In the Country

by Mia Alvar

  We did feel sorry enough to give Ligaya the upstairs room. Having shared the bed there for nine years, my mother and I moved to the sofa and a straw mat on the ground floor. After she had settled in, Ligaya told us “too much up-and-down” could harm the twins. This meant that someone had to bring her meals upstairs to her and bus the dishes after. And someone was my mother. Ligaya saw her as a slave, which enraged me. (I must have felt I was the only one who had the right to treat my mother like a slave.) Ligaya couldn’t quite adjust to life without a gardener, a housemaid, or a nanny (not to mention a chauffeur). Of course, she didn’t feel that climbing up and down the stairs to walk outside, take the jeepney to Makati, and visit all the shops she could no longer afford to patronize, like a mourner visiting a grave, would harm the twins.

  As for my mother, she was too used to taking orders to push back, at least not right away. For six years now, ever since the trouser factory where she once worked had closed, she’d been calling herself a traveling seamstress, making “house calls” after church each morning in some nearby, nicer towns. But most houses there had help already. If she didn’t happen on a garden party or a child-care crisis that could use an extra hand right then and there, the best she could hope for was a guilt-plagued housewife who could give her pity money. When I was thirteen, still accompanying her on these rounds, I saw people draw their shades as we approached, my mother’s sewing basket of no more use to them than a bundle on some hobo’s stick.

  After that, I had a terror of becoming her, the multipurpose servant a few lucky scraps away from living on the street. I refused to serve Ligaya hand and foot. At the same time, I remembered enough from the jungle kingdom of high school not to fight with someone like Ligaya and insist she pull her weight. Instead, watching them both while I did homework on the sofa, I pretended they were strangers, who had little to do with me. I imagined I was a reporter on assignment, paid to watch and cover subjects in a house that wasn’t mine. Servant work has turned, I scribbled in a notebook, looking at my mother, from what she once did for a living to who she is for life. I had no doubt that both my living and my life would be different. She holds a grudge against the world, I wrote of Ligaya, for defaulting on its promises to beautiful women. It didn’t occur to me that I’d been counting on similar promises, made to smart girls who studied hard.

  —

  In Riyadh, my brother shared a flat with nine men—Filipino gardeners or servants or drivers like him, or men helping to build the pipeline from Saudi’s oil wells to refineries offshore. The desert sun tanned him in no time, as it had his friends. We all could pass for Moros now, he wrote home, on an aerogram as thin as onionskin.

  When he called for the first time, from a pay phone in a downtown hotel, I told him that I liked having a sister for a change. “Why didn’t we think of replacing you sooner?” I’d never lied this way for anybody’s sake before. I must have wanted him to feel, five thousand miles away, that he was working toward a good cause. School, I wrote, because I knew he’d eat it up, has it all over the real world.

  I’d started college that June. When I arrived on campus, among freshmen who had come at sixteen and would leave by twenty, I felt of a different species altogether: discipula laboranda plebeia, the ancient, part-time scholarship girl. I was only one year older, but would age faster than them still, paying tingi or “retail”-style for a few credits each semester, the way my mother bought garlic by the clove or shampoo by the foil sachet. My classmates didn’t look down on me so much as fail to see me altogether, as I stamped their books and served their lunches, as constant and inconsequential to their landscape as the statue in front of their student union.

  This life-size, concrete man on a pedestal was supposed to be a Katipunero, or rebel from the 1896 uprising against Spain. He held a red flag in his right hand and a bolo knife in his left, his open mouth a cry to arms. But I saw him more as a security guard: watching for intruders, waving his bolo to keep girls like me out of the student union, that exclusive realm of monthly club dues and “activities” that didn’t earn a grade or paycheck.

  My partial scholarship was in journalism. I’d never cared for newspapers, but I disliked children and sick people even more. (Teaching and nursing were my other scholarship options.) It had been five years since the President declared martial law, and rules had been cemented about who could print what, and where. One famous editor had said that finding decent Filipino reporters was easier in prison or abroad than in a newsroom in Manila. (No one heard from him again.) But I cared less about press freedom than I cared about myself. If media posts kept opening whenever “real” journalists offended Marcos, that left more for me. I would have followed any marching orders that led out of the barangay.

