Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(64)
One of Norman’s crooks stood in front of the wrought-iron gates, waiting for our return home—as if he and his boss were sure that we’d be back that night. He walked Mama up the driveway and the main steps, then down the long dark hallway, and toward the master bedroom. I trailed behind them without making a sound, exhausted from sprinting my mother to momentary safety. Norman came out of the room, more sober than drunk, but drunk nonetheless. They locked eyes and stood there, as though nobody else shared the space and air with them.
He held a glass filled with something clear and offered it to Mama and said while brushing the hair off her face, “I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to hurt you. You know I didn’t mean to. Here’s some water.”
Mama, sniffling and hurting, reached her hand forward and took the glass.
I ran upstairs, stomping hard on the floor, knowing exactly what Mama was doing below: she was lying next to Norman and was, sip by sip and drop by drop, drinking the water.
No Fisher of Men
1999
Papa never made it to the desert, so he gave the ocean a try.
His daughter from his first marriage, Lucia, had started a family with Danilo, a pharmaceutical representative. Together, they built a catering company and shared an office with Papa’s first son, Luis, a cargo-delivery servicer. The office sat adjacent to the Entrepreneurial Union of the Philippines, a nongovernmental organization that granted funds to entrepreneurial socioeconomic and environmental projects.
During a visit with his first family, Papa came across the cooperative and quickly forged a friendship with them. His visionary way of life, his personal messianic purpose, his flight toward the sun, had finally found a group of social scientists that could help realize his dream of saving the world while making a living.
Fishermen trying to provide for their families and keep up with the national and international appetite for seafood had adopted a dangerous way of catching fish. At the time, dynamite fishing had become a necessary evil in the Philippine Islands. The use of dynamite initially proved to be profitable, but it soon depleted coastal towns of healthy fish habitat. The explosives flattened coral reefs and killed marine animals and fish eggs. It sometimes killed fishermen, too. The daily catch steadily dropped below subsistence needs. Inland ecosystems failed and forced fishermen to venture farther out to sea. Boating to the deep Pacific reduced their time for supplemental crop farming. Deep-sea fishing also increased the risk of their getting caught in a storm, running across pirates, and falling prey to creatures too large and too ferocious, or yet unnamed.
But Papa found a way to save them. He traveled to Tokyo and the Niigata Prefecture to study Japanese net technology. From there he learned a new way about stationary large-net fishing: a system that used three large nets suspended from buoys. The Japanese used the first net as a decoy—it hung from the surface to the seafloor like a straight-line curtain, blocking fish swimming against the current. On either ends of the straight-line floated basket nets the size of a tugboat, trapping fish that had tried to swim away from the first curtain of mesh. From these two baskets, a mechanical dipper scooped out the catch—the equivalent of the traditional Filipino fishing boat’s three-week yield. With this system, bycatch such as dolphins, sharks, and sea turtles could be released. The system—which Papa developed, enhanced, and later named as Orionet—convinced the cooperative that it could save the industry, the townspeople, the environment, and Papa’s last tad of vision and self-esteem.
Papa took jeepneys and trikes to coastal provinces such as Minas and Aticlan, rallying together and educating fishermen on how to adopt a new way of making a living, of prospering while caring for the earth. He convinced them that if they were to stop using dynamite and instead respected the waters, the ocean would then repay them with yield upon yield. The men, as the men on the sierra and in the desert had once done, trusted him with their trade and their lives. Papa, who was once Leo in the forest and Orion in Arabia, had become—at the dawn of the new millennium—the fisher of men.
The problem with great ideas was this: they could be stolen. People within local trade found out about Papa’s plans. They rewarded townspeople and councilmen for tips on Papa’s 2.0 technology. They pirated his principles and produced crude versions of the straight-line and basket nets. Papa operated on a small cooperative grant and could not keep up with their speed and yield. What he designed for one million pesos, they fabricated and distributed for less than a hundred thousand. Their operations destroyed Papa’s last undertaking and squeezed him of his last cent.
The ocean lured other industrialists to the salt and sand of Minas and Aticlan, and diverted Papa away from a new moneymaking, man-saving deal. It blew him far from the tides and back to the metro. Without saying goodbye to his new friends, Papa turned his back to the sea. He remembered that he had always been afraid of the deep blue, of drowning. Papa had never learned to swim. And he was sinking now. He decided to go back inland to find his family—to find me.
Millennium
1999
We were two months out of hurricane season. At general assembly, instead of singing another patriotic song or listening to an alumnus speak, we sat our bottoms on the cold gymnasium floor through two or so hours of a lecture on how to live without contact with the outside world, without electric power, without running water, without food, without light, and possibly, if things were not to be resolved soon after midnight of December 31, how to live without certainty or security or an ounce of feeling good.