Things My Father Built
It was airy and light in the living room where my father worked on afternoons. At our bicycle store downstairs, there was always spectacle and hubbub. A boy howled over his trainer bike that his shamed father had run over with the truck. Dewy and golden adolescent boys expertly piled shiny metal scraps one on top of another and the clink-clank was din. A jeepney driver drove my mother the cashier a hard bargain over a mat of obscene and gaudy stickers. But upstairs, in the living room where my father worked, it was serene. Sunlight poured into the huge cathedral windows abundantly, making the sweeping room wider, the towering ceiling higher, and the white walls more brilliant. In the middle of the modest room was a simple wooden table and there, on afternoons, I always found my father softly dappled with the sun, quietly bent over something and the sight was almost holy.
My father made model villages. He would begin with illustration boards, tape, colored pens, and his stainless steel ruler and cutter, and at sundown end with a village of fifty or so miniature houses with proper windows and doors that open and tiled roofs and manicured lawns. Sometimes, too, when the village was especially fancy, the houses had lights and shiny cars in the garage. I saw my father build countless model villages and listened to him expertly talk about houses and their construction in countless conversations, and so when I was younger, I told my classmates that my father was an architect. When I told him about this, he corrected me and said that he was, in fact, a real estate agent and that more than this, what he was truly was an inventor.
One afternoon, when I was about five and he had leftover illustration board from a model village, my father announced that he will make our portraits and promptly left my siblings and me in irrepressible excitement for no one had drawn our portraits before. That day, he came home with a shopping bag filled with charcoal and color pencils and a veritable eraser and charged the whiteness of the illustration boards with our wide-eyed stares and pudgy cheeks. For afternoons he was this way, and I sat beside him and watched him work and worked on my own dilettante portraits. When the portraits were framed and displayed in the living room a week later, my siblings and I were in reverence of our color pencil versions. Years later, when I was about nine and our eyes had already lost some of their sparkle and our cheeks were no longer as pudgy, my brothers and I found the illustrations among unused, outdated curtains and decided to take them out of storage. I showed them to our father and he laughed and in his eyes I saw again the man who fierily charcoaled our features into significance until the sun came down and his pencils dwarfed in size.
It was just after New Year’s Day when my father’s father died. We were almost out the door on our way to the toy store to get the presents we had painstakingly chosen and ebulliently anticipated for months when the phone suddenly rang and our mother told us that we will have to wait another day. My eldest brother, who had been looking forward to getting his Black Fortress Lego set the most, threw a tantrum and our father had to spend his final hours in Manila before leaving for his father’s wake in Bacolod trying to appease the bereaved child. My father did not cry that afternoon and I wondered about why he did not cry and if he will cry later and what it must be like to lose one’s father. When my brother’s wails had been reduced to pitiful whimpers and our father had finally left, I spent an hour in the bathroom sitting on the toilet and willing myself to cry. I felt a need to cry for my grandfather, whom I had never known but was my grandfather still, and for my father, who could not shed tears for himself. It was only when I found myself face-to-face with the portraits he made of us when I went to bed that night that I finally cried, and copiously. When I asked my father years later if he cried at the funeral and he would not answer me, I felt relieved that I cried for him that night.
My father loved telling stories about his childhood, and I was always his happy audience. Once, when I was about ten and he was much younger, he showed me a baby picture he kept in his wallet and I found that beneath the wrinkles, the smudges, and the sepia color, the two-year-old in the picture bore an undeniably striking resemblance to the portrait of my younger brother he made years ago when he was still a real estate agent and we still had a bicycle store downstairs. I remarked that he was a handsome baby and at this he became taller and said that he was his parents’ favorite among their brood because he was the most attractive. In fact, he said, had not his family been poor, he would have become a movie star in the manner of his idol, Harrison Ford. But they were in such penury that they could not even afford toothpaste and had to make their own toys out of empty sardine cans and so his fans were his parents who doted on him with the occasional night at the movies and the bigger portion of Sarsi. My father recalled these things fondly mostly during the nights, when he sat in the dirty kitchen with me while we prepared the gulaman and waited for his famed adobo with hardboiled eggs to cook.
