THE HOUSE ON ZAPOTE STREET

Quijano de Manila
Quijano de Manila is the pen name of Nick Joaquin. He started writing
before the war and his first story, Three Generations has been hailed as a
masterpiece. He has been recipient of almost all the prestigious awards in
literature and the arts, including the National Artist Award for Literature in 1976.
He was also conferred, among other recognitions, the Republic Cultural Heritage
Award for Literature in 1961, the Journalist of the Year Award in the early 1960s,
the Book of the Year Award in 1979 for his Almanac for Manileos, the national
Book award for several of his works, the Ramon Magsaysay Award for
Journalism, Literature, Creative Communication Arts (the Asian counterpart of
Nobel Prize) in 1996, and the Tanglaw ng Lahi Award in 1997.

Dr. Leonardo Quitangon, a soft-spoken, mild-mannered, cooltempered Caviteno, was still fancy-free at 35 when he returned to Manila,
after six years abroad. Then, at the University of Santo Tomas, where he
went to teach, he met Lydia Cabading, a medical intern. He liked her quiet
ways and began to date her steadily. They went to the movies and to
basketball games and he took her a number of times to his house in Sta.
Mesa, to meet his family.
Lydia was then only 23 and looked like a sweet unspoiled girl,
but there was a slight air of mystery about her. Leonardo and his
brothers noticed that she almost never spoke of her home life or her
childhood; she seemed to have no gay early memories to share with her
lover, as sweethearts usually crave to do. And whenever it looked as if
she might have to stay out late, she would say: "I'll have to tell my father
first". And off she would go, wherever she was, to tell her father, though it
meant going all the way to Makati, Rizal, where she lived with her parents
in a new house on Zapote Street.
The Quitangons understood that she was an only child and
that her parents were, therefore, over-zealous in looking after her. Her
father usually took her to school and fetched her after classes, and
had been known to threaten to arrest young men who stared at her on
the streets or pressed too close against her on jeepneys. This highhandedness seemed natural enough, for Pablo Cabading, Lydia's father
was a member of the Manila Police Department.
After Lydia finished her internship, Leonardo Quitangon
became a regular visitor at the house on Zapote Street: he was helping
her prepare for the board exams. Her family seemed to like him. The

mother, Anunciacion, struck him as a mousy woman unable to speak

save at her husband's bidding. There was a foster son, a little boy the
Cabadings had adopted. As for Pablo Cabading, he was a fine strapping
man, an Ilocano, who gave the impression of being taller than he was and
looked every inch an agent of the law: full of brawn and guts and force,
and smoldering with vitality. He was a natty dresser, liked youthful colors
and styles, decorated his house with pictures of himself and, at 50, looked
younger than his inarticulate wife, who was actually two years younger
than he.
When Leonardo started frequenting the house on Zapote Street,
Cabading told him: Ill be frank with you. None of Lydia's boyfriends
ever lasted ten minutes in this house. I didn't like them and I told them
so and made them get out." Then he added laying a hand on the young
doctor's shoulder: But I like you. You are a good man."
The rest of the household were two very young maids who spoke
almost no Tagalog, and two very fierce dogs, chained to the front door in
the day time, unchained in the front yard at night.
The house on Zapote Street is in the current architectural
clich: the hoity-toity Philippine split-level suburban stylea half-story
perched above the living area, to which it is bound by the slope of the roof
and which it overlooks from a balcony, so that a person standing in the
sala can see the doors of the bedrooms and bathroom just above his
head. The house is painted, as is also the current fashion, in various
pastel shades, a different color to every three or four planks. The
inevitable piazza curves around two sides of the house, which has a strip
of lawn and a low wall all around it. The Cabadings did not keep a car,
but the house provides for an eventual garage and driveway. This, and
the furniture, the shell lamps and the fancy bric-a-brac that clutters
the narrow house indicate that the Cabadings had not only risen high
enough to justify their split-level pretensions but were expecting to go
higher.
Lydia took the board exams and passed them. The lovers
asked her father's permission to wed. Cabading laid down two
conditions: that the wedding would be a lavish one and that was to pay
a dowry of P5,000. The young doctor said that he could afford the big
wedding but not the big dowry. Cabading shrugged his shoulders; no
dowry, no marriage.
Leonardo spent some frantic weeks scraping up cash and
managed to gather P3,000. Cabading agreed to reduce his price to that
amount, then laid down a final condition: after the wedding, Lydia and

Leonardo must make their home at the house on Zapote Street.

