The story of

Many Mansions
By; Exie Bola
 Small world
Ledesma St., San Juan
• It probably was a small house, but size throws off a child. What seems
modest to an adult is extravagance to a little one. It was the world to me. It
certainly seemed ample then. There were three bedrooms, which we called
blue, green, and aircon. Children’s names, these; one bedroom was painted
blue, one green, and one had a new air-conditioner. I don’t remember what
we called it before the air-conditioner arrived, but it was yellow, with a
parquet floor and a deep dressing area. It was the room of my parents,
which is why the new Sony color TV and Betamax were there. The old TV
was in the living room downstairs, a Zenith in a large cabinet with doors
that slid open. In front of it was a coffee table and the blue sofa where Tito
Bing, when he was visiting, would sit shirtless, leaving a deep, sweaty
impression on the vinyl.
• My mother sent most of us to piano lessons, and soon
enough, a piano took its place in our living room. We went to
a music studio in northeast Greenhills, a short walk from the
Greenhills shopping center. To us that whole complex was
simply Unimart, where my mother bought groceries; then
came Virra Mall, a modern marvel, not yet a seedy haven of
smuggled goods. This was my small, well-traveled universe:
Ledesma Street to Unimart; further down Ortigas to Meralco,
where my father worked and where we played tennis on
Sunday afternoons; and then on to Ateneo, where I had
studied since grade school.
• San Juan seemed pretty much the whole city then, because even my
relatives were there. On M. Paterno Street, adjacent to Ledesma, lived Tito
Pepot with my father’s parents. Tito Tito and the Litonjuas lived in another
part of Greenhills, with Tita Letty and the Mendozas nearby on Mariano
Marcos Street. Sundays we heard mass in Mary the Queen, where I would
marry my wife years later.The big round dining table was new, and I
suppose like a lot of families, we experienced that moment of bliss when,
having changed from a long table to this round one with a novelty called
the lazy susan, we were liberated from the forced courtesies of asking
people to pass this or that dish. I wonder though if something was lost, if
the convenience of just turning an inner platform set on marbles until what
you wanted was right in front of you did away with the learned cordiality,
the togetherness with one’s table mates that taught you the give and take of
community.
• There were orange glasses and a matching orange pitcher, and at meals
we’d have it and a blue one on the table. Tito Bing would pour orange
juice into his coffee, forgetting that the water was in the orange pitcher,
the orange juice in the blue one. Ledesma Street was a short one, and
quiet. Our house was unassuming, with walls of a modest height and a
green gate. The gate opened to a long three-car garage. We’d play
football there, and Bombit, the eldest, once fell on his wrist and broke it.
On birthdays there would be parties, with folding tables from one end to
the other, balloons, spaghetti, hotdogs, ice cream, and our painfully cute
posing for pictures. Our next-door neighbor made coffins, or so they said.
I don’t remember seeing any. Actually, I don’t remember seeing anyone
in that tiny gray house on our left. My mother says that some of the
people there had gone insane. Somehow, coffin-making and insanity
come hand in hand, as we’ve learned from old horror movies.
• In high school I discovered the perilous thrill of chasing after girls. Going to soirées,
meeting them, getting their phone numbers, calling them up – how crazy it all was, to
daydream an entire afternoon away, my books on the living room coffee table, my head
in the clouds. The studying could go to hell as my mind floated in its hormone-induced
bliss. It was a heady time, reveling in the rush of taking risks, then wallowing in the
crushing despair of rejection. The Assumptionistas wouldn’t let you stay on the phone
with them more than fifteen minutes. The Scholasticans would talk for hours, and I
loved that. Niña and I would talk often, it would be daylight out, then it would be dark
and I wouldn’t even get up to turn on the lights, and we’d talk some more. But I should
have seen how that affair would turn out: she lived on Vito Cruz, way beyond my
familiar orbit. At a certain point, we saw each other at a volleyball game in La Salle
Greenhills, then asked "Was that you?" later in the evening when I called. When you
don’t know what each other looks like anymore, the courtship has officially failed. Then
we transferred. It was 1984, I was fifteen and finishing my second year in high school.
