In the Country

by Mia Alvar

  I was always conscious of the ways people moved through the world, because of my own condition. Where others have legs, I have only the beginnings of legs; below that, a semblance of ankles; and finally two misshapen knobs, smooth as stones worked over by water. I got around in an old manual wheelchair that once belonged to my grandfather. The reason for my handicap was neither accident nor illness. No: when I was very young, my mother told me of its mystical and far stranger origin.

  —

  My mother’s father, Daniel Wilson, was an American GI who came to Monte Ramon in 1944. Our town had been invaded by the Japanese, and my grandfather was among the troops sent out to liberate us. As a soldier he helped evacuate the wooden statue of the Virgin of Monte Ramon—the gilt, gem-encrusted patroness of our town—from her church into the nearby mountains. This was to keep her safe from wartime desecration; yet strangely it was those carrying her who felt protected as they ventured deep into the forests and mountain trails. She became known, after that journey, as Our Lady of Safety.

  At the height of the liberation, during a battle in the forest, my grandfather happened upon an Axis land mine and lost both his legs. America flew him home and nursed him at a veterans’ hospital as the war was ending. Once healed, Daniel Wilson traveled back to help rebuild Monte Ramon and seek out a girl he’d met during his first visit. He arrived just in time for what became the very first Festival of the Virgin. Pilgrims came from all over the Philippines to make offerings to Our Lady, now salvaged from her mountain hideaway and safely reensconced in her church. Daniel spotted his girl (who would become my grandmother) in a parade, waving from a float of beauty queens. She descended from the float and placed a garland of sampaguita around his neck. One year later, they had my mother.

  I never met this American grandfather, who died in 1963. But just before she gave birth to me, my mother had a vision. The deceased Daniel Wilson spoke to her, dressed in camouflage and lying in the forest where he’d lost his legs. Although I am dead, Daniel told my mother, I shall live on through my grandson. He told my mother to name me after him, her father, not after the boyfriend who would end up deserting her. Daniel Wilson would not reveal specifics, but said I would be different from other children and remind my mother every day of the family’s legacy of pride and courage. And so I arrived: with a telltale lightness to my skin, and the vague buds of feet and toes that never quite articulated themselves.

  My mother told this story often when she was not too tired. Its ending left her eyes lacquered with tears. She would gaze tenderly at her parents’ wedding portrait: a fair-haired soldier in a wheelchair, Purple Heart pinned neatly to his uniform, and a Filipina bride standing behind him, her white-gloved hand on his shoulder. My mother saw no need to replace Daniel Wilson, Sr.’s old wheelchair for an electric model. “What was good enough for a man like Dad is good enough for us,” she said. (He was always Dad or Daddy to her—never Papa, or Tatay.) “Who needs a Motorette when you’ve got an heirloom like this? And who needs an ordinary father when you’ve got such a grand father?” My mother smiled at her own pun. As it happened, my “ordinary” father had left us soon after my birth, and was said to be living these days in Manila.

  —

  I tried to hold the stalwart image of Daniel Wilson, Sr., in my thoughts each morning when I went to school. My books were bound by a leather strap, which I would grasp between my teeth, while my arms pumped at the steel rings of my grandfather’s old wheelchair. When I was younger, my schoolmates could be violently, unimaginatively cruel: there was a day they shoved me to the ground and ran away with my chair, leaving me to crawl hand over stump about a quarter mile until I found it. Sometimes they hobbled on their knees, in amputee fashion, beside me. They were often caught, of course, and punished by the priests; and so they soon discovered ways of mocking me that didn’t risk lashings or demerits. Recently they’d christened me Manny—to rhyme with my nickname, Danny, but also short for manananggal. The manananggal, a mythical vampire, could detach from her own legs and fly her torso freely into the night, feasting with a forked tongue on the wombs of unsuspecting women. Whenever those other boys aped me or called me Manny, I thought of medals and uniforms, of the Bataan Death March, of my grandfather bleeding in a nameless wood. Did I think it would be a cakewalk, the road to glory? Was it easy for Daniel Wilson, Sr., to risk life and limb for the freedoms of his Little Brown Brothers? Of course not! “Christian children bear their burdens,” a priest once said to me, “and suffering burnishes our lives to a high radiance.”

