Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(54)

I spent time in Mama’s garden, now barren of flowers and consumed by overgrowth. I sat where the orchids once bloomed, pretending to be a character from The Secret Garden. I talked to Tachio and brought him meals I refused to eat and left plates of rice and sardines on his grave, on the plot of dirt where his preterm body continued to decay. His perfect nose, his perfect lips, his ten fingers, ten toes, rotted away, bit by bit digested by maggots—his body having given itself as nutrient, as an offering, to dead soil.

I sang to him. “Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday, dead baby. Happy death day, you and me.”

I searched the grounds for the makahiya, shy plant, sleepy plant, sensitive plant, shamed plant, touch-me-not. I suspected that a clump of them hid underneath a fallen bougainvillea leaf. I waved the bougainvillea off with the back of my hand, reached for the makahiya’s spine and traced it with my finger. I blew hot breath on its blades, snaked my pinky around every micro leaf, and watched it fold. It cowered into itself and away from me, the predator.

“Wake up!” I yelled at the fern.

It stayed clutched up.

“Wake up!” I yelled again and remembered that my yaya once told me that the makahiya closed around predators in the dark and reopened in the light. I bent down and kissed it. “I know.”

I understood that plant—I knew its fear of nightfall. And I knew its longing for light.

I trawled myself through the damp air and back upstairs. I crumpled to the floor, next to the termite hole, and folded in. I stayed stock-still as if I were four years old again, on the concrete, my faculties unable—I had only my awareness. I recalled lying on the stretch of my parents’ and brother’s laps in the back of the car, my mother’s wet hair and tears falling on and covering my face. I remembered hearing everything around me: my mother’s weeping and nagging, my father barking at the help and making arrangements to save me and singing to me refrains about sunshine, and my brother repeatedly apologizing as he sobbed. I remembered not bleeding, not leaking red from my beat-up skull, not showing signs of trauma besides lying still, being unable to move, and, seemingly, deceptively, as only a kid can do, appearing tranquil.

Good night, mansion.

Good night, world.

I ambled to my room and rested on one side. Motionless, unable to speak, I hurt in places outside my body. I told myself to hurt no more because, perhaps, dying would drown me to the depths of darkness and through it, perhaps toward light. Perhaps a girl with curled fists, digging her nails into her palms, could show him, them, that they’d hurt me, killed me, as only a grown-up could do to a child.

Sleeping was dying; dying was sleeping.

Close your eyes.

Go to your room.

Go to bed.

Shush.

Good night.

The six o’clock bells rang. The sun was coming down now. I saw it ease from the top corner of my window and toward the sill. The black approached, encroached, surmounted over all that was and is and will be. But then, there it was, at the moment just right before dusk touched down—evening’s blue light: Diyosa’s glow.

In the blue light, peacock-colored eye shadow gleamed, moonflowers blossomed, the moon itself so coyly shone, and Our Lady—the blue-cloaked saint—stood watching over us with regal beauty and a peaceful face. In the blue light, the makahiya opened one last time before it slept to receive twilight’s dew and the last rays of sun, the rays that signaled the promise of its return.

Gong, gong, the convent bells rang, reverberating, resounding, at six o’clock on the dot, the peace that I knew was meant for me, the peace that I knew as my own, the peace that knew everything: the petting, the playing, and the praying; the peace that knew my name. Those who roamed the mansion—they knew not this peace, this hand that reached out for me, ebbing, flowing, swishing, shushing, beckoning.

Sleep now and come.





Election Day





1998


I had almost forgotten that I was in some kind of war when I woke up on the first day of summer break to Norman yelling, “Pulitika!” He raised a pistol and pointed it at the ceiling of mirrors in the ballroom.

“Pulitika!” Mama and their cronies said in return, also aiming arms at my sweet, spectacular glass puzzle above. I prayed they wouldn’t fire and shatter it as I watched them from two arched entryways away, my fright disabling one muscle after another.

“Ah, there she is,” Mama said as she slipped her pistol down into her last Hermès bag. She moved toward me in her signature high-heeled style. And as she always did to show contempt for my appearance, she exhaled heavily and brushed the hair off my face. “It’s time.”

I flicked her hand away. Her words brought hot blood out from some hidden segment of my marrow, and my face and ears reddened, my toes curled under, my tongue dried like salted cod in the hot sun. I shook my head.

“We’re going north and spending the summer there,” Mama said.

“No. Why would I want to go anywhere with you?” I said. “I’m staying in the mansion.”

“Pack your bags or not, you’re coming. We leave in an hour. You might even like it there.”

“No.”

“We are going north because we matter—still matter—there. The capital has nothing for us now. This mansion is crumbling, but we can build another one up there. Your grandfather ruled up north. I know the North. The North knows me. So today we go.” She grabbed my arm, walked me out of the ballroom and up the steps, and said, “I am your grandfather’s legacy. Now pack.”