Scary business

I don't celebrate Halloween. It’s not traditionally Filipino. All Souls’ Day is. It’s more creepy for being about the actual dead. That the dead remain that way guarantees the fun. Or, if not that, it drives home the sobering point that life comes but once. But I do not go for All Souls’ either. I honor my share of dearly departed far more than once a year. They live on in my thoughts, although the strings their memories tug at reach farther down.

Some people do not think that enough. They brave traffic and put their lives in the hands of homicidal bus drivers just so they can pay homage to— what, a pile of dust? Don’t take offense now: you know very well that is what it amounts to. I have this friend who claims that her parents appear to her in dreams, and she takes this as a plea from the beyond for her to visit their graves.

You dream, therefore you are. Alive, that is. You want to stop dreaming about your loved ones (or anything else, for that matter), there’s a sure way to do that. Get dead. Then you can come visit me in my dreams, preferably with a certificate from your divine being of choice attesting to your neediness for flowers, candles, or joss sticks. Special requests welcome. Your favorite dish, maybe? A DVD of the latest season of The Walking Dead? How about some candies na lang? They will get stolen anyway, probably by the same people who live atop your concrete box pretty much the rest of the year.

I’m sorry about that. What I’m really saying is that I do not believe in the supernatural: visions, apparitions, visitations, and manifestations by all manner of dili ingon nato (in English, “those unlike us” — white ladies, duwendes, the Virgin Mary on a potato chip, etc.). I think Noli de Castro and his ilk do us a disservice with their annual special coverage of such rubbish. For Pete’s sake, there are still people who dare not venture outside their homes lest the Skylab fall on their heads — and Skylab was fact (NASA had put the odds of re-entry debris hitting any particular person at 1 in 600 billion).

Another fact: People are scared of the unknown. Well, isn’t that why we have religion? Imagine if the Bible or the Koran had contained references to vengeful souls in white shifts and heavy mascara, winged creatures missing lower appendages and the company of a comb, or some such monstrosity. Oh — they do? Darn. Anyway, my friend is more scared of ghosts than armed robbers dropping in on her in the dead of night. Tell me, does that make sense to you?

But there’s one thing that scares me: barang (kulam to Tagalogs). That’s local voodoo. Kabayan regales viewers with crude dolls and needles and human paper cut-outs cavorting in mid-air. It’s pure showbiz. The really spooky side involves very ordinary-looking people who poison others out of spite, or something as banal as a pathological need to. Or they are contracted to by another party. Wings and fangs I can handle. Poisoning, driven by very real human urges? It’s the stuff of true-crime shows.

I wasn’t always convinced there were such people. Neither did another friend, a highly educated woman whose fierce intellect I respect. It had been plain to see that she was ill. Even her doctors conceded that losing a lot of weight in such short time could not be healthy. Except the lab tests said otherwise. From a medical standpoint, there was nothing at all wrong with her. In desperation she acquiesced to be taken to a tambalan (healer). He took one look at her and pronounced her a victim of barang.

Does that sound fantastic? “So be it,” she would say. “But I was there. It happened to me.” Fair enough. Speaking of fantastic, you haven’t heard anything yet. The tambalan had her drink a shot of lana — consecrated healing oil derived from the lowly coconut. That was all it took for her to regurgitate a piece of slimy meat, all of a piece (I gather it was big) and black as sin. And she was healed. Just like that.

When people complain about the lack of income opportunities in our province, I sometimes joke that we should promote cosmetic tourism, with a specialty in weight loss. Here’s how it works. The client goes to an accredited barangan (if he can be hired to poison your enemy, why couldn’t he poison you for the same fee? Or is there a protocol against that?). Draw up a contract, if need be. Or at least a waiver by the client, just in case. Then client waits as the poison takes its toll until such point that he/she drops to the desired weight. Then out comes the oil. Voila! Everyone’s happy. Except Dra. Belo, of course. Who cares? She’s already drowning in money.

I used the word “accredited” earlier. That’s because there are two kinds of barang, poison-wise. The one I described is known as laygay, wherein the poisonee wastes away for a protracted period before dropping out of the proposed program (or dead, God forbid). Then there’s pinabitî. That is where the victim dies in record time, express-like. Who wants that? It would be bad for tourism. Or maybe not. Assisted suicide qualifies as a niche market. Did I mention that the tambalan can also be a barangan?

But enough morbid musings. Have some pie — and never mind the look of it. I’m rather proud of the shell; so far it’s the only thing I’ve kneaded that has turned out the way it should. And the filling looks like pumpkin. Very apt for our topic. So did I celebrate Halloween after all? Nah. I just felt like trying my hand at pie for a change. I used kalabasa (squash), the cheapest filling I could find — you know, just in case I made a mess of things. It had happened before. Too many times, in fact. Baking is scary business.