I was happy that his childhood, while poor was not short on love, but also relieved that my father was different from his parents and did not play favorites and instead grappled to enforce fairness. I could imagine that one of his most trying times as an advocate of equality was during the NAPOCOR crisis of the early 90s. Blackouts were frequent and sleeping in our sparsely windowed new house in Pateros was terribly uncomfortable. In the middle of such night, we were roused and brought to our parents’ bedroom where we were welcomed by a lineup of sleeping mats on the floor and our father grinning like a child. It was only when we had taken our places on the floor that he revealed his contraption—out of three bath towels he fashioned an enormous fan spirituous enough to sweep the room with glorious, benevolent gusts. Way into the night and until the electricity finally came on, our father stood in the middle of the room with his towels and flapped and fluttered away. As he fanned us, he dreamed of developing the towel fan for mass production and we ingratiated him with our oohs and ahhs and he was happy.
He would not tell us why the bicycle shop was gone and why we moved into the house with the few windows, but I found that I could always tell the state of my father’s finances by looking at the things he built. Some time after the move, my brothers and I found him foraging in the backyard. He went from tree to tree, plucked a leaf here and there, and when he was done he came to us with his bucket and we watched as he assiduously inspected and washed each leaf before he boiled it in a pot of water. For an hour he carefully and lovingly stirred and he smiled as he inhaled the smell of the leaves and we imagined he was a warlock making his secret potion. When the pot had been sufficiently stirred and inhaled, he sieved the potion into a teapot and served us a cup each, and when we tasted the murky liquid we also smiled. The trick, he whispered, is to make sure each leaf is fresh and unmarred.
My father made herbal tea. Before the sun was up every day, he left the house with his assistant, Mang Rene, and together they scoured the streets for mango, guava, and chesa trees. At noon they were back, carrying a forest with them. My father lovingly plucked each leaf off its branch and inspected and washed it until it was fresh and unmarred. He did this so efficiently that every day, before the sun was down, the forest in our house was gone. He had already cleaned and laid the leaves out in the sun to dry. The next day, when they were crisp, he ground them in a kitchen blender and my siblings and I helped spoon the powdered tea into tiny Ziplock bags. The day he sold his first bag for seventy-five pesos, he ran to the Intellectual Property Office and bought the copyright for Pito-Pito, the medicinal herbal tea that broadcaster Ernie Baron had popularized in his television and radio shows. For years my father proudly recounted at dinner parties how he made Pito-Pito rightfully his and not Baron’s. He got there first.
His goal was to produce Pito-Pito by the volume. When he brought home an industrial grinder and blender, I knew that his herbal tea business was going well. He transformed the storage room downstairs into a factory and there he demonstrated his new toy to me. He fed a bucket of dried leaves into the mouth of the blender, which, in a matter of seconds, spat a storm of powdered tea into a tub. That night, too, on an illustration board I had leftover from a school project, he designed a box and poster, and when the shiny yellow Pito-Pito boxes and posters that had my father’s drawings of leaves and a teacup on them arrived from the printers a few weeks later, I became his official factory worker.
Every day, after school, I would go straight to my father’s factory downstairs and assemble boxes. He shared his technique with me and soon I was able to put together hundreds every afternoon. I memorized their folds and edges, and where to press and crease. I loved touching the glossy yellow surface, which was a stark contrast to the dilettantism of the Ziplocks from years ago, and I memorized each word on it. At the back of each box, my father indicated the seventy-seven diseases curable by Pito-Pito and I recited them over and over in my head as I pressed and creased.
BronchitisAsthmaFluDiabetesRheumatismMenstrualpainPsoriasisHighbloodHighcholesterolBeri-beriSkinallergyMeningitis.
