by Mia Alvar
After our final stop, Andoy wanted to buy presents for the children. We picked up roller skates and tricycles in Quiapo, toys for children older than his own. “You know the twins don’t even know how to use a spoon and fork yet,” I protested.
“I miss a lot of firsts,” he said. “At least this way I’ll leave them with the right equipment.” His ideas for his girls, their childhood—much like campus life and full-time course load for me—seemed to have originated somewhere far outside the lives of anyone we knew. The movies, maybe.
I fell asleep on our way home. Andoy held my hand as I dismounted, woozy, from the jeepney. Then he helped the women after me, standing like a footman in the road. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that he’d turned, the way our mother had years ago, into a servant for life.
“We need a Cadillac next time to get to all those houses,” I said, remembering the days he used to chauffeur me to convent school. “Being a carabao is more exhausting than it looks.”
“It’s not so bad.” My brother slowed his steps along the Creek, our old signal to talk in private, where the others wouldn’t hear.
“Make it quick,” I said. “The Creek smells extra ripe tonight.” I was so used to his good news by then that I added, “Let me guess. Al-Thunayan adopted you? Or bought you a Cadillac of your own?”
Andoy laughed and shook his head. Then he said, “What I told you about love is true. It’s never easy or convenient.” His smile faded. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, as if the dust and garbage smells of our neighborhood, the mud and sewage, were precious memories he wanted to preserve.
He and Alia, the wife of his Saudi employer, hadn’t planned it. And when they felt it, they tried to suppress it. “But it took over us,” my brother said. A fragile conspiracy among the other house servants gave them time alone together. “Not that it ever feels like enough.”
“You’re in love?” I said stupidly, my voice and hands shaking.
“I’ll still provide for all my girls,” said Andoy. “I’ll still come home to see you every chance I get. This won’t change anything.”
But I couldn’t believe that. Not after all the carabao stories I’d heard over the years. My brother’s love affair broke more Saudi laws than I could count.
“You said yourself how lucky you’ve been there,” I said. “Your amo treats you well. And now you want to test that luck? For what?”
“If you knew her, you wouldn’t need to ask.”
“Why don’t you introduce us, then? Invite her to the barangay for tea. I’ll tour her along the Creek. Show her where we keep our pet rats.” I had an urge to smack him, but didn’t. “What were you thinking?”
He shook his head again. “I had to stop thinking.” He’d lain awake too many nights, he said, thinking: about the religious police, about the lashings men he knew endured in prison, about the public plaza with its granite tiles and chessboard-size drain. Risks he chose to take, for love.
When we got home I didn’t breathe a word of Andoy’s trouble to my mother, who was chopping onions by the stove; or to Ligaya, who was folding washcloths while her babies cooed and gurgled in their pen. I didn’t speak of it that night or the rest of the month, even to Andoy. As long as I didn’t mention his dalliance aloud, even after he left Manila for the third time, I believed I could contain his story, leave it unfinished at the point where he had told me he was in love and reassured me everything would be all right. I could just will this craziness with Alia to run its course, like all his love affairs.
For months, it worked. The envelopes arrived, on schedule, through the carabao. Andoy called home and wrote, made plans for the future with us while carrying on five thousand miles away with Alia, like any man who had a ship in more than one port.
We kept hearing from him until November. Then a month passed without word from him. At Christmas, we received no phone call or black-market greeting card, the kind he used to buy from an Indian grocer who kept a secret stash under the register. We didn’t hear from him on New Year’s Eve, the start of a new decade, when the children, as they did each year after using up their store-bought firecrackers, hurled matches into the Creek until a bright hedge of fire blazed through the barangay. I’d done this as a child myself, never once considering the danger. Even the youngest of us, I think, got the symbolism: new beginnings, our village cauterizing itself clean of all the past year’s garbage. But that year, the year Andoy went silent, the flames only looked like hell to me, and smelled like what they were: a gutter of filthy gases burning.
By late January, Ligaya and my mother were frantic, and I was channeling my fears into the only place I could. In my stories, Andoy had injured his hand or voice or mouth; he’d argued with a carabao who got revenge by “losing” his balikbayan envelope; Al-Thunayan had assigned him, as his most trusted servant, to an emergency top secret project in the desert where contact with the outside world wasn’t possible. I made up one fat chance after another to explain his silence. I’d written my brother so often into danger, willing his real life to look more like fiction; the least I could do was try to write him out of it.
I was at home alone, typing away at one such story, when I heard knocking at our door and saw a pair of jeans and aviator glasses through the screen.
—
Andoy used to dream aloud of turning our mother into the kind of woman who watched game shows and soap operas all day, lifting her fingers only to sip cocktails or eat cake. “She’ll get too lazy to talk,” he said. “We’ll have to hang a whistle from her neck to call the servants with.”
