In the Country

by Mia Alvar

  I didn’t care much for the story, but I had the urge to mimic them, these boys, adopt their earnest style of arguing the way I’d tried to sit and walk the campus like a full-timer. “It is a mess,” I told them, “but what’s wrong with that? Whoever wrote this took away the narrator and left some room for me. I’m not a child. Why hand the story to me on a platter? Why shouldn’t it be up to us to piece together our own history?”

  With that, somehow, I passed. The tie was broken, and the boys moved aside to make space for me. We spent a half hour on each of three remaining stories, the seconds ticking like a toy heart in the tweed pocket of the boy to my left. I sat and watched and chimed in now and then, feeling like an interloper at some mad tea party. Even when I told them I had landed there by accident, from the journalism department, they just congratulated and welcomed me to what they called the dark side.

  And that was how I joined the campus fiction journal: as a sort of challenge to myself, a game. The magazine was called The Katipunero, like the statue outside. I’d seen it before in the library, where every three months I would bring its newest issue out onto the periodicals shelf. The heavy, lead-gray cover, textured to resemble slate. The loopy calligraphy of its letterpress title. The Katipunero was like that: all preciousness and pretense. Those Victorian getups; those boys, who also called themselves Katipuneros and wrote fiction of their own in their spare time, though everyone knew that, after graduating, they would forsake such things to join their fathers’ banks and firms. Outside of class they didn’t need to work for money; instead they spent their spare time analyzing paragraph breaks and “pee oh vee” as if the cure for cancer depended on it. A kind of smirking fascination brought me back to the student union every week, to pick up new submissions from the tray next to José Rizal and read them on the jeepney home, at lunch, even on the grass; to type rejection slips and bring them to the campus post office; to bring pieces I liked to the editors’ attention; to offer my two cents at the weekly meeting.

  The Katipuneros stayed up late to pull off an issue each quarter. Afterward they spent the university’s money and some of their own to throw a launch party. I passed out flyers that most students threw away behind my back, hung posters that would disappear beneath other posters the next day, sound-tested microphones in the cafés where student authors read their work aloud. I drank a lot and smoked a little at these parties, feeling as the only girl that I had to keep up. (“Most girls prefer poetry or journalism to us,” one of the Katipuneros told me, when I asked if there’d ever been a Katipunera before.) After the cafés closed, they spilled into the dormitories to prolong such life-and-death debates as whether literature had social duties, as Salvador Lopez believed, or whether art’s only obligation was to art itself, as Jose Garcia Villa did. I even lost my virginity to one of the editors, behind the common-room sofa in his dorm, after the others had gone home or fallen asleep.

  —

  Faking my way among the Katipuneros also gave me an escape from the barangay. At home my mother, sick of slaving for Ligaya, had started to stick up for herself. But Ligaya wouldn’t go down without a fight, and every day after Andoy’s visit from Saudi, I witnessed one.

  “You should have thought of that before,” my mother said, hearing Ligaya complain of morning sickness.

  “Before what?”

  My mother eyed Ligaya’s belly. “Andoy’s had a million girlfriends. You think you’re the first? You’re just the first to get yourself in trouble.”

  “Myself in trouble!” Ligaya almost choked. “Of course. I did this to myself. So I could get my hooks into the son of an unemployed seamstress.”

  Another time, Ligaya alleged our home was unsafe for children. “We live in a death trap,” she said, once the twins were crawling. They were always slipping on the wet floor, or picking up dust bunnies and trying to eat them.

  “Nothing’s wrong with this place, if you watch your kids,” said my mother. “I brought two children up here.”

  “I wouldn’t brag about your children’s upbringing if I were you.”

  “Now my children weren’t brought up right? A girl in college, and a son, who’ll go as far as Saudi to support his wife and kids?”

  “His wife! His wife!” Ligaya howled, as if she’d heard a punch line, holding her still-ringless hand against her ribs.

  They bickered in that same style about money, about Andoy, about child rearing and housekeeping. Eventually my mother would turn on the TV to drown out Ligaya’s voice. At full volume, the soap operas bled into their arguments, so that sometimes I could hardly tell whether a plate had shattered in my own house or an actress on the screen had flung it. The noise would set the babies wailing. Ligaya stormed upstairs and slammed the door (or had the evil landlord on TV slammed it?). Music blared from the phonograph, angering the babies even more.

