THE VIRGIN by Kerima Polotan Tuvera

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.

A Character Analysis of Kerima Polotan Tuvera’s The Virgin

Kerima Polotan-Tuvera’s “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. A Filipina should be proud to have maintained her virginity but in the case of the thirty-four-year-old Miss
Mijares, she is ashamed of it. In her thirty-four years of existence, she had never been committed in a relationship.
When she was younger, there had been other things to do and she never put love on top of her priorities. She had
college to finish, a niece to put through school, and a mother to take care. Her duties became hindrances for her to
be in a relationship. Miss Mijares’ childhood experiences and duties affected her personality.
Miss Mijares is a thirty-four-year-old woman who works at a job placement agency. The first encounter of the two
characters is at the job interview. The way Miss Mijares treat him is as aloof and cold just like the way she treated
her other interviewees. She looks at herself as superior which explains the impolite language she uses to
communicate with them. According to the text “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.” Her childhood experiences affected the way she is
now, it greatly affected her personality. According to the theory of Sigmund Freud namely Psychoanalytic Theory of
Freud, a person’s childhood experience and unconscious mind contributes to his or her personality (Cherry).
The way Miss Mijares keep her distance from other people and the way she talk to them serve as a defense
mechanism. Her unsociable manners coupled with frank and abrupt way of speech is a disguise for her loneliness.
For nine years she dutifully looks out for the needs of her mother. For nine years she doesn’t think about her own
happiness for she prioritizes her duty to take care of her parent. According to the text “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 dying 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 gratitude.” We
can infer from the way she dedicated her early years to take care of her mother that she valued her family more
than herself. She was really affected by the death of her mother whom she loved so much and it triggered the
change in her personality. She exemplified her superiority as a woman.
“Miss Mijares did not look 34. She was slight, almost bony, but she had learned early how to dress herself to
achieve an illusion hips and bosom. She liked poufs and shirrings and little girlish pastel colors.” According to this
text, Miss Mijares knows how to make her look appealing to opposite gender. This is her way to deal with her
loneliness. For thirty-four years she has not even touched a man. The way she behaves and deal with other people
acts as a defense mechanism.
According to the Behavioral Theory, personality is based on the interaction between the individual and the
environment which can be learned and unlearned (Cherry). Her bossy and indistinct manner of speech coupled
with the way she dress acts as a defense mechanism to hide her depression. The “girlish pastel color” as stated in
the story is also a way to hide her true feelings. She is ashamed of herself for still being a virgin at the age of thirty-
four.
“And yet Miss Mijares did think of love.” It is stated in the text that Miss Mijares had short lived fantasies. She is still
hoping that love will come her way someday. It suddenly happened when he met the carpenter. She is cold and
distant at first but suddenly she is drawn to the man. It all started at the moment she saw the man holding her
paperweight. It is a wooden block with a bird poised to flight. The paperweight was damaged with one wing tilted
unevenly so the carpenter decided to fix it. The bird symbolizes freedom; it symbolizes the freedom of Miss
Mijares. She lived in a system where virginity is something important and should be taken care of.
The problem is she is trapped in this system because at the age of thirty-four she is still a virgin who never touched
a man. This will change because of the carpenter. She will be free like the bird in her paperweight fixed by the
carpenter. She will be unwittingly attracted to the carpenter. She doesn’t like the way he talk without permission but
it won’t change her feelings toward the man. When she learned that the foreman has only given him three peso but
he is filling in for a four-peso job, she confronted the foreman right away. It not expected for her to be concerned
because of her cold and distant way of treating him. A change in her personality can be seen and it is because of
the carpenter.
Miss Mijares was emotionally attached to the carpenter. She was surprised and angry when she learned that the
carpenter has a son. She thought the he is single and not committed. After learning that he was raising a child by a
woman he is not married to, she notice everything else that is wrong with him-his crooked grin and defective front
teeth. Her reaction proved that she is really in love with the carpenter. She doesn’t even notice his grin and tooth
because of her infatuation. Miss Mijares rode again a jeepney that detoured again to avoid traffic but this time he is
with the carpenter. It was raining and all of them were asked to get down the jeepney.
She noticed that there are no other people in sight but the two of them. Her emotion has gone wild for her young
dreams have suddenly come to life. She turned to him with her ruffles wet and wilted. Out of her free-will, Miss
Mijares has grabbed the opportunity for love. According to the Humanist Theory, a person’s free will and individual
experience contribute to personality development (Cherry). Her feelings for him have changed her personality. She
suddenly becomes more caring and concerned. Her personal emotion is the factor for the change in her
personality.
The Virgin deals with the life of Miss Mijares. A daughter bounded by her duty. She lived in a society where
virginity is something to take care of but at the age of thirty-four she is ashamed that she is still a virgin. Miss
Mijares’ childhood experiences and duties affected her personality. The cold and distant personality coupled with a
frank and abrupt manner of speech can be traced back in her early years. All of these serve as a defense
mechanism to hide her depression. She developed a certain superior mentality that can be seen in the way she
talks during interviews but all of these changed when the carpenter came into her life. The paperweight with a bird
on it symbolizes freedom. Miss Mijares was now free from all her anxieties because of the carpenter who brought
order in her life just like how he fixed the paperweight. Her loved for the carpenter brought the change in her life.