Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(47)
Elma poked me on the side to tickle me while we walked and said that I shouldn’t look so desperate, even when I am desperate. She said that the cure for anything, even thirst or hunger, was laughter, and that I should tell her jokes Paolo used to tell me. So we walked some more and told jokes, like two sisters glancing at each other before each punch line, and giggling and swift-stepping, side by side, clutching our vessels like the fishing poles and baby dolls we once had considered our treasure. We were sisters by need, sisters of pursuit, sisters in exploration of teendom and in search of clean water.
After our thirty-minute trek, we arrived at the oasis: a four-by-four cement square with a pole, lever, and spout sticking out of the ground. The pole drew mineral-rich groundwater from forty-five meters below. The lever pumped pressure in and out of the pole, a device that children in line before us rode like a three-hundred-pound seesaw, pushing all their weight down into the simple machine to pull the water up, and kicking off the ground to release the lever and let the water run out of the spout. The pozo was a playground of a special sort, a mix between a water park for the young and a water source for the poor.
I loved it.
At our turn, Elma motioned for me to arrange our buckets and jugs from biggest to smallest—the largest container positioned closest to the spout in case we were hurried out of our spot in line—collecting as much water as we could on the first try. Then she straddled the lever and told me to do the same and cued me to push with a one, two, three. Then mmmmmmph, we drew the water up. Uuuuunnnh, we kicked and drew the water out. Up, down, up, down, sisters on a seesaw, fetching water for the day. Up, down, up, down, hard work combined with the innocence of play. Norman had no idea what I was experiencing, enjoying, learning to do. Mama gallivanted day and night with him, conning people with fake titles and deeds and invisible products, and going by different names: Rosinda, Anita, Carmelle. And there I was—embracing our new level of poverty, caught in the rhythm of play and the momentum of sweaty, low-class Indio work. And the spritz of cool groundwater that splashed off the concrete square and onto our limbs, necks, and faces freshened body and soul, wakened senses from long ago. I understood in that moment of up-down-splish-splash why Jesus was always playing around with water—walking on it, turning it into wine, bathing people in it, washing feet, meeting shamed women at a well.
My dire circumstances taught me to drink deep—to live a life of life: crying from the marrow, laughing from the gut, working with every muscle, acting and reacting with ten fingers, ten toes, five senses, and a sixth one . . . the heart.
The water at the well smelled rich, not of chlorine, but minerals, the scent of a waterfall cutting through the stench of the ghetto’s imburnal—sewage canal. Water from the spout hit the bottom of buckets and jugs with a slosh that warped us out of Metro Manila and into the beaches of Siargao, Boracay, and Palawan, the hem of the Pacific I’d never seen.
“Remember when the mansion was flooded?” I said, sitting on the cool concrete and leaning against the back side of the pozo.
“Good times,” Elma said, sitting next to me and spritzing my face with water from her fingers.
“I pushed you in,” I said, elbowing her and smirking.
“You almost killed me,” she said and elbowed back.
“I taught you how to swim.”
“Yeah, well, I taught you other things.” She dipped her hand in a bucket and splashed me.
I splashed her back. “Tsunami!”
We snuck our half-empty buckets under the spout and refilled them. “Okay, that’s enough wasting water. Except for this one.” She splashed me again. “Tidal wave!”
The water hit me right in the head and cooled my scalp. I shook my head like a dog to dry my hair and said, “Isn’t it strange that we’d never been in the ocean and yet we know what it’s like?”
“Yeah, we know that it’s both loud and quiet. I love that it’s both of those things.”
“How do you think we know so much about it?” I said.
“Movies?”
“Maybe. But maybe it’s just one of those things.” By those things I meant the things that lived in my heart: the things that I had daydreamed about in class, the things that made me reread lines and dog-ear pages of books, the things that made me pause while playing, the things that I’d never encountered and yet could meticulously and exhaustively imagine and sketch.
The coolness of groundwater buried deep and away from the touch of the sun felt like aloe on burnt skin; it kissed and closed my pores. Its taste, however, remained a mystery. I formed my hands into the shape of a bowl and scooped a drink from the bucket. And as I brought my hands to my mouth, Elma slapped my wrist.
She shook her head, saying, “We filter, we boil, and then we drink. Never touch the water with your lips until you’ve filtered and boiled it, understand? You can die, you hear me? You can die.”
After a morning’s work and play, Elma and I hit the path back to the mansion. Our feet flip-flopped down the unpaved road, dirt dusting off the ground and sticking to our wet ankles and toes. Elma held her containers with no trouble, with the inner reserve of physical strength that belonged only to an Indio. I, on the other hand, grappled and fumbled and spilled. I braced the ice-cream bucket on my front side with both arms, while the gasoline jug, yellow as the sun above us, hung from my first four fingers with the weight that reminded me just how valuable the contained resource was. The seam of the yellow plastic handle pressed onto my knuckles and, at our fortieth step back to the mansion, skinned the fold of one finger, then two, then another. To save the fourth, I let go of the bucket, spilling half of my morning’s work on the El Ni?o–stricken ground.