The room down the hallway

When I was eight years old, my family moved to an old two-story house in the San Beda area of Manila, Philippines. It was crafted in the Spanish style, with a tile roof and a stucco stairway that led from the driveway to the second floor. My father worked for the government and made a decent living, but apparently it was not enough because I remember moving from rental to rental until this house. It could also be that my father never got along with neighbors.

It was a huge house, the kind that a child could happily get lost in. Our widowed landlady lived on the ground floor and operated a store; we lived on the upper floor. There was a spacious living room with a hardwood floor and two large picture windows that looked out onto the other houses. Saturdays, the maids would polish the floor with coconut husk and floor wax until it gleamed. We didn't have any furniture in it, which suited us children just fine. I would lay on the floor next to the window and watch dust motes float in the sunlight. Next to the foyer, there was a room rented out to an Iranian student named Irwan whom my brother, sister and I would tease: "Irwan! Two! Three!"

We occupied the kitchen and the room next to it, both of which lay just past the living room. It was a very interesting sleeping arrangement. My family (my parents and three kids) slept on one mattress on the floor. I can't remember if the maids slept on it, too, but logic says otherwise. I mean, is there a mattress big enough for eight people? I don't know, but I remember all of us sleeping in that room, with a urinal to use in the middle of the night tucked in one corner.

Like I said, very interesting.

Past the kitchen was a hallway which had more bedrooms, most of which were unoccupied during the year or two we lived there. We set up the sewing machine in the first one on the left. Through that bedroom window, I could see the top of a tree and into the dirt, fenced compound of the neighbor whose dog chased and bit my brother. Across from this bedroom, there was the bathroom, with old-fashioned spigots and a tiny window that let in little light.

At the end of the hallway, there was a little room with a door that opened like an accordion.

Now this is where it gets even more interesting.

Someone told us, in that room, a nurse had committed suicide.

I didn't know if that rumor was true, or the product of someone's imagination. But as an eight year old, I believed that with all my heart. When I went down the dimly lit hallway, my eyes were riveted to that door, half-expecting it to be open and then:

A corpse in a nurse's dress would be swinging from a rope at the rafters.

Just thinking about that, these many years later, gives me goose bumps all over again.