The house

He grew up in an old house haunted by a ghost named Jangkin. Ghosts were essential to the reality of the place. They were real, perhaps not real in the universal sense of the world, for there were places in the world where ghosts have all but disappeared; but real in the sense that everyone about him believed. And so they were real for them inside their quaint little world now become only a memory, a story. They were at least as real as the claim that the croaking of house geckos foretold the rain and so, too, the flight of termites.

He remembers himself accompanying them in song: Toko, ulan, toko, init, toko, ulan, toko, init … And from time to time he sees them, flying ants at evening orbiting the light of lampposts everywhere in their thousands eventually losing their wings to crawl in the ground perhaps to found their own colonies if they were so lucky. If not, they would be by morning food for lizards and birds. They were markers in the travel of time where the old house stood. The ghosts, too, must watch them from where they rest inside its shadows.

The house has a name. “Dakung Balay” means literally “Big House.” Perhaps it might have acquired this name by being the biggest house once in this neighborhood they call Ylaya in Dumanjug municipality, 73 kilometers south from the city. It is made of hardwoods—molave, ypil, bayong, etc. It is a beautiful house with stately proportions and a decorative tin ceiling stamped with rococo motif, imported it is said from San Francisco, USA. It must have been quiet a remarkable architectural feature in the 1930s when the house was last rebuilt.

Nobody human lives here now though the family still regularly visits. But the Maker grew up here as a child back when there was no electricity and the evenings were lighted only by kerosene lamps. He remembers still the silong, which once held the cash registers, the boxes of papers filed away and the old picture-magazines. He used to rifle through their dust looking out for pictures of how beautiful things were back then. He remembers the cabinet with huge ancient law books in Spanish. He remembers the posts set a few feet away from the corners of the rooms. They were perfect hiding places for playing tago-tago (hide-and-seek) when the neighborhood kids came to visit some long afternoons. In the evenings against the dim of kerosene lamps, they were the deepest darkest shadows one can imagine. They might have been portals into another world.

He remembers coming home once with his mother, Consuelo. It was late afternoon just as the shadows started to emerge to signal the coming night. They alighted from their ride and started walking up the stairs only to find most of their neighbors there. They were praying in a chanted chorus led by the parish priest who nervously exorcised the old house’s front door with a spray of holy water. They would get the whole story much, much later. But as it went, the neighbors were suddenly awakened from their afternoon siesta that day by the screaming of Consuelo’s older brother Valeriano. The house had a steel wash basin in the main room. Tito Valer, as the kids called him, was perched on top of it as he screamed in his hoarse baritone: “Tabang!”

It seemed he had been chased all over the room by the bed on which bed slept Vicente, Consuelo’s second youngest son. His yaya sat next to him and yet bed, boy and yaya still moved, sliding in a shudder across the polished hardwood floor, the uncle screaming away from the wash basin. This was the scene the neighbors saw when they first entered, whereupon they sent someone in a rush to fetch the town priest. They were cowering at the doorway chanting the Rosary when would finally arrive Consuelo and her third youngest child, the Maker of these stories.

They pushed themselves through the crowd overtaking the priest, Consuelo holding the Maker by his left hand. Perhaps the Maker would have trembled in fear in the light of all these if only the hand that held his were not as firm and unafraid. He was only a little boy. Finally, she talked into the shadows in that gentle, friendly voice normal to the ladies here: “Nauli na mi. Palihug, ayaw na mi’g samuka.” (We’re home. Please don’t bother us anymore.) After saying this, she entered the room to wake up her second youngest son taking him up into her arms.

She always did that. Talk to the shadows. Talk to Jangkin. She taught her children to ask permission always before entering the house. “Maayo, mosulod mi.” (Hello, may we enter.) And they always punctuated odd acts with the word tabi (excuse me). For her the shadows were not mere absence of light. It held things that were neither absolutely good nor evil. They were just there, mysterious, and to be talked to; and by the spoken word, appeased. And yet through all these, she was a resolute Catholic. Indeed, that night she invited the neighbors and priest to stay around and finish the Rosary anyway despite everything. They prayed and, after this, laughed. They talked and, after everything left, took home with them a memory of that day, which would in time slowly fade into a slight recollection of olden days, a story. Fiction.