"I built this house for Lydia," said Cabading, "and I want her to
live here even when she's married. Besides, her mother couldn't bear
to be separated from Lydia, her only child."
There was nothing Leonardo could do but consent.
Lydia and Leonardo were married on September 10 last year, at
the Cathedral of Manila, with Mrs. Delfin Montano, wife of the Cavite
governor, and Senator Ferdinand Marcos as sponsors. The reception was
at the Selecta. The status gods of suburbia were properly propitiated. Then
the newlyweds went to live on Zapote Streetand Leonardo almost
immediately realized why Lydia had been so reticent and mysterious
about her home life.
The cozy family group that charmed him in courtship days
turned out to be rather too cozy. The entire household revolved in
submission around Pablo Cabading. The daughter, mother, the fosterson, the maids and even the dogs trembled when the lifted his voice.
Cabading liked to brag that was a "killer": in 1946 he had shot dead two
American soldiers he caught robbing a neighbor's house in Quezon City.
Leonardo found himself within a family turned in on itself, selfenclosed and self-sufficientin a house that had no neighbors and no need
for any. His brothers say that he made more friends in the neighborhood
within the couple of months he stayed there than the Cabadings had
made in a year. Pablo Cabading did not like what was his to stray out
of, and what was not his to stray into, his house. And within that house
he wanted to be the center of everything, even of his daughter's
honeymoon.
Whenever Leonardo and Lydia went to the movies or for a ride,
Cabading insisted on being taken along. If they seated him on the back
seat while they sat together in front, be raged and glowered. He wanted
to sit in front with them.
When Leonardo came home from work, he must not tarry with
Lydia in the bedroom chatting: both of them must come down at once
to the sala and talk with their father. Leonardo explained that he was
not much of a talking: "That's why I fell in love with Lydia, because
she's the quiet type too". No matter, said Cabading. They didn't have to
talk at all; he would do all the talking himself, so long as they sat there in
the sala before his eyes.
So, his compact family group sat around him at night, silent,
while Cabading talked and talked. But, finally, the talk had to stop, the
listeners had to rise and retireand it was this moment that Cabading

seemed unable to bear. He couldn't bear to see Lydia and Leonardo

rise and go up together to their room. One night, unable to bear it any
longer, he shouted, as they rose to retire:
"Lydia, you sleep with your mother tonight. She has a
toothache." After a dead look at her husband, Lydia obeyed. Leonardo
went to bed alone.
The incident would be repeated: there would always be other
reasons, besides Mrs. Cabading's toothaches.
What horrified Leonardo was not merely what was being done to
him but his increasing acquiescence. Had his spirit been so quickly
broken? Was he, too, like the rest of the household, being drawn to
revolve, silently and obediently, around the master of the house?
Once, late at night, he suddenly showed up at his parents house
in Sta. Mesa and his brothers were shocked at the great change in him
within so short a time. He looked terrified. What had happened? His car
had broken down and he had had it repaired and now he could not go
home. But why not?
"You don't know my father-in-law," he groaned. "Everybody in that
house must be in by a certain hour. Otherwise, the gates are locked,
the doors are locked, the windows are locked. Nobody can get in
anymore!
A younger brother, Gene, offered to accompany him home and
explain to Cabading what had happened. The two rode to Zapote and
found the house dark and locked up.
Says Gene: "That memory makes my blood boilmy eldest
brother fearfully clanging and clanging the gate, and nobody to let him
in. I wouldn't have waited a second, but he waited five, ten, fifteen
minutes, knocking at that gate, begging to be let in. I couldn't have it!"
In the end the two brothers rode back to Sta. Mesa, where
Leonardo spent the night. When he returned to the house on Zapote the
next day, his father-in-law greeted him with a sarcastic question: "Where
were you? At a basketball game?"
Leonardo became anxious to take his wife away from that
house. He talked it over with her, then they went to tell her father. Said
Cabading bluntly: "If she goes with you, I'll shoot her head before your
eyes."
His brothers urged him to buy a gun, but Leonardo felt in his
pocket and said, "I've got my rosary." Cried his brother Gene: "You can't
fight a gun with a rosary!"
When Lydia took her oath as a physician, Cabading announced

