Suelita was seventeen and her mother had plans for her to go to nursing school. She could have been anything she wanted; I was sure of it. Watching her now, as she cut out individual words from the newspaper and spread them out over the counter, a bored expression on her features the whole while, it occurred to me that perhaps the reason why she always looked so discontent was because the best she could hope for was nursing college, when maybe what she wanted was something else entirely.
I looked around to see where I might wait. Rico and his boys stretched out a little, closing the gaps between them. I was glad; the store had a liquor license and they looked like they’d been here awhile. I moved round the corner away from the hatch and sat down on the front stoop.
The curandero’s shack squatted in the alley that ran from Primo’s store all the way to the basilica and the Chinese bars that skirted it. It was a single-storey wooden structure that Uncle Bee’s grandfather had built with the help of his neighbours when Esperanza Street was still young; when the older, richer houses perched wide apart on the hillside with a clear view of their lands, the docks and the ocean beyond.
The shack, like countless identical buildings in the neighbourhood, or like the nipa huts that were scattered through the backcountry, had an ageless quality to it. Whenever I saw it, it seemed to me a thing that lay close to the heart of our street, not its geographical heart but its essence. The bones of buildings just like it lay under ever-newer structures like the Coffee Shak with its rain-marked concrete and plate glass, or the forecourt of Earl’s garage, or my father’s apartment block.
Uncle Bee had added the sari-sari store and a consulting room to the shack himself, though he hadn’t had to rebuild anything to do it. Both were just part of the main room that he’d fenced off with nipa panels and were separated from each other by a partitioning curtain. The consulting room contained a fold-down bed and floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with herbs, bundles of dried leaves, dried fruit, oils and balms, cigarette papers, candles. From the rafters, long strips of Sunsilk shampoo, hair conditioner and laundry-detergent pouches hung down like creepers.
From the back of the shack came a chorus of voices and electronic noise. Suelita’s younger brother Fidel and his boys were in. I watched Uncle Bee through the small front window, heard him talking, going over something once, twice, pausing for a response. I couldn’t make out the words.
Beng Beng Bukaykay had been a curandero, a healer, since his teens. He wasn’t really my uncle. Before I went to live at the Bougainvillea, I’d come to his house sometimes with my mother, and so now, whenever I passed that way, the place took on the colour of memory.
Uncle Bee told me when I was a kid how he came to be a curandero. He said that one by one he’d discovered the secret nesting sites of all the birds including, finally, the daklap owl that lays its eggs on the beach. And it was on account of the owl that he’d been given his powers. He told me how he’d stumbled upon her nest as the sun was setting and she’d begged him not to reveal its whereabouts as her children had yet to hatch safely. He promised never to breathe a word and, in return, the spirits gave him his powers on the understanding that if he ever went back on his word he would lose them. That, at any rate, was his story for the children. I liked his version and demanded to hear it every time I saw him, even after my mother told me that Uncle Bee’s grandfather and great-grandfather had both been curanderos and that he’d learned the trade from them. She also said that Uncle Bee’s father alone had broken with tradition and tried to make it big as a musician in Manila, the Big Apple. He’d come back a shadow, she said, fond of his drink, and married Bee’s mother but died not long after Kokoy, Bee’s younger brother, was born. That part she didn’t tell me, but she discussed it with her friends, forgetting, as usual, that I was there to hear it too.
Uncle Bee did a pretty good trade; he was the only curandero in the barrio. From the bottom end of Esperanza almost everyone came to him, apart from Pastor Levi and Father Mulrooney, who both preferred the attentions of the real doctor in the health clinic on Salinas Boulevard. Pastor Levi could afford a real doctor because his brother, Cesar, was a solicitor who worked for Eddie Casama. Father Mulrooney was a foreigner and didn’t trust Uncle Bee’s remedies. At the top end of the street, most families, including Aunt Mary’s, had their own physicians in the centre of town — guys that had trained in Europe or the States and charged by the hour. For everyone else, Uncle Bee could always be relied upon to offer a cure.
Uncle Bee accepted payment in many forms and it wasn’t unusual to see rice, or eggs, or a pile of sweet potatoes left on his stoop. For a long time, I’d wished to be ill enough to be treated by him, an illness so life-threatening I imagined the white-coated doctor on Rizal Avenue at a loss to diagnose it, my only hope being the curandero with his jars of tree barks and dark, oily pastes and Latin prayers. But Aunt Mary would never have heard of it, and so it wasn’t until America came out in a rash and refused to see anyone else that I had a chance to see inside Uncle Bee’s consulting room again.
I was lost in these thoughts when the door opened. I stood up and moved out of the way as a woman came out. I’d expected a man, an important looking one. I glanced in the direction of the hatch where Suelita was chiding Rico as he rapped on the counter with a coin for another cigarette.
Uncle Bee followed his patient down the steps, clapped a hand on my shoulder. ‘Joseph!’ he said. ‘I see you walking past but you never stop by.’ Uncle Bee was of a breed of men whose appearance never seemed to change; he would remain the same weight and young in his face forever. He was a good advertisement for his herbs.
‘Aunt Mary sent payment for America.’
‘Straight to business? No time for a drink even?’ He twitched his fingers, palm up, motioning me indoors after him.
When he built the house, Uncle Bee’s grandfather would have slipped some money into the hole for each corner post, as was customary, to ensure prosperity. He must have stuck some bills down there rather than small change because his grandson was doing well for himself. Outside, the house was shabby from season after season of monsoon rain and inside it was cramped, but squeezed in among the furniture were a TV and hi-fi equipment and a new Frigidaire.
Fidel was playing a video game with his friends. They were perched everywhere like birds in a tree. Fidel lay across the armchair, languidly, as if he were holding court and slightly bored with it. Fidel was nice enough, an average kid, not especially bright or athletic, but the video game had made him popular. I was in the same class and had heard about the game console that Uncle Bee had bought him for his birthday, bought second-hand from one of his patients, but nevertheless one of the first in the barrio. Even Benny didn’t have one, though not for lack of asking. I could still hear Aunt Mary’s voice explaining why he wasn’t going to get one: ‘Just how is a thing like that going to help your development?’
‘Atari Twenty-six hundred,’ Fidel said to me, briefly lifting his eyes from the screen. I nodded as if this meant something significant; it was certainly a phrase that had some effect on our classmates. He shifted his legs along the armrest. I sat down lightly on it and he handed me the controls, like a king bestowing honours, enjoying his own generosity. ‘Pac-Man,’ he said. I was immediately inept. He took the controls from me again to demonstrate, smiling as he did so at my momentary reluctance to let go.
Behind the partition, I heard Uncle Bee moving crates around. He emerged from the store with a Pepsi in each hand, jerked an invitation with his head for me to follow him out onto the stoop. ‘Big mistake buying that thing,’ he said. ‘House is never quiet anymore.’