Although nothing ever seemed to change in Silay—not the tall stories or the trusty companions or the heritage houses or the imaginary phantoms—one man traces his influences back to this bedrock of kinship.

I was born and raised in Negros though my birth and baptismal certificates say Manila and all my school records show me to have stayed in Manila nine months of the year. Negros meant the town of Silay, “the Paris of the Orient.” A U.S. State Department official married to a Gaston relative said he drove through the town in less than 15 minutes, seeing only the stone church built with my grandmother’s money and to my Masonic grandfather’s chagrin, and a somber row of seemingly uninhabited and weather-worn houses on both sides of the main street. Three months on the island, year-in and year-out, made me Negros born and raised. While I learned to read, write, and reckon nine months of the year in Manila, I lived and received all the impressions that have lasted and haunted me, made me what I am, in those three months in a town that is a closed world to everyone outside it—but all the world to its unchanging inhabitants. Same houses, same families, same relations, same conversations, same-same—a friend observing them remarked that they didn’t bother to finish their sentences. What for, I said, whatever it is, it’s been said before.

By mid-morning on the very first day of the summer vacation, we cousins would be standing on a dock, watching our baggage being loaded on the Negros Navigation ship. Overnight the ship would take us—and what a night it would be with all the cabins occupied by just us. No sooner was it docked than we would rush down the gangplank and up into a weapons carrier of World War II vintage. We were on our way to Silay, baggage to follow. We jumped off the truck the moment it stopped and ran in any direction to whatever house we chose, though throughout the summer we could change houses at will, so that at summer’s end we had to be tracked down door-to-door and hauled out of every house where we had hidden and taken back to school in Manila.

Except for myself. I was expected at the same maiden aunt’s house. She was the keeper of the “faith” and I, who possessed to a greater degree than anyone else the main features of the family—a kind of caricature you might say—had to stay there. For instance, as a child I instinctively took to rolling rice and rubbing it on my nose to absorb the oil, just like all the great ones in the family. I would flick it out of the window when it had hardened and come to resemble a booger. Or stuck it under the table. My father had the habit (as his father and uncles before him), so that when he was in prison, his cellmate, Chino Roces, complained to the authorities that he was afraid to touch anything in the cell and come up with something he would rather not think about.

I don’t recall other adults in Silay when I was growing up other than aunts who supervised the preparation of our meals and uncles—one in particular—who took us hiking and hunting, aside from showing the same movies every night: The Blob and Invasion from Mars. Everyone was a relative except an old woman who balanced a tray of freshly made pastries on her head every morning. I didn’t see poor people or any other people for that matter, except in the farms and mostly during the milling season.

we ran screaming back to the clearing and up the huts until the game was tied to a stake in the ground so we could let it all rip with our rifles until there was little discernible game left.

The town offered everything: a bakery of doubtful sanitation but inevitable delight, a dry and dusty bowling alley with two lanes and incomplete duck pins, a church where you could sleep off the alcohol, a cemetery with dancing lights at certain times of the year, closed houses in near total darkness except where a shaft of sunlight illuminated the golden air, sleepy houses which sprang into life the moment you stepped in and were recognized as so-and-so’s son, impenetrable boarded-up houses haunted by an event that everyone was all too ready to explain and why no one, heaven forbid, could mention it—intimacy, sadness and loss, like the woman with the long black hair who still lives in what is left of the best example of antebellum architecture and had spoken to no one since her parents had refused her marriage to someone poor—not even to her parents on their deathbed.

In Manila, an old American family lived up the street; their two kids had, I swear, metal submachine guns that could be wound up to go rat-tat-tat like the real thing. They had realistically rendered train sets with yards of track. I never felt the smallest twinge of envy. Back in Negros we kids had .22 caliber rifles and a real locomotive we could grab on to and jump off as it hauled away cane.

We hunted wild pig; well, not exactly hunted. The farm kids did. We went up to the mountains and slept overnight in nipa huts on stilts, which the villagers graciously lent us. We were up and about at first light beating the bushes for game. Well, not us exactly but the farm kids. If anything was flushed out, we ran screaming back to the clearing and up the huts until the game was tied to a stake in the ground so we could let it all rip with our rifles until there was little discernible game left. Providentially, we never shot each other for I distinctly recall that we stood in a circle around the piglet.

On such occasions it was not uncommon to come upon a crash site of a World War II plane, with the markings outside barely visible and only traces of webbing dangling inside; the machine guns and the crew long gone. There were unexploded bombs, one of which I had someone unscrew and disarm. I used it as a pencil holder and would go “Boom” to my classmates.

A little higher up the mountain was a small, well-appointed, well-lighted hospital painted yellow and white, where family members with traces of tuberculosis could rest in the cool months, like Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, my aunt said. And like the one who died in the room behind my bed, she did not say.

Back in Silay, I lived in constant fear of the night when, there was no help for it, I had to sleep alone in that house set aside for me, while my cousins slept in the Big House in one big room in facing rows of beds protected from ghosts by their numbers.

Not me. I was special; so I slept with the “ancestors” so to speak. Rather, I sweated in my pillow, in a huge bed that, mercifully, was pushed against a locked door that, alarmingly, did not open out but inwards so the headboard served no purpose except as a viewing gallery for whatever was in that locked room. In all those years through all those summers, I must have slept ten hours total.

But every morning made up for it. A small voice in the cool damp air while sunlight banished the mist signaled the approach of the old woman with the tray of pastries. The aroma of rice on the boil, grown in the mountains only for us, filled the house, along with that of mushrooms frying in butter and small shrimps done to a crisp. It was the start of another day in the only life I care to recollect. Outside, a weapons carrier (World War II vintage) with a hood ornament of a wooden American Indian head, idled noisily, waiting to take my aunt up to an orchard with a basket of food that she said was for the giant that stood sentry there. “Anyone takes fruit, he will be ripped apart limb by limb,” she said loud enough for the house help who had family up there to hear. “Just like Beowulf,” she whispered to me.