Later, in bed, they were too excited to sleep. During their ramblings, Tala spoke of Inday, a woman who wove miraculous figures out of banana leaves, and her son, Baitan, a boy with a heart of gold, who had nothing. It was the first time she’d mentioned either of their names.
Following this confidence, he decided to ask Tala about the albularyo, recalling his wife’s relaxed body language in the albularyo’s stall as they exchanged conversation and a little red box.
“Speaking of the market,” he said casually, “it’s easy to get wind of what people are saying, even when you’re not sticking your ears out. Have you been visiting regularly with an albularyo?”
“Why would I? I don’t believe in such witchcraft,” she lied.
11. Possessor of Fortunes
“Do you see him?” Iolana asked her husband. She held the curtain to one side and hid herself behind it, standing sideways like a curious, peeking bird. Andres walked directly to the window and looked out.
“He’s gone. But what’s the worry? He’s as thin as a reed. If he shows up again in his Captain Suave sunglasses, Luchie will blow him over to the other side of town with a few waves of her fan, and that’ll be that.”
Luchie rocked evenly on the chair, fanning herself and yawning. She picked at the little hairs protruding from the mole on her chin. She had not seen the mysterious thin-man lurking around the neighborhood. She certainly had a bad feeling about it all, but the most she did was wrinkle her brow, frown, and pick at her mole hairs. And besides, no one had asked for her opinion.
“Should we tell Manolo?” Iolana asked. She’d released the curtain and now pushed it open again just a crack, peering through it with one eye.
“Why worry him? Knowing him, he’ll stop working to keep a lookout here, and then we’ll all starve,” retorted Andres.
Luchie suspected that something strange and unnatural was afloat. Prior to the pregnancy, there had been the gossip. Intrigued by its scent, Luchie followed it to its source: a bitter old man with a loose and biting tongue, who’d somehow come to resemble the candles that he made for a living.
The nosy candlemaker was the type who enjoyed suffering, as long as it wasn’t his. She herself had wriggled in discomfort under this man’s scrutiny. He watched every customer who visited the albularyo’s booth across the way, as if that were his business and the candles were a side job. Then he’d yammer on with the basketweaver in the booth next door about the way their faces changed, from tragic to hopeful, depending on whether they were coming or going. The regulars would be his favorite, those whose faces were nearly always tragic, whose remedies were sought and taken in vain. He dedicated most of his time to them, to their sorry fortunes and wayward lives, connecting them in some way to everything wrong in the world. Sometimes, these same customers visited his booth for candles or incense, and surely then, he’d try to find out more. About where they lived and with whom, and he’d change his theories to match.
Now the basketweaver also loved gossip, but only after announcing himself as the kind of man who minded his own business. He kept his head immersed in work like an honest man, he’d say, even when the customers were scarce. Even so, he relished the candlemaker’s nosy speculations more than he admitted. Luchie knew this because he’d tell his wife every detail of it that same night. The candlemaker said this and the candlemaker said that, and what a character that candlemaker is, but you know, he’s got a point about so-and-so. Then he’d add his own theories, even about the pretty girl who came by the market a few times a week. He didn’t agree with the candlemaker that she was married to a seaside toad, he told his wife. It must be some kind of prince that she went to all that trouble for.
The basketweaver’s wife was Lourdes’s sister. My husband is a man who minds his own business, she’d say first, to either Lourdes or to her cousin, who was also Camcam’s husband. With this tribute to the basketweaver’s good name she passed the gossip on to the neighbors who lived on Manolo’s street.
So it didn’t take long for news from that not-so-anonymous market corner to reach Luchie’s willing ears, then for the speculations to begin traveling both ways, until theories, then conclusions formed in the shape of Tala. She was in fact the pretty girl who went to the marketplace to visit regularly with the unpopular albularyo. No one trusted an albularyo who spoke so little, who got to the point without so much as a prelude, not like others of her kind with nothing but talk for as long as you had the money to listen. And with this woman, they were seldom the words one came to hear.
More than that, Tala’s visits with her were rumored to be long, so long the neighbors joked Manolo would go bankrupt while his wife tried to fix whatever was wrong with him.
But Luchie was not silly enough to accept the sour end of gossip, when curiosity changed to malice. She did the math, and in the end agreed with Iolana. Iolana, too, ignored this line of gossip and dared not let Andres’s pride be wounded by hearing condescending rumors about their son. Tala was not unlucky in love; she and Manolo adored each other in equal measure. She did not have prematurely thinning hair or pimples. Neither had she been bitten by a manananggal disguising itself, and its thirst for pregnant women, in an unsuspecting human form. She never displayed the ill health or excessive paleness of the bitten, and she was too level-headed to have been possessed by a duwende. But there was another reason why a young lady might visit an albularyo. Tala had simply been unlucky for too long, and she had been ready to conceive by whatever means necessary.
Luchie was convinced that no good could come from meddling with one’s destiny. After working its powers, planting a seed in Tala’s womb, the magic would waste no time demanding its due; it would take from Tala’s life whatever was necessary to earn back the luck it had forged, or worse, make a profit, with Tala as the losing gambler.
