JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Frame from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

The Defenestrations
Chapter 3BA
by Deo Giga

Part 1

Teepee’s phone rang. She ignored it. Feeling too restive to take a call now, she was spinning about and looking for the source of the voice. Her son’s voice.

“Tell me you heard that,” she glared at the security guard.

“That’s your phone, Ma’am.”

“No, tonto, my son! Mierda, I can’t right now! I just can’t!” The ringing did not stop. After fumbling in her Evelyne bag—she could only keep her cheapest Hermès now, but at least it was authentic (her pricier Birkins turned out to be fake)—she screamed into her phone.

“What is it, Melissa???”

“Ma’am Teepee, I hope you’re doing better…”

“Just get on with it! I’m actually in your building, on my way to your office.”

“Sorry, ma’am. I just spoke with your lawyers and I wanted to tell you personally that we are unable to accommodate the media coverage of your son’s memorial, unfortunately. I’m so sorry. We can handle repatriation of…of his…remains..but an after-party is still in consideration. Since you’re here we can meet and I’d be happy to discuss the matter.”

Still in consideration is an equivocal ‘No,’ Teepee thought. “Why? My son—a celebrity like my son with enough traction to pull your shitty juice company out of dwindling sales—deserves all the fanfare he can get, even in death! Especially in death! You people sponsored his travel. He’d still be alive if not for that stupid trip.”

“Ma’am Teepee…”

“And are we even sure he’s dead? Are you sure it was mijo who died in Prague? I can tell you I just saw him here.” Teepee herself did not understand what she was saying any more. “Wait till you hear more from my lawyers, pollas en vinagre!” She hung up in frustration.

Portrait of Ginevra de Benci by Leonardo da Vinci, from Wikimedia Commons.

Part 2

“Yes, my son just died, in case you needed to know,” she snapped at the guard. “Or that’s what I’m told. I swear I just saw him enter here. Do you not know Iñigo? Iñigo Villa-Real? Jesus, this building has got my son’s face plastered all over its walls!”

She stormed out of the hallway and back to the stairwell. She needed to think. She paid no heed to the guard’s useless mumbling of condolences behind her.

“Mom, let’s go.” That was Iñigo’s voice echoing behind the door.

“Esperame, mijo.” But there was no one there. Enervated, she sat on the top stair, never mind that she was wearing her favorite Gucci (from six seasons ago). Facing her was a casement in a wall, large enough to offer the breath-taking panorama of the slums not far off on the horizon. This was a back stairwell after all—no one needed to see this kind of beauty.

She couldn’t keep the tears dammed any longer. How could they not have invented a procedure to freeze one’s tear ducts and keep mascara from running? Looking in the mirror every day all she could see now was a visage ravaged by age and science. A once gorgeous woman trying to stop time could only do so much with surgery. She’d gone under the knife more times than she could care to admit. At least to her amigas.

“What I get for marrying rich,” she thought, stifling her sobs with her late husband’s Burberry handkerchief.

Bridge of Dreams by Utagawa Tokoyuni, from Public Domain Review

Part 3

There was a time when Teepee called Mindoro home. And another time when it was Tondo she called home too, albeit reluctantly.

There was a time when “Teepee” was “Chopeesta,” a vernacular elision of “Teofista.” (Naturally she detested her name. Or at least the way people said it. She blamed it on the laziness of the Filipino tongue that similarly turned “Buendía” to “Bwenja.”)

But that was two lifetimes ago. Now, if she didn’t get to walk in—no need for reservations, she was a Sunday regular—for lunch at Spices on a particular Sunday, the hostess, sensing the deviation, would call her up to see if she were ill or needed a dinner “reservation” instead. Only illness or some prior Vibranium-cardholders-only commitment would preclude the presence of the restaurant’s suki.

She surveyed the shanties in front of her. They reminded her of her younger years, when she wasn’t just all beauty and penury. She had smarts, enough to help her win a scholarship at the state university, where her aspiration to say things like “higher echelon” and to climb it at the same time started. She began to make friends with the scions of society’s ten percent; she figured she’d get to the one percent soon enough. One echelon at a time.

And how else to do this but to major in economics and minor in political science? She took one elective in Spanish and found it sufficient to start peppering her conversations with Castilian idioms.

Around this time, she’d asked people to call her “Teo.” It conferred upon her a sense of the androgynous, and androgyny was always in vogue. Already she was feeling like a cliché. Being called Teo was her tenuous attempt at being unique.

Part 4

Opportunity reared its head in the shape of a modest building that she and her friends once passed by on the way to some after-school thing. It was a modeling agency.

“Why don’t you try modeling?” one of her friends asked. “Time those cheekbones and that waist the circumference of a mug earned some money.” They all laughed.

