Summer Solstice Archetypal Theory

4693 Words19 Pages
The Summer Solstice Nick Joaquin THE MORETAS WERE spending St. John's Day with the children's grandfather, whose feast day it was. Doña Lupeng awoke feeling faint with the heat, a sound of screaming in her ears. In the dining room the three boys already attired in their holiday suits, were at breakfast, and came crowding around her, talking all at once. "How long you have slept, Mama!" "We thought you were never getting up!" "Do we leave at once, huh? Are we going now?" "Hush, hush I implore you! Now look: your father has a headache, and so have I. So be quiet this instantor no one goes to Grandfather." Though it was only seven by the clock the house was already a furnace, the windows dilating with the harsh light and the air already burning with the immense, intense fever of noon. She found the children's nurse working in the kitchen. "And why is it you who are preparing breakfast? Where is Amada?" But without waiting for an answer she went to the backdoor and opened it, and the screaming in her ears became wild screaming in the stables across the yard. "Oh my God!" she groaned and, grasping her skirts, hurried across the yard. In the stables Entoy, the driver, apparently deaf to the screams, was hitching the pair of piebald ponies to the coach. "Not the closed coach, Entoy! The open carriage!" shouted Doña Lupeng as she came up. "But the dust, señora" "I know, but better to be dirty than to be boiled alive. And what ails your wife, eh? Have you been beating her again?" "Oh no, señora: I have not touched her." "Then why is she screaming? Is she ill?" "I do not think so. But how do I know? You can go and see for yourself, señora. She is up there." When Doña Lupeng entered the room, the big half-naked woman sprawled across the bamboo bed stopped screaming. Doña Lupeng was shocked. "What is this Amada? Why are you still in bed at this hour? And in
Open Document