On Ancestral Houses

I slept three-quarters of the day away after an all-nighter at the airport. As I would only be here for one night, I swore I shall walk the old streets of Iloilo and retrace the footsteps of my ancestors. 

I managed to do so, and around sundown, I found myself in front of a plaza, near an almost century-old mansion-turned-tourist spot.

There are many ancestral houses here. Humble, grand, dilapidated, renovated, lived, abandoned. Some showing signs of age, others left for dead. I thought of the many storms they have witnessed, the thousand sunsets they’ve gone through, the generations of children that ran in their halls, the lives they’ve seen lost. 

I wonder where my fascination with them roots from. Perhaps I was a mason many lifetimes ago. Or maybe a bricklayer, a carpenter, a roofer.

I wonder why my ancestors from this island never bothered to build one. Maybe they thought legacies live on through their many descendants.

Or maybe they did, but it did not stand the test of time. Maybe stones and sand and wood were too ephemeral and that we live longer than these material things. 

Or maybe I breathe the yearning of the past, one who dreams of legacies and lasting forever, and fate is retelling a lesson it taught my ancestors—that we must not dream of immortality because that in itself is feeble. That maybe I am greedy to want more than being remembered by one’s kin, and that this aspiration to be awed at by those who do not know us is something I must have acquired from the unresolved ambitions of a humble mason.

These thoughts… I must write them down, I thought. So I took my notebook out but alas, I forgot my pen.

So there I was, swallowed by my thoughts at an open cafe outside a refurbished ancestral house. In the absence of a pen, my phone’s notepad was the best alternative to peg these thoughts down. Oily fingers across glass screens while munching on the largest mozzarella cheese sticks I’ve had in my life and sipping caffeinated Speculaas mixed in liquefied sugar. 

The Sunday dusk breeze is warm and comforting. A lovely busking duo, an awkward boy with a pop-rock voice and a handsome girl with a guitar, sang “Fly Me to The Moon” as an elderly lady danced with her dog in her arms.

Frank Sinatra’s wishes me a merry little Christmas from behind the boom boxes planted across the plaza. It clashes, quite amusingly, with the Sunday sermon coming from the open doors of the Molo Church.

This is a very nice experience and an even lovelier memory. 

Would I still remember it years from now?