The house was one of those prewar structures spared by the holocaust of Liberation that leveled much of the Ermita and Malate districts, south of the river. It was built by his grandfather in the twenties for Vicente and his Spanish bride.
Sometimes his grandfather drifted into his thoughts, particularly when Luis and his writer friends talked about the revolution of 1896 and how in the end it was usurped by the ilustrados. His grandfather was one of them; though he had always considered himself — according to Don Vicente — a Filipino, Luis knew that his loyalties were with that far-off peninsula from which his forebears had come. The old man had been an astute politician, although he did not run for any public office; he knew where the centers of powers were, and when he saw, for instance, the inevitability of revolution, he made the proper noises, which seemed to indicate that he, at least, sympathized with the ill-disciplined, ill-equipped Army. As a Basque, he had always regarded the Spaniard as inferior in the first place. But to avoid total involvement, he had feigned illnesses and was conveniently sick in Manila. The coming of the Americans ended the masquerade for the wily old Vascongado. He saw the inevitability of American suzerainty, and one of the first things he did was join the Federalista party. He would have gotten a very high position in the new government — friendly as he was with those in Manila — but he had decided, like all good Basques, that the future lay in the land, which had, after all, supported him in splendor all through the years.
He was not wrong; it was a time when the haciendas were being forged and sugar plantations in the south were being set up with American and other foreign money. He went back to Pangasinan and the vast lands he had laid claim to and built that region’s biggest house, which became a rest stop for any tired and visiting Americano. In the process, through the American cadastral surveys that were being made all over the country, he brought out his old Spanish titles, and with Spanish sherry and other forms of concession, he included into the Hacienda Asperri hundreds of small clearings that the Ilokano settlers had made.
The old man liked to consider himself a diviner, a plutocrat ahead of his time. He saw, for instance, the movement of Manila out of the strictures of Intramuros, and he bought lots in Santa Mesa and of course in Ermita, on the boulevard close to the sea. It was in the Ermita house he built where his son Vicente lived, his daughters having married Americans and Spaniards and left for wherever their husbands willed.
The hacienda in Pangasinan prospered, and he died a very happy man knowing that his other son was prepared to take over while Vicente hobnobbed with the rich and the powerful in Manila. He did not know of the ill will that exploitation had spawned, how the house would be burned by the same peasants who he thought were loyal to him. Don Vicente continued living in Manila, depending on the overseers who worked for him, knowing that though he was in the city, he wielded great power. He played poker regularly with Quezon and was on the best of terms with the mestizos who revolved around Malacañang.
Having finished law and studied history as well, he had learned what his father had taught him, and to this wisdom he added his own instincts. He had information on what stocks to buy, where new roads were to be built, and when export crops were to be developed, and his intentional losses at the poker table, which were substantial, were easily recouped.
He contributed, too, to the campaign funds of senators and, of course, to the Independence mission, while in Pangasinan his tenants toiled and filled his bodegas with grain. Even when his brother was killed and he had taken his niece under his wing, he did not see the need for returning to Pangasinan; the order of things was secure, the constabulary would see to it that a similar uprising would never happen again.
After the war, his instincts served him once more; he could see the changes coming, and one of the first things he did was rebuild the old house that had been burned, bringing to it many of the artifacts in Manila that were not destroyed; his son was growing, he could leave Manila and go back to the land where he now should be.
Luis had the Ermita house, therefore, all to himself shortly after he finished high school, except on those occasions when Don Vicente visited him, which was quite often at first but soon became infrequent. Don Vicente gambled still, but most of his old poker cronies had died, some of them at the hands of the Japanese, some in exile in America, and the old man did not seem to be at ease with the new occupants of Malacañang. Luis also knew that his father had some special women in Manila. He had never seen the Spanish woman his father married, for she was one of those mysterious creatures who lived in the shadows. The servants talked of her, however, of her madness, of her having been shut up in a hospital in Manila and then in the tower room of the big house, where she would be very quiet except for her whimpering, which sounded more animal than human. There was no medicine, no doctor, however, that could clear her mind, render it lucid again, for what had cracked was not because of some genetic discrepancy or some frustration that had finally surfaced but the heavy accretion of past profligacies, lies, indiscretions, and that hedonist view that regarded woman as a plaything as, indeed, Don Vicente considered his wife when she was younger. But she was a sensitive woman who was not just uprooted from hearth and home; she had also loved her husband deeply and had great hopes about the new land that she thought would be her country as well. When the poor woman finally died, her funeral was just as secret, for she was buried not in Rosales but in a cemetery in Manila. To the best of his knowledge, his father never visited her grave, and not once did he tell Luis of the life they had lived together, even in those moments when Don Vicente was reminiscing about Europe.
The Ermita house was not particularly big by the standards of the district, which was Manila’s best housing area, but it was formidably built in Spanish style, with wrought-iron grills for windows and doorways. Red tiles were used unsparingly, and the walls were serrated, although this fact was no longer visible, for the walls had been covered with ivy, which Simeon trimmed. The grounds were wide, the grass was mowed regularly, and the pots of dahlias and ground orchids seemed perennially in bloom. Somehow the Ilokano nature of Luis’s housekeepers was evident in the grounds, for at the back, close to the garage where they lived, were plots of tomato, eggplant, and okra, and it was from this garden that Luis often got his fresh vegetables when he felt like having vegetable stew.
The house had four bedrooms, and furnishing and decorating them when he was through with high school had given him some amusement. Together with Trining he had toured the furniture shops and the few drapery stalls in Divisoria. He had had air-conditioning installed in his bedroom and in the room that he had converted into a study/guest room. In the hall his father had placed a grand piano, which no one played except Trining when she dropped by with her college friends. He had a radio/phono, too, in the study, and extra speakers in the living room, and although he leaned toward the classics, Trining insisted on buying and stocking the record bar with her own Latin and boogie-woogie favorites. His library had been growing, but he often lent books to friends, and some of them took advantage of his good nature and forgetfulness.
Marta was watering the gumamela hedges by the gate when the car drove in. She flung the gate open, then ran to open the door of the house.