THE HOUSE ON ZAPOTE STREET
Quijano de Manila
About the Author
Quijano de Manila is the pen name of Nick Joaquin. He started writing before the war and his first story, “Three Generations” has been hailed as a masterpiece. He has been recipient of almost all the prestigious awards in literature and the arts, including the National Artist Award for Literature in 1976. He was also conferred, among other recognitions, the Republic Cultural Heritage Award for Literature in 1961, the Journalist of the Year Award in the early 1960s, the Book of the Year Award in 1979 for his Almanac for Manileños, the national Book award for several of his works, the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, Creative Communication Arts (the Asian counterpart of Nobel Prize) in 1996, and the Tanglaw ng Lahi Award in 1997.
Dr. Leonardo Quitangon, a soft-spoken, mild-mannered, cool-tempered Caviteno, was still fancy-free at 35 when he returned to Manila, after six years abroad. Then, at the University of Santo Tomas, where he went to reach, he met Lydia Cabading, a medical intern. He liked her quiet ways and began to date her steadily. They went to the movies and to baketball games and he took her a number of times to his house in Sta. Mesa, to meet his family.
Lydia was then only 23 and looked like a sweet unspoiled girl, but there was a slight air of mystery about her. Leonardo and his brothers noticed that she almost never spoke of her home life or her childhood; she seemed to have no gay early memories to share with her lover, as sweethearts usually crave to do. And whenever it looked as if she might have to stay out late, she would say: "I'll have to tell my father first". And off she would go, wherever she was, to tell her father, though it meant going all the way to Makati, Rizal, where she lived with her parents in a new house on Zapote Street.
The Quitangons understood that she was an only child and that her parents were, therefore, over-zealous in looking after her. Her father usually took her to school and fetched her after classes, and had been known to threaten to arrest young men who stared at her on the streets or pressed too close against her on jeepneys. This high-handedness seemed natural enough, for Pablo Cabading, Lydia's father was a member of the Manila Police Depatment.
After Lydia finished her internship, Leopardo Quitangon became a regular visitor at the house on Zapote Street: he was helping her prepare for the board exams. Her family seemed to like him. The mother Anunciacion, struck him as a mousy woman unable to speak save at her husband's bidding. There was a foster son, a little boy the Cabadings had adopted. As for Pablo Cabading, he was a fine strapping man, an Ilocano, who gave the impression of being taller than he was and looked every inch an agent of the law: full of brawn and guts and force, and smoldering with vitality. He was a natty dresser, liked youthful colors and styles, decorated his house with pictures of himself and, at 50, looked younger than his inarticulate wife, who was actually two years younger than he.
When Leonardo started frequenting the house on Zapote Street, Cabading told him: ill be frank with you. None of Lydia's boy friends ever lasted ten minutes in this house. I didn't like them and I told them so and made them get out." Then he added laying a hand on the young doctor's shoulder:" But I like you. You are a good man."
The rest of the household were two very young maids who spoke almost no Tagalog, and two very fierce dogs, chained to the front door in the day time, unchained in the front yard at night.
The house of Zapote Street is in the current architectural cliché: the hoity-toity Philippine split-level suburban style—a half-story perched above the living area, to which it is bound by the slope of the roof and which it overlooks from a balcony, so that a person standing in the sala can see the doors of the bedrooms and bathroom just above his head. The house is painted, as is also the current fashion, in various pastel shades, a different color to every three or four planks. The inevitable piazza curves around two sides of the house, which has a strip of lawn and a low wall all around it. The Cabadings did not keep a car, but the house provides for an eventual garage and driveway. This, and the furniture, the shell lamps and the fancy bric-a-brac that clutters the narrow house indicate that the Cabadings had not only risen high enough to justify their split-level pretensions but were expecting to go higher.
Lydia took the board exams and passed them. The lovers asked her father's permission to wed. Cabading laid down two conditions: that the wedding would ba a lavish one and that was to pay a downy of P5.000.00. The young doctor said that he could afford the big wedding but the big dowry. Cabading shrugged his shoulders; no dowry, no marriage.