that only he and his wife would accompany Lydia to the ceremony. It
would not be fair, he said, to let Leonardo, who had not borne the
expenses of Lydia's education, to share that moment of glory too.
Leonardo said that he would like them at least to use his car. The offer
was rejected. Cabading preferred to hire a taxi.
After about two months at the house on Zapote Street, Leonardo
moved out, alone. Her parents would not let Lydia go and she herself was
too afraid to leave. During the succeeding weeks, efforts to contact her
proved futile. The house on Zapote became even more closed to the
outside world. If Lydia emerged from it at all, she was always
accompanied by her father, mother or foster-brother, or by all three.
When her husband heard that she had started working at a
hospital he went there to see her but instead met her father coming to
fetch her. The very next day, Lydia was no longer working at the hospital.
Leonardo knew that she was with child and he was determined to
bear all her prenatal expenses. He went to Zapote one day when her father
was out and persuaded her to come out to the yard but could not make
her take the money he offered across the locked gate. "Just mail it,"
she cried and fled into the house. He sent her a check by registered
mail; it was promptly mailed back to him.
On Christmas Eve, Leonardo returned to the house on Zapote with
a gift for his wife, and stood knocking at the gate for so long the neighbors
gathered at windows to watch him. Finally, he was allowed to enter, present
his gift to Lydia and talk with her for a moment. She said that her father
seemed agreeable to a meeting with Leonardo's father, to discuss the young
couple's problem. So the elder Quitangon and two of his younger sons went
to Zapote one evening. The lights were on in the Cabadings house, but
nobody responded to their knocking. Then all the lights were turned off.
As they stood wondering what to do, a servant girl came and told them that
the master was out. (Lydia would later tell them that they had not been
admitted because her father had not yet decided what she was to say to
them.)
The last act of this curious drama began Sunday last week
when Leonardo was astounded to receive an early-morning phone call from
his wife. She said she could no longer bear to be parted from him and bade
him pick her up at a certain church, where she was with her foster brother.
Leonardo rushed to the church, picked up two, dropped the boy off at a
street near Zapote, then sped with Lydia to Maragondon, Cavite where the
Quitangons have a house. He stopped at a gasoline station to call up his
brothers in Sta. Mesa, to tell them what he had done and to warn them that

Cabading would surely show up there. "Get Mother out of the house," he told
his brothers.
At about ten in the morning, a taxi stopped before the Quitangon
house in Sta. Mesa and Mrs. Cabading got out and began screaming at
the gate: "Where's my daughter? Where's my daughter?" Gene and Nonilo
Quitangon went out to the gate and invited her to come in. "No! No! All I want
is my daughter!" she screamed. Cabading, who was inside the waiting taxi,
then got out and demanded that the Quitangons produce Lydia. Vexed,
Nonilo cried: "Aba, what have we do with where your daughter is? Anyway,
she's with her husband." At that, Cabading ran to the taxi, snatched a
submachinegun from a box, and trained it on Gene. (Nonilo had run into the
house to get a gun.)
"Produce my daughter at once or I'll shoot you all down!"
shouted Cabading.
Gene, the gun's muzzle practically in his face, sought to pacify the
older man: "Why can't we talk this over quietly, like decent people, inside the
house? Look, we're creating a scandal in the neighborhood."
Cabading lowered his gun. "I give you till midnight tonight to produce
my daughter," he growled. "If you don't, you better ask the PC to guard this
house!"
Then he and his wife drove off in the taxi, just a moment before
the mobile police patrol the neighbors had called arrived. The police
advised Gene to file a complaint with the fiscal's office. Instead, Gene
decided to go to the house on Zapote Street, hoping that "diplomacy" would
work.
To his surprise, he was admitted at once by a smiling and very genial
Cabading. "You are a brave man," he told Gene, "and a lucky one" and he
ordered a Coke brought for the visitor. Gene said that he was going to Cavite
but could not promise to "produce" Lydia by midnight: it was up to the
couple to decide whether they would come back.
It was about eight in the evening when Gene arrived in
Maragondon. As his car drove into the yard of this family's old house,
Lydia and Leonardo appeared at a window and frantically asked what
had happened. "Nothing," said Gene, and their faces lit up. "We're having
our honeymoon at last," Lydia told Gene as he entered the house. And the
old air of dread, of mystery, did seem to have lifted from her face. But
it was there again when, after supper, he told them what had happened
in Sta. Mesa.
"I can't go back," she moaned. "He'll kill me! He'll kill me!"
"He has cooled down now," said Gene. "He seems to be a

