I felt I didn’t deserve to wait two hours in still another doctor’s clinic, only to be told in the next second to go get another test.

I was a good girl, I worked hard, exercised daily, treated everyone fairly and was kind to the poor. I loved my children and their mates and they loved me. Whatever new test that was, the result would only join the sheaf of diagnostic results already clipped to my wall, one of an endless number I would still have to undergo the rest of my life.

I had a mild fever. I couldn’t figure out whether it originated from throat or stomach but I felt wretched. I tried to get my correct temperature from a relatively new digital thermometer whose readings I did not trust. My old reliable glass mercury thermometer had broken long ago and was already phased out. The palm of Beni, my cook and yaya, was more reliable.

Beni suggested a woman in the neighborhood, who had once given her a massage, to cure me with tawas. Why not? After all, I wasn’t going to see another doctor ever again.

As a child, I remember having witnessed a tawas when we still lived in our old bahay-na-bato in Quiapo. I was always in the entresuelo, the “under the floor” quarters of the driver. I liked playing with his kids. Once, the youngest was incessantly crying. Aling Nena called an albularyo to give the toddler a tawas.

Tawas is the diagnostic tool as well as the cure-all of the poor. It is for health ailments, either physical or psychological. Tawas also refers to the substance used for the cure. It was an alum-based, somewhat cloudy crystal rock.

Interpreted

With the little rock, the aforesaid albularyo traced a cross on the forehead of the ailing child. Later he placed the crystal on a tin dish of live coals. Before the tawas disintegrated it was retrieved by the albularyo. The resulting shape was interpreted as “a horse that frightened the child and made her sick.” Since there were many carretelas lined up on our narrow street in Quiapo, that seemed to be the right answer. (Later, tawas interpretations were not as simple; they included black dwarves, encantos, other  nature spirits or demons.)

Later I told my daddy about the ritual. He was a doctor and said it was all “sheer nonsense.”

Flor, the tawas person my cook recommended, lived in a shack somewhere in our QC neighborhood. The corner of Panay and Roces across Andok’s is where all the unlicensed vendors with trifling businesses congregate. A cart full of buko is parked there in the early morning; a newspaper vendor has a stand there; another plants himself at the corner before lunch with a bilao of fried chicken. (By nightfall, when my car passes the corner, the fried chicken is almost all gone.)

Flor, the tawas lady, lives in a shack somewhere around the neighborhood, my cook said. She stations herself in the corner waiting shed. She has a curtain strung on the concrete wall behind her long bench.

A handwritten sign announces that she offers “Hilot, Tawas, Sa malamig.” I thought the “Sa malamig” referred to the tube ice she also sold by the piece from her decrepit styropor cooler. But no, the lamig it referred to was the “cold” spots in the body that make us sick. Lamig results from cold drinks or contact with sudden cold air (as from an air-con).

Flor came at nightfall. She slathered me with massage oil, lit a candle and whispered a secret oracion or   bulong into a piece of paper. She asked for three eggs. One of them, unfortunately still cold from the fridge, she rolled over my arms. Then she threw the egg out the window where it cracked on the walk. The other two she cracked on the roots of the two biggest trees in the yard.

Offerings

I made a wild guess. “You are throwing them out because they contain the root of my illness?”  “No,” she said, “they’re offerings to the spirits.” “The rats and the cockroaches in the yard will just feast on them,” I complained. “But the spirits will already have smelled our offering and will make you well. The vermin can have the rest.”

Flor gave me a two-hour massage that was memorable. I realized she wasn’t a masseuse but a healer. She worked very gently, with great concentration. She was really into it. She reminded me of musicians who put their all into an instrument they are playing, or a conductor who feels the music he is directing. She never hurried, kneading every muscle. When it was over, my fever was gone.

My driver Gilbert had long gone home, having been reminded of his promise to take another tawas healer over the next morning. And so the next day he reported for work with Jackie in hand, a plump 37-year-old. She was very voluble, tracing the roots of her healing talent from a grandfather, to her mother, how she fell into a swoon and was considered dead while she was travelling from planet to planet etc., etc., etc.

Jackie had a different style of tawas. She slathered my back with massage oil, asked for a sheet of “coupon bond” and placed it on my back. She held it against the light and announced that she had made an X-ray of my interiors. She could now read from the map which parts were in trouble.

Jackie asked Beni for some live coals. Beni came with an old wok full of it. Jackie put in some incense which perfumed the room. I was made to dangle my feet from the bed over the perfumed smoke. The heat was very soothing to my feet.

Another tawas healer I wanted to experience was one who read candle drippings in water. My driver promised her to me. I waited for her for two days but she was a no-show.

“But I’m still glad a lot of traditional healing is back,” I told my wise BFF Manny. “They’ve always been around,” he said. “They never left. It’s us who left them.”