specimen, through the corridors of the school, and without bothering to knock, pushed me ahead, through a door marked Mr. Gabriel, and said, “Mr. Gabriel, this is Elisa.”

Miss Ramos is a witch, I wrote Salud. When she’s around, she gives off a smell that makes me sick.

Everyone smells, Salud replied, but you will smell most of all, Elisa, if you don’t stop hating people.

Not everyone, I wrote back. I like Mr. Gabriel. He is a good man.

Mr. Gabriel was small and thin and stooped, with a way about him that made him seem even smaller. His eyes laughed even when his mouth did not, and when that happened, the tenderness spilled down the cheeks to his quiet lips. When Miss Ramos blazed into his room, demanding forms and reports and C-156’s, Mr. Gabriel met the storm with soothing coolness, as though he dealt with just another wayward student.

One day, we were weeding the grounds when I swung my scythe and hit my leg instead. I stood bleeding, watching the red fluid flow down to the soil, stain it momentarily, then sink and disappear, leaving nothing but a wet spot. Miss Ramos walked up to me, smiling thinly. She said, “Why, it’s only blood.” Mr. Gabriel took me to the clinic. He stopped before the door, fumbling through his pockets for the key. A dark flush had spread over his face and neck. Inside the clinic, I sat on a white stool while Mr. Gabriel opened a window. He took a long time searching for swab and iodine and bandage but when he sat in front of me, the flush had disappeared from his face. It was not a deep wound but it was ugly. The tip of the scythe had drawn a gash across my leg, leaving a piece of flesh dangling by a thread of skin. Mr. Gabriel washed and bound it. Except for some throbbing, it had ceased to hurt me. I said so as we left the room – “It’s not painful,” I said wonderingly. “It will return later,” he said.

I followed him out of the room. The yard was empty; the other children had left. A frown passed over the face. He hurried down the steps and sloshed through the mud, his shoes squeezing down on the wet soil. Bits of clay clung to the cuffs of his pants. It was a brown suit he wore. I had seen it on him several times before. It was loose and it fitted him badly. As he walked, the back of his coat swished about his thighs. In the light of early evening, he was a weird sight, like an earthbound ghost hurrying through the countryside. I trotted after him. When we reached the fork, he raised his hand quickly and disappeared in the twilight.

We had begun to write themes again and I looked for words like agony and happiness and soul. Each time I used such a word, a bell seemed to ring inside me. One morning when Mr. Gabriel read one of my themes in front of the class, I sat still, trying to recall my feelings as I wrote it. But it was no use, something was gone. Perhaps, it was Mr. Gabriel’s voice: it was soft and low, like a woman’s, and I kept thinking: I wish I could talk to him alone. Perhaps it was the memory of what I had written about – a white, long-legged bird skimming the rice fields while I stood on the shoulder of the road watching, the great sky above me.

If Mr. Gabriel had seemed amused, I might have hated him. But he smiled faintly and looked away, and then as gently as that, between one heartbeat and another, I fell in love with him.

I did not write to Salud about it. I was certain her answer would come, underlined with mockery: Yes, but is he in love with you, and if he is, is he a married man, and if he isn’t, will he marry you?

I betrayed myself in a hundred ways.

When Mr. Gabriel stood beside me in class, watching while I wrote a theme, his presence, would undo me so completely that my mind would go blank and I would ask to be excused. Outside, I crawled beneath the school building, where it was damp and I could be alone, but as soon as class was over, I lingered by the door of the teacher’s room, compelled to stay by a new, frightening necessity.

One day, he surprised me beneath the building. He had gone to look for the boys who had disappeared as soon as the gardening assignments were posted on the board. He looked under the schoolhouse and saw me on the ground, hugging my legs together. “Elisa?” he called. “Mr. Gabriel, “ I replied. “Come out,” he said. I crawled to where he waited by the hedges. “Were you hiding?” he asked. I stood mute. I felt that if I began to explain I would say more than I should, I would in an onrush of hope tell him everything – Salud and my dreams and the sense of sin that possessed me because I had begun, despite myself, to span with aching arms the emptiness of my youthful bed at night. For one, instant, I could have, but someone came to ask for a hoe, and Mr. Gabriel handed me a trowel and I headed for my garden plot.

In February that year, I fell ill. On the fifth day of my illness, a friend passed by the house and left a note. How do you do, Elisa? It read. Are you better? Hurry up and come back to us, we miss you. Sincerely Leonor. Then P.S. What is wrong?

It was the postscript that completed my betrayal – Leonor’s girlish prescience. In my own handwriting, I replied to that question, I wrote: I love Mr. Gabriel. I trembled as I wrote the words. Dimly, I realized I had identified the precipice at last. I had met the forlorn stranger in my dreams, face to face, no longer, would she go wandering tremulously on mountaintops, dying her lonely deaths, she was where I sat in my sick clothes, writing the fateful words that accepted the knowledge of womanhood.

When I returned to school the next Monday, it was all over the place. The damning note had made rounds and reached Miss Ramos, before whom I now stood, awaiting judgment. The principal smiled that grim smile of hers and said, “A costly mistake. A very costly one. You have involved Mr. Gabriel that may mean his job.” I said nothing, accepting suspension.

When I returned to my room, I saw on the blackboard someone had written “Elisa Gabriel.” I picked up my things and left. I took the long road, the one that led past the market and the billiard hall, past the empty south lots, around the graveyard, then I cut across the plaza and headed for home. But on the porch of our home, I had no sooner put my books down than I turned around and ran back to school, taking the narrow dike this time. I ran so fast that my heart rose to my throat and beat there, heavy strokes, that made breathing difficult. To my right, the river lay, untouched by the panic that led me to the building on top of the hill. It was dark when I stumbled into Mr. Gabriel’s room and found him, not bleeding and helpless and dying, but seated at his desk, correcting papers. We frightened each other, I think, because his jaw dropped, and at the sight of him, I missed a step and fell to my knees, and there on the floor, in that grotesque, unintended curtsey, the words were wrung from me, “Mr. Gabriel. Sir, I love you.”

I never found out if he went to my father about this, or even told Miss Ramos, but I can see myself in the dusk of that room years ago, in that absurd posture, along with the strange, gentle man to whom I had lost my young heart. For what seemed forever, Mr. Gabriel did not move until I stood up and, in my shame, burst into tears. Then he approached me and led me to the door. The wind had picked up a mournful sounds, like the far-off despairing wail of an animal caught in some trap, and now it reaches us both where we stood in the deserted corridor of the school . “Run home, Elisa,” he said. “Run home.”