reasonable man after all."

"Oh, you don't know him!" cried Lydia. "I've known him longer, and
I've never, never been happy!"
And the brothers at last had glimpses of the girlhood she had
been so reticent about. She told them of Cabading's baffling changes
of temper, especially toward her; how smiles and found words and
caresses could abruptly turn into beatings when his mood darkened.
Leonardo said that his father-in-law was an artista. "Remember
how he used to fan me when I supped there while I was courting Lydia?"
(At about that time, in Sta. Mesa, Nonilo, on guard at the gate
of his family's house, saw Cabading drive past three times in a taxi.)
"I can't force you to go back," said Gene. "You'll have to decide
that yourselves. But what, actually, are you planning to do? You can't
stay forever here in Maragondon. What would you live on?"
The two said they would talk it over for a while in their room.
Gene waited at the supper table and when a long time had passed and
they had not come back he went to the room. Finding the door ajar, he
looked in. Lydia and Leonardo were on their knees on the floor, saying
the rosary, Gene returned to the supper table. After another long wait,
the couple came out of the room.
Said Lydia: "We have prayed together and we have decided
to die together. We'll go back with you, in the morning."
They were back in Manila early the next morning. Lydia and
Leonardo went straight to the house in Sta. Mesa, where all their
relatives and friends warned them not to go back to the house on Zapote
Street, as they had decided to do. Confused anew, they went to the
Manila police headquarters to ask for advice, but the advice given
seemed drastic to them: summon Cabading and have it out with him in
front of his superior officer. Leonardo's father then offered to go to
Zapote with Gene and Nonilo, to try to reason with Cabading.
They found him in good humor, full of smiles and hearty
greetings. He reproached his balae for not visiting him before. "I did
come once," drily remarked the elder Quitangon, "but no one would open
the gate." Cabading had his wife called. She came into the room and sat
down. "Was I in the house that night our balae came?" her husband asked
her. "No, you were out," she replied. Having spoken her piece, she got up
and left the room. (On their various visits to the house on Zapote Street,
the Quitangons noticed that Mrs. Cabading appeared only when
summoned and vanished as soon as she had done whatever was expected
of her).

