Paula and Candida Marasigan

Sisters Paula and Candida Marasigan maintain the increasingly dilapidated family home where they still reside, even though well into middle age, with their ailing father. Don Lorenzo Marasigan was once a renowned painter, and he somewhat recently completed a new portrait that he refuses to sell or show in galleries, instead leaving it under Paula and Candida's control. The sisters are deeply aligned with their father's moral and ethical stance on materialism, exacerbated by the tensions between the proletariat and bourgeoisie in the rapidly transforming Philippines. However, though the sisters are devoted to their father and to a more traditional way of life rooted in Spanish colonial Filipino history, they have suffered great humiliations for not adapting or making more of their life, in a financial and social sense, like their older brother and sister, Manolo and Pepang, have. Ultimately, though tensions mount between the...