Lydia

From the foot of the nearby hills the lie of the land runs down at a quiet gradient, toward the sea coast some kilometres distant. Here, through this village and its surrounding fields, a sombre river of five meters width wanders with easy pace along a slow eastward course.

It is the dry season now, from November until the following June. No rain in the hills or on the plains for three months. Yes, the month is February, thus our river is of shallow draught and less than half a meter in depth at the maximum point.

The rich, verdant greens of the monsoon season have reluctantly given way to hues of brown and yellow. Vegetation is parched through lack of quenching rains. Fields are baked dry, with the brown earth fissured and tempered hard - the height of a northern Philippine summer.

Cotton-floss candy heads atop the river bank's tall, dry grasses and reeds perform a slow and quite majestic ballet in natural response to the musical orchestrations of the late afternoon's breeze. Then chaos overcomes their elegant dance. White, fluffy seed heads bounce around and move in disarray. Something stirs below their vertical stand – a thing aggressive in its forward progress, as yet unseen.

Now, as the grasses thin towards the river bank's upper edge, we hear this intruder upon tranquillity approach. Now, the final grass stems part and it steps forth into the light of the day's tiring sun.

It is her. Lydia, she most wicked and foul – an iniquitous harridan and toothless hag become, and not yet a half century of years passed in life- as her dumpy form, a meter and a quarter in height, waddles and shuffles along. Feet clad in rubber-thong sandals, she is bagged in a pair of ragged shorts which reach her arthritic knees. Lower nut-brown legs bared to the elements. Her upper form is rib-protruding skinny, nay emaciated. She wears a faded green army shirt, which bears more stains than a bar-room carpet.

Hair, black and uncombed, it falls to shoulder-level. Her face is one of Gothic proportions in the classical sense, as sun-dried and dark and wrinkled as a desiccated prune. Her eyes are grown rheumy and squinted beyond their natural oriental cast. Her few remaining teeth, and gums and lips, are stained crimson-red. A chewer of beetle nut is the subject of our observations.

She shuffles to a halt, snorts and sniffs through her flat, wide nose, then hawks and spits into the dusty earth at her feet. Wiping a gnarled hand across her lips she removes threads of residual red spittle. Long ivory-yellow nails terminate the fingers of these hands – these predatory claws. She roots an index finger nail inside each nostril in turn, inspects her harvest then flicks it away with an apathetic flip. Truly she bears a Medusan image, and mayhap silent and venomous vipers do reside hidden within her scraggled scalp.

As a small pebble strikes the dusty ground to her right, dark piercing eyes seek out the origin of the stone's passage, then fix upon a stand of bamboo some twenty meters distant. She stares at this point intently, then a group of four children twix the ages of eight and twelve years break cover and run towards the adjacent dry paddy fields. A catapult, that most basic of adolescent ballistic toys, falls from the grip of the tallest boy in this most rapid and discretionary of retreats.

Walking to the bamboo stand she stoops and picks up the simple weapon, then drops it into her shouldered basket of woven rattan.

"Little piglets, you dare to shoot a stone at ME! Your precious eyes will dry out hollow and be blinded while you sleep this night!" she calls hoarsely after the departed boys. Then she spits a stream of beetle-red saliva once more. The ritual of spitting always follows a cast curse. For this is the way of witches. Spit and curse. Curse and spit. Throughout history, this is their way.

Ah, did I not mention until now? Why, she is a witch, our Lydia. Self-declared, and too, self-taught. She has ‘the gift’, or so she tells all who are gullible enough to listen. What actual gifts she possesses are left to the discerning to decide for themselves.

The gifts of prophecy and clairvoyance, she declares, of changing the weather to her whims. Curing the ills of those afflicted and ailing, and speaking in tongues - the voices of those dead, and departed their mortal coil, passing through her lips.
Table rattling’s for every taste, with séances to suit the individual’s needs and personal requirements - all at a price, of course. The ceremonies of the bleaching of the bones, reading tea leaves, tarot cards, or a chicken's or goat's entrails for divinations.
Horoscopes, telescopes, periscopes, and oscilloscopes, Lydia can do all. So she claims. The locating of lost treasures too - those recently mislaid or stolen – and those buried deep within the Earth's confines, and obscured from memories by history's passage.

We must not forget the spells and the casting of curses: curses of evil against one's enemies, curses for courses and curses for every need. Casts them, and removes them. Removes those cast by her contemporary witches - the opposition, so to speak - her adversaries upon the lofty astral planes of the occult nether world.

I personally do not take her boasting and meandering talk with any serious content. But some do and more than enough to justify in logic and reason, maintaining a belief in archaic superstitions that restrict the processes of mental development for this modern technological age of grand renaissance.
Perhaps to be best described as an anachronism in motion – a foot dragging over the doorstep from the Dark Ages into the 21st century.
Luckily she was born into an age of partial enlightenment, and not the time of the Grand Inquisition. No mere ducking stools in their stables of enquiry. Dungeons damp in castles dark, with hot irons laid out ready beside the racks.

Broken upon the radius of the wheel were heretics of Lydia's stamp. Blaspheming hags, burned at the stake unrepentant, those self-confessed brides of Lucifer. The Devil's Handmaidens - those Cursed Concubines of that Satanic Seraglio.

Ah Lydia, a past master of self-delusion. Mentally she is as stable as a tortoise on stilts and not playing with a full deck, as our American cousins fondly phrase such cerebral aberrations.