Cabading then announced that he no longer objected to Lydia's

moving out of the house to live with her husband in an apartment of
their own. Overjoyed, the Quitangons urged Cabading to go with them in
Sta. Mesa, so that the newlyweds could be reconciled with Lydia's
parents. Cabading readily agreed.
When they arrived in Sta. Mesa, Lydia and Leonardo were sitting
on a sofa in the sala.
"Why have you done this?" her father chided her gently. "If you
wanted to move out, did you have to run away?" To Leonardo, he said:
"And youare you angry with me?"
Then he repeated his announcement that he was all for letting the
newlyweds set up house by themselves. Gene felt so felt elated he
proposed a celebration: "I'll throw a blow-out! Everybody is invited! This
is on me!" So they all went to Max's in Quezon City and had a very
merry fried-chicken party. "Why, this is a family reunion!" laughed
Cabading. "This should be on me!" But Gene would not let him pay the
bill.
Early the next morning, Cabading called up the Sta. Mesa house
to say that his wife had fallen ill. Would Lydia please visit her? Leonardo
and Lydia went to Zapote, found nothing the matter with her mother,
and returned to Sta. Mesa. After lunch, Leonardo left for his classes. Then
Cabading called up again. Lydia's mother refused to eat and kept asking
for her daughter. Would Lydia please drop in again at the house on
Zapote? Gene and Nonilo said they might as well accompany Lydia there
and start moving out her things.
When they arrived at the Zapote house, the Quitangon brothers
were amused by what they saw. Mrs. Cabading, her eyes closed, lay on
the parlor sofa, a large towel spread out beneath her. "She has been lying
there all day," said Cabading, "tossing restlessly, asking for you, Lydia."
Gene noted that the towel was neatly spread out and didn't look crumpled
at all, and that Mrs. Cabading was obviously just pretending to be asleep.
He smiled at the childishness of the stratagem, but Lydia was past being
amused. She went straight to her room, were they heard her pulling out
drawers. While the Quitangons and Cabading were conversing, the
supposedly sick mother slipped out of the sofa and went upstairs to
Lydia's room.
Cabading told the Quitangons that he wanted Lydia and Leonardo
to stay there at the house in Zapote. "I thought all that was settled last
night," Gene groaned.
"I built this house for Lydia," persisted Cabading, "and this house

is hers. If she and her husband want to be alone, I and my wife will move
out of here, turn this house over to them." Gene wearily explained that
Lydia and Leonardo preferred the apartment they had already leased.
Suddenly the men heard the clatter of a drawer falling upstairs.
Gene surmised that it had fallen in a struggle between mother and
daughter. "Excuse me," said Cabading, rising. As he went upstairs, he
said to the Quitangons, over his shoulder, Don't misunderstand me. I'm
not going to 'coach' Lydia". He went into Lydia's room and closed the
door behind him.
After a long while, Lydia and her father came out of the room
together and came down to the sala together. Lydia was clasping a large
crucifix. There was no expression on her face when she told the
Quitangon boys to go home. "But I thought we were going to start
moving your things out this afternoon," said Gene. She glanced at the
crucifix and said it was one of the first things she wanted taken to her new
home. "Just tell Narding to fetch me," she said.
Back in Sta. Mesa, Gene and Nonilo had the painful task of
telling Leonardo, when he phoned, that Lydia was back in the house on
Zapote. "Why did you leave her there?" cried Leonardo. "He'll beat her
up! I'm going to get her." Gene told him not to go alone, to pass by the
Sta. Mesa house first and pick up Nonilo. Gene could not go along; he
had to catch a bus for Subic, where he works. When Leonardo arrived,
Gene told him: "Don't force Lydia to go with you. If she doesn't want to,
leave at once. Do not, for any reason, be persuaded to stay there too."
When his brother had left for Zapote, Gene realized that he was
not sure he was going to Subic. He left too worried. He knew he couldn't
rest easy until he had seen Lydia and Leonardo settled in their new home.
The minutes quickly ticked past as he debated with himself whether he
should stay or catch that bus. Then, at about a quarter to seven, the phone
rang. It was Nonilo, in anguish.
"Something terrible has happened in Lydia's room! I heard four
shots," he cried.
"Who are up there?"
"Lydia and Narding and the Cabadings."
"I'll be right over.
Gene sent a younger brother to inform the family lawyer and to
alert the Makati police. Then he drove like mad to Zapote. It was almost
dark when he got there. The house stood perfectly still, not a light on inside.
He watched it from a distance but could see no movement. Then a taxi
drove up and out jumped Nonilo. He had telephoned from a gasoline

station. He related what had happened.

