`

Miss Mijares, a lady of 34, 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. She was light, almost bony, but she had learned early how to
dress herself to achieve an illusion of hips and bosom. And yet Miss Mijares
did think of love, secret and 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. And in the movies, to sink
into a seat as into 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 she had college to finish, a niece to put through school and a
mother to care for, she had no time for love. It had seemed to her that love
stood behind her, biding her time, a quiet hand upon her shoulder 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. When she returned to the
office, a man stood by the window, he held papers in his hand. He was a
high school graduate and also a carpenter. He talked too much and without
a call. He came on odd days. The following week, Miss Mijares lost her way
home. But she had lost only for a while. The driver stopped at a corner that
looked like a little known part. The new hand was absent for a week and he
failed to report. When he returns, he said that his son died. A slow bitter
anger began to form inside her because he said he was single, and he
explained that he was not married to the mother of his child. It was past six
when she ventured outside the office. It was raining hard and the cold tight
fear of the old dream was upon her. When she flagged a jeepney and got in,
the carpenter jumped in after her. He was faintly smiling to her. The driver
swerved his vehicle and swung into a side street. It was a different alley this
time. In her heart, Miss Mijares dreams fluttered faintly to life near this man
--- seeming monstrous but sweet overwhelming.
`

An Application of
Psychoanalysis in Critiquing
“The Virgin” by Kerima
Polotan Tuvera

Submitted By:

Labay, Christine Joy

Malonzo, Andrea Claire

ED-31

Submitted To:

Prof. Estrellita C. Talag