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1
Malas, Swerte, Mana
Celestina was barely five years old when she got her first lesson on the concept of malas. She was not allowed to have a pet since dogs and cats made the house smell and shed hair all over the furniture. Her father did indulge her request for a “pet cactus” from an itinerant plant vendor who made the rounds in their neighbourhood. It was a Bullwinkle cactus, a comically funny figure to the child’s eye, with a body that looked like it had been flattened with a rolling pin. It had two small branches that stuck out like ears and two longer ones that suggested outstretched arms ready to hug. Unlike the other cacti in the vendor’s cart, this one had only the slightest hint of spikiness.
She named it Gumby, after the cartoon character she liked. Thereafter, it took its place on her bookshelf, beside a mermaid doll and her drawing of a creature that looked like a horse crossed with a dragon. Gumby’s residency lasted until the eagle eyes of Stella, Celestina’s mother, spotted it on the bookshelf.
“What is that?”
“That’s Gumby,” Celestina replied brightly.
“Well, Gumby is a cactus. We do not keep cacti in the house. It’s malas.”
Little Celestina had heard the word countless times before. It meant something bad, although she did not know exactly why or how. She immediately mounted a valiant defence of her pet. “Gumby is a good cactus. He only has baby spikes. He can’t hurt anyone.”
Stella sat down so she was eye to eye with little Celestina. “If you keep a cactus, you won’t find a husband. You’ll become a spinster. We don’t want that.”
“What’s a splinster?” little Celestina asked.
“A spinster,” Stella corrected, “is an older lady who never married. A matandang dalaga. They’re the ones who grow old alone.”
“Oh. Are the nuns in school spinsters?”
“No, my dear. They’re married to Christ.”
“Is Manang Rio a spinster?” the child asked as her mind turned to their very own housekeeper.
“Yes, she’s a spinster.”
“Is she going to be okay?”
“I think so. She’s lucky because she’s with us. Otherwise, who will care for her when she can no longer care for herself?”
And so, Stella removed Gumby the Cactus from the shelf and consigned it to the outer edges of the garden, where its thorns would serve as a deterrent against malas and other manner of evil. Following her, little Celestina looked at the high walls that surrounded their house, with their sharp wrought-iron spikes styled as fleurs-de-lys. She had serious doubts that Gumby’s baby thorns were up to the lofty job Stella had foisted upon it.
After a week on guard duty, Gumby the Cactus fell prey to a hungry monitor lizard. The
bayawak, according to Manang Rio, was the size of a guitar. It devoured the cactus in one gulp before disappearing into one of the storm drains. Little Celestina, mercifully, did not witness Gumby’s grisly end, although she did see the pot bearing the cactus stump, which was still juicy. Henceforth, the giant lizard would make appearances in nightmares whenever she was troubled.
That was Celestina’s first lesson in malas, and it would not be her last. Over the years, she learned that cracked mirrors, chipped dishes, and dead clocks were verboten in their house for they invited poverty and death. It did not stop there. By Stella’s decree, the toilet lid must never, ever, be left up. To do so would be to flush your money down the sewer. Her husband regarded her beliefs with exasperation and often “forgot” to put the toilet lid down. They had no shortage of issues to fight about, but this gesture of civil disobedience was always a dependable middle finger to Stella’s house rules.
There was another more benevolent but no less demanding force Stella often tried to summon: swerte. It was credited for the rise of Sebastien Sytanco, Stella’s father and the patriarch of the clan. Every aspiring entrepreneur in the country had heard about his story — the young man who went from managing a dusty shoe store to owning luxury shopping centres in every major city on the archipelago. Swerte was embodied in the logo emblazoned on his establishments, his initials styled as upward-moving dragons forming the ultra-auspicious number eight.
We need to attract swerte, Celestina often heard. Swerte, she would learn, were things or actions that invited wealth, abundance, happiness, and long life. It was the reason the Sytanco family wore life-affirming red during weddings and birthdays. And it was why her grandfather kept aquariums with arowana fish, their scales round and shiny as gold coins. Swerte’s domain stretched from the noble to the absurd, judging from her mother’s laughing Buddha with conspicuous man breasts.
The byzantine logic fascinated and amused Celestina to no end. She had not realized it then, but her mother’s belief system was a masterwork of syncretism — Chinese feng shui with a Filipino Spanish vocabulary and a touch of indigenous animism thrown in. At their core, the Sytanco family members were still Chinese — even with their Hispanized names and Catholicism, their fluency in the local dialects, and their philanthropy in local causes. Their identity bound them and gave them strength. But it also assured they would remain the Intsik even after generations in the former Asian colony of the Spanish empire.