Summer Solstice

THE SUMMER SOLSTICE

The Moretas were spending St.John's day with the children's grandfather, those feast-day it was. Dona Lupeng awoke feeling faint with the heat, a sound of screaming in her ears. In the dinning room the three boys, already attired in their holiday suits, were at breakfast, and came crowding around her, talking 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 instant or no one goes to Grandfather"

Thought it was only seven by the clock the house was already a furnance,the windows dilating with the harsh the

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 close coach, Entoy! The open carriage!" shouted Dona Lupeng as she came up.

"But the dust, Senora-"

"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, senora,I have not touched her."

"Then why she is screaming? Is she ill?"

"I don't think so. But how do I know? You can go and see for yourself, senora. She is up there."

When Dona Lupeng entered the roo., the big half-naked woman sprawled across the bamboo bed stopped screaming. Dona Lupeng was shocked.

"What is this Amada?" Why are you still in the bed at this hour? And in such a posture! Come get up once: You should be ashamed!"

But the woman on the bed merely stared. Her sweat-beaded brows contracted, as if in an effort to understand. Then her face relaxed, her mouth sagged open humorously and rolling over on her back and spreading out her big soft arms and legs, she began noiselessly quaking with laughter Ð'- the mute mirth jerking in her throat; the moist pile of her flesh quivering likje brown jelly. Saliva dribbled from the corners of her mouth.

Dona Lupeng blushed around helplessly; and seeing that Entoy had followed and was leaning in the doorway, watching stolidly, she blushed again. The room reeked hotly of intimate odors. She averted her eyes from the laughing woman on the bed, in whose nakedless she seemed so to participate that she was ashamed to look directly at the man in the doorway.

"Tell me, Entoy, has she been to the Tadtarin?"

"Yes, senora, last night."

"But I forbade her to go! And I forbade you