Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(22)
Mornings and afternoons mimicked elaborate breakfasts with Mama, although without the softness and stillness I associated with those early moments of the day. Dusk until dawn resembled my third birthday party—the sparkling of champagne glass towers, the plushness of couture gowns and red carpets—but without the quiet ending of Tachio’s death.
Some nights Paolo sat with me and Elma on the balcony, all three of us ducked behind the rail, to watch the dancing and parading and champagne-glass toasting taking place in the garden. Our stalking from our would-be tower made us privy to what was unseen below: a truck piled high with chafing dishes, glassware, and décor, parked to the left of the wrought-iron gates, and Lancho and Sid hauling rice sacks of goods and siphoning the last of my parents’ capital.
I twiddled with my tassel while viewing the spectacular show that was Mansion Royale. The more I fidgeted with the golden tuft, the more it came undone. Braids untwisted, threads thinned out. Soon the tassel was merely a fray—a fringe no longer gilded, an unhemmed bunch of loose thread.
With Our Lady looking over the festivities and our dead baby brother lying underfoot, strangers lived what they thought were our lives—ball gowns, boutonnieres, scenes, and sights; a mansion bedazzled, bewildering, but a dream.
Forty Days
1994
Papa sat with me and Elma at the top of the main staircase, the three of us looking out at the haze of gray rolling in as frogs hopped on and off the steps while bloating their throats. The Bermuda grass in the garden undulated and swayed to the amphibians’ croaking, while the maya birds took shelter in the gables.
Elma and I had been playing jacks that morning, bouncing the rubber ball and swiping plastic asterisks off the marble floor. Papa joined us, sipping his morning coffee, singing “You Are My Sunshine,” and at times interrupting our play by cupping his hand over the ball, catching it, bringing it to his mouth, and pretending to swallow it whole. Elma and I laughed each time, and then begged for him to give us back our toy.
“If you tell me a joke, you can have your ball back,” he said.
“Oh, me! Me! I have one!” Elma and I both said, raising our hands. We told jokes until thunder made an interruption.
And then it came: that sensation of a lick on the back of the ear, dampness on the brow, and eyes glossed and eyelids heavy with dew. Papa’s metallic-framed glasses fogged up, the polished jade urns sweated, clamminess swarmed in my shirt and all around.
The storm announced itself again with thunder. And with it, flickers of light touched the ground. A wind rushed toward us from beyond the mansion’s stone walls and over the green garden, and cycloned up the steps and to the landing. My plastic asterisks and rubber ball whisked off the marble floor, and away they went toward the storm, bloop-bloop-bloop down each step.
The noxious Philippine heat gave way. The earth laid its plains flat and ready for the pouring of rain, the watering of crops, and the quenching of thirst. The pond and rice paddy next door swelled up, and the farmer and his sons cried out—so loud that we in the mansion could hear them from the other side of the stone wall—“Salamat sa Diyos!” Thanks be to God. They rain-danced in their rolled-up jeans and cotton camisetas, welcoming Mother Nature’s gift from above. The nuns hauled potted plants and chairs on rickshaws into the convent and pulled shut their holy doors. The plants and trees once again had something to drink. The mammals of the land and the birds of the air could cool down. The frogs puffed up their throats as if to exclaim, Hallelujah!
Papa, on the other hand, shook his head. “We’ve needed this rain, but this’ll be more than what we need. Elma, find your mother and brother. Tell them to pack up.”
Elma found her mother and brother, and along with a few of the maids they rescued Mama’s clothes, shoes, and accessories from the basement closet—whatever hadn’t been sold to a friend or auctioned off at an off-site estate sale. They bagged jewelry boxes, Hermès bags, and dozens of pairs of Christian Dior and Salvatore Ferragamo stilettos, espadrilles, ankle boots, and kitten heels. Yaya and Manang Biday unhooked dozens of hangers holding blazers, dresses, and puff-sleeved blouses. They threw them into wicker hampers and suitcases, and lugged them to the main floor with the might that belonged only to the low-class laborer.
Papa kept grinding his teeth and clenching his jaw. He said under his breath, “Good god, no. This is a Pacific rain—the kind that drowns all things.”
I hugged his leg and rested my weight on his side. Together we watched as land and sky stared at each other, as land and sky became hard to tell apart. Each reflected the water hole that it faced. The drips kept coming, faster and harder each time, as the water found all the mansion’s cracks and creases, and spilled and sloshed its way throughout and through-in. The water came from all sides, first dashing through the back-lot kitchen, taking down with it stacks of plates, chafing dishes, table linens, goblets, champagne flutes, silver trays, pots, and pans. Then it circled in closer and closer, until the entire downstairs—the garden, the driveway, the maids’ quarters, the parking lot and back lot, the gym, and Mama’s basement closet—was submerged. Waves of brownish-white froth thrashed from bank to bank, from one side of our thirty-million-peso fort to the other. A ring of foam wrapped itself around our tropical manor, warning: Two and a half meters of water. Sink or swim.
Papa paced back and forth while saying, “This is not happening. We’re already drowning.”