The Neighborhood

Much of my neighborhood got flooded during the rainy season. The water remained on the ground long after the monsoon rains were over, so when te ihe dry season arrived the earth abov was flaky but underneath the ground was soft. Mosquitoes were a constant nuisance. To reduce the mosquito population in the early evening we would coat a plate with oil and wave it over our heads. We heard of people getting sick of malaria in Palawan, but I heard of nobody getting sick of the dread disease in our community.

Marcel de los Reyes had a musician brother who played various instruments. He played Spanish tunes with his accordion. He also played the guitar and the trumpet. At that time musicians like him played in dance orchestras which meant he had to work at night. But at times he would stay and we would be lulled to sleep by his music. He was a friendly man. He was quite thin and smoked a lot. Despite his skill he and his wife were always short of money and they changed houses some four or five times as I can remember but still within our community. Our little community was bounded to the south by the ice plant; to the east by Jereos Street, to the north by Gustilo Street and to the west by a clump of bamboos. This circumscribed my life as a boy.

I mentioned Tiya Enya. She was from the town of Cabatuan, where mangoes were grown in abundance. I remember the road from Cabatuan to Janiuay lined with mangoes. She would offer an unripe mango for kids like me to remove white hair from her head. She was a widow and Tidoy was her son. There was another daughter, Rosing, who worked in Manila and was the first in our community to boast of wearing a brassiere. They lived at the back of the house rented by the Tirols, the second house from Jereos Street. Tiya Enya's house was bamboo and nipa as most houses were, two levels, and they lived upstairs, the rooms below were rented.

Next to them was the original house of the delos Reyes family but it seems to me it was sold later and the new occupants was a woman with the name of Bingbing. Her husband drove a jeepney and they had a daughter a year or two older than me who loved to sing while washing clothes. She was a pretty girl but kept to herself and her singing. The next house was occupied by an old gentleman who had beriberi. He ate a lot of mongo beans.

There were two more houses before you reached the clump of bamboos to the west. There was the house of a family that ran a calesa. Their house was higher than the others, to accommodate the horses below (partly to allow the foul dung air to escape). Their children were ill mannered and we didn't have much to do with them except to use their house, being higher, to post our bamboo cannons during Christmas and fire empty milk cans into the ice cream factory. Our community was filled with the sound of industry--the pockety pock from the diesel engines of the ice plant, the crushing of ice, the neighing of horses, and the whirring of ice cream making machines. You get used to these sounds and when I go to Janiuay I keep hearing the sounds in my head.

The last house belonged to the family of Lonsing Ballesteros. Their business was collecting glass bottles, cleaning them and reselling them. They also made drinking glasses after the war when a lot of household utensils were scarce to find. Lonsing had an elder sister who was rumored to have been a teacher but was fired for some kind of immoral conduct. Until the arrival of the Ledesmas, Lonsing and the delos Reyes boys were my closest friends.