My mother buys him cosmetics, gives him almost new high-heeled shoes after she tires of them. Uncle Panchito manages to squeeze into her shoes because his feet are so narrow. “Are you sure they’re not killing your feet?” my mother asks him, concerned. Uncle Panchito shakes his head, grimly determined to wear her electric blue stilettos no matter what. “His feet are probably killing your shoes,” Salvador observes, wryly.
Salvador had absolutely no interest in wearing dresses or stilettos. He was horrified when my mother gave Uncle Panchito some of her bathing suits, the one-piece maillots in leopard, black, and purple my father brought her from Hong Kong. “But Dodi—how can you do that? That’s a fortune in swimwear—and you’re just throwing it away!” Salvador gasped, calling my mother by the nickname he and Panchito once thought up.
“She is not throwing these bathing suits away—she’s giving them to me!” Panchito glares at him. He turns to my mother and smiles.
Salvador holds up one of the skimpy, shimmering swimsuits. “Chito,
puwede ba
! Let’s face it, you’ll never fit into this—”
Uncle Panchito grabs the tiny suit and stuffs it into his shoulder bag with the rest of his newly acquired loot. “
Hoy
,
Bruja
, what century are you living in? Have you ever heard of miracle stretch fabric?”
“You’ll need a miracle all right,” Salvador retorts.
“
Puta
!” Uncle Panchito is insulted. His mood has soured. I look up from where I’ve been sitting at my mother’s glass vanity table, alert to the sudden tension in the room.
“It’s all right, Chito. You look fabulous and besides—I have no use for the damn things,” my mother says to him gently. I watch as she touches him lightly on the arm. “What am I going to do with all these outfits? I can’t even swim!” she laughs and eases the tension. Salvador grins. “Wear them for Jaime Oliveira,” he suggests. Uncle Panchito rolls his eyes.
My mother winces at the mention of the Brazilian ambassador’s name. She suddenly notices I am there, in the room with them. “Rio, please go to the kitchen and tell Aida to bring us some drinks and
merienda
.” She winks at Salvador and Uncle Panchito. “
Ano ba
—are you ready for scotch and soda?”
My mother the nonswimmer has smooth skin the color of yellow-white ivory. She stays out of the sun. She think it’s bad for the skin, that she will age much too fast and have crow’s feet and freckles like the American consul’s wife, Joyce Goldenberg. My mother uses cold creams, moisturizers, takes daily naps with masks of mashed avocado, mashed
sinkamas
, and red clay from France smeared on her face. She is a beautiful woman who works hard at it. Every couple of months she has Chiquiting Moreno tint her black hair with auburn highlights, just like Rita Hayworth. She yells at me and cousin Pucha not to play in the sun, she warns us about cancer, old age, and the perils of ugliness. Pucha heeds my mother’s warnings. I decide to take my chances and disobey her. I love the feel of the sun toasting my skin as I float on my back in the water.
The week before my birthday I am in my mother’s room, modeling a new dress for her and her two friends, a red cotton satin dress trimmed with black rickrack. Uncle Panchito has designed and sewn it for my birthday. My mother insists I wear a stiff white crinoline underneath. “I hate dresses!” I blurt out, bursting into tears. “And I don’t want a birthday party!” It is no use. I know I will be forced to wear this ridiculous outfit with an itchy petticoat to a party that has nothing really to do with me. It has been planned weeks in advance, invitations delivered to my cousins and to children of my father’s business associates, who are strangers to me.
“How can you say that in front of Chito? You’re an ungrateful little brat!” my mother scolds, ordering me out of her beautiful mauve rooms. I am not to return until I have apologized and promised to be obedient and wear the red dress.
“She’s so strange! So strange!” I overhear her wailing to Uncle Panchito and Salvador as I close the door behind me. I know how much I exasperate her; I know she talks about it all the time with her two pals.
What can I do
—
enroll her as a boarder at the convent? Why is my daughter so rebellious?
She even complains to my father, who brushes her off. “Rio will be fine,” he says, “she’s around your weird friends too much, that’s all. How can you blame her? You’re a bad example for your own daughter,” he admonishes her. It was one of their worst fights, I heard it all through the thin walls of my bedroom. My mother turned the tables on him, caught my father by surprise. “Look who’s talking,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm, “Everybody’s heard about you and that starlet in Hong Kong!”
