A tale of two fathers, 2

Concluded from Monday

A year after my mother died, my father Pablo started looking for a new wife.

Among my father’s officemates at the Budget Commission was Modesto Enriquez, who was married to Trinidad Diaz, both former teachers who would become the owners of, first, the D&E Coffee Shop, and later of the Sulo and Silahis hotels, among other businesses.

Trinidad had a younger sister, Milagros, and Modesto played matchmaker between her and my father. She lived with the Enriquez couple in a split-level cottage on Kamuning Road, Quezon City, where the Delgado Clinic is now. My father courted Milagros there.

My father sometimes took me courting with him. He taught me what to answer when asked the question, “Why do you want your father to marry again?” My answer was to be: “So somebody will take care of us.” Perhaps I fulfilled my role satisfactorily because Milagros agreed to marry my father months later.

So it was that one evening, my father took his new bride home to Malabon. We younger boys took her as our new mother but our only sister, the oldest in our brood, was still loyal to our mother and did not.

So the couple decided to rent an apartment on Lepanto Street in Sampaloc, Manila, at the corner of Azcarraga (now Recto) behind the old Selecta Restaurant and across the street from the University of the East. We children were left with our Lolo Nano in our house in Malabon.

About once a week, my father went home to Malabon and spent the night there. The whole family slept on mats spread on the living room floor, under two big mosquito nets. Our small bedroom was only for keeping mats, pillows, blankets and mosquito nets. When my father spent the night, we children fought for the right to sleep beside him. Almost always, the two youngest boys got to sleep on each side of him. When we woke up in the morning, he would be gone.

I stayed in the Lepanto apartment when I was studying at the University of Santo Tomas on España. The university was within walking distance from the apartment. On weekends I went home to Malabon.

Later, the couple built a house on K-1st street in Kamuning. They had five children of their own, also with only one girl.

My father was a hard worker. He brought home unfinished work from the office along with a hand-operated adding machine, and at night we would be kept awake by the noise of the adding machine.

When Manila was bombed by the Japanese on Dec. 8, 1941, my father was working at the old Intendencia building, now the abandoned hulk beside the building of the Bureau of Immigration, just outside the walls of Intramuros. He was nicked on the scalp by a small piece of shrapnel. When he went to his car parked outside, he saw that it was riddled with shrapnel holes. His efforts to start it were futile. (He and a mechanic went back the next day to fix it, but they found only its burned hulk.)

When my father got home to Malabon that first day of the bombing, his head was bandaged and his shirt was all bloodied.

During the Japanese Occupation, my father and his new family lived on Lepanto and later on Kamuning, while we children lived in Malabon.

Even when he was a Cabinet member, my father still took a bus to his office. He bought a second-hand car with his own money only when President Carlos Garcia told him it did not look good for his Cabinet members to be riding in buses to their offices. When my mother was alive, however, we had a Chevrolet Roundabout with a rumble seat in the back, where the boot was. When we went for a ride, we children fought to ride in this rumble seat.

His next car was a four-door sedan. This was what was burned in the bombing of Manila. His third car, the one he was forced to buy, also second-hand, when he was already a Cabinet member was another four-door sedan.

It was while he was working one evening in his room at the Office of Economic Coordination that he had his first heart attack. He was preparing to go home, but when he stood up he fell back on his chair. He couldn’t get up, his chest felt like it was on fire, and he had difficulty breathing. His staff took him to a hospital. The diagnosis: heart attack.

He was confined at the Veterans Memorial Hospital where he stayed a long time, under an oxygen tent.

I was then working nights at a newspaper (was it The Manila Chronicle or The Evening News?), and when I finished work after midnight, I passed by the hospital to visit him. I usually found my eldest brother and his wife there, keeping watch over him.

When my father was able to leave the hospital and go home to his house in Kamuning, there was much rejoicing in both families.

Pablo Cruz was a fighter. Whenever I visited him in Kamuning, I usually found him exercising with the aid of banisters built especially for him. He was trying to regain his ability to walk. But he had another heart attack and had to go back to the hospital. He was in and out of the hospital many times. His heart had mended and was working fine. It was pneumonia that killed him.