  —

  Daniel Wilson, Sr., also helped me to endure the sordid claims that schoolmates made about my mother. Once, in grade five, I stood up to my tormentors, informing them that I was descended from an American war hero. “You’d all be speaking Nippongo now if it weren’t for my grandfather,” I said to the other boys. I told them of my mother’s vision and how my birth had confirmed it. My classmates’ jaws fell open. The school yard turned so quiet I was certain I had put the insults to rest at last. But then from someone’s mouth there came a sound like a balloon deflating, and everyone began to laugh and slap their knees harder than ever. “How precious!” “That is rich!” “What a grand inheritance!” “The baby’s got his mother’s eyes, and his lolo’s stumps!” Then a boy named Luis Amador said: “That’s a good theory, Manny. But I’ve got a better one. You didn’t get this handicap from your grandfather. You got it from your mother—who earns her living on her knees!” To what seemed like a million voices cheering, Luis genuflected and bobbed his head like a chicken in a coop.

  It was true my mother had friends in Monte Ramon’s finest men: engineers; police officers; even, on one occasion, the mayor. These guests showed their gratitude to my mother in various ways. Bright flowers adorned our mantel every week. After a brownout, our lights were among the first in town to be restored. A priest from my own school gave her a payneta comb, carved from coconut wood into the shape of a lady’s fan. “Oh, Father,” my mother breathed, fingering the comb’s scalloped edges, “you are too generous.” She coiled her hair—cola-colored hair with streaks of copper in it—above her nape, and secured it with the comb. Even the dentist offered us his services for free—a welcome gift, as my teeth ached often from the weight of my books and other belongings. Countless men in Monte Ramon were good to my mother. I refused to believe, however, that she could somehow be degrading herself in the exchange. In her own words, my mother repaid her friends with “company and comfort—that’s all,” and I did not consider it my province as a son to challenge her.

  I suppose that there were reasons, as many as the hills in our town of Monte Ramon, to doubt my mother’s stories; and reasons, as variegated as the stones that sparkled on our Virgin’s robes, to doubt my mother herself. But what were reasons in the face of faith? I believed her—honoring, as the commandment taught me, both my mother and that greater, universal parent Himself.

  —

  In the month of March, every year since 1947, the town held a fiesta to honor our Virgin. Pilgrims flooded Monte Ramon to pay her homage, and men carried the statue of Our Lady from her church into the mountains and back again in a parade that commemorated her odyssey to safety during the war. Vendors sold roasted cashews and jars of coconut caramel along the streets.

  The church stood between my school, General Douglas MacArthur Preparatory, and our sister school, the Academy of Our Lady of Safety. Tradition held that when the boys of “Doug Prep” and the girls of “Safety” were thirteen, we met and prepared to escort each other in the March parade. Half a school year’s preparation led up to this, and the Safety girls arrived at our campus on a bright Tuesday in October. My classmates kept their hands in their pockets and their eyes on their shoes. The nuns and priests who had taught us Comportment told us now to introduce ourselves and make small talk. In my wheelchair, I sat apart from everyone.

  “What’s the matter with you, Manny?” Ruben Delacruz called out to me. “Haven’t you been taught that a gentl
eman stands up in the presence of ladies?” His friends ate that one up. Ruben was our unofficial school prince, blessed with a screen-idol smile and a supernatural ease in everything from basketball to elocution. He was also the son of our one and only Dr. Delacruz, a man beloved in Monte Ramon. Dr. Delacruz ministered to a scraped knee with the same gentle attention as to a severe pneumonia. Every few years, when my back became afflicted with a pressure ulcer, Dr. Delacruz gave me antibiotics and applied the saltwater rinses with his own hands. An outbreak of influenza in the town, two years before, had Dr. Delacruz making house calls even to the grimiest parts of the ravine, with no concern for his own safety. It was these qualities that earned him the nickname the Messiah of Monte Ramon.

