Philippine Speculative Fiction (29 page)

Marc Gregory Y. Yu graduated from the UP College of Medicine and is currently an Internal Medicine resident at the Philippine General Hospital. Once in a
while, he leaves the portals of science to traverse the fine line between the real and the unreal. His fiction has been published in the
Philippines Free Press, the Philippines Graphic,
and
Lauriat: A Filipino-Chinese Speculative Fiction Anthology,
while his nonfiction has been published in the
Philippine Daily Inquirer
and
Tulay Fortnightly Magazine.
He received a Palanca Award for the Kabataan Essay in 2004 and a Philippines Graphic-Nick Joaquin Literary Award for Fiction in 2010.

“
But Mary kept all these things, and reflected on them in her heart.”

Luke 2:19

“YOU ARE NOT to call her Uncle’s wife.”

The warning came in a slew of soft, simmering syllables, strung through the summer air like a steaming bowl of boiled, piping-hot stew. Like an invisible shard suddenly lodged in space, I froze
stock-still in my seat. Inches away, my younger sister had shot up from her chair in a split-second impulse, pouncing upon the question with ravenous curiosity.

“What is she then, Mother? Tell me!”

Inquisitive eyes met the sheen of Mother’s uneasy gaze, grappling with the vagaries of yet another precocious interrogation. She let out a weary sigh as she caressed my sister’s
ebony curls, gentle strokes that seemed to say, “Honey, I wish I could tell you but you are so young,” but somewhere deep inside her I surmised Mother thought it best not to reply with
another of those perennially hackneyed, sugary statements. Oh no. She had to muster a lifetime of resolve to finally say the words that dangled precariously over the family’s good name.

“Mother of his child.”

I murmured those words over and over with the innocuous timbre of a schoolboy romancing a psalm. An austere Catholic upbringing had inculcated the proper sequence of wifehood and motherhood and
the proverbial puritan boundary between them, the unbending societal norm of all relationships:
wife
first, and then
mother.
Not the other way around, and certainly not merely the
latter. Booming and godlike, the school superior’s clarion voice resounded across the perimeters of the mammoth quadrangle: “Sex is sacred! Sex comes after marriage!” Nothing more
beyond that, and arms at our sides, we’d trudge back to our classrooms in a synchronized sea of shuffling feet. At my age, I knew not of the lure of contemporary sirens, knew not of the
scourge of whores, sluts, bitches, and concubines—“the plagues that wreak the destruction of men”—in the words of a self-righteous classmate.

Dolorosa was her name. From what little bits and pieces I have patched together from patiently eavesdropping during sacred adult conversations, I learned that she had appeared one day on my
grandmother’s doorstep. How she got there—and why—was an elusive secret at first, a piece of the puzzle entrenched in the cobwebbed crevices of the thick cement wall behind which
I crouched in stillness, ears pricked for each perceptible word. I learned, too, that she was the fourth in a brood of four—much to everyone’s chagrin.

“Fourth! Of all numbers, four!” I remember First Aunt complaining, banging her swollen fist on the table. “She will bring bad luck and misfortune will befall us all!”

As if that wasn’t unsettling enough, deciding what to call her became an equally cumbersome matter in itself. “Do we call her Dolor or Rosa?” Second Aunt queried, scratching
her head. “Good Lord, if she were only named Dolores instead.”

I swiftly ran her name down the back of my head and rummaged for synonyms.
Dolor.
Pain. Sorrow.
Was she named as such because her own mother went through terrible labor pains
just to bring her out into this world? Or perhaps, because she was aptly born on September 15, the Feast of our Lady of Sorrows? As of the moment, it didn’t matter. In our family’s
eyes, she was simply Dolor, bringer of pain. Bringer of sorrow.

Just as intriguing was how the second half of her name stood out in stark contrast to the ominous undertones that Dolor boded: Rosa, the rose. “What do you expect? She is an only girl, a
rose among the thorns,” Third Aunt opined, shrugging her shoulders. But First Aunt was quick to snap her out of it. “When I was a little girl, I had been pricked by a rose once! Vile
things.”

In the end, someone was summoned to encroach near her quarters and slyly pop the magic question (“Um, how do you prefer to be addressed? We are a bit puzzled. Really.”) at the first
creak of her doorjamb.

