The Phantasma

By Karl R. De Mesa

She was tall, androgynous, and the ceramic Saint Francis I carried was inverted in her cat-slit eyes. I could see her clearly, towering over the crowd, amid the press lining our plaza that Good Friday. The tight collar of her dress framed her swan neck, was draped across her collarbone.

She could have so easily been one of those emaciated, bag-of-bones people so frequently shown in the fourth world documentaries that even her clothes could not hide it. With virulent strains of avian influenza making the rounds her fevered visage, pursed lips and the swaying, bobbing motion of her head like silent coughs mimicked the afflicted.

Only once before had I seen one of the Madres. That night I had played hooky with a girl I was courting and a few more minutes of gratification had overcome the fear of a beating, the terror of the shadowed trails. I ran home with the sky running duskward far too quickly.

A few more steps around a corner and I would have run into her. I pressed my back against a wall and risked a glance round the bend.

Her gait was half-stumbling and half-dainty, her hair undisturbed by the breeze. Her hands clutched at the air like brushing away cobwebs. She wore a wistful, far-away look and the distress in her mouth made me want to ask her what was wrong. Through the translucence of her diaphanous, white dress her nipples were embossed like pencil erasers. There was only the scruff of her feet against loose stones. She made no other sound.

They haunted the streets and small roads leading to interior villages when they’re deserted, the windows boarded and the garlic bulbs hanging above the crosses chalked on doorways. Father had warned me not to block their way if I chanced them like this, on one of their walks.

“You must not meet the Phantasma, be it Madre or Padre, or try to pass it by,” my father had advised, screaming into my ear. “Stay on the roadside, boy! Stay out of its sight and it will do you no harm!” He whacked me once on the shin with his cane so the lesson would sink in.

So I scampered behind a balete tree, crouching, trying not to piss as she shambled by. Just inches away, her head brushed the low branches as she strode forward on impossibly long limbs. When she vanished before turning the next corner I dropped my knuckles from my mouth and wiped my tears on my sleeve. Thank you for the caning, father.

Yet now there was no other option but to pass her by as the procession advanced. I could not shake her gaze. In those green, reptilian eyes I was the bearer of an inverted icon in an equally distorted parade.

In that distortion, the statue’s bald head tucked under my chin, I looked like a page torn off some tantric manual. The suffering Christ beside me was also upside down mirroring a warped orgy with the four girls who guided the miniature carroza or platform. Their figures cavorted as they strained on the upward slope.

She did not step into my path. She did not reach out to drag me into one of the empty alleys. Instead she blinked. And blinking, her eyes went back to a dull sienna as if some nictiting membrane had merely disguised the human within her.

With the unblinking stare broken the rush of the crowd came back to me and with it the shouts, the claps and the brass as the band started playing the backdrop for the Golgotha’s reenactment.

Over my shoulder I saw her put on a pair of sunglasses then walk away into a narrow street.