After her last honeymoon with her husband, the girl spent much of her time nesting indoors, and Luchie compared the pregnant Tala to the smiling-smiling girl of a year before. She was a mother-to-be now, long past the stage of seeking her place in the home. Recently, while playing a game of Scrabble, she’d asked about Luchie’s mother. Luchie could not tell her much. She’d been younger than Tala when her mother died. She could no longer tell which memories were real and which imagined. But she never did forget the feeling, that of losing everything joyful in the world. Like the seas draining, suddenly and frightfully, leaving an emptiness behind that would never be right.
“Losing a mother,” Tala had replied, “is probably the saddest thing in the world.”
“Not as sad as losing a child,” Luchie said, wishing she did not have the misfortune of knowing this was true. Luchie’s son was not dead—she had long been dead to him, a far worse predicament than the grave itself. Like many in his generation, he’d gone to school and immediately left the country for better opportunities abroad. With her son sending money like clockwork, she considered herself retired. She had lived and worked long enough, slaving away in other people’s mess so her son could have a future. Her dedication to his schooling—ensuring he always had new clothes to wear to class, spending her bonus checks on his latest whims to keep him motivated—all of it had finally paid off. Then her son sent her a letter—he had found himself a woman and they were starting a family. She gasped at the idea of a grandchild. Any day, she expected a letter from her son proclaiming that her petition had gone through and that her plane ticket would be next to arrive. Instead, she never heard from him again.
Old enough to be Tala’s grandmother, Luchie had enough experience to recognize that the mistress of the Lualhati household, in spite of her grown-up role, was still just a girl, bright but impulsive, well-intentioned but careless. She could not know that the decisions she made now would impact all her life, set the stage for every minute ahead of her. Meddling with dark forces she had no business meddling with, she would eventually have to contend with the consequences.
There was another reason Luchie was so convinced. It started when Tala, in her r
avenous state, began stalking the kitchen to munch on dessert rolls or leftovers from the night before. When the rolls disappeared and the leftovers ran out, Tala would make an omelet with the last of the eggs, then search the refrigerator for tapioca pudding. She repeated this pattern throughout the day. In the process, she neglected the market for a week at a time, all the while consuming all the food in the house, mopping up the chicken salad with a loaf of bread, cutting up an avocado to ice in milk, or stir-frying vegetables between meals. She opened and closed cupboards and stared into the refrigerator for minutes at a time. Finally, when it seemed Tala might eat the refrigerator itself, Luchie grabbed her red cart and some money from the envelope Manolo kept for her in the drawer. She had long ago memorized the list of foods the couple kept in the house.
“If you happen to come across any tarot cake, I would adore that, my dear Luchie,” Tala managed to yell out as Luchie rattled her old bones in preparation to leave.
Like most men, Manolo loved his meat, the pork bellies and beef tongues and slippery tripe. There were the habitual fruits and vegetables and canned goods Tala had grown into the habit of using. And then, Luchie liked to throw in little treats here and there to mix things up: plantains to fry, raw mangoes with salted shrimp, bagged pork skins to dip in vinegar.
Pulling her red cart behind her, Luchie moved at a steady, even pace, which others might have considered painfully slow. She was not young, and hurrying, she was sure, would only bring her closer to whatever unpleasantries awaited at the end of all the hurrying.
She could not remember why the curiosity hit her. The albularyo’s booth was at the end of that short alley that she normally avoided. For years, she’d made it a point to keep her distance from the perverted candlemaker. Particularly after an incident, when his meddling had gone too far, far enough to ask her if she’d ever been touched by a man. Afterward she could only bear to come as close to his booth as the intersection, whenever she had the inkling to buy fresh crab.
That day, though, she’d given herself an excuse out loud, for her own benefit to hear: I’ll rub my nose into the nosy candlemaker’s business for a change. But her true intention was to satisfy a curiosity to see the notorious albularyo for herself. She already knew what to ask for: a moisturizing salve that could fill in her old lady wrinkles.
The air had been dry and seemed even drier as soon as she passed her feet across the threshold of that inconspicuous alley. An eerie wind rustled, sending the debris afloat from one dusty corner to the next. She greeted the basketweaver upon passing, heard the raspy sound of her own voice melt quickly into absence. He nodded in return like a statue version of himself. He did not know her, could not know that with the help of his chatty wife, she was acquainted with a handful of his bedside habits, none of them flattering.
The candlemaker was not around. But his booth was open, the candles lined up dutifully: tall, short, thin, fat, all of them lifeless. A plain young woman read a magazine behind the counter, looking up without a trace of enthusiasm in her bang-swept eyes. Luchie looked toward the albularyo’s booth and saw she was there: alone, her face down, her long hair falling over her cheeks, obscuring her. Luchie walked closer. And the woman behind the counter looked up, waiting, then expectant, her posture straightening.
Luchie continued walking until the two of them were face to face, and then she gasped.
Tala herself was the albularyo.
Luchie muttered something about losing her way and walked off without waiting for a response.