When we were about to leave, we felt the excitement of moving to a new house, a
bigger one, in a more upscale neighborhood. It meant good things, that we were moving
up in the world.
 Small world
Ledesma St., San Juan
• Theme: Child memories
• Setting:
• POV: First person point of view
• Conflict:
• Narrative time:
• Figure of speech:
 Five brothers, One Mother
Taurus St., Cinco Hermanos, Marikina
• The Marikina house wasn’t finished yet, but with an ultimatum hanging over
our heads, we had no choice but to move in. Just how unfinished the house
was became bruisingly clear on our first night. There was no electricity yet,
and the windows didn’t have screens. There were mosquitoes. I couldn’t
sleep the whole night. My sister slept on a cot out in the upstairs hall instead
of her room downstairs, maybe because it was cooler here. Every so often
she would toss and turn, waving bugs away with half-asleep hands. I sat
beside her and fanned her. She had work the next day. In the morning
someone went out and bought boxes and boxes of Katol.Work on the house
would continue, but it remains unfinished eight years later. All the interiors,
after a few years of intermittent work, are done. But the exterior remains
unpainted, still the same cement gray as the day we moved in, though
grimier now. Marikina’s factories aren’t too far away. The garden remains
ungreened; earth, stones, weeds, and leaves are where I suppose bermuda
grass will be put down someday.
• In my eyes the Marikina house is an attempt to return to the successful Greenmeadows
plan, but with more modest means at one’s disposal. The living room of the Cinco
Hermanos house features much of the same furniture, a similar look. The sofa and wing
chairs seem at ease again. My mother’s growing collection of angel figurines is the new
twist. But there is less space in this room, as in most of the rooms in the Marikina house,
since it is a smaller house on a smaller lot.The kitchen is carefully planned, as was the
earlier one, the cooking and eating areas clearly demarcated. There is again a formal
dining room, and the new one seems to have been designed for the long narra dining table,
a lovely Designs Ligna item, perhaps the one most beautiful piece of furniture we have,
bought on the cheap from relatives leaving the country in a hurry when we still were on
Heron Street.Upstairs are the boys’ rooms. The beds were the ones custom-made for the
Greenmeadows house, the same ones we’d slept in since then. It was a loft or an attic, my
mother insisted, which is why the stairs had such narrow steps. But this "attic," curiously
enough, had two big bedrooms as well as a wide hall. To those of us who actually
inhabited these rooms, the curiosity was an annoyance. There was no bathroom, so if you
had to go to the toilet in the middle of the night you had to go down the stairs and come
back up again, by which time you were at least half awake.
• Perhaps there was no difference between the two houses more basic, and more
dramatic, than their location. This part of Marikina is not quite the same as the
swanky part of Ortigas we inhabited for five years. Cinco Hermanos is split by a road,
cutting it into two phases, that leads on one end to Major Santos Dizon, which
connects Marcos Highway with Katipunan Avenue. The other end of the road stops at
Olandes, a dense community of pedicabs, narrow streets, and poverty. The noise –
from the tricycles, the chattering on the street, the trucks hurtling down Marcos
Highway in the distance, the blaring of the loudspeaker at our street corner put there
by eager-beaver baranggay officials – dispels any illusions one might harbor of
having returned to a state of bliss. The
first floor is designed to create a clear separation between the family and guest areas,
so one can entertain outsiders without disturbing the house’s inhabitants. This
principle owes probably more to my mother than my father. After all, she is the
entertainer, the host. The living room, patio, and dining room – the places where
guests might be entertained – must be clean and neat, things in their places. She keeps
the kitchen achingly well-organized, which is why there are lots of cabinets and a
deep cupboard.
