Madelina Jacquinto's Near Death Experience

by Michael Mendones (he/him)

Madelina Jacquinto was born into poverty in the Philippines. Her father was a carpenter and her mother had 12 babies. When the last was born with an ungrown tongue, Madelina left school, aged 12, and worked in a factory, wrapping thousands of sweet yellow carabao milk pastilles in loose rice paper parcels.

She cried on the day she left school—she didn’t want to go, but even at such a young age, she knew what responsibility was, and that she would have to be strong for her family as the firstborn. Growing up, all she remembered was the appearance of a new baby to hold at the hip, and the ever-shrinking portion of food she could allow herself to eat as they tried to divide three eggs, rice, and fish sauce between 12 hungry mouths.

Despite these hardships, life had its small pleasures. She enjoyed going to church with her mother Lureanna, arranging flowers, and walking to wherever her father was working. She would spot him on the roof of a new house in the baking sun and call out to him that she had his lunch. She went ‘duckpin’ bowling with her many friends and was popular with the village because she was a ‘good girl.’ The future held some promise because she had one special gift: she was beautiful.

Madelina was the classic mestiza. This was slightly puzzling as both her parents were dark, and in fact, her father was rumoured to have Indian blood in him. This made her Spanish beauty, large eyes, and Caucasian skin even more remarkable. In the village, it was almost miraculous. No one imagined she would stay there for long.

From the age of 14, Madelina was courted by all and sundry: suitors would queue around the corner of her house to spend a few minutes with her. She gained a reputation among the young men for being suplada, as if she was too good for them. In fact, as my uncle told me many years later, she was cripplingly shy, and she found it almost impossible to meet the eyes of her awestruck potentials. She did not know what to say to them in response to their banal attempts at small talk, and the forced chaperoned meetings were a source of dread to her.

Madelina also knew that if she was to help her family to the best of her ability, she had to secure a marriage with a man of means, but this thought terrified her. She did not want to leave her family. They meant everything to her, and her siblings were like her children.

Time passed, and despite the dozens of men who sat expectantly in front of her, Madelina had not yet met someone who excited her. She had no ambitions to find a matinee idol to complement her own big-screen grace—she liked a simple, honest man with a big heart. Instead, the boys who gathered outside and crowded her home succeeded only in leaving her unimpressed with their boasts of how much money they would make, how big their future house would be, and the size of their father’s lands. Madelina found herself becoming more and more bored by these superficial show-offs, wishing she was climbing trees with her friends or eating banana-cue from a street stand near the church.

If ever there was a foregone conclusion in the history of Panghulo’s annual beauty contest, then the year 1960 was the one. My mother, then 16 years old, not only won the contest but also won the Obando contest. This accolade had never been afforded to a Panghulo girl before; it made her beauty known not only where it was firmly established but also far and wide to nearby regions.

This, coupled with her newly installed title of ‘Obando Duckpin Bowling Champion 1960’ made her a prize to be even more feverishly pursued than ever before. The queue outside the house grew longer.

She only carried on viewing potential husbands out of a sense of duty to her mother. She had met the man she wanted to marry, but he was not suitable. He was poor, but he was kind and gentle and saw her as a person—not a painted doll. His name was Louis and it was the first time she had kept anything from her parents.

Up until this point in my mother’s history, she had led a charmed life. Despite the abject poverty she had experienced, she wanted for nothing. Madelina had a perfectly formed role to play, and thus was a fully-fledged, respected member of the community. Conducting herself with a renowned dignity and selfless dedication to family and the church, she was not expected to taste tragedy. Her beauty bestowed her with luck, or so the village assumed.

One lugubrious Saturday, after catching the jeepney home with her friends after another triumphant game of bowling and a modest merienda, Madelina found herself brought low with a headache that would not cease. She lay in bed feeling guilty because she could not feed her brothers and sisters. Moreover, it was the first time in her living history that she had not attended church on Sunday, had not cleaned the aisles, or tended the flowers.

Lureanna sat in the church fanning herself with the alacrity of the anxious; the conspicuous absence beside her brought shame, and the disruption to her normally life-affirming routine had been an epiphany. She had left her daughter behind under the most astonishing of conditions, lying in bed, useless, after midday.

Madelina’s head felt like it was imploding—these migraines would plague her decades later. She had not felt pain like this before and had not been sick even once. Her childhood had been so robust that no one had commented on it; her grandmother Anicia had believed her blessed because God had made her flawless. 

