For Papa
“The goose came with the house!”
This is what Lolo told everyone, every
birthday party, Noche Buena, every time Lola invited her friends for a merienda
and mah-jong. Even when those big,
burly men came to drop off a painting or a new piece of furniture, he would
stop, offer them a cigarette or two, and tell them to look out the window, past
the patio, beyond the flowerbeds, over the hedge. “Kita mo?” he would puff out a cloud of smoke, nudge their sides and
flash a cheeky grin. He would point to the small, white speck floating on a
pond. “Iyon ang pangarap ko sa buhay.”
When the photographers and the magazine
people would come, he would tell them the same thing. After showing them the
mezzanines, the balconies and the sitting rooms, after my siblings and I had
posed against the swing set and the settee, he would bring them to the gardens
to show them neither the marble sculptures nor the gazebo, not even the
swimming pool or the tennis court. He would bring them to the pond, where the
goose would be paddling or sometimes sleeping under the mango tree – luckily
not when she was noisily asking for sunflower seeds. That would’ve been
embarrassing. After all, she had always been Lolo’s charm. She was always clean
and poised, with her beady, black eyes looking as polished as dark tourmaline.
The goose arrived on a warm, August
afternoon. We had just come home from Sunday mass when a large pick-up truck
pulled over outside our gate. I was only four years old back then, but ever
since the house was built early in the year; my memory had sharpened to fit in
all the people that I had met. Cousins and titas
I had never seen in any of our family reunions, college friends of Mommy
and Daddy, even old workers from Lolo’s company – they would always be waiting
at the gate, with a copy of Lifestyle
Asia or Travel and Living in
their arms. “Exequiel,” they would tell Lolo, “I read the feature on your
house! It’s been so long!” and would turn to me, cup my cheeks into their hands
and trill, “Is this Luisa? Ang laki mo
na! Last time I saw you, you were just a baby!” Usually they just came in,
ate the turon and biko Mommy made, complimented the marble
floors and the chandeliers, admire the family portraits and would be gone
forever. That day, I wondered if it was going to be just like that.
But it was different. Two men came out of
the pick-up truck, wearing dirty aprons and oily, black boots. They lifted a
crate from the back of the vehicle and placed it down before Lolo’s feet. When
they pried it open, Lolo told me to look inside. I could not believe my eyes.
Inside, sitting on a pile of straw, was a white, feathery goose. Besides the
ones on TV, I had never seen one before. Its beak was as yellow as a banana and
its curious black eyes stared right at me. Lolo had the help bring the goose
into the gardens. “This is our new pet, Luisa,” he told me, as I followed him
into the house. I watched our driver and the gardener place the crate on the
grass. The goose ran out almost immediately; its webbed feet almost tripping
over the pebbles. It spread its large, white wings and let out a honk. It was
the funniest and most amazing thing I had ever seen.
A week after, Lolo had the pond made. I was
there when he told the people “Twelve by twelve!” He had a giant hole dug up
under the mango tree, and I watched them fill it up with pipes and a tank. They
covered them with soil and rocks and later on, when the gardener came, lush,
green plants and bright, pink flowers. A lot of my friends at school had ponds
too, with huge orange and red fish swimming inside. “They said it’s for good
luck!” I told Lolo, “That those fish bring lots of money.” Lolo simply laughed
at this, “Iha, the goose comes with
the house. That is all the luck we will ever need.”
I never really knew what he meant by that,
but Lola told me that he loved the goose as much as he loved the family. Our
family was big, so I figured that was a lot. In the house lived Lolo and Lola,
Mommy, Daddy, Kuya, Ate and me, my Tita Vicky and Nina and our five yayas. My
yaya, Rose, would tell me about her gansa
– the one in her farm. She said
that geese had a painful bite (“But don’t they peck, Yaya?”) and they chase you
all around your house (“Well, at least they don’t fly.”) until you fall and eat
your eyeballs out. This terrified me, and I did not want to go near the goose.
I watched Rose prepare her feed of pechay,
papaya and sunflower seeds and would walk with her to the gardens. But I
never went near the pond. I was too scared for my eyeballs.
But still, there was something magical about
the goose. I could never really put my finger on it. Perhaps it was the way she
spread her wings majestically whenever it rained. There would be typhoons so
violent that they would send the windows and the rooftops flying. From my
bedroom window, I would watch the storm ravage the flower beds and flood the
swimming pool. I was always so afraid that the goose would be blown away. But
she wouldn’t. She stood there, wings outstretched as she ran across the gardens
with her eyes and her beak shut tight. Ate would laugh and tell me “Tingnan mo o, she wants to fly!”