• And she put them to good use. According to Titus, the fourth, who
accompanied her recently while grocery shopping, she buys groceries as if
all of us still lived there. I don’t recall the cupboard ever being empty.That
became her way of mothering. As we grew older and drifted farther and
farther away from her grasp, defining our own lives outside of the house,
my mother must have felt that she was losing us to friends, jobs, loves –
forces beyond her control. Perhaps she figured that food, and a clean place
to stay, was what we still needed from her. So over the last ten years or so
she has become more involved in her cooking, more attentive, better. She
also became fussier about meals, asking if you’ll be there for lunch or
dinner so she knows how much to cook, reprimanding the one who didn’t
call to say he wasn’t coming home for dinner after all, or the person who
brought guests home without warning. There was more to it than just
knowing how much rice to cook.
• I know it gives her joy to have relatives over during the regular
Christmas and New Year get-togethers, which have been held in our
house for the past half-decade or so. She brings out the special dishes,
cups and saucers, platters, glasses, bowls, coasters and doilies she
herself crocheted. Perhaps I understand better why her Christmas
decor has grown more lavish each year.After seeing off the last guests
after the most recent gathering, she sighed, "Ang kalat ng bahay!" I
didn’t see her face, but I could hear her smiling. My father replied,
"Masaya ka naman." It wasn’t a secret.Sundays we come over to the
house, everyone who has moved out, and have lunch together. Sunday
lunches were always differently esteemed in our household. Now that
some of us have left, I sense that my siblings try harder than they ever
did to be there. I know I do. I try not to deprive my mother the chance
to do what she does best.
 Five brothers, One Mother
Taurus St., Cinco Hermanos, Marikina

• Theme:
• Setting:
• POV: First person point of view
• Conflict: Man vs Nature
Man vs Self
• Narrative time:
• Figure of speech:
 The House on Stilts
Mariano Marcos St., San Juan

• We called it Ortega, but it wasn’t really on Ortega Street. It was on

Mariano Marcos in San Juan, but we had called it Ortega all our lives,
and Ortega it still is. That was how we called it, the way the house on
Ledesma Street is "Ledesma," the house on Heron Street
"Greenmeadows" (not Heron); the way my wife calls the Malate house
she was born in "Vermont," though Vermont Street has been J. Nakpil for
ages.It felt strange, karmic in a bad way, that we were moving into it. My
Tita Letty and my Mendoza cousins had stayed in that house all the years
I was growing up, and they had just moved into a none-too-posh
subdivision in Marikina, not like the grander ones in the Ortigas area we
were leaving. We knew it was going to be a step down.
• It was. From the surface sheen of Greenmeadows to this. The house seemed
old, and more importantly, run down. It stood on stilts, as we kids called them,
the house raised from the ground a few feet, in the style of older times for
some purpose we no longer thought applicable. The doors didn’t have knobs,
just handles and hooks. They closed because of springs attached at the top.
You’d hear them bang, the springs squeak, when someone passed through.
When typhoons hit, the house made a low rumble as storm winds made the
doors and windows jitter, as if it all would finally come apart.The interiors
were tighter, the corridors narrower, and – perhaps the surest sign of our harder
times – there were fewer bathrooms. There were no marbled floors as in
Greenmeadows, just narrow wooden planks worn away at some places, and
they creaked under your step. The windows weren’t sheets of tinted glass on
large metal frames; they were made of wooden and capiz panels, in the style of
old houses I see only in Manila or the provinces.
• This house sat on an unusually shaped corner lot, with one road (Smuth, which
we never did learn how to pronounce) rising sharply upwards from Mariano
Marcos, creating a pizza-pie slice of land. At the thin end of the pie slice was the
gate, which opened to a long driveway of concrete that was broken in some
places. When it rained, opening the gate was a chore; it was low, water collected
just under it, and my mother eventually bought boots and left them by the front
door with an umbrella.The plan was for us to stay here while our new house in
Marikina, in the same middle-class village our cousins had transferred to, was
being built. We didn’t know how long that would take, but it seemed to slow
down when the Gulf War broke out and prices shot up. That was the attitude: we
were here only in transit. When you walked into the master bedroom, you could
tell we didn’t intend to stay. Together with my parents’ queen-size bed were
single beds, a red sofa, and wing chairs, all refugees from the house on Heron
Street that was no longer ours. They seemed to be biding their time, waiting to
be restored to their rightful place, to a room more in keeping with their status.
