It was as magnificent as we had imagined for years. The crown moldings on the ceiling were still intact, the wood resonant and strong. The house exuded majesty, though the high ceiling was patched with mold, the walls laced with cobwebs, and the air thick with the scent of rat droppings.
“There’s where it appears.” A hand was lifted to point to the wide staircase and promptly yanked down. Pastor Gerry turned around to address the group, describing the agreed-upon route we were to take around the house.
To our left were double doors which, when opened, revealed the parlor, a large wood-paneled room forlorn with a few scattered cane chairs and patches on the wall where the pictures used to hang. Holding his Bible aloft, Pastor Gerry led the group’s hasty prayer. After reading a few biblical passages, he raised his voice and issued the command for the demons to depart in the name of Christ. We held our breaths for a moment, and when it became apparent that nothing would materialize in objection, we broke into relieved chatter.
The group moved on, in high spirits, to repeat the process in the library and dining room on the right side. There was scarcely any furniture left, though it was easy to imagine how grandly the rooms had once been outfitted from the pale silhouettes of long-gone bookcases and cupboards on the walls.
In the kitchen, Lola Concha instructed the Pastor to wrench open a small door that hid the stairs servants used to get to the second floor. Without protest, everyone squeezed into the tight passage. Emerging from it, we found ourselves in the right wing of the house.
There were four rooms in this wing, Lola Concha explained, the biggest of which had been hers. She strode across her room while we scattered and examined the skeleton of her four-poster bed, a delicately carved night table inlaid with mother of pearl that had apparently been overlooked in the inventory, and all the other remnants of her hermit years. Pastor Gerry stood by the door, and after some minutes, cleared his throat impatiently. Immediately, we hurried back to formation, horrified at a few moments of distraction.
The rites were performed in the other rooms, leaving the master bedroom at the far end of the left wing last. The chatter, which had been rising steadily, slowly died down as we approached the door that led to where, in Lola Concha’s words, “everyone I knew in this house had died.”
The room was stifling; the two windows had been boarded up. On the floor lay debris from a part of the ceiling that had crashed down. The only fixture in the room, a tall thin wardrobe, sat in a corner, and a few women jumped upon seeing their reflections on its mirrored doors.
I looked at Lola Concha; her face was drawn with infinite sadness. She took the Pastor’s arm, and slowly pushed open the door to the bathroom, where her husband had died far from her sight.
The tiny black and white tiles were green with age, the small bathtub swathed in cobwebs. On the wooden cabinet above the sink, tiny bottles with faded labels were lined up, still in place, as though waiting for someone.
Pastor Gerry intoned the invocation; Lola Concha’s head was bowed, her lips moving with a prayer of her own.
After the ceremony was finished, we moved out of the room slowly, down the hall to the grand staircase, discussing the feasibility of a batchoy lunch downtown. The sun was now high in the sky; the light streamed through windows that we had opened, wiping away the shadows. Some of the members heaved sighs of relief; my mother giggled when she was teased about her fear.
Down the staircase, we could see the open front doors and the street beyond. We were at the last station. Pastor Gerry flipped his Bible open and began to read the first lines of Psalm 23.
It was then that the wind came. It rushed down the stairs, sped to the front doors, slamming them shut. The walls threw back our screams, upstairs the windows were rattling like sinister applause. The wind clutched at our clothes, our hair. One woman shrieked, “There it is!” setting the others off like dominoes.
“It’s here!”
“Look up, there’s someone there!”
I closed my eyes, hearing Pastor Gerry’s voice struggling to surface beneath the panicked noise.
“In the name of Jesus, in his holy blood, be gone!”
When I opened my eyes, everything was still. A weak light suffused the room. The women were on their knees, holding their heads. My mother clung trembling to my leg. Pastor Gerry was slumped on the step, gripping his Bible. Only Lola Concha was slowly rising to her feet.
“Pastor,” she said. “Is it gone?”
