Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(59)

And there, by lamplight, I penned an apology to the people of Abra and asked for forgiveness for a multitude of sins: for the starvation and poverty, the lack of bridges and fully paved roads, the need for guns and hypervigilance, and for the danger their sons faced daily.

I wrote with my pen: “This man you are about to vote for, he is not a nice man. I’ve seen him do things. He’s brought my home and my family down. He will bring you down, too.”



The speech lived in my skirt pocket overnight. Mama and Norman so trusted my skills that they didn’t think to review what I had written. All they asked was that I get in the cargo space of the Land Cruiser after breakfast and travel with them on convoy to the gubernatorial debate. We trucked on, ten beat-up autos of varying degrees of dent and rust, our ride fourth in line. Norman and Mama bobbed in their seats, and I thrashed back and forth: a replay of our trip to the North, but this time with bags of silk-screened shirts and posters around me. I had gotten used to this skid-and-go, and then—

Stop. A band of motorcycles and goons T-boned our motorcade.

“Stay in the car! Stay down!” Tony yelled and stepped out of the truck. He fired his gun toward the squad.

“Anak ng puta!” Norman said. He reached for his gun, rolled down his window, and blasted at the barricade of armed men.

“Stay down,” Mama said as she grabbed me by the collar, pressing my face down on the floor mat. The mat’s polyester purls scraped my cheek and the corner of my mouth, giving me a taste of my own blood. Mama let go of me, knowing I wouldn’t dare get up. She half opened the door, hunkered behind it, reached into her Hermès bag for her gun, and blindly fired at the masks and motorcycles four cars from us—her manicured hands flailing in the wind with a weapon about a fourth of her weight. She yelled her favorite word, “Pu?eta!”

I crammed my body under the back seat and screamed, “Mama! Stop! Stop! Papa, help!” I couldn’t hear myself. The sound of silver on steel and steel on silver overpowered my cries. Bullets struck the tin around me until they lodged in bags of cotton—my friends’ handiwork absorbing the blasts from the goons outside. I wanted to peek out the window to see where Mama was—Was she safe? Okay? Alive?

Craning my neck to look out the rear window without moving up from the mat, I searched for the colors and animals that had amazed me upon arrival. I saw pitta and maya birds fleeing from the scene, beating their baby bijou wings—gems lucky enough to have the gift of flight.

I did not have wings, so I made myself shrink. I curled my extremities under me. And I tried to sing my papa’s song about sunshine and gray skies leaving. But again, my tongue dried like salted cod in the hellish Abrenian sun. So I tried monosyllabic words.

“Stop.”

“God.”

“Stop.”

“Help.”

“Stop.”

The land listened. The shooting ceased.

I exhaled and turned to look out from under the seat. The rear window framed the shift in hue. Yellow paled. Green and brown turned into granite, as if camo and tree bark could be absorbed back into metamorphic rock formations. And red gave way to deeper red.

To red. To red. To red.

To blood black.

Tony suffered a gunshot wound to his ankle, leaving Norman to drive. He and Mama got back in the truck unscathed, saying nothing as we drove off. We overtook the three cars preceding us in the convoy—a slaughter of commies bleeding from multiple wounds. My scratched face stung as I looked back at the carnage: boys no older than Paolo swimming in pools of almost black, some with their legs still straddling fallen-over motorcycles and others slumped over another dead boy’s body. I did not know which to cover with my dye-stained hands: my bleeding cheek or my eleven-year-old eyes.

At the roundabout, we U-turned to the safe house, never making it to the gubernatorial debate. The speech continued to live in my skirt pocket. It never reached the ears of those whose lives I’d hoped to somehow change. We arrived at the metal-and-terra-cotta building, where boys had been waiting to help us unload the crates and carry Tony in. Nobody made a sound except for Tony, who was moaning in pain. The boys gripped onto his limbs like the ends of a stretcher, and heaved him up the spiral staircase. Norman followed, then Mama and me. I sat down on the crate by the desk, and Mama sat on the sofa where she, Norman, and Father Balweg had been drinking earlier that week. Mama cried and I watched her. I watched her face turn red, her forehead and hands turn veiny, her cheeks and neck get wet with tears.

“Stop crying and make yourself useful,” Norman said to her, pointing at Tony.

She tried to control her sobs, but couldn’t. Still, she attended to their right hand, shaking as she tried to recall how to fix a nonfatal gunshot wound. She asked one of the boys for his T-shirt and tied it around Tony’s leg as a tourniquet. Then she asked for Norman’s whiskey, poured it into the wound, and gave Tony some to drink. I watched Mama be a doctor again. She hadn’t been in the medical field since the Gulf War, since she lost her medical license. And she hadn’t been a nurturer since Tachio’s birth and death, so I found it oddly comforting to watch her care for a human being. Perhaps the bloodbath was what we needed—the U-turn at the roundabout as our way back to normal times.

Election Day came, and Norman lost. He said nothing in response to the message of the gunfight. The kids I’d commissioned and played with didn’t turn up at the safe house again. All I could do was think of them and pray for them, willing with my heart and gut that they hadn’t joined either army. Father Balweg and those of his men who hadn’t died in the cross fire returned to the boondocks, and we returned to Manila. Balweg and his Cordillera men took their guns and gongs, leaving us as a failed political machine with nothing but inked T-shirts and tattered posters. The Land Cruiser crossed the river one last time on a bamboo raft: from evergreen there to evergreen beyond, the rush of water underneath swishing us onward and away from the mountains and highlands, telling us to never return to its killing fields again.