“Of course wants to!” My lolo would scoff,
as he lit the candles whenever there was a brown
out. “She watches the tiny Maya birds fly! Someday, she will too.” Lolo was
always defensive about the goose. The Christmas I turned 10, my parents bought
us a Pekingese, which tore through the net in the tennis court and shredded all
the bougainvilleas. Lolo never got angry, but when the dog chased the goose out
of her pond, he forbade all other animals to go past the flowerbeds and the
gazebo. “What if she got killed!” he exclaimed. He propped up a garden chair by
the pond and stayed there for weeks. Not even the coaxing of Lola or the smell
of his favourite bibingka cooking
could make him move. “The gardens are my home,” he said, waving her off. I
remembered those words when the walls were built.
I was fourteen years old when they closed
up the gardens. I was sitting by the patio when Daddy told me that the men had
arrived and I should go back to my room. “What men?” I asked him. I screamed
and kicked when he had the maids carry me to my room. He said I was too young
to understand. But Mommy told me what had happened. Lolo had lost money. “Lolo
had to sell the garndes,” she wept, so that Daddy wouldn’t hear her. I stayed
in my room for days and I ordered the maids not to draw the curtains. I did not
want to see the lifeless stumps of the mango trees, the barren strips of soil,
the demolished gazebo and the tennis court. I stayed wide awake at night, so in
the mornings I would sneak into Lola’s room and steal her sleeping pills. I was
not allowed to have any of them, but I did not have to hear the sounds of the
bulldozers and the drills and the large machines that ate up our gardens.
The goose was moved to the smaller yard at
the other side of the house. Lolo sold the playground and a bunch of other junk
to build a small pond for her, but he could not afford the oxygen pipes or the
filtration. “It would cost too much,” I overheard him talking to Mommy. His
voice sounded like a broken musical box. The pond turned out murky and dull,
and as weeks passed, insects and mosquitoes and giant frogs settled around it.
I never went near it, but Lolo always did. He pulled up his garden chair and
sat there, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days. He would talk to the goose,
but I could never hear what he would say.
That summer, we had to say goodbye to some
of our maids, one of them was Rose. I was old enough to take care of myself,
Lola told me. I wasn’t really sure if that was the reason, or we couldn’t
really pay for their salaries anymore. During those last few days, Rose taught
me how to fix my bed and clean my bathroom. The toilet had sprung a leak and
the fluorescent light flickered overhead. “Your house is getting old, my bulilit,” she pinched my cheeks and
smiled. I could tell that she wanted to cry, because the painful knot in my
throat hurt so much too.
But as fast as it took to break my heart,
forgetting about it happened in a blink of an eye. That year, I went to high
school. I worked hard, studied well and whenever I would ace a test or brought
home a medal, Lolo would reward me with a red envelope with P200 inside. I
would stuff the bills into my piggy bank, save up for a night out with my
friends. I would spend weekends out of town – sometimes with my friends, other
times with my family. “Travel marks no expense!” Dad would tell me. We would
book cheap flights abroad and be away for weeks. I would forget about the
house, the goose and I would not even remember Lolo, who would stay behind,
saying that the goose needed company. “It would get lonely.” The older I got,
the more preposterous that excuse seemed.
How could a goose get lonely anyway? She was
a bird, a farm animal, a dense, flapping gansa
that had lived all her life in solitude. Whenever Lolo gave us that petty
excuse, I would tell Lola or Mom that nobody even really held the goose. The closest anybody in this family ever got to it
was watching the maids feed it. Did we even love the goose? “Would it make a
difference if it was dead?” I asked my Lolo once, over dinner. He glared at me
from his plate and asked me: “Does this family mean anything to you?” We did
not speak after that. He still refused to go to trips with us, even to Tagaytay
or Baguio. I wished that the goose died, that she choked on her food or drowned
in her pond, that a stray cat tore her long, gangly neck apart. Lolo basked, or
rather festered –in the ambience of
mosquitoes and flies and the slippery moss of her ugly pond. I could not bring
myself to understand why.
“Lolo loves
that animal,” explained Lola, her eyes fixated on the television screen. As
Lolo grew more and more lost in the mucky pond of the goose, Lola shut herself
up in her room, drowning her glassy eyes in wine. Actually, we all did. We
bolted the mezzanine, locked the storerooms and the guestrooms. The small yard
had grown strewn with weeds, dead bark and centipedes. On the rare moments I
would drop by to check on Lolo, who would be lying motionless on his chair, I
would find the goose nipping at the wildflowers and the beetles. Each time, I
would realize that her feathers had grown yellow and damp; her orange webbed
feet had been caked with soil. She’s so old; I would think; then run back to my
house and order myself to dismiss such horrid thoughts. I did not want to think
about it. There was nothing much to say, really. We had grown accustomed to the
quiet, and this was helpful when Lolo died.