We all stared, mouths agape, as she crumpled to the ground and wept mightily. “Is it gone?” she cried.
The only answer was the stillest silence, unlike anything I have ever heard again.
This was years ago, now the house is no more. When her time came, Lola Concha died in her sleep, peacefully, they said—something I wanted so much to believe.
Things have moved on, the house has faded from the town’s memory, although sometimes I can still see its rooms and feel its weight, and wonder what it truly was that we all left behind.
Beggar of Description
Adel Gabot
WHEN I PASS dark, deserted alleys or shadowy street corners, I look, and I look very hard. It’s been nearly six years now, and I still haven’t found him; if he isn’t dead yet, I mean. And to my mind that’s highly likely, considering.
I don’t understand what happened in that jeepney on that day six years ago, and I won’t pretend to; I don’t think I’ll ever understand.
Sometimes when I sit thinking, I dread the moment I actually do find him because I don’t think I know what I’ll do. A large part of me wishes I could forget the whole thing. Perhaps I’m better off not knowing. But I can’t let it go.
On that day, several things conspired to make me a witness to something that has changed my life. It was one of those rare cusps when things come together for no apparent reason and have dramatic effects on lives. Some people win lotteries, and some have the unfortunate luck to step in the path of a stray bullet.
In my case, I rode an old passenger jeepney.
My family and I live in one of those subdivisions that straddle the gray area between urban and rural. Six years ago the subdivision was appended to the city by a series of streets that were more appropriately called wide dirt paths. During the rainy season they were so muddy and rutted as to be nearly impassable, much to the delight of my students. The route is almost two hours away by car, and a heavy downpour is enough to set me back plenty. I was told by my other colleagues in the faculty that my advisory class hunts up improved versions of Indian rain dances in their free time.
On that day, my husband’s old Corona wouldn’t start, so my daughter Elli and I had the privilege of using the public transport system. That meant leaving the house at half-past five in the cold morning, so Elli and I could have a chance of not being too late for recess.
Elli is graduating from high school next term, so that puts her at about fourth grade on that day six years ago. She studied in the school where I was teaching then, as she is studying now in the exclusive girl’s school where I am, despite my shortcomings, the new assistant principal. She isn’t impressed at all by my new position because, she says, she hasn’t gotten the slightest advantage at all from me since she started going to school anyway.
Elli saw everything that happened that day, so at least one soul could corroborate everything I saw. But even though it almost literally happened under her nose, Elli’s youth has diluted the experience and memory of that day. When I try to talk to her about it, she casually says, oh, yeah, that, as if I was talking about last Saturday’s lunch menu, brushing a hand through her long, beautifully straight, jet-black hair, in her dismissive Elli manner.
On that day, it was raining as if my advisory class, aided by a whole tribe of American Indians, spent the previous evening dancing their very best rain dance. On top of all that, we were a disastrous half-hour late starting. Elli and I spent nearly forty minutes waiting in that downpour for a ride, so you could imagine my mood and ho
w it worsened when the old clunker of a jeepney that was supposed to take us to safety hove muddily into sight.
The old jeepney crawled through the puddles wearily toward us, patiently doing the tired chore that was its raison d’etre. By sheer instinct, it picked its way around holes that it could barely see for the rain; being a driver myself I know the feeling of plunging heavily into one of those bottomless pits. You get to know which was just bound to wet your tires and which would break your axle in two. This jeepney was a veteran on that score.
It was nearly full. Actually, there was just one seat left, a tight squeeze, but you couldn’t tell that from the outside; fogged-up plastic flaps kept that secret in, as it kept the rain out. But you could tell it was full by the way it set heavily into the holes that would catch it by surprise, by the height and distance of the brown splash, or the metallic grunting of the overworked chassis.
I wedged myself between a fat housewife with a large basket that we had to step over, and a quiet woman and her baby. Elli perched herself on my lap and her yellow slicker thoroughly soaked the front of my dress. I held our dripping umbrella awkwardly. We made a sad, wet, miserable tableau.
