Hungry Hearts

by Elsie Chapman

  But customers who were wronged and angry, hungry for vengeance against some perceived slight, ordered the sisig special instead. The meal itself was a test; if they could finish the dish despite the growing infernal spiciness of each bite, then, in the mangkukulam’s eyes, their revenge was justified. The pact was then sealed, with a lock of their target’s hair or a fingernail clipping mixed into a tiny portion of sisig previously set aside, then smeared against a straw doll. Payment was then arranged, and it was a rare instance when her client’s enemies didn’t succumb to misfortune shortly after.

  But if the supplicant wasn’t worthy? Well, misfortune fell upon them instead, and they still had to pay for the meal besides. Upon learning what was required of them, most were quick to back out of the agreement, suddenly finding new reasons not to risk what happiness they had to ruin someone else’s. “Humans,” Lola Florabel had said, shrugging like she wasn’t one herself. “Always predictable. It is only when they realize they have everything to lose that they decide that they can live without their petty vengeance.”

  You were quick to point out that she lost customers that way, but none of the witches seemed bothered. “It is not the money,” Lola Simeona said. “It is the reputation. Who would eat at a carinderia that would serve scum like them?”

  It was Lola Simeona who served their bestseller: Soup No. 5 was a horrifying concoction of bull testes and spices, yet still was the best broth this side of the city, a popular meal for the adventurous and for those who prize umami above all. Occasionally a new customer would stagger out, pale and green all at once, because Lola Simeona was never shy about telling them exactly what they were eating, and in great detail. If it tasted good, she liked to say, then why would knowing this change anything?

  Lola sold Soup No. 5 regular at nearly all hours, closing at two a.m., only to begin again at nine the next day. Soup No. 5 regular was a picker-upper, a mood brightener. Soup No. 5 regular put people in cheerful temperaments, ready to face the day with optimism—a surprising side effect, given the cantankerous nature of the chef.

  Soup No. 5 special, on the other hand, required a three-day notice. Soup No. 5 special began after Lola Simeona invited her client to the back of the tiny eatery for a mandatory screening. Finishing the sisig special was Lola Florabel’s test; for Soup No. 5, Lola Simeona herself was the test.

  Lola would circle the customer like a tiger eyeing prey, scrutinizing them closely as if she could glean secrets from that alone. She would fire off questions: Why do you ask for the special and not the regular like most? Who do you intend to court? What is the status of your current relationship? What are your intentions with the person you wish to pursue? She sniffed out lies like an old bloodhound, and as far as you could tell she had never been wrong.

  Answer poorly, and she would dismiss you, sometimes even chase you out if your explanations disgusted her, as had happened more often than not—Lola was never shy about asking if they intended to seduce or sexually harass the object of their affections. When their guilt became obvious, she would end the interview, the nonclient kicked out with great prejudice. Lola Simeona had been taught arnis as a young girl by her own father, and while wooden sticks were not immediately available at the carinderia, straw brooms were nonetheless deadly weapons in her hands. Few people were willing to report being chased out by an old Filipina lady, especially one who was skilled at exaggerating her aches and limps on the rare instances a cop came inquiring.

  But answer right, and a miracle would happen; she would visibly soften, a rare smile gracing her wrinkled face, and she fussed over her new customer, making sure they were relaxed and comfy as one could be in her small food stall before serving them her prized dish.

  Lola had only ever sold Soup No. 5 special sixty or so times in her long lifetime: to husbands and wives desperate to rekindle their romance, to elderly men and women hoping to find love again, to youngsters unable to feel. They called Soup No. 5 special an aphrodisiac, but it was more than just a love philter. Soup No. 5 special didn’t turn you into a raging pervert or a philandering horndog or any one of the misconceptions often associated with the word. Soup No. 5 special changed you into the person you would have to be in order to find true love, wherever that might lead.