From then on, the vision of Tala behind the albularyo’s booth tugged like a distant, bad dream. Surely an omen for her to look ahead toward her next move, to whatever means the world might allow to keep her body fed and her feet warm. She weighed her options, considering which of her alternatives would be most merciful on an aging old woman. But then she shrugged it all off and sat back down on the rocking chair. What else was there to do? Like many things that seemed so convincing at first, the certainty of it began to fade. Luchie’s own life was a metaphor for this fact, and she didn’t need her fortune told to admit it. She never thought she’d end up alone. Now her solitary routine suited her like a comfortable pair of socks on a cold floor.
She would watch the household drama until it was time to go home or refill the cupboards. Today, that drama consisted of Iolana, Andres, and the question of the strange reappearing thin-man.
“It’s odd,” Iolana said. “Tala doesn’t go out these days, gallivanting for flowers or what-not, and suddenly, this man starts coming around.”
“And what does one have to do with the other?” Andres replied.
“There’s always a connection, my dear husband. One just has to make sense of the dots.”
“Well, our daughter-in-law is quite engaged with expecting our first grandchild. That’s all I know. It’s good she’s settling down for a change.”
“Wait, it’s him. He’s back, Andres, he’s back!”
Luchie perked up in her chair and craned her neck to see, but Manolo’s parents blocked the window.
“Well,” she asked. “What is he doing? What does the thin-man want?”
When they didn’t answer, Luchie stood up and wedged herself between them.
“But that’s no man. That’s just a boy,” she said.
“Stranger number two, Luchie. Another dot to connect.”
The boy had knobby knees, oversized clothing, and long, unwashed hair sweeping across a sun-brown forehead. He leaned toward the Lualhatis’ front entrance, all of his energy devoted to the direction in which he leaned, though his feet were firmly planted. He saw them peering at him through the window, but seemed too timid to approach the front door.
“Susmaryjosep,” Andres said. “This could last all day.”
Andres went out front, with Iolana following close behind. Luchie kept her place at the window, where she could see and hear everything without having to look over a pair of meddlesome heads.
“Hoy, you there. Come here, child. Yes, closer, go on. Are you lost? Is everything okay?”
“I am Baitan, from the market. Is Tala here?”
“She’s napping, son,” Iolana said. “What is it?”
“Can you please tell her. A man has come to our mat, and to all the market stalls?”
“A man, son?”
“Yes, a man. He’s looking for her. He says he’s her brother. And can you tell her. The albularyos—they’re all gone.”
“All? Well, just how many of them were there?”
“They’ve disappeared and the stall is empty.”
12. Shapes in the Water
The Boatman arrives by the third sunrise, collecting lost souls stranded between worlds, shepherding them to the Land of the Dead. When she was not there to meet him, her sisters set up the market stall to watch over her in this new life. To us, this narrow market stall is in fact as wide as an ocean.
Tala herself closed the door to that infinite sea. She did not know that Dalisay, Imee, Ligaya, and her other sisters had been shut off with her, banding together against the fate she’d dealt them.
I did not wait long before she arrived with her husband, as I knew she would after the boy had delivered his warning. I invited them to the interior of the booth, sniffing the back of her neck and touching the hem of her skirt without their noticing. When they were seated, I sealed the back of the booth from view with a fresh white sheet substituting for a curtain.
Who am I? No one but a simple albularyo. One who can read this pregnant woman and her husband. A voice escaping a box, a voice escaping a dream. To many, I am no one.
I placed a bowl between them, with a rim as wide as a plate, filled with water and sprinkled with leaves. The wood-paneled walls around us were bare and aged, the spaces between the panels having widened over time, letting in the outdoor air. To me, there was no such thing as place in that moment, only distance and the illusion of time. In the back of the booth, the trinkets and bottles weren’t visible, but their smells were ev
erywhere. She had settled on bubble gum, he on mint, and I smelled the aroma of ten different flowers, all of them associated with the occasions in my life I’ve had the misfortune to grieve.
I did not speak. I sensed his anger growing in the bristling of his eyes, his resistance to wait in silence like a fool. But soon his eyes left my face and settled on the water swirling through the bowl. Its movement mesmerized him. It took shape, many shapes, a scalloped edge here and a thumb-sized dent there. Its variations were limitless. Reflections in the water began as specks of light, then came to resemble the hot sun in a pair of eyes, staring at him. He saw Imee’s eyes, watching him. He sensed lobster claws snapping. He remembered Tala visiting with Imee, her relaxed gestures in the albularyo’s company, the boy playing with marbles at her feet.
He had hoped to find answers by coming here with her today. But instead, he’d found me, with these wild, unbrushed curls framing my murky eyes, seeing him as if from a great distance. He saw that they are old eyes, and frightening, older than the face in which they are embedded. He questioned who Imee was, who I was. Would Tala ever tell him of her otherworldly life, the life he believes he stole? She was opening up to him about her past, filling in the details, but they included no wings, no sisters, no stars. He pondered how she could have a brother, an entire past in the slums of Tagarro Bay. He felt pain and fear, for her, and for himself. The thought of their child in her womb flickered in the water, cheering him. He squeezed Tala’s hand.
The Hour of Daydreams Page 11
