In the Country

by Mia Alvar

  She sits in most of these audiences, clapping along, telepathically feeding him lines from the speeches she typed. The man who once confessed a soft spot for Sun Tzu, now a champion of nonviolent resistance. The man who once quoted The Prince by heart, now the inspiration to all freedom-loving people of the world. The man who made no secret of his plan, in 1969, to style himself as the President’s loudest critic (hit him hard when and wherever I can; the only way to keep my name in print till I can run against him), now the man at the podium claiming no ambition greater than to fight for his beloved Filipinos even if it ruins him.

  How much he loves the Filipinos—that part is not a line, not a lie. He loves them all: poor or vulgar, greedy or corrupt. He loves the death-row inmates at the New Bilibid Prison, the prostitutes in Ermita with their tragic teeth, the karaoke gangsters who start knife fights over songs they’ve claimed as their exclusive turf. “You’ve got to hand it to them,” the old girl’s husband will say, about pickpockets in Makati who can slit a purse seam silently, or snatch a pair of earrings that the owner won’t miss until her bleeding earlobes itch, “they’re nothing if not good at what they do.”

  He even smiles, sometimes, about the First Lady, who’s visited him in the States, once at the old girl’s house. She went on and on about how much the Reagans love her, how she put the Philippines on the map. Well, I can’t argue with that. He keeps a gold cross the First Lady gave him before he left Manila, emblem of the cozy and unwholesome bond between them. He shakes his head over the President’s latest convoluted proclamation. But he does get people to believe this legalistic mumbo jumbo, doesn’t he? As if they were two unruly children run amok in Malacañang Palace—minds of their own; what can you do?—not powers that be who jailed him for eight years.

  At times he sounds less like a hero than like a long-suffering wife: the Philippines might be this or that, but the Philippines can’t help it. And neither can he: the Philippines is his.

  Before the audience leaves, the moderators of these speeches almost always point the old girl out. They say behind every great man, and all that. She stands and bows and smiles and waves.

  Proposal

  When they pick up his bib—the one thing she can’t do without him—it’s pep talk time.

  “Spring’s right around the corner,” says the old girl. Copley Square glitters, still slushy from the last storm. “These trees will start turning for you by race day.”

  “Once you turn onto Boylston, you’ll have a few blocks to go—that’s it! The kids will all be at the finish, waiting for you, calling you their hero.” The old girl’s even giving herself chills.

  “Bitbit’s already sewn the letters on your shirt. Strangers will be chanting your name.”

  Her husband smiles a gloomy smile. “They’ll probably mispronounce it.”

  “So?” They stand above the barren, icy ditch—a babbling fountain in the summertime. “You’ll know who they’re talking about.”

  He says nothing.

  “Right here you’ll get your medal. Popsy’s going to take the pictures—not that any of us will ever forget it. Imagine the people back home. ‘Harvard na, marathon pa!’ they’ll say.”

  The old girl’s husband shakes his head. “I’m thinking I should not run at all.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “You were right. I’m no spring chicken anymore. A little arrogant to think I could just take this up.”

  She never said that. After twenty-eight years, it seems, she didn’t have to.

  “You’re not so old,” the old girl says, not wanting to discourage him from a dream by now she’s bought into. You’ve caught the bug!

  “Training takes up too much time,” he’s saying. “We have more important things to think about right now.”

  Inside, she feels herself adjusting, one more time. Don’t worry, Dad. We’ll still watch from our balcony. Better for your foot to heal. So he took the long way around to her point of view: so what?

  The bronze statue of Copley, with his palette and paintbrushes; the church behind them; and the tint of the dusk sky take her back, all of a sudden, to Manila. Another walk after another dinner with their families—their early dates, if you could call them dates, had mostly been just that. Around this time of day, on one walk, they sat beneath the statue of Rajah Sulayman, with the church behind them and Manila Bay before. He simply asked, “How do you feel about October?” Counting on assumptions that had already passed between them. And she said, “As long as it’s not late October, too close to All Souls’ Day. When death is on people’s minds.”