  Lola turned down food documentaries, celebrity chefs, news crews. She despised trends with all her being. Most culinary students who came asking for an apprenticeship were promptly turned down—though Lola made one notable exception by hiring a young dishwasher who came at night and left before the carinderia opened the next day. “The others come chasing glory, their personal fame,” Lola said dismissively. “They bring nothing to my food. But this one—he is a good man at heart, and eager to make something of himself. You cannot improve your cooking if you feel very little need to improve yourself. He will go far, this one.”

  On the other hand, you loved reality cooking shows, baking competitions, No Reservations reruns. You wanted to be paid to travel the world and eat culture. You wanted to fall in love with shakshuka on a boat to Tunisia, with Belon oysters atop the Eiffel Tower, with xalwo at a Somali wedding. What’s wrong with wanting to explore everything through flavors? you asked. Isn’t the point of Old Manila exactly that?

  But Lola would scoff and wave her hand like that explained everything, when it only explained nothing.

  The first time you were allowed to observe the rituals of Soup No. 5 was with a man unhappy with his marriage, wanting a second chance with his distant wife. He was well dressed, arriving in an expensive suit and tie after what appeared to be a hard day’s work, a Bluetooth device still tucked by his ear. Something was missing in his life, he explained, and try as he might, he did not know what that was. Lola Simeona was satisfied by his sincerity. “This shall take you down a road you may not expect to go,” she warned, setting the broth before him. “A sip means there is no going back.”

  He sipped, and finished the soup in twenty minutes.

  It was two weeks later, after the scandal broke of the ImmersiTech CEO who had left his wife for a male accountant, that you remembered him. Lola Simeona had beamed with pride at the news. “He’s happier now, Ami. No one else can determine that for him anymore. He will still be a rich man, and with the money he makes for them, they will still allow him to build his little applications—”

  “Apps,” you corrected her, and she shrugged.

  “—but now he will find better peace in his life, even though it will not be with the wife as he had thought. Tara, Ami. He has found his happiness, but we will have to work harder for ours.”

  * * *

  You called Florabel and Teodora lola out of respect, but Lola Simeona was your real grandmother. Her son, your father, was a nurse and had no instinct for cooking, the magic apparently skipping a generation. Both your parents worked long night shifts at the hospital, and it was Lola who looked after you while they were away.

  Your father was delighted to learn you were spending your days at the carinderia. “Your lola isn’t always the nicest lady, but she’s kind when she wants to be, and she’s an excellent cook,” he explained to you once. “I’m glad she wants to teach you. I’ve never seen her in better spirits.”

  Lola’s life revolved around cooking. She didn’t have many friends outside Pepper Street, save perhaps for Mrs. Maymoona Jamal from the recipe club, with the granddaughter who was an award-winning filmmaker, and the sweet old lady at the taqueria, who she liked to trade a bowl of Soup No. 5 with for a beef suadero taco. When she died, Lola liked to say, she wanted her wake at the carinderia, because she was the carinderia, and to honor her is to honor that, and while her son and daughter-in-law made enough money, she wanted people to come and play cards and gamble by her coffin like they did in the Philippines when funeral costs needed to be paid.

  You were never sure if she was joking. Lola was the type of person you felt was going to live forever.

  There was more to the magic than just cooking. The day after you became her apprentice, an
d a week after your seasoning test, she began teaching you how to read people: tics, hand gestures, signs of discomfort at direct questions. Lola Simeona played mahjong, blackjack, poker. She would have earned more at professional tournaments than at the carinderia if she wanted to.

  You were disappointed that there weren’t more spells involved, but Lola was a pragmatic woman. “All the magic you need is in here,” she told you, wriggling her fingers. “It requires no thinking, only practice. Learning to read people—that will take time to master also. You need to understand human nature, hija—both the good and the bad.”

  But wasn’t this being deceptive, all the same?

