Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(50)

“There’s another life for you and for me,” Elma said. “You will get out, I promise.”

“I will?” I said, resting my weight on her.

“You will get out of here and find the ocean.” She said nothing more as she placed my arm around her neck and limped us off the terrace and down the steps. She hushed me and smiled for me, her crooked mouse teeth peering through. Her crooked teeth reminded me of the day we met, when I locked her in a cabinet under the stairs in Mama’s basement closet, in between silk and cotton layers, nearly suffocating her in hopes of keeping her with me at the mansion.

We walked, arm in arm, back to the pozo. Our legs, slender from work and little food, swift-stepped together, once again beckoned by cool groundwater.





Woman at the Well





1998


I had been fetching my ration of water on foot from the pozo for four months now and had grown confident in my abilities. I seldom needed Elma—who had found work and an apprenticeship at the wet market—to accompany me on trips.

I waited until dusk to start my route. I had learned that sunset meant most poor folks were preparing dinner, either for themselves or for their masters. At that time of day, the pozo was mine.

The air at half past five filled with a melodic whispering coming from the well.

The sweet singing called me to my destination, not hastily but with the slow summoning of a mother waiting for her children to come home. I felt my heart as it had been—empty, like the bucket and jug I had brought with me. And there she was, singing, pumping water from the pozo with the strength of her arms and the grounding of her legs. Singing, soothing, with a voice coming from a soft, supple bosom.

Her hair, gathered on one side as she pumped water, fell to her waist, wisps long and black as a moonless night. But no, there was a moon—her face crowning her five-foot-seven body. She kept singing.

She bent down to sit on an overturned bucket and proceeded to wash her hair. She sang some more.

Enamored, enraptured, I inched closer, a deer panting for water. I drank in her voice, my lips parting to taste the sweetness that tropical flowers gave off at eventide. A moonflower, yes, that’s what she was: mestiza, tall, vining to celestial skies, and blooming after hours. Evening’s blue light made her glow.

“Hello,” she said, interrupting her song.

“Hi.”

“I’m Diyosa.”

“A goddess?”

“Something like it,” she said, tousling the tips of her hair.

“Do you live here? I’ve never seen you here before.”

“I live in your house, actually. At least for the time being,” she said, rubbing the roundness of her belly hidden behind her perfect hair.

“My house? The mansion?”

“Yes. I’ve come through many times, late at night, likely when you were sleeping.”

“At night?”

“Let’s just say I used to work there, and now I live there. It’s complicated to explain to a young girl like you. But now that we live together, we can be friends.”

Before I could respond, she continued her singing.

I knew, when I saw the cantaloupe-sized roundness of her belly, that she was one of the lady workers, what one of Norman’s men called “joy givers,” who came through the main doors late at night, when Norman turned the mansion into somewhat of a post-cockfight no-tell motel and rented out rooms to gentlemen and their paid company. Papa’s room, the lanai, became the most popular one for its exotic qualities: wild flowers, wild air, wild sex. Diyosa used her blue-lit glow to seduce men of middle to old age, giving them her alabaster skin, her legs that lingered from toe to thigh, and her tresses that smelled like twilight’s open blooms. At night, she was lady divine.

And there, at nightfall, I saw what they saw in her. But even more so, I saw what they didn’t. Out and apart from the backdrop of the mansion, Diyosa kindled a different side of her being. I saw not a prostitute made beautiful by products, whose worth was determined by what she could give and do, but a lady making every square inch of space into a generous and intimate reception, a stage for her singing.

She took my bucket and began to pump. I said nothing and did not move. Certainly, I thought, they liked her, loved her, because compared to the other mistresses and whores, and to Mama who had become as strong as her tea and as stiff as her gin and tonic, Diyosa maintained an ease and a luminescence amidst the mansion’s gloaming.

She filled my two containers and topped off hers, singing still as she smirked and gestured toward the direction of the mansion. We walked back together, our gallons of water in hand, her tune and tone taking the strain out of my eleven-year-old muscles. I had known no better way to walk home.

I asked her where she was from.

“Cebu, but I was born in Clark Air Base,” she said.

Cebu was known as a fast-paced, tourist-heavy city, and Clark, an American airbase peopled by light-skinned, forgotten bastards of G.I. Joes like Norman, the product of an indigenous Abrenian laundrywoman and a soldier from New Jersey.

She continued on, half whispering and half singing her story. She told me that her mother worked on the base, visiting several Americans each night. With the number of pilots and privates she had slept with, there was no way of telling who Diyosa’s father was. Her mother sent Diyosita to a parochial school, keeping her off the streets at least until the age of twelve. Her mother died of some undiagnosed illness, and the day after her mother’s burial, Diyosa took after the only legacy she’d been left with—the art of making men happy. And there her transformation from Diyosita to Diyosa took place, aided by her half-American skin. Men prized and worshiped and adored it as the country did Our Lady.