  “Things are bad back home,” her husband says now. “Maybe worse since martial law was, quote-unquote, ‘lifted.’ More debt, more deaths…”

  She doesn’t mean to tune out, let her mind wander, but as he goes on about successors and juntas and the President’s dialysis machine, she can’t help it. She’s wondering which of his colleagues will jockey for the Heartbreak Hill spot now. She’s remembering the year she left New York for good, for Manila—daydreaming, as her law professors droned about property taxes and civil procedure, of the American future she’d forfeited. It’s morning in New York, she’d think. Mary Ann’s alarm clock would be going off; the old girl would be boiling coffee for the both of them. Her not-yet husband, back from Korea, teased her about having an American accent. Come to think of it, he always brought up America jealously. I don’t suppose that’s a problem in America, he said, about the stench wafting from the bay toward Malate Church. As if America were some rival suitor. And in a way, it was. When he asked, “How about October?” she didn’t hesitate over some other man she’d rather marry, but flashed instead to New York in the fall, its leaves on fire, and the bachelorette rent she had planned to split with Mary Ann. A life of purer solitude than she has known: she could have been (and happily) the spinster teacher, the aging nun. Back then not every bride-to-be in Manila wore a ring, but he produced one, saying that after so much time in America he thought she’d expect it. She’s remembering he had to place it on her pinkie finger—that’s how small he thought she was. She’s thinking how a marathon is like a marriage: the long haul, the ups and downs, the tests of endurance and faith, the humbling, undiscovered country. Even entering with eyes wide open (and who, of everyone she’s known, has ever been more pragmatic than the old girl?) guaranteed nothing, only injuries you couldn’t predict, potholes and pitfalls and dark hours no sane person would sign up for willingly.

  When she tunes back in, he’s still talking. “If I really thought the opposition could get it together by May, on their own, that’d be one thing.”

  She stares at Copley Square’s ash-colored slush, dripping lampposts, ice-glazed trees.

  “This is what deserves my energy, and all my focus, now. I’m going back, Mommy.”

  She doesn’t feel it as a gut punch, not really. She can’t be too surprised. No one who knows him can honestly imagine he’d be happy here forever, at chalkboards and podiums, in a tweed jacket and suede elbow patches. So why is she struggling, a bit, to breathe? Old girl, you idiot. She met him almost half a century ago, and still she hasn’t learned.

  Finish

  Four months later, the old girl wants a word—sometimes she finds them, in German or Japanese, words that capture something Tagalog and English don’t—for preemptive nostalgia. She’s longed for this life in Boston all three of the years she’s been living it. This town, this house, this bed where they wake early on the morning of his flight out of Logan Airport.

  “Mommy,” the old girl’s husband says, “what’s going to happen?”

  But he knows what. At best, no sooner will he touch down in Manila than he’ll be cuffed and sent back to prison, for who knows how long.

  At worst—well, he’s been talking about that for as long as they’ve been married, as long as he’s been in the public service.

  They can’t shoot me; they’re afraid to make a hero of me. He has said that.

  Then, in
the same breath: Who would Rizal be without the firing squad? Just a brown man in coattails and a bowler hat, homesick in Madrid, yakking away about revolution this and independence that. I don’t want to be another sad, ranting, exiled old-timer.

  It’s not a crystal ball he wants—just a little reassurance.

  “You’re going to get on that plane,” says the old girl, “and we’re going to follow you.”

  A Contract Overseas

  When I was in high school, long ago, my brother Andoy used to drop me off and pick me up from campus in a Cadillac. It wasn’t his, of course, any more than the rented uniform I wore was mine. And certainly we weren’t fooling anyone: not the neighbors in our barangay, not the nuns who’d given me a scholarship to their convent school in San Lorenzo. The car belonged to the family my brother worked for, as a live-in chauffeur. Each morning, Andoy woke before they did, put on his gloves and trousers in the dark, and drove from the suburbs to the slums to collect me. He’d already be muddling through traffic on EDSA Boulevard by the time I rose and got into my own X-shaped necktie and schoolgirl pleats.

