Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(27)
Her words and tone jolted me out of sadness and sympathy, and into fear. I let go of the curtain, which drifted for a moment in the air and landed on her back. The cloth confined her shakes, her mutters, her cries, and disguised her as part of the house.
She was part of the house. Her weeping was the mansion’s very voice.
Desert of His Mind
1979
There sat on Papa’s nightstand a photograph of him from before I was born. In the picture, he stood smiling next to a mustached man wearing what I called a long white dress. Papa was outfitted in linen and denim, and his hair was big, dry, and dusty. The getup and the do alone told me that the photograph was from a different time. And the hills of sand in both foreground and background stated that the photograph was from a different world.
The picture prompted stories.
They began, “I was a gardener, not a rescuer, the first time I packed my suitcases for the desert, the first time dry heat filled my nostrils with sand.”
It was seven years short of the People’s Revolution against Ferdinand Marcos and seven years before my existence. Papa hadn’t met Mama yet, but was supporting his first wife and their two teenage children. He set off for Saudi Arabia, not hoping to build a fortune, but just to get by, to feed mouths during the peak of martial law—an era defined by the amassing of wealth by the Marcos family, the eradication of freedom of the press, and thousands of unexplained arrests, detentions, and executions without trial. Papa’s own brother and childhood friends, activists, and students of history and the law protested and were many times tortured by the armed forces.
Papa also left to escape the scandal his then-wife had gotten into. She had been sleeping with Papa’s closest confidante in Nueva Ecija, a logging town. The friend, the traitor, had been keeping young housewives entertained in their village bungalows while the husbands hiked up the mountain for work. One day, instead of chopping down a tree, one of the village husbands took his bolo knife and hacked the town lover to death. Every man with a wife became suspect. Shamed for being a cuckold and swarmed by gossip about a crime, Papa fled the mountains and forest, his natural habitat. At first, he wanted distance, not fortune nor heroism nor acclaim.
He left his wife and two teenage children, a girl and a boy, whom he would send money to for a decade. Papa did not see his first daughter and son until after I was born. He invited them to my birthday parties, including the one when I stole licks of icing from the cake, when the night robbed us of our baby brother.
Papa’s children had grown up with barely anything, but they made it to Metro Manila, and both graduated from university, married, and became entrepreneurs. When my parents first moved into the mansion, Mama gave them permission to visit, but soon after the Gulf War, per Mama’s judgment, they were once again estranged.
At the time, Papa was an agricultural engineer with a knack for entrepreneurship and for leading men. He had just spent nearly a decade as a logger in the mountains of the Sierra Madre. Just six days after Papa hiked down the cordillera, a man—a lawyer, a genie, an adviser to the prince—found him filling out forms at a recruitment agency in Manila. Reading the transcript from over Papa’s shoulder, the man in a thawb—an ankle-length, white robe-like garment—and a red-and-white-checked headdress offered Papa what the man called “a special job.”
“My name is Ahmed Al-Ajmi,” the man said. “Can you help me? I’m under time pressure for a special project.”
“Sir?”
“You know about plants and trees, yes?”
“Yes, sir. I am a logger. I just came down from working on the Sierra Madre.”
“Good, good. You know about people, yes?”
“I lead a group of men on the sierra, sir.”
“Good, good. So you can help me, yes, Mohandes?”
“Sir?”
“Mohandes. Engineer, builder, fixer.”
“I see. Where and when, sir?”
“We leave for the Royal Kingdom of Saudi Arabia tomorrow, Mohandes.”
“Tomorrow, sir?”
“Yes, I am under time pressure, you see. Tomorrow, yes, Mohandes?”
“Will I have time to pack, sir? What should I bring?”
“Nothing, Mohandes. Everything will be provided. Everything.”
The next day, Papa arrived in Saudi Arabia by jet, where Ahmed Al-Ajmi welcomed him with a handshake and a kiss on the cheek. They were now close friends. Al-Ajmi asked about his plane ride, his children, and his health, but never the topic of wives. He led Papa to a 1979 Land Rover, which drove through dust lands for hours, through desert and more desert, past ancient Riyadh mud-house relics and a souk—a market where animals, imported produce, and spices were traded by bargaining. It was while driving past this souk that Papa first understood man-woman relations in the Middle East. He saw men purchasing goats and sheep, dragging the mammals by their bound legs, and throwing them into the back seat of a luxury American or European car, crammed next to one or two or three wives. The wives wore coverings from temple to toe, and never looked their husbands or other men (including Papa) in the eye. Papa became certain that he no longer was in Nueva Ecija or Manila.
At a stop, Al-Ajmi gestured for Papa to exit the vehicle, to which Papa reacted with a smile and a quick unbuckling of his seat belt, as he had needed to use the bathroom since landing. As Papa walked around the vehicle in search of a spot where he could relieve himself, the royal adviser beckoned Papa to stand with him on a sand hill.