  Of course, I knew enough to keep these bleak and bitter motives to myself.

  —

  Two months after my brother left, a man came to our door in denim (not just jeans, but a vest and jacket too) and gold-framed aviator glasses. His hair was like a soldier’s: short, cropped close enough to show his scalp; his tennis shoes and T-shirt so white they hurt my eyes.

  “Your carabao,” he called himself: our water buffalo, our beast of burden. His skin was not quite carabao-dark, but close. And rather than a plow or produce cart, he’d brought a woven straw box full of envelopes from men he knew in Saudi. “Something smells delicious, Tita,” he told my mother. She plated up some rice and fish for him.

  He told us his name and parents’ province, what job had brought him to Saudi and how long ago. My mother fixed her eyes on him, as if by staring deep enough she’d locate Andoy there. “We have good times, considering,” he said. His shared flat in Riyadh, for instance, overlooked the public plaza known as Chop Chop Square. “Who needs TV when you’ve got ringside tickets to that?” He raised his arms to show us how the executioner would wield his sword over the accused. We must have cringed; he cut the demonstration short. He cleared his throat and left it at “You know Pinoys. Easily entertained.” He reached into his neckband to reveal a gold cross on a chain, purchased in secret from an Indian dealer. “It’s a crime to wear it there,” he said, stroking his neck as if thinking of Chop Chop Square again. “But I feel safer with it on than not.” He tucked it back into his shirt.

  Ligaya glowed around him, a sudden charming hostess. “I’d offer you some San Miguel,” she said, “if we had any. You miss the taste, I bet.” His visit was the most time I had seen her spend downstairs with us. She even smiled and thanked my mother for the food.

  I puffed up too, made jokes to get my own kind of attention. “Make sure my brother knows that beer is all she meant,” I said, “when she offered you what you can’t get in Saudi.” He laughed.

  Before leaving, the carabao gave us Andoy’s envelope. He didn’t blink when I turned from the table to count what was inside it. He must have hoped, when it was his turn to send money home, that his own wife or sister would do the same. Standing from the meal, he rubbed his stomach. “I’ll need two seats on my flight back to Saudi,” he joked, “if everyone I see today feeds me like this.”

  After that, they came every two months, on leave between their own contracts. They worked with Andoy or lived with him; they had socialized at parties in the workers’ village or worshiped together at a secret Mass held in a basement. Each time, my mother set a place at the table; Ligaya glowed and flirted; I joked around and counted money; the carabao ate and told stories and complained, before leaving, about needing two plane seats for his return to Saudi. Each time they wore the uniform I came to call the Saudi suit: the aviators, the white T-shirt and spotless sneakers, the gull-shaped Levi’s stitch on their back pockets as they turned toward their next delivery. Ray-Ban, Adidas, Jockey—“Stateside” brands, about as far from Peter O’Toole’s thob and head rope as I could have imagined. They even smelled the same: like cigarette smoke and crumpled cash. Through them, Andoy remitted half his pay to us, while he lived on a quarter and saved the rest for his return.

 
Ligaya gave birth in September. Standing in for my brother, I stared at her flushed and puffy face; her plastic cap and sweat-soaked gown; her swollen ankles as they thrashed against steel stirrups that, in my eyes, might as well have had a ball and chain and gang of fellow prisoners attached. I pitied her, and every woman in the ward that day—not just the wailing ones in labor but the nurses at their service and the twin girls who emerged, all smeared in blood and fury, from between Ligaya’s legs.

  My mother’s hope—that babies would smooth out Ligaya’s nature; that nursing, cradling, bathing, and swaddling them would calm their mother, too—turned out to be in vain. Ligaya had a new and longer catalog of gripes now. “They refuse to drink,” she sobbed, jamming the bottles to their infant mouths. She mourned the changes they had wreaked upon her figure. “They’re here to stay,” she wailed, in underwear, tracing the stretch marks on her waist and hips.

