The acrobatic twists and turns in the life of Ildefonsa will now finally conclude after a long pause caused by a lengthy haggle with the real-life families involved in this docu-drama. The author can now reveal to the followers of this heartwarming saga what happened next to Ildefonsa in the hands of Conchita, her mother-in-law with an evil agenda.

PREVIOUSLY: Our heroine, whose long-distance love affair with Rico culminated in a fairy-tale wedding that attracted world-wide interest, is finally settled in a small picturesque town, running a successful business zillions of miles away from the pressures and isolation of her thankless job in Chicago. Her eventual reunion with Rico was engineered by Rico’s mother Conchita. Alas, that now made Conchita her mother-in-law, a position that is better approached with extreme caution in the hierarchy of many extended Asian families. While to the outside world Conchita was a loving grandmother to all her grandchildren, she was descended from a strange creature called Concha (Spanish word for shell as in ‘rápidamente salió de su concha’ or ‘she soon came out of her shell’).

Conchita was destined to be Concha’s new phoenix rising from the ashes...

Concha lived in a shack by the mouth of the river that empties into the strait separating the main Island of Cebu and the smaller Mactan from Bohol Island. She lived alone in a makeshift hut that looked like a garish Goldilocks birthday cake that has been left out in the rain. If not for its idyllic location, a ledge that looked like a sacrificial altar carved by the adoring waves, the colorful dwelling was really a lean-to that will not be out of place on a rotting hill in Smoky Mountain.

But how did it get there? Who built it for the loner Concha? Who was she? Was she married?

The curious hut was the first sight that confronted the fishermen of San Pedro at their first turning into the river delta on their way home from their fishing expeditions. The garish structure

suddenly materialized on that prominent location one unusually sunny morning after a heavy typhoon that flattened almost half of San Pedro.

The fishermen of San Pedro had no choice but to maneuver their way home through the familiar meanderings of this estuary, a no-man’s land until this rare creature, half peacock with polyester plumes and half hippopotamus with manicured cloven hooves, colonized it.

When the mysterious and sudden appearance of Concha’s gaudy structure was noticed by the fishermen of sparsely inhabited San Pedro, none of them bothered to immediately investigate, because they were anxious to put food on their table after that infamous typhoon had passed and the seas have calmed down enough for them to get on with their livelihood. Those who were engaged in other trades on firm ground were preoccupied too with picking up the pieces left by the devastation.

San Pedro Gets A New Airport

But there it was, sticking like a sore thumb but surprisingly rather than shock the natives it simply grew on them as the dry season approached, almost the lighthouse they never had—to guide them home safely to their loved ones who they want to protect from the mysterious resident of, ironically, that same ‘lighthouse’ that materialised after the storm.

If you looked closer with unprejudiced eyes, the house of Concha was actually made of redundant election banners and mottled beauty-product billboards. Her front door was partitioned only from the breezes and the seasonal typhoons by a festival of flimsy discarded fabrics in naughty tints from the factories of Cebu Island.

How these bulky pieces of billboards got there as if by magic was, according to the local children and the village wise men, not exactly rocket science. The answer was in the rows of discarded rum bottles filled with colored water that demarcated Concha’s front pathway.

When the afternoon sun bounced on them, they glowed like a runway in an airport in Las Vegas. It was unanimously decided over a cask of tuba, the local brew made from coconut flowers, that these “solar-powered” lanterns guided Concha’s nocturnal landings when she swooped on her colorful building materials from a dumping ground in Cebu Island and flew them across Mactan Island to her recycled hobbit house by the river bank. The children agreed.

Concha, you see, was originally from the neighboring island of Siquijor (called Isla del Fuego or the Island of Fire during the Spanish era), a small isolated island more known for its witches and supernatural phenomena than its beautiful beaches andhospitable inhabitants. Even up to now, people of all sorts of persuasions would engage ‘specialists’ from Siquijor to either find missing loved ones or obtain a cure for an awkward malady. Or seek vengeance.

The Devil They Knew

But Concha, while feared by many was convenient to some. During the pre-Concha years, when a child was troubled by stomach pains, the cashstrapped locals had nobody to blame for their infants’ misery. After Concha’s Siquijor origins were established by the town gossips, it was swift for the local cirujano (Spanish term for surgeon but really a quack in San Pedro context) and arbolario (someone who concocted magic potions from local herbs) to proclaim her as the source of just about every misfortune and with flippant authority prescribed the antidote specific to Concha’s evil designs on their loved ones. There was a tacit gratitude for Concha’s looming presence among the local healers, because they now have found their starting point when staging their mumbo jumbo. She was the devil they knew.

