Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(26)

“Where did she go, Papa?” I said, pulling on his sleeve.

He sat down in Mama’s peacock chair and put me on his lap. “Here, help me. You read the numbers out loud and I turn the dial, okay?”

“Okay,” I said. I rotated the spindle on the Rolodex and picked out a card. I read phone numbers belonging to Mama’s siblings and cousins, to former clients, and to friends she had gone shopping with or had hosted for champagne or tea. With every turn of the dial, I prayed in my heart, God, please find my mama.

Papa began every phone conversation the same way. “Hi, yes, this is Gonzalo Arcilla. Yes, I apologize, I know my wife has aggravated you, but I hope we can set that aside for now. She’s gone missing.” He went on for two hours making calls. He asked whoever was on the other end of the line to pardon my mother for a named or unnamed offense. “Yes, yes, I know. I’m sorry.”

The crickets still chirped outside, and the air-conditioner in the master bedroom continued to hum. Along with the night’s white noise, Papa’s groveling grew tedious. I started to feel sleepy. Still sitting on my father’s lap, I dozed off momentarily, my chin falling to my chest. I snoozed until Papa yelled into the phone and startled me awake.

“Abra! Why the hell would she be on her way to Abra?” he said.

Paolo came out of the master bedroom after hours of rummaging through Mama’s drawers, bags, and bins. “Abra?” he said. “But that’s so far away.”

Papa kept nodding as he received information over the phone. He said, “Mm-hmm. Yes, I know how far away that is. Well, thank God, she’s only halfway there.”

“What’s Abra, Kuya?” I said.

“It’s some place. She’s crazy.”

“Hey, don’t call Mama crazy.”

“She is crazy. Only crazy people leave their families at night and go to faraway places like Abra. I hope she falls off a cliff!”

I gasped. “That’s really mean, Kuya. I hope you fall off a cliff!”

“Excuse me, hold on,” Papa said into the phone. He held his hand over the receiver. “Stop fighting, you two. Band together, remember?”



I fell asleep in Mama’s chair as Papa continued to telephone relatives and friends. Paolo slept in Mama’s bed, the Game Boy resting on his chest after rounds of Tetris. The maids and Elma came back exhausted from searching the neighborhood on foot, and the drivers returned to the mansion without my mother.

A few hours later, we all awoke to dawn’s rose-pink light and to Papa saying, “We’ve been looking for you. Who were you with?”

I had barely stirred to consciousness when Mama stormed into her room, escorted half-asleep Paolo out onto the long hallway, and shut the door. Papa said nothing and skulked about until he made his way to his upstairs habitation, exhausted from patrolling through the night and searching for our mother, who had, at age forty-four, lost children, lost wealth, lost health, and lost her sense of home.

Paolo kicked the master bedroom door many times, and screamed, “You left us! Papa stayed up all night looking for you!” He went into the breakfast room, picked up the Rolodex, walked back with it through the arched entryway, and hurled the spindle-card stack at Mama’s door. The cards scattered onto the floor. He bolted upstairs, screaming, “Next time, don’t come back!”

But I liked that Mama came back. I liked hearing her nervous sniffs again, the jangle of her bracelets, her heels tapping against the floor, her hands whirring through her makeup organizer, and her humming. I turned the doorknob and let myself into her room, where she had undressed and left a trail of shoes and clothes. At the moment I spotted her, she was wrapping herself in her robe and tying its sash around her waist. She untucked her hair from under her collar, slipped behind a curtain, and stood there, forming a mannequin’s figure behind the drapes.

Neither of us moved.

“Were you looking for me, or were you looking for your money?” she said, facing the window.

“Both,” I whispered. “Where did you go, Mama? What did you do with my money?”

“Listen, I was going to give you back the cash. Stop whining already,” she said.

“I want to know where you went,” I said, inching forward. “I was scared.”

“Scared? Pfft,” she said in a monotone, listless and low. “You want to know what’s scary? Losing everything is scary. Losing your babies, your money, your connections, your reputation, the people you thought were your friends.”

I inched closer until I was an arm’s length away—to hear her better and to see her. I pulled the curtain away from her, off her back, revealing what had formed next to the window, what had taken the shape and place of the mansion’s matriarch, our chief of staff, our genesis. In the rose-pink light stood a woman five feet in height: a hundred pounds of sheet dress, silk robe, black hair, and the chin-up, jaw-jutted-out look of a thoroughbred. She had her hands on the windowsill, lightly, as if to play the piano. The tips of her toes grazed the baseboard. The tips of her hair came down to greasy points, tousled and unwashed. The tip of her tongue moved between her lips, her muttering inaudible and undecipherable.

I could tell she hadn’t slept much. Her eyes drooped in the corners and the skin under them sagged, her lips were chapped, and her complexion was beige. She kept muttering. The only words I could make out were names: Mara, Tachio, and Mansion Royale. She kept mumbling, until finally, she snapped. “Not the mansion, too! We don’t know how to be anywhere else! Pu?eta!”