Reden and Very Strange Circumstances

Reden has been my masseur for the past 25 years now. He is a former boxer from Surigao del Norte. He married some eight years ago. He and his wife live near my house.

Like me, Reden has an office job on weekdays. He used to maintain five other clients. He eventually let go of them due to lack of time, and so, for many years now, I have been his sole client. He comes to the house on weekends.

I suspect that Reden retained me as a client because we share a common interest: indigenous Philippine magic. I have given him many of my books and talismans, which he has always hungered for. I teach him something new whenever we meet. Reden is, in fact, more of an albularyo than a masseur; he lays his hands on my head and whispers an incantation before beginning my massage. He mixes his own lotion, a compound of different oils. Like all other albularyos, he visits a fellow albularyo every once in a while. The name of the old albularyo he visits is, strangely, also Reden. During one of the young Reden's visits to the old Reden, the old Reden informed him, quite accurately, that he continues to visit an elderly man to give him healing energy. That elderly man, of course, is me. Young Reden and I have been planning to visit Old Reden together for some time now, but it has never happened because Old Reden lives in Marikina, which I consider a huge distance from Cubao. Old Reden, however, does exist, because I gave his address to a co-worker once, and she went and consulted him.

Reden's life is a series of tragedies. When he first married, he and his wife had unstable jobs. They tried everything they could to make a living with their meager resources: selling sandwiches at the Araneta Center Bus Terminal, selling fresh coconut in the streets, installing posters on mall walls. His wife suffered a miscarriage after their marriage. Reden then went through a schizophrenic episode during which he heard voices whispering in his ear. He was eventually taken in at the National Mental Hospital in Mandaluyong, and he stayed there for three months. After he was released he briefly went back to Surigao to work at his relatives' piggery. He also went through a phase of making pilgrimage to distant, old churches on foot.

Last Christmas, after eight long years, Reden's wife gave birth. Her pregnancy and childbirth had been kept a secret from me in order to eventually surprise me. Sadly, the three-month-old baby died of SIDS in March. The day after the first night of its wake, the house where Reden and his wife were renting a room burned down. They lost everything.

Despite all of that, Reden has remained pleasant, cheerful, humble, and optimistic, and his faith in the Almighty is steadfast. Every year I give him all my unwanted shirts, pants, bags, and wallets, and he has always accepted and been appreciative of them.

Whenever I feel troubled I think of Reden. I believe that God sent him to me 25 years ago in order for me to learn life's lessons from him.

It was never the other way around.