For a year I was my father’s worker and so for a year I was this way, that when we had a spelling bee in school and the championship word was rheumatism, I won and easily. When I came home that afternoon, my father was so proud. He said he trained me well.
The day we left my mother and three brothers and did not come back for two years, it was Quezon City Day and I had the day off from school. My parents had a terrible row the night before, which went on until that morning when mother threw a fork at father’s head and my two-year-old sister bawled her eyes out. I never forgot this because it was also my father’s birthday, and I never forgot that he shared his birthday with Manuel Quezon because of two stories. My father told me the first story one afternoon when we were making boxes, and it went like this: Back when he was younger and was a real estate agent, he found himself stuck in heavy traffic on his way to a meeting. The traffic had not been moving for a while and traffic enforcers were nowhere to be found that my father decided to step out of his car and be the enforcer himself. Within minutes, he proclaimed, the cars could move freely and the roads were cleared. Later that year, I read in our history book that Quezon had done the same thing back when he was president of the Commonwealth government. When I told my father about this, he beamed proudly. He had always liked that Quezon guy, he said.
When we left my mother and three brothers on my father’s birthday and did not come back for two years, we packed light. I packed a couple of shirts and a pair of pants each for my younger brother and sister, and my father had even less. He told us that we were going to start a new life and so we flew to Bacolod to his mother and siblings, and there he worked for the family auto supply shop.
My father’s family was wealthy and had a string of auto supply shops, a garage filled with cars, and a 5-storey building for a house. Later I found out that when my father was a teenager, he worked as an errand boy in a Manila auto supply shop and, when he had saved enough money, went back to Bacolod to establish a similar business for his family to free them from poverty. When we flew to Bacolod to live and my father worked in the auto supply shop he put up years ago, he worked as an ordinary employee, just like years ago in Manila when he was a teenager and worked as an errand boy.
We had been living in Bacolod and sleeping in the spare bedroom at my grandmother’s house for a year when he introduced my siblings and me to the battery terminal. It was a stainless steel tube the size of my thumb made from the scrap metal my father found at the shop. I never truly understood what a battery terminal was but he told me that the ordinary car battery terminal sold for four pesos while his sold for eighty because of his invention—the small metal bar that pierces the stainless steel at the foot. It was a built-in screw that allowed the installation of the battery terminal into a car without the help of tools. The next year, before my grade school graduation, he announced that he had sold enough battery terminals and saved enough money and that it was time to go back to my mother and brothers.
On our return to Manila I found that my family now lived in a small apartment and that most of our things were gone and that the portraits from my childhood were nowhere to be found. What was left was a two-feet tall wooden Buddha that my parents had bought during their honeymoon in Baguio years ago when they still did not know what will happen and each other. That day, after we unpacked our things, my father sanded the dark varnish off the Buddha and painted it yellow until its fat tummy glistened. He said yellow is a happy color.
My father painted the Buddha yellow and paid our tuition fees and bought my mother a fax machine and then the money he had saved from when we lived in Bacolod was gone. Soon, I found him foraging in the neighbor’s garden and conducting experiments. One of his theories was that malunggay leaves could ward off dengue mosquitoes, and so one Sunday when my mother’s relatives came over for an afternoon of cards, he decided to give his theory a try and proceeded to burn a handful of malunggay leaves that he plucked off the neighbor’s tree. When the smoke gave my uncle a vicious asthma attack, my father abandoned his garden experiments altogether and went back to making herbal tea. That week, before the sun was up, he went out to scour the streets for mango, guava, and chesa trees just like years ago and lovingly plucked and cleaned and dried each leaf just like years ago and ground the dried leaves in a blender just like years ago and it was like nothing had changed.
I could always tell the state of my father’s finances by looking at the things he built. When, instead of foraging in the neighbor’s yard and designing herbal tea boxes on scrap illustration boards, I found my father putting together zen gardens, I knew that things were good. On mornings he drove to the garden center and bought clay pots, water fountain mechanisms, bonsai plants, rocks and stones, and miniature Buddhas. For afternoons he put zen gardens together that our house was soon filled with them, and everywhere we went we heard water trickling down the smoothness of stones and saw tiny fat men pop out from everywhere to grin the way they do.