Leonarado spent some frantic weeks scraping up cash and managed to gather P3.000.00. Cabading agreed to reduce his price to that amount, then laid down a final condition: after the wedding, Lydia and Leonardo must make their home at the house on Zapote Street.
"I built this house for Lydia," said Cabading, "and I want her to live here even when she's married. Besides, her mother couldn't bear to be separated from Lydia, her only child."
There was nothing. Leonardo could do but consent.
Lydia and Leonardo were on September 10 last year, at the Cathedral of Manila, with Mrs. Delfin Montano, wife of the Cavite governor, and Senator Ferdinand Marcos as sponsors. The reception was at the Selecta. The status gods of Suburdia were properly propitiated. Then the newlyweds went to live on Zapote Street -- and Leonardo almost immediately realized why Lydia had been so reticent and mysterious about her home life.
The cozy family group that charmed him in courtship days turned out to be rather too cozy. The entire household revolved in submission around Pablo Cabading. The daughter, mother, the foster-son, the maids and even the dogs trembled when the lifted his voice. Cabading liked to brag that was a "killer": in 1946 he had shot dead two American soldiers he caught robbing a neighbor's house in Quezon City.
Leonardo found himself within a family turned in on itself, self-enclosed and self-sufficient — in a house that had no neighbors and no need for any. His brothers say that he made more friends in the neighborhood within the couple of months he stayed there than the Cabadings had made in a year. Pablo Cabading did not like what his to stray out of, and what was not his to stray into, his house. And within that house he wanted to be the center of everything, even of his daughter's honeymoon.
Whenever Leonardo and Lydia went to the movies or for a ride, Cabading insisted on being taken along. If they seated him on the back scat while they sat together in front, be raged and glowered. He wanted to sit in front with them.
When Leonardo came home from work, he must not tarry with Lydia in the bedroom chatting: both of them must come down at once to the sala and talk with their father. Leonardo explained that he was not much of a talking: "That's why I fell in love with Lydia, because she's the quiet type too". No matter, said Cabading. They didn't have to talk at all; he would do all the talking himself, so long as they sat there in the sala before his eyes.
So, his compact family group sat around him at night, silent, while Cabading talked and talked. But, finally, the talk had stop, the listeners had to rise and retire - and it was this moment that Cabading seemed unable to bear. He couldn't bear to see Lydia and Leonardo rise and go up together to their room. One night, unable to bear it any longer he shouted, as they rose to retire:
"Lydia, you sleep with your mother tonight. She has a toothache." After a dead look at her husband, Lydia obeyed. Leonardo went to bed alone.
The incident would be repeated: there would always be other reasons, besides Mrs. Cabading's toothaches.
What horrified Leonardo was not merely what being done to him but his increasing acquiesces. Had his spirit been so quickly broken? Was he, too, like the rest of the household, being drawn to revolve, silently and obediently, around the master of the house?
Once, late at night, he suddenly showed up at his parents’ house in Sta. Mesa and his brothers were shocked at the great in him within so short a time. He looked terrified. What had happened? His car had broken down and he had had it repaired and now he could not go home. But why not?
"You don't know my father-in-law," he groaned. "Everybody in that house must be in by a certain hour. Otherwise, the gates are locked, the doors are locked, the windows are locked. Nobody can get in anymore!”
A younger brother, Gene offered to accompany him home and explain to Cabading what had happened. The two rode to Zapote and found the house dark and locked up.
Says Gene: "That memory makes my blood boil -- my eldest brother fearfully clanging and clanging the gate, and nobody to let him in. 1 wouldn't have waited a second, but he waited five, ten, fifteen minutes, knocking at thai gate, begging to be let in. I couldn't have it!"
In the end the two brothers rode back to Sta. Mesa, where Leonardo spent the night. When he returned to the house on Zapote the next day, his father-in-law greeted him with a sarcastic question: "Where were you? At a basketball game?"
