RR [An Unfinished House in Nueva Ecija]

RR - An unfinished house in Nueva Ecija
September 3, 2002

It stands along the national highway that leads to Arayat, Pampanga if you're coming from Gapan, Nueva Ecija. In a corner of a quarter of a hectare of land with a perimeter fence but no gates. That also has the old rice mill in the middle and a long L-shaped row of now-empty pigstyes. Made of concrete with precast outside the bedroom, living room and kitchen windows. It has two floors. Two peculiar spiralling columns stand as posts at the upstairs foyer overlooking the road. A wide uncovered patio fenced in by metal grills occupies almost a fourth of the second floor as it faces the highway.

The ground floor has a garage that became a storage room for cavans of palay. The garage is next to the main door that leads to a wood and metal grill staircase to the next floor. The main door also opens to the wood-paneled and marble-floored living room and the kitchen/dining area. The toilet-and-bath cubicles and a bedroom are adjuncts to the kitchen. The kitchen's door in turn leads to an open cemented yard and the path to the old rice mill. A cluster of bamboos with shoots hanging over the roof of the rice mill's warehouse grows at the back of the warehouse. These bamboos would make langitngit that could be heard from the house every time the wind blows hard enough. At night, kapre stories become more believable with the sound of the bamboos swaying heard in the background.

A mini-mountain of palay chaff would build behind the rice mill every harvest season. As kids we usually played and tumbled in this mountain and would get skin rashes in the process. A three-storey high water tank of cement and concrete was built behind the rice mill and near the mountain of palay chaff to store water when the new house was erected.

The upper floor was laid out to have three bedrooms and a toilet/bath. Only one bedroom materialized; the one on top of the kitchen/dining area. The supposed master bedroom (on top of the garage) and another planned bedroom are wide open since the partitions never went up. Even the toilet/bath is incomplete and therefore unusable.

The ceilings on the upper floor have long since vanished while the alulod in both ground and upper floors should have been repaired a long time ago.

Viewed from the road, it looks like a grand house since it is shaped like a welcoming V.

This is the house that my mother and my father started to build. And never finished.

Mamay and Papay borrowed money from DBP in the early 70's. With the meager land they owned as collateral for the 10-year loan. For a piggery ostensibly. But after building the L-shaped row of pigpens, up came next the house. I remember Mamay as she discussed the building of the house with Papay through letters, since Mamay was based in Daraga, Albay and Papay was handling the vegetable trading business from his base in Tondo, Manila. It was clear that my parents really wanted to build that house.

And I discovered why.

One time, when Mamay was mad at us (that would be me, my brother Buboy and sister Tess) and after spanking us for a certain misdemeanor, she went into a ranting monologue sometimes accentuated with her banging her head against the wall or pulling her hair in acts of desperation and frustration. She ranted that we were so disrespectful and good for nothing. That we have done nothing but give her sama ng loob, despite everything she had gone through and has been doing to make life easier for us. That we're such ingrates. It was just as well she and Papay have started to build a house for themselves. They would not depend on us in their old age. She and Papay would live by themselves and fend for themselves in their own house when we have all left the coop so to speak. She and Papay would have no need for us, their thoughtless and thankless children.

It was histrionics pure and simple. It was theatrical emotional tirade at its best. I could laugh at it with fondness now. But for kids barely at the threshold of elementary school, it was a scary and dreadful display of a mother's angst. Which made us guilty and remorseful in equal measure. How we all wished we would vanish into thin air than watch and listen to our mother rip herself to pieces.

Mamay's and Papay's dream house was finally blessed one summer fiesta. We all trooped to Sto. Cristo, San Isidro, Nueva Ecija as was our wont during summers. My parents were beside themselves in leading us and all our relatives and guests with lighted candles as we went room by room behind the priest who sprinkled holy water on the floors and walls of the whole house. Later, coins were thrown from the staircase to the throng at the living room for good luck. A photo still exists of us kids standing beside Mamay and Papay as they beamed to the photographer. They had every reason to be happy. In the eyes of the Magnos and the Balajadias, this formerly poor couple had finally "arrived" and now could be considered "can affords". They may not had become rich; they had obviously become progressive. They had the house to attest to their rise in the economic ladder.

Ironically, Mamay never really lorded it over her manor. She continued to stay in Daraga, Albay till she died in the late 70's. A succession of my married brothers (from Nonot to Frisco and Lito) occupied the house. We also increasingly stayed at this house everytime we would be on a break from school. I was already in college by this time. Home was Sto. Cristo and no longer Daraga.

My married brothers, while staying at the house, looked after the rice mill and the piggery. But try as they might to let the endeavors flourish, the rice mill had to be shut off since new and portable mills started to separate palay grains from the chaff right on the rice fields, making it less and less profitable to operate the huge but old and rickety milling machine that broke down every so often. The piggery also went up against many similar backyard investments while the diminishing profits or minimal earnings were eaten up by day-to-day household expenses. It was also getting to be more expensive to raise hogs on feeds priced more and more exorbitantly every week.

The pigstyes were home to chicken coops at another time but when the flock was na-peste, no new chicks were raised again. There was also a time when my sister Doris brought home from UP at Los Banos, Laguna, kabute spores that we let grow on moist piles of hay. We were so happy when everything sprouted after a few weeks. The venture was so experimental that we never did pursue it.

In the meantime, as DBP exhorted small business enterpreneurs in radio ads that "Ang utang dapat bayaran, nang tayo'y mapagkatiwalaan....," Mamay and Papay defaulted on their loan. Without a steady source of income (mainly from the piggery business for which the loan was made in the first place, and a failing vegetable trading business that eventually went kaput after Mamay's death) that could cover monthly amortizations, the loan ballooned to twice the principal amount. The interest payments alone bloated the original figure. There were attempts to re-schedule payments on the loan. I think it was successful for a time. But the pattern of defaults soon came back. Then the bank prepared to foreclose.

It was a very difficult and seemingly hopeless time for us.

We faced ending the 80's without the house we have come to call our own ancestral home. Until Kuya, my eldest brother, came to the rescue. He paid off the loan. But it was as if Kuya was saying, "Ok, here, let me pay it all off but that's it. There's not going to be any help from me anymore from hereon." I still hope I am wrong in thinking about Kuya and the repayment of the loan this way but I could not help thinking this way. After all, he has virtually vanished from our lives since then, choosing to live his life in the US --- away from us all. He did not even come home to bury Papay when Papay died in the late 90's.

Papay retired into this house after Mamay died and when the vegetable trading business he put up with her never picked up again. On his retirement, Tess and for a time, Buboy, managed the house for Papay and for themselves. Papay had sold the milling machines as scrap metal. There only remains the mill warehouse and the pockmarks on the cement floor where the old bolts used to be. The pigpens still stand but the roofs had long been blown away by typhoons.

After Papay died, Tess has now been the only one left as she keeps house for herself and her daughter Tricia and sometimes for her partner Raul.

But even with Tess' full devotion to keeping up the house, it never really regained the once-attractive pull of going home and staying there. Maybe because we each have our own lives to lead and we've been led to many varied directions, literally and figuratively. Maybe because we were not really meant to live in this house for it was for Mamay and Papay only. Maybe because we're just biding our time; that we will eventually find ourselves filling up the empty nest in our own old age.

Whatever our reasons are for the time being, we all had agreed after Papay died, that no matter what, the house that Mamay and Papay started to build, will never be sold. And no one among us offsprings will claim it for his or her own. It will never be ours; it will forever be Mamay's and Papay's, unfinished though it may be.