The Door on the 9th Street (Danny C. Sillada)

“The thought of suicide is a great source of comfort: with it a calm passage is to be made across many a bad night…”

-         Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

      

Along the 9^th Street at door # 4 of an old Spanish apartment, the blue paint is flaking off from the surface of a century-old narra door revealing its antique look, which is typical of old Spanish doors during the pre-war era in old Manila.

Bereft of any gilding, the door # 4 is accentuated by a rusted chime hanging at the topmost level of its vertical wooden frame. When the door opens, it creates a strident noise, a repetitive resonance of hinges evoking an eerie feeling. And one could almost hear the sound of footsteps of previous tenants coming in and out through the doorway.

How many of them? No one could tell but one thing is certain, the door has been a silent witness to the stories of those who came and passed though it. 

What is outside the door is relatively the same inside the apartment: old wooden furniture with faded shellac coating, holed and dilapidated ceiling and a coarse wooden floor that squeaks during summer, evident of the lack of maintenance by an eighty-year old Spanish-Filipino landlord.

The recent occupant of door # 4 is a forty-five-year old man who used to have a family, but rumor has it that his beloved wife abandoned him for a wealthy lover, bringing with her their three children ranging from 7 to 16 years old. Since then, the solitary tenant has been distant and aloof from his friends and neighbors. He rarely goes out from the apartment, except at evening time for his night shift job as a security guard at the National Museum.

But tonight, the occupant did not report to his work, the light at the living room is switched on, which he usually turns off before leaving from the apartment.

The interior of his apartment is bleak and dreary, the furniture is awkwardly arranged in a random setting, curtains are old and unchanged for weeks or months, and the wallpaper is peeling off from the wall. The wooden floor is littered with muddy boot prints, old newspapers and cigarette butts emitting a pungent smell into the air. The utensils on the table and at the kitchen are piling; strewn in disarray covered with grease and molds as though the place had been abandoned for years.   

On the narrow hallway leading to the three bedrooms, are frames of photographs tilted and dangling on either side of the wall. Below the wooden frames are names, places and dates when and where the photographs were taken.               

On the right side of the hallway, a hanged photograph of a boy blowing the seven candles on top of the birthday cake with other children gazing at him; his father is holding a huge box containing a birthday present. Parallel to the hanging frame is another picture of a young lovely woman breastfeeding her child with long curly hair down to her waist.                                                      

At the other side of the same hallway is a photograph of a newly-wed couple in black and white; their shimmering faces depict the happy moments of their wedding surrounded by their family members and relatives. Adjacent to the picture is a bigger frame of a family portrait of five; the happy couple is standing behind their three beautiful children, a young lad and two lovely girls. The boy’s name is Zachary, fifteen years old and the girls are Lily and Lolita, six and ten years old respectively.

By looking at the photographs on the wall, they portray typical family members teeming with love and affection with no hint of regret or discontent. Sometimes, though, photographs can be deceiving; they masked something hideous, which the posers are trying to conceal through their best images.

At the entrance and inside the master’s bedroom, scattered letters and cigarette butts are pullulating all over the floor. The ceiling is almost bare with cobwebs covering the wooden beams and electrical wirings. The place is totally cluttered that it could be mistaken as a storage room.

Beside the king-size bed is a small brown table with a dimly-lit capiz lamp. At the outer covering of the lamp is a pasted paper with undecipherable words inscribed on it. Hanging above the bed’s headboard is a relatively huge close-up portrait of a woman with metallic silver frame facing toward the door.

The glass frame is cracked, but the picture seems to defy the broken glass with its imposing presence. The woman’s portrait is captivating, a figure similar to the pictures in the hallway. She is in her late 30s, but her face retains a youthful look: deep-seated eyes, cheek boned and dimpled with aquiline nose.

The woman is the epitome of a mestiza Filipina, a mixture of Spanish and Filipino blood. However, despite her endearing presence, something inexplicable is lurking beneath her eyes, something deep that foretells deception and defiance. But she is also the kind of a woman that any man would dream to possess, and a very expensive woman to lose.

Meanwhile, silhouettes of human figure amid the shadows of foliage are delicately projected at the bedroom’s wall with streetlamp’s light cascading through the window. One noticeable shadow is the vertical figure of an abaca rope tied on the wooden beam at the ceiling. The other end is carefully entwined around the man’s neck; a wooden chair is standing on the floor, supporting the weight of his body.

The man appears to be wallowing in extreme desolation. Tears are dripping like a loosened faucet from his hollowed eyes while listening to the song of The Beatles playing on an old turntable stereo at the corner of the bedroom. The neighborhood is quiet outside the apartment; the nocturnal sound of crickets is faint and distant, the atmosphere is abysmal…

When the music stops, the abrupt sound of a fallen chair reverberates; the man and his shadows on a faded wall are silently swinging like a pendulum…

Comments

[Aurora]

You effectively captured the moment of despair in this haunting vignette. Well done, Danny.

[dcsillada]

Thank you very much Aurora. I'm not writing recently; I'm quite busy preparing for my coming one-man show.

[Aurora]

I wish I could be there.