Red Commas

If I wanted to find Yaya Clemen, I only had to follow the red. She marked the day the way fishermen track the tides, little commas of spit that browned at the edges on the concrete, on the wet market tiles, beside the bougainvillea, on the jeepney step where she would lift me by the armpits and plant me between sacks of rice and the lady with a basket of malunggay. Not blood, not really, though when I was small I swore it was, and the more they told me it was nganga, betel and lime and leaf that turned the mouth brave and bitter, the more I decided it was some private kind of magic, a red ink only she wrote with, a map she made for me alone.

She was my first yaya and my first encyclopedia. Thin as a dried fish, all angles, calves roped with veins, skin the color of old trunk bark, rough and beautiful if you knew where to look. Her hands were a lesson in grip and mercy. She could lift a pot of sinangag with her left hand. With her right she would swat my hand from the frying pan, then place a fried egg on my plate so the yolk looked like the morning sun. “Hurry,” she’d say. “You’re already late. And your socks do not match.” I would stand there believing she was both a general and a saint. She slept by the Frigidaire, on a folding bed that ate her when it closed. In the morning she was already up, the coal bright, the radio soft, my bacon wrapped in wax paper, my name scrawled in a shaky hand on the brown bag like an oath.

She smoked Kaibigan. Even the name felt like a joke, the box a green lie. She would tap the cigarette twice on the lid, light it with the gas stove, and lean out the window so the breeze took the first exhale into the mango tree. Kaibigan smelled cheap and steady. It stuck to her duster, to the hem of my PE shorts, to my hair. My mother said, “Clemen, outside please, we are all going to die,” and Yaya Clemen would say, “We are all going to die anyway, ma’am. But if I die today, let it be after this pandesal.” Then she would laugh and I would laugh because I did not understand death, only the way her shoulders shook, only the way the smoke made a thin flag in the air and the red mouth made everything look like a story.

At school the other kids called her aswang. They were afraid of her teeth. They were afraid of the red. When she came to the gate with my forgotten lunch, the guard saluted her like she was the barangay captain’s mother, and my classmates whispered, don’t go near her, she eats children, she sucks the liver out through the belly button. I said she only eats the bad ones, which is you, and they ran in dirty sneakers and I felt taller than the flagpole because terror is also a kind of crown if you are nine and your champion is a thin woman who spits red commas that frighten even dogs. She knew I liked the way they kept a respectful distance. She pretended not to notice, handed me the container—rice still hot, adobo fat glistening—

“Kain na,” she said. “Your brain cannot think if your stomach is gossiping.”

One Friday, she showed me how to spot a real aswang. “The eyes,” she said, “are like mirrors where you cannot find yourself. They walk at noon to confuse you. They don’t know how to tie a proper knot.” She touched my forehead. “The best weapon is vinegar. Or a prayer you mean.” She had both. My father told her to stop telling the boy nonsense. She shrugged, lit another cigarette. She believed in God and also in the neighbor’s dead brother who visited for black coffee at three in the morning. She believed in saints and in placing a walis tingting upside down by the door so a witch would be confused and spend the night counting twigs. I went to catechism and recited the Creed and then came home to her inventory of what else might keep me alive. It made sense to me then, that the world could be held by the rosary and by a leaf folded just so.

We liked to say she was family. My titas asked why she still chewed nganga in front of guests, could she not tuck it away. My mother said, “She is family and she is old and she is allowed.” In the kitchen they moved around each other like people who had learned a slow dance: my mother reaching over her shoulder for the fish sauce, Yaya Clemen shifting her hip to let the Frigidaire door swing past. My mother showed her the new rice cooker. Yaya lifted the lid halfway through and listened, as if steam could speak. On Christmas my mother pressed an extra five hundred in her palm and said, “Salamat,” while the camera waited, and Yaya wiped the red from her lip and fixed my collar. “What a handsome boy,” she said. We said family and meant it, or thought we did. It fit until the day it asked for more than photographs.

On her day off, she disappeared into her own city. Once she let me come. We rode a jeepney before dawn to Quiapo. She knelt, eyes closed, lips moving without a tune, then bought two brown candles and a bottle of cheap vinegar to bring home. She traded jokes with a vendor who called her Ate. We ate goto standing up. No one there knew the folding bed or my mismatched socks. She was not our yaya in that morning air. She was simply Clemen, who bargained well and walked fast and laughed like a match striking.

There was a summer when I was thirteen and taller than her by a forehead and newly embarrassed by everything. I asked why she still chewed nganga when toothpaste existed, when my classmates said her mouth was a curse. She shook the tin with the betel and the leaf. “Anak, this keeps my hands steady. Your toothpaste keeps your mouth polite. Both have a job.” I said it would be nicer if she stopped. My mother heard me and told me to say sorry. Yaya waved it away and fried another egg, yolk whole, then reached out and pinched my ear, then kissed the same ear, a faint red print I kept until bath time. That was the year I learned that wanting to help can arrive wearing the face of wanting people to look like you.

Once, on the way back from the sari-sari store because we had run out of laundry soap and because she wanted her cigarettes, she showed me how to crack open an atis with both hands and avoid the seeds. She said her town had a river so clear you could count the fish and a kapre in the big acacia, which is why her mother never dried clothes outside at night. “A cousin,” she said, “fell in love with a man who sold fountain pens. She got pregnant. He disappeared like a coin in deep water. The boy grew stubborn as a goat.” She shortened the atis like that, one breath, then handed me the sweeter half. “Life goes home,” she added. “When rice is tall and sisters fall sick, life goes home.” The juice gathered where her upper lip met the red. “Are you sad?” I asked. “Sadness is work,” she said. “You carry it like water on your head. If you are lucky, the wind is kind.” I kept the picture and let the cousin’s details float away, not noticing how the story had turned its face toward the province.