The house may not have been much to look at. And commuting to anywhere was
harder since it was a long walk toward the nearest jeepney routes. The drive to Ateneo
was longer. But it wasn’t without charms. It had wide open spaces, for one thing.
There was a garden, which wasn’t like the manicured, sculpted showcase in
Greenmeadows; it was thick with grass green and wild, not prickly bermuda. The
earth was soft under your running shoes. In the evenings I’d look out from the living
room window at the grass shimmering in the ghostly moonlight.At dusk fat flies
hovered eerily in the air, after darkness had relented but before the sun had come out,
as if presiding over some solemn ceremony in which the night gave leave to the day. I
saw that strange but wondrous rite several times because of my insomnia attacks. One
summer I suffered a particularly severe one. I’d go to bed at ten then be awake at two,
unable to sleep anymore. I’d get up and play games on the computer, watch tapes,
read. When my mother got up at dawn I’d help her heat some water for coffee, put ice
in and fill the water jug, and sit at the kitchen table. We weren’t talkative at five in the
morning, so we would just drink coffee.
• When it started to get light out I’d take a walk or jog, pounding the concrete and
the soft earth and grass, making small circles in the yard, the fat flies that
buzzed softly paying no heed. I’d come in and eat a heavy breakfast, sleep the
whole afternoon, then go through it all again that night. Somehow, after weeks
of this, I was finally able to fall asleep at midnight and wake at eight. I counted
my blessings, old house included. The end came soon enough. The owners of
the lot had sold it to a townhouse developer, and we had until the end of March
1992 to move out. It had been nearly three years.We packed up and started
shuttling between this place and the next, but moving seemed like more work
this time than when we left Greenmeadows. The trips to Marikina were longer
than the ones from Ortigas to San Juan, and the traffic had only grown heavier.
We’d be able to make only two, maybe three trips a day before pleading
exhaustion. The Hi-Ace got worn down quickly. On our last trip we stuffed
everything that would fit into the cars, just barely fitting into them ourselves,
and drove out for the last time.
• It was also my last day as a teacher in the Ateneo High School: March 29, Sunday,
graduation day. I’d taught there two years. That last year I’d met Hilda. On my first date
with her in the middle of August, I came home at six in the morning. We had been on
the couch in her living room talking until two, fell asleep, and woke up at five thirty, my
head still on her lap. My mother opened the gate, a look of worry on her face, as if
afraid she’d lost me to someone else. She did. One week later Hilda agreed to be my
girlfriend, my first ever. Five years later we were married.After two years on probation
at Ateneo High, my contract wasn’t renewed, and on that last day I stuffed what was left
of my things into plastic shopping bags and, after the ceremony and a complimentary
dinner, threw them into a car and drove off into the night. No job, new house, no teary
farewells.A few days later, my mother would go back to try to retrieve some more
things. The gate was open, she said; someone had shit on the driveway. Faucets and
other fixtures were gone, tiles torn out, the place a mess. I’m glad I never saw that. Then
they torched the house, easier and cheaper than tearing it down, and I suppose that was
good, as good a way as any to go.
 The House on Stilts
Mariano Marcos St., San Juan
• Theme:
• Setting:
• POV: First person point of view
• Conflict:
• Narrative time:
• Figure of speech:
 When We Were Rich
Heron St., Greenmeadows
• There were no phones. For some reason, our application for two lines had been
held up. Having just moved, I became acutely aware of the lack of
communications, a serious shortcoming in the eyes of a fifteen year-old. In such
ways were an adolescent boy’s inept attempts at wooing adolescent girls doomed
before they hardly had a chance to succeed.To communicate with the outside
world I simply upped and went to a friend’s house, Gerry’s in Xavierville or
Abe’s in La Vista. I would simply show up and take them by surprise. Was there
some emergency? they would ask. Why had I gone all the way there? Then they
realized that without the ability to call them, I had little choice but to pop up
unannounced at their houses, ready to make myself at home and partake of their
meals. Teenagers can get away with such blithe effrontery.