There was silence, followed by the sounds of my mother hurling an object, her angry whimpering and my father’s gruff voice, muffled in response. Later, I found out from Macario that my mother had not only thrown something but had tried to beat my father’s head and shoulders with one of her stiletto heels. My father fended her off with his arms, and ended up spending the night at Uncle Agustin’s. Macario told me all this with a slight smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, as if he found the entire episode funny and almost enjoyed hurting me with the details. “It’s all true,” the chauffeur said, driving Raul and me to school several days later. Lorenza sat in the front seat with him and never said a word. “Your father has fallen in love,” Macario announces gleefully. My face burns with shame. Raul spits out a curse. It is the last thing we hear him say for days after that.
I love my mother’s mysterious mauve rooms, so cool and softly lit. Whenever she looks in any of her mirrors it is always night and she is always beautiful. She designed the rooms herself, the dressing room with its floor-to-ceiling closets for my father’s wardrobe and hers; the special shoe racks and tie racks and drawers just for stockings and lingerie, the closet doors with their full-length mirrors. The dressing room adjoins the bedroom, with its massive bed covered in a quilted mauve bedspread. In one corner there is a rattan settee with two armchairs on either side, where my mother has her manicures on Fridays and my father reads his Raymond Chandler novels at night.
The windows are boarded up and painted over, the air conditioner blasts twenty-four hours a day. There is never any sense of day or night in my mother’s rooms, or of the glaring heat outside her mauve sanctuary. I spend hours here, watching her dress and undress, talk in hushed tones on the telephone to Isabel Alacran or Mimi Pelayo, or give orders to the servants. While she gossips with Salvador and Uncle Panchito, I perch on the velvet-upholstered stool in front of her vanity table, mesmerized by her perfumes, her jars of creams and ointments, her gleaming tubes of lipstick in red and lavender shades, her jewelry boxes inlaid with pearls and carnelian, her tortoise-shell combs and brushes, the round boxes of scented talcum, and a black lacquered music box from Japan. A Christmas gift from Jaime Oliveira, it plays a Chopin étude when wound up. That same Christmas, Jaime Oliveira gave me an onyx good-luck charm in the shape of a fist from Brazil, Raul a tennis racket, and my father gold cufflinks with the initials “FG” from the same jeweler in Brazil. Jaime Oliveira and my father like each other, and my father was pleased with his gift. He doesn’t notice the music box on prominent display in the center of my mother’s vanity table.
I can tell about Jaime Oliveira. I study him around my mother, at Christmas parties at our house or at the Alacrans’. He always brings his wife, who’s a very nice woman. Sometimes he brings his two daughters, but they’re much too old to talk to me. They tease my brother Raul and flirt with cousin Mikey, who’s intimidated by them. Jaime Oliveira hardly speaks to my mother at these parties; when there’s music, he asks
Tita
Florence or his own wife to dance. Or he’ll sit in a corner somewhere with my father and
Tito
Agustin, deep in conversation about who knows what—probably the perils of being a diplomat, life in Sao Paulo versus life in Manila, golf versus tennis—just the kind of chitchat my father relishes. If the General shows up the men will all get very jolly and drink more, competing with each other for the General’s undivided attention. No matter what, Jaime Oliveira is solicitous of his wife and daughters, and always compliments Pucha and me on how pretty we are. Pucha melts under such flattery, and puts Jaime Oliveira high on her list of sexy old men.
My mother laughs a lot when the ambassador’s around, but she never talks to him either. She caught me staring at her once, and shot me one of her sharp looks. When she’s in a carefree mood, she calls me
precocious
, an uneasy pride in her voice. I looked
precocious
up in the mildewed Webster’s that used to belong to my grandfather Whitman. Cousin Pucha has no idea what the word means. “Am I precocious too,
Tita
Dolores?” she asks my mother. “Sort of,” my mother replies, changing the subject quickly by commenting on Pucha’s elaborate hairdo, one of Jojo the New Yorker’s recent masterpieces. My mother feels sorry for Pucha, that’s why she keeps inviting her to our house to spend weekends with me, in spite of the fact that Pucha gives her a headache. My mother worries about Pucha’s influence on me. I’m sure my mother secretly thinks Pucha is obnoxious and hopelessly boy-crazy.
Uncle Panchito worries about my mother. He has never understood why she had all the windows in her room boarded up. They argue about it, sometimes. “It’s creepy,” he complains, “I never know what time it is! It isn’t healthy living like this.
Dios ko
—your house feels haunted!”
