Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(36)
She came to my room, rested two tin bowls on my dresser, and rolled me off my sweated-through sheets. The blisters had broken and leaked, and had left imprints of ooze on the bedding. I ughhhed to her touch. She heaved me up from lying down to sitting against the baseboard, and fed me Knorr bouillon broth with a spoon. Her arthritic hand shook as she brought the spoon from bowl to mouth. I peeled dry lip from dry lip, dry tongue from the roof of my mouth, as I anticipated the taste of salt. After the last sip, I slid back under my sheets as my eyelids fluttered. Manang Biday rolled up my sleeves, dipped a washcloth in a bowl of brown vinegar and cooled black tea, and patted the sores on my arms. She rolled me to my side again and patted the sores on my back. She cooled the blisters by blowing onto them. I asked her what they looked like, and she said, “Like chicken skin.”
Manang Biday came thrice a day for the next ten days.
“I get sad and bored lying here,” I said to her as she attended to my sores.
“Oh, no use complaining now. You need rest,” she said. “Besides, you’ll have nothing to do out there. Elma’s away at the farm now to help my brother.”
“Do you not miss her? I miss her,” I said. “And does she not get tired of going here and there, to wherever she’s needed?”
“That’s life for us. We’re used to it,” she said, wiping sweat off my forehead. “Bahala na ang Diyos.” It’s up to God.
“Bahala na.”
“Next time you step out of your room, you will not recognize this house,” she said.
“How so?”
“Chickens.”
“The others have chicken pox, too?” I said with pep, relieved that I wasn’t the only one stricken.
“No. Real chickens,” she said.
I did not recognize our house the morning I emerged from quarantine. The sounds alone made me feel like I had woken up in a busy part of Manila: the city’s periphery where, as I’d seen on the news, children swam in the imburnal, pickpockets whizzed through crowds, and people still died of tetanus and malaria.
The sounds and smells struck me. Crowing, squawking, haggling, and a din rose from the floor below. The fetor of sulfur and ammonia entered my nostrils and went straight to my mouth. I retched. The stench was the kind of stench that made you think of colors: dirt brown, fish gray, liver red, and muriatic acid orange.
But because I’d been confined for nearly two weeks, I refused to stay upstairs. I had to investigate. I had to know what had replaced the smell of orchid, jasmine, and ylang-ylang, of orange juice and orange tea, of my mother’s freshly laundered robe. I had to know what had superseded my mother’s humming, my father’s singing, and Katring’s and Loring’s laughs.
A few years back, the clinking of champagne glasses and the swishing of debutantes’ gowns resounded through the ballroom and disco room. That day, babbling boomed through the hallways and arched entryways. I made my way to the main floor where, for every ten scraggy, dark-skinned men, there stood a potbellied male in a short-sleeved linen polo barong, or gusot mayaman. Wrinkles of the rich. Cigarette smoke rose from wherever the men stood. And they stood in circles, as if to gather around a subject worth speculating. I came closer, coughing, breaking through clouds of puffed-out fumes and budging my way through the horde. I snuck between two smokers and saw what was causing a commotion: a chicken.
The rooster sat with its breast and fluff in the cup of a man’s hand; his fingers forked between the bird’s thighs. The rooster wore all shades of red: a vermilion comb, a ruby-red hackle, a crimson wattle, and a maroon tail. It had a short but sharp beak, blood-black plumage in the torso and neck, and spurs dressed with blades. The handler stroked it from head to tail, repeatedly, as if stroking were part of the animal’s breathing. His hands and the bird’s feathers were equally oily, making it hard to tell how the grease transferred—from bird to man, or man to bird.
“Hoy!”
Someone grabbed my forearm and towed me to the main steps.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in your room?” Tony, Norman’s right hand, said.
“I’m better,” I said. “I want to see what’s going on. It’s my house.” I shrugged his hand off my still-itchy arm.
“Always so curious,” he said, shaking his head. “You want a show? Come with me.”
I followed him down the steps to the shaded drop-off, and down the driveway toward the car lot. Plops of moss green and grayish white spread over the ramp connecting driveway and lot. The latter—the floor of which was now also a mantle of ammonia-smelling feces—stored what looked like miniature batting cages. The maids’ break room, where Judith and my yaya used to share a Coke while watching a teleserye, now housed stacks of cardboard crates. And from inside the crates, roosters crowed. I knit my brows together and scratched my head.
I knew what was happening. Even though my parents hadn’t participated, it was a big enough sport in the country: sabong, or cockfighting, the country’s favorite blood sport. Norman and Tony had transformed the downstairs part of the mansion into a breeding and training center, and the main floor into a reception for gamblers. They had set up a gaffing station in one corner of the break room: a tool bench with knives and spurs of varied contours and lengths. On the other end of the room, they had placed a crib mattress on an upturned box, a hospital bed for an injured bird.