This is a fact of life: one of the hardest things to do is to travel an hour-long ride with only a smidgen of a seat holding you up and a squirmy, heavy kid on your lap. A bumpy road just doubles the agony.
To take my mind off the pain of holding Elli up, I began to look at who my riding companions were. They were the usual: housewives on the way to the public market, some high school girls, one or two laborers and a few middle-class commuters like Elli and myself. An assorted, motley crew; it seemed to me each face mirrored the gray depression of the sky outside, for they were all sullen and quiet. I gave Elli our fare, and she paid for us with the flourish of her wet, raincoated arm, spattering everyone.
Small talk seemed a chore; the air was heavy and wet and smelled of mildew and badly laundered clothes. The slapping of the rain on the roof made it difficult to exchange even the simplest of pleasantries, leave alone the juiciest, most urgent gossip. Another fat woman across from us seemed to want to say something, but thought better of it and went back to staring at the rain. Everyone seemed to contemplate the downpour, the slowness of our progress and each one’s worrisome tardiness.
All except the baby in the arms of the woman beside us.
The baby was swaddled heavily against the rain and the cold in what seemed like endless yards of old fabric. I realized later on that it was a faded blanket, so big that the baby seemed lost in it. The small pink head peeking out of it told me it was barely days old, and the stuffed, cheap bag flanking Elli’s schoolbag in the aisle told me that the mother and child were on their way home from the public hospital nearby called Sta. Isabel’s.
The baby was crying lustily and with abandon, as if giving voice to our collective depression. Elli positioned herself on my lap to watch it in earnest as it struggled in the blanket in its mother’s arms. The mother turned from Elli as if to protect her child from my nosy daughter. Elli turned up her nose, harrumphed at the rebuff and turned back to watching the roof drip water onto a man’s head.
The baby was crying up its own storm within the hot, damp confines of the jeepney. The mother tried vainly to shush her baby, but gave up after a while. She glanced up at me and I caught a forlorn look in her eyes that disturbed me. She probably hocked her house and jewelry to be able to pay Sta. Isabel’s already indigent-adjusted fees, and was angry and ashamed and confused and worried and embarrassed and defiant all at the same time.
Then the baby struggled furiously out of its blanket and I saw the real reason for the mother’s expression.
The little baby had a harelip.
It stretched its pink, toothless, deformed mouth wide, pushed aside its swaddling clothes with small, chubby arms and let out a deafening, mournful wail, as if it was aware of its disfigurement. The terrible cleft lip slashed up into the baby’s nose, exposing a distressing amount of gum and the reddish inside of the nostrils. It cried plaintively now, untrammeled by the blanket, loud in the small, cramped space of the jeepney.
The mother looked around at the other passengers, desperate and embarrassed, as the baby struggled in her arms. She tried to swathe the baby’s face in the blanket but the child resisted her efforts. She looked like she wanted to cry herself, and a soft keening sound escaped her, barely heard in the rumble of the rain. It was their first time out in public, I guessed, the first time people other than the hospital would get a look at her child. She took a small lace handkerchief from her pocket and gently tried to cover the baby’s mouth.
Wiping teary eyes on her sleeve, she held the baby close to her chest to quiet it down, and look at the rest of us with hurt, reproachful eyes, sure of what we were all thinking. Like everyone else, I caught myself staring, and I realized it was painfully obvious in my case because I had to twist my head around to look at the mother and child, as Elli and I were seated directly beside them. I immediately cast down my eyes to the back of my daughter’s yellow raincoat, burning with shame. The sticky, humid closeness of the jeepney became distinctly more uncomfortable, and I twisted uneasily on my perch.
“Mommy—,” Elli began, and I cut her off with a withering look. The normally dense fourth-grader immediately grasped the situation and remained quiet, but continued to sneak wondering glances at the baby.