• But even with its isolation, remedied a few months after we moved in when the phone
company finally deigned to be of service, the house had its attractions. In fact, in many
ways it was a dream house. It sat on some eight hundred square meters, more than
twice the size of the San Juan house we left behind. And since the house my civil-
engineer father designed used up less than half the lot, we had more room to roam than
we had ever had, or ever would.I was especially fond of the wide backyard. Half of it
was concrete, on which we thrashed around playing our tortured brand of basketball
with an undersized ball and a makeshift board and ring. The other half was a garden,
green and expansive; all we had at the back of the Ledesma house was a patch of dark
soil where nothing would grow. Afternoons I’d take the cover off one of the round patio
tables and spread it on the prickly bermuda grass. I’d lie there on the thick tablecloth
that was just long enough for me and gaze wistfully at a blue, blue sky. The open space
of the backyard gave me a vantage point to the heavens I haven’t had before or since.
Not a bad place to live in for someone who sometimes wanted to just ponder the sky,
who wanted the occasional chance to escape to it.
• I did that often, sitting on the sidewalk outside vigilantly watching the sun
setting over what to me was Greenhills (where the girl of special interest to me
lived), or lying on that tablecloth in the garden. Or sitting at the balcony that
joined the rooms of my parents and Pixie, my sister, on the nights I’d suffer an
insomnia attack; my sister asleep in the master bedroom, I’d bring a chair from
her room onto the balcony. An insomniac, who sometimes has no choice but to
be awake when the dark gives way to light, can always treat himself to the
dawn sky.For the growing teen, perhaps the most important thing about the new
house were the bedrooms. For the first time I had my own room, no small thing
in a household of five boys and one girl. An only girl must have her own room,
mother reasoned, and we used to envy Pixie her privilege. When we moved, I,
the third child, finally had mine. This was important. As a child staggers into
adolescence, he grows increasingly ornery when it comes to matters of privacy.
At last I had a place where my things, and thoughts, could be left undisturbed.
• Late afternoons and early evenings I’d turn off the lights and play something on my stereo
– Barbra Streisand’s "Somewhere" or Boston’s "More Than a Feeling" or "Amanda," U2’s
"With or Without You" – anything that soared, and turn up the volume. I’d lie in bed
facing the window. Or I’d open the window and sit on the sill, my feet in the plant box,
and let the music take me up into the deepening darkness.
It didn’t take long, though, before I felt that I didn’t quite fit here. Neighbors can
do that to you. On the asphalted tennis court at the park I played mostly with kids from
around the village, kids ten, eleven, twelve years old. And they were kids in their brash,
self-absorbed way. I was never comfortable around them, and I put up with them only
because I enjoyed the game. On the basketball court things were worse. The brash, self-
absorbed kids of the tennis court were replaced by brash, self-absorbed grown-ups. They
found me quiet, but what was there to talk about? I didn’t smoke, do drugs, party till
dawn, or fawn over cars. In my eyes they were moneyed men in the aimless, petty way I
imagined you grew up to be if you didn’t see anything much that made sense beyond what
you could drive, wear, eat, smoke, or screw. I had nothing to say to them .
