(First of Three Parts)

I lost count of how many hours it took before I reached the small village where my father had been born. I kept checking my watch, but the hands hardly seemed to move. After a while, I sighed, leaned back in my seat, and stopped looking at the time. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep instead.

I had already taken two buses and a jeep, yet I still had not reached my destination. For the last stretch of the trip, I even had to ride a tricycle.

Long journeys never really bothered me, but this time the rain would not stop. A storm was coming. The roads were flooded and muddy, making it difficult and exhausting to transfer between vehicles. That was why I decided not to bring my wife with me. She easily gets dizzy during long rides and quickly loses patience. With the way the vehicles crawled along, painfully slow, she would not have stopped complaining.

The last part of the trip turned out even worse. The tricycle driver must have forgotten to put up the rain cover, or maybe he was simply too lazy to bother, so I had to use the umbrella I brought to shield my bag and the gifts I was carrying. I let the rain fall on my face. Even my pants were soaked. Instead of getting irritated, I found myself enjoying the rainwater washing over me. It had been a long time since I last got drenched like that. I just hoped I wouldn’t catch a cold because of it.

When I was about to get off, the rain eased a little. It was already dusk. The windows and doors of my aunts’ houses were shut tight because of the wind and rain, but I could tell there were people inside. The lights were on, and shadows moved behind the curtains. I decided not to disturb them yet. I was soaked, and I needed to change clothes and boil some water first. A hot cup of coffee would have been perfect at that moment. Instead, I went straight to my father’s house.

The surroundings were quiet. The only sounds I could hear were raindrops striking the rooftops and the leaves rustling under the force of the wind. I could already see the house from a distance. Only then did I notice that, in the dim light, it looked strangely unsettling. As if a stranger passing by for the first time, you would feel a chill and hesitate before coming closer.

I stepped into the yard. The bamboo fence in front had almost collapsed to the ground. A rusty sheet of metal served as the only barrier. The grass around the house had grown long, and dry leaves were scattered everywhere. As I climbed the terrace, a spider web suddenly brushed across my face. I hadn’t seen it stretched across my path. A small butterfly caught in the web nearly went straight into my mouth.

When I finally stood in front of the door and reached for the knob, I realized I didn’t have the key. I should have borrowed it from Aunt Cecille, my father’s youngest sister. I was about to go to her house when, before I could even take a step away, the door slowly opened by itself.

I had seen scenes like this too many times in horror movies.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I hesitated to go in. Then I told myself that maybe someone had simply forgotten to lock the door the night before when Aunt Cecille asked someone to turn on the terrace light. It must have opened because of the wind.

My aunt once told me that they kept the terrace light on every night so the house wouldn’t look abandoned. No one lived there anymore. My stepmother, Lea, no longer stayed there either. Ever since my father got sick, his second wife has rarely visited him. When he died, and she tried to live there again, my aunts refused to let her. I wouldn’t have allowed it either.

I accepted her as my stepmother and treated her with respect, but the affection I once had for her slowly faded when she let my father live alone in that house. I didn’t want to blame her, but sometimes I couldn’t help thinking that if she had been there the day he had his heart attack, he might have been taken to the hospital in time. And if it was true that he choked while eating, someone could have handed him water… or at least slapped his back.

Maybe he would still be alive today.

When I finally stepped inside, I winced as a mixture of musty odor greeted me — damp wood, dirty walls, and, if I wasn’t mistaken, the smell of cat droppings. I immediately opened the window to let the air circulate.

It was dark. I had to turn the lights on. I struggled to move around while reaching for the switches.

Cobwebs hung everywhere. The floor was wet and filthy. The nipa roof had long been damaged. It leaked whenever it rained and was badly in need of replacement. The house had not been repaired for a long time. My siblings and I only visited it occasionally after our father died. As for me, I worked in Japan and came home only once a year.

In truth, it would not have cost much to fix the roof. Even while my father was still alive, I wanted to replace it with galvanized iron sheets, but he refused. He said the nipa made the house cooler. Whenever I pointed out the small holes in the roof, he would tell me to leave them alone so he could see the sky while lying in bed. Once, he even joked that the holes were useful because he could peek at stewardesses whenever an airplane passed overhead.

That was my father. He could make a joke out of things that others would consider problems.

Just then, I heard a faint whistling sound, as if someone were calling my attention. I paused, slightly startled, as a strange uneasiness crept over me. I looked around the room, expecting to see someone. For a moment, I thought it might be one of my cousins sneaking around the house, hoping to startle me. But there was no one there — nothing but my father’s portrait hanging on the wall.

I exhaled slowly and forced a faint smile. Silly of me to feel startled in my own father’s house.

“Oh, so it’s you, pa, calling my attention. Give me a second. Let me just settle down.”