  I feared catching their rages, like the infections that bounced back and forth between my nieces. When Ligaya gave birth to a third daughter, in February, I nearly moved into the student union. “Off to work,” I’d say and make tracks as soon as the bickering began. Each time I passed the Katipunero, he looked less like a hostile guard and more like my redeemer. The brass plaque beneath him contained an old Tagalog word for freedom, and he stood for mine.

  —

  By March most students cleared the campus for vacation—except the Katipuneros, who insisted on a summer issue; and me, who still had credits to make up from my part-time days. With fewer writers around to contribute, we had to lift our policy against publishing staff work. The managing editor wrote a story called “McKinley Road,” in which a wealthy businessman left his wife, children, and mansion for a secretary. In the copy editor’s story, “Keys to the City,” evil typewriters rose up against and killed the leading lights of Philippine literature, one by one. An associate editor wrote about a seventeenth-century Colettine nun with supernatural powers. And one of my fellow readers wrote about a colony of fruit bats fleeing the destruction of their home forest for a new place to live.

  These were good stories, and reading them, I had to admit that the Katipuneros were more than spoiled blowhards. The literary magazines and novels they read instead of studying for class; their half-hour critiques; their drunken post-midnight debates about whether, for instance, the English language, as a souvenir of American imperialism, could ever be the basis of a truly national literary tradition or whether Filipino literature had a future only in the local vernacular—all of that had added up to something, which was their own art, or the not-unpromising beginnings of it. The Katipuneros exceeded their own standard for student work. And their devotion to a magazine that turned no profit, whose readership nobody measured, their passionate arguments over what belonged in it, was not a game. They’d given themselves over to exactly what Andoy had wished on me: an enterprise without a practical end. They were amateurs, in the classic sense of the word: they did it all for love.

  It came to me that next to them I was the dilettante. I didn’t sit around in a top hat or a velvet jacket, but I drank their whiskey and passed judgment on their craft, all the while never trying to make something of my own.

  But if I were to write myself, then what about? I knew nothing about businessmen and secretaries, evil typewriters or supernatural nuns or fruit bats in the forest—and those were just the ideas that were taken. Pausing before the plaster Katipunero outside the student union again, I felt gloomy, as unwelcome in his world as ever. But for the first time, I looked at his face and fist and bare feet up close. Till then I’d had him sewn up with ideas about wealthy full-time students; I’d never taken stock of his disheveled, common clothes. The Katipunero, I realized, was poor. The muscles showing through his torn camisa de chino belonged not to some fop who sat in classrooms and cafés all day but to a peasant “son of sweat,” who’d plowed and planted, dug and hoed since he could stand.

  Of course he rose above those circumstances to become a founding hero of the nation. Anyone who’d taken grade-school c
ivics or read the plaque at his feet could tell you that. But now I wondered about others like him—the majority of sons of sweat, who didn’t end up making history. I couldn’t write their stories—not exactly, having never seen a farm or country field in all my life. But I knew something about city peasants—Manila sons of sweat like Andoy, whose experiences came to me in letters and cassette tapes, conversations on the phone or with the carabao. Before I knew what I was doing, I had found a bench beside the student union and started writing in my notebook:

  In Riyadh he shared a flat with nine men—gardeners, servants, or drivers like him, or construction workers on the pipeline being built from Saudi’s oil wells to refineries offshore. I could pass for a Moro now, he wrote home on an aerogram as thin as onionskin, about the way the desert sun had darkened him.

  I skipped my afternoon classes, gliding through campus, landing on a grassy quad here and a flight of stone steps there to add a paragraph or sentence. At home, my mother begged me to consider the electric bill as I wrote by the kitchenette bulb through the night. I barely ate or slept for two days. If someone had predicted, a year earlier, that my brother would inspire me one day to write fiction, for fun, I would not have believed them. Now it felt both new and fated to me, a thing I didn’t know I’d always meant to do.

  The words came easily, at first. It made me happier than I’d ever been to sketch out scenes in my notebook and type them up. “Aren’t you in a good mood,” said Ligaya, and then: “Did a man finally notice you, by some miracle?”

  And then I read my draft again, stacking the masterwork in my head up against the mess I’d made on the page, and sank into despair. “Whoever he is, he’s not worth it,” said my mother, as I moaned and wallowed facedown on the sofa. That night the same pages I had filled in a manic fever were torn into shreds, floating in the Creek.

