Philippine Speculative Fiction (30 page)

It took him three tedious years, and countless roundtrip plane tickets in between, before he could finally summon the courage to invite her home, together with the tangible proof of their mutual
flesh and blood. That statuesque moment when she first rang the bell on my grandmother’s doorstep with overflowing ambivalence, looking for my Uncle, was as good her moment of epiphany as
mine. It was my elusive piece of the puzzle that came full circle at last.

FOR MY GRANDMOTHER, life had its own way of playing unwanted tricks up her sleeve. She hobbled to the door one day to find a complete stranger on the doorstep, asking to see
her only son, holding a child that eerily possessed some of her features. Her heart raced. The woman resembled no one she knew before, and yet something about her seemed awfully familiar, sending
chills up her spine. “
Maayong aga
,” the woman struggled in her thick accent while averting her eyes from my grandmother, who continued to stare at her, dumbstruck.

Scarcely a week had passed since her arrival, and the news had spread like wildfire. Young people in our neighborhood began congratulating my Uncle. His friends proposed a toast and feted him
for being a real man, while winsome maidens batted many a bashful eyelash whenever he passed by, as if discreetly recognizing his achievement and upping his potential value as a dashing debonair.
The elderly folk in our village, however, certainly thought otherwise. They sported disapproving frowns whenever passing by my grandmother’s house, shaking their heads and whispering to each
other in hushed, stiff voices.

“She is from Capiz,” began First Aunt, stroking her chin. “Careful, she might be a witch. Or half a witch. Or one-sixteenth of a fourth of an eighth of a witch.” One of
my female cousins instantly let out a high-pitched shriek of terror and Mother cupped a palm to her mouth, effectively hushing her.

Unfazed, First Aunt proceeded to discuss her theory. “In the unlikely event that she’s entirely human, a good chance her mother is, or her grandmother, or her great grandmother, or
her grandmother before her.” And then she turned to my younger cousins, with their innocent faces and huge, curious eyes. “Which means,” she elaborated, lips pursed and index
finger raised for emphasis, “You must always carry a clove of garlic with you and never stare at her reflection.”

“Not entirely impossible. I saw her sneak out the other night unnoticed. Well of course,
I
did notice! Right after sundown,” Mother seconded, crossing her arms with a
characteristic pout.

“And she’s always dead tired in the morning,” Second Aunt countered. “Slumped on her bed like a log and fast asleep like there’s no tomorrow, as if the mere
presence of daylight willed her to it. One time she was so tired she went to fetch her child at school and couldn’t even find her! Now what kind of mother would lose her child!”

Third Aunt clucked her tongue.

“The day her frantic mother couldn’t find her, that daughter of hers was discovered by a search party in a secluded area of the campus, preaching some sort of weird stuff to her
classmates.”

“Like the child Jesus?” asked one of my young cousins, with a gleam in his eye. My sister, meanwhile, raised a wobbly hand.

“So… I guess Mother was right, after all.”

“Right about what?”

“She really is the mother of his child.”

Everyone turned to my grandmother, with the usual solemn look on her face. She opened her mouth as if to speak but no words emerged. I peered into her cloudy eyes, drawn wide with disbelief as
the harrowing truth sank in. The shock and sorrow of having to deal with an unmarried affair—plus scores and generations of bastard grandchildren and great-grandchildren, human status yet
undetermined—had stabbed her straight through the heart and silenced her.

NO ONE HAD the heart to tell my grandmother when the news became official.

An autopsy ruled out any suspicion of foul play or suicide. The attending doctors mentioned some alien disease which crept like lightning, suffocating the heartbeat and snuffing out life in
seconds. Some pioneering Spanish doctor named Pedro Brugada had meticulously mapped out its intricate technicalities, by wonder of research, but even his notable expertise—plus the numerous
electrical shocks delivered beneath garish fluorescent lights—proved insufficient to save my Uncle from his own mortality.