There was the tricycle driver who pinched my thigh when he thought I would not tell. She moved faster than a line of ants crossing sugar. “Hoy,” she said, a slap on his shoulder like a gavel. She made him apologize, then sat on our steps and spat a red arc that looked like a warning. I asked how she knew. “Boys carry danger like a pocket knife,” she said. “Men carry danger like a belt. Both don’t like to be seen.” She watched the street a long time after, quiet, as if counting the ways the world could tilt. Superheroes save cities. She saved me for ten pesos.

That year she began to read the back pages of the newspaper for bus schedules. She held the rice and said it felt tight in the sack. She coughed more and called it nothing. On Sundays she stood longer by the window where the mango tree made a shade the shape of a country. “Soon harvest,” she said once, to no one, like a person reminding herself of a promise she didn’t want to remember.

I did not notice the last spit. No one notices the last of anything. The morning she didn’t tap my shoulder, my dream went on too long. In the kitchen, the egg on my plate was centered and perfect, the rice domed without stray grains, the spoon and fork soldier-straight. Her folding bed leaned shut against the wall, blanket folded into a square so crisp it could have been ironed. She was there—of course she was—pouring water with unusual care so it did not splash. She looked at my socks and said nothing. “You’re early,” I said. She nodded, eyes on the plate like someone making a gift they cannot afford. My mother came in, voice lower than morning voices usually are, and said, “Clemen’s sister had a stroke.” Then softer: “The rice is due for cutting.” Yaya opened her mouth as if to begin a sentence that had waited years for its first word. She closed it. “Eat,” she told me instead, and pressed her thumb to the table to test for dust. Later, at dinner, my mother said, “Clemen went home to her family.” There was squash in coconut milk and fried galunggong. The house smelled like we were all okay. I said, home is here, she is here, she is our family. My mother nodded and folded her napkin until it was a small square that couldn’t hold anything.

I went outside with my plate and looked for the red map. The tiles were washed. The afternoon had diluted whatever she left. The dining room looked bigger without her folding bed. I could hear the Frigidaire humming for the first time.

After she left, the mornings changed shape. My mother cooked for a week and burned the first pot of sinangag because she forgot the garlic. I wrapped my own baon, sloppy corners, ketchup bleeding into the wax paper. I walked to school without the small parade of her voice behind me—no reminder about socks, no tap of a spoon against the glass to make me drink water. A cousin of my father stayed a month to help and taught me a lazy way to fold shirts that made drawers look full. For weeks, the dog waited at the gate at four in the afternoon, confused. A tita visited and looked at the new helper and said, “Thank God you got rid of that betel chewing,” and my mother didn’t correct her. To friends on the phone she said, “We gave her a good severance,” and I knew numbers by then. Two thousand pesos is a kind word for not enough.

Years later, one July, in the ferry terminal at Batangas, I saw an old woman selling refreshments. She had a mouth the exact red I would know even blindfolded. Small shoulders, the habit of tapping the cigarette twice against the box, the way of holding the flame close like a whispered secret. I was carrying a box of pasalubong, biscuit tins that dent if you breathe on them, and I said it before I could stop it, “Yaya.” She turned because everyone turns when someone calls yaya; it is a word that belongs to a thousand women at once. Her face was not hers. Of course it was not. I stepped closer anyway, looking for a scar on the wrist that I might have invented. “Sorry,” I said. I bought a bottle of water I did not want, then another, then a packet of biscuits I would not eat, just to stand there a little longer. She looked at me kindly the way old people look at children they do not know. A man in a blue shirt mopped the floor in long patient strokes. The mop passed over thin red arcs near the bench, one by one, the water blurring the edges, then lifting them away. I thought, I could ask again. I didn’t.

People ask what happened to her, as if the end of a person must arrange itself into a story. I tell them what my mother told me: she went home to her family. Sometimes I try other sentences—maybe she married late, or set up a sari-sari store with money we like to remember giving. Maybe she kept smoking and grew light as paper. Maybe she chewed nganga until her teeth were a row of little shadows. Maybe she left before we could fold her into a photograph again and call it love. What I know is simpler: love doesn’t erase labor; labor doesn’t erase love. If we say family, we should mean it in the way that changes where a person sleeps and which plans carry her name.

I live far away now, a city of cold light and bicycles, a kitchen that faces a canal where the wind comes clean. I bike to work with my lunch in a neat box and schedule calls on the half hour. On Sundays I phone home. Some nights I set the table the way she taught me—rice on the left, spoon and fork shoulder to shoulder, egg like a sun. I catch her in small places: a green box of cigarettes behind dusty glass; a red smear on a sidewalk that is probably cough syrup; a boy at a school gate clutching a lunch his own yaya packed.

If I wanted to find Yaya Clemen, I still know how. I follow the red that is no longer there. I breathe in the ghost of Kaibigan. I stand in the doorway of the dining room in my memory and wait for the radio to crackle a woman singing about a love that endures. Then I sit with my confusion until it feels honest, and I eat while the window catches a small breeze, and the mango tree says nothing, and I say it for both of us, anak, kain na.

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About the Author

Alfred Luarca is a Filipino writer and art director based in Copenhagen. His fiction explores family, diaspora, and Philippine folklore, examining how myth and memory shape identity across generations and geographies. He is completing a short story collection.