The following is an excerpt of “Fragments of the House of Reason”

Chapter 1

Mother made her way across the rubble-strewn part of Tayuman St. with the four of us in tow. Already mounds of rocks, soil and detritus from an ongoing roadwork had caused the traffic to build up on that section of the road. 

One could tell from the springy steps of morning newsboys that the city was now stretching for a new day’s action. 

On the sidewalk, a homeless family of five, including a sickly old woman, packed their stuff into a grimy quilt-bag lying on the beat-up wooden cart where they slept the night before. The mother, an adolescent girl, reached under her shirt, scooped up her swelling breast before shoving the tit into the mouth of an infant crying in her arm.

We had just gotten off of one of those festively decked-up commuter jeepneys. Across the front signboard, it bore the Tayuman – Lardizabal route signage, handwritten in stubby uneven red letters. 

It seemed like an endless fun ride starting from our point of origin at the corner of Vicente Cruz St. and Magsaysay Boulevard in Sampaloc until we hit stop at a designated jeepney stand in a corner of Oroquieta Street, a stone’s throw across the Catholic Trade building. 

Judging from the movie posters and tunes dominating the lights-and-soundscape, Nazareth would be the favorite American band, and Aga Muhlach, the current boy-next-door craze. 

There were five of us in the beeline– Mother in the front was followed by my stepfather, who was followed by adopted sister Bridget, 15, who was followed by half-brother Lester, 9. And then, of course, there was the wiry-framed, stringy-haired, Miniong, 14. Yes, that would be me. 

We took to the sidewalk by the perimeter fence on the southern side of Espiritu Santo Parochial School. Across the street was a row of old two-story Spanish-colonial stone houses, each in varying degree of slow, uneventful dilapidation. The structures now served as showrooms for the myriads of life-sized religious sculptures and statues– saints mostly, martyrs, and national heroes. 

Amazing how some folks would actually take the time to attend to the finer, those quite less obvious details of adult life which otherwise would have been lost in the mundane of daily drudgery. For example, the simple routine of fixing wooden and plaster cast images, polishing them to a spit-shine, and then arranging them all spick and span. At once they reminded me of the regimented formations ordinarily associated with the military– platoons of soldiers, as they were, in their spotless, methodical arrangements, ready for on-the-spot tactical inspections. 

A street sweeper walked by. He wore a yellow shirt with red long sleeves, wide-brimmed red salakot on the head, and a tall wicker broomstick in hand. He was, above all, about as snappy as the familiar face beaming from the political button pinned to the top of his native hat.

We came upon a small open space after turning right through the archway of the dark overhang of the main campus building of Espiritu Santo along the Avenida Rizal side. I slowed down by a giant wooden door, staggered by the sight of the ancient Diocesan Shrine. The belfry stood close by the side, towering high up to sky. 

To be honest, I had not seen any manmade structure of such magnitude before, no, nothing I could recall that had drawn my breath for the sheer size of it. Not even the M/V Doña Virginia would come close in comparison. 

I grew up on a tiny island called Siquijor in Central Visayas. My Social Studies teacher fondly called it, ‘the bellybutton’ of the Philippine archipelago. It was undeveloped for the most part. We only had tall coconut palms and ancient trees blocking our views of the mountains, the ocean, and the great expanse. 

For a minute I thought my heart skipped a beat. I froze there like a sparrow raring at the threshold of an exploration– into as strange a realm as the cavernous vaults inside an old church. 

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