  The twins inherited Ligaya’s lungs and her talent for misery. They screamed whether we put them down or picked them up, whether we spoke to or sang to or ignored them. Illness and infections plagued them: thrush, clogged noses, pinkeye, diarrhea. I chased their mucus and secretions, wiping noses, backsides; wetting washcloths to dislodge dried crusts. “This is Sisyphean,” I said, kneeling to scrub the floor or furniture. As if anyone understood. As if my fancy new college-speak could elevate me from the muck.

  —

  In May, another carabao with dark skin, military hair, aviators, and denim came to our door. Our mother was boiling rice at the stove. “Save some for me,” the carabao called through the screen; and there was no mistaking Andoy’s voice.

  I ran to him, the textbook falling from my lap, and Andoy dropped his suitcases. “You reek like a carabao, too,” I said, my cheek against the smoke-and-money smell of his shoulder.

  Our mother couldn’t speak. She touched his face, confirming him the way a blind man would. “It’s gone,” she finally said, when her fingers reached his hair.

  Ligaya played indifferent, unlidding the rice and cooing to her babies. When she turned, she held them out like puppets. “We’re not supposed to talk to strangers,” she squeaked for them. “Who are you?”

  Andoy grinned. His daughters, who had fussed and squirmed all day, blinked silently at him, docile as dolls. “I’ll show you who I am,” he said, taking them into his right arm and winging his left around Ligaya. With a dip, he planted the kind of kiss on her I’d seen in pictures of American victory parades after the war.

  “Idiot!” Ligaya yelped, smiling.

  He’d brought gifts home from Saudi: gold earrings for Ligaya and the twins, a rug for the upstairs room, a brass coffeepot with a swan-shaped spout. But more came after. From the electronic bazaar in Quiapo, he bought me a digital wristwatch and a typewriter with its own carrying case. Between deliveries to other families of carabao, he found my mother an electric cooker that could steam rice without her supervision. By the weekend, we had a color TV set. Neighbors came to watch John and Marsha on our sofa. Our mother made adobo and pineapple ham, while Ligaya served up the San Miguel and Johnnie Walker Black she’d always wanted to offer the other carabao.

  Afterward, Andoy and I walked out to dump the chicken bones and paper plates into the Creek. “Do all the carabao party like this when they come home?” I said. “What will you have left?”

  “Left for what? What am I working for if not my girls?” He put an arm around my shoulder and lowered his voice. “Actually, I’ve been meaning to tell you something.”

  The last time I’d heard him whisper, in this keyed-up and conspiring way, it was to tell me he had fallen for Ligaya. “You can’t be serious. In Saudi?” I groaned. “You’re a father now, you said yourself!”

  “Not that!” He laughed. “Although you could say I got lucky.”

  He’d driven, many times, a man named Abdul Ghaffar Al-Thunayan from the airport to his palace in Al Nasiriyah. When his limousine broke down one day, with Al-Thunayan in the back, Andoy was worried. Al-Thunayan, who sat on the Ministry of Oil and had ties to the royal House of Saud, was an important customer. Displeasing him would not go over well with Andoy’s boss. But Andoy peeked under the limo’s hood, tightened the battery cables, and fiddled with the spark plugs till the engine purred again.

  His passenger took notice. “I have great passion for cars,” Al-Thunayan said, as Andoy dropped him off. “I like my Corniche convertible, but Maserati is also excellent.”

  A week later Andoy’s boss told him he was free. Al-Thunayan had bought him out of his driving contract and moved him west, into the servants’ wing of his mansion in Jeddah. My brother took over for a retiring Indian chauffeur, but he would also occupy a new post, as personal custodian of Al-Thunayan’s luxury car collection.

  Needless to say, he would be earning more. “Enough for you to go full-time,” said Andoy. “No more tingi-style education. Have fun, be a college kid, get involved in some campus life, all right? That’s an order.”

  How my brother knew from full-time student and campus life—things I’d barely dreamed about myself—I had no clue.

  When we got back inside, he chased Ligaya up the stairs. She giggled as they closed the door, and then the phonograph drowned out their voices. The twin I carried stopped her gurgling long enough to smile at me. Her sister fell asleep in my mother’s lap. This kind of peace seemed possible in our house, the month Andoy was home.

