Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(2)
“A young lady like you should never be out in the sun. Besides, you’re already dark. Too dark. We have to keep you out of the sun or you’ll look like those poor farmers,” my mother would say. This was the same reason I never learned how to ride a bike. But when she wasn’t home and the nannies were glued to the screen watching a telenovela, I walked out to the terrace and let the wind—which carried the little brown birds hovering over the paddy—blow my hair, whisk my skirt up, and sway me.
On the terrace, I heard the ancient church bells of the convent next door, where the nuns prayed the rosary and sang the Hail Mary in unison.
Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with Thee. Blessed art Thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.
Then a full, long, resounding in-unison high contralto: Aaaaaah-mmmehnnn.
Papa adored their singing and rewarded them with regular rations of rice. Their hymns and invocations became my background music; they were the accompaniment to the stages of life in the mansion—the soundtrack to my preschool, grade school, and preteen years. The nuns created for me a holy atmosphere, a sheltering sound where I could abide. Wherever I was, as long as I could hear them, I had somewhere to hide.
My father made his money in the dining hall. He had an office, yes, but that served as storage for typewriters, contracts, blueprints, and ledgers. The real work took place where we ate, where he and his kumpares feasted over coconut crab, lobster, and bouillabaisse. The oval dining table seated at least twelve—where my father made eleven other oil investors and manpower recruiters richer. Not that their houses in Hong Kong, Dubai, and Singapore weren’t large enough. The oil and manpower-recruitment industries were stable and booming. The men were merely bored. So when the Gulf War started, they were all shaken off their thrones. The oval table had no corners for them to hold on to.
“What’s a meal without a drink?” my parents would say. That’s what the bar was for. Not a trolley with an ice bucket, but our own taproom playing Christopher Cross and Spandau Ballet. What my parents lacked in musical knowledge, they made up for in their collection of beer, wine, and Rémy Martin. I never told them, but my brother occasionally stole San Miguel beer from the cooler. I, on the other hand, was always good. I only asked the bartender for Shirley Temples. I drank them on the barstool in my crinoline Marks & Spencer dress, my yaya holding me so I wouldn’t fall. She often gossiped to the bartender about our family. Si Misis nanglalalake, si Ser wala nang pera. The missus cheats on her husband; the mister has no more money. I always heard what she said and, worse, I understood.
Next to the bar were two stairwells. The one on the left took you to the two “extra” upstairs bedrooms. They were called “extra” because the occupants changed as frequently as the monsoon brought rain to the tropics. The first few years, they belonged to my yaya and her sister, Judith. They were our nannies and were head of the house staff—matronas, we called them. When they left, and my parents stopped sleeping in the same bed, my father took over the tucked-away rooms. He used one room for sleeping and the other to store the ruins of his empire: yellowing sheets of contracts, dust-covered plaques, and photographs of him shaking hands with other suits-and-ties.
The stairwell on the right took you downstairs, where the help lived and where I often played. Downstairs was where I learned how to braid hair, how to skip rope, and how to eat balut—a common Southeast Asian street food: a developing duck embryo boiled alive in its shell. Downstairs was a whole other universe—one to which I wished I belonged.
Past the stairwells stood the breakfast room, where my mother seemed most serene and lovely to me. The light coming through the French doors filled the room with a whiteness, a cloud where I could catch and swallow dust sifting through beams. On a daily basis, the servants filled the breakfast room with floral arrangements as high and fragrant as my mother’s hair. At our morning meal, Papa, Paolo, and I sat in white armchairs, while Mama sat in her favorite white rattan peacock chair. The maids stood against the wall in waiting, their clothes smelling like whatever had been tossed into the omelet du jour: onion, garlic, tomatoes, or Papa’s and my favorite, corned beef from a can.
In the center of the house stood the disco, a rectangular marble space accessed from adjacent rooms through arched entryways. After drinks at the bar, my parents took their colleagues and friends into the glass-roofed atrium for a short sway to jazz tunes or a late-night samba or cha-cha. It was in that sparkly mirror-ball-lit room that my brother and I learned to, as he put it, “really get into the music.” I tried to copy his dance moves—his isolations, gyrations, and the running man. I helped him put records on the turntable, pulling out the vinyl from their crisp sleeves.
The master bedroom took up the far corner of the main floor. It was the biggest bedroom in the house, and the only one with a walk-in closet, double vanity, his-and-her toilets, a bidet, a Jacuzzi, a built-in cosmetics organizer, two balconies, and its own well and garden. It had a king-size bed with built-in drawers, a davenport and chaise lounge, a coffee table, and two armchairs. It boasted a large TV equipped with both Betamax and VHS. The master bedroom had mood lighting and glowed in Louis Comfort Tiffany and capiz shell décor.
Right outside my parents’ room, a door was camouflaged as part of the wall. This secret entrance led to the basement, which was my mother’s closet. The basement housed her most prized possessions, her shopping compulsion and rituals: her shoes, jewelry, purses, and clothes. It was a private fashion exhibit containing as many stilettos as former First Lady Imelda Marcos’s palace held. For a while, this was my favorite part of the house. It was a girl’s playland. There I tried on my mother’s Dior heels, twirled in her petticoat skirt, and played little brown Audrey Hepburn in her little black dress.