Consuelo

The high-rise buildings had erupted like perfectly aligned teeth, and the old gave way to the new. First, it was Mr. and Mrs. Yu, the old Chinese apothecary couple who were driven out to the red-light district, forced to rebrand their herbal medicines as aphrodisiacs. A year later, the beloved Paper Dragon Firecracker store exploded due to its centuries-old electrical wiring, and everyone mistook the conflagration as a premature New Year fireworks display. By then, most everyone was already ready to leave, as the small knickknack stores and hopia pushcarts, one by one, relocated by the cathedral.

But not Madame Consuelo’s bookshop. It was one of those stores which, despite the apartments and fast-food chains that came and went, thrived in its own hiddenness, like a wild mushroom growing in the dark. And like any sought-after mushroom, many an unfortunate adventurer had mistaken it for another variety. You might mistake it for the religious bookstore that also happens to give indigenous tattoos or the Taiwanese one that sells only alternative birth control medicine. They’re all shiny and interesting, and each has dealt the wrong person its own poison.

Madame Consuelo’s, perhaps the most potent of them all, lies in an alley somewhere near Ongpin Street, on the left side just before the red bridge. Or was it the right side? The storefront is almost as small as its doorway. You’ll recognize it by its black bagua mirror, the low-ringing windchimes tickled by the foul wind of the estero, and the walkway leading into an abyss that seems to stare right at you.

At the entryway, a black feline with white paws guards the establishment. From a high table, it maneuvers around the Buddha fountain and the small gilded statues. With its hind legs taller than its front, it appears ready to pounce at some golden insect on the floor at any moment.

I patted and stroked the cat’s head, if only lightly, feeling for the spots that I thought were comfortable for most cats. Its ears retreated, and I quickly withdrew my hand. It grabbed the air with its sharp claws, with the statues keeping their watchful tranquility.

“You should be confident with your intentions with Malika,” a voice behind me said, “Otherwise, she’ll just hiss and paw at you.”

Malika sprung across my left shoulder and wrapped her body around the neck of a small figure who seemed larger because of her hooded cloak.

“Sorry, I just wanted to buy a Perpetual Help statue?” I said, thinking of my mother.

“You must be lost, hijo,” she said, “The religious gift shops have moved near the cathedral.”

The wooden floorboards hummed with the warm, orange radiance of fairy lights above, strung on two adjacent walls. The lights revealed a counter-altar with a cash register, a crucifix, and a stone frog above a pond of coins. On the adjacent wall is a bookcase lined with tomes whose frayed faux leather skins exposed their spines. Beyond, smoke from red incense sticks betrayed the apparent smallness of the space.

“But I do have something that may interest you.” From the bookcase, she took what appeared to be a necklace nestled in a small metal box.

It was an amulet. Mother Mary’s face, in profile view, was engraved on a bronze oval coin, her face surrounded by Chinese characters, inscrutable both by age and design. The wear on the coin depicted Mary older than she usually was, perhaps decades after her son’s death, still grieving.

“Wear this for good luck. It can also be used to cure infertility, heal wounds, relieve insomnia, increase testosterone, dissolve tumors. You name it. All-purpose,” she said.

All-purpose brought to mind a diluted starch solution. But Mother has bought most every Mary statue imaginable. Maybe the unfamiliar old face will restore her belief in some way.

“How much?” I asked.

“Seven fifty. But for a handsome face like yours, seven hundred.”

She paused. “Your look familiar. Where did you get that scar?”

“Why?” I asked, feeling for the space above my right eyebrow.

She shook her head, as if discarding some memory. “Other than that, your prominent temples indicate a divine counterpart coming to you very soon,” she said, tapping my cheekbones.

I did meet someone three months later, though not yet fully conviced of the divinity. On our third date, after visiting Binondo Church that evening praying to our gods, I thought of impressing Rico by visiting Madame Consuelo.

“It should be around here.” I said, pressing into my motorcycle’s handbrake just before the bridge.

