The rainbow's promise

Look at the rainbow, I said. We all looked at the beautiful arc across the sky with the shadow of a second one slightly above it. It promised us a wonderful day. Strange when you’re over 60.

This began when I got a text from Rose asking me to join the Jung group that would visit the Pastor residence in Batangas. I remembered having a conversation about that house with Greg and Mayo, and instantly I knew I wanted to go. We turned into a street and suddenly I saw a beautiful Filipino house. Look at that lovely house, I gasped. 

Greg said, That house belongs to Tonying Pastor. He will show it later.

He owns that house? I asked. I want to live there.

You might, Greg said. Mr. Pastor is single, in his 80s but never been married. 

We arrived at the big house that was built late in the 1800s. I stood back from the car and looked up at it. It was beautiful, a stunning old Filipino house. What do I mean by Filipino house? It has two stories. The first floor is basically a utility area. Once upon a time, it housed the family’s carriages, as this one does till now. The house itself is on the second floor. You climb a sweeping staircase. The ceilings are high. The rooms are divided with carved filigree that lets the air through. The windows are big. You have capiz windows, which you close when it rains. 

Inside those you have wood windows with small louvers, which you close to control the sun that comes in. There are thick, polished windowsills made of molave, grooved to make your windows slide easily. Underneath the windows are ventanillas, literally smaller, grilled windows that let even more air through. When you don’t need more air, like when it’s raining, for example, you close them with sliding wood panels. The floors are all wood. The lamps are old, glass, one or two are chandeliers.

We remembered our childhoods. How we had slept on similar beds lined not with mattresses but with banig, covered with nets to protect us from mosquitoes. We would sleep with the windows and ventanillas wide open, and the air would rush in and play around the house making it cool. Why did we stop building houses like this one? 

A man who looked like he might be 70 came up the stairs and we were all introduced to Antonio Pastor. He took us on a tour of the house, showing us his mother’s room, their room, lots of original furniture, long benches, lots of what was then called Vienna furniture or bentwood. 

They were 10 children, nine boys and a daughter. All the boys slept together in one big room. He was a music scholar, he recalled later, went to the Conservatory of Music at UP. Then he went to the US to study and played the piano to earn extra dollars.   

He regaled us with music played on his Austrian baby grand, which he said he bought because only it could lament the way he wanted it to when he played one of Chopin’s nocturnes. Then he played it and almost brought tears to our eyes. He played Mozart, Debussy. He called his brother to sing with him. They were both tenors. They sang If I Loved You. 

Joji turned to me and said, “Me, too. I want to live here. 

He sang Some Enchanted Evening. He was an outstanding tenor, one of the best I have heard in the Philippines. His musical performance took our breath away and we applauded spontaneously but with tremendous admiration.

We sat down to a delicious lunch of vegetable soup, chicharon, kinilaw, adobo, fried chicken, shrimp salad, with desserts — leche flan, matamis na saging na saba and ube ice cream on top of being served galletas and chocolate when we arrived. 

After lunch, he said, now I shall take you on a tour. First we will go to the house that I bought and refurbished. It is now a workshop center that they use here. Then I shall take you to the church that I built, then the park, the auditorium, the hospital. Let’s go. 

I looked at him and quietly wondered where his energy came from. He was 15 years older than me but he had the energy of someone that’s much younger.

The house in the corner was our first stop. Our research told us that these wooden grills were typical of homes here in Batangas then, he said, as he passed his hands over the wooden bars that sort of bumped out slightly. They called it buntis (pregnant). Immediately, one understood why. The house was so well restored. It even had a bangguera where glasses hung out to dry and it had a big banga to cool drinking water. What can I say? The house was beautiful and we, three of us now, Joji, Choncho and I, all wanted to live there.

Then he put us in a van and drove us to the church. It is a beautifully simple church with dramatically simple, stained glass windows. It has a choir loft and three carillon bells that he purchased in Holland. He walked us through the church, brought us down to the baptismal and then through the columbarium. We emerged from there to the church garden across from which was where you went to pray and light candles, and at one end a small European-style café. Then he ordered someone to ring the bells for us. Three in the afternoon and the bells rang a festive message. 

I wondered if the bells had roused someone from siesta and made her wonder — for whom does the bell toll? It tolls for us, I thought of answering with a smile. 

From there we went to the Pastor Park, A Cultural Haven, donated by him on his aunt’s behalf. Her statue stands in the middle of the park. By this time we are awed thrice — first by his music, then his church, now his park. He then wanted to show us his auditorium, which he said will be completed by September. We were speechless. Again it is splendid, in navy and white, with a tree, which he refused to cut. Then he drove us down to the hospital, which he built and his brother manages for the people of Batangas. 

By this time we were all half-dead from exhaustion and speechless with awe. This man is admirable, a renaissance man, who speaks of his passion through his music, his concern for the people, his desire to pay back for the scholarships he received, his desire to share everything good in his life.

The day passed quickly. It was time to say goodbye and to hope that Mr. Pastor had enjoyed our company as much as we had enjoyed his. After all, three of us do want to live with him but why? I think it is not that we wish to take advantage of him. We want to live briefly in a truly Filipino way again, linger in those lovely cool houses, without air-conditioning, eat kinilaw and galletas, and listen to music like our grandmothers used to. 

I think we want to live there to recapture strains of our past that we remember but happened to mislay as the modern world caught up with us.

Does this article do the man and the place justice? No, it does not. It was a wonderful day that’s hard to describe. But it was wonderful in every way. The rainbow kept its promise.

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