He said that when he and Leonardo arrived at the Zapote
house, Cabading motioned Leonardo upstairs: "Lydia is in her room."
Leonardo went up; Cabading gave Nonilo a cup of coffee and chatted
amiably with him. Nonilo saw Mrs. Cabading go up to Lydia's room with a
glass of milk. A while later, they heard a woman scream, followed by
sobbing. "There seems to be trouble up there," said Cabading, and he
went upstairs. Nonilo saw him enter Lydia's room, leaving the door open.
A few moments later, the door was closed. Then Nonilo heard three
shots. He stood petrified, but when he heard a fourth shot he dashed
out of the house, ran to a gasoline station and called up Gene.
Nonilo pointed to the closed front gate; he was sure he had left
it open when he ran out. The brothers suspected that Cabading was
lurking somewhere in the darkness, with his gun.
Before them loomed the dark house, now so sinister and evil
in their eyes. The upper story that jutted forward, forming the house's
chief facade, bore a curious sign: Dra. Lydia C. Cabading, Lady Physician.
(Apparently, Lydia continuedor was madeto use her maiden name.)
Above the sign was the garland of colored lights that have been put up
for Christmas and had not yet been removed. It was an ice-cold night,
the dark of the moon, but the two brothers shivered not from the wind
blowing down the lonely murky street but from pure horror of the house
that had so fatally thrust itself into their lives.
But the wind remembered when the sighs it heard here were
only the sighing of the ripe grain, when the cries it heard were only the
crying of birds nesting in the reeds, for all these new suburbs in Makati
used to be grassland, riceland, marshland, or pastoral solitudes where
few cared to go, until the big city spilled hither, replacing the uprooted
reeds with split-levels, pushing noisy little streets into the heart of the
solitude, and collecting here from all over the country the uprooted souls
that now moan or giggle where once the carabao wallowed and the frogs
croaked day and night. In very new suburbs, one feels human sorrow to
be a grass intrusion on the labors of nature. Even barely two years ago,
the talahib still rose man-high on the plot of ground on Zapote Street
where now stands the relic of an ambiguous love.
As the Quitangon brothers shivered in the darkness, a police van
arrived and unloaded quite a large contingent of policemen. The
Quitangons warned them that Cabading had a submachinegun. The
policemen crawled toward the front gate and almost jumped when a
young girl came running across the yard, shaking with terror and

shrieking gibberish. She was one of the maids. She and her companion
and the foster son had fled from the house when they heard the shooting
and had been hiding in the yard. It was they who had closed the front gate.
A policeman volunteered to enter the house through the back
door; Gene said he would try the front one. He peered in at a window
and could detect no one in the sala. He slipped a hand inside, opened
the front door and entered, just as the policeman came in from the
kitchen. As they crept up the stairs they heard a moaning in Lydia's room.
They tried the door but it was blocked from inside. "Push it, push it,"
wailed a woman's voice. The policeman pushed the door hard and what
was blocking it gave. He groped for the switch and turned on the light.
As they entered, he and Gene shuddered at what they saw.
The entire room was spattered with blood. On the floor,
blocking the door, lay Mrs. Cabading. She had been shot in the chest
and stomach but was still alive. The policeman tried to get a statement
from her but all she could say was: "My hand, my handit hurts!" She
was lying across the legs of her daughter, who lay on top of her
husband's body. Lydia was still clutching an armful of clothes; Leonardo
was holding a clothes hanger. He had been shot in the breast; she, in the
heart. They had died instantly, together.
Sprawled face up on his daughter's bed, his mouth agape and his
eyes bulging open as though still staring in horror and the bright blood
splashed on his face lay Pablo Cabading.
"Oh, I cursed him!" cries Eugenio Quitangon with passion. "Oh, I
cursed him as he lay there dead, God forgive me! Yes, I cursed that dead
man there on that bed, for I had wanted to find him alive!"
From the position of the bodies and from Mrs. Cabading's
statements later at the hospital, it appears that Cabading shot Lydia while
she was shielding her husband, and Mrs. Cabading when she tried to
shield Lydia. Then he turned the gun on himself, and it's an indication of
the man's uncommon strength and power that, after the first shot, through
the right side of the head, which must have been mortal enough, he
seems to have been able, as his hands dropped to his breast, to fire at
himself a second time. The violent spasm of agony must have sent the
guna .45 caliber pistolflying from his hand. It was found at the foot
of the bed, near Mrs. Cabading's feet.
The drama of the jealous father had ended at about half-past six
in the evening, Tuesday last week.
The next day, hurrying commuters slowed down and a whispering
crowd gathered before 1074 Zapote Street, to watch the police and the

reporters going through the pretty little house that Pablo Cabading built
for his Lydia.