by Mia Alvar
“My children will forget what I look like,” they said.
“But this is how you want your children to remember you.” To Milagros it was a beautiful thought: the rules suspended for a time, toddlers subsisting on Cheez Whiz sandwiches and staying up late to watch their mothers on TV. Even Gloria Gambito, whose husband didn’t want her working in the first place, dared to bring her three-year-old daughter to the picket line, a STRIKE ’71 T-shirt reaching her ankles.
Jaime Reyes, a reporter for the Metro Manila Herald, came to City Hospital on the twenty-second. On his way to Ermita, to the Congress Building, a tip had reached him from the hospital. When he introduced himself—“Jaime Reyes,” he said; “call me Jim”—Milagros was holding too many things. A picket sign, a clipboard, a megaphone. She moved to shake his hand and dropped the picket sign. Not on purpose, not like a lady in bygone days dropping a handkerchief, but it may have looked that way because Jaime Reyes, call him Jim, was handsome. Tall and lean, like an athlete, with the slightest wave in his black hair. Seeing him, Milagros wished she knew more about makeup. She’d kept her hair as short as it had been in high school: wash and go.
Jim stooped to help her with the picket sign and read her Pentel-penned slogan aloud: CITY SHOULD REWARD EXPERTS, NOT EXPAT$. He gave her a look of amusement, or reverence, or both. “EXPAT$,” he repeated, tracing the dollar sign in the air with a finger. “That’s good.” Their palms met as he returned the sign, hers a little damp.
“How did you find out?” Jim asked. “About the wage gap, that is? I can’t imagine this was public information.”
“A friend in Payroll tipped me off,” Milagros said, laughing. “This is my Pentagon Papers, I guess.”
That made him smile again, in his amused and reverent way.
If she had ever joined a campus protest, she might have known of him. Jim Reyes had been a fixture at those picket lines, interviewing the long-haired marching children. But because she rarely opened a newspaper, she had never read his stories of the First Quarter Storm or the jeepney workers’ strike, his forecasts that the paint bombs and broken car windows and Molotov cocktails would backfire. Proof of a state of emergency. Exhibits in the President’s case for staying on in the palace past his legal term limits. Martial law—like the word cancer, in those days: widely murmured, barely understood. Least of all by someone like Milagros, who would have taken Jim’s warnings, if she’d read them, as just another reason to skip the campus picket lines altogether.
Her ignorance made the other nurses giggle. “I called him here,” Janice Mendoza, fresh out of college, admitted. She’d met Jim at a rally on Mendiola Bridge the year before, when students tried to storm Malacañang Palace. “I was just swept up in what my friends were