Romancing a ‘Bahay na bato’

(ABOVE) the house before demolition. PHOTO BEFORE DEMOLITION BY GOOGLE STREET VIEW

Days before Christmas in 1915, then Chief Justice Cayetano Arellano penned a decision involving a land ownership issue between two families in the central Luzon town of Baliuag, in the province of Bulacan.

That issue involved two parcels of land in the barrio of Balanti (today’s Santa Barbara) owned by an old maid named Leoncia Javier and the future buyers of the lots, Ana Ponce Ignacio and her husband Tomas Lim-Ungco.

In a will by Javier, executed in 1882, she bequeathed the lots to her grandnieces Esperanza, Maxima and Emilia through their father, a certain Alejo Javier, who sold the former to the said couple at the cost of P500 in 1884.

Two years after, another deed of sale for the same lots for P1150 was executed between the couple and Javier’s grandnieces but Maxima and the sons of Emilia (deceased) filed a case in 1911 against Ponce and her new husband, Prudencio Binuya, seeking to recover the parcels of land. This was junked by the Bulacan Court of First Instance.

The case was appealed but it was also junked by the Supreme Court in 1915.

A relative of writer and propagandist Mariano Ponce, Doña Ana, as she was called, lived in a house, a bahay na bato located in a spacious property at the corner of A. Luna (now Vergel de Dios) and Balagtas streets in Baliuag.

Obviously a member of the town’s principalia, Doña Ana’s 19th century house was big and typical of the town’s Spanish-era homes which are longitudinal.

As with other bahay na bato elsewhere in the country, it used to have a separate rest room at the back, accessible through an elevated pathway.

The main portal was flanked by pilasters decorated with a pair of carved rosettes.

It has a bare zaguan (passageway from entrance door to the central patio), as it was used as a store room, barrel vaults at the northern end of the zaguan, at least two rooms at the upper level and a spacious sala (living room).

In that house she raised her only child Jovita who would later marry United States serviceman Fruto Capulong of Apalit, Pampanga. They had 12 children.

Starting from the American period, portions of the property were sold to three different families but the house held ground.

Less than five decades ago, it underwent renovations, losing the aesthetic details such as the decorative moldings of the main portal which would later surface as those were used as fillers of a concrete stair.

The house would later face an uncertain future with the problem of foreclosure due to unpaid mortgage as with other old houses in Baliuag.

It and the whole property were eventually sold to a private company which planned to turn it into a call center hub. Even so, the house still stood.

But the passing of its last resident, Irma (Jovita’s daughter) in March of this year became also the last breath of the house, sadly, one of only few surviving Spanish era houses in Baliuag, the town which rivaled Malolos and San Miguel in the number of heritage houses in the province.

The sudden turn of events caught everyone by surprise and in August, the house was bought by an antique shop and subsequently torn down, the salvaged materials of which were to be sold to their new owners.

It’s disheartening, said Edwin Arceo, one of Jovita’s grandsons.

Like other old houses owned by the elite in the town which had their own processional religious images, he said the edifice used to hold the religious image “Ang Paglupaypay ni Jesus.”

This image mounted on a carroza is part of normally more than a hundred floats during the popular yearly Baliuag Holy Week processions.

With the demolition of their ancestral house, Edwin, still in disbelief said, “Nalupaypay kami (we were disheartened)” alluding to the image their family owns.