In this essay, Gilda Cordero-Fernando recalls her growing up years in what used to be their two-storey house in Escaldo and Barbosa, “two side streets named after obscure Spanish captains.” A duplex with “two units that looked like one… with individual entrances and bronze knockers like ladies’ hands,” the house was occupied by a violin maestro, a dentist uncle, the family driver, and two drivers of the Nakpil family.  

 

          “Escaldo then was not the obscure, edited street of three buildings that it is today,” writes Cordero-Fernando with fondness. “It was a long, quiet road that led straight to the side door of the Quiapo church. If you can imagine it, there was no Quezon Bridge or Quezon Boulevard yet, everything was just a network of little streets.”   

 

          She remembers the way waterways and trees segmented her part of Quiapo: “The estero formed a kind of dividing line between the better-off (supposedly us) and those of the kabilang ilog, mainly represented by curtainless shanties where workers at the lumber mill lived…. On our bank of the estero, my father planted two acacia trees. He planted trees to preserve our gentility.”  

 

          But she need not look beyond her bank of the river to realize how class differences created rifts in the community. Her playmates were Paching and Vehing, two girls that belong to two totally different groups. Paching lived in a house with a patio rented by merchants of votive candles shaped like legs, arms, and hands, “depending on which body part ached.” The Flores de Mayo where both of them were dressed up for the occasion was a memory she associates with Paching. Then, there were the Nakpils in the house across from theirs. Doña Petrona, also called Manggoy, would host musical events, weekend lunches, and tertulias for family and friends. Yet there was also Vehing, one of the daughters of Mang Andoy, the Nakpil driver, to whom she became a close friend until they were both of mature age. Cordero-Fernando recounts an incident where she accidentally tore Vehing’s dress in a game, and how bad she felt after Vehing accused her of doing that to her because she was poor.  

 

          From her house’s rooftop, she draws a memorable scene of the neighborhood: “For I could see into the windows of every house—the high-ceilinged kitchen of the Ilustres with its wood-fire stove and curtain of swinging sausages, the close, shadowy bedrooms of the Peñalozas, the cool, hushed sala of the Nakpils with the filigreed clocks frozen forever at twelve, and across the estero, the Japanese pagoda of the Ocampos, a mad technicolor dream come true. From up there, you could also look down into our aforementioned interior patio and Vehing’s bath water three stories below.”  

 

          Like all old buildings in the fast-paced commercial district of Quiapo, the house on Barbosa St. eventually gave way to change. Converted into a “second-class hotel” by Juan Ching, the writer’s father finally decided to have the house torn down.  

 

          With a note of nostalgia, Gilda Cordero-Fernando writes: “Everyone knows what happens to old houses in Quiapo—they become fashion academies of cramped ladies’ dormitories or tumble-down government offices…. The Quiapo house is now gone. But I can reconstruct in my memory its every detail.” 

​

Header Photos: Mauricio, Mitch. Portrait of Gilda Cordero Fernando. 2 Dec. 2010. Blogspot, www.anikaniklove.blogspot.com/2010/12/gilda-cordero-fernando.html. Accessed 3 Nov. 2017 

Ventura, Sylvia. A Literary Journey With Gilda Cordero-Fernando. UP Press. 2005. 

​

WORK CITED

 

Fernando, Gilda Cordero. “A Quiapo Childhood.” Pinay: Autobiographical Narratives by Women Writers, 1926-1998, edited by Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000, pp. 25-34.  

​