She kicks at the dusty ground to secure her sandals upon large splay-toed feet. Bunions, corns, and calluses deprive them of any aesthetic quality they might once have possessed: if ever. Now she scratches at a wart on the left side of her face, then spits on a finger end and applies the red-tinted balm to this point of irritation. Yes, warts. She has them. Not in any abundance, but enough. All witches do - a mark of their cadre and badge of office.

Frogs and toads have warts too but Lydia is merely a frog who dreams of becoming a toad. Such is the pathetic state of some humans' ambitions. A pitiful creature of circumstance of her own creation is Lydia. Yet for all her curses and threats, she is insignificant in the greater realm of the Cosmos.

Though for the population of her small world, which is this village, this provincial rural backwater hamlet, steeped in superstitions and ghosts never exorcised, then she holds some modicum of sway and enforces a sense of dread upon the uninitiated.
The majority of the small population here achieved no more than rudimentary educations. Most can read and write, but have little need for even these basic academic achievements in their everyday adult lives.

They are tenant farmers in the main, living a hand to mouth existence, all Roman Catholics to a man, and woman - from the cradle to the grave. Hatched, matched, and dispatched, under the tender auspices of the Vatican. Such communities tend towards larger families. Thus incoming finances fall short of that required. Thus poor farmers beget children devoid of substantial legacy in any form.

No Mercedes-Benz ply these dusty lanes. No swimming pools adorn their gardens, nor do patio barbecues. Simple pleasures lie in basic needs: meat and fish for the table and a dram of illicit moonshine liquor occasionally. A game of mah jong, a hand of cards, or mayhap the Sunday cockfights - and a greater burden of debt due their indulgence.

Yes, these folk are easy prey to those of Lydia's ilk. Not all, but most. Some believe naught she utters, yet fear her boasted powers. Those rumoured abilities to bewitch and curse they that dare incur her ire. Those who would dare cross her path.
All have heard of her braggadio of being a member of the insurgent communist New Peoples' Army - the dreaded NPA. And a full-fledged Colonel, no less, she claims to be. Ka Rose. Comrade Rose, her clandestine alias. Colonel Ka Rose: NPA Commander, Broomstick and Black Cat Battalion – with covert operations on nights sporting a full harvest moon. Such nonsense she spouts. Yet these village folk hereabouts fear to disbelieve.

Although to consider this infernal thunderer of worlds as a threat to humankind and our civilization is farcical. Her worst civil offense to date is estafa: the purchase of goods or borrowing of monies without due intent to redeem the ‘utang’ (debt) – colloquially known as ‘lista ng tubig’.

Oh, there was the case of the Ramirez' dog being poisoned on the day after the family refused to lend money to Lydia - money to gamble and buy grog. That came to the attention of the local police, due her uttered threats of retribution. But a stern warning to behave was their harshest meting out of justice.

All hereabouts suspect, nay know with some modicum of certainty, that she steals wayward chickens and dogs for her culinary requirements and spells. An odd water buffalo is led away from its grazing grounds during the night. The following day Lydia is seen lurking around the Urdaneta cattle market. Lydia has money to gamble and to drink for a while. No Sherlock Holmes required to solve these misdemeanours.

Her last husband, Ondo, died a ruined and disillusioned man - alcoholism and cirrhosis of the liver. Lydiaism. A fatal and terminal dose of Lydiaitis, and driven to drink by her perpetual naggings and insistences to dig for the treasure buried on their meagre farm holdings. Treasure put there by her spirit guide, her fairy. Lourdes the Fairy.

Ondo dug holes everywhere under Lourdes' instructions, given to Lydia while she went into her customary trances.
Twice his deep pits, all unshored, caved-in and almost killed him. Pits and holes galore, each one flooded out from natural ground water seepage. No treasure was ever unearthed. Fairy Lourdes apparently kept moving the horde due Ondo's slow progress in its pursuit. Oh dear, our Lydia and her wicked ways.

Five husbands she boasts to have put in the ground - worn them all out for deliverance to premature graves. And to have borne more offspring than a prize hybrid sow - yet none of her natural progeny, nor the step-children of her last marital bonding, will even acknowledge her existence. Such is the fill they have absorbed of dear Lydia, that most dubious of maternal figures.

If the due processes of justice were to be served, then Lydia would be crucified for her flagitious and nefarious deeds. And for her petty crimes, for they are too numerous to bear mention - committed over a lifetime of sins and misdeeds. Her unremitted borrowings and minor extortions from those with serious ailments and terminal conditions she swore and promised to cure. Mostly they lie in a state of questionable peace within the graves of the earth. From them and their families she would demand payments in advance for her potions and spiritual cures. The laying of hands and supposed psychic surgery. The talismans she casts her spells upon, for them to wear. Power crystals and touch stones, Lydia supplies all - she of the glib tongue, the local charlatan.

See her now, as she re-shoulders the rattan basket and shuffles on. Towards that pigsty of a nipa hut she claims as an abode. Old beyond her natural years, the wages of sin materialized, and marking well her physical countenance and stature. Her soul: the blackest of jets - a reversed process of the Dorian Gray syndrome. Yet what portrait or mirror she uses to judge her reflections, who can tell. Perhaps none, for she is a victim of her own self-delusions.

Lydia. The Wicked Witch of the East, feared by some, believed by those born gullible. Yet loved by none and hated by all – and now subject to the sad circumstances of her personal vile creation.