“I don’t think I’m pretty enough.”

“You don’t have to be pretty, you just have to look like a hanger.”

“Well then, I’ll just hang out here every day until somebody notices and ineluctably hires me.”

“Ineluctably!”

Which is what Teo did. Little did her friends know that the absence of fat around those cheeks and waist and collarbones was not a result of exceptional genetics but of those nights when she would sleep her hunger off because their dining table was bereft of victuals. Also, that “golden tan” was due to the fact that, time permitting, she had to help her parents sell kakanin at the talipapa, under the scorching sun, typically after school or on the weekends. There were three other mouths to feed in the household.

It didn’t take long for the ineluctable to happen. Teo did get noticed by an agent and asked if she was a model. The tapered fingers of her slim hand glided to her throat (what better way to draw attention to the length of her neck) and she feigned astonishment at such an unlikely question. “Me!? I’m just a student.”

“Students can be models! What’s your name?”

“You can call me Teepee.” It was a split-second decision. “Teo” was gone.

Champagne label by Alphonse Mucha from Wikimedia Commons

Part 5

Then began a career of further climbing. She met her future husband, Claudio Villa-Real, at the agency. He was best friends with a son of the agency’s owner, whom she called “Tita.” She made it a point to get close to everyone—from the service people to agents to management and, eventually, to Tita.

It was Tita who, informed by her son that Claudio was interested in Teepee, told Teepee of the stories going around about the Villa-Real curse.

“Their males meet untimely ends from windows.” She said ends as if what the men met were some life-changing epiphany at windows. Teepee imagined floating hostile aliens snatching the men with sharp tentacles and hurling them down buildings.

“You know the Dimaudlots? In the other barrio? That family is cursed,” Teepee’s mother once said. She would share stories over the weak flame of their makeshift lampara while putting her children to bed. This was when her parents still used to till the soil for another family in Mindoro. Later, Teepee would learn the concept of feudalism in school.

“What’s a curse?” one of Teepee’s younger brothers asked.

“It’s when you make an enemy of someone and they have you hexed for life.”

“What’s a hex?”

“Who’s their enemy?”

“Shut up, let Nanay talk!”

“One of their ancestors had a suitor whom she jilted. Defeated, the man either consulted a witch or was a mangkukulam himself. Anyway, the woman’s nose spontaneously developed a lesion that never healed. It eventually putrefied. Her nose was her face’s prominently beautiful feature. From then on, the girls in their clan—those considered pretty at least—would eventually have a deformed nose, through no discernible cause, when they reach the age of eighteen.”

Photo by Lucas Ludwig
Part 6

“So if you were pretty, it was a curse, for it meant a future ugly nose? But how could you be pretty if you had an ugly nose?” Teepee thought curses were ridiculous.

“The man wanted to take away her beauty and that of all her descendants. If he couldn’t have her, no one would. Now, all of you go to sleep.”

Would you rather be pretty then have a decaying nose in adulthood or be ugly to begin with and retain your ugly features intact? Teepee’s thoughts kept her up that night.

“That is one specific curse,” Teepee thought now, sitting on the stairwell. “And what a way to make your children go to sleep.” If her mother were alive, Teepee would gladly tell her what a curse was. A curse was being born into poverty. A curse was trusting in scams that at their presentation were styled as “multi-level marketing” or “authentic Birkins shipped straight from New York” or “Van Cleef & Arpels jewelry at a discount.” A curse rests on the fact that money will always come in once you land a well-heeled gentleman. A curse was leaving your degrees in disuse in the attic of your mansion in Forbes, now that you’d become a trophy wife. A curse was your accountant running off with your money, leaving the Internal Revenue hounding you for money that could’ve been flaunted at philanthropic events.

“Mom, there is a curse.” It was the disembodied voice of her son again, this time closer to her ears. Teepee whirled around once more, trying to locate the sound.

“Iñigo, why are you doing this to me? Where are you? I need to see you.”

Photo by Steinar Engeland

Part 7

She stopped to stare at a spot outside the window. There was Iñigo on the street below, gazing up at her. Gasping, she hollered at him, as if he could hear her. “Stay there, cariño!” My son is alive and I’m going to make sure of it, even if it means smashing this window and falling to the ground. Wiping her eyes, she tried to make sure that when she got out of the building, people would not see her messed up look. Before turning to go, she glanced below for a second time. Iñigo had gone.

“What I get for marrying rich,” Teepee thought, looking out the window. “A curse.” A hand—cold as ice stabbing her fevered mind—touched her shoulder. She turned around, her mascara-smeared eyes widening at the face she saw.

* * * * *
Whom did Teepee see?

B. It’s someone else.

Vote! Then tune in next week for the next chapter.