  —

  In June, I quit my cafeteria job and gave up all but two shifts at the library. These were the new terms of what my brother called the Abdul Ghaffar Al-Thunayan Scholarship. I flailed, that first day of the semester, at doing as the campus natives did: their slow and easy amble through the grass was harder than it looked, and sitting on the quad, against a tree, made my spine ache. I went and studied them from a bench instead. A boy, reading the campus daily newspaper on the other end of the bench, reached across to clamp his hand on my knee. I froze in fear. This must be flirting, I thought, despairing that only “college kids” who lived the “campus life” knew how to handle it.

  The boy just smiled, pointing his chin at my knee. My leg had been bouncing nervously against the bench since I’d sat down. “Sorry,” I said. He nodded and went back to reading. I was too embarrassed to move again till after he stood, leaving his paper behind.

  I picked it up, scanning headlines about an Independence Day earthquake, the ongoing trial of former Senator Aquino, a teenage housemaid named Rosy Lacaba. The second page contained instructions, below the masthead, for prospective student reporters.

  Why hadn’t I thought of it before? The perfect solution—a necessary notch on my résumé that still fulfilled Andoy’s mandate for Life Outside the Classroom.

  The next day, per instructions, I brought a steno notebook and ballpoint pen to the campus daily’s headquarters, on the fourth floor of the student union. Don’t blame me, I thought, looking up as I passed the Katipunero on his pedestal. This wasn’t my idea.

  But Room 401 was locked. I checked the paper again, not knowing yet what I’d later find out: that its editors and reporters no longer met in the student union, that they had gone underground after running afoul of both the university chancellor and the national Office of the Press Secretary too many times. I didn’t know the paper met in secret now, in the off-campus apartments of its alumni, who believed that any savvy would-be journalist should easily sniff out as much.

  I did hear voices, though, and followed them to the other end of the hall. There, under a cloud of smoke, twelve boys were sitting on the floor, around a braided rug. They seemed dressed for some other time and climate, in plaid wool pants, velvet jackets with large buttons and thick piping, floppy printed cravats. A podium in the corner held a plaster bust of José Rizal; in the opposite corner, a second podium held a thick unabridged dictionary, open to the middle.

  “If I wanted to eat chop suey, I’d go to Señor Woo’s,” said one boy in a top hat, flinging a typed manuscript onto the floor. “It’d be more sa
tisfying, too. Is this a story? Is it enough to take old sermons and pop songs, comic books and teaching manuals, and call it a story?”

  Another boy held up his hand, in its fraying fingerless glove. “What other way is there to write about this country?” he replied. “Three hundred years under Spain, via Acapulco. Thirty years under the Americans and three under the Japanese. A history of fragments and confusion—‘chop suey’ is the only style that captures it.”

  A third boy argued one could write about confusion without actually confusing the reader. A fourth insisted that old standards of clarity in prose no longer had relevance to how we live today. “Is that what fiction’s after, then—real life today?” said a fifth. “That’s not why I read stories. If I just wanted facts shoved in my face, I’d go and read the campus paper.”

  By now I knew I’d come to the wrong place and backed away. A shrill bell rang, and a sixth boy pulled a brass chain from the pocket of his tweed jacket. “We’re out of time,” he said.

  They were still split down the middle: six of them for publishing the story, six against. A rolled-up manuscript was tossed in my direction, and all twelve faces turned. “What do you think?” asked the timekeeper, looking at me as he shut off the alarm and wound the dial.

  Now that they had seen me, I was too proud to retreat. As far out of my depth as I was, I stooped to skim the first few pages at my feet, which took me on a kind of romp—through artifacts and documents that stood, it seemed, for the history of the Philippines. Lines translated from a Spanish zarzuela. Menu items, such as stewed prunes and “college pudding,” served on the 1901 USS Thomas voyage from San Francisco to Manila Bay. I couldn’t tell if these fragments were real or fabricated, or some combination of both. The author, whose name was blacked out in the top-left corner with a marker, had what I could only call a casual relationship with grammar, chronology, punctuation, historical accuracy, and most other courtesies a reader might expect.