MY GRANDMOTHER had smooth palms. I wondered why this was so, considering she did hard work practically all her life. The skin on her hands was stretched taut, firm and smooth as wax. I fell to musing about this every time she massaged my back full of cold bumps ready to crack beneath her fingers. Our family had a very strong tradition of hilot. It was my Grandmother’s prescription for every illness, especially when we were racked with cough or the flu. The latter, if it was quite severe, would not only warrant a massage with Vicks or coconut oil but also a basting of tuba leaves and vinegar. You would smell like kilawing ampalaya! That is why I dread it so much, since you are not even allowed to bathe the next day. But hilot was not only reserved for illnesses; it was also used for improving the shape of the body. Even before touch therapy for babies was advertised and recommended by Johnson and Johnson, my Lola had already established the practice in the family, although my Lola’s main objective in baby massages was to shape the baby’s body while it was still pliable. For example, my Lola boasts that I have this nose because she persevered on coaxing something out of that flat thing that she tells me I had when I was a baby. The massage not only consists of molding noses to achieve Vicky Belo results but also of lifting baby by both sides of the jaw to lengthen the neck. One must also straighten baby’s legs. This was done by grasping the calves and pushing the knees with the thumb. This would ensure that the baby would not grow to be pikî. A similar technique applied on the hips would prevent the baby from being sakang. I had the fortune of being born while my parents still lived with our Lola, making me the most massaged baby in our family. And I am quite content with the results. My siblings on the other hand were also massaged, but we lived too far from Lola then to benefit from her expertise, so my mother did it instead, though not as religiously.
But I am most grateful for the hilot whenever I am stressed out. My mother would start massaging my back and I fall to a fulfilling dreamless sleep. Sometimes I ask my mother for a massage not just for the purpose of relieving my stuffy nose or calming the coughing fits but also to feel pampered and cared for. A massage could calm me so much so that it’s the only remedy I could think of whenever insomnia hits me. And only a massage from my mother would effectively put me to sleep. But I didn’t like massages this much when I was little. I even remember complaining in the middle of the night when I was four, insisting my back was burning with the Vicks my mother had put on. I remember Vicks was the all-around remedy then. Before we got a nebulizer, my mother used to melt Vicks in a container of hot water and have us breathe in the vapors. I favored coconut oil then because it did not heat the skin so much.
But there was this thing that my mother did that I liked, and I don’t know if I liked it for the ritual that it entailed or because it gave warmth without the bite that Vicks had. It required heating oil in a spoon over a candle and squeezing calamansi juice in after. It was entrancing to see the oil sizzle when the calamansi juice hit it. The scent of burning oil and calamansi was so magical for me. The essence of the calming and cleansing smell of calamansi trapped in the oil. Then the still hot mixture was used for massaging.
I miss my Lola now even though I still have my mother to massage me when I am not feeling well. Even though she was difficult to deal with during the last years of her life which she spent with us. She suffered from severe and premature senility. She had Alzheimer’s disease. My mother had already experienced handling an Alzheimer’s patient before since my other Lola, my paternal grandmother—Lola Doray—had it, too. She lived with us ever since I was five and she died in 1992. But my maternal grandmother was different. Not only did she lack short term memory, she was also extremely stubborn. She had been a pack rat but since she forgot where she hid her things she became extremely suspicious of people around her, she accused people of taking her stuff. Everything violet was hers. Her senility even confuses her grief. She would suddenly cry claiming that her brother, Lolo Indoy, had died and she would not be consoled when we insisted that he was still alive and it was her other brother who had died many years ago.
But as her faculties were dwindling and we felt that she was just a shell of who once was the matriarch of the Basilios, her instinct for hilot did not leave her. Her skill for cooking could not stand her faulty memory but her touch was still healing. In fact, I enjoyed her massages more because she would not remember to stop. I did not care then if her stories while she was massaging me were the same and were repeated every minute. I just listened to the sound of her voice. The tone was always the same and I would know that she was giving the same advice: don’t put the lid on or stir something that you have put vinegar in before it boils, and don’t bathe or even touch water when you have your period. She would also sneak in a couple of stories about the good old days: how her brothers would bring her to the dances or how she rejected a rich but ugly suitor out of so many others. But then all of the repeating stories and the meticulous massage all boils down to one thing—her grandmotherly love. In fact. it was only when she massaged me that I truly felt that she knew she was my grandmother, and that she loved me and her family. Though she would not even recognize us when we talk to her, a touch would bring in a lucid interval. It was a spark of what she once was. And it was the one thing that made us go on loving her in spite of the difficulties of living with the shell that was my grandmother.
My experience with my grandmother proved to me that there are various effective ways of showing your love. I do not always obey my mother’s commands or obey them on time, but I do not hesitate to attend to her when she says she has a headache or her back is sore. I almost never say “I love you” but I hope that she knows that I love her when I knead her hand stiff with washing our clothes.
Ma. Chrizelda B. Bernal won first place in the Essay category of the 21st Ustetika Awards for Literature. – Ed.