  Our mother was the one who washed and starched and pressed my uniform each night, as if that would fool the sugar heiresses and Senate daughters at my school into mistaking me for one of their own. Andoy knew better. Every morning, in the car, he gave me money for the school canteen and ate the bag lunch our mother had packed. He paid the dentist who filled my cavities and the orthodontist who straightened my teeth. On weekends we saw movies or played records on our father’s old phonograph, so when my classmates squealed over Leif Garrett or the Osmond Brothers, I’d know enough to squeal along.

  I graduated in 1976, the same year that Andoy was fired from his driving job. His employer’s daughter, Ligaya, had just turned eighteen, and she and Andoy had been caught “celebrating” her birthday in the backseat of her father’s car. With Andoy unemployed and my mother scraping to feed us, I couldn’t go straight to college, even with a scholarship. We both spent the next twelve months mopping floors and stocking shelves to scare up rent and some tuition. I didn’t see an end in sight till Andoy told me, in May of 1977, that he’d found a better job.

  “This time I want an Eldorado convertible,” I said. We’d just stepped off the jeepney on Salapi Road, whose pavement ended half a mile or so before our barangay began. Along with his old job, of course, we’d lost our access to the Cadillac. It depressed me to be riding jeepneys again, sardined thigh to thigh with strangers in a steel caravan painted up in circus colors, sometimes so crowded that brave young boys sat on the roof or hung on to the jeepney’s sides, the plastic-tarp “windows” flapping against them. After air-conditioning and leather seats, music from a cassette player, and my brother for a white-gloved chauffeur, it felt uncivilized to me to pass warm coins and damp bills forward to the driver, who even when we shouted para! sometimes barely slowed enough to let us jump from the doorless rear exit.

  So I was thrilled to hear another family had hired him. “Where?” I asked, imagining another garage, another suburb of Manila. The aftermud of a typhoon sucked at our shoes as we walked home.

  He said, “Saudi Arabia.”

  I took this as a joke. “Now that’s a uniform,” I said. Peter O’Toole on a camel, in white robes and a head rope, was pretty much my whole idea of the Middle East.

  “I’m serious.” He slowed his steps along the creek that flowed through our barangay. We called it that: the Creek. In fact it was an open sewage canal, wide enough to fit a pedicab and five or so feet deep, bringing the runoff from our houses through the next village and into the San Juan River. We threw our garbage in the Creek. We joked about what else wound up in there: unlucky cats lured by the fish-bone smell, tainted syringes, worse. No threat could crush a child’s tantrum faster than holding a toy—or, better yet, the squalling brat herself—above the Creek. After a flood, eggshells and beer-can tabs and bottle shards clung to the Creek’s banks, as if even trash hoped to escape. But the Creek did serve a purpose, outside of waste disposal: with everyone holding their breath and hustling past the stench as fast as they could, it was the one place in the barangay to have a private conversation.

  “You’re gonna be a college girl,” said Andoy. “The textbooks will be heavier, and so will the tuition.” Driving taxis and limousines in Riyadh, he said, would pay him six times what he earned in Manila. He’d recoup his airfare and work visa fees in time, with some left over to send us, and save up for the driving school for rich expats he’d open when he returned home for good.

  “But I’ll apply for scholarships,” I said, panicking at the thought of Manila without my brother in it. “A year from now, I’ll have enough to start part-time. If I can find a job in the library and cafeteria—and tutor, too, at night—”

  “And study when?” He laughed, exposing a hole near the back of his mouth that still startled me. Years before, Andoy’s two right upper molars had rotted and fallen out. “Promise me you’ll take just one job, and save the wages for pocket money. Bus fare, if you want.”

  We didn’t talk about his other reasons. Along with my textbooks and tuition, Andoy’s girlfriend, Ligaya, would be growing heavier too. She was already nineteen weeks heavier, to be exact, with Andoy’s twins.

  “What exactly will you do in Saudi?” I asked.

  “I told you—same as here,” said Andoy, “but for Arabs. Rich ones.”

