A sweet goodbye
Sometime during the trip to Mexico last December, I went up the hill to look at my grandparents' house. The house was still standing, but it had been abandoned some years ago because of an earthquake that left the walls cracked and several pillars shaky. My grandmother moved three or four houses down to the house my dad had built, and has been living there since.
But that old house is still engraved in the hearts and minds of my uncles and aunts as the home of their childhood. My late grandfather Bonifacio built that house, and was always banging away at it, repairing this fixture or that. And when his children were small, he painted the upstairs rooms light blue and pink, with silver moons and stars on the ceilings. Because the house was high on a hill, the view to the sea was uninterrupted, and I would spend hours watching the bay, while my grandfather painstaking typed out letters on an ancient typewriter, because his Parkinson's disease had robbed him of the motor skills to write them by hand.
In her old age my grandmother's habit for hoarding became worse, and the lower floor became cluttered, and frustratingly hard to navigate about. After she moved out, the family reunions were held at the house my dad had built. The new house is bigger, and has weathered various earthquakes without incident. Altogether a much better arrangement.
But sometimes I'd look up the hill in the direction of the old house, and remember the old spaces; the lovingly painted ceilings, the gently crumbling walls and flaking paint, and be seized with a desire to climb through the bathroom window, squeeze my hand through a gap I knew existed between the door jamb and the door, and jiggle the lock open from the outside.
So this last trip, on a random afternoon, I just set out up the hill. But when I saw that the windows had been boarded up and a huge chain had been affixed to the door, I decided not to go all the way up to the house. Before the new additions had been added to discourage vandals, the house had seemed always accessible, simply waiting just round the corner for the time when one of its children would return and pay it a nostalgic visit. But now it seemed violated for some reason. Even though I knew the bathroom would probably have been overlooked and I could probably still get in, the house no longer felt mellow and welcoming. So I went back the way I came without checking.
Last night I had a dream, that I visited Papa Boni's house up on the hill, and found the door ajar. To my surprise all the clutter my grandmother had left behind had been cleared out. The huge beds where my mother and aunts had piled in for hours talking as sisters were gone, but the old dining tables were there arranged with their chairs around them, the red concrete floor swept clean. I opened all the doors and windows so the setting sun could stream in, and started taking pictures, trying to capture for posterity this place that had been the home of my mum and her siblings. I even went to the bathroom, and the concrete water tank was full of water, the tap still dripping into it. When I turned on the shower, it shuddered and spat like it always did before it came on properly. It was as if we had never moved out.
I must have been concentrating too hard on savouring everything around me, because as I was climbing up the steps to the upstairs room where my grandfather had painted the murals, the dream reality started bleeding away, and I started to wake up.
Its strange that I feel a sense of closure even though I only visited the house in my dream. Maybe it was better this way, that I didn't creep through the darkened house, treading carefully to avoid spiders and overgrown weeds, wrinkling my nose at the smell of mildew and the stink of the abandoned.
I always knew that it was important to say your goodbyes, but I didn't know until now that goodbyes needed to be said to places too.
But that old house is still engraved in the hearts and minds of my uncles and aunts as the home of their childhood. My late grandfather Bonifacio built that house, and was always banging away at it, repairing this fixture or that. And when his children were small, he painted the upstairs rooms light blue and pink, with silver moons and stars on the ceilings. Because the house was high on a hill, the view to the sea was uninterrupted, and I would spend hours watching the bay, while my grandfather painstaking typed out letters on an ancient typewriter, because his Parkinson's disease had robbed him of the motor skills to write them by hand.
In her old age my grandmother's habit for hoarding became worse, and the lower floor became cluttered, and frustratingly hard to navigate about. After she moved out, the family reunions were held at the house my dad had built. The new house is bigger, and has weathered various earthquakes without incident. Altogether a much better arrangement.
But sometimes I'd look up the hill in the direction of the old house, and remember the old spaces; the lovingly painted ceilings, the gently crumbling walls and flaking paint, and be seized with a desire to climb through the bathroom window, squeeze my hand through a gap I knew existed between the door jamb and the door, and jiggle the lock open from the outside.
So this last trip, on a random afternoon, I just set out up the hill. But when I saw that the windows had been boarded up and a huge chain had been affixed to the door, I decided not to go all the way up to the house. Before the new additions had been added to discourage vandals, the house had seemed always accessible, simply waiting just round the corner for the time when one of its children would return and pay it a nostalgic visit. But now it seemed violated for some reason. Even though I knew the bathroom would probably have been overlooked and I could probably still get in, the house no longer felt mellow and welcoming. So I went back the way I came without checking.
Last night I had a dream, that I visited Papa Boni's house up on the hill, and found the door ajar. To my surprise all the clutter my grandmother had left behind had been cleared out. The huge beds where my mother and aunts had piled in for hours talking as sisters were gone, but the old dining tables were there arranged with their chairs around them, the red concrete floor swept clean. I opened all the doors and windows so the setting sun could stream in, and started taking pictures, trying to capture for posterity this place that had been the home of my mum and her siblings. I even went to the bathroom, and the concrete water tank was full of water, the tap still dripping into it. When I turned on the shower, it shuddered and spat like it always did before it came on properly. It was as if we had never moved out.
I must have been concentrating too hard on savouring everything around me, because as I was climbing up the steps to the upstairs room where my grandfather had painted the murals, the dream reality started bleeding away, and I started to wake up.
Its strange that I feel a sense of closure even though I only visited the house in my dream. Maybe it was better this way, that I didn't creep through the darkened house, treading carefully to avoid spiders and overgrown weeds, wrinkling my nose at the smell of mildew and the stink of the abandoned.
I always knew that it was important to say your goodbyes, but I didn't know until now that goodbyes needed to be said to places too.