  She looked offended. “Panloloko? No, no. Every one of my clients who have shown me that they are worthy have always gotten what they came for. My magic is real. It is in our bones, Ami, ever since the old days where datu ruled the islands and there were no white-skinned Kastila come to tell our people they were nothing more than servants. No Kastila, no Amerikano, no Hapones. We are made of spells. Walang panloloko dyan. No deceit. My conscience is clear.” She turned to the simmering pot at the counter. “At the very least, they all get a good meal. Practice, Ami. There is no talent without practice.”

  And practice you did. You hacked at livers and pig brains for sisig, spent hours over a hot stove for the perfect sourness to sinigang. You dug out intestines and wound them around bamboo sticks for grilled isaw, and monitored egg incubation times to make balut.

  Lola didn’t frequent clean and well-lit farmers markets. Instead, you accompanied her to a Filipino palengke, a makeshift union of vendors who occasionally set up shop near Mandrake Bridge and fled at the first sight of a police uniform. Popular features of such a palengke included slippery floors slicked with unknown ichor; wet, shabby stalls piled high with entrails and meat underneath flickering light bulbs; and enough health code violations to chase away more gentrification in the area. Your grandmother ruled here like some dark sorceress and was treated by the vendors with the reverence of one.

  You learned how to make the crackled pork strips they called crispy pata, the pickled-sour raw kilawin fish, the perfect full-bodied peanuty sauce for the oxtail in your kare-kare. One day, after you have mastered them all, you will decide on a specialty of your own and conduct your own tests for the worthy. Asaprán witches have too much magic in their blood, and not all their meals are suitable for consumption. Like candy and heartbreak, moderation is key.

  And after all, recipes are much like spells, aren’t they? Instead of eyes of newt and wings of bat they are now a quarter kilo of marrow and a pound of garlic, boiled for hours until the meat melts off their bones. Pots have replaced cauldrons, but the attention to detail remains constant.

  There was only one rule to being a mangkukulam, Lola told you. Never make it personal. There can be no hidden vendettas, no taking advantage of the magic to cause mischief or harm to someone else.

  Even when they deserved it?

  “Would people trust a judge who takes matters into their own hands?” Lola Simeona asked. “Would customers trust a cook who killed someone she calls a criminal, knowing that the cook can look into their own souls and see more potential criminals hiding within?”

  * * *

  Lola Simeona let you prepare Soup No. 5 regular for the first time two years into your apprenticeship at seventeen years old. Your customers praised it, and she beamed. “You are stronger in the spells than even I am, hija,” she said.

  The first time you brought it to school, Steven de Guzman grabbed your lunch out of your hands and tossed it into the trash. “Testicle Girl,” he sneered, and for the greater part of two weeks, before he grew tired and looked elsewhere for new cruelties, that was your name. Testicle Girl. Testicle Girl. Amihan Anna Dimatibag was already a mouthful to say, and when the novelty of Testicle Girl faded, he resumed mocking your actual name, gargling it in his throat like it was gibberish. He and his friends laughed at your dark skin, at your hobbit height, at the accents your family carried around that thirty years living in America couldn’t slough off their tongue. In another two weeks, he would find something else to mock you for.

  The rest of your classmates watched, said nothing.

  Your grandmother found their bullying irrelevant. “Pay them no attention, Ami,” she would say, though you knew that was easier said than done. “People who pick on others have a rot inside of them the same way bad fruits bruise faster and poor vegetables wither quicker. They are more susceptible to magic, more inclined to break the longer they live. They will get their karma in due time. Let God deal with them.”

  People, your grandmother always liked to say, were viands made from only three fundamental ingredients: the salt of their blood, the spice of their bones, and the venom in their veins. The latter was the most important; poison, she added, gave character.

  But karma’s flight was delayed, apparently indefinitely, so when Steven did it again the next day and several people started laughing along with him, you wound up eating your lunch at the library for the next two weeks. All through that first week, you hid your face behind the largest book you could find, so no one else could see you cry. But by the second week you were angry. Something had hatched inside you, coiled around your chest, with rage in every heartbeat. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair.

