by Nunilo M. de Leon
I was born in Manila, at the Mary Johnston Hospital on Quesada St., overlooking Manila Bay. The North Harbor area was still under the sea then and Calle Bangkusay, which is now some distance from the sea, was then the shoreline of Tondo. I was actually my mother’s second pregnancy. She had a miscarriage in her first one.
I was born in Manila, at the Mary Johnston Hospital on Quesada St., overlooking Manila Bay. The North Harbor area was still under the sea then and Calle Bangkusay, which is now some distance from the sea, was then the shoreline of Tondo. I was actually my mother’s second pregnancy. She had a miscarriage in her first one.
My parents were schoolmates at the Bulacan Provincial High School in Malolos and my father had been wooing my mother since high school. Father was a senior Bachelor of Science in Commerce student at the University of the Philippines while Mother was in fourth year of her Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy course at the University of Santo Tomas when they were wed, and “Tatang” had to find a job. Having to mix work and studies, he only got his diploma the year after their marriage. When they were married, “Inang” had stopped her studies, as it later turned out, for keeps. We lived in a rented accessoria, as budget-priced apartments were then called, on Calle Ilaya, very near the Tondo parish church. The UP was then on Padre Faura St. in Ermita district, Manila while the UST was where it continues to be, along España Blvd.
“Tatang” was Roque Pantangco de Leon, the ninth and youngest child of Lolo Ramon and Lola Juli, who died soon after giving birth to Tatang. “Inang” was Anita Mendoza Macapugay de Leon, the third child and only daughter of Lolo Luis Macapugay and Lola “Celang”, Marcela Mendoza y Macapugay. The Macapugays originated in the towns of Bulacan and Hagunoy, which are neighbor towns of Malolos, in the province of Bulacan.
For her secondary schooling, Inang went to Malolos, where the nearest high school was located, and where she first met Tatang. She boarded at a girls’ dormitory near “the crossing”, the intersections of the provincial road, the national highway and the railroad, within walking distance of the Bulacan Provincial High School. The strait-laced dormitory, owned by a well-known family from the town, had a strict curfew rule and only authorized relatives were allowed to visit. Inang’s big brother was a priest, the dormitory owners knew this and treated Inang accordingly. Lolo Luis would bring her to Malolos on Sunday afternoon and bring her home to Bulacan on Friday afternoon.
According to her friends, Inang was quite a “belle of the ball” in high school. She was one who would volunteer herself for school presentations, such as programs and stage plays where she would declaim and sing. She was rather proud of her singing voice and was a soloist in their school choir. She was the opposite of Tatang, who shunned the spotlight, was shy, quiet, introverted. Their former schoolmates, including my future father-in-law, would joke about Tatang shadowing (one would now call that “stalking”) Inang in school and following her up to her dormitory door.
The unlikely courtship continued in Manila, although handicapped by distance and the conservative standards of those days. Then there were the constraints which might have been imposed by their families, who must have known what was going on. Tatang stayed in a men’s dormitory on Nebraska St. near the UP campus on Padre Faura St. while Inang was in the Santa Catalina Ladies Dormitory, across Gov. Forbes St. from the UST. The latter was owned and run by the Dominican order of nuns and had stricter rules than Inang’s Malolos dormitory. Visiting hours were only on Sunday afternoons (no weekend home leaves), for only one hour, in the dormitory parlor, with one of the sisters always on watch. The sisters knew the class hours of every boarder and made sure that everyone was always accounted for. This longtime wooing ended in an elopement and wedding in their senior year. One can imagine the consternation this caused in both the De Leon and Macapugay households.
After his graduation, Tatang was offered a job by the Chong family who needed a bookkeeper for their business in Malolos. I still remember a few members of that family. There was the matriarch, known to us as “Lola Meliang”. The patriarch, called “Chong Pok”, was pure Chinese and could barely speak Tagalog. Then there were their children, “Tio Inggo”, “Tio Cinto”, “Tia Sitang”, “Tia Salud”, and “Tia Nitay”, all very Chinese-looking. There was also Tio Inggo’s son Domingo Jr., who was to be my classmate in Grades 5 and 6, and his sister, [named Adelina according to my cousin Rogelio “Boying” de Leon Peña who was her classmate]. There were other Chongs but I do not recall meeting any of them in our visits to their family compound, which contained their large house, office, rice mill, rice noodle “bijon” factory and bodega, on the bank of a wide river in Barrio Canalate, in the western outskirts of Malolos. [Another cousin, Mercia “Meya” de Leon Crisostomo Aquino, recalls that there is another Chong there, a lady with long braided pigtails, very small bound feet, always in traditional Chinese garb and never speaking except to Chong Pok, probably his mother.]