A Burger King joint, a few cafes, and an apartment project were all that we could find. “Forget this. Let’s gatecrash,” Rico said, jumping the yellow lines that cordoned off an unfinished building.

We were in the beginnings of a parking lot. Thick, circular concrete columns flanked pavements that went straight and spiraled up the higher floor.

I grabbed a piece of metal jutting out of a concrete column. Soon enough, I was rock-climbing using the exposed rebar from the concrete. “Show off,” Rico said, racing me to the top on another column. I focused on my own climbing, knowing that comparison will surely throw me off my game. Looking up, I realized no more rebar was available above me. “No fair,” I shouted. I jumped out of the column, and jogged around the columns in a zigzag, hoping for him to join me in another game.

“Is that it?” he asked, at the top of his column, pointing towards the street.

Police cars sped away from a storefront with a glass door. “It could be any store. Let’s check,” I said, eyeing for a bagua mirror.

“I’ve always been here,” Madame Consuelo said, “I’ll never let those bastards take what’s left of this street.”

The counter-altar was now on a wall near the entryway. Red lanterns lit up the four corners of the room, and about a dozen bookcases revealed themselves in a recess bridged by a small set of steps. The store seemed roomier than I remembered.'

“Rearranging helps with the flow of energy,” she said.

Malika, the black cat with white socks for paws, brushed against Rico’s hairy calves, making him tiptoe.

“She likes you,” she said to Rico, then scanned me from head to toe. “This one still has a lot of warming up to do.”

I thanked her for her help months ago. “My mother wears it even in the shower. Says it finally cured her,” I said.

“I’m glad, but I thought it was more for you.” She put her hand on her heart, then fingered her jade necklace. “Your scar is widening,” she said, “Want to talk about it?”

I politely declined as I did last time. But Rico said he wanted his fortune read. “Don’t be such a baby,” he said.

Rico and Madame stepped over to the counter, whereupon she shuffled a deck of cards. I stepped over to the bookcases on the other side of the room to give Rico some semblance of privacy. To my delight, Malika was leading me to an aisle, her siopao head beckoning to me.

“Perhaps it’s time we got to know each other,” I said as she leaped on top of a bookcase.

Toggling the torch feature of my phone, I illuminated the shelves book by book. Some of the titles were in Chinese, but I leafed through them just to get pleasantly lost in a sea of characters. Sometimes, words one knows have such a charge to them that one prefers to see symbols as they are, like the mutterings of someone lulling you to sleep. Elsewhere, Madame and Rico spoke in terms of pentacles and wands and swords. There was the exchange of laughter and the sound of cards lightly reshuffling.

At the end of the shelf, there was a crystal ball, acting as a bookend and something upon which the cat may rub and rest its head. As I pulled back my light, the ball revealed itself as a snowglobe. Snow collected like tiny coconut shavings at the bottom of the hemisphere as I tilted it. I turned it over, gazing as if it had something to say. The snow fell through the water disguised as air and lightly blessed the little streets and little colored houses. Magical, I thought, though never had I seen real snow before.

Books that had depended on this little world fell like dominoes, with one settling on the carpeted floor. A bright pink cover, it spelled out in bold, “Love Spells and Potions”. The cover had a glossy finish, yet the tattered pages told of the many hands that have leafed through the manuscript. The lengths people would go to, I muttered to myself. I avoided the words and preferred resting my eyes on sketches: wand movements, leaves and herbs, faces of paramours, potion bottles, hair and fingernails. I heard my name whispered like some curious thing bobbing up among dead leaves in the water.

I keep the book close to my chest and peered over the books.

Madame flips over a card in the center: a cloaked woman sitting between pillars of black and white.

“The High Priestess,” she said.

