Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(29)
Nevertheless, he pushed through with plans: leveled the rolling hills of sand with diggers and bulldozers, built a foundation with a cork-and-wood subfloor tilted at forty-five degrees for gravity-led irrigation, dug a well, and devised a cooling and misting system out of insulated pipes—a system that recycled the little amount of water they had. He imported nutrient-rich soil from the Philippines and moisture-retaining peat moss from Holland, and sprinkled them onto a kilometer-wide square, and fashioned panels of glass around the new earth: a prism that collected light and a tank that bottled up moisture—a flower and vegetable garden in the middle of the Arabian Desert, the expanse known to have scorched throats, charred bones, and swallowed up creeping and crawling creatures.
The greenhouse had two primary purposes: first, to stand and gleam under the sun, for all men and wives to see just how majestic, how powerful, how wealthy Al-Ajmi’s superiors were; and, second, to produce the coolest, most refreshing of trellised vines—cucumber.
“The Americans, they put the cucumber on their eyes to cool them. And they pickle them and eat them in the summertime,” Al-Ajmi said. “We want cucumbers here, Mohandes. We are tired of importing these small, refreshing squashes. We want to wow the world, my friend. Just imagine, cucumbers growing in the desert.”
Papa’s commitment to his crops became a devotion. He played priest, an intermediary between the celestial and the vegetal, begging God to give just enough sun and just enough water, and whispering to the plants, “Hush. Drink. Feed. Grow. Hush.” He instructed his men to be like parishioners, daily attending what could have been Mass—a holy sacrifice of till, tears, and sweat; a series of sacraments: the mulching of soil, the deep watering of roots, the dressing with compost, the trimming of weeds, the fervent supplication for seeds to fall on good soil, and the veiling of crops from the high sun. Each sixty-four-day cycle culminated with a Eucharistic rite, a celebration of the yield, a breaking—not of bread—but of cool, crunchy Holland Hothouse bitter-free cucumber, announcing, “Hallelujah! The harvest is here!”
At night, when the Egyptians, Pakistanis, and Arabs left for their tents, Papa and his men from the cordillera circled around the fire, wrapped in sunset-colored blankets woven by the Bedouins. Each shared a story of survival or confessed a sin: one man escaped from prison, another escaped a town fire. Papa admitted to having missed his family, but declared praises to God for having brought him out of Nueva Ecija, and away from his childhood spent half on the street and half in the fish market. He talked about his two children and about starting over again. He mentioned dreams of a new chapter in Manila, in the big city, possibly with a new woman, an educated, sophisticated one, and building a life—an empire—so very non-provincial, so worldly, so classy, so metropolitan, so sparkling, so divine.
Papa and his men toasted tin cups—an amen to a brother—and let moonlight reflect on their dust-covered, tear-filled eyes. At each day’s end, they circled together, orbiting a fire that kept them warm and scared off creatures of the dark. The fire became like Moses’s burning bush, a beckoning toward rest and a calling to mission. Their nightly fireside circle became church for them—a congregation of Catholic dropouts in Muslim-Arab land. Papa built not only a greenhouse in the desert but a parish on sand hills.
Papa, the gardener, the grower, the nurturer. Papa, the maker. Papa, the friend. Papa, the engineer and designer, the leader, the magician. In the desert, Papa became like many of the stars he watched at night: Leo, the Lion; Orion, the Hunter; and Perseus, the Hero.
Each night, after he put out the fire and before the badlands turned too cold, Papa lay on the sand and looked up. He made dusk a cathedral, and the sky a painting on the basilica’s ceiling. He pointed at constellations and named new ones, and read from them parables for the desert wanderer. “Thank you,” he called out to the brilliance above. And right there, where the Bedouins had roamed, where many had drifted, and where the world’s religions were born, the brilliance confirmed in Papa’s heart, with a sparkling and a glinting and a quiet that echoed the breathing of God, “This is your place.”
1985
Cactus and orchid danced.
He, a recruiter and oil importer, and she, a doctor and pageant queen, do-si-doed in the hallway connecting their two offices. In his wing of the prime commercial complex, he signed work contracts and traded engine lubricant. On hers, she took heart rates, recorded blood pressure, and prescribed medicine.
The cactus—a product of the sun, dark from Indio birth and tan from recent travels to Kuwait—spoke with a voice reverberating from a body that once had braved something impossible, something far from home, something desperate and hot.
The orchid—fragrant, soft in her white pantsuit, yet striking from the tip of her mestiza nose to the tip of her lacquered finger—possessed a confidence so sharp, it cut through the flirting space between them.
“Estrella of LVM Medical Centre,” she said, “and you?”
“Gonzalo of Orion Recruitment and Starlite Oil,” he replied.
Just a year later, I was born.
They bought a house together—a mansion on the foot of the Antipolo hill. It had ten bedrooms, a sprawling lawn, a meandering driveway, a ballroom, a disco hall, a breakfast room and dining room, a basement for a closet, and two terraces hanging over a rice paddy and a convent.
The monsoon frequented the mansion. The monsoon washed it throughout and through-in. The orchid lost her license for having issued more health certificates than she had performed medical exams. And the cactus lost thousands of men to dust storms and the war between Uncle Sam and Saddam Hussein.