[My cousin Teresita “Tessie” Borja de Leon Lat says that her father related that Lola Meliang was a cousin of Lolo Ramon, Dada Merced and Dada Ninay. They had Gonzales forebears. Lola Meliang and Dada Ninay really looked like they were sisters.]
Listed in the historical records of the Malolos Municipio is an Antonio Chiong who served during the Spanish era as “Alcalde Constitucional” from 1890 to 1891 and as “Presidente Municipal” in 1900. The Chiong family name figured prominently in the political life of Malolos during the last part of the Spanish regime. I also had several Chiong contempories, among them brothers Armando and Faustino Chiong, and the first cousins Aida and Antonio Fernando whose mothers both bore the maiden name Chiong. Their families were into “farmacias” located in Santo Niño and San Vicente districts. However, I do not know if the historical Chiongs and the Chiongs and Chongs I knew were related.
Tatang accepted the Chongs’ job offer and we moved from Tondo to the De Leon home in Tampoy. The big house was then almost empty, with Dada Ninay the only De Leon there. Lolo Ramon was in Daet, Camarines Norte. Three of his six living children, all already married, had long left home. Of the two still unmarried ones, “Tio Toniong” or “Sanko” the fifth child and third son (Antonio Pantangco de Leon), was staying most of the time in a dorm in Manila. He was completing his Doctor of Medicine studies at the University of the Philippines. Tia Monang, the youngest daughter and the seventh child, was with Lolo Ramon in Camarines Norte, teaching at the Daet Central Elementary School.
The Gonzales-De Leon lot on “Callejon de Tampoy” was in the shape of a trapezoid, with the eastern (shorter) side parallel to the western (much longer) side. Tampoy was the front boundary of the property while the creek was its back. The property was land-filled and higher by half a meter than the level of the street and the adjoining lots. The big sprawling house, a chalet, was in the middle of the property, surrounded on three sides by flower gardens, thickly-growing vines, tall and robust fruit trees, which almost completely hid it from view.
From the outside, the most prominent feature of the house was its long “balcon” or “galeria” which ran along two sides of the house. A large concrete stairway led from the front garden to the front part of the “balcon”. On the inside, the most noticeable were the many wide and high doors. From the front “galeria” one could enter the “sala”, the house’s main room, through one of its three wide 2-panel sliding front doors. Directly opposite the three front doors were three swinging single-panel doors leading to three separate bedrooms. Wide floor-to-ceiling windows, with translucent “capiz” shell panels on top and wooden rail “ventanillas” forming the bottom, were on the right. On the left, a seventh 2-panel swinging door led to the library. The smaller library was furnished with book cabinets, filled with books and magazines, and had a three-meter long study table in the middle, indications of how learning was valued by the De Leons. Entering the library from the sala, a door to the left led to a fourth bedroom, another to the right to the “comedor” and two more 2-panel sliding doors straight ahead opened on the side “balcon” which wrapped around this fourth bedroom and connected to the front “balcon”. The entire house was high-ceilinged and had decorated openings at the top of all room partitions, for ventilation.
We were assigned the unoccupied fourth bedroom, Lolo Ramon’s corner bedroom at the street side of the house overlooking the front and side gardens, the one with a wrap-around “balcon”. Tia Monang had a bedroom reserved for her at the opposite corner of the house, overlooking the creek and the side garden. Next came Dada’s bedroom overlooking the “azotea”, then another bedroom, which was called “kuartong madilim” or dark room. This remained vacant most of the time and was used mainly as a storeroom (we kids believed that it was haunted and stayed away from it).
These three bedrooms had interconnecting doors and each one had a door to the “sala”. The “kuartong madilim” had, in addition, a window and a door which opened on a short hallway, which, in turn, led to the “azotea”, to the toilet-bathroom and to the dining room.
The “comedor” (dining room) had a walk-in storage pantry, or the Spanish “despensa” as we called it. This enclosed pantry was about one-and-a-half meters wide, three meters long and two-and-a-half meters high. The pantry had rows of shelves running along one side, for storing seldom-used cooking and dining materials and supplies. It had its own door and window. The despensa did not reach all the way to the comedor’s ceiling and its top was used for additional storage space. The only trap door to the house attic was over the despensa. One had to use a ladder to climb to its top and then enter the attic. The comedor also had a “banguera” (wide, latticed platform built outside a wide floor-to-ceiling window) for drying and keeping frequently-used plates, cutlery, silverware and other dining implements plus a big clay “tapayan” for cooling drinking water. The banguera was big enough for early afternoon naps and siestas.
