My relationship with my father was never an easy one.
He was a military man—disciplined, authoritative, steeped in the structures and hierarchies of the Philippine Constabulary. I, on the other hand, grew into a queer life he did not know how to recognize, a political consciousness he did not know how to hold. During my university years, when I joined rallies against government corruption, against US imperialism, he would call me on my first Nokia 5110 as soon as the protests appeared on television. He forbade me from joining them.
And yet. At thirteen or fourteen, I did not yet understand what it meant that he would drive from Lucena City to Manila—three, four hours through traffic—every single Friday, to pick me up from my theatre lighting classes at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and then drive the same three, four hours back. Him on the steering wheel. Me sleeping. The radio filling the silence between us. On one of the rare moments he spoke during those drives, he said something I did not know what to do with at the time: One day, son, because of your work in the arts, you will travel the world and perhaps go to Europe. An odd thing to say out loud, I thought, to a teenager, in the dark, on a highway through four provinces.
He could be talkative when he wanted to be—thousands of dad jokes in his repertoire, inappropriate, boisterous, deployed on strangers without warning, always followed by that laugh, that enormous, room-filling laugh. But somehow, when we were alone together, we could sit through hours of silence. I spent much of my young adulthood not knowing his private life, his side of the family, his hometown. I thought his distance was the distance of the soldier. And perhaps that is one reason I ran as far as Europe—toward archives, toward histories, toward stories that felt distant enough to be safe.
What I did not yet understand was that he, too, had once run.
He grew up in Alcala, Pangasinan, rising before dawn to tend his father’s land before walking to school—a strict farmer who asked everything of the soil and everything of his son. The labor was relentless. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Education, and in 1975 worked as a research assistant at the UP Institute for Plant Breeding in Diliman, developing new mango varieties at the UP Arboretum. But the path that took him furthest from the farm was the Philippine Constabulary. As I was doing my doctoral research years later, I kept encountering the regimental bands of Spanish colonial Philippines—the same musicians who would eventually form the US-established Philippine Constabulary Band. It was one of those fortuitous historical entanglements: Chapter 6 of my book, Sounding Modernities, is about the PC Band from the beginning of the twentieth century. My father would join the Philippine Constabulary half a century later. Several tours of duty followed—including an appointment in Tagkawayan, Quezon, where he would meet the woman who would become my mother. Perhaps becoming a soldier was the only path out of the life he had inherited. Perhaps the uniform was not a choice of ideology but of escape. He ran from his village. I ran from the Philippines. We were, without knowing it, performing the same gesture, a generation apart.
What I had interpreted as authoritarianism in my youth may have been fear. Fear that I might fall back into a cycle he had worked so hard to leave. Fear that I would inherit the hardship he had fled.
When the Philippine Constabulary was dissolved in 1991, he turned toward his training before the uniform: a vocation for teaching. He became the Director of the Regional Police School, Region 4, shaping generations of cadets with the same steadiness that had shaped him. After his early retirement in 1998, he continued as a guest instructor. Many of his former students made a point of reconnecting with him in his later years—a testament, perhaps, to what it means to be taught by someone who chose teaching not as a career but as a calling.
On one of my visits home, I discovered a cabinet where all my IDs and diplomas going back to first grade. Every newspaper clipping that had ever mentioned my name, including the announcement of my acceptance to art school. He had kept all of it. He was the archivist of our family long before I understood what that word meant.
Something shifted between us in 2019, when he visited me in Europe for the first time. Throughout our travel, he never asked for his photo to be taken. I was the one asking him. There is one exception. He stood outside my university office, read the name on the door, and, for the first time, I saw him look at me with unguarded pride. A father’s pride. There he asked me, ‘I want a picture beside your office name plate.’
He loved history. His version of it was shaped by a different era—textbooks memorized as a boy in Alcala. Walking through Prague Castle, he narrated what he remembered from his history classes, calling the country Czechoslovakia, a name the map had long since retired. I did not correct him. I was too busy realizing that I had become a historian too—not despite him, but in some refrain of him. His sense of geography, unaided by Google Map, was sharper than mine will ever be. He always knew where he was.
During the intermission of Carmen at the National Opera in Prague—a performance we watched together—I learned for the first time that it was not his first time seeing it staged. He had seen a production of Bizet’s opera at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1975, with an American woman he was dating at the time. It was one of the rare things I had learned about his private life since our relationship had quietly, slowly begun to open. We were, for a moment, two adult men moving through the world together.
On the morning of his departure, after weeks of traveling together and my first real attempt to show him the life I had built in Europe—a decade of struggles and small victories that I could not always see clearly myself, but that I watched register in his eyes—I woke from a lucid dream. In the dream, I was living in a haunted house. Ghostly faces stretched out from the walls; spirits crossed the doorways and hallways I had grown used to live with. I had reported them to the house manager many times, who was annoyed with me for imagining things. In the dream, my father was visiting. I was preparing him a cup of hot chocolate—his drink, always—and after I handed it to him, I asked whether he had noticed anything in the corridor. He looked at me and said, without hesitation: There are ghosts in your house.
And I woke up.
It took me time to understand what the dream was telling me. That our weeks together had been the first time I felt truly seen by my father—my new home, my Europe, and the ghosts I had learned to live with in it. What my father had come to do, perhaps, was to witness my life. To look around and tell me: I see them. I see what you carry. Because he had known me since before I knew myself.
My first attempt to interview him was during that same visit in 2019. My questions were too direct; his answers were guarded. In 2025, I returned to him with my recorder and a question shaped by more years of thinking through sound: What are the sounds in of your life that you remember?
He began to speak, and opened sonic doors: The crowing of roosters at dawn. The tooting horn announcing pandesal for sale. His father’s bolo chopping coconut fronds. His mother’s pagtatahip that once separated grain and husk into the air in a rhythmic choreography. The neighbor’s horse and carriage returning to the stable at the end of the day. The hum of weapons in a warzone. The tense silence when snipers were near. The lullaby his sister Milagring had sung to her children more than fifty years ago, that he still carried somewhere inside him.
Carrying the same recorder, I traveled to Alcala to find the sounds of his childhood. Some sounds were still there—the crickets that erupt at night when the humidity shifts, the long stretch of road where gravel announces arrival. Others had already disappeared. The pounding of rice with the heavy wooden lusong. The winnowing that once lifted grain and husk into the air like dust. I asked my cousin to perform these acts so I could record them—gestures my father remembered from his childhood, resurrected by the hands of a new generation.
And I told Auntie Milagring how even after fifty years, my father still remembered her lullabies. Without hesitation, she sang them for me.
As I walked through the fields where my father and grandfather had once worked—watching my cousins toil, backs bending, working the land of our ancestors—perhaps I understood why he had rarely returned.
He had always joked, when teased about choosing retirement over promotion, that he would rather die with his hands dirty with soil and chopping wood. And that is almost exactly what he did. He went back to Tagkawayan—the very town where, decades earlier, he had first met my mother—and he planted. Over two thousand mahogany trees. Nearly a hundred mango trees. Several species of orchids, his favorite flower. He spent a lifetime shaping people—cadets, students, a granddaughter, three sons—and in the end, he returned to shaping the land.
His prophecy to me came true. And so did his own.
He encountered his end with his hands dirty with soil and chopping wood, and passed on May 17, 2026, in the company of my mother, Erlinda, the woman he had met in Tagkawayan all those years ago.
He was the archivist of our family. But he was also my archive. And now I am his—because ultimately, the body is the archive. They hold what institutions cannot: the lullabye of a sister, many a life lesson learned, of ghosts we are running away from, the memory of a long drive home in silence.