They found him by the pond. He had fallen
off his chair. His body was caked in mud and grass. The doctors said he had
suffered a stroke – perhaps many, but because he always took himself to
solitude, it was nearly impossible for anybody to notice. During the ride home
from the wake, Lola explained that during his last few months, Lolo refused to
eat or drink anything. He spent all day by the pond and refused to move from
his chair. When it rained, he called a maid to stand next to him and hold an
umbrella above his head. “Bakit po,
sir?” our labandera asked, the first
time. Lolo told her: “Kung mamatay ang
gansa, gusto kong kasama ako.” That night, when I couldn’t sleep, I walked
over to the pond and stared at the goose, who lay next to a rock, sleeping. I
hated her. I hated how she took Lolo away from all of us. I opened my mouth to
scream, but nothing came out. The morning after, Mom found me curled up in our
patio. I never cried so much in my life.
When Lolo died, the house died with him.
Lola took to selling everything – the chandeliers, the paintings, the antique
furniture she and Lolo spent all their lives collecting. And if it weren’t for
the family portrait hanging on top of the grand piano, Lola would have sold it
as well. She spent all her days in the casino, wasting away the remains of
their measly fortune. When I complained to Mom that Lola was becoming obsessed,
Mom told me that Lola was getting really old. “Well, isn’t everybody?” I yelled
back. I wanted to break away from the mess, from the house – which was not so much of a house anymore.
When I graduated from high school, getting
a scholarship to an Ivy League university was the best thing that had happened
to me in years. I was always out of the house – fixing my documents, arranging
the travel plans, making calls and celebrating despedidas. I was so eager to leave, that when Dad found me packing
my bags in my room, he couldn’t help but say: “You’re leaving in two months,
Luisa. You must be excited.” He sounded sentimental, and I wanted to hug him
and tell him that I was going to miss him and everybody else. But I wasn’t going
to lie. When the day finally came and I was saying goodbye to everyone, my
sister asked me if I was going to say goodbye to the goose. I pretended not to
hear her. I pretended not to hear any of them, their sobs, their sentimental
slurring. I would rather not.
And when I boarded the plane, I realized
that I didn’t have to. Not anymore. I watched the city of Manila grow smaller
and smaller, until the tall skyscrapers became a maze of tiny pinpricks. The
house, the goose, the motionless carcass of Lolo lying against his rotten
garden chair – they were all gone.
And I was more than happy to forget about them.
The life I had abroad and the life I had
back home in Manila were two different things. I had a dorm, which I shared
with two girls, one American and one Italian. We hit it off instantly, and we
took road trips to San Francisco and San Jose, trying all sorts of food and
drinks, meeting all sorts of people. One of those people was Heath. He was
tall, blonde, had a killer smile that made me want to stay in the United States. And so, I made sure that I did.
I studied hard, made sure that I had every book memorized, that every test had
a big, fat A on it. Mom or Dad would phone once in awhile and sometimes I’d
Skype with Kuya and Ate. They told me that my hair was
getting wavier, that my skin was growing lighter, that I had an accent. I told them that everything was great here; I
did not bother to ask them how it was back at home. I already knew. Lola was
submerged in her wine and her gambling, the house was falling apart, and the
goose – maybe she was still alive. I didn’t really care.
I was twenty-five years old when the goose
died.
I had just arrived back home from work,
exhausted from another day of answering telephones and posting reminders on the
cubicles of my workmates. I lived in LA at that time, and things were going
smoothly. I graduated with top honours, moved in with Heath. We got
well-paying, steady jobs, got ourselves a cute apartment and paid the bills. We
were even thinking of getting married. I came home once or twice for Christmas,
but when I wasn’t back in Manila, I wasn’t thinking of my family, of the house,
of the goose. In fact, I did not tell Heath about the goose at all. When he was
looking through a box of photos that Mom had sent me, I had to force myself to
tell the entire story.
“That’s just amazing! You know, most people
have dogs or cats as pets, but you had a goose!”
I told him that it was nothing special, that
the goose was my grandpa’s pet, not mine. I snatched the box from him and
shoved it back into the closet, hoping that we would never have to open it
again. We went out for drinks that night. I made sure that I blacked out.
It was September 5th, three o’
clock in the morning when Mom called me. With eyes still closed, my hand groped
around my bedside table for the telephone. It took about seven rings until I
was able to close my hand around it, and when I did, the phone went on
loudspeaker. “Luisa? L-Luisa?” my mom’s voice was choppy through the receiver.
I sat up, eyes wide open and turned the phone back to normal mode. “Mom? Can
you hear me?” I whispered.
The goose died a couple of hours ago, was
what she said. Her voice sounded empty on the phone, or maybe that was because
I forced myself not to completely listen. I did not want to know the details.
