memories: anting-anting at agimat
I believed in those things at one point. And I don’t mean in the dull, background headache kind of way. I mean with the strength of migraines that seem ready to rip your brain to shreds. I mean with the kind of intensity that forces you into immobility, so that you can’t function, or even open your eyes without hating the world and the hallucinatory brightness into which it seems to have suddenly been dipped.
[Yes, I suffer from occasional migraines. And I mean real ones - ones that necessitated a scanning of my brain. And let me tell you, if you’re still functional, if you can still get up from your bed, if all it takes is a tylenol, then it’s not a migraine.]
One of my nannies from a long time ago used to have them in her room, these anting-anting and agimat. I’ve seen them being sold around the church in Quiapo, right beside glow-in-the-dark rosaries and brown plastic scapulars in those ubiquitous tiny stalls, hawked by fortune tellers and tarot readers.
Amulets for love, and money, and luck. Strange laminates with images from mishmashed esoterica. Rings for power and lust. Prayers in odd pidgin latin, or obsolete Filipino-Castillian spanish, or even old, highbrow Tagalog.
Like all her neighborhood cohorts, my nanny collected these things as if they were baseball cards, trading and lending and buying and selling amongst the other girls on the block. At the time, we were still living in the old house in Baclaran, within shouting distance of drunkards and addicts, on a road that was lined with potholes and sewer rats. Our home was big but old, all faded glory and nostalgia, one of the last vestiges of better days.
Magic and amulets made sense there. Lots of dark secret things made sense there.
One afternoon I decided I had to know what the fuss was about. I bought an anting-anting from my nanny with my schoolgirl allowance. It was a little brass pendant, with a vaguely religious image etched on it, and she gave it to me with a piece of paper that carried ‘instructions’. The amulet was supposed to get me to memorize great swaths of data at remarkable speed. [We all know what you’re going to say. Dorkus Supremus? That would be me.]
An aunt of mine, as devout and pious as the many iterations of the image of the Sacred Heart nailed to most of our neighbors’ dirty doors, saw my anting-anting and took it away.
“The devil’s work,” she said.
As a child, I believed in magic as a matter of course. Even in church, I would watch the old veiled women of the parish with fervor, more interested in the strange, folk rituals of prayer and song than in the prayer and song themselves.
[Three Ave Marias to ward of ghosts, an old woman in blue would whisper. Sing the penitensyarya to bring back lost love. Alleluia, Amen.]
The pious and devout, my mother would say as the troop of covered faces passed us, their eyes cast down but chins held up, the sarcasm in my mother’s voice always carefully kept well beneath anyone’s radar. I watched with the fascination of the very young. I liked the patterns of the lace that covered their heads, the crosses and pendants that hung from their necks, the various symbols tucked into the belts that circled widening waists.
[St. Christopher to protect you on your travels, church vendors would say as they hawked their wares. St. Anthony to find your lost things. St. Catherine to find you a man.]
They all seemed to be privy to some mystical secret of the world, as if we were still in Ancient Greece, and deities controlled all the various little nuances of fate.
Sometimes, I find myself unable to believe in magic anymore. More’s the pity.
Originally published on Tumblr, September 2010.