  Dr. Delacruz’s late wife was said to have died giving birth to Ruben. Other boys—like Renato Cazar, whose mother had succumbed to cancer; and Vince Santiago, whose father had run off to Cebu with a younger woman—were teased and shunned for their family situation, as if being half-orphaned was a disease anyone could catch. And other boys—like Oscar Padilla, whose father was a lawyer to accused criminals, and Nemecio Ferrer, whose father was a debt collector—seemed stained by their parents’ work and clientele. Having both misfortunes would have surely doomed any other boy, but not Ruben. Somehow he’d fixed it early on so no one dared mention Dr. Delacruz’s patients or the late Mrs. Delacruz’s death to him; in fact, in Ruben’s case, his father’s work and mother’s absence seemed only to heighten the air of specialness that hung about him always.

  “Give Manny a zero in Comportment, Father O’Connor,” said Pedro Katigbak, though not loudly enough for Father O’Connor to hear. I stared down into my school trousers. The laundress had pressed a crisp, straight crease down each leg, long past the point where it mattered.

  The girls, on their patch of campus green, paid little attention to us boys. In their pinafores and Peter Pan collars, they had formed a circle, singing:

  Negrita of the mountain,

  what kind of food do you eat?

  What kind of dress do you wear?

  I remembered hearing “Negrita’s Song” in primary school, when we learned about mountain tribes like the Batak and the Aeta. The nuns took notice and put a stop to the chanting. Then some of my classmates, led by the brave Ruben Delacruz, started to approach the girls, and I saw Annelise for the first time.

  Though a schoolgirl in uniform herself, she was unlike the others. She did not blush or chat with her classmates, or glance at us from the corners of her eyes every so often. Instead, she was reading a book. Anyone who was not a child was tall to me, but this girl, in particular, loomed. Her cinnamon-dark complexion stood out against the regulation white, and tight, spongy curls bloomed from her head, unpinned and unribboned. As if she sensed me looking, she glanced up and directly at me, displaying a blunt wide nose my mother would have called “native.”

  After some secret chatter the girls brought their new boy acquaintances to Annelise. “How do you do, Negrita?” Ruben said, extending his hand as for a formal introduction. “Tell me: what kind of food do you eat, up there in the mountains?” Other boys followed suit, so that the insults of “Negrita’s Song” could seem from far away like small talk. The girls grew red holding in their laughter. Before long both boys and girls had crowded around her. There was no response from our teachers, this time; they mistook the huddle for a social success, and smiled in our direction.

  I had longed for the day when my schoolmates would find a new target, a victim other than me. Now that she was here—a girl, who seemed unfazed by the teasing—I felt none of the relief I’d expected. I felt only shame at my own school-yard weakness, and a deep curiosity about this girl they called the Negrita.

  —

  A few days later, when Annelise came to our doorstep, she struck the brass knocker despite the key her mother had lent her. I was midway through my daily push-ups, which I did against the armrests of my chair to keep the steering muscles strong. I wiped away the sweat above my lip and caught my breath as I wheeled myself to the front door.

  Her feet were dusty in their rubber tsinelas. She was not in uniform but in a shapeless duster like the ones her mother wore. Only when I looked up did I recognize the cloud of curls and the dark indio face from school. Annelise, for her part, did not seem to remember me. Blunt and bold as she looked, her first words to me were polite. “Evening, sir,” she said. My mother would have approved: she liked when people understood that ours was an English-speaking household. “Your labandera cannot come today. I’m her daughter, Annelise.” Her voice was as forceful and as flat as a wooden spoon against a table. It was not a voice that would sing sweetly to you, or tell tales. “If you show me where the clothes are, I can start now.” I let Annelise into the house. Beside me, she trailed the powder-clean scent of fresh laundry.

