Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(56)

“Post-Spanish, post-American, post-Marcos, post-Aquino, post–Pope John Paul II,” Mr. Santiago had said. “We are living in the most dangerous of times. Why? Because of new armies led by men like Conrado Balweg. And because of their weapon: children.”

My heart started to beat faster.

Norman bragged to Father about each one he had brought with him, me included. And then it clicked: I understood why the Common Enemy had come here and why he had come into our lives. I had learned about this at the library and in another one of Mr. Santiago’s classes.

“There are seven M’s to building a dynasty,” Mr. Santiago said. “Money, machine, media, marriage, murder, myth, and mergers.”

Each one of us, from Mama and me to Tony and his men—we were Norman’s seven M’s. He managed an eighth one, too—M for mansion. He returned to the Philippines after having lived a life in California and New Jersey, in hopes of running for office and building an empire of some malicious sort. The day he met Mama at the Hotel InterContinental, the moment he heard her maiden name and made sense of her breeding and belongings, he knew he had caught the wildest catch—a mestiza daughter of an Ilustrado with a background in politics, unraveling from her multimillion-dollar marriage, living in a pearl-and-marble palace, and raising a child who was supposedly good at writing speeches and speaking to the masses. The only thing we couldn’t give him was murder—the trigger-happy militia. And so he coalesced with one widely feared man, revered both at church and on the battlefield, and whose men could fashion an M16 out of scrap metal from an old ship. Norman had lost his home in Jersey, so now he was to reclaim his home in the mountains—his birthplace and that of his late mother’s, his mother who fed him scraps from the seminary kitchen. I’d heard him talk of the poverty he grew up in, but only now could make sense of the bitterness in his heart. He grew up in a province where bridges didn’t exist, where cars floated on makeshift rafts, where American privates and missionaries impregnated women and abandoned them, where indigenous people tended rice terraces unclothed and unprotected from storm and sun, where industry was controlled by 3 percent of the population, where foreign aid was distributed among the rich and not the needy, where the hateful advised the powerful, and where clergy and commanders shook hands with Communists.

“Laban! Laban ng Makabayang Masang Pilipino!” the room roared. Fight! Fight of the Nationalist Filipino Masses!

They pounded their rifle stocks against the floor. I quivered to the beat. I perused the room to look for my mother, who intoned with their incantation, her manicured hands beating the air in rhythm with their chapped, calloused, bandaged, knuckle-heavy fists. Her last pair of Dior heels, red like blood and like her nails, click-clacked against the same floor the goons’ duct-taped boots plodded. It was as if all the chapters from the history books I had read had somehow folded into one—Tribal Times and Prehistory, Indigenous Cultures, The Kingdom of Tondo, The Rajahnate, The Sultanate, The Bruneian Empire and Rise of Islam, The Spanish Era and Catholicism, The Philippine Revolution of 1898, The American Era, The Commonwealth, The Marcos Era and Martial Law, Communist Insurgence, The People’s Revolution, The Rise of the Tiger and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, The Fifth Republic. What next?

We are living in the most dangerous of times.

The most dangerous of times.

Danger.

Common Enemy.

Why? Because of the new weapon—children.

Weapons of destruction.

Silver and steel.

Children.



There was nothing on TV except coverage of the elections. For the first time in years, we had power and a working antenna, and what a letdown it was to flip from channel to channel, only to find rosters for politicos and supporters already bludgeoned to death by their warlord counterparts. On the bottom-left corner of the screen flickered an ongoing counter, ticking away digit by digit, going up from the tens to the hundreds in no time. Each digit represented the number of casualties and wounded military, paramilitary, and civilians. The camera panned to a blown-up car on the side of the road some twenty miles from the safe house, showing four bodies burnt from the midsection up.

The news reporter said, “And the bloodbath continues as political clans war against each other.”

Election Day was still a month out.

Both startled and bored, I went down the spiral steps to kill time on the first floor. I had always been fascinated by handiwork, so the vats of glue and pots of dye were of interest to me. I traced my finger around the mouth of each vat and pot and stirred the bamboo sticks resting in them. I sniffed the reams of paper soaring from the asphalt floor and flipped through the corners as if they were the edges of my dearly beloved library books. I stepped over rifles to get to every inch of the room, picking up and examining, feeling rulers, paintbrushes, and gauze.

Then a ringing sound came from the other end of the room. I looked up. Norman was tracing the rim of a dye jar with his finger, making a pinging sound. He stopped to point his finger at the paintbrushes.

“Interested, huh? All my savings have gone into guns and this. And you’ll get to play with these things. Lots.”

“What do you mean?”

“I want you to go outside and find some friends. Bring ’em back here and tell ’em you have a little art project you need help with. Go. Dinner depends on it.”

Norman ushered me out the back door. I stepped out, one flip-flop at a time, scouting the grounds for these so-called friends. Immediately, two boys came into sight and rushed out of the bushes. They first spoke in their dialect, then guessed by my lack of response that I only knew Tagalog—Manilagirl, that particular kind. I gave them my age, told them where I went to school, who I came with, and what I liked to do. And all they said, in Tagalog, was “Want to play?”