Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(32)
Why him?
I studied his moves. He cleaned his teeth with his tongue, clicking it to remove the food stuck between. He clenched the ends of his armrests while talking and slapped his knees to punctuate his lines. He tossed his keys—our keys—from hand to hand, as if readying to pitch. He never stopped moving, didn’t carry the ease Papa had when carrying conversation. His many mannerisms outnumbered Papa’s. In fact, Papa only had one—his only gesture was to embrace us.
So why him?
My eyes traveled and landed on his face, his Elvis face—a mass of forehead, low-riding eyelids, prominent cheekbones with full and droopy cheeks, a broad jaw, a small mouth curling to one side, and a cleft chin. He sat there, bashing our coffee and porridge, and obstructing breakfast—my most favorite time of the day—with his unkind words, raised brow, Hollywood smile, and dimpled nose from where all his facial components measured their symmetry.
That’s it! His nose—his narrow, high-bridged nose. It matched that of Mama’s, of Tachio’s, of Our Lady’s. And his skin buffed within the same shade range as theirs. I watched him and Mama fall into each other’s wanting, nod along to each other’s plans. When I couldn’t take a minute more, I closed my eyes, and, as I had the habit of doing in that room, breathed Mama in. I smelled a lingering of Ana?s Ana?s, but with a trace of sweat—the kind that had been trapped long enough, and finally released as vapor from right under, an impenetrable film of product and pride. I took the mix of scents as a chemosignal from the air.
Be smart, Papa told me the last time I saw him, the last time we embraced. I took his words as this: I needed to use not only my head but my gut and my senses to interpret a situation, a person, or a place. Our world, our country, our home was in some kind of war, I remembered. And sniffing out the Common Enemy ranked first on my list of duties.
Him.
He sweated through his short-sleeve button-down, unaccustomed to Manila heat. The mansion was down to two air-conditioners: one in the master bedroom and another in Paolo’s room.
Norman, the big mouth, patted off his perspiration with our table linens. His sweaty Elvis face glared and signaled to me, like a flare missiled to the sky, that a battleground now lay within our stone walls. The Common Enemy. Whatever it is that makes us unhappy.
“Been living in America for three decades. I forget how hot it is here. Golly, ooph, hot like hell,” he said. “Estrella, love, have the maids fetch more ice water, then fire them.”
Mama leaned over for a kiss and said, “I’ll take care of those ignorant ingrates tonight.”
“All part of the plan,” he said.
“You know me, love. I come from power; I will stay in power,” she said. “Benny bonita.” She smiled the smile of the little girl from the sepia pictures.
They continued saying things that I thought people only said in the movies or were taglines for Paolo’s video games. They talked about being in office, expanding the mansion, going to hotels, and meeting with investors. They alternated whispering with yelling, him with his wheeze-laugh, and her with her humming.
The oddness, the newness, the veering away from what had been—they made me slide down a fork from the breakfast table and into the slip of yesteryear’s now-outgrown petticoat skirt.
Jeepney Joyride
1996
“I hate that motherfucker,” Paolo said as he punched the wall. “He’s fired everyone. He’s taken away everything. Fuck him!”
“Kuya, don’t curse. It scares me,” I said, pulling him away from the wall and toward the bed. We sat on the edge, my short ten-year-old legs dangling off the side and his fifteen-year-old feet planted firm and heavy, as if to funnel all his anger into the hardwood floor. He kept cracking his knuckles, grunting, grinding his teeth so hard that I could hear the enamel crush into dust.
We hadn’t eaten more than one-and-a-half meals a day for the past three weeks. Mama said it was all she could afford, and Norman wasn’t spending any more money on us because he had to feed his chickens. When we ate, it was a mound of rice for each of us and a can of sardine or tuna to share. The rice was hot, the viand cold and oily. I never complained about not having three square meals a day because I knew it could’ve been worse—but Paolo had had it. It was getting to him. He’d been cutting classes to look for food money, borrowing from friends, or selling what he called “things.” When he didn’t find enough cash to buy both of us lunch, he’d buy a cigarette and a stick of gum. Smoking kept his hunger satisfied and sugar kept me going.
Sometimes I thought of cutting class, too. I’d grown tired of lying to the lunch lady, making up excuses for not having cash that day. “I forgot my wallet,” I said on Monday. “Do you guys have change for five hundred pesos? Oh, you don’t. I’ll break the bill after school and pay you tomorrow,” I said on Tuesday. “You know what, I used up that five hundred pesos at the bookstore yesterday. Can you just add this to my credit?” I said on Wednesday. By Thursday there was no use even walking up to the lunch line. The lunch lady had her eyes fixed on me since I walked into the canteen, like she’d figured out my scam.
I had nice friends who wanted to lend me money, but I didn’t want to borrow so often that they’d find out I’d never be able to pay them back. I didn’t want to take on loan after loan from my school friends, blowing my cover and revealing to the elite student body that I was, in fact, poor. Mama said that we had nothing left—no money in the bank and no bank to trust us with a credit line. All we had to our name was the mansion and our place in Manila high society, and that place I had to help secure.