I approached my father’s portrait, bowed, and mumbled, “Mano po, Pa.”

I closed my eyes, only to open them quickly when I felt a faint whiff of air brush against my forehead.

For a moment, I thought his expression had changed… but I quickly told myself it was only my imagination, and that the air I felt was nothing more than a simple draft.

I collected myself and spoke to the portrait as if my father were really there.

“I’ll be back later, Pa. I just need to settle down first. See you later, alligator.”

In my mind, I could almost hear him answer, “After a while, crocodile,” the way he used to.

I left the portrait hanging where it was and continued looking around the house. There was still a lot I needed to check after being away for so long.

I continued looking around the house, taking in everything I had not seen for a long time.

I could have repaired the house after my father died. I even had the living room repainted and the terrace reinforced with concrete instead of bamboo. But I knew that if the house became too nice, my eldest brother would turn it into a hangout for himself and his drinking buddies. It would become a place for drinking, and who knew what else they might do there.

So I left the house as it was.

Another reason was that if the house became comfortable, my eldest brother might move in permanently with his family. That wouldn’t be fair, because our youngest sister was also looking for a place to stay. To avoid trouble, I decided that none of the three of us siblings would live there. I promised them that once I had enough money, I would pay them their share of the house and the small piece of land our father left behind.

I had always believed that my father’s share of the land was bigger, based on what he and one of my uncles had told me. But after he died, my aunts said that was all he really owned. I wasn’t the kind of person who chased after things that weren’t meant for me, so I let it go. Maybe that really was his share. Maybe not. Only my aunts — and God — knew the truth.

Sometimes I wondered why my two siblings never tried to build their own house. Perhaps they never learned from the years when our family moved from one place to another. Once, we were even driven out of a house by a relative. I never knew why, and I never wanted to know. Maybe I misunderstood what happened because I was still a child.

I never held a grudge, but the memory stayed with me. It became one of the reasons that pushed me to work hard. I studied. I persevered. I forced myself to have a house and land of my own.

But my greatest inspiration was my father.

From him, I learned how to work hard, how to stand on my own feet, how to trust myself and not depend on others. He was intelligent, resourceful, and quick-witted. People often said I took after him.

The next day, my two siblings were expected to arrive. It would be the lifting of mourning for our father. Almost a year had passed since he died. I knew there would be endless questions again about when I would pay them their share of the house and land. They would insist that we sell it because they needed money and capital for their business, as if that were their only way to survive.

But I did not want my father’s house and land to end up in someone else’s hands.

They would have to wait.

I didn’t even want to rent the place out.

The house was small and already falling apart, and the land was not even that big. But it was my father’s memory. It was our connection to the family we came from. I would never let it belong to anyone else.

After turning on all the lights and sweeping the living room a little, I went into the bedroom and placed my things on the small table beside the bed. I spread the folded mat and blanket on the bed. Luckily, they had been wrapped in plastic, so they were still clean. Even so, I shook them several times before laying them down.

**********

I changed my clothes. Then, as I always did whenever I visited the house, I took my father’s portrait from the wall.

The picture showed his face down to his chest, up to the last button of the polo shirt he was wearing. The portrait hung above an old television set, like a silent guardian watching over the house.

I brought the picture into the bedroom and wiped it with the towel I had used earlier.

When it was clean, I lifted it and looked at it closely.

For a moment, I thought I saw my father’s lips move.

It seemed as if he smiled at me.

I couldn’t even remember if he had really been smiling in that picture. Maybe my eyes were just playing tricks on me again. I was tired, still dizzy from the long trip.

“How are you, Pa? I’m sorry, alligator, that this crocodile took so long to come back to your swamp.”

After I said that, the smile seemed to fade, as if he were sulking. A chill crawled over my skin, and the hairs on my arms stood on end.

“Well, Pa… are you making your presence felt?” I said, forcing myself to sound brave.

“Go on… show yourself. Come on, Pa.”

I believed in ghosts, but I had never seen one. I didn’t know if I was afraid of them or not. But if it were my father who appeared to me, I might even hug him. I missed him terribly. He was always so funny, always full of jokes. I wanted to hear them again —

even if only as a ghost.

I stared at the portrait again.

When I thought about it, there was a reason I had felt startled earlier when I saw my father’s portrait after hearing the whistling sound. My aunts had told many strange stories about that picture. Sometimes, they said, it would suddenly appear in the living room of one of their houses. I always dismissed it, thinking one of my mischievous cousins must have been playing tricks on them.

One of my relatives even said that when Aunt Cecille once asked him to turn on the terrace light, he saw that my father’s picture was blank — and heard a sound in the bathroom, like someone urinating. He ran away in fear and refused to go back there again.

I never believed that story.

I thought he must have been drunk.

But they insisted he wasn’t.

FATHER’S PORTRAIT – PART 2