Leonardo became anxious to take his wife away from that house. He talked it over with her, then they went to tell her father. Said Cabading bluntly: "If she goes with you, I'll shoot her head before your eyes."
His brothers urged him to buy a gun, but Leonardo felt in his pocket and said, "I've got my rosary." Cried his brother Gene: "You can't fight a gun with a rosary!".
When Lydia took her oath as a physician, Cabading announced that only he and his wife would accompany Lydia to the ceremony. I would not be fair, he said, to let Leonardo, who had not borne the expenses of Lydia's education, to share that moment of glory too. Leonardo said that, if he would like them at least to use his car. The offer was rejected. Cabading preferred to hire a taxi.
After about two months at the house on Zapote Street, Leonardo moved out, alone. Her parents would not let Lydia go and she herself was too afraid to leave. During the succeeding weeks, efforts to contact her proved futile. The house on Zapote became even more closed to the outside world. If Lydia emerged from it at all, she was always accompanied by her father, mother or foster-brother, or by all three.
When her husband heard that she had started working at a hospital he went there to see her but instead met her father coming to fetch her. The very next day, Lydia was no longer working at the hospital.
Leonardo knew that she was with child and he was determined to bear all her prenatal expenses. He went to Zapote one day when her father was out and persuaded her to come out to the yard but could not make her make the money he offered across the locked gate. "Just mail it," she cried and fled into the house. He sent her a check by registered mail; it was promptly mailed back to him.
On Christmas Eve, Leonardo returned to the house on Zapote with a gift for his wife, and stood knocking at the gate for so long the neighbors gathered at windows to watch him. Finally, he was allowed to enter, present his gift to Lydia and talk with her for a moment. She said that her father seemed agreeable to a meeting with Leonardo's father, to discuss the young couple's problem. So the elder Quitangon and two of his younger sons went to Zapote one evening. The lights were on in Cabading house, but nobody responded to their knocking. Then all the lights were turned off. As they stood wondering what to do, a servant girl came and told them that the master was out. (Lydia would later tell them that they had not been admitted because her father had not yet decided what she was to say to them.)
The last act of this curious drama began Sunday last week when Leonardo was astounded to receive an early-morning phone call from his wife. She said she could no longer bear to be parted from him and bade him pick her up at a certain church, where she was with her foster brother. Leonardo rushed to the church, picked up two, dropped the boy off at a street near Zapote, then sped with Lydia to Maragondon, Cavite where the Quitangons have a house. He stopped at a gasoline station to call up his brothers in Sta. Mesa, to tell them what he had done and to warn them that Cabading would surely show up there. "Get Mother out of the house," he told his brothers.
At about ten in the morning, a taxi stopped before the Quitangon house in Sta. Mesa and Mrs. Cabading got out and began screaming at the gate: "Where's my daughter? Where's my daughter?" Gene and Nonilo Quitangin went out to the gate and invited her to come in. "No! No! All I want is my daughter!" she screamed. Cabading, who was inside the waiting taxi, then got out and demanded that the Quitangons produce Lydia. Vexed, Nonilo Quitangon cried: "Abah, what have we do with where your daughter is? Anyway, she's with her husband." At that, Cabading ran to the taxi, snatched a submachinegun from a box, and trained it on Gene Quitangon. (Nonilo had run into the house to get a gun.)
"Produce my daughter at once or I'll shoot you all down!" shouted Cabading.
Gene, the gun's muzzle practically in his face, sought to pacify the older man: "Why can't we talk this over quietly, like decent people, inside the house? Look, we're creating a scandal in the neighborhood.."
Cabading lowered his gun. "I give you till midnight tonight to produce my daughter," he growled. "If you don't, you better ask the PC to guard this house!"
Then he and his wife drove off in the taxi, just a moment before the mobile police patrol the neighbors had called arrived. The police advised Gene to file a complaint with the fiscal's office. Instead, Gene decided to go to the house on Zapote Street, hoping that "diplomacy" would work.