Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(20)
“Where’s the food?” I said.
“Good morning, darling girl,” Papa said. “How’s my good luck charm doing this morning?”
“Hungry.”
“Hungry? Oh, well, we have no time to be hungry this morning. Today we start our next big project.”
“Our what?”
“Our next big project: Mansion Royale! A Grand Palace!” Papa said, looking around the half-decorated breakfast room and half-ornamented disco hall and waving his arm in one big swoosh, as if presenting a newly knighted squire.
My yaya handed me a roll of pan de sal, sat me in a rattan chair, and brushed my hair. As she brushed the hundred strokes my mother had primarily hired her to do, my yaya explained that Mama and Papa were transforming the mansion into a function hall, a place where the upper-middle class, or as Mama put it—the newly rich—could host weddings, debuts, birthday parties, and banquets. For a fee and a booked date, Yaya said, the public could experience the grand life we supposedly lived. They could dance under our disco ball, waltz under the chandeliers and puzzle of mirrors, and dine while being served by our household staff.
“But this is our house!” I said, crossing my arms while munching on the roll.
“They need many money,” Yaya said in English. “Many money to save house. People want to live like you and your brother, want to see inside house.”
“Why would they want to live like us? Mama and Papa are always fighting, I have no friends, Paolo screams at Mama the way Mama screams at Papa. I don’t get it.”
“Then don’t get. Just eat. Eat.”
That about ended the conversation, and before long, Mama instructed us to leave the main floor and to wait upstairs until “everything’s ready.”
For days, Paolo and I ate our meals in bed and played in our upstairs fort, not allowed to set foot on the main floor and garden. Finally, after nearly a week of eavesdropping on the clinking, clanking, and moving, Paolo and I stepped out of our rooms, fetched by Papa to see the obra maestra they had created below.
“Ta-da!” Papa said, his presenting arm once again spread out like a king’s. “What do you think?”
Paolo and I stood bemused at the foot of the steps, our heads tilting from side to side, as if to inspect something that had been turned upside down.
The jade urns glowed, the marble floors in the ballroom and the terra-cotta tiles in the breakfast room smelled of citrus-scented polish, and the chandeliers sparkled alternately with the tassels—hundreds of tassels—hanging from every bit of architecture and trim. High-top tables lined the perimeter of the ballroom, and where the oval dining table used to be, a rectangular fourteen-seater now welcomed guests with bone china and stemware. Flowers once again adorned consoles and tea tables, perfuming the mansion with the smells of years past: Hawaiian gardenia, jasmine, daphne, bird-of-paradise, and, of course, orchid.
“It’s so . . . so . . . shiny,” we said together.
“We’re already so popular. Our first guests arrive tonight—an engagement party,” Mama said as she leafed through her black leather-bound Filofax. “Then two days from now, a wedding, and then an eighteenth-birthday debut. The next weekend, we have another wedding, then a launch for some nutritional product, then the week after we have my aerobics friend’s fortieth birthday, then another debut with a full cotillion . . .” Mama carried on, flicking the pages of her organizer. She called out words to the air again.
“Cotillion!”
“Etiquette!”
“Debutante!”
“Corsage!”
That night marked the beginning of my nightly lockup with Paolo. He and I remained cooped up upstairs while hundreds of strangers elbowed one another through the main doors.
We spied on the festivities below from the top of the stairs, sometimes scrunching our faces through the handrails to see the ball gowns, tuxes, and traditional barongs making merry on the main floor.
My favorite of the events were the debuts, the eighteenth-birthday balls given to daughters who, Mama said, “were no longer girls, but ladies.” The birthday girl received roses from eighteen suitors and wish candles from eighteen female friends. She walked up and down the red-carpeted main staircase in a ballooning gown frilled with bows and lace, escorted by the suitor she found to be most attractive and suitable for her class and kind. “Prinsesa,” Elma and I called her, charmed by her sashay across the ballroom floor.
Equally admiring and envious, Elma and I sat in the guest room balcony with our sketch pads, drawing the sparkling scenes that interrupted our home life. I drew each princess, paying attention to every detail—from the width of a pleat and the curlicue of a ruffle, to the height of her coiffed hair and the point of her kitten-heel shoe. But I drew the tassels hanging around the house and surrounding the princess with the most effort, drafting and then erasing, drafting and then erasing, until I got every golden strand right.
“No, Elma. This strand flicks to the right, that braid swings to the left. The ones hanging in the disco room swish with the air blowing from the big fan. See?” I held up my stolen tassel to show Elma how the golden adornments swung.
Some nights, the parties lasted until daybreak, which meant that if Paolo and I pretended to sleep long and believably enough, we could dress ourselves in our Sunday fashions and sneak downstairs and mingle. Paolo zipped through the crowd to the turntables, asking the DJ if he could teach him to spin. I shimmied through the promenade of goblet-toasting guests, finding my way to the ballroom where I used to play princess. At seven years, I was half the height of most guests and couldn’t see around the room filled with parading and waltzing bodies. But then I remembered to look up at the puzzle of mirrors ceiled above. And there it was, my beloved kaleidoscope, a jamboree of boutonnieres, shoulder pads, pastel to neon dresses, and suits as black as the coifs dancing near them: a human carousel. They spun and spun, and I circled with them. For a stolen second, I twirled in my petticoat skirt like the princess I was rumored to be. And at mid-twirl, voilà! It was over.