By the time Tuesday came around, and it was clear that Madelina’s condition was worsening, her parents were beyond worry. They could not afford to send for a doctor, and they could not afford to lose their daughter. She was not yet seventeen but she was also the prize they had produced, a way out of poverty and into a more comfortable way of existence. She enhanced their standing in the community; without her, the sheen on the family would fade and perhaps the luck which had sustained them through the hard times would decide to flee and alight on a more deserving flock.       

Yes, the truth was that in the minds of the Jacquinto’s, not only was the fact of Madelina’s existence tangible proof that life could offer future possibilities to savour, but that even in a backwater village where urbanisation would come last, where capitalism would spread its malign influence and break up its cohesiveness with the arrival of outsiders, even a village like this could produce a woman capable of evoking envy in the big rich city.

However, by Thursday, Madelina’s family knew the inevitable was at hand. It was obvious that she had brain fever—some kind of meningitis perhaps. Whatever the diagnosis, it was apparent that this beloved girl was dying. She had not spoken for four days, hadn’t slept or eaten for six. Her skin had turned grey; she had lost an astonishing amount of weight, which had manifested itself in the sweat that steadily poured off her.

Ariston was heartbroken, and to stop himself from falling into a depression, he consoled himself with work. It was not within his power to heal her. He fashioned a simple plywood coffin and left it in the front room, a sinister harbinger of his health-affirming daughter’s decline.

A sort of numbness hung over the village. Everybody knew about Madelina—there had been a vigil in the village for the last three days, which was unprecedented and even a little heretical. Vigils had only taken place in the church for Jesus when he was dead over Easter Weekend, so the ritual that took place seemed a little strange for the parishioners—they knew that instead of the rejoicing and liberty allowed during fiesta to celebrate His resurrection, there would be no Lazarus, only mourning to return to.

Some of the less generous members of the congregation held less noble intent in their hearts than to pray for a holy intercession to save this poor innocent girl’s life. A minor core of the prayer givers, mothers with daughters approximately Madelina’s age, schemed and plotted as they fingered their rosary beads, rethinking marriage plans, deciding the new pecking order of beauty that would result.

Yes, even when the village contemplated the loss of its prized asset, the one that had put its place on the map in the district, jealousy abounded, and the veneer of kindness the people displayed was thinner than the smiles of condolence they gave to the girl’s family when they visited. 

Nevertheless, Madelina was a fighter. And as she fought to purge her system of the poison that engulfed her, as her consciousness moved further and further away from her surroundings and she could no longer hear her sisters calling her name, she knew that she was getting closer and closer to meeting the man whose image she had adored all her life in the church.

Pio was crying. He was not the kind of person who shared his grief with others, and he carried his sadness and anger at the injustice in the world like an invisible burden, weighting his steps and slowing his gait. He was only ten years old and had learnt that life was not fair, that his older brother Bonifacio was the favourite male, that he was second in the pecking order, and that his father loved him less. Bonifacio was a much more powerfully built boy, yet was so lazy that he let Pio do all the chores they were supposed to share. 

One day, when he had had the temerity to question Ariston in the field where they were tending to their meagre allotment, he found himself running, as the fury of an elder challenged in a society where children do as they are told came after him with a razor-sharp scythe and a roiling anger that would not subside for days. 

Life was hard for the boy, but now that his worshipped and blameless older sister—that shining beacon of goodness that had shared her love equally between them all was dying—he was bereft. Her kind words and gestures had always given him something to look forward to, something to hold on to. He was crying beneath the guava trees near his best friend Pitchon’s house. Beneath his veil of tears, Pio did not notice the old woman approaching him.

Had he been more aware, he would have wondered who she was, a stranger to the village, stranger even more for the fact that she was old; all the new people that came were younger, and she was clearly not here visiting with the rest of her family. The stranger’s presence slowly entered the periphery of Pio’s consciousness because he was aware that he was being watched.

He shook himself out of his solemnity with a start, his large eyes taking in the sight of this ancient yet strong looking woman, who possessed a supernatural strength of which even a young boy had to be respectful in the presence. 

“Where is she?” asked the woman.

Pio was momentarily stunned. The woman addressed him with the imperiousness of his grandmother, expecting total respect and for her orders to be followed.

 “I-I don’t understand you, ma’am,” Pio answered tentatively.

 “Your sister. Where is she? Does she live still?”