We stretched the joke out. “Her hands will fatten up,” I said. “We’ll have to cut off all the rings you bought her. Melt them down into one ring, that barely fits her pinkie.” It tickled us to even think of her, our servant mother, at rest.
And yet, in a perverse way, in that first year of a new decade, Andoy’s dream came true. My mother did retire to the sofa. Clutching one of Andoy’s old bandannas, she watched TV for hours, bursting into tears at times I least expected: scenes where estranged soap-opera lovers reunited, moments when game-show contestants hit the jackpot.
In that same year Ligaya’s parents called, offering forgiveness and a place for her and the three children to live. But she surprised me too, by staying with my mother in our barangay. I thought their bickering would flare up again in no time, but it never really did. Instead, leaving the twins with a neighbor, Ligaya strapped the baby to her back and traced my mother’s daily route: to church, then house to house with a sewing basket and an offer to work at almost anything.
As far as they knew, Andoy was a victim, pure and simple. I told them (when they raised the inevitable questions, and asked me how much I knew) a tale of treachery and blackmail, with details lifted out of Genesis. I cast my brother as the decent Joseph, his lover as the wife of Potiphar, tugging at his clothes. I told them Andoy fled her advances, but not before she’d seized a work glove and the sooty rag he used to clean the cars. Your servant has insulted me, this Alia told her husband, waving the false evidence like a pair of flags.
And I, holding the truth inside me, returned to the dutiful path of the old scholarship girl. Around the time the envelopes stopped coming, I asked for my old jobs back at the library and cafeteria. “We miss you,” said one Katipunero as I stamped his book. He’d read some of my stories months before, shy as I still was about sharing them, and encouraged me to keep at it. “Come join us when your shift is done,” said another, as I served him lunch. He’d once promised to make room in the fall issue for me, if I had something good. I made all sorts of plans to see them, but got too busy. Most of them graduated later that year, replaced by younger boys I didn’t know. Whenever I walked past the student union, I avoided my old statue’s eyes. Everybody has to grow up sometime, I told him. Soon I was majoring in journalism again. A professor offered meals, a room, and fieldwork credits in exchange for my transcribing shelves of interviews she’d taped with politicians since the sixties. So
I moved my books and clothes and typewriter to her town house close to campus. Once a week I still took the jeepney home to Salapi Road, to stock the fridge and pay some bills. This started as my private penance for deceiving them, Ligaya and my mother. But over time it just felt like a load that someone had to carry. They were “my” girls now.
Rejoining the ranks of the older, part-time scholar—early to class and early to work, always bypassing the student union—didn’t leave spare time for much, least of all something as frivolous as fiction. Except, of course, that I couldn’t sleep. At night, after class and work and studying, I lay awake, while my landlady professor snored next door. The guilt of lying to my family, and the grief of missing Andoy, did not exactly add up to a good night’s rest. And so I passed the time by writing.
It was always Andoy, or a version of him, that I wrote about. The same imagined brother that sustained me once we stopped hearing from the real one. This fictional Andoy called me from a pay phone in Bahrain, where friendly Filipino workers sheltered him and Alia after a bold, elaborate escape from Saudi. She left her cousins at the Suq and met our van on an unmarked road. This Andoy sent a tape from Abu Dhabi, saying he and Alia had bought new passports and work visas from an expert forger. Expensive, but love always is. This Andoy wrote home on an aerogram postmarked from Dubai, where he’d secured janitorial work at a hotel. If you work hard—and cheap enough, I’ve found—most bosses will keep any secret. Things didn’t always end well for this Andoy, either. In one draft, the strain of all that hiding broke him. In another, Alia Al-Thunayan saw love wasn’t much to live on after all, and grew to hate the man who’d plucked her from the comfort of her husband’s palace. I even had Andoy arrested, sent to prison, and deported by a Saudi judge back to Manila, never to see Alia again.
These Andoys went by other names, or none at all; but they had one thing, their survival, in common. At times I thought so long and deeply about other ways it might have gone for my brother that I almost sensed him, present in the room, with me. I never could get used to the “withdrawal,” as some Katipunero staffers called it: the rude comedown from having lived so thoroughly inside a story it felt real. But these stories weren’t. I could spend my whole life writing, version upon version, none of which would turn the man in jeans and aviators at our door into Andoy. That carabao would still arrive, not two months into 1980, prop the glasses on his head, and tell me, “You look like him.” This man would still open his palms to me, to show he had no envelope on him. What he had brought was news: that Andoy’s body had been found, alongside Alia’s, inside a destroyed Porsche that belonged to her husband, his employer. He’d lost control of the car after swerving off the road to avoid a collision. An accident—on a routine, if secret, drive between lovers, ending in a fate not far from what they might have suffered anyway, if anyone had found out what they were up to. Fiction didn’t have a prayer over facts like that. And yet, I felt it would have pleased Andoy to know that I still wrote. I could picture him, reading my words somewhere, chuckling at my attempts to save some version of his life. Who could say, then, that I had an altogether lousy or inadequate imagination? My brother got to live forever, in a sense.