• I sensed that it was a matter of time before I had to leave. The land surrounding
our house was empty, but for how long? Houses were going up all around the
subdivision. How long until the banging and clatter of construction work drove
away the quiet, the burgeoning houses encroaching upon us and obstructing our
view? How long before the whole place was filled with the arrogant, chattering,
idle people I thought my neighbors were?The parish church didn’t make me feel
any better. It was just outside the village, and Sundays we heard mass there with
the rest of the subdivision and nearby villages. I never liked the church. I thought
the immense bug-eyed statue of Christ above the altar, to which all eyes had to
turn, was ill-proportioned and hideous. It only added to the feeling of strangeness
I felt among my expensively coiffed, dour-faced neighbors. And then there was
the sound. No matter what they did, no matter how they tried, an echo always
bounced off the walls and made it hard to track the priest’s words. The word of
God deserved better acoustics.
• Maybe it was no accident that my crisis of faith occurred at about that time. It was hard
enough grappling with soul-piercing questions of faith; it became tougher to hang on to God
in a place that didn’t seem to want you to. How could faith smolder in a house of worship
cold as this? I stopped going to that church, or any other.
I see now that such thoughts could probably weigh heavily only on the mind of a mid-
teen, one grown attuned, excessively perhaps, to the hollowness of conformity. I was fighting
my quiet rebellions, against family, school, social classes, God – the things that boxed me in
and told who I should be, what I should believe in, how I should behave. I was concerned,
maybe too much so, with the incongruence between who you were and who you pretended to
be. It was too easy to judge. And perhaps a teenager feels more acutely than others that he is
an outsider. Was I one of them? Yes and no, and I squirmed at the contradiction. There I was
in their midst, living a comfortable life in one of their cushy houses. I wanted the money and
what it could buy (in a family of six children one feels that there is never enough to go
around). But I spurned the accoutrements of such a life, the status symbols, the badges one
wore to prove membership in what I thought was a vacuous elite.
• I felt uneasy knowing I wasn’t poor, that my skin was pale, that I spoke in competent
English, that my tastes weren’t lowbrow, that I ate well, that we had cars and maids
and an eight-hundred square-meter house in a posh private subdivision, that I studied
in an expensive exclusive school – that I was part of a narrow stratum of society that
did exceedingly well at fending for itself. This was who I was, and it wasn’t all right
with me. I had become what I scorned: a rich kid. It was one other thing to fight.In
the end, perhaps all this – the uneasiness, the awkwardness, the wanting to be both in
and out of the club – was simply part of the growing pains, endured during an
adolescent’s labored and fitful evolution toward a higher form of being. Perhaps I
was simply suffering the displacedness one first comes to notice as a teenager, the
universal feeling of not quite being at home anywhere, even in one’s skin. I’ve never
lost that feeling. It’s probably just another part of the turmoil of living in a world that
turns and turns without asking if it’s all too fast for you.
Soon enough, my father told us that we had to move out.
• He no longer wanted to stay in the construction arm of Meralco, which he had
served for decades. He wanted to strike out on his own with a new company, with
his own people. And that meant earning less. The house had to go, or rather, we
had to let go of it. In August of 1989, two months into my last year as an
undergraduate in college, some five years after we first moved in, we trundled
out of the house on our trusty old Hi-Ace and a small truck my father borrowed
from the office. Years later, we would look back at the years we spent there and
chuckle: those were the days when we were rich, the days of our brief but failed
foray into the ranks of the wealthy. When my mind wanders back to those days,
I’m often back on the balcony outside my sister’s room, up at daybreak because I
haven’t slept a wink, and I watch the darkness turn into a thin gray, then a blue
that grows more and more vivid, the wisps of clouds streaked with red, herald of
the arriving sun. "Night’s candles are burnt out and jocund day stands tiptoe on
the misty mountain top," wrote Shakespeare. Those years in that house when I
had a balcony seat to the break of day I knew exactly what he meant.