  The summer passed like this. From the clouds of inspiration to the gutters of dejection and self-loathing and back again, over and over. My grades, meanwhile, slipped in only one direction. By the time I failed a term paper in psychology, after ditching class to write the day it was assigned, I decided that my problem was I hadn’t read enough. And the hole in my apprenticeship was too wide to close in my free time. I resolved, like a determined suitor, to get serious. In the middle of my sixth semester in college, I dropped my journalism major and took up English literature with a special focus on creative writing.

  “Shifty?” asked my mother.

  “Shiftee,” I said, the registrar’s term for students who switched majors. “It happens all the time. The average student changes twice or more before graduation.” I admitted that the switch would set me back a few semesters.

  “How much longer?” said my mother.

  “How much more money is the question,” said Ligaya.

  I couldn’t blame them. What would I want next? A room on campus? A semester abroad?

  Rather than sell Andoy on my craziness, I released him. I’m going part-time again, I wrote to Jeddah. I’ll pay my own way, take another decade to finish if I have to.

  He called as soon as he received my letter. “It says here it just hit you,” he said. “One day you knew.”

  “It’s true.” I knew how cracked this made me sound.

  “Now it keeps you up at night. You feel awake for the first time. Like you’d been sleepwalking through life before.”

  Instead of answering, I pictured him in Al-Thunayan’s servant quarters, standing by the phone, untangling the cord. Everything appeared to be a shade of desert sand—the walls, the carpet, and the telephone; a yellow pencil, dented by different teeth; a yellow notepad filled with scribbled messages. Squares of yellow light checkered the hall from the doorways of the shared bedrooms off it. There’d be a smell of instant noodles and dirty laundry, as in boys’ dormitories I had visited; and from opposite ends of the hallway, the sounds of a communal TV and a running toilet.

  “Congratulations!” he said.

  “Congratulations?”

  “Now you know what it’s like.”

  “To change my major?”

  “To fall in love.” Andoy laughed. “I always wondered who it would be. What boy could keep up with the toughest girl I know? I should have guessed: it wouldn’t be someone for you. At least not a living someone. It would be Shakespeare, and José Rizal, and the Katipunero outside the student union.”

  I cringed. “It sounds ridiculous,” I said. “Forget it.”

  “No!” said Andoy. “Listen. I’m no scholar, but love I know about. That’s my major.”

  “I’ll never get a decent job.” His optimism had me arguing against myself.

  “Relax! Love’s a miracle, not a disaster. Who said it would be easy, or convenient? But if you can’t sacrifice everything for love, what else is there?”

  “It’ll take more time.”

  “And money—yes, love does.” He laughed again. “You’ll learn that quick.”

  He did have one condition. “I want to meet this new love of yours,” said Andoy. Anything I wrote, he said, I was to send him a copy.

  —

  In Jeddah, Andoy told me, every Filipino line cook and janitor seemed to know about Abdul Ghaffar Al-Thunayan. Some saw him as an almost mythical creature: the fair, generous master, rare as a genie or an oasis in the Rubʿ al-Khali desert. Al-Thunayan fed his servants well, paid them on time, let them hang on to their own passports and work permits. And for all his wealth, Al-Thunayan chose to have just one wife, Alia, and treated her like the princess that she, by blood, actually was.

  At his new job, when he wasn’t driving Al-Thunayan’s family, my brother washed and waxed the cars, dusted and vacuumed their insides, balmed the leather seats with oil. Privately, he christened each one with a Filipino name. He called this BMW Dolphy; that Jaguar, Imelda. He kept the keys to every car and the code to the garage’s security alarm. Family or friends who wished to borrow cars from Al-Thunayan—from oil associate to minor prince—went through Andoy first.

  Best of all, Al-Thunayan let him “exercise” each car as he saw fit. My brother drove to the coast at dusk to watch the sky change colors over the Red Sea. Or he took the other servants downtown on their days off, to eat fast food and hear the Filipino waiters hoot in admiration. “A Rolls-Royce with anaconda-skin seats!” he said. “My friends can’t pick their jaws up off the floor.”

  I drank these details in, writing one Andoy-inspired character after another. When I mailed him all my drafts, as promised, Andoy was tickled by the attention. “I guess I’m going to be famous after all,” he said. That year he answered more of my questions about his life in Saudi Arabia than would fit onto the page.

