My house is a home

I was a tourist scrutinizing houses while doing brisk walking. “I like that house … no, not that … I’d like to build a house with floor-to-ceiling windows and shutters … I could repair mine … I’m positive that house there of dark stone with a protruding awning was built in the early ’70s because it looks like mine.” 

At that time a house of P800,000 was expensive. Nowadays that money can’t buy a house in my village nor a luxury car. Erratic were my tastes, and I was happy being changeable and inconsistent. I was dreaming with eyes wide open. How would an antiquated Torogan from Lanao Sur look in Dasmariñas Village?

A Torogan in Lanao Sur was the sultan’s residence in the center of the barangay with his family and no matter how many wives. It was where the sultan gathered kin and leaders of the community, pretty much like Peping does every Sunday with his harem of five daughters, three granddaughters and six grandsons. In the Torogan the sultan celebrated festivities, court proceedings, religious gatherings, wakes and coronations, very much like the occasions held in Peping’s ancestral home.

The Torogan was the Maranao’s Buckingham Palace and as such, was a symbol of power. Ornate designs of a huge bird or a snake jutted out of four corners of its structure like the prow of a boat. Should an earthquake shake its foundations, never mind. Its massive posts from gigantic tree trunks were firmly embedded between huge boulders and stone pebbles to tilt and sway. It was in respect of the sultan that the community built him a two-story Torogan. The ground floor was for his armed commanders, the upper floor accommodated 200 people, generally 10 beds, heavy brass daily ware, kulintangs, weapons the sultan kept near his bed, carved chests that served as headboards. Few and far between, they don’t exist much in Lanao Sur, so that its Filipino-Malay architecture surrounded by huge narra trees is disappearing. But it could hold out majestically in my village among western-influenced houses.

I vividly remembered the 1920 Spanish house I grew up in with wide stairs, floors of narra, and an iron grill to keep us safe at night that was left open the whole day. It was of two floors with tall windows that lined the whole porch where my grandfather, Angel, sat on a perezosa lounging chair, and when I looked out the window I’d see a huge balete tree, that was, according to my yaya, the kapre’s home. I love trees beside a house like my grandmother Lucia, but that house would be better situated in Paco, where it stood then, than in Dasmariñas Village.

Atty. Louie Baltazar said to me, “No. You like native houses in a jungle setting. I will build you a Samal house made of bakawan and nipa. You like nature entering your house but you don’t touch the soil and hate the sun. I’ll plant vines and trees and make them the walls of your house. I’ll construct you a house without walls!” He did in Zamboanga City. Mine is the only Samal house with a thatched roof and huge cacha curtains that blow with the sea breeze.

In 2000 I received a call from Sylvia Ilusorio Yap. Would I coordinate with Gelo Mañosa for the now-renovated Baguio Country Club interiors? We made bedrooms to enlighten guests on Ifugao and Gaddang artifacts that are rapidly vanishing and enclosed them inside recessed glass cases — a snake-bone headdress, the tak-ba an ancestral backpack, a woven rattan basket that once contained edible insects and snails, clay pots, a blanket of black, white and red, a wooden carved drinking cup — to familiarize members with Cordillera’s culture. The bedroom doors are now sliding varnished shutters through which a peek at the greenest grass with petunia blooms always makes me recall the Baguio of my youth.

In Sultan Kudarat Province, my Medal of Valor officer brought me to his house beside guava trees we picked on. It was a nipa hut with a galvanized roof and its earthen flooring was extremely well swept, evident from the walis tingting marks. At night a wooden bed and native mat would be placed over the earth. In these surroundings, my colonel’s parents were proud of their economic status as farmers and never apologized for their humble home. It was in better condition than my Tawi-Tawi house, whose bamboo flooring on the left side had tilted downward to the sea.

In the ’80s Cotabato had no hotel (it doesn’t even now) to lengthily book myself into during my studies and political involvement in Maguindanao. Louie came to my rescue again and coordinated with architect Cholo Blanco of Cotabato City. Both built a wooden house of mango-chapuy. It’s lasted me 23 years in spite of a balete tree’s trunk that surprisingly jutted out from under my wooden living room floor and kitchen. Anay attacked my walls, and bukbuk charged into my bedroom windowsills. It’s a most sentimental home where every PNPA graduate stays while on a brief break from their ARMM duties and leave coffee mugs with their names displaced by my telephone since 2007.

I cherish my houses, whether by Lindy Locsin in Tarlac or Ogie Periquet in Manila. Frank Lloyd Wright? Robert Stern? I’ll take Mang Tony, my Samal foreman, who constructed my house.

My personality is imprinted in my homes, like yours is. They are repositories for my secrets … my dwellings that keep me close to my family … the nest that binds our family and keeps us united … where negotiations take place, where friendships have been formed, and where I am protected. My houses contain my life story.