strange houses. a blinding yellow bungalow, a bamboo hut that could whistle, a concrete box smelling like a half-shut clothes drawer stuffed with fungused moth balls.
my mother dragged me into them. mostly when she could still dupe me into wearing gabardine shorts to school while the rest of my boy-classmates were already strutting around in their faded glory and bang-bang denims.
this was the first house we moved into. it was a clapboard bungalow bathed in strange yellow. it was not painted at all but even the cracks in the planks were soaked in that strange yellow, that yellow of a morning urine. it was under two pubescent kamachile trees.
mang talyo, our neighbor across had two souped up vehicles. one was red, the other one redder, both lounging in his front yard. we had my blue trike to laze in ours.
this house faced west and when the monsoon rains sneaked upon our town, the V-cut panels in the awnings of the house welcomed sheets of rain to our parlor.
there hardly were any reasons to be affectionate toward this house. during the sweltering months, thick and hairy caterpillars inched into our living quarters. they introduced our family to the stench of the calamine lotion. but it's not these that I remember vividly of this moving. it's the first friend that I admitted, though reluctantly, into my conscious personal story.
first morning, a new house, a room now all my own. I now had to sleep alone. I was gullible enough to believe my mother's latest bed time story that I now was big boy.
he must had been rooted in the same spot throughout the night watching me sleep. there were no incursions in the field of plum morning dew drops mushrooming on the exposed side of the window pane of my new room. his entire length was completely static.
as I gawked as his paler side, his underside, his tongue was unceasingly pounding against his throat. then as I stirred in my bed, he just moved on almost grudgingly, leaving minute flower prints on the dew-drop field and quickly disappeared from the frame of the window.
this was civil, our first meeting. not the next time.
second night, wasted and limp from the rigor of the house transfer.
he was above my bed, his scaly paws magically stuck to the ceiling. but his head, his length, his corpulent tail threatened to fall on me. with only the meagerness of the kerosene lamp aiding my eyes, I saw his hide hideously populated with acne eruptions, pus filled, more ogrish than the papules I had on my face and belly when I had chicken pox.
I spasmed as I imagine him hurtling down on me, his complexion rubbing against mine. his was not unlike that of the ceiling impregnated with mysterious blisters by rainstorms that ravaged our new house. his eyes rolled as in delight over my fright and seemed to drop out from their sockets independent of his head and body. every time he breathed, the white stripes of his body grazed into the greying areas like an overdrawn concertina.
and when he announced his presence with his characteristic call, I shrieked and ran out of the room and was back into the much missed nighttime company of my mother.
my mother dismissed me. a gecko was no more than another of those maligned creatures, as harmless as the ordinary house lizard. in fact, suerte (her word) the house that has one. (I later learned that to have a gecko in a house means a centipede and scorpion free existence.) but no reason, scientific or plain gut, quiets a wildly stirred child.
what if it would fall on me? could I easily remove it from my skin? I saw how it mocked gravity, how much more my terrorized terrain? mama conceded it would be a trifle hard, but a glass of strong vinegar would do the trick. most likely (her word). how reassuring.
but there's that thing devilish of him, his call, I persisted in my arguments. what a silly notion, mama shushed me. it's only a loud wish from a solitary lover for another of its kind so they could start a family of their own and live in silence.
i quited down only after we fetched downstairs a big glass of vinegar which mama placed conspicuously upon the wobbly headboard of her bed. the strong aroma of the vinegar shielded us like an impenetrable mosquito net against a throng of malevolent gnats and other night creatures.
and finally the arrangement of my sleeping alone in the other room was shelved for the night and probably for forever. I then huddled against my mother. her enormous girth prevented my wrapping fully my no-longer-small-but-not-so-big-yet trembling hands around her.
then as we drifted to sleep, mama's snores, so loud yet so plaintive to me, as if longing for someone other than myself to share this bed with her, drowned the gecko's diabolical yet hypnotic and soporific calls. tuk-ko,tuk-ko,tuk-ko.