There was an azotea (a roofless concrete-floored garden-veranda also used as a laundry, an extra bathroom, and as a place in which to sit and catch the breeze blowing in from the creek) overlooking the river landing. Finally, there were four separate cubicles; a washroom, toilet, men’s urinal and shower room.
The main house was raised some five feet from the ground. The space under the house, the fenced-in “silong”, was used mainly for storing heavy material and other odds-and-ends, including the household’s bancas.
The comedor’s back door led to the back stairs, another concrete stairway only slightly smaller than the front one. The back stairs landing connected the comedor to the kitchen, an extension the size of a small house, which contained the kitchen with its own banguera and silong. On one side of the kitchen house’s silong was a paved open platform or “batalan” for heavy washing, laundry and baths. On the other side of this silong was a small open shed, a “dirty kitchen” as it would now be called, containing a large wooden platform, overlaid with clay. On top of the fireproof clay cooking surface were three earthen wood-burning stoves where much of the heavy cooking was done.
Some distance away and to the kitchen’s side were the poultry pen and the pigeon coops built on wooden posts, beyond the reach of predatory cats. Between the poultry and the creek was a vegetable garden and beyond that and overlooking the creek was the pig pen. Some distance back of the kitchen house was an outhouse which jutted out into the creek, used for emergency purposes, when the toilet in the main house was occupied and one could not wait. That part of the property had no embankment and was protected from erosion with thick-growing reeds, “nipa” palms and “bakawan” or mangrove trees, which almost completely covered the river bank. That part of the property was almost completely hidden from both the creek and the main house.
The house was very well-built, some say over-built, with closely-spaced thick narra posts. It was built to last as designed and constructed in the mid-1920s by a newly-graduated civil engineer, my Tio Carlos. The property was enclosed on the front and two sides with a two-meter high, linked-wire fence with wooden posts on concrete footings. The river side was not fenced but the stone rip-rap embankment, plus the riverside reeds, palms and trees made access from the river difficult. Those coming on water craft had to use the river landing adjacent to the azotea to enter the property. There was a front gate opening on Callejon Tampoy, a side gate to the vacant lot on the west and a small almost unnoticeable gate to the Abad lot on the east.
(As of 2011, the house has been restored to a “better-than-the-original” condition by cousin Teresita “Tessie” Borja de Leon Lat, who has given much of herself to preserving this legacy.)
This new and bigger house was built on the site of a smaller one. In that old and smaller house had lived my Lolo Ramon and my Lola Juli. There they reared their nine children, three of whom died in childhood. Lola herself died of what is now known as eclampsia in 1910, at the age of 35, soon after giving birth to her youngest. Those who had died in childhood were Conrado – the second child and eldest son or “Koyang”; Margarita - the sixth child, and Basilisa - the eighth. The six survivors were (by order of birth; Paz “Ate’, Carlos ‘Diko’, Josefa “Diche”, Antonio “Sanko”, Ramona and Roque.
Tracing Lolo Ramon’s ancestry was rather difficult. His roots were difficult to dig up, probably because of Inkong Tasio’s and Lolo Ramon’s involvement in the resistance against the Spanish. Perhaps their records were deliberately made to disappear, by the authorities or even by Inkong or Lolo themselves. [Victorina Chico Cano’s son, Renato “Sonny” Cano has researched on this subject. He says that the young Inkong Tasio was the Sacristan Mayor in the parish church of Baliuag, Bulacan, a position of trust which, in that era, carried a certain amount of prestige. He had completed the “cartilla”, the basic education of those times (mid 1800s), probably comparable to today’s secondary education. The priests then were Spaniards. He later moved to Malolos, perhaps with the same priest, who might have also been transferred to the Malolos parish. Tasio became popular in Malolos and this popularity, together with his widely-recognized charm and street-smarts, helped him to be selected “Cabeza del Barrio” or the counterpart of today’s Barangay Captain. From there, he acquired other official posts and duties, until he was infected and developed the revolutionary zeal of those times and ran up against the authorities.]
Photos taken by Leo Cloma of Akyat-Bahay Gangster
Photos taken by Leo Cloma of Akyat-Bahay Gangster