Pio wanted to buckle under the weight of his shock. But he now realised who—or what—this woman was. He had heard his elders talking about witches, or holy women, that wandered around the land and knew magic and plants and had strange powers. To a young boy with a strong imagination, all this made sense, and he was galvanised into action by the possibility that he could help his sister somehow with the help of this magic woman.

Madelina’s family were quite simply dumbfounded to be confronted with the sight of a breathless, red-faced Pio, who had practically broken the front door in his eagerness to enter the house, clutching something in his hands and declaiming some fanciful story about an old woman with magic witch powers that he had never seen before. There was a moment of hilarity that temporarily broke through the tension when Pablita, the next oldest girl to him, scorned him.

“He’s gone crazy—look, he’s got that poisonous fruit in his hands!”

Indeed it was true. When Pio had gathered his breath and explained what had happened, the family understood that this mysterious woman had instructed him to gather two large examples of the Mabolo fruit, a potently poisonous member of the nightshade family, and told him with complete and utter exactitude that he should crush the overripe fruit in a bowl and feed the sick girl every single last bitter piece of flesh, ensuring that she swallowed.

“Only then, and with God’s mercy, might she live”.

With these last words, Pio had run to the nearest tree, which was located on the edge of the village, near the fish ponds and abattoir, thankful that he and his friends knew the whereabouts of the fruits available for them to steal. Once in a while, one of them would get a beating. It was worth it for the guava, rambutan and sickly sweet chico. Little did Pio know at the time that he would utilise his neighbourhood fruit map in such a way one day.

There was a debate within the family. Some thought Pio had taken leave of his senses and imagined the episode. Others thought that as there was a coffin ready for their sister, even if they poisoned her at this stage it wouldn’t make much difference. If it worked, it would be incredible. If it hastened her death, no harm would be done as she was practically dead already. One or two were undecided, wary of the fruit’s deadly reputation - they had all been warned about eating it and the memory lingered. It didn’t matter what anybody thought because the final decision came down to Ariston. And as he remembered how the ermitanyo had taught him that some poisonous fruit and plants were not necessarily bad if used in the right way, at the right time, he decided that he would prefer to try something, anything, if it could have any chance of returning Madelina to him. 

He doubted that she would be able to ingest anything at this stage anyway, but in full view of his large young family, he pulped the soft dark orange flesh in a wooden bowl, instinctively smelling that this substance shouldn’t pass a human being’s lips, and forced the whole lot into Madelina’s mouth, getting Lureanna to hold her nose until the mass was swallowed down. They waited. Expecting a violent explosion of vomit, and perhaps the expulsion of whatever poison had taken hold of her, some of the Jacquintos retreated from her. Nothing happened. They waited longer, and after three more hours of speculation and debate, some were accusing Pio of killing his sister, forgetting that she was already pretty much dead.

A night passed. By this point the family had stopped receiving well-wishers and visitors, the coffin was just waiting to be filled, and the sight of one in the front room of a house without a body to look at seemed almost vulgar. Some of the spinsters had already begun to make food for the wake. It was all they could do—turning purple yam into a pulp to be mixed with coconut milk, mixing glutinous rice flour with water, boiling little sweet dumplings to be coated in shredded fresh coconut, sugar and toasted sesame seeds. They were good neighbours, good people. Who wouldn’t help each other in a time of need?

Louisa, perhaps Madelina’s most devoted sister, was only eight years old. Yet, she had the kind of unflinching faith a grown woman would struggle to display, being the only one that truly believed in her heart that she would see her sister smile again. She had slept next to Madelina, exhausted by all the excitement the night before, not understanding everything but knowing that she had no part to play in the decision-making. 

All she could offer was her total and utter devotion to the girl who had taken her to school. She would notice her terror and calm her down, and promise that it would all turn out okay. And it did.

Louisa knew that this current drama would turn out okay, and as she turned to look at her sister and realized that her face was no longer grey and that she had stopped sweating, Louisa smiled with the certainty that only faith rewarded can supply.  

Madelina was reminded of her own miraculous recovery from near-death many many years later, and had to dig deep into her own reserves of unflinching faith to believe that her only son, born more than two months early, would survive. Inconceivably tiny, yellow from the jaundice he was born with, Madelina wept as she looked at the child she could not hold—he was too delicate and the plastic barrier of the incubator separated them.

But she had given him a gift she contained, the strength to fight for every breath to live, to keep on going whatever the obstacles, and she, too, was rewarded with some kind of hope.