That day, Inday was nowhere to be found, but no one was shocked. No one questioned her whereabouts, either, save for the glum-faced, guileless gardener who wanted to ask her permission to take
home some of Uncle’s beloved bonsai, in his loving memory. Some thought the ghosts of the ancestors banished her to the portals of damnation for her insolence, while others believed that
Uncle’s loss pushed her over the edge and finally made her lose her mind. A few malicious theories even abounded, comparing her to “a wily felon fleeing the crime scene, looking
uncannily bewildered.” Whatever the case, most agreed that we were actually better off without her. For the first time since Inday’s inopportune arrival in my grandmother’s
household, First Aunt looked especially relieved, and she could be heard jovially humming along to jukebox hits on the radio, no doubt comforted by the thought that she could finally eschew a
month-long ritual of painstakingly chopping garlic and avoiding her own grisly reflection in mirrors, as though they might strangle her.

“I always thought she would leave anyway. Eventually, at least,” Mother commented while drafting an obituary for the local newspaper. “It’s just a matter of
time.”

It was therefore to everyone’s astonishment when Inday showed up during the funeral, clad in a plain black dress and an antiquated lace veil that shrouded her misty eyes. Her luxuriant
hair, not anymore tied in a bun, waved in the wind and fell freely to her shoulders. During the long march towards the cemetery, she walked on with her gaze fixed at the muddy ground, heavy feet
bouncing off the earth freshly slaked with an afternoon drizzle, her diminutive figure occasionally obscured by the montage of pungent flowers and condolatory messages from kith and kin who wished
they “could be present in these difficult times but couldn’t make it due to unforeseen circumstances.” The dull glimmer of funereal bulbs reflected our collective grief, a ghastly
specter of bleary faces and swollen eyelids, gaunt and scruffy from refusing to sleep or swallow any more sorrow.

“What is she doing here?” First Aunt furiously hissed, albeit a little too loudly, even as she brushed off the angry tears that blotched the makeup on her rotund face.

My younger sister who trailed behind Inday, meanwhile, had an oddly strained look on her face, as if expecting her to grow fangs at any moment or sprout hideous bat-like wings then fly off into
the distance with a full moon serving as backdrop. Now and then, she would teeter on tiptoe and survey the gloomy faces around her—slightly perplexed at how everyone seemed alive and well,
with no signs of twin bites on their necks, or worse yet, their livers torn into unrecognizable morsels.

“You’ve been watching too many horror movies,” I rebuked her as the funeral dirge softened to a nadir, the mournful party arriving to a stop in front of the damp grave
site.

From this point onwards, the series of events that took place have been described as both tumultuous and unreal. There were several contradictory elements in the testimonies of disputed
witnesses, a missed detail here and there, but the format of their accounts contained a general consistency, with all of them agreeing that the chaos evoked an inexplicable, unflinching sense of
dejà vu somewhere in their personal histories. As the coffin was lowered to the ground, there was a hue and a cry as horrified bystanders saw Inday dash forward, shove off some of the dazed
pallbearers and hug the casket hysterically, crying, “My husband! My husband!” even as others attempted to pluck her off in vain. She flailed her arms dangerously, refusing to budge or
let go.

“Don’t you dare! Don’t any of you dare! Do you know that I am his
wife
?”

One petrified onlooker described it as a scene yanked straight out from a Lino Brocka classic—“a youngish Nora Aunor at the brink of widowhood, driven mad with suffering—only
there were no miracles.” Her more religious companion, however, claimed that it resembled more a vulgar pastiche of biblical times—“like a boorish, weepy Mary at Calvary,”
even as she hastily made a sign of the cross, clutched her rosary close to her chest, and mumbled a quick prayer of forgiveness for using the Virgin’s name in vain. At that precise moment,
lightning flashed and thunder clapped, and rain blasted down, hard and heartless, scattering the column of numbed mourners.

“What happened?” Mother asked one of the pallbearers as she scampered with the rest of my aunts towards the overhang of the nearest mausoleum for shelter, shivering and dripping
wet.

“She ran off.”

“Disappeared? Just like that?”

“Yes. Vanished. Took the child with her.”

“I think she must have left for good.”

“Do you think she’ll return?”

“If you’d ask me, this might be the last time we’ll ever see of her.”

MEMORY HAS ITS way of spanning the unforgotten years, winding back to you in splinters. Each rusty fragment inhabits the peripheries of our existence, growing sallow with
obscurity, the lonely slivers dwindling to our last vulnerable leavetakings.

