Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(67)
“I have to be at school! I have something important at school!”
“What’s more important than this? I’m finally letting you do something you want to do! The Philippine Inquirer is hiring junior writers—your chance to do what you love and make me some money,” Mama said, brushing the hair off my face.
“I’m not making you any money!” I said as I yanked the door handle up and down. “Take me back to school!”
“Calm down and shut up. We’re already here,” Mama said as the Land Cruiser slowed to a stop.
Tony pulled me out of the cargo space and dragged me into the Philippine Inquirer building. Norman remained in the car, and Mama tromped up to the front desk. I breathed hard through my teeth and through the hair on my face as Mama wrote my name on the form fastened to a clipboard. She sat me on a chair in the queue, wiped the hair off my face one more time, forced the clipboard between my chest and crossed arms, and said, “We’ll be back when it’s over. Make me proud and make me some money.”
I wanted to spit at her face but resolved to take my revenge on paper. I waited for someone to call my name, and as soon as they did, I marched my way to a seat in a room full of aspiring writers, all under the age of sixteen, and wrote away. I wrote so hard into the paper that I punctured it at every punctuation and vowel. The contest proctor told us to write a review of a book or a film, and although I could have written about Holden Caulfield, I instead wrote like Holden Caulfield. I plowed my pen through each line, scattering curse words on the page like the chicken shit spattered all over our house.
I wrote about the three things I knew well: architecture, landscape, and weather—my childhood. Each represented my mother.
I divided my essay into three sections. The first section began, “My mother is the mansion.” She was a labyrinthine edifice with gold-plated doorknobs and marble floors, but with no water and no food. She was the house with too many rooms because she had too many secrets to keep, too many versions of herself to shelter: the mother who’d lost children to prematurity and drugs, the princess who so badly wanted to be queen, the con artist who sold fake deeds, the guerilla girl with red politics and red nails. She, like the mansion, rose three stories high to the heavens and sank deep into the ground. The basement closet—her innermost part.
Then, “My mother is this land.” Unruly, untamable, an archipelago—a country made up of floating islands, born of lava, a republic tended to by servants and farmers. She, like the land, boasted troughs and peaks, quaked, avalanched. But she, too, smelled like orchid, like orange peel, like rain drying on cement.
And lastly, on that note, “My mother is the monsoon.” She fell and took everything down with her. Like cloudburst, she spun around the city, hovered, found a target, then blasted to drown us. She, Little Benny, was meant to be the star—but when she came falling, she forgot that she was supposed to twinkle. Instead, she shot down to us as a storm. When Tachio died, I saw her wail. She rained tears. She became her tears: cold, incessant.
Deluge. Delusional.
Breaking into a million pieces.
I was drowning in a monsoon of her.
The timer buzzed. I got up from my seat, stomped to the front of the room, and flung the clipboard across the proctor’s desk. I scrunched the essay into my skirt pocket and marched out of the room and through the building’s doors. The Land Cruiser pulled up as if on cue, and I jumped into the cargo space.
Mama asked, “So how’d it go?”
And I said, “Very well. I wrote what I had to.”
On Nochebuena, every house but ours twinkled with Christmas lights and capiz shell parol. Our house was the largest but quietest on the highway. While families feasted on lechón, hamonado, and fruit salad in condensed milk, I fed myself gelatinous blood cake and mashed mungo bean. I overheard the singing from my window and caroled along, singing of Jesus’s heavenly birth.
I sang with them softly, purring as I watched the tiny bulbs of green, red, and white glitter outside. Softer and softer, I sang. And as my voice became muted, the sound of someone’s steps became more audible.
“You’re leaving!” Elma said as she swung my door open.
“What? When?”
“You’re leaving tonight,” she so casually said. She pronounced the words without stutter, without sentiment, without pause, without dread.
I hugged her and she squeezed me back. Then she shrugged me off and said, “You have to pack. Dali!”
I packed clothes, books, and pictures—one of me with Papa and Paolo by a waterfall, one of me and Paolo cuddling in a crib, one of me with Mama, who in the photo was plump and pregnant with Tachio, and lastly, me under a chandelier—its crystals giving luster to objects below.
Elma zipped the duffel bag, grabbed my hand, and ran me out of the room. She pulled me away from the upstairs bedrooms, down the steps, past the cathedral window, through the long dark hallway, and to the main doors. “Sige! Halika na!”
Mama, who must have been cleaning her scalp wounds or powdering her face, heard the scurry of our steps. She tottered around the bed that Norman drunk-dozed in and charged to where we were—only to be stopped by Elma, the dormant volcano whose boil was inside.
She erupted at my mother. “You cannot stop her! You will have to skin me alive before you keep her from leaving this damned house! You and I will die in this mansion together, but not my friend. She will leave tonight.” Then she uttered Mama’s favorite word, “Pu?eta!”