  A narrow stone paving led from our back door to the grass and the house’s outer wall. Clotheslines hung in between. Annelise surveyed the plastic basins, the steel sink and faucet, and the folded ironing board. She seemed accustomed to breezing into strangers’ houses to do the wash. She turned on the faucet, testing the water temperature with her fingers.

  “Is your mother sick?” I called out, over the sound of water striking a basin.

  Annelise seemed surprised that I should ask. “No. She just gave birth to a son.” She unfurled some lacy garment of my mother’s, scanning the front and back for stains.

  Had I known that our laundress was expecting a child? She stooped and wore such tentlike clothes, it was odd to think of her in such terms at all. I suddenly realized with horror that, among the other laundry, Annelise would soon be scrubbing my briefs. I wheeled myself over the cracked, loosening cement and reached for my laundry basket. “These are clean,” I said, balancing the basket on my lap and using my other arm to retreat toward the house.

  Annelise gave me a puzzled look, then shrugged and wiped her hands on her duster. “She was pregnant when she started here,” she said, as if she’d read my earlier thoughts. “You didn’t know what she looked like not pregnant.”

  “Can I bring you anything?” I asked.

  Most servants apologized shyly for so much as breathing or taking up space in a room. Annelise looked up from the wash and said, “Do you have a radio?”

  I brought a small transistor from my room and set it on the windowsill between our yard and the kitchen.

  “Thanks.” She smiled. “We don’t have one at home.” Drying her hands on her duster again, Annelise tuned the dial to a radionovela. The characters of Pusong Sinugatan (Wounded Heart) included Joe, an American soldier, and Reyna, a Manila debutante, who met fatefully in 1944. “A pair of star-crossed magkasintahan,” the announcer called them. The radio was old and full of static. Shampoo jingles alternated with bombs and air-raid sirens. “After a word from our sponsors,” said the announcer, “we’ll find out what the Japs have done to Reyna’s beloved papa!” Annelise plunged her shining brown arms into the suds, unaware that I was listening along.

  —

  Our first coed Catechism took place at the Academy of Our Lady. The girls played with their skirt hems and pencil cases as we arrived. My classmates filled the spare desks along one wall of the room, leaving me only the space behind the very last row to park my chair. I spotted Annelise up front. Her curls hovered over a composition book. Sister Carol rapped her desk with a ruler to quiet us, and Father O’Connor said something about miracles.

  Sister Carol directed us to a passage in Luke. “Annelise Moreno,” she called, for a first reader. The laundress’s daughter stood.

  “A woman with a hemorrhage of twelve years’ duration,” Annelise began, “incurable at any doctor’s hands, came up behind Jesus and touched the tassel on his cloak.”

  There was a murmur on the girls’ side of the room, and some of Annelise’s classmates giggled softly into their hands.

  “Immediately her bleeding stopped,” continued Annelise. “Jesus asked, ‘Who touched me?’ ”


  Two girls in the row before me turned to each other. “How fitting,” said one. “She should touch that cloak!”

  “Hemorrhage girl!” whispered the other. They giggled and then mumbled something else I couldn’t catch.

  “Everyone disclaimed doing it, while Peter said—” Annelise began, then stopped and slammed her Bible shut. She whirled to face my corner of the room. I startled, briefly convinced that she was glaring at me. “Rose and Gemma, if you have something to say,” she called, “say it loud and to my face. Don’t cover your mouths. Let’s hear it.” Her voice was hot and full of challenge. The two girls in front of me crossed their legs and laced their fingers, then glanced at each other, wide-eyed.

  “Miss Moreno!” Sister Carol rapped her ruler against the desk. “Were you not instructed to read a passage from the Bible?”

  “I was, Sister Carol,” said Annelise, without lowering her voice.

  “Then tell me, please: why do I seem to be hearing other words out of your mouth?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. Those words were meant for Rose and Gemma.”

  “I see. As a reminder, Miss Moreno, that teachers, not students, are in charge of classroom discipline, you may remain standing at your desk until I invite you to have a seat. Let’s have someone better able to follow instructions read where you left off.”