By Yasmin Adele Majeed
Maria del Rosario Says Hello is a lovely, precise short story about a fake memory, and an encounter in Manila.
719 words
“A similar thing happened to me when I was in Manila. I was sick of my family so I went to one of the night markets by myself and this woman came up to me while I was paying for some suman. I had no idea who she was, this old Filipino woman, she was looking at me like I was a ghost. It turned out she used to live down the street from us and babysat me as a child. Her name was Maria del Rosario. I recognized her immediately once she said her name. I had all these memories come up of a young woman who used to watch me whenever my mom had to go to work of her perfume, which smelled like night jasmine, and I swear she was wearing it then in the market. We ended up spending the evening together. She took me to a stall nearby and we ate bagnet and she told me about her life. Her husband had left her shortly after we moved, for a younger woman—their neighbour. Since then she had been struggling; she had moved in with her eldest son and his wife and their four kids. She seemed so genuinely happy to see me. It made me giddy, I’ll admit it, to hear this. She said that taking care of me as a child had been one of the last times she was truly happy, and that she thought about those days a lot lately. I felt so bad for her, but I was also thrilled by the whole interaction. I had spent the whole trip with my extended family who just liked to hang out in the house with each other and talk tsismis about people I haven’t seen in fifteen years. I felt like I wasn’t having a real trip. I didn’t want it to just be a family vacation because I was mostly thinking about my writing. I know that makes me sound terrible. The whole time that she was telling me about her life a part of me was making mental notes and analysing it as a narrative. Finally, something of substance I could turn into work. It’s fucked up. I don’t know how to turn it off, or I just didn’t want to, because I had been stuck for months and I thought the trip would, I dunno, dislodge something creatively. When we said goodbye I gave her some pesos. Not much, and at first she wouldn’t accept it, but I insisted. The last thing she said. ‘Tell your mom Maria del Rosario says hello.’ When I got home I grabbed my mom. I was like, guess who I saw at Tutuban? She made a joke about my asshole father showing up after all these years. But when I told her I saw Maria del Rosario she just had this blank face. I was like, Maria—the woman who took care of me from the ages of two to four, our old neighbour. But she just shook her head and said that my Ate Tina was the one who would watch me. I said no, it was Maria, but nobody knew who she was. My mother, her sisters, my cousins. They all looked at me like I was crazy. She was an absolute stranger. I don’t even think I told her my name. It just never came up because I assumed she knew me. Or she was scamming me but I don’t really care if she was. A few pesos, it’s not much. And maybe everything she told me was true and she really did mistake me for some other little girl or maybe she hangs out at the market on the lookout for American girls to buy her dinner. I’ll never know. Even her perfume, I’m not sure if my babysitter really smelled like that. I asked my mom if Ate Tina wore jasmine perfume and she said she couldn’t remember. My brain must have made it up. I went back to Tutuban a few times but I never saw her again. And now that I’m back home I don’t know if it’s anything more than just a story to tell about the trip I took to Manila. I don’t know if I’ll write about any of this yet, at all.”