My father started making zen gardens when my mother and four brothers moved to the house on the next block. My mother kept all the furniture except for the Buddha because he wanted to start a new life and she did not like the Chinese. The carpenters arrived and painted the walls mint green and installed colorful blinds on the windows and brought in new tables and chairs. He filled the door of the new refrigerator with magnetic fruits and letters because he said colorful things are happy. When my mother and four brothers moved to the house on the next block, too, he bought boxes of Lego battleships and I spent hours putting them together and when they were done he had acrylic cases made for them and he displayed them in the living room so that all may see. When I graduated from college and bought myself some old Hollywood movie posters, he designed red frames for them and when they were made we displayed them in the living room so that all may see, too.
When things were okay and my father no longer foraged and instead had someone do that for him, he started to busy himself with other things. He did not put together zen gardens and he did not put colorful magnets on the refrigerator anymore for he was done with those, too. First, he bought the lot down the street. When he gets rich, he said, he will build a house on it with doors and cabinets that open and rooms that pop up at the press of a button. He dreamed about Batman’s house. In the meantime, he fortified the lot with a wall and propped up a gate, which he painted a different color every month. People called it McDonald’s when he painted it yellow and orange, and when he changed it to a bright blue, he found that the name had stuck. Some years later, when things were no longer okay again and my father had to forage again, he stopped painting the gate every month. For a long time it stayed blue, until the blue shriveled and the gate peeled away to the colors of its past. Blue, yellow, orange, green, violet, white, and then there was the color of stark metal.
The other thing my father was busy with was the big house in the adjacent village, and that was how the end started. When the lease on the house where my mother and four brothers lived was up and my father decided it was time to buy a house, we fell in love with it. It was so big that it took up the entire block and had many big bedrooms and a fancy guest powder room and servants’ quarters and a spacious courtyard. The first time we went there, my siblings and I divided the rooms among ourselves, and our mother planned to transform the courtyard into a beautiful garden.
My father bought the house when we loved it. My mother had its exterior painted all white that everyone in the village called it The White House, and when she painted the rooms downstairs herself, she painted them white, too. For days she painted, and when she painted the walls she needed a ladder because the ceiling was arched so high but she did not mind because it was beautiful. Upstairs, the bedrooms were colorful—black and red, pale pink, royal blue, ochre. Outside, a landscape artist transformed the courtyard into the garden mother had wanted and constructed waterfalls on the walls and ponds below and hung orchids and vines and propped up wooden angels on the branches of trees.
And then my father said he now had little money. When he talked to us about money, people started talking too and they talked about the other things with which my father was busy and which they said we did not know. People talked about women and panciterias in Marikina and mansions in the province and love children. When he could no longer give us money to buy paint for our walls and build gardens anymore, people talked about my father’s other things even more, and my mother listened to them finally.
The morning mother got so angry she sent my siblings and me to talk to father, we went to look for him in the lot with the colorful gate. When we entered the gate we found that he had transformed the lot into a village. There were little houses and a garden and a pond, and people- men and women with babies who were gifted with panciterias and mansions in the province- lived there. Our father was not there and so we went to look for him in his house, and when we got there I went to the maid’s room and found that it had been transformed into a nursery. I looked at the tiny pillows and the teddy bear bedspread and the colorful mobile hanging from the ceiling and the stuffed toys cramped into the smallness of the room and I felt sorry for my father who wanted to build Batman’s house but became busy with other things.
The last time I went to visit my father, I had already moved out of The White House and had a house of my own. When I got to his house he was busy and so we talked while he worked. We talked about my work and about the lot with the colorful gate that was no longer his, and I watched as he scraped his two-feet tall Buddha of its yellow paint and hosed it down with water, and then when it was dry, I watched as he painted it a shiny gold.
