Part 2
In the sala, furniture was in suites arranged like islands. Our piece de resistance was a long caned sofa mariposa with art nouveau carvings of shells and flowers. Two sloping armchairs with graceful caned backs and elongated arms (silla perezosa or “lazy” chairs) stood on either side. My father and his best buddy would lie back on them with both legs up on the arms and talk away the afternoon.
In front of the chairs was an ebony Chinese-style coffee table (not yet so-called because only Americans served coffee after breakfast). Its sides were intricately carved with grapes and leaves.
A silk footstool with a blue brocade cushion didn’t match anything. Most of the chairs had antimacassars tied to their backs to protect them from the men’s pomaded hair, and every table top had a crocheted or embroidered doily. (Women were always crocheting or embroidering something). Above the sofa was a long, horizontal Art Deco mirror with a pewter frame.
Against one wall was the obligatory piano. This may all sound very elegant and luxurious; actually, such furniture pieces were common in professional middle-class antebellum Filipino homes. And all our daddies still spoke Spanish.
We owned a bulky, portable crank-up phonograph with a needle. The earliest disc I remember hearing was a song by comedian Vicente Ocampo called “Ang Bibingka Kung Lutuin.” I didn’t realize till I was an adult that it was such a risqué song. I had fun with that alongside the window, where there were two big square seats known as “window chairs,” with a table between them. One could sit on one of those chairs for hours, watching life on the street go by.
Bookshelf
Against what was once a working door stood a bookshelf. It was locked on our side and on the violinist Maestrong Abdon’s side, and was almost indiscernible. This has led me to suspect that ours must have originally been one big house that had been hastily partitioned.
When the violin teacher left in 1940, the “duplex” (I always use quotes because there was no such word yet then) was taken over by a slovenly, low-class pair named Mang Teroy and Aling Susing. They opened a hand laundry downstairs called “Up-to-Date Laundry.”
They were paying P15 monthly before the war and insisted on paying the same amount in Japanese money. My father wanted them to leave, but they wouldn’t, and compromised instead by giving us back two rooms, the ones contiguous to our sala.
The bookshelf covering the secret door was filled not only with obscure books, but also the current American magazines including one fashion magazine intriguingly called Delineator.
In Good Housekeeping, I loved the advertisement of Ovaltine which was in comics form. A healthy and pretty little girl and her mama visit another mama who has an anorexic-looking little girl. Impressed with the healthy child’s glowing looks, the thin child’s mother asks what the healthy child takes. It’s Ovaltine! For three weeks the thin kid faithfully drinks Ovaltine and becomes as glowingly healthy as the other.
I also liked looking at the ad of Campbell Soup which was a cartoon of chubby Campbell twins wearing sometimes Dutch caps, sometimes Eskimo parkas, changing costumes with every issue.
Many anterooms
Our house had many anterooms, even an antebedroom used by my father. His big slant top desk was filled with a treasure trove of bond paper, yellow pads, blue exam Bureau of Education notebooks, brown envelopes, long envelopes, pencils, eraser and notebook.
Beside the desk was a night table; in the brown shelves below were my drawings and Grimm’s, Anderson’s and Andrew Lang’s fairytale books. Its heavy, square marble top was carried to the kitchen when Aling Zosima, a cook from Pagsanjan, came to cook crisp empanadas with “scales” (kaliskis). She used my marble top for rolling out the dough.
Otherwise, when the marble top was in place, it carried a big toy merry-go-round with five passengers in it—the Dione quintuplet dolls (Marie, Cecile, Emily, Annette and Yvonne were the first widely publicized quintobirths). The dolls were dressed in sunsuits and bonnets and had little medal IDs. When my sister was a baby, she often lay in a huge wicker rocking chair talking to the dolls.
Unlike the merry-go-round which had its own glass case, the Shirley Temple doll with a hairnet, the “drinking” doll, the benevolent teddy bear with glass eyes, and the doll in a nun costume were cramped in a long narrow cabinet on the corridor. They had all been bought at Beck’s, and I had outgrown them.
The matrimonial bed in the master’s bedroom had an elegant wooden crown with barandillas, from which its mosquito net descended at night like a cloud. The spare room’s bed matched it, as did my kiddie bed with railings.
Bedroom chamberpots
Like the other rooms, the master bedroom also had its own faucet and washbowl. My father shaved in front of it with a Gillette razor and Barbasol shaving cream. We all used Kolynos toothpaste and an almond-shaped soap called “Big Bath.”
We used chamberpots at night because most houses then only had one toilet and bath, and ours was far from our bedroom. Mama’s enamel potty was one-and-a-half foot tall. In the bathroom was a spacious Art Deco bathtub with a wide lip and a shower head. Next to the shower was a copper kerosene heater that had to be lighted with a match. In its own separate cubicle, the toilet came with a bidet.
In the dining room was another enamel Art Deco faucet and washbowl. What old houses lacked in bathrooms was made up for in lababo. Our dining table was heavy narra, again in Art Deco style, and expandable. It was by Puyat, the supreme furniture maker of the ’30s. Every day we used a white damask tablecloth and our best silverware. My father believed that one’s best silverware should be used daily, not for visitors only.
Recessed into the end wall of the dining room was a grand China display cabinet. It contained an all Willow Ware set of 60 dishes. At mealtime, a bronze Chinese bell hanging from a carved arch was struck 12 times with a padded stick to indicate that hot soup was already on the table.
