Aswang

by Hugh Todd

Sometimes one has no choice but to give up. When the Aswang wants you, what can you do?

It's just that she’s not what I expected. I never thought I would make my own way to her, sick with dread. But I did. And she took what she was after and flew away, just as the old stories say.

Once, when I was small, I heard her. Deep in the night, long after the last of the sounds of muted conversations and the shared TVs and the drinkers singing to their out-of tune guitars had ended, I woke up and heard her. She has pointy feet and they made a tick-tick-tick sound on our tin roof. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. She was looking for a hole.

Obet was still deep in sleep, and I pressed up against him. He's my kuya, my big brother. My heart was pounding so hard I thought he would wake up, but he barely stirred.

I had woken because I was hungry, and my tummy hurt. Or maybe it hurt because the Aswang was there, and she wanted me, and my tummy felt it, as if it knew what would come one day. Felt the tug and the pain and the loss.

Because that’s what she does, the Aswang. She sucks out your innards. She lets her long tongue down through the roof and feeds on you. She even sucks the babies out of pregnant women. Then she flies away and looks for other victims.

In the dark I could sense her blind searching, her mind feeling the walls, the floors, the sleeping mats, the bodies lying there. Tatay, Nanay, Lola, Tess, Josie, Obet. When her mind felt mine it was like an electric shock. I felt her desire, and there was a jolt, a flash in my brain. There was a sudden scrabble on the roof, and I clapped my hands to my mouth to keep from screaming. The iron creaked, as if it was slowly lifting up. My whole body jangled in fear. Then there was a loud crashing noise, as though the iron had fallen back. I heard Tatay shout, then a flurry of tick-tick-ticks on the roof, followed by the sound of wingbeats. Tatay flicked on the light. He looked confused, and was holding his knife.

‘It was the Aswang, ’Tay,’ I said, hardly daring to speak the word, trying not to cry.

A scowl crossed Tatay’s face. ‘Aswang,’ he said. ‘Sure.’ He went outside, and I heard him walking around the house. He came in, turned off the light and lay down again. ‘Aswang,’ he snorted in the dark. The others rustled and turned over, and all was quiet again.

But I know it was the Aswang, and I know that from then on she wanted me, and it was only a matter of time.

Our home was not a happy one. Nanay and Tatay had never married. They’d just taken up with each other, and then kids had come along, and there they were. Whatever impulse had brought them together had long since exhausted itself. Nanay and Tatay bickered constantly, about gambling, about work and money, about drinking and cock-fights and good-for-nothing friends. I liked to get out and spend time with my barkada. They were good mates, Mani, Boy Gonzales, Hubi, Boy-Boy and Freddie.

Mani was the craziest, and he made us all laugh. He was the first of us to jump off the bridge into the Pasig, even though he wasn't the best swimmer. He let out a yell as he flailed through the air, and disappeared under the current with a great splash. We cheered and screamed and waited for him to reappear, but there was no sign. We fell silent, and gazed big-eyed at the great brown expanse sliding under us. Then we heard a triumphant squeal, and Boy-Boy pointed to where Mani’s face was grinning at us from near the bank. At that we all capered around like crazy on the steel parapet, screeching and yahooing and pointing at Mani who climbed out by the storm water outflow all glistening and smug.

After that we all had to do it. Boy Gonzales and I were the last, and the others teased us like crazy. Hubi took to lazily falling off, as though he'd forgotten where he was, and feigning a look of horror before doing a somersault and splashing neatly in. His nonchalance was a reproach to Boy and me. It was this, in combination with the appearance of Mila Rodriguez and her sister Jen-jen, that finally propelled me, holding my nose and shutting my eyes, out into the void. Everyone on the bridge cheered when I came up for air, except Boy Gonzales who, even from far below, looked distinctly grey and unhappy. It took him another two months to take the plunge, and he only did it the one time, just to keep his place in the barkada.

A year or two after the Aswang came, Tatay left us. He told us it was for work, but if it was I don't know where the money went. He returned home every week for a while, bringing us little treats, but Nanay did not seem as pleased to see him as we were.

‘Just one more mouth to feed,’ she said. Which was a serious problem, because at times we had nothing but rice to eat, with salt to give it flavour. And even though Aling Choy at the sari-sari store was a friend of Nanay’s, she was often reluctant to give her credit.

I would wake up and hear Nanay and Tatay arguing hoarsely in the dark, and by morning he would be gone again. His visits became less frequent, and then one day he took a whole lot of things from the house, and loaded them on Aling Choy?s rental trolley with the roller bearing wheels and pushed it over the bridge and out of our lives for ever. As it rolled away down the line, the trolley went tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. Nanay never talked about him again.

