Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(23)
While most of Mama’s prized belongings made it to dry land, some disappeared into the water—the great cleanser. The grown-ups clicked their tongues as they salvaged what they could, hauling pieces—broken or whole—to higher ground, where they thought they’d be safe.
Elma’s father, Manong Bidoy, reported to my father and said, “Some poor people have drowned; some rich people have fled. What should we do, sir?”
Mama and Papa decided to stay put. The flood had already made an island out of us. My family and the help stayed on the main and upstairs floors, sharing space and air in a way we never had before. My family slept in our respective bedrooms, while the household staff was instructed to camp on the ballroom floor. I wanted Elma to sleep in my bed with me, but my yaya reminded me that Elma was dirty and ran around with no shoes—she certainly was not allowed on my linens.
The storm did not stop. It forced us to amuse ourselves indoors for days, weeks, or what Papa called, “these goddamn forty days.” Sometimes the power went out and stayed out for fifteen, twenty, forty, ninety minutes. Sometimes it stayed out for a whole night. The monsoon gave me my first experience of candlelit living, of darkness being larger than our upper-class life.
When morning came, Elma and I played. We found sticks and string to make fishing poles with. We tied the parts together—tight, so the current couldn’t break them. Then we lowered our tools, our simple machines, dangling them down from the terrace to the sea beneath. A slipper, a bicycle tire, a can, a necklace, and a satin ribbon from Mama’s basement closet were our catch of the day. While fishing, Elma and I snagged what Mama called “bottom-feeders”: catfish, flatfish, eel. Elma choked our catch with her thick-skinned hands, ripped it off the hook with no remorse, and held it up to my face and said, “Smell it. That is what fish smells like.”
I gagged, but I giggled. I giggled because I’d done something Mama would never do or approve of, but something Papa was accustomed to. Something he had done as a child. That is what fish smells like. It was the same smell that swarmed through the wet market he grew up in, the pungent, striking stink that said, “Welcome home.”
Elma’s family’s shanty, a square made of cardboard and corrugated tin, soaked in the back lot. It steeped in the earth’s sweat and tears, coloring it brown like a tea bag in hot water. Its bits withered until most of the primitiveness was gone.
“Elma! Your things!” I said, pointing at the deterioration.
“Okay lang,” she said, “I saved the important things. Anything else we own is trash.”
She mounted a chair on a table, climbed up on it, and reached for the gable roof. She pulled out a shoe box—her treasure. In it she’d arranged a Hello Kitty coloring book, a rainbow-colored hairbrush, broken crayons, and her El Shaddai prayer hanky. All but the kerchief I’d gifted her. She said, “Anything I need is right in here.”
Elma and her family let their house erode. As Elma and I watched from the terrace, and her family watched through the breakfast room’s French doors, they hummed to the rhythm of the rain, collectively quelling our panic with the stillness of their Bicolano spirit. And once the entirety of the brown shanty had dissolved in the water, they proceeded with their work as if nothing was lost and the flood hadn’t just consumed their home. Maximo, Elma’s oldest brother and one of our “boys,” fashioned a raft out of rubber tires, plywood, and my old, now-unwanted blow-up whale. He boarded his ship and smiled, then scooped utensils, a TV antenna, neon thermos cups, sunglasses, and Mama’s favorite Paula Abdul workout video out of the water. Typically, he was our trash collector, gardener, and catcher of feral strays. But those “goddamn forty days,” he had no task but to be captain of the sea.
Their mother, Manang Biday, also reveled in the monsoon. On sunny days she washed our clothes and linens by hand, squatted over basins and washboards in the back lot, scrubbing and kneading and wringing and sweating in the hot sun. But during the flood, she worked indoors, turning our guest-room tub into a handmade washing machine. She stood over the tub, stirring laundry into a gray-brown whirlpool with my brother’s kayak paddle. She sang, “Purihin ang Panginoon.” Praise the Lord. She was a queen for a day, praising the king, a queen with a batik head wrap for a crown, a kayak paddle for a scepter, and a toilet for a throne. The dark storm stood as her domain.
My father, on the other hand, drowned in threats of marital annulment, demands for repatriation of our overseas employees, bank accounts closing, ties being severed for some unpaid debt or some uncle’s jealousy or some aunt’s disloyalty.
“Our people are stealing from us,” Mama said. “Pu?eta.” Mama’s favorite curse word, meaning “fuck” in Tagalog, or “hand job” in street Spanish. Pu?eta. Pu?eta. It was the sound she constantly made while it poured and we were stuck on the main and upstairs floors, and the word that cued Papa to leave the room, to walk to the extra bedroom and to lock himself up, mapping out business plans and investment proposals and repatriation petitions until he became fatigued enough to sleep. He made calls to Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, but his efforts proved futile. I listened with my hands cupped to his door and my ear leaning against them, eavesdropping, then flinching every time he banged the receiver against the phone base.
“Hello. Hello?” he said, dialing again after being hung up on. “Please don’t hang up this time. My name is Gonzalo Arcilla of Starlite Oil and the FossilFil Project. I’m looking for my men . . . Hello? Putang ina!”