Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(3)
Every few weeks, our couturier, Mr. Albrando, measured and fitted us in his creations. On those days, merienda took place in the basement—coffee and Fita biscuits. In between sips and bites, Mama pointed out pictures in Vogue and Elle. “That one! Make me something just like that!” Mr. Albrando obliged and always overcomplimented, in his made-up accent that was a cross between Old Castilian Money and British, “Of course, of course! Oh, Madam Doctora, you will look so good in that—better than that model!” But his accent was fake and his clothes made me uncomfortable. I asked our yaya, “How can someone not know that ruffled lace makes you itch?”
Where the secret closet door ended, the long dark hallway began. Our “boys,” our male servants, did everything to light up that corridor: recessed lighting, suspended spotlights, floor lamps, sconces, even electric torches. They all eventually sparked, blew, and died. The house staff—whom my mother called “ignorant and superstitious”—believed that dark spirits roamed the hall. I believed it, too.
The hallway’s length varied over the years. The older I got, the longer it seemed to be. What started out as a span of twelve toddler steps later on stretched to a thirteen-meter dash, a sprint, a chase to the finish line for my dear life.
I never want to walk down that hallway again.
The last room on the main floor sat at the front part of the mansion. We called that room the lanai, which means “roofed patio.” It’s not the kind of patio that wraps around colonial houses, nor is it a fire-pit area. It was half indoors, half outdoors, always smelling like moss and artificially ventilated air. It felt dry on sunny days and wet when it rained. Papa liked to have his beer and boiled peanuts there. Mama rarely visited. “Too humid,” she said when it rained. “Too hot,” she said when the sun blazed. Papa called the lanai “part forest, part desert,” his home within our home from where he and I watched the sky.
The main floor ended where another world began: the stairs to the top floor. The stairs backed up against a twelve-meter, two-story-high window. The window flooded the steps and upstairs corridors with natural light. Standing there, I felt very close to heaven.
Four bedrooms made up the highest section of the house: the guest room, my brother’s teenage bedroom, my bedroom, and my brother’s room that he’d had when he was a child. I considered it to be the most peaceful part of the house. There we kept books, sketch pads, crayons, dolls, giant stuffed animals, Matchbox cars, Game Boys, Nintendo consoles, and our favorite blankets. It was where Paolo and I pretended to be pilots, presidents, fairies, Mom, Dad, and peasant child.
I slept in a princess bed with carved wood columns that held up an eyelet-cotton canopy. Most of my toys were kept in a glass cabinet over my dresser, where dust could not touch them. The dresser held a broad mirror in which I later saw the flaws my mother pointed out: my dark morena skin, my flat nose, my round belly and flabby arms, and my big beaver teeth. The same dresser kept gold chain necklaces, earrings, and pearl bracelets my Saudi Arabian godfathers gifted me.
On the top floor, my brother and I laughed and played and ran and cried and screamed—and nobody on the main floor or downstairs could hear us. It was our very own island.
A puzzle of diamond-shaped mirrors covered the mansion’s ceiling, and where their tips met, crystal chandeliers hung. They sparkled so much, I couldn’t resist plucking them out. I stacked footrests on top of chairs and chairs on top of tables, and climbed up my makeshift ladder ever so lithely, gazing to the top with twinkling eyes, my big beaver teeth biting into my lower lip. The sparkly glass puzzle that hovered above resembled a kaleidoscope—a prism of rainbows and reflections, of pieces cutting through patterns, shifting and rotating, mirroring the jumble, the circus, and the wonder within. I was a little girl who loved to twirl, often in a polka-dot petticoat skirt—my mother’s purchase and my father’s delight. After I had plucked my crystal and descended from the tower of furniture, I twirled, with a chandelier trinket secured in my hand. I twirled, looking up to my illusion of a Technicolor sky. I twirled, dizzying and dizzying.
Falling.
PART ONE
Garden Party
1986
I was born two pounds small with a diamond-shaped birthmark on my left palm. A contradiction, a paradox of holy signs, my yaya and the maids had said. The common masses, which my mother spoke about with a raised brow, believed that the birthmark meant good luck for business. The dark brown smear at the axis of my palm’s fate and heart lines heralded fortune after fortune for Papa’s ventures. The diamond, which looked like a distant star in mid-twinkle, projected my parents’ professional plans and encouraged them to sign on every deal.
“My Lucky Star,” Papa called it, rubbing and kissing my hand as if it belonged to Our Lady of Good Fortune, or better yet, a shiny Golden Buddha gifted by a Taiwanese investor.
But the maids also pointed out that the star was on my left palm—the bad palm, the “other” hand, Satan’s preferred side. Kaliwete.
And my premature birth, others thought, was the evidence of sin. “Whose sin?” the maids speculated. It gave gossip hour something straight out of their beloved, melodramatic teleseryes. Was it the sin of my father? Was it evidence of his not having legally terminated his first marriage—the marriage he was forced into at age seventeen? Or was it evidence of my parents’ fake nuptials—the falsified certificates, the joint bank accounts opened as the consummation of their union, the thousand glittery, champagne-toasted parties in lieu of a wedding reception?