At around this time, Nanay borrowed some money to start a little vending business selling banana-cues. She bought bags of fat cooking bananas and fried them in coconut oil with sugar, and sold three on a stick. She had a knack for picking rich, ripe bananas full of flavour, and they were very popular. She was never quite able to pay off her five-six debt, though. The lender, an Indian with an undertaker?s expression, used to arrive on a bike to collect his interest. A peso extra per month for every five pesos borrowed. You could hear him coming and going. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.

Nanay expanded her business to sell kamote-cues as well (kamote is a sweet potato), and pressed us into service to carry baskets of them up and down the railway line, calling our wares. In actual fact, we boys weren't much good at this, so the girls tended to do it more while we skived off to play, or to throw our nets down from the bridge to catch bits of floating plastic to sell to the recyclers.

With her small enterprises Nanay managed to put us through primary and some of high school, albeit with some breaks and turn-taking on our part.

I became a bit wild. Life on the railway bridge was not all skylarking and innocence. As boys in our neighbourhood grew older the pressure grew to be involved in tougher ways to earn a living.

Fishermen on their way from Laguna Lake to the markets in Divisoria had to pay a ‘toll’ of fresh bangus, which they threw in silver sprays from their narrow painted bangkas up to the boys on the bridge, on pain of having rocks dropped through their hulls. Any unwary barges that were not guarded by armalite-toting guards were fair game for young pirates who boarded them and made off with fire extinguishers, hoses, anything that could be sold by the local fence, Mang Jojo, also down in the markets of Divisoria. As time went on I became involved in these activities, to Nanay’s shame and the anger of my sisters.

‘At least I’m doing my part to put some food on the table,’ I said.

‘You’d do better if you didn’t smoke and drink so much of it away,’ said Josie.

She was right, of course, but that was the price of being in the barkada. One thing we didn’t do, though, was to sniff Rugby, the glue that so many boys poured into plastic bags that they held over their noses, inhaling the fumes that could take them away from their squalid surroundings and dull the pain of their hunger and the deeds they performed to appease it. Nor did we join the hold-uppers, who set off in groups of three with hidden knives to relieve jeepney passengers of their money and valuables.

When I was seventeen catastrophe struck. After forty-five years of accretion alongside the railway track, our community was to be relocated. The government wanted to reclaim its easement and upgrade the track, with the help of some foreign loans. A jigger came down the line, carrying Government and international bank officials. It made a sound as it passed. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.

We were moved to Cavite where the government had constructed row housing on an empty hillside in the middle of nowhere. We now had no means of earning a living. Nanay had had to repay the Indian in full before we moved. She had to start again with only a tiny amount of stock, but our neighbours were now as destitute as we were. Her ability to replenish supplies ebbed away. Hunger returned.

Obet by this time had a girlfriend and an eighteen-month old baby. She came from another squatter area, and he had gone to live there. I was now the man of the house.

I talked about our situation with the barkada.

‘You need to make your living outside this area,’ said Boy-Boy. ‘That’s what my tatay is doing.’

I turned to him with exasperation in my voice. ‘Travel needs…’ I rubbed my forefinger and thumb together to indicate the unnamable and elusive commodity. ‘And we don’t have any.’

Boy-boy scratched the ground with a stick. ‘What if there was a way?’ he said ‘I met a man who might be able to help.’

I grimaced. ‘I can’t get into trouble,’ I said. ‘Things are bad enough as it is.’

‘Nothing illegal,’ said Boy-Boy. ‘But it’s not for the faint-hearted.’

Mani was all ears. ‘Tell me, tell me, tell me,’ he said.

So Mani went first, as usual. He went away, and we wondered if he would come back to us, but he did, bobbing back into our midst as he had done in the Pasig River, a bit sore but waving his money around, sure enough. Two thousand dollars. The equivalent of four years’ work. I felt ill at what he had done, but the money was real, and he seemed to be the same old Mani. One by one the others did the same, until only Boy Gonzales and I remained.

‘Don’t do anything you don’t want to,’ said Nanay, but I felt ashamed at my cowardice in the face of our need. I had a meeting with the man, and made the arrangements.

You can get by perfectly well with only one kidney. I don’t even miss it, and the scar is impressive.

The process of losing it, though, was not nice. The hospital staff spoke down to me, as though I was less than human. They could see from my clothes that I am a poor person. They just ordered me around, and took what they wanted, and sent me away with my money.

They told me I would not even meet the person who was buying a part of my body. But I did. I met her in a corridor near the operating theatre. She was old and slightly stooped and rich and white. A foreigner. As we approached each other her empty blue eyes flicked over me and away again. In that instant I felt a shock, and I knew who she was. Her shoes as she passed by went tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.