She tones down her voice saying, ‘when the time is right’ and crosses her hands. Rico leans over to her with wide eyes. She mentions words like ‘handsome’ and ‘divine counterpart’, and he smiles. I felt relief and excitement. Then I pinched myself, shuddering at my reaction. The Madame flipped back the card and reassembled the deck. I walked back through the entryway and made my exit, not wishing to destroy the little pieces I made out from what I heard. The windchimes laughed like children.

“She said you were a keeper,” Rico said as I gripped on my handlebars.

“Damn right I am.” I said, powering up the engine.

“Then she kept saying how I was this great student of life, being an Aquarius in most of my placements. And that resonated with me so much with my graduate applications.” He gazed up at the sky, starrier now that store signs and lights across the street have been turned off. “It will need a lot of hardwork and sacrifice for me to be successful. That why the Eight of Pentacles kept showing up in my reading,” he said, palming an imaginary card.

“You’re so gullible.” I took his hand and kissed it.

“At least I’m upfront about it, Claudio.”

A year later, weeks before Rico would migrate to Zurich for his graduate studies, we decided to pay Madame Consuelo a final visit.

Arriving by the red bridge, I looked ahead for landmarks, the buildings piling higher and higher than I had remembered.

“I thought you said it was around here,” Rico said.

“It’s on the other side of the bridge,” I suggested.

“Didn’t it use to be in front of some new apartment?”

“Don't you mean a parking lot?"

Before our questions erupted into a heated debate, I suggested we could walk instead and just enjoy the sunset.

I held Rico close as we strolled, wrapping my arm around his shoulder, knowing we wouldn’t see each other again in a couple of years. He brought his nose close to my neck.

“I didn’t think we would last this long,” he said.

“Me neither.”

Finally he said, “We’re on the wrong alley.” He led me to a space between a McDonald’s Desert Stall and some antique store whose gigantic vases seemed to crack if you looked at them hard enough. We found an unfinished apartment and right across it, the spot where Madame Consuelo used to be.

A big orange excavator hauled large slabs of concrete. Shards of glass on the pavement reflected like calcified tears. Rico ran towards the scene of the crime. I hadn’t dared to look, and instead rested my eyes on the symbols and logos around me that seemed real.

“They’re taking this place apart,” Rico said, cradling the destroyed windchimes.

I fought back a tear. “C’mon. Let’s grab some dimsum. It’ll cheer us up.”

The last time I returned to Binondo, I made my final devotion for my mother. I had knelt in church for almost two hours. Once I had emerged from my thought and prayers, the sky outside the cathedral had darkened to a pleasant shade of grey. Evening had come earlier than I had expected and remembered that Christmas was coming. I expected nothing that season save for a call from Rico who hadn’t come back for almost four years.

I took an alternate route on the ride home. Chinatown Christmas is a winning combination. Pastry stores scattered along alleys smelled of mooncakes and sweet pastries. People would line up for their glazed ham wrapped in tin foil. I manuevered my way around cars, pedestrians, and potholes, imagining tender hands wrapped around my waist. I passed under the Filipino-Chinese Friendship Arch and felt I had crossed some finish line.

Relishing my victory, I slowed my motorcyle down in an alley flanked by an array of orange street lights, some winking at me. In the distance was some muffled ringing of metal, like the laughter of children. I kept my eye on the lights and kept close to the illuminated spots. In the corner of the street, the little light had revealed the silhouette of a creature, blacker than night, though betrayed by its snow-white paws.

Stopping my motorcycle, I caught a faint glimpse of a small circular mirror in my peripheral vision, the one they hang above doors for good luck. Running to the sidewalk, I scanned through the storefronts I could find. Eventually, I stopped by a bright and cheery 7-11 with no cat nor mirror in sight. Turning around to investigate, I faced a newly-built apartment complex. I almost did not recognize it but I recalled the concrete columns, the rebar, and the inner workings of the building where Rico and I used to climb.

“It was right here,” I cried, hunting for the black cat, the bagua mirror, the tickled windchimes blown by the foul wind of the river beneath the bridge. I gazed at my reflection on the glass pane of the convenience store.

I know what I saw.