The baby-sitting grandmothers of San Pedro also used Concha’s name to control their misbehaving wards, threatening to deposit them in a sack in front of her technicolor house, a reprimand that rendered them coy for hours until their next mischief.

And so the uneventful coexistence between Concha and the village of San Pedro went on for a couple of years or so without any untoward incident (save for the occasional pains that were hastily attributed to her mystical powers but actually required a straightforward appendectomy in Cebu City) until one morning in July, when on her usual weekly journey to Cebu, the schoolteachers was confronted by an apparition of Concha in a completely different persona.

Witches are known to appear as different beasts of prey but what they saw made them lift their tired torsos from their seats on the ferry, almost in military unison, to give way to the freshly made-over Concha. In the past, Concha would invariably make her entrance as a medley of flaming polyester chiffon scarves usually seen in accessory racks at train stations in China. Even so, her countenance would not merit a giggle. The teacher nearest her usual space would infact graciously usher her to her “reserved” position, never with fear of her suspected powers but with approbation to her almost aristocratic albeit eerie elegance. She always sat there in a stance seen only on a port outbound, starboard home (posh) side balcony of a luxury cruise liner on her way to the Bahamas. There was definitely substance beneath those synthetic plumes.

Concha would always be on time for this Friday afternoon trips of hers to Cebu alongside the schoolteachers on their way to join their families for the weekend. This particular trip though, she was late by a good twenty minutes, but the skipper would not budge without her, insisting it would be bad omen to leave a person of her sort behind.

This was another ordinary Friday afternoon and the teachers expected the usual theatrical apparition of their usual unusual co-passenger so that when she finally appeared in a sedate pure cotton frock that covered her fat knees and concealed her generous breasts, the teachers were caught unaware and reacted like red-handed students.

As Concha waddled towards them, the female teachers gave each other a decided nod that the loner Concha, now stripped of her fuchsia lipstick and Chernobyl-green eye shadows, was with child!

In the past, she would scale the rickety gangplank like the mute but agile lead in Igor Stravinsky’s ‘The Firebird’, but now she struggled to board the waiting ferry as if to confirm her condition. She was only in her fourth month by then but perhaps she made a decision to be in character and pantomimed the part with great aplomb.

Concha never engaged in small talk with the teachers, or anybody in San Pedro for that matter because she never went to the village centre to get her food supplies. She did her food shopping in Cebu City and came back on Monday mornings with the same group of teachers that leave with her on Fridays, dragging her week’s supply of essentials and her obiquitous trail of colorful scraps from the fabric factories.

But this afternoon, even if she came late and had caused the rest of the passengers some anxiety, she was in good spirits and definitely looked like she was angling for small talk.

The local children have always wondered loudly to their teachers whether Concha was mute or spoke exclusively in a special language understood only by the animals that flocked to admire her landing lights during the dark evenings of December. The whole town have long embraced this suggestion.

An Immaculate Conceptionee

This sailing, the teachers were both surprised and disturbed when she actually seemed to notice the presence of the other passengers as she glanced sideways to acknowledge them with a regal nod. The Concha they knew was a remote commuter that travelled in her own universe and despite her luminous accouterments and appointment as the village witch, people looked past her not in disgust but in fear that they might discover a superior soul behind the kitsch and the Mystic Meg sheen.

The now 100% cotton-clad and freshly scrubbed Concha nodded in their direction, her right hand patting her growing belly, and declared loudly above the breeze and the rattle of the starting motorboat that she was, as they suspected, with child.

Oh my God, she could speak!!!!

Nothing odd about a pregnant witch, but it was her almost scientific description of her pregnancy, when was her last period, when she was hypothetically due, what kind of delivery she would prefer, etc., said in flawless English heard only in BBC costume dramas, that shocked the daylight out of the weary maestros and the intrigued maestras.

To be continued

*Bibingka is the Pilipino word for rice cake that is made with coconut cream (which is high in fat content and laborious to create from scratch and Ildefonsa was a clever cook who created her own version without the fattening ingredient).