Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(30)
The monsoon let the orchid live.
The monsoon nearly killed the cactus; it could only survive by replanting itself in the sand.
1994
A constellation of sparks dotted the Arabian Desert at night—eyes watching, waiting. Eyes that could have belonged to wolves, sand cats, and striped hyenas adapted to waterless living. These sparks, however, flickered not from the faces of mammals bred for arid areas, but from the faces of men promised employment in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, the Emirates, and Qatar—the seeds to my parents’ fortune. Papa recruited them from 1979 through 1990, adding their names to a ledger of Filipino workers venturing abroad. For every laborer sent to the Middle East, Papa received a fee. For every work contract signed, Mama gave a medical exam and issued a health certificate required for a visa. Together, my parents operated a machine that simultaneously drained the Philippines of under-and unemployed men, and fed the Crescent and the Gulf with the labor force it needed to develop and dig. My parents acted as middlemen between princes and paupers, a rising empire and a failing one. They brought thousands upon thousands from the islands, only to be caught in the First Gulf War, only to be left with the responsibility of bringing each one of the workers home.
The Gulf War lasted from mid-1990 through early 1991, but the effects on Filipino-Arab relations continued. In 1994, soon after my eighth birthday, Papa talked about his men meandering—shoeless, hungry, thirsty, and delirious. He talked about having to save them, having to bring them back home. Every single one. He talked about those who had died, but mostly, he talked about those who survived. He talked about how strong they were, how they had scrounged for food, evaded checkpoints, ran from rebel soldiers, spotted relief workers and journalists, found camps, found telephones, found water.
“They stay alive because they know I will rescue them and bring them back home, and find them jobs here,” Papa said. “If I stay in the mansion, I will die. And if I die, they die.”
The desert in Papa’s mind: sand dunes, dry air, blistered knuckles, chapped lips, pet goats for company and for slaughter, and sweaty, dust-flecked brows belonging to thirsty men. These men walked through the Arabian Desert for weeks, maybe months, but really years, and most of them lost track of the whereabouts of home. Some of their friends now lay past scorch and in decay, buried not under fertile soil, but dull gray-black stones, in unnamed graves spotting the badlands. The living ones wandered, dressed in tatters, with shreds of their dead comrades’ clothing as turbans, night and day, hoping both to be rescued and to remain unfound. They were men who’d worked for years in a greenhouse, an oil field, or in an oil tycoon’s palace, and now left undocumented and unemployed because of the Gulf War. They entrusted their lives to my parents with a sign of their names on a dotted line, for the promise of employment in Abraham’s many nations: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, the Emirates, and Qatar. They were men who prayed to God, but belonged to Papa. God Almighty their Provider, but Papa their Savior.
And he knew this. He believed it.
Which is why when he emptied a cup of coffee in one steady sip at breakfast, he stared out into the distance, or why the picture on his nightstand made him cry, or why he fell silent at my bedside while singing “You Are My sunshine.” He heard his workers’ pleas; he felt the sweat of their brows on his brow.
Papa had built a multinational business with the flex of these men’s muscles, with the tendons that connected not just tissue to bone, but the indulgence of the Arab world with the diligence of the Filipino workforce and the American need—or greed—for oil. He recruited them primarily as aides in building the first greenhouse in the desert, and thereafter as workhands wherever his Arab partners needed laborers, an oil site, a car lubricant–packaging plant, a five-star hotel, a would-be international city that later became known as Dubai.
Gonzalo Arcilla: self-made family man, survivor of Third World poverty, storyteller, and nexus between America, Arabia, and our seven-thousand-island archipelago.
As I ran up the driveway from a day of playing with Elma, two suitcases at the top of the stairs stopped me in my tracks. Papa stood next to the luggage, a corner of his prized photograph peeking out from a half-zipped suitcase pocket. He knelt down and cupped my cheeks in his hands, and said, “I have to go. I have to see to my men.”
He said he couldn’t repatriate his ten thousand workers if he didn’t leave the mansion, and that staying would mean the death of him. He said all his efforts to salvage the mansion had failed, that there was no redeeming their marriage, that Mama now loved another man. He said his plan was to find another livelihood and to start anew, to gather funds so he could buy his men plane tickets home. Then he would come for Paolo and me.
He had every good reason to leave. But what he saw when he looked out into the distance, I couldn’t see. All I saw were two suitcases, one medium and one small, but both large enough to fit me in with the clothes and compasses and water jugs and dreams and visions he had packed to take with him.
Papa had to save the world he had built, but first he had to leave.
He folded me into his arms and I felt the heat of Arabia emanate from deep within him. He gripped the hair on the back of my head with one hand and the back side of my collar with the other. His chin and the hard bite on his lower lip shuddered on my shoulder, and mine on his. We cried into each other, with eyes shut, making sounds only sad mammals made, my tears mixing with his tears in beads of sorrow collecting on our sleeves. The wet spots were the water he took with him to the desert; the last bit of moisture he salted away from the flood.