At First Aunt’s behest, Uncle’s room was to be tidied and torn down. She said it harbored far too many memories—memories so painful “they could shatter her heart in two,
like a dreadful earthquake.” The antique bed was to be stripped of its sheets and sold, the hardwood furniture to be repainted and upholstered, the velvet curtains to be taken out and washed.
With the afternoon sun streaming in from the drab windows, I casually made my way into the room, tracing a film of dust that had settled on the shabby walls, wondering how much unanswered mysteries
it contained.

And then I saw it.

I blinked once, and then twice, and swallowed hard.
It couldn’t have been,
I half-murmured to myself, feeling an unusual pounding in my ears. There, at the far right corner of the
room, half-tucked beneath a moldy mattress and a pile of termite-eaten wooden planks, one beholds her, serene and spotless: a miniature statue of our Lady of Sorrows.

Mater Dolorosa
.

I walked over and pulled out the figurine. Other than a chipped nose and peeling layers of paint in disparate places, she was perfect. She wore a haunting cloak of the finest brocade, her milky
hands clasped in profound prayer, the virginal crown on her head a symbol of her immaculate glory. And yet her tender face brimmed of an unspoken agony: sad mouth tightened into a waxen furrow,
supplicating eyes smudged by an inadvertent pool of wetness. Rooted to the spot, I felt a bitter, acrid taste sear my lips. It was the look of a woman who had borne an extraordinary cavalcade of
pain in her lifetime, her heart bled and pierced and wounded only too many times by the imaginary dagger of sin, and yet remained perpetually gracious and compassionate to those who were foolish
enough to shun her inhuman sacrifices.

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I thought I heard the wind rustle ever so slightly.

“Inday?”

I whipped around, but was met only by silence, and the windows, and the lifeless ruins of a room left behind by the ghosts of abandon. I gripped the Marian statuette tight in my hand and felt it
bear down on my palm with the awful weight of all these years, as if it were carved out of cold, unforgiving stone. Stepping out into the yard, I watched as the fiery radiance of the incandescent
sun blazed down to its final rays, slanting across a grove of blossom-laden trees spread out with the perfect symmetry of nature. A heady fragrance wafted through the balmy twilight breeze,
settling on a lush carpet of dew-soaked grass as the somber knell of nearby church bells tolled the hour of evening.

Hail Mary, full of grace, thy Lord is with thee.

Mother’s voice echoed from the kitchen, calling us to dinner. The flaming sun had retreated back to its nightly abode, and in its stead, a dazzling parade of stars. I smiled knowingly.
Ever obedient to Mother’s words of wisdom, I had obliged dutifully. I never did call her Uncle’s wife.

Elyss G. Punsalan is based in Manila and runs her own video production company. Some of her fiction can also be found in the anthologies
Philippine
Speculative Fiction (Volumes 3 and 6), Philippine Genre Stories, A Time for Dragons, Horror: Filipino Fiction for Young Adults,
and the webzine
Bewildering Stories.
At one point in her
life, she produced and hosted the monthly Filipino audio fiction site Pakinggan Pilipinas (
http://pakingganpilipinas.blogspot.com
). Elyss hopes to find true love one day.

SIMON WAS CAREFUL when he kissed his women. He kept his mouth closed and his eyes open. His hands were always busy. His fingers pressed the smalls of their backs, glided along
the arc in their spines as if they were made of glass. His partners whimpered and moaned, opened their mouths to his, coaxed his tongue with theirs, but he answered them with church kisses on their
cheeks, and that killed the mood entirely.

What’s wrong? they’d ask.

Nothing’s wrong, he’d say.

Everything’s wrong, he’d say to himself. I have a scissor tongue.

Not willing to expound on the matter, he would untangle himself from the knots of arms and legs and quietly, gently, get up from bed. At first he would contemplate on taking a cold shower, but
the pull of a good drink would win him over, and down the stairs he would go, down to the unfinished cellar where the expensive wines were.

They would leave, asking no more questions. Their hair would be a mess but their lips radiated with some variation of Vamp Rouge. A few tried to tempt him with casual conversation on the way to
the door, hoping for a breakthrough, a change of heart, followed by a return to magnificent sex. At the dating rituals he had always shown his wit, his ease, his love for dialogue, but Simon would
only smile back as he held the liquor in his mouth. They would leave, they would think him a tease, and he would be sadder and more deflated than any of them.