It happened at the clearing booth of NAIA flight station. She was bound for Thailand for a five-day trip to join a cultural immersion and was booked for a tattoo demonstration in Bangkok. Her head was still clouded with the foggy weather of Baguio City and her long hair was still damp from its cold breeze. I felt a sudden achill on my neck when a police officer came to me intercepting our queue, he held my elbow and gestured me out, I knew then that the time had come. After 20 years, I would see my Mom in prison. So, it did happen, they saw the lighter and a silver knife in her luggage. They searched further and found a dried marijuana leaf mixed among the lemon thorns she used as needles in her hand-tapped tattoos. She was sacked out and was placed under police custody that night. They seized all her things including her phone, and she was worried they would tap her transactions with Amaki.
Amaki was the leader of marijuana traders operating in Benguet. In the deep mountains where rain is abundant, he had tended acres of chayote plantation. They grew luscious sunflowers on the foot of the mountains chopped the leaves and mixed them with chicken dung from Tublayk, a potent fertilizer for the marijuana leaves to grow abundantly. Amaki scattered the seeds under pine trees and they became invasive – his reward for small-time pushers. Every quarter of the year, Amaki harvested loads of fresh leaves and dried them below his house. He had a lot of porters who traveled in the border mountains and shipped them in the lowlands.
She met Amaki when she was freelancing at a small booth on Session Road in Baguio. She was just an amateur tattoo artist then and experimented with different designs appealing to locals and foreigners. The common tattoo designs were for protection like the standing eagle, the seven-ray sun, and the half-dotted moon. The traveler’s compass, the triangular mountains, and ferns were designs the locals wanted. When Amaki asked her to copy a pagan symbol from the mummified tattoos of Benguet, she felt a boulder of fear pressing on her.
At first, she was hesitant, not only because she heard it was forbidden to use a sacred symbol and she knew that it was meant to be used for a summoning ritual. But when Amaki showed a bundle of cash worth to pay her one-year rent in Tam-awan she clicked her tongue then she whistled a very soft tune – drawing out the heavy air from her lungs and singing to someone familiar in spirit. From nowhere, she heard a response amidst the noisy crowd passing along Session Road – distinct from the loud singing of a local band, across the fidgets and mad laughter from cos players, and a searing voice higher than the children’s cries upon drawing colorful faces on asphalt. Somehow, she took it as a confirmation to take Amaki’s offer.
She studied the symbol which looked like the scepter held by the mummified tribe leader Adama. Three lines point to a golden disk where a bulol is seated above three curved lines symbolizing the northern clouds. The last sighting of this symbol was inscribed on the coffin of Adama but was destroyed when the Japanese ransacked the caves and threw Adama in the Amburayan river where the myth told us how it didn’t sink at first and was circled instead, floating for many days—a spell had protected it. When the Japanese, however, threw their iron stakes and whacked the coffin, it finally drowned in the waters. It took her eight hours to complete the tattoo of Adama, she was instructed to put the bulol at the center of Amaki’s chest and a circular centipede to guard it. The lemon thorns she used broke and were changed at least three times during the tattoo session, and every hour she clicked her tongue and whistled softly to hear the voice that served as her protection.
It was too late for her to understand what Amaki was trying to achieve. He had used the tattoo to invoke protection for his marijuana farm in the Benguet mountains. Now and then, he learned from clients that Amaki performed a ritual to call for heavy clouds to descend upon his place whenever police used choppers to locate his marijuana farm. The police could not ride in Amaki’s direction for thick clouds would hide the place and heavy storms would suddenly poured on the farm. Since Amaki’s bold offer, she had received a lot of recommendations and her tattoo career flourished. She became a resident tattoo artist and people sought her.
During rainy seasons when tourists didn’t come up to Baguio, she would take a break from tattooing and visit the caves in Kabayan and Sagada. She collected driftwood in the underground rivers and dead trees in the mountains. In her apartment in Baguio, she would dry them in her kitchen and when they were ready she would make her charcoal from the collected woods. She would store them in the bottles and label them with the place they came from. When clients requested for her service, for instance, the families of the old clans in Baguio and Sagada, she was brought to their private houses in Camp John Hay. These powerful clans who owned big lands in the city held regular canao rituals. After butchering pigs and exhuming the bones of their ancestors, she was asked to attend their cleansing ritual, and right there they asked her to tattoo protection symbols on their skins, others mixed the human bone powder with her charcoal, which she saw possessed them. She focused her eyes on the pores of their skin tapped the ink to their skin and avoided their eyes that penetrated her very soul. There were things she wasn’t supposed to see wherein people behaved weirdly while being tattooed. But what disturbed her the most was when she tried clicking her tongue and whistling a soft tune to calm her spirit, there was no response from the wind, only a cavernous silence and she knew she lost the source of her power – the voice of her mother.
A case was filed against her and they took the dried leaf found in her luggage as evidence to indict her. After a week she was transferred to the Pasay Jail. She was determined to look for her mother who was imprisoned twenty years ago because she was caught with marijuana leaves while traversing the border mountains of Tinglayan. She hadn’t seen her since then but while growing up she carried on the tattooing tradition and she felt her hand-tapping was guided by the soothing lullaby of her mother, which she recalled with the clicking of her tongue and singing the tune of Laguna, their maiden tribe. The last time she inquired about her mother’s location was when she was ten. Her aunt told her that her mother was held first in Baguio Jail but was transferred to Manila.
“Where are you, Inah?” she whispered upon entering her cell. She was mindless of the presence of many crime offenders in the place and was in a deep trance searching for any trace of her mother. Once she met the jail guard with a standing eagle tattoo on his arm, the ink used was properly ground and the technique was hand-tapping. She cried many nights when the guard confirmed that indeed five years ago, he got tattooed by a woman using the ashes from the cigarette butts. “Your mom died a month ago in a riot in cell 13, her body was thrown in the river when no family member came to claim her.”
For three months, she stayed inside the jail, and during routines, while doing the morning exercises and walking during breaks time, she looked for people with hand-tapped tattoos on their arms. She found at least 30 people tattooed by her mom. They were human vessels where her mother left trails for her to find her. And when she tapped them, she heard a broken tune from the river – some, the sound of a ripple, some, the meeting of river stones, some, the cracking of driftwood. “Oh, Mother, your voice is everywhere,” she whispered and offered her tears to those people. “The one who gave you that tattoo is my mother,” she proudly said to them, and they responded with a sad smile.
One night, she dreamt of her birthplace in Kalinga, she was walking past the lemon trees brimming with fruits. She took one of them and when she opened it, it was empty like a hollow skull and when she inspected the trees, no thorns were growing from their stems! “There were no thorns to be used in our tattoos!” she woke up from the cry of a woman at the gates of their hometown.
The next day, she called for the jail guard and requested an audience with the highest officer. “Call the chief police, tell him, in exchange for my freedom, I can help him bust Amaki and the marijuana trade in Benguet.”