In the Country
1971
She called the strike on a Monday, the busiest day of the week. As strikes go, hers was poetry. Eighty nurses, their brown hands clasped around the Self-Sacrifice statue on the lawn outside of City Hospital. The chairman of the board’s white face, turning even whiter when he came out of his car and saw them. Milagros could have lived on that rush forever.
That morning, June 21, their cause was a simple one. At City Hospital, the native nurses, like Milagros, earned less than the American ones. Forty centavos to the peso, if you did the math; less, in some cases, if you weighed education and experience, skill and seniority. When she learned this, months before, Milagros had simply asked her own boss for a raise. I think you’ll agree from my performance reviews that I deserve one. Her boss liked her well enough to talk to her boss, who talked to her boss’s boss. A message of hand-tied sympathy came down. “I know it looks bad,” said Milagros’s boss. “But we’re talking two different standards of living. Take transportation. You ride the jeepney to work, correct? Four pesos round trip? Americans love their cars, and they’re too tall to stoop under the jeep entrance. Gas costs a fortune these days, and what about Christmastime? You’re where you need to be; they fly seven thousand miles or more.”
The math made some sense. But then Milagros went home, to the apartment whose rent she’d helped pay since she was old enough to work, and shouldered all on her own since college; the apartment she shared with her mother, who washed clothes for a living, and her brothers, and their wives and children. Her mother said, “You have a job.” (Her own brothers should be so lucky.) “Don’t waste your time wanting somebody else’s slice of pie. Be happy.” Good advice, for anyone in this life. But the numbers nagged, like a stitch in Milagros’s side. What if she wanted to drive a car to work? Travel at Christmastime? Live in a place of her own?
She started small, with crumbs of gossip. “I heard,” she whispered to a colleague, as they washed their hands together at a scrub sink, “Peggy Ryan pulled in twenty thousand pesos last year, even without a master’s. Know anything about it?” She stepped lightly around her co-workers’ squeamishness: about money, about Americans, about advanced degrees.
The story bled from nurse to nurse like dye. They met for lunch at a carinderia around the corner from City Hospital.
“I’ll just talk to my supervisor,” said one nurse. “Can’t we all?”
“I tried that,” said Milagros. “They don’t listen to one woman, by herself.”
So they voted, three to one, to start a union, with Milagros at its helm. Together they wrote memos, scheduled meetings, made jokes at the negotiation table. The greenest American does better than I, because I am brown. The chairman of the board liked that one. The chairman was fond of Milagros, he said. Impressed with Milagros. The chairman laughed Milagros and her little union right out of the conference room.
Milagros Sandoval, Registered Nurse, twenty-two years old, had no road map from there. Her mother was a laundress. Her father had hopped farm to farm for work. Growing up, Milagros learned to keep her head down, her boat steady. In college she had never joined a single protest. Maoists or Marxists, Young Patriots or Christian Socialists or Democratic Youth, were only obstacles on her campus course from class to job to library. All those long-haired, picketing boys and girls—that was how she thought of them, as children, next to her—blocked her path and made her late; their chants on land reform and U.S. bases sounded like nursery rhymes, like games for kids who never had to work. In 1969, her senior year, those kids accused the President of bribing and bullying his way to a second term, news that felt as far from Milagros as Armstrong’s moon landing. She couldn’t call those classmates for advice now. They had not exchanged numbers at graduation, and probably they would not even know her name.
But she was a quick study: Milagros Sandoval hated nothing in the world more than feeling like a beginner. She learned how to pitch nonbelievers who didn’t want to cause trouble. Buzzwords—worth and equal work—set the air crackling. When in mid-June yet another meeting went south, and ended with the chairman patting Milagros on her white cap, the union voted on its best last resort.
Refusal to negotiate in good faith, she keyed into a borrowed typewriter that night.
On strike until an agreement is reached.
It was not about the country yet, though hand grenades at Plaza Miranda two months later would send gurney after blood-soaked gurney into City Hospital. A year later still, strikes would be against the law altogether.
June 21 came before all that. June 21 was about these nurses, the value of one human’s sweat against another’s. And yet Milagros felt her world grow a few sizes, while the city, street, and small apartment where she grew up shrank. Until the union she’d thought no further than her own
degree, her own job, her first proud payday, when she brought home eggs, bread, beer, and chocolate to her mother and her unemployed brothers.
Family, those waiting at home, turned out to be a sticking point, when union meetings lasted late into the night.
“My children need me,” said the older, married nurses.
“The union needs you too,” said Milagros.