Bahay Kubo

For more than ten years I lived in my bahay kubo, a one-bedroom affair that my dad had originally built for himself and my mom. It stood -- stands, actually, for it is still there though I don't live in it anymore -- in one corner of our family compound, about a hundred yards from our main house and separated from it by a low, white gate with flaking paint. It had its own kitchen and bathroom, plus a veranda that often doubled as a guest room whenever my friends were in town.

I think my dad decided to give the kubo to me, some twelve years ago, when I started bringing "friends" home. It was his silent way of saying, "Okay, son, I know what you're up to and I understand. Just don't do it in our house" -- meaning, of course, our main house. In short, that decision was the equivalent of turning a blind eye.

Whatever my dad's original vision of the kubo was -- and if I know my dad, it would be completely rustic -- I changed it as soon as the key was handed to me. Some of the changes were banal enough: I added a small library, tacked movie posters on the wall, typical college-boy stuff. But some of the other changes, I'm sure, made my parents stay clear of the kubo even as they started wondering what ritual sacrifices were being done there. I replaced the white light bulbs with red ones; I hung black curtains on the window; to top it all -- and here I've got to give my mom credit for not even tittering -- I installed a rectangular, two-meter long mirror over the bed.

In the ten years that I stayed there, with various lovers, I was able to live a life that would make Arthur Rimbaud green with envy. Well, maybe not Rimbaud -- he lived a pretty bad-assed life himself -- but certainly many of my UP friends who thought it was darned cool how I lived in a house of such ill-repute, and in the suburbs at that. Suffice it to say that our maid had grown accustomed to finding used rubbers in the trashcan. In fact, I think she would have been disappointed to find none after a gin-soaked night.

But it wasn't just the sex and the freedom that made the kubo special. It was also where I spent some of the most wonderful, as well as most heart-wrenching, moments of my life with both friends and lovers. There I played strip 7-up with the gang, much to the delight of my best friend Melvin, who got the chance to see his long-time crush dance ocho-ocho buck naked. There I discovered a rice sparrow caught in my mosquito net one bright morning -- Lord knows how it got there -- and flying like a tiny angel over my right foot. There I was able to write in a sort of trance my first real poem entitled Bicycle. And there too, sadly, I drank beer on the roof with a lover who after three years had fallen in love with someone else. Many times, I went to bed in my kubo wanting to die. But just as many times, I woke up and for some inexplicable reason just couldn't help but smile.

That kubo was a witness. A witness and a gift. And if my parents don't give me anything else (but generous them they have already given me so much more), I wouldn't be able to say that they didn't love me.