 When We Were Rich
Hero n St., Greenmeado ws

• Theme: Teenage Dilemma

• Setting: Rich Heron St.,Greenmeadows, August, 1989
Posh private subdivision
Tennis Court
Basketball Court
Parish Church
Bedroom/Balcony
• POV: First Person Point of View
• Conflict: Man against Himself ( Man vs. Self)
Man against Society (Man vs. society)
• Narrative time:
• Figure of speech:
 Epilogue
• The dispersal began in the mid-eighties when Bombit went to the United States and
never returned. He left some months after we’d moved to Greenmeadows, yet I
have no memory of him there. (In memory there are no things, only worlds. Things
never exist by themselves, but only with and against other things, between
backgrounds and foregrounds, swimming in contexts. This is how we can
remember that something is out of place, like a fancy wing chair in the master
bedroom of a worn-down house, like an eldest brother in a house he left behind.)I
remember him only in Ledesma, the rough playmate, sometimes the bully who held
us in his thrall, who would jump on cockroaches with glee, who would take alarm
clocks apart and not put them back together. I remember him in the green station
wagon, pillows in the back, disappearing for days visiting his girlfriend in Manila.
In the US they would get married, have two kids, and divorce messily. The guest
room in the Marikina house is for him, for his hoped-for return.
• The exodus resumed in 1996 when I got married and moved to
Diliman. Pixie, my only sister, the fifth child, married in December
1999 and moved to Blue Ridge. Titus, the fourth, transferred to a
Makati apartment with his wife after their wedding this past March.
Raul, the second, and Mikko, the sixth and youngest, are left with my
parents.My father is what most people would call a man of few words.
He was a father of few words as well. These past few years I’ve tried
to talk to him more and more, which is special because we never did
when I was younger. We often talk about money. I am amazed to learn
how little we had in the first place, and I wonder how we could have
afforded the Greenmeadows house, how much he has lost keeping the
company he started afloat, how much he still owes here and there.
• To me it makes more and more sense for him to sell the Marikina house, use
some of the money to pay off his debts, buy a condominium with two or
three bedrooms, and live off the interest on what remains, which would still
be substantial. I’ve mentioned this to him a few times, and he seems
receptive. But I wonder if there’s such a thing as a transfer threshold,
dislocation fatigue that accumulates over a lifetime of setting up in one
place then moving. By my count the Cinco Hermanos house is my father’s
eighth home. Will he and my mother be too tired, too weary for another
relocation?A few years ago my father and his brothers and sisters sold their
house in San Juan. Built in 1948, it had lasted nearly half a century,
sheltering my grandfather and grandmother and their eight children. They
had planned to build a condominium on the lot, but the real estate bubble of
the mid-nineties convinced them that it would be better to just sell. It was
sold.
• That was not my father’s first house, though it seemed so to me. Born in
1935, he lived near Pinaglabanan church, then in 1940 at the corner of M.
Paterno and Alfonso XIII, with relatives. In my mind the Paterno house was
his first, not just because I hadn’t seen the first two (the first is gone, the
second rebuilt). The Paterno house was where his father and mother lived,
and I’d always imagined them and their children making do in that structure
that weathered the decades.When we were little, my siblings and cousins, we
spent Sundays there. I learned how to ride a bicycle on the long driveway.
We played tennis on a neighbor’s court after climbing the back wall. In the
grassy front yard we played baseball, and I hit the first homerun in that tiny
ballpark. We fished for star apples with long bamboo sticks, picked dewy
santan, got caught in the thorny bougainvillea bushes retrieving errant
pingpong balls. The last time I passed by the lot the house had been torn
down.
• My father would have been thirteen when he moved into it; he was over
sixty when he and his brothers and sisters let it go. It made sense to sell
it, but I wonder if anything was bargained away in the transaction. He
had lost his parents years before. Was losing the house a final
orphaning? Is this the
last one? Am I here for good? Or should I keep the boxes and packing
tape handy? Houses provided us the necessary certainties – somewhere
to come home to where you’d find your family, your things, a hot
dinner, a bed or a good couch. Write to me here. Call me at this number.
But I’ve changed addresses and phone numbers enough times to know
better. Perhaps that’s what houses are really about: the fundamental
uncertainty of life, the slowly learned fact that the reference points by
which we draw our maps and chart our course are ever shifting, and a
life’s cartography is never quite done.