I looked at the other passengers. Some were busily looking away, ashamed of themselves and their thoughts. The two high school girls had begun whispering among themselves, but the fat woman with the happy face put a stop to them with a furious look that I didn’t think her capable of. No matter. The mother was oblivious now, and was trying to distract the baby by making sounds at it. The baby continued to cry loudly.
The jeepney picked its way slowly through the ruts and potholes, and the silence inside it lay heavy with unspoken thoughts and unacknowledged embarrassment.
The mother finally succeeded in quieting down her child by the oldest of maternal tricks—sticking a bottle in its mouth. She began to rhythmically squeeze the plastic bottle, dripping the formula down the baby’s throat. It dawned on me how difficult raising a child like that would be—the simple instinct of suckling would be impossible for the baby with its cleft palate. Even now, the baby gurgled and choked as the milk flowed down the wrong pipe; the mother became more careful, but it was hard with the jeepney’s swerving and swaying.
Raising this baby would be difficult under the best of circumstances, I realized. I was lost so deeply in my thoughts that I almost didn’t see the beggar leap up and cling to the back of the jeepney; I think we were rounding one of the many bends of our route when he stepped out from under a tree and hopped aboard to hang on the step. If Elli hadn’t suddenly drawn against me, it would have been some time before I realized we had an extra passenger. But then again, I think the smell would have alerted me before long.
The man was filthy. And that was being kind.
He was one of those poor souls you see rummaging about garbage heaps, hanging around alleys, sleeping under bridges and begging near churches and other places where people congregate and emerge from with generous, charitable moods. There were many words to describe them: scavengers, hobos, bums, tramps, but none so colorful and pungent as the vernacular term taong grasa.
He wore tattered, blackened clothes that were more hole than fabric, held together by grime. Old and thin, the man had long, wet oily hair plastered to his head like a greasy shawl. He was veined with light brown lines where the rain had eroded the dirt on his skin. I supposed I should be thankful that the downpour had washed him off a little. He clung to the bars at the back of the jeepney, leaving grease marks on them.
It didn’t seem to bother him much that the jeepney was full; I don’t think it mattered—empty or not, he’d likely just hang on to the back anyway. I felt Elli relax against me as she realized that the taong grasa had no intention of forcing himself inside and finding a seat. She looked a
s relieved as the other passengers, and I imagined my face reflected similar sentiments.
The fat housewife sitting beside us and separating us from the filthy man edged nervously away from him, making my position all the more precarious. The others looked away in disgust and wrinkled their noses. The lady with the chubby, happy face now held a chubby hand across her nose and mouth.
I took a surreptitious look at our new passenger and was more appalled by what I saw; he was worse off on close inspection.
He looked like he could keep a team of doctors busy for a whole day straight. He had running and bleeding sores; in fact, he seemed to have a scar on every other pore, and sores in between. A nasty, scabbed and pus-crusted gash on his elbow looked raw and bleeding. If they ever got him to sit still long enough to be treated, I don’t think the doctors at Sta. Isabel would know where to start.
The jeepney lurched. To get a better grip, the man reached in and grabbed the overhead rail inside the jeepney, right above my head. I glanced up at his hand clutching the overhead rail and saw that he was missing most of his fingers. One of those left was stunted and underdeveloped, as though from birth, and two looked like they were lost in an accident. I couldn’t see the other hand. Even his arm looked funny; it rested at an odd angle, as if it was broken and the bones were left to set and knit on their own.
I looked closer. One leg, dangling from the running board, seemed shrunken and gnarled as though from a childhood bout with polio. He seemed like he’s had a lot of bouts with a lot of nasty things throughout his life. All things considered, he made a good case for a generous, full-service dole-out from some big corporate benefactor.
He was wracked suddenly by a violent coughing fit (tuberculosis?), spittle flying, and I recoiled, like everyone. He stared up and caught me looking at him.
Ghosts of Infinity: and Nine More Stories of the Supernatural Page 4