Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(31)
We held on and held on. We kept holding on until the wind breezed by and signaled that it was time for him to leave.
He let go, first of my hair and collar, and then of the rest of the child that was me. I swallowed my spit, and felt it slide down, then clog my throat. Unable to move, unable to speak, I hurt in places outside my body. I told myself to hurt more because, perhaps, my aching would be stronger than the sun. Perhaps a daughter with curled fists, digging her nails into her palms, could show the man with packed suitcases that he was hurting me as only a father could hurt his child.
“Promise me, you’ll always remember, none of this is normal. But we were not made for normal, and for that, I am sorry, my warrior girl,” Papa said. “Be brave, be smart, be kind, and have faith. Remember that you are made of light.”
He turned away and slipped into the light and space before him, and disappeared out of the mansion’s landscape and into the desert of his mind.
PART TWO
Elvis Face
1995
The mansion was supposed to be my parents’ masterpiece: the Antipolo hill as the easel, the stone walls as the canvas, and the people its every hue. But the last tad of inspiration left that midweek when, after I had been playing with Elma in the back lot all morning, I sensed that the house had received its unwanted visitor. At nine years old, I had the curiosity of a kindergartner and the questioning of a teen. Papa left some six months ago, and now, the wind, the geist, the stale smell wafting in the ether, told me that the man who sang me into sunshine was being replaced.
There lived in my mind things I was aware of but failed to understand: Tachio’s death; the struggle for Paolo to be a boy; the disappearance of all things big, bright, and beautiful; and alta sociedad Mama, Indio Papa, and the span between. And now, I gained awareness of another.
This other tracked the main steps with shoe prints larger than I had ever seen before. The prints came to a square tip, unlike the leather pairs with rounded toes that Papa wore. I stepped into one of the sole-shaped marks and fit both feet heel-to-toe in the length of this person’s shoe. I tiptoed out of it, this gray-black impression that at smeared parts resembled pocks in an ogre’s face. I walked farther up the steps, only to find two suitcases—one large and one extra-large, both tagged with the letters EWR>MNL, Newark to Manila.
The main doors parted, the doorknobs warm, the gold-plated keyhole scratched at the mouth, as if someone, after much jingling, fumbling, and forcing, had penetrated it with a newcomer’s key. I pushed open the right-side door and slipped through, making no sound except for my shallow breathing.
Kuya, where are you? I kept thinking as I edged along from doorway to hallway. The walls rumbled with the clamor coming from the breakfast room, but I approached the prattle anyway. Papa’s last words to me included a command to be brave. So there I was, taking heed. The closer I came to the breakfast room, the stronger the smell of Ana?s Ana?s became, signaling that Mama, along with the square-toed, big-footed visitor who’d muddied our marble and terra-cotta floors, occupied the space where I once listened to her closed-lip singing, where I once breathed in her softness.
The arched entryway gave space to tarry, my back against the wall—a pit stop between life then and life now. Who is Mama with? I wondered. A man, I answered, hearing the baritone. An American, I added as I deciphered the accent—long o’s, open u’s, soft f’s. Curiosity wouldn’t leave me be, so one foot after another, I walked into their space and saw what life at the mansion was becoming—what it would become.
“Is this her?” the man said. “The smart one who writes and draws?”
“That’s her,” Mama said, sniffing. “She’s gifted and will make me rich again one day.”
“Is that so?” the man said as he reached to shake my hand. “Norman.”
I pulled my hand away.
“Strong will, this one. I like it,” he said. “We’re gonna have fun, little miss.” He stirred sweetener into his coffee, took a sip, and quickly spat it out. “Nasty! You Filipinos don’t know how to make coffee! You call this ‘coffee,’ this instant stuff? First thing tomorrow, we’re buying a coffeemaker.”
He rattled on, sitting in my mother’s rattan peacock chair, talking about his upbringing in Abra, his laundrywoman mother, and his American father. He listed micro and macro changes he would spearhead. “We don’t need maids, just the laundrywoman. Keep her—she’s the lowest-paid one, plus she has those children we can use. They come as a package, don’t they? Sell the last sedan; keep the van and the Land Cruiser. There’s so much space in this goddamn house, we better make use of it. Make money. We’ll turn that back lot into a moneymaker. And golly, rice porridge for breakfast? Donuts! We’re eating donuts from now on. That’s how the big boys do it in Jersey. Donuts and real coffee.”
“Lorna!” Mama called out to Yaya. “Call a meeting for the maids tonight.”
Norman rattled and prattled, and I tuned him out. My ears fought to hear life outside: the singing nuns, the wind blowing through the rice paddy, the jeering between Elma and her siblings. And Mama? I barely recognized her. She sat in Papa’s old chair, cocking her head back with a fast laugh—her every response to the man’s every word. She had never been a pleaser, never known to tease, or hoot, or, really, take orders or suggestions from another. She ignored her soft-steeped tea, when I had never seen her wait for her morning drink to get cold. I had seen Mama wear her Chanel pantsuit accessorized with a raised brow, a high tone, or a bad word. But never ever, not in the years I had lived in that ten-bedroom house, had I seen the suit paired with an eagerness to gratify another.