Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(21)
“What are you doing here?” Yaya said as she hoisted me out of the ballroom. “Naku! Your mama will be mad. Come on, before we get caught!”
Mama had an industrial kitchen built in the back lot, pushing the boundaries of Elma’s family’s shack into a tighter squeeze of space. Manang Biday and her children’s living space, as they understood, now extended into the restaurant-size kitchen, which meant that now they were not only to wash our clothes, mop our floors, and trim our grass. They were to chop vegetables, butcher meat, rind lemons, and peel Saba bananas as well. Mama, of course, did not leave all cooking operations for Mansion Royale to Manang Biday’s ingenuity and ability to adapt. She hired a chef: Sid, a dark-skinned plump man with a mole on the cleft of his chin, who used to cook on luxury liners.
The maids loved Sid. He talked about his travels to Qatar, to Indonesia, and once, to Alaska. He knew how to make delicacies from elsewhere: couscous and tabbouleh from the Mediterranean, croque-madame from France. He sang while stirring, jived while he julienned. He said, “It’s not important! I’m here now—to serve you lovely ladies,” every time the maids asked why he stopped working on ships. The maids quickly forgot the question, smitten by his cultured ways.
Apart from cooking, Sid also trained the waitstaff. He showed them how to make swans and rosettes out of napkins, and how to pintuck a tablecloth into a drape of pleats and diamonds. Unfortunately, Papa said, training the staff wasn’t Sid’s strong suit. The napkins he and the maids folded often slumped like sloths, or coiled, not like roses, but snails. The pintucks looked more like a wrinkled curtain than a cascade of precisely angled geometric shapes. Papa had to hire someone who had the skills of a ma?tre d’h?tel—Lancho.
Lancho stood straight all the time. His body was erect as one flat ironing board from head to foot, not one joint bent from knuckles to toes. His black serving tux stretched from one bony shoulder to the other, making Sid’s white chef suit look like a sad case of a rice sack. Lancho set tables with the help of a meter stick, and not only folded napkins but also ironed them. He walked around with a clipboard, always smiling but never showing his teeth. I never heard his voice because he only ever spoke to Mama and Papa, and only by whispering to them over their shoulders. Mama and Papa always responded with a nod, or “Well, of course.”
Sid, on the other hand, half-snorted most of his sentences while chewing on a toothpick. Paolo and I found the two hired men funny. One reminded us of a Siamese cat, and the other, a pug. They kept us entertained like the pets Paolo and I had always wanted.
“It’s still not enough,” Papa said, as he tsk-tsked over the ledger.
“What do you mean, not enough?” Mama said, ripping the ledger out of Papa’s hands. “This is impossible.”
The upkeep of the mansion and the overhead for the function hall, Papa explained, depleted much of the cash flow. “The cost of lighting up and air-conditioning the house alone is killing us,” he said. “We have to expand.”
For another week, Mama and her decorator instructed the help to repaint, repolish, and move furniture. The male servants emptied the master bedroom of personal items, transferring jewels, cosmetic kits, neckties, and robes to the basement. Without choice, but also without much hesitation, Mama and Papa made the matrimonial suite accessible to the public. The public, however, found it peculiar to be spending the night in my parents’ bed. Mansion Royale: A Grand Palace garnered little bed-and-breakfast type of attention, and the only other way to make an income off the master bedroom was to turn it into a film set.
“Lights! Camera! Akkkk-syon!” I heard some man yell into a large cardboard cone. As soon as the baseball-capped man yelled his three words, the mansion—strangers, staff, and residents alike—quieted and froze. Then a mustached man would break the silence with a “Honey, I’m sorry” or an “Anak ng puta!” Then we would hear moaning, or sometimes moaning, then screaming, then moaning, and after a minute or so of sheets rustling, “Cut!” the man with the cone would yell.
“What are they doing, Yaya?” I said, scrunching my face through the handrails on the steps.
“Make teleserye. My show. My peyborit show,” she said of the production, which was called Ana Luna, Mara Clara, Clara Ana, Ana Clara, or some other combination of those names.
“So the man and the woman are just pretending to sleep and play in Mama and Papa’s bed?”
“Ay naku! Shh! No more questions. Makulit.”
Cameras, costumes, big lights, small lights, fake guns, microphones, reflectors, extension cords, tripods, and scripts trailed our floors and took over what used to be a space for playing. Our kitchen help made chafing dish after chafing dish of food for the cast and crew, fashioning a catering service out of the back-lot kitchen. The maids still in our employ relished lunch and coffee breaks, as they had the opportunity of serving and coming close to a movie or teleserye celebrity. Some members of the household staff were lucky enough to be chosen as extras: the drivers playing themselves in big-screen productions, driving the don or do?a up or down the driveway.
Daytime brought in strangers with cameras, large microphones, and cardboard cones, while sundown marked the opening of wrought-iron gates to strangers paying to party. I heard one of the crew say to Mama and Papa, “What a majestic place, talaga. Must be magical living here, diba?”