Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(15)

“Oh, my Benny, it looks like you’re ready to go to school,” her father said.

“Yes, Papá, I want to go to school like my big brothers and big sister,” young Estrella said.

“Okay, my Benny, I will take you to school and you will show me how smart you are.”

Little mestiza Benny sat in her sister Lupita’s class for an afternoon and wrote her name and sang songs and learned one-plus-one and two-plus-two. She raised her hand to ask questions and clarify points, sometimes contesting the teacher. She named all the rural towns and political districts of La Union and introduced herself to each first grader, shaking their hands and presenting herself as “Estrella, also called Benny, daughter of the longest-serving mayor of Rozal.”

By the end of the day, she had earned the teacher’s favor and a front-row seat in class. She had also earned the envy of her sister, who lagged behind her for years to come. From the first grade through her father’s death in 1981, the year Paolo was born, Mama sat in the center of a world corrupted by politics, a world built on rice and tobacco farmers’ backs, and a world made to bleed purple by several People’s Revolutions.

By the time Mama had finished retelling tales from her childhood, tears had formed watermarks on some of the pictures. She pulled her knees into her chest and buried her face in them. First, she let out a sniff. Then let out a howl from her hollow womb. She sobbed, her shoulders quaking like they did the night of my third birthday, the night Tachio was born and immediately died. The bed shook with her, and the vibrations traveled up my back and neck. I was reminded of how she collapsed into the shaft of moonlight on the floor, wailing and trembling for her benumbed child.

“Mama, are you okay?” I said. “Tell me another story from when you were little.”

“What?” she said. “Why are you here? Why aren’t you in school?”

“Mama, I don’t have school.”

“Why not? Why are you here?”

“I’m here because you were telling me stories.”

“Lorna! Lorna! Get her dressed! She’s late for school!”

I scrambled out of her bed as she snapped out of Orchid Mama and into tiger mode.

Papa and Paolo played combat upstairs, while I fought to escape the conflict between Mama’s personalities—Mama the fire versus Mama the flame.

This, too, was war.



Nightfall came. Fatigued from my day of learning about fighting, I requested just one bedtime story from Papa.

“One? It’s like I don’t even know you,” Papa said.

“I’m tired, Papa. I did a lot today,” I said.

“Well, what about a story about the fish market?”

What Papa lacked in pedigree, he made up for in character and tenacity. He was Indio inside and out, the poster child for everything that represented the Filipino plebeian: brown-skinned, flat-nosed, flat-footed from never having owned a decent pair of shoes. No one in his family had ever proved on paper whatever Spanish heritage he or his siblings claimed to have—they were either undocumented or fabricated. But no matter what colors or classes ran through my father’s veins, he knew one thing to be true: he rebelled against the class system.

Papa had always been a great storyteller, a pro at turning any memory from his frugal childhood into an endearing fable. He rarely read picture books to us at bedtime because he had much better tales to tell. My favorite story was about him and his siblings living in the fish market, practically homeless, roughhousing and teasing and egging one another on like any other family.

“We had no money, but we were happy.” Papa began all his stories this way. He sat on the bed between Paolo and me.

“What did you do as a kid? What made you happy?” Paolo and I asked him.

“Oh, the usual. We ran around—barefoot, of course—and we made fun of each other and called each other names. Your titos and titas called me ‘goat’ because I smelled and I didn’t like to bathe,” he said, clipping his nose with his index finger and thumb and pretending to gag.

“Eeeeew. Papa! Kids have to bathe!” Paolo said.

“Well, I told my sisters and brothers, ‘You should thank me for not bathing: I’m leaving more water for you.’”

We laughed.

“Still, Papa, Mama says we should bathe twice a day.”

“Your mama grew up rich. I had nothing.”

For years, Papa and his parents and siblings didn’t have a house. At night, after the fish market closed, they crawled up the market’s scaffolding and squeezed between the ceiling and the roof, where they slept and kept the few things they owned.

“Was it dark? Were you scared?”

“It was dark and tight and hot and full of mosquitoes,” he said. “We slept one skinny body next to the other, no space in between, like sardines in a can. Once you lay down, you couldn’t get up, because there was no room to move.”

“But were you scared?” I asked again, holding on to the edge of my blanket.

“Me? Scared? No way! My siblings and I made the most of what we had.”

My father turned the dark into a place where he could imagine anything. In his mind, he said, they were royals! Papa placed his right hand on his chest and the left hand like a crown on the top of his head. “Royals from the Sultanate! Royals from Great Britain! Royals from the Arabian Desert!”