  Other readers (I took my first fiction workshop that semester) were more critical. I couldn’t just record Andoy’s experiences, my classmates said. Good fortune like my brother’s did not make for a story. Where was the conflict? The danger? Fiction needs trouble, or else it’s just description, wrote my professor in the margin of one draft, underlining “trouble” twice.

  “Does Al-Thunayan have a temper?” I asked my brother.

  “Not that I’ve seen.”

  “But every prince has got his warts,” I insisted, quoting that same professor. “What does Al-Thunayan do if a servant makes a mistake?”

  “I want to help you,” Andoy said. “But he’s a good man, and he hires good people. You’ll have to make up your own trouble. It is fiction, isn’t it?”

  I tried. I wrote about what might happen to my fictional chauffeur if vandals keyed a Bentley under his watch, or stole the stereo. I wrote about the chauffeur’s friends nicking the gold-flecked paint by accident, or staining the anaconda leather with their jars of black-market siddique. Goofy scenarios, but they did give me some confidence in my own imagination. I began to see that Andoy’s luck could last in real life while I embellished it with fictional disasters. I stopped searching for the hidden dangers in his tapes and letters home.

  So when his trouble really started, I mis
sed it. I didn’t notice the shift, as he continued to invoke her in his letters, from Al-Thunayan’s wife to Madame to Alia. If I thought of her at all, I thought of a black veil, nothing more. He’d praised too many legs and lips over the years for me to recognize, in this case, desire for what he couldn’t see. By the time I reopened the letters and replayed the tapes, by the time I realized the warts I should have looked out for were his, not Al-Thunayan’s, it was much too late.

  The eyes of Al-Thunayan’s wife are hard to describe.

  I know Madame is nearby from the clinking sound of jewelry on her wrists and ankles.

  When I drive Alia into town, the car afterwards smells like honey and roses.

  —

  My twin nieces could identify a pair of jeans and aviator glasses before their second birthday. “Cow!” they cried from their playpen that May, pointing to our screen door. Their infant pronunciation of carabao had stuck.

  It was Andoy, their own father, at the door. They held their palms out to him, a trick we’d taught them to amuse the carabao.

  “How is my brother, Cow?” I said, as he met his baby daughter. The twins, who recognized his uniform more than his face, kept saying “Cow” and play-begging to him, a sight that gave me such sad visions of a litter suckling at some giant teat that I had to joke around to keep from crying. “We hear they’re treating him like dirt out there. He must be wasting away.”

  In fact, Andoy had put on weight. His cheeks looked fuller, with a flush to them, like he’d been jogging in the sun. “He’s miserable,” said Andoy, grinning. “The one thing keeping him alive is his kid sister, who he swears will be a famous writer someday. He’ll retire rich, off her.”

  Andoy wanted to make his deliveries first thing in the morning. By the time I woke up, he’d already come back from the bank, dressed in his denim and white shoes. He beckoned me to help. At the kitchen table, he went down a list of names and riyal contributions, converting them on a calculator into pesos, which I doled into envelopes. We matched cassette tapes, photographs, and cards to the amounts and put them in a straw tampipi box. Then we took the jeepney: from Antipolo to Santa Rosa; from Marikina to Laguna; from tin shantytowns to houses with clay roofs and living room pianos in neighborhoods so tony I could hardly believe the people there relied, as we did, on a son or brother overseas. Aging mothers squinted hard at Andoy, as if they could blur their own sons into being. Wives and girlfriends perked up in his presence. Children gaped at the stranger they were told to kiss because “he knows your father,” and I even recognized myself, in teens who surfaced from their textbooks long enough to crack a joke and count the money. Like all the carabao I’d met, my brother sat and ate more than he wanted, fed them Saudi trivia they’d likely heard before. I saw what an essential trade was taking place. My brother’s health and cheerfulness told them their own beloved boys were well. And he would bring their rosy performances of family life back to his friends in Jeddah. Walking through each barangay with him, into the swarm of children shouting Carabao!; seeing people through each screen door rise, when he appeared, in hope and recognition; I finally understood the purpose of the Saudi suit. I’d always thought it heavy for Manila, not to mention a billboard for thieves. But men so silent and invisible overseas must have loved this guarantee of being seen at home.