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Updated: June 15, 2025
Doña Consolacion a number of times applied the lighted end of her cigar to the bare legs of Tarsilo, but his body did not quiver. It put out the light. "He has asphyxiated himself," murmured a cuaderillero. "See how his tongue is turned, as if he wanted to swallow it." The other prisoner, trembling and perspiring, contemplated the scene. Like a madman he looked about him.
"If you are Christians, if you have any heart," he begged in a low voice, "let me down quickly or make my head strike against the sides so that I'll die. God will reward you for this good deed perhaps some day you may be as I am!" The alferez returned, watch in hand, to superintend the lowering. "Slowly, slowly!" cried Doña Consolacion, as she kept her gaze fixed on the wretch. "Be careful!"
"Take care of my sister!" the unhappy one murmured, looking at the cuaderillero, with supplication. The bamboo pole creaked again, and again the condemned man disappeared. Doña Consolacion observed that the water remained still. The alferez counted a minute. When Tarsilo came up again, his face was livid and his features contracted.
Stones rained on the squad of cuadrilleros who were conducting the two offenders from the scene, and there were even those who proposed to set fire to the barracks of the Civil Guard so as to roast Doña Consolacion along with the alferez. "That's what they're good for!" cried a woman, doubling up her fists and stretching out her arms. "To disturb the town! They don't chase any but honest folks!
Doña Consolacion also heard them in her tedium, and on learning who it was that sang, after a few moments of meditation, ordered that Sisa be brought to her instantly. Something like a smile wandered over her dry lips. When Sisa was brought in she came calmly, showing neither wonder nor fear.
Themistocles after the battle of Salamis could not have shown more pride at the Olympic games. Doña Consolacion yawned in one corner of the room, and disclosed her black palate and her crooked teeth. Her cold and evil look was fixed on the door of the jail, covered with indecent pictures.
As a consequence, any one who after this would still be the enemy of such a man, deserved to fall into worse repute than even the weak and unwary devils. But the alferez deserved his fate. His wife was an old Filipina of abundant rouge and paint, known as Doña Consolacion although her husband and some others called her by quite another name.
She knew that she was beautiful, attractive, that she had the manners of a queen and that she dressed much better and more gorgeously than Maria Clara herself, though to be sure the latter wore a tapis over her skirt while she wore only the skirt. The alferez had to say to her: "Oh, shut your mouth or I'll kick you till you do!" Doña Consolacion did not care to be kicked, but she planned revenge.
"Remember that I'm no ancient! What are you thinking about?" "Never mind! Say Filipinas!" "I don't want to. I'm no ancient baggage, scarcely thirty years old!" she replied, rolling up her sleeves and preparing herself for the fray. "Say it, you , or I'll throw this chair at you!" Consolacion saw the movement, reflected, then began to stammer with heavy breaths, "Feli-, Fele-, File " Pum! Crack!
With the dawn the smell of burning became more pronounced; the hitherto crystalline clearness of the air was seen to be dimmed by a thin veil of brownish-blue vapour; and the lookout in his eyrie far up the mountain-side signalled that flames and thick smoke were visible in the direction of Consolacion del Sur.
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