“Oh, Inday. Call me Inday.” She shyly remarked. “I’ve always been called Inday.”

With that, the arguments were finally put to rest and a strange quiescence hovered over the family table. Inday. We’ll call her Inday.

THE FIRST TIME I met her, fireworks gushed forth like streaks of Technicolor meteors across the pristine nighttime sky, heralding an epoch of providence and prosperity. There
we were at my grandmother’s place, the rowdy lot of cousins, nephews, nieces and grandchildren honking horns, slamming saucepans and jauntily jostling one another as the dreary drone of The
Yellow River Concerto floated in the background. At eighty, my grandmother seemed to dwell in a makeshift world lost in the shadowy gears of age. She appeared oblivious to the riotous sounds of
revelry now racking her residence, her glassy eyes sifting the scene before her, entreating us to crowd around her ancient rattan rocking chair. We each took turns guiding her wrinkled palm to our
foreheads as she handed out red glossy packets containing crisp indigo bills, trying to make sense of the boisterous bunch that was her lot of eleven grandchildren.

In the midst of the merriment, I spied her at the corner of my eye, a flash of magenta in a scurrying sea of red. She was seated on a vintage sofa almost musty with neglect, a lighthearted beam
on her face, as if she contented herself to be a mere spectator of the trifling commotion. My eyes darted down and then I saw her, too, the four-year-old toddler in a gingham jumper and harmlessly
playing on her lap, who undeniably possessed my Uncle’s arched nose and his deep, hazel eyes.

We caught each other’s gaze and her visage broke into a genial smile, reaching across the distance to penetrate the warp of silence and reluctance. To me, this moment was epic. I would
careen forward with heavy and hesitant steps, each monumental tread teeming with apprehension. She, on the other hand, would promptly leave her seat, lips readied in greeting.

“Hello,” she spoke timidly, her voice a fleeting echo in the cacophony of idle chatter. “
Kung hei fat choi.
”

It was a standard salutation graced only too many times that day, and yet this one sounded crisp and newfangled: the drawl neatly palpable, the twang decidedly distinctive. She must have willed
herself to hide it but it was there, the thick accent betraying her native tongue—“kung” rolled off reedy and brusque, “hei” lusciously splayed into a wide, lilting
inflection, “choi” slick with a thin, delicate lisp. My countenance lit up in amusement and she somehow viewed it as approval, her face a glowing portrait of unalloyed pleasure.

Before I could utter my first words—best described as a euphemistic amalgam of “How do you do?” and “The fireworks are magnificent, no?”—I saw Mother
graciously extending a silky hand, beckoning to her as she ambled her way to assemble with the rest of the family: the row of boys in Mandarin collars, the sprightly girls in glittering frocks, and
everyone sporting broad, saccharine smiles. Outside, the stream of fireworks continued their resplendent outburst, casting surreal wisps of smoke around the place. In the aftermath of the revelry,
when the noise had died down and the kids put to bed, when the food has been blessed and the incense burned to dust, the Year of the Tiger will come roaring in with a mighty bang—and Mother
fittingly saw to it that an amicable gesture was tendered in an effort to please benevolent spirits.

“Come, Inday, join us.”

For a minute, the heavenly deities must have been smiling down from their celestial thrones. I half-expected her to rise in flattering acquiescence, the exultant finale to this rare act of
recognition. But no, she meekly shook her head and smiled, curtly acknowledging the invitation and then quietly whispering to her daughter who trotted off to join my Uncle, her miniature frame
hauled up into his burly arms, giggling and drooling. She watched from a distance with a cheery look as the camera clicked away for posterity, that blinding flash of light belying layers of jaded
smiles that stretched to the fabric of our cheekbones. The casual onlooker, from afar, would probably attest to the sketchy portrait of happiness for several seconds at a time, the picture of one
big happy family, as it has always been and always will be, or at least that’s what we were taught to believe we are, after all these years.

“Maybe she knows her place,” Third Aunt whispered to Mother, straightening the frills of her blouse as the nonchalant cameraman wrapped up the last of his props, the screen fading
into oblivion.

