Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(35)
We were a team, Paolo and I and the van, and we’d found our Common Enemy, the one Papa had warned us about a long time ago. Its name was Hunger, its accomplice Defeat. And we did everything rather than fall prey to Norman, its Commander. But just as in any other war, the good soldier needed to get struck down, get back up, get struck down again, and crawl and fight and even cry his way to glory. But, oh, how I prayed for glory to come sooner.
Paolo and I cried out together. He hid me under his arm, and used his other hand to scramble for a weapon—a bat, a ruler, a brush. Norman had been drinking all day, upset about misprinted deeds and a large bribe to the sheriff, and set his mind on taking out his rage on Mama. When he was mad, he clubbed Mama with a shoe tree and chased her around until they both fell from drunkenness or trauma. Once they passed out, I ran to Mama and found her bruises, rubbing and soothing them while checking for her pulse. Paolo considered kicking Norman in the groin, but backed down, and ran out to the car lot instead. Norman stayed asleep and heavy on the floor, long enough for Paolo to key the Land Cruiser and run to the nearby sari-sari for an ice pack and Band-Aids. That night Mama slept in Paolo’s room, crying and groaning in pain. She cried for us, too.
“I’m sorry,” she said, half-conscious in our bed. “So sorry.”
We showed her our stash of savings and told her about our secret—our van operation and the cool things we did in it. She said she didn’t understand, but that she was proud of us, that she had raised such book-smart, street-smart children—the perfect combination of her and Papa.
We enjoyed talking to her, telling her a bedtime story about our life. I showed her drawings I’d made of the van and of our friends, and Paolo played her some songs that were popular on our route. I rolled out a map I’d made of our daily itinerary, which she studied and traced with her red-lacquered finger. Paolo listed the names we’d given each other, emphasizing in the end that a boy five years my senior had called me Prinsesa.
“I think we found her first crush,” he said, elbowing me.
“Stop, Kuya!” I said, slapping his elbow.
We jeered and heckled, while Mama held my map up to her face.
“What do you think of our route, Mama?” I said.
“Pu?eta. It’s brilliant.”
“Wake up, sloths,” Norman said as he pulled the blanket off us.
“What do you want?” Paolo said, pulling the blanket back on and sitting up as if to shield me.
“Oh, you idiot,” Norman said with a grin. “You try to fight me, I fight you back harder. You’re gonna pay me back for those wheel mags, sir. Oh, yessir, yessir.”
“What do you mean?” Paolo said.
“Get up and get ready—you’re going to school early. I got a van service to run,” Norman said as he walked away, tossing Paolo’s keys from hand to hand. “No one can stop me, you bastards. I own this mansion now and I own you.”
Norman took over our business that morning, hiring Tony, one of his cronies, to drive us to school, then to operate our established routes. They made more money than we did because they could make trips while we were in class. His man took a fourth of the profits, while Norman and Mama split the remainder.
Mama fed us with her portion, but our regular meals didn’t suffice. Our adventures on the van had grown in us a different kind of hunger—for freedom and friendship. They may have filled our stomachs, but they, too, killed something special in us. They birthed in Paolo a certain kind of sadness, and in me a certain kind of pain.
The following week, Paolo and I each entered our versions of the dark world, me in my imaginative little head, and he at the bar and billiard hall. When together, we continued to listen to the same music upstairs, bobbing our heads in rhythm. Paolo drummed the beat with his finger and cigarette, and forced the words to each song through clenched teeth. I succumbed to my inner world and wrote in my journal: “It can’t be a joyride without a few bumps. No, it wouldn’t be a joyride at all.”
Fowl
1996
I was born too small to have needles puncturing my translucent skin. Mama decided against vaccines, appalled by the thought of seeing her already-unpretty baby lanced in her fatless thighs.
The summer I turned ten, and Tachio would have turned seven, fluid-filled blisters coated my body. Mama quarantined me in my bedroom and said, “You can handle chicken pox. Take this every four hours.” She placed a bottle of acetaminophen on the dresser.
“Mama, will you stay and sing to me? Please?”
She began to hum, stroked my hair with her bony fingers, smirked, then stopped, and said, “I can’t.” She pulled the door behind her and did not return that night nor any night thereafter. I listened to the click-clack of her heels as she walked away.
Paolo didn’t want to get sick. He was busy with orders. He knocked on my door and spoke from the other side, his mouth pressing against the door frame, and said, “I have deliveries to make. I’ll bring home something for you, ’kay? Gum or maybe Choc-nut?”
Malaise would not let me respond.
“It’s just to the billiard hall, then back. You know I can’t get sick, right?” he said.
Only Manang Biday had intention or permission to come near me. We all somehow believed that her visits to the garbage hill immunized her from air-and waterborne diseases. Her gravelly voice, thick-soled feet, and leathery skin caused us to think that whatever lived under her blackness and inside her Indio-ness was impervious to malady.