  Lola Simeona herself was a potent toxin. You were slicing pork strips to make liempo when an elderly Japanese man came tearing out of the shop as fast as his old legs could carry him. Not far behind was your grandmother, eyes bulging with rage, armed with a fistful of knife, just as slow as her prey. “Putangina mong Hapon ka!” she screeched. “Papatayin kita!”

  The Japanese man had fought in the imperial army during the Second World War. He was no longer the young soldier Lola had encountered in the forests of Bataan, her beloved province, but she had recognized him and his atrocities all the same.

  “He escaped,” she snarled later on, a hot cup of salabat tea cradled in her veined hands, her attempts at homicide thwarted by the law and a sympathetic but firm-handed cop. “I killed his men, but he escaped.”

  Bits of the story trickled out, Lola Florabel and Lola Teodora cobbling them together for you because Lola refused to. Your lola had been a young girl forced to cook for the soldiers who had invaded her village, forced to sample the meals herself to prove their harmlessness. The men died anyway, their bodies twisted in agony like the kabantigi plants in her old garden. Lola Simeona said little else about her time with the invaders, only that she had killed them in the end.

  The Japanese were a superstitious lot. Her village had been left alone after that, in the four months before the war ended.

  But later that night, when the noise of the city had died down to sporadic sirens, you heard her crying. For the girl she might have been, for a pain that knew no passage of time.

  * * *

  You did your best to be a good student. You chopped and cooked and measured and served according to her wishes. But sometimes you wondered if the stall could stand to be upgraded with modern comfort food. With pandan ensaymada instead of the increasingly popular but also growingly common ube, the bread fresh from the oven and the cheese still melting, sweetly fragrant from the infusion of those steeped leaves and as simple as a summer morning. Or chopped watermelons in bulalo soup to replace tomatoes, for that extra tang. Or even pork adobo, but with chili and sweet pineapples. You had so many ideas.

  Some people at school still gave you a hard time over your choice of meals. Since learning that making bull testicle soup was your main family business, many had been relentless. “How many cows have you sucked off today, ho?” Steven de Guzman would taunt you. Other people joined in too—Gary McLeroy and Mike Bayer loved to dump your lunch on the floor like de Guzman did, and Lani Noda would turn her nose up and announce very loudly that you were stinking up the whole class because you smelled like what you ate—but it was de Guzman who made it a habit, who made it personal, who made it his life’s work to make yours
miserable.

  Most just watched—worse, sometimes they walked away.

  It was easier when you brought in ube rolls, fried lumpia spring rolls, pancit noodles. Normal-looking food. Fusion-looking food. Food that didn’t have to be made from animal extremities or brains. Food that didn’t look like it was cooked from them. Everyone knew and liked adobo, even if Steven de Guzman would never admit to it. Some days, when your lunch looked like it could pass for everyone else’s, he would even leave you alone. Things were always easier when your food could be mistaken for food that didn’t stand out.

  It’s not like you ate Filipino food all the time. You loved Emperor’s Way takeout, and the friendly Chinese girl there who you were too shy to ask but whose name tag said to call her Ming always gave you extra sauce for your orange chicken. The sweet potato pie from Butter was absolutely to die for, and it made you feel soft and warm the same way Lola’s leche flan did. The youngest Manzano once handed you a delicious pastry without prompting or demanding payment before drifting away, seemingly lost in a world of her own. If this was a marketing strategy for their pastelería, it worked.

  But you could tell that there were differences in the way they cooked and baked, that they took old and treasured recipes and put in their own unique, modern spin to them. Why couldn’t you do the same?

  And so you made ube ensaymada without your grandmother knowing and lugged containers of it to school the next day. You had baked enough of the brioche for a small army; you ran out in ten minutes, and Lani even apologized to you shortly after.

  (But had you added spells to the food without meaning to, and was that why she was sorry—or was the food just that good? You were made of magic, Lola said, but this kind of magic didn’t come with instruction manuals.)