THAT WAS THE first time I saw her, and because first impressions arguably last, that is how I shall always see her: An inch short of five feet, her sandy complexion almost
fashioned out of some unspoiled beachfront, contrasting Uncle’s pale, alabaster features. The trademark magenta outfit gradually evolved into collateral infusions of peach, burgundy, and
cyan—subtle nuances that highlighted her long, black tresses kept tightly tied into a bun. Two dainty eyes occupy a perpetually wistful face, an unmistakable mole jutting out from the slope
of a rounded nose like a pearl, akin to a youthful Nora Aunor back when throngs of adorers worshipped on their knees in pure, unadulterated devotion.

“I think I’ll always prefer an overweight Sharon Cuneta any day,” First Aunt staunchly declared when I suggested the comparison. It seemed understandable. Unlike Nora’s
fantastic odyssey of pain, hardship and eventual triumph—spectacularly captured in silver rolls of celluloid—real life does not guarantee a picturesque fairy tale ending to punctuate
long, battered years of sorrow. Inday, as I came to discover, hardly knew a life of instant miracles.

Nothing much can be said of the years before she met Uncle. Some said she successfully kept a dual identity, putting herself through school by day and beguiling men with her deceptive, old world
charms at night—from the elderly, grayed executive to the unsuspecting, gawky young man, all falling prey to her petite figure and unassuming ways, and she taking them all under her sleazy
wing for the night. Others were more reasonable. She must have found a decent job somewhere, perhaps as a laundrywoman or laborer, which would explain her shrunken face and roughed hands. What is
certain is that many years passed before she came to meet the man who would change her destiny, who would later become the father of her child.

How she met Uncle remained heretofore a baffling mystery. In the weeks that passed since its rickety conception, the story has meandered its way like a modern-day legend, rushing through the
rhythms of our lives like a raspy rumor. A concerned neighbor contracted it from one of Uncle’s erstwhile drinking friends, the hapless fool having once seen them “hand in hand,
sauntering through the silhouettes of a deserted alley without so much as the slightest hint of care in the world.” In the version I know, and have heard the most, the story involved traces
of a trite, mawkish romantic novel, best summarized as promising young entrepreneur meets obscure young rural lass. He would first glimpse her in a district fiesta one day, traipsing around the
myriad stalls that sold scores of polished rice and
lambanog
. She would pretend not to see him, though deep inside she must have acquired a particularly soft spot for his dreamy eyes and
elegant, trimmed mustache.

At this point, the story would be invariably cut short, a snapshot in time reeled back to reality.

“Not tall or attractive. What did he see in her?” A few listeners tipsily commented in between sips of cognac, as my aunts regaled them with the story of how everything began, the
plot unraveling down winding directions with each round of telling and retelling. Last I heard, there was no whirlwind romance, there was no love at first sight. Serendipity guided them to a common
endpoint at the embellished city plaza, where the mayor hosted a dinner for all visiting businessmen. She was supposed to have mixed a potent love potion into his glass as he dined, drank, and made
merry.

The object of her affection was a budding real estate agent who spent a great deal of time on out of town trips. All his life, Uncle had no choice but to live by the gridlocked checklist of
roles preemptively laid out for him, as is typical of an only son. Take a wife, bear children, and carry the family name for generations hence. At thirty-three, however, he remained noticeably
unmarried. Despite persistent urgings from his mother and sisters to settle down and start a family, he simply shrugged his shoulders and reasoned that he loved his work too much, more than
anything else, and that there was no need to worry, he would ultimately find her, one of these days.

Unknown to us, on one of those days, he did find her. Some said she reminded him of his first love: a haughty brunette of the mestizo elite who willingly spurned him for a wealthier, much more
prominent bachelor. Others believed he finally cracked under the bulk of social pressure and immediately grabbed the first girl he could find, no matter that he had arrived a virtual stranger in a
faraway provincial capital; that he found her not through cute little blind dates or prudent matchmaking help from his friends; that her impoverished origins were light years away from the
comfortable life that was thrust like a silver spoon into his mouth as he babbled and crawled atop his parents’ matrimonial bed. All I know is that right after Uncle returned from that
fateful trip, he was significantly more than his usual animated self, throbbing with the vibrant pulse of life and love.