Its rooms had no air-conditioning and no screens, a testimony to its age, and the plumbing, which had been a wonder in the late forties, was challenged by the years, though there was still water running in the pipes. A full bucket was in the shower stall, and a tabo with which to bathe. If I had waited until morning, I could have asked Beng to heat water, which usually she did in a large kettle that she added to the bucket, but the idea of dousing myself with cold water was actually appealing.

Tita Rosa was the eldest survivor of my mother’s siblings. Her role in the family was that of matriarch, a self-created title that she’d claimed as young woman and held for over sixty years. She was now ninety. Shortly after the end of the Second World War, my aunt had married a man who had been a friend of her father’s, one of the old Konyos, or Spaniards, whose money had survived. At the time of their wedding, Tita Rosa was seventeen and Tito Iñigo thirty years her senior. Tito Iñigo had died in the eighties, but I remembered him well. He had a narrow face and a long, hooked Spanish nose. His expression had always been composed in a sort of regal withdrawal, but he had loved low Filipino culture: bad TV, junky food. Tito Iñigo had often traveled to the province for cockfighting, boxing matches, local fiestas with native dancing­—­things that people in Manila disdained. He had been loved by the peasants who worked his lands, where rice and peanuts were grown, and at his funeral, bus after bus had pulled up outside the church, disgorging what seemed to be the entire village of San Isidro. That day it had felt to me that we were burying not only my uncle but also an era of Philippine life that had been lost with land reform and the rise of the city.