New home

I'm 40 years old, female, single, working as a paralegal in a government office in a third world country, the Philippines. I'm working on my law degree. Been working on it for the past ten years. Gotta have something to aspire for. At the very least, all my skills and persuasions lean toward the legal practice. Not that it's a tradition in the family. We have no lawyers in our family. We're mostly employees, eking out a living in this corruption-ridden economy, this much ballyhooed only-Catholic-country-in-Asia myth.

Obviously, I'm no big fan of the Catholic religion -- or of religion, in general. I'm spiritual, but not religious. For one thing, faith in this society is more superstition than anything. Admittedly, faith is blind belief, but to be uneducated as well as blindly following is too Spanish colonial for me. A large majority of the population live below the poverty line. Way below it and extremely uneducated. I live just a wee bit above this cut-off and know just a wee bit more than the average guy on the street. Or so I hope. After all, all that education hasn't really gotten me anywhere.

I'm moving into my own place -- or I've been trying to. I don't know where the difficulty lies. I've lived on my own before: rooms, dorms, an apartment. It's nothing new to me. However, I can't for the life of me understand why it's so difficult this time. Maybe it's because this time, it's a house, with a second floor and rooms upstairs, a downstairs and even an upstairs toilet and bath.

It's only a small affair, 42 square meters floor area. No yard. It's part of a row, townhouse-style. Very small houses, most of which have a second floor balcony, with grills out front, covering the ground floor bit of a terrace and the balcony. They're very charming, really. The owner is away in Dubai, another single woman working for her keep. Anyway, for the meantime, it's my house. It's in Bacoor, a small municipality in Cavite province, just outside Metro Manila.

Like I said, I've been trying to move in, trying to borrow a vehicle. My own car's too small for the wooden table, the ironing horse, the screen, the 21"-screen tv, the mini-compo, and my books. The other stuff I can load onto my old battered car. Note to myself: buy clothes iron, and new car. Hah! I wish!

Illegalities in Moving Furniture

Last Saturday, I picked up the living room set made of giant bamboo trunks. It still looked nice, and still in one piece: a large piece and two small pieces. They wouldn't fit in the rear entrance ot the jeepney I hired. So the men tied the big piece and one small piece onto the jeepney's roof, with the other small piece tied to the handles of the rear entrance. It was such a strange sight: a jeepney with a piece of furniture hanging from its rear and some more slithering right to left and vice versa on its roof, and all that space inside unutilized.

What's more, the driver warned me of the possibility of being pulled over for "illegal topload." Apparently, if the vehicle doesn't have a luggage rack, it can't carry toploads. Before I could freak out, Raffy, the driver, came up with the obvious solution: bribery. It would probably amount to a mere P150. Laurent, friend, future neighbor, office-mate and former cop, assured me that he could probably bring that down to a smaller amount. So, with no little trepidation, we set out, me driving my small Japanese car, following that artifact of Filipino folk art carrying more native artistry.

We got to the house without much adventure, just a lot of traffic which proved to be a blessing in disguise, as the traffic police were too busy keeping crazy drivers in their place. And we all know that driving insanely in the streets of Manila is the norm. Anyway, Laurent worried what we'd do if the furniture wouldn't fit in the front door. Of course, he was joking but it did make me think. It would have been hilarious.

Operation Mopping

I spent the rest of the afternoon till late at night cleaning the ground floor. First, the toilet and bath, which I hated. Then the laundry area right outside the t&b. Then the kitchen. I don't know which I hated more, cleaning the t&b or the kitchen. The wooden drawers I had all pulled out from the kitchen cabinets and given a shake outside. The wood had that rotten smell and it didn't look at all well. Someone suggested that I give it a good coating of varnish. Maybe a double coating. Or triple.

Once I had the drawers out, the cockroaches scurried all over the place. Not to worry, I was prepared for just this eventuality: insect spray. And not the water-based formulation either, which was gentle on the nasal passages. I went for the strong, original one which always made me wheeze before I pass out. No gentle hand in this situation. I was merciless, and ruthless, and scheming, and dizzy. I had to stop.

Christmas & other spirits

Being as it was December, the kids in the neighborhood were going around in small groups, singing Christmas carols in monotone, each one in his own pitch and pace, asking for small dole outs of money. Being extremely taken up with murdering insects by use of superior force and with a weapon of mass destruction (Saddam would have been real proud!), I screamed at the brats to take their gadawful racket somewhere else. Then it dawned on me: I was in my own home, being caroled at, and I finally had the right to scare off unwanted guests at the front step. It made me feel warm inside.

By the time Laurent poked his head in (actually, he sneaked in onto the terrace and called out through the window bars, speaking very loudly, asking if I'd taken my dinner and causing me to jump), it was already a quarter past nine in the evening. I had just come from my bath.

Interestingly, I could sense a presence in the rear part of the house, on both floors. That would be the kitchen, laundry area and the t&b on the ground floor, and the rear bedroom and t&b on the second. Now, I'm not one who scares easily. I've experienced two incidents of haunting in my life, and once, when I was four or five, I saw house gnomes. I believe that I'm attuned to this frequency of what is popularly known as the supernatural.

In this case, the feeling is the usual one: like there's someone behind you. It's not a malevolent presesence. More like curiosity on its -- or their -- part. I feel that there are several spirits in that house. Which is really surprising because it had never been left vacant for very long. Maybe a couple of weeks. The former occupants, a young family, never spoke of any such experience in that house. The reason they left was because they found a cheaper place, or so I was told. Besides, I don't think they'd keep anything like haunting a secret. Such stories get good mileage in this society. They make for good stories. Also, the place has a reputation for hauntings and poltergeists. Laurent himself was interviewed on national tv once about a figure who's often seen hanging from a large mango tree right outside the subdivision gates. And he himself experienced, along with the village volunteer security group, following a woman who disappeared into thin air right inside the subdivision.

I do, however, think that talking to the house alleviates the distress of these spirits. I feel that taking pride in the house and voicing out my appreciation of the place ease and assure these spirits that I have no intention of "negating" their presence, or trying to take them out of the scheme of things. Just like the movie, "The Others," I feel that they're just as scared of me as I am, of them. The trick is not to rock the boat.

Terrible beauty

The first time I came to that subdivision, I fell in love with the place. There were rice fields flanking the road to the entrance, with a bamboo grove to the right, and large mango trees scattered here and there. These days, there is a big haystack in one corner of the field, and farmers are busy tilling for another planting, driving that huge beast of burden, the carabao. It's idyllic. It's straight out of an Amorsolo painting.

It is, therefore, not surprising that spirits of the supernatural abound. Not to mention that a lot of people met their end savagely in that area. It's a killing field where the bodies of those "salvaged" were thrown away or where the victims were actually killed. It is also a favorite place for murderers and rapists. The road leading to the barangay where my house is located used to be a really desolate place. There were no houses, just rice fields. Unlike these days.

There are two big fancy subdivisions being developed, which is a good sign. More of the living, please. What will eventually happen to displaced spirits is anybody's guess. One of them in my house is more than enough. I hope they don't invite any more of their kind to the place.