In Silay, ‘the woman who never spoke again’ inspires artists to tell her tale
In the sleepy town of Silay, Negros Occidental, a white neoclassical house stands; its tall pillars and wide porch exuding the unsettling luxury of American plantation homes. As a child, artist Moreen Austria would bike past this house, which was just two blocks from where she lived. Dried plants once covered its facade. And, once in a blue moon, a woman would come out.
She had long white hair, and always wore black. Sometimes, Austria would see her in church, on a wheelchair. The woman rarely spoke. She never smiled.
“I was mystified,” says Austria. “Who is that lady?”
After the woman died, Austria read a blog entry published in 2012, where a Silaynon blogger tells a story “talked about in whispers by our old folks.”
A woman fell in love with a man she was forbidden to marry. Her parents were affluent, and the man—a dentistry student—was not as rich as them. The woman eventually locked herself in her room—exchanging letters with the man through her best friend. They made a vow to wait for one another.
The man ended up falling in love with her best friend. The two got married, bore children, and—tragically—lived right across the street from the woman. Legend has it that she could watch the man she loved building this new life from her balcony—the life she could have had. “It’s no wonder that this poor lady lost most of her rational mind,” writes the blogger. She died at 96. She left behind hundreds of notebooks, allegedly, where she wrote down her life story again and again, fearing it would fade and disappear.
There are many versions of this story, the blogger admits, but this was her family’s version of “the woman who never spoke again.”
This is the legend of Adela Locsin Ledesma: The lady of the mansion. The recluse. Born in 1914, she was the granddaughter of the richest man in town, Don Jose “Pepe” Del Rosario Ledesma. Adela grew up in the glory days of Negros Occidental’s sugar industry. While sakadas labored in fields for meager to no pay, sugar barons built grand bahay na bato homes. They adorned them with Amorsolo-esque portraits and furniture shipped from Europe. They threw lavish parties. In one wedding, where the groom was a Ledesma, a fountain reportedly flowed with champagne.
An only child, Adela became the object upon whom her family projected this spectacle of royalty. At home, she donned glamorous Filipiniana gowns, even when they had no guests. “They would make her a mannequin,” says her relative next door, Solomon Locsin. “This is a typical Silay lady, prim and proper.” She was obedient, mostly, “because it was convenient to be obedient.”
But what intrigued local townsfolk was her decision to shut herself from the outside world. Did she really go crazy, like the blogger suggested? Or was this, like Austria now believes, her own quiet form of rebellion?
For the past few years, Adela’s enigma has compelled artists to imagine.
Austria asked her aunts about Adela, and learned that they, too, would see her when they were children. “Mom, si White Lady!” her aunts would say whenever they saw Adela standing at her balcony. She always wore her iconic terno dresses. “For me, the dresses were oh-so-romantic,” says Austria. They inspired her to create metal sculptures, transforming these typically soft and delicate dresses into a cold, hard form.
In 2017, she used these sculptures as part of the set design of a contemporary ballet she produced, De-ling. Dark and whimsical, the ballet fictionalized the life of Adela, dramatizing themes of love and betrayal. A local dance company performed the ballet at the University of St. La Salle, Bacolod City. By the time it ended, students were in tears.
There is a deeper layer to Austria’s metal sculptures. In one, she replaced the terno’s distinct butterfly-sleeve silhouette with that of a ribcage —evoking the feeling of being caged. In another, barbed wires line the sculpture. Austria alludes to the rough, uncomfortable garment that Catholic penitents wear to punish themselves—the hairshirt. “Silence,” she says, “is the hairshirt of the soul.” In the ballet, there were moments when Adela’s character would scream, but no sound would come out.
Austria knows the feeling of growing up in Silay’s small and strict Catholic community all too well. “Everything na ginagawa mo, sinasabi nila. Your actions mirror your family. So you can never be free to be yourself,” she says. The pressure doubles when you are a woman.
She created the ballet to say: this is what she went through. And it is what her mom and aunts went through, too. “When you’re not allowed a lot of choices, what do you do?” She sees Adela’s seclusion as her choice—as how a woman of her time coped. “Bakit?” she asks, her voice lowering.
“There are many ways to write a woman in history,” AK Ocol wrote in an artist statement. Ocol partook in an artist residency called LARGA, which Solomon Locsin founded in 2019. It was based in Silay, and artists would live on the street just across Adela’s home.
While founded by Locsin, the LARGA Residency was curated and facilitated by artist Ginoe, who selected and worked closely with the artists of the residency. Ginoe was working under Sachet Projects, the artist’s curatorial initiative.
In Ocol’s work “Taxonomy, How to Write a Woman,” paper cutouts are pinned to a panel, its surface chipped and cracked. The papers contain handwritten texts. During her time at LARGA, Ocol listened to different accounts of Adela and wrote them down, mirroring how Adela obsessively wrote her story. Yet, rather than a neat, single narrative that endlessly repeats, the work visualizes memory’s true nature: scattered shards and missing parts, never quite whole.
Artist Jel Suarez was also a resident at LARGA. She grew curious about Adela’s extensive perfume collection. If it’s true that Adela secluded herself from the world, Suarez thought, what was the point of keeping all this perfume?
“Through smell,” says Suarez, “maalala pa rin.” The perfume was perhaps a portal to memories of the life she left behind.
Suarez created a still-life video featuring Adela’s perfume collection, and when she exhibited the work at the end of her residency, she displayed the actual bottles. Audiences in Silay were invited to smell them. The strong, strange scent of old perfume reminded Suarez of her grandmother. Now, it is also tied to her own memory of Adela.
EMMARY, a small production team of local creatives, shot their film They Never Spoke Again in Adela’s home, which is now a fine dining restaurant. In the film, two former lovers sit together al fresco. Martin, the protagonist, tells Adela’s tragic love story until the sky darkens.
In the book Feast and Famine: Stories of Negros, author Rosario Cruz Lucero writes a short story about a girl named Anabella. Her father was a powerful haciendero, and she lived in the tallest house in Silay. She fell in love with Francisco, a dental student, then shut herself in her house for the rest of her adult life. It was forbidden love, the town concluded.
The end of the story reveals that what she saw from her balcony was not, unlike the local legend, her lover’s home. Rather, it was “the many lives of Silay on side and back alleys, through open windows and doors left ajar”. The priest who drank. The mayor who hid. The leper and the doctor, visiting the same prostitute.
A chest filled with stacks of notebooks sat at the end of her bed. The narrator imagines them containing not only autobiographies — but dozens of novels, short stories, essays, plays and poems.
Anabella didn’t want to marry. She had the perfect view of Silay’s strange, secret lives—so instead, she wrote ferociously.
This story is plain fiction, but it is the one I wish were true.