Collected Philippine Short Stories

The Doll | Egmidio Enriquez

HE was christened Narciso and his mother called him Sising. But when be took a fancy to his mother's old rag dolls which she preserved with moth balls for the little girls she had expected to have, his father decided to call him Boy. His father was excessively masculine, from the low broad forehead and the thick bushy brows to the wide cleft chest and the ridged abdomen beneath it; and the impotence of his left leg which rheumatic attacks had rendered almost useless only goaded him to assert his maleness by an extravagant display of superiority.

"We'll call him Boy. He is my son. A male. The offspring of a male." Don Endong told his wife in a tone as crowy as a rooster's after pecking a hen. "A man is fashioned by heredity and environment. I've given him enough red for his blood, but a lot of good it will do him with the kind of environment you are giving him. That doll you gave him—"

"I didn't give him that doll," Doña Enchay explained hastily. "He happened upon it in my aparador when I was clearing it. He took pity on it and drew it out. He said it looked very unhappy because it was naked and lonely. He asked me to make a dress for it—"

"And you made one. You encouraged him to play with it," he accused her.

Doña Enchay looked at her husband embarrassedly. "I had many cuttings, and I thought I'd make use of them," she said brushing an imaginary wisp of hair from her forehead. It was still a smooth forehead, clean swept and unlined. It did not match the tired look of her eyes, nor the droop of her heavy mouth.

Don Endong saw the forehead and the gesture, took in the quiver of the delicate nostrils and the single dimple on her cheek. "You are such a child yourself, Enchay," he told her. "You still want to play with dolls. That is why, I suppose, you refuse to have your son's hair cut short. You'll make a sissy out of him!" His eyes hardened, and a pulse ticked under his right ear. "No, I will not allow it," he said struggling to his feet with his cane and shouting, "Boy! Boy! Boy!"

His wife leapt forward to assist him, but as he steadied himself on his cane she couldn't touch him. Even in his infirmity she could not give him support. His eyes held her back, melted her strength away, reminded her she was only a woman—the weaker, the inferior, the dependent. She felt like a flame in the wind that had frantically reached out for something to burn and having found nothing to feed itself on, settled back upon its wick to burn itself out. She watched him struggle to the window.

When he had reached it and laid his cane on the sill, she moved close to him and passed an arm around his waist. "The curls will not harm him, Marido," she said. "They are so pretty. They make him look like the little boys in the story books. Remember the page boys at the feet of queen? His hair does not make him a girl. He looks too much like you. That wide thin-lipped mouth and that stubborn chin, and that manly chest—why you yourself say he has a pecho de paloma."

Don Endong's mouth twitched at one corner, looking down at her, he passed an arm across her back and under an arm. His hand spread out on her body like a crab and taking a handful of her soft flesh kneaded it gently. "All right, mujer," he said, "but not the doll!" And he raised his voice again. "Boy! Boy! Boy!"

The boy was getting the doll ready for bed in the wigwam of coconut fronds he had built in the yard below. The doll was long, slender, rag-bodied with a glossy head of porcelain. He had pulled off its frilly, ribbon trimmed dress, and was thrusting its head into a white cotton slip of a garment that his mother had made and was a little too tight. His father's stentorian voice drew his brows together. At whom was his father shouting now? His father was always shouting and fuming. He filled the house with his presence, invalid though he was. How could his mother stand him?

"Boy! Boy! Boy!" came his father's voice again.

Ripping the cotton piece from the head of the doll where the head was caught, he flung the little garment away, and picking up the doll walked hastily towards the house.