Before the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Revolution by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa

Author:Luisita Lopez Torregrosa [Torregrosa, Luisita Lopez]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Editors; Journalists; Publishers, Literary
ISBN: 9780547669236
Google: bMqhKKZOiNkC
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2012-08-06T16:00:00+00:00

6

‌

HOW QUICKLY WE disassemble our lives. The apartment at Del Pilar had been our cloister, but now we wanted a house, trees, a garden, a bigger sky at our windows.

We found an old wooden house in a compound a couple of miles up Roxas Boulevard, farther out from the city. It had a yard with frangipani trees and tamarinds, marigolds and bougainvillea.

Elizabeth had longed for the outdoors: she missed her garden back home, the sense of space that came with a house and many rooms, porches to sit on, and birds to track.

We saw the house off Roxas one day when we went over to visit Camilla, who lived alone with her pug and her maid in the compound, diagonally across from a house that would soon be vacant, number 33. It was the first in a cluster of four houses on an unpaved two-car lane. The houses were wonderful relics from colonial times, unlike anything I had seen in downtown Manila, draped in bamboo stands, palm fronds, and yucca leaves. The compound had no name, but we called it P. Lovina, the name of the street that ran alongside it, a stretch of dilapidated motels, food stalls, and squatter huts, a block off the bay.

From outside, the house seemed oddly askew, with curved bays north and south. It stood a bit lopsided, as if one side had sunk inches deeper into the ground over decades of floods. Cypress green patches showed in spots through a thin coat of white paint that was already flaking, and the slanted tin roof was rusting. Set back from P. Lovina, with only a sagging wire fence to protect it from passersby, the house rose high off the ground, almost two stories, with the lower exterior enclosed by flimsy wood slats nailed in a crisscross pattern, giving them the appearance of a garden trellis. Bordering

the foot of the house were overgrown rosebushes, bare patches strewn with broken glass, and a tangle of weeds. A shroud of old trees cast large shadows over a yard that had been left to the seasons. And around the front, where a garage door opened to an empty, unfinished ground floor, an awning of tin scraps hung over the maroon-colored steps that led up to a wide, screened veranda cooled by the breeze.

From the moment we swerved into the dirt driveway and ran up the steps of the house, Elizabeth wanted it. She waltzed from room to room, throwing doors open, sticking her head in the bathroom, measuring the rooms in her head: a sunny living room with beamed ceilings and wide-plank floors, bleached cedar walls and Capiz-shell window shutters; an airy kitchen; a sunlit room for my study; and our bedroom, with high windows open to the side yard. There was a raw beauty about the place, and a feeling that it would soon come to ruin. Winds had blown too hard against it, and time, too. But for us, it seemed ideal, secluded and unspoiled.

We would have

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.