My mother smiles. “Of course it’s haunted.” The room, she goes on to explain, is designed to soothe her. “Like a womb.”
“Like a tomb,” Uncle Panchito corrects her.
I hold the crystal stopper soaked with “Mystere de Rochas” up to my nose, inhaling its dark, rosy fragrance. I close my eyes. “I can still see my angel-gorilla to this day!” my mother is saying. Salvador grunts in response. “He visits me while I’m napping,” she continues, “I can feel him in the bedroom, watching over me. He’s quite naughty. Why sometimes, that angel-gorilla has the nerve to sit on my lap while I’m riding in the car. Freddie sits in front with Macario, of course, while I sit in the back, all alone with my guardian angel. I never say a thing, even though he’s so heavy, I can’t breathe! Can you imagine,” she laughs, “if I told my husband? He’d be the first one to put me away. He complains about me all the time to that family of his.
Temperamental
, he calls me. Makati Medical—that’s where he’d send me. He’d have me locked up downstairs in the psycho ward…”
“Mimi Pelayo’s son is still there,” Salvador says, “after all these years.
Dios ko naman
—he must be thirty by now! She still can’t stop talking about him.”
“I know just what you mean,” my mother says, “Did you know she visits him every weekend? I went with her once. I felt sorry for her and went along to make her feel better. He was all drugged up. His face was bloated. He shuffled around the visitors’ lounge in this smelly old bathrobe, like an old man, bumming cigarettes from everybody. ‘Did you bring any smokes?’ he kept asking Mimi. He kept calling her Benedicta. He didn’t even recognize his own mother. He certainly didn’t recognize
me.
I gave him my pack of menthols—
naku,
he was so happy! Poor Mimi. I left them sitting there, I pretended I had to go to the bathroom, and never came back. I made up an excuse later about feeling sick.”
Salvador holds up another bottle of nail polish: “Silver Moonlight” by Cutex. “How about this, Dodi?” My mother shrugs.
Uncle Panchito looks up from his magazine. “Don’t use silver on her—it’s tacky!”
“I’ll have you know, this is Isabel Alacran’s favorite shade,” Salvador informs him.
“It’s still tacky,” Uncle Panchito says. He is not fond of Isabel Alacran, whom he considers overrated. He holds up another page from
Vanidades
so everyone can see. I stop trying on my mother’s perfume and look over to where they are sitting. So far, I’ve put on “Mystere de Rochas,” “Shalimar,” “Joy de Patou,” “Mitsouko,” and “Fleurs de Rocaille” by Caron.
“Now there’s a woman!” Uncle Panchito exclaims. Anita Ekberg is poised with her mouth open, her head with its mane of blond hair tossed back in an arrogant gesture. She is a lioness; she is obviously not ashamed of her enormous breasts, which threaten to pop out of the plunging, heart-shaped cleavage of her strapless evening gown. She’s been photographed by the paparazzi at the premiere of a scandalous new movie,
La Dolce Vita.
Rita Hayworth is at the same party, standing in the background with some man, whose face is obscured by Anita Ekberg’s voluminous hair. “Oooh,” my mother croons, “let’s go see this when it comes to Manila—”
“
Puwede ba
—maybe in five years, if we’re lucky,” Salvador says, applying the first coat of silver polish on my mother’s nails. “That movie will never make it to Manila. Didn’t you hear? It’s been condemned by the Archdiocese.”
“Put that down before you break it!” My mother warns, her eyes flashing. I had just begun sniffing her latest acquisition, something musky and awful by Coty.
Uncle Panchito comes to my rescue. “Rio, do you want me to fix your hair? I’m an excellent haircutter—”
“I wish you would do something with that straight hair of hers,” my mother sighs. “I’ve been thinking of taking her to Chiquiting Moreno’s for a permanent.”
I look at Uncle Panchito, aghast. “Permanents are tacky,” he says to my mother, “there’s nothing a little trim won’t fix. Come on, Rio—how about the Audrey Hepburn look?”
Salvador starts in again. “I knew you’d say that. There’s nothing wrong with permanents, Chito. Little girls look adorable with curly hair.”
“I am not a little girl,” I remind him.
“Your idea of a little girl ended with Shirley Temple,” Uncle Panchito adds, in my defense. They all start laughing while he rummages around my mother’s mauve rooms, making a mess of her beautiful things, practically knocking over her precious perfume bottles in a futile search for a pair of scissors. My mother keeps laughing and doesn’t seem to mind.