  “But what will you do,” I said, pointing at him, “in a place like Saudi?” This was still a few years before everybody’s father, uncle, nephew, son began to leave the Philippines for the Middle East, but already we’d heard stories, from the earliest recruits: men who’d gone to jail for looking at a woman the wrong way, unmarried sweethearts who couldn’t walk side by side in public, secret sex rooms that charged by the hour and were routinely raided by the police. Here in Manila, the decade of halter tops and hot pants suited Andoy just fine. The night before, he’d nuzzled up to Ligaya and caught her shoulder straps between his teeth. “Spaghetti for dinner,” Andoy said, “my favorite.” How would he get by in a country where women veiled themselves from head to toe in black?

  “I’m going to be a father now,” he said. “Saudi’s the best place for me.”

  —

  Before Ligaya, there was Rose; before Rose, there were Vangie, Monica, and Teresita. “She’s the one,” Andoy would declare each time, clutching his chest as if Cupid had hit the bull’s-eye. He knelt at their windows with our father’s guitar, crooning till the neighbors complained. I offer you no wealth or high ambition, went one of his favorite Tagalog ballads, beyond the promise of my everlasting love.

  “You sang that to Rose,” I said, after one serenade. “And to Vangie, and Aurora, and Belen.”

  Andoy laughed, flashing that gap behind his teeth—the one flaw, people said, in his otherwise good looks. Looks he’d reportedly inherited from our father, along with the musical gift that had him strumming those kundiman by ear. “You’ll understand,” he told me, “when you fall in love.”

  That closed the discussion. Love was unknown territory to me: I couldn’t challenge him on it any more than I could question what he said about our father, who had taken off for good before my birth; or what our mother told us of life in Manila during the war. I had to take them at their word.

  “She puts the sun to shame,” he’d say. “I looked at her and every part of me was ringing.”

  Even more than beauty, what really made my brother weak was danger, obstacles—the chance to break a rule or cross a line or overcome some hideous odds for love. Vangie had a boyfriend. Aurora was engaged. His best friend already had an eye on Rose. Teresita was a decade and a half his senior; Belen lived in another province.

  “I can’t have her and I have to have her,” he’d said most recently, after falling for the boss’s daughter.

  I said, “You’ve been listening to too many radionovelas with Ma.”

  —

  In convent school I’d known a few girls like L
igaya, girls whose parents had some money but didn’t quite play golf in Forbes Park. (Her father owned some fancy cars, as Andoy put it, but his wife was always on his case to sell one.) Ligaya was stunning, even by my brother’s standards: rosy and pouty, long and slim but round where it counted, with skin like a steamed pork bun. Pregnancy seemed only to exaggerate those looks. Her hair had grown, with mermaid luster, to her waist. Even her growing belly didn’t so much mar her figure as match it, curve for curve. This new look, of course, appalled Ligaya’s parents, who had thought that firing Andoy would put an end to the affair. Seeing, in the flesh, how much she’d disobeyed them left them no choice but to kick her out.

  So Ligaya came to live with us. When she arrived, with her matching crocodile trunk and train case, she burst into tears. “It’s a swamp,” she sobbed. “I’m going to live in a swamp.”

  It was a swamp; we didn’t need Ligaya to tell us that. Every day my mother washed what clothes we owned and hung them from the banister to dry. Water trickling from the sleeves and hems kept the floor wet. Steam issued from the iron my mother used on the dried clothes, and from the rice she cooked at lunch and dinner, and from the pots of water that we boiled when it flowed brown or orange from our faucets. All that moisture gave the house a smell, so constant we’d forgotten it, of mold.

  Nine years before, a “slum upgrade” had turned the scrap shacks of our barangay into two-story homes, one room below and one above. We had electricity and plumbing now, concrete blocks instead of tin-and-plywood walls, furniture and some appliances, a bathroom with a faucet and flush toilet at the foot of the stairs. Since then the First Lady, who’d led this initiative herself, had moved on to concert halls and galleries. The crown jewel of the planned upgrade—a concrete promenade to cover up the open Creek—never materialized. And like all the neighbors’ houses, ours deteriorated faster than it had improved. Rust had spread its scabs over the bathroom floor and walls. The vent built into the wall above the kitchenette to air out cooking smells became a nest for rats, who chewed through the wire mesh and made a racket with their shrieking every night.