Why was she calling me? Why would I care? When I put the phone down a few
minutes afterward, I stared into the darkness of my room. For a moment, I
pretended that the window was my old
window, with satin pink curtains and lace. I walked over to it, hoping to see
the gardens – the flowerbeds, the mango trees, the tennis court, the swimming
pool, the tall, white gazebo with the pink bougainvilleas. I didn’t.
I booked a flight to Manila the day after. I
left right away, telling Heath and my officemates that I needed to be back with
my family for just awhile. “Something came up,” I told them. If said the truth,
that it was because an old pet died – I don’t think anybody would believe it.
In fact, I couldn’t even believe myself either. I did not even tell my family
that I was coming home. Upon boarding the plane, all I could think about was
Lolo and how his frail, limp body lay on the old, garden chair. “Don’t you ever
forget, Luisa,” he told me that night I wished the goose dead, “The goose comes
with the house.”
When I arrived back home, I couldn’t wait
to get back to the house. I was restless, pushing and shoving my through every
line. I almost fell over when I reached for my suitcase in the luggage pick-up.
I ran towards the airport doors, demanding the fastest taxi driver in the city.
I needed to get back to the house in half an hour.
“Ba’t
ka nagmamadali?” asked the taxi driver, as we zoomed through the highway.
I told him that my lolo died. He built the
house that I had lived in most of my life. I told him that my lolo treasured
everything about the house – the wide, white walls, the large, red roof, the
glossy, silver gate. “At yung mga hardin,”
I told the driver. I must have said it five or six times, and each time, I
would tell him that I loved running through the flowerbeds with my cousins,
going as high as I could in the swing set, jumping into the swimming pool with
my pambahay on and Yaya would get so
angry. I told him that I loved the house, that you could climb up the mango
tree and you wouldn’t realize how big it was. And I couldn’t miss his funeral,
because Lolo loved it too.
When we got to my house, I grabbed my bag,
paid the driver and rang the doorbell. Once. Twice. Five more times. Our old labandera was the one who answered the
gate. “Bulilit!” she shrieked,
enfolding me in her arms. “Lumabas si
Mommy at Daddy mo! Kasama sina Ate at Kuya.”
“Okay lang,
Manang,” I told her. “Nandito lang
ako para sa gansa.”
I rushed past her, took a shortcut and cut to
the yard and I saw that the grass was so tall that it reached my knees. Insects
flew everywhere – they circled my head, clung to my hair, bit my skin. I felt
my palms grow sweaty and my heart race as I approached the pond, which looked
the same as I had left it – stagnant, murky, and strewn with water sliders and
mosquitoes. The one thing that was different was the small cardboard box by the
edge of the pond. I approached it, nervous, my heart slamming against my rib
cage. Why was I so nervous? I never loved the animal.
I peered into the box. Inside was a wilted,
pallid creature, looking as stiff and pasty as dried up glue. Its wings, which
looked like soggy pieces of soiled cloth, were tucked under its feet, which did
not look like feet anymore, but sloppy, browning things that looked damp and
crooked. This was not the goose; this was not anybody’s goose! The goose was
tall and plump and strutted around the gardens with her wings outstretched and
her beak high up in the air. I did not want to believe it.
I closed my eyes. I did not cry, but I
felt like a million strings had been tied up inside me, and some painful,
invisible force was pulling and tugging at each of them, over and over, as if
forcing me to scream and burst out in tears. But I couldn’t. How – how could I
ever love that animal?
I stumbled back into the house, opened my
eyes and saw the house – its yellowing walls, the cracked, marble floors, the aged,
old furniture pushed to one corner. I looked up and saw the holes in the
ceilings where the chandeliers used to be, the hooks on the walls where the
paintings once hung. In my delirium, I wondered whether this was really my
house – the house – the one that I
had spent so many days of my childhood running around, screaming, being chased
after by my cousins, or Yaya or sometimes Lolo, who would find me under the
table and coax me out, saying: “Iha, nandito
na ang mga photographers. Won’t you
tell them that this is such a beautiful house?”
In that moment, I turned around saw our
family portrait, which hung placidly across a window. I walked over to it and
stared at the picture. I did not bother to look at anybody but Lolo, who sat
proud and erect on a cushioned armchair. He wore a gray velour suit, and his
hair was slicked back behind his ears. On his lap was me, five or six years
old, and I suppose the picture would have been perfect if I looked straight at
the camera just like everybody else.
In
that moment, I collapsed on the floor and felt the walls of the house close up
and consume me.
______________________________________________________________
Cathy eats too many chocolates for
her own good. She is an English staffer of Heights and Workshops Deputy of
Writerskill; she owes both the publication and the org the biggest thank you
for being one of her biggest inspirations since her freshman year.
The
Goose was published in the Heights LX Folio (SY 2012-2013). It was written for
her grandfather.
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