Magnificence

ESTRELLA D. ALFON

here was nothing to fear, for the man was always so gentle, so kind. At night
T when the little girl and her brother were bathed in the light of the big shaded
bulb that hung over the big study table in the downstairs hall, the man would
knock gently on the door, and come in. He would stand for a while just beyond
the pool of light, his feet in the circle of illumination, the rest of him in shadow.
The little girl and her brother would look up at him where they sat at the big
table, their eyes bright in the bright light, and watch him come fully into the
light, a dark little man with protuberant lips, his eyes glinting in the light, but
his voice soft, his manner slow. He would smell very faintly of sweat and pomade,
but the children didn't mind although they did notice, for they waited for him
every evening as they sat at their lessons like this. He'd throw his visored cap on
the table, and it would fall down with a soft plop, then he'd nod his head to say
one was right, or shake it to say one· was wrong.
It was not always that he came. They could remember perhaps two weeks
when he remarked to their mother that he had never seen two children looking
so smart. The praise had made their mother look over them as they stood around
listening to the goings-on at the meeting of the neighborhood association, of
which their mother was president. Two children, one a girl of seven, and a boy of
eight. They were both very tall for their age, and their legs were the long gangly
legs of fine spirited colts. Their mother saw them with eyes that held pride, and
then to partly gloss over the maternal gloating she exhibited, she said to the
man, in answer to his praise, But their homework. They're so lazy with them.
And the man said, I have nothing to do in the evenings, let me help them. Mother
nodded her head and said, If you want to bother yourself. And the thing rested
there, and the man came in the evenings therefore, and he helped solve fractions
for the boy, and write correct phrases in language for the little girl.
In those days, the rage was for pencils. School children always have rages
going at one time or another. Sometimes it is for paper butterflies that are held
on sticks, and whirr in the wind. The Japanese bazaars promoted a rage for.
those. Sometimes it is for little lead toys found in the folded waffles thatJapanese
confection-makers had such light hands with. At this particular time, it was for
pencils. Pencils big but light in circumference not smaller than a man's thumb.
They were unwieldy in a child's hands, but in all schools then, where Japanese
bazaars clustered there were all colors of these pencils selling for very low, but
unattainable to a child budgeted at a baon of a centavo a day. They were all of five
centavos each, and one pencil was not at all what one had ambitions for. In
rages, one kept a collection. Four or five pencils, of different colors, to tie with
strings near the eraser end, to dangle from one's book-basket, to arouse the envy
of the other children who probably possessed less.

Add to the man's gentleness his kindness in knowing a child's desires, his
promise that he would give each of them not one pencil but two. And for the
little girl who he said was very bright and deserved more, he would get the
biggest pencil he could find.
One evening he did bring them. The evenings of waiting had made them
look forward to this final giving, and when they got the pencils they whooped
with joy. The little boy had two pencils, one green, one blue. And the little girl
had three pencils, two of the same circumference as the little boy's but colored
red and yellow. And the third pencil, a jumbo size pencil really, was white, and
had been sharpened, and the little girl jumped up and down, and shouted with
glee. Until their mother called from down the stairs. What are you shouting
about? And they told her, shouting gladly, Vicente, for that was his name. Vicente
had brought the pencils he had promised them.
Thank him, their mother called. The little boy smiled and said, Thank you.
And the little girl smiled, and said, Thank you, too. But the man said, Are you
not going to kiss me for those pencils? They both came forward, the little girl
and the little boy, and they both made to kiss him but Vicente slapped the boy
smartly on his lean hips, and said, Boys do not kiss boys. And the little boy
laughed and scampered away, and then ran back and kissed him anyway.
The little girl went up to the man shyly, put her arms about his neck as he
crouched to receive her embrace, and kissed him on the cheeks.
The man's arms tightened suddenly about the little girl until the little girl
squirmed out of his arms, and laughed a little breathlessly, disturbed but innocent,
looking at the man with a smiling little question of puzzlement.
The next evening, he came around again. All through that day, they had
been very proud in school showing off their brand new pencils. All the little girls
and boys had been envying them. And their mother had finally to tell them to
stop talking about the pencils, pencils, for now that they had, the boy two, and
the girl three, they were asking their mother to buy more, so that they could
each have five, and three at least in the jumbo size that the little girl's third pencil
was. Their mother said, Oh stop it, what will you do with so many pencils, you
can only write with one at a time .
. And the little girl muttered under her breath, I'll ask Vicente for some
more.
Their mother replied, He's only a bus conductor, don't ask him for too many
things. It's a pity. And this observation their mother said to their father, who was
eating his evening meal between paragraphs of the book on masonry rites that
he was reading. It is a pity, said their mother, people like those, they make friends
with people like us, and they feel it is nice to give us gifts, or the children toys
and things. You'd think they wouldn't be able to afford it.
The father grunted, and said, The man probably needed a new job, and was
softening his way through to him by going at the children like that. And the
mother said, No, I don't think so, he's a rather queer young man, I think he
doesn't have many friends, but I have watched him with the children, and he
seems to dote on them.
The father grunted again, and did not pay any further attention.
Vicente was earlier than usual that evening. The children immediately put
their lessons down, telling him of the envy of their schoolmates, and would he
buy them more please?
Vicente said to the lillIe boy, Go and ask if you can let me have a glass of
water. And the little boy ran away to comply, saying behind him, But buy us
some more pencils, huh, buy us more pencils, and then went up the stairs to
their mother.
Vicente held the little girl by the arm, and said gently, Of course I will buy
you more pencils, as many as you want.
And the little girl giggled and said, Oh, then I will tell my friends, and they
will envy me, for they don't have as many or as pretty.
Vicente took the girl up lightly in his arms, holding her under the armpits,
and held her to sit down on his lap and he said, still gently, What are your lessons
for tomorrow? And the little girl turned to the paper on the table where she had
been writing with the jumbo pencil, and she told him that that was her lesson
but it was easy.
Then go ahead and write, and I will watch you.
Don't hold me on your lap, said the little girl, I am very heavy, you will get
very tired.
The man shook his head, and said nothing, but held her on his lap just the
same.
The little girl kept squirming, for somehow she felt uncomfortable to be
held thus, her mother and father always treated her like a big girl, she was always
told never to act like a baby. She looked around at Vicente, interrupting her
careful writing to twist around.
His face was all in sweat, and his eyes looked very strange, and he indieated
to her that she must turn around, attend to the homework she was writing.
But the little girl felt very queer, she didn't know why, all of a sudden she
was immensely frightened, and she jumped up away from Vicente's lap.
She stood looking at him, feeling that queer frightened feeling, not knowing
what to do. By and by, in a very short while her mother came down the stairs,
holding in her hand a glass of zarzaparilla. The little boy followed her. The mother
said, I brought you some zarzaparilla, Vicente.
 But Vicente had jumped up too as soon as the little girl had jumped from his
lap. He snatched at the papers that lay on the table and held them to his stomach,
turning away from the mother's coming.
The mother looked at him, stopped in her tracks, and advanced into
the light. She had been in the shadow. Her voice had been like a bell of
safety to the little girl. But now she advanced into the glare of the light that
held like a tableau the figures of Vicente holding the little girl's papers to
him, and the little girl looking up at himJrightenedly, in her eyes dark pools
of wonder and fear and question.
The little girl looked at her mother, and saw the beloved face transfigured
by some sort of glow. The mother kept coming into the light, and when Vicente
made as if to move away into the shadow, she said, very low, but very heavily, Do
not move.
She put the glass of soft drink down on the table, where in the light one
could watch the little bubbles go up and down in the dark liquid. The mother
said to the little boy, Oscar, finish your lessons. And then turning to the little
girl, she said, Come here. The little girl went to her, and the mother knelt down,
for she was a tall woman and she said, Turn around. Obediently the little girl
turned around, and her mother passed her hands over the little girl's back.
Go upstairs, she said.
The mother's voice was of such a heavy quality and of such awful timbre
that the girl could only nod her head, and without looking at Vicente again, she
raced up the stairs. The little boy bent over his lessons.
The mother went to the cowering man, and marched him with a glance out
of the circle of light that held the little boy. Once in the shadow, she extended her
hand, and without any opposition took away the papers that Vicente was holding
to himself. She stood there saying nothing as the man fumbled with his hands
and with his fingers, and she waited until he had finished. She was going to open
her mouth but she glanced at the boy and closed it, and with a look and an
inclination of the head, she bade Vicente go up the stairs.
The man said nothing, for she said nothing either. Up the stairs went the
man, and the mother followed him behind. When they had reached the upper
landing, the woman called down to her son, Son, come up and go to your room.
The little boy did as he was told, asking no questions, for indeed he was
feeling sleepy already.
As soon as the boy was gone, the mother turned on Vicente. There was a pause.
Finally, the woman raised her hand, and slapped him full hard in the
face. He retreated down one tread of the stairs with the force of the blow,
but the mother followed him. With her other hand she slapped him on the
other side of the face again. And so down the stairs they went, the man
backwards, his face continually open to the force of the woman's slapping.
Alternately she lifted her right hand and made him retreat before her until
.• they reached the bottom landing.
 He made no resistance, offered no defense. Before the silence and the grimness
of her attack he cowered, retreating, until out of his mouth issued something
like a whimper.
The mother thus shut his mouth, and with those hard forceful slaps she
escorted him right to the door. As soon as the cool air of the free night touched
him, he recovered enough to turn away and run, into the shadows that ate him
up. The woman looked after him, and closed the door. She turned off the blazing
light over the study table, and went slowly up the stairs.
The little girl watched her mother come up the stairs. She had been witness,
watching through the shutters of a window that overlooked the stairs, to the
picture of magnificence her mother made as she slapped the man down the
stairs and out into the dark night.
When her mother reached her, the woman held her hand out to the child.
Always also, with the terrible indelibility that one associates with terror, the girl
was to remember the touch of that hand on her shoulder, heavy, kneading at her
flesh, the woman herself stricken almost dumb, but her eyes eloquent with that
angered fire. She knelt. She felt the little girl's dress and took it off with haste that
was almost frantic, tearing at the buttons and imparting a terror to the little girl
that almost made her sob. Hush, the mother said. Take a bath quickly.
Her mother presided over the bath that the little girl took, scrubbed her, and
soaped her, and then wiped her gently all over and changed her into new clothes
that smelt of the clean fresh smell of clothes that had hung in the light of the sun.
The clothes that she had taken off the little girl, she bundled into a tight wrenched
bunch, which she threw into the kitchen range.
Take also the pencils, said the mother to the watching newly bathed, newly
changed child. Take them and throw them into the fire. But when the girl turned
to comply, the mother said, No, tomorrow will do. And taking the little girl by
the hand, she led her to her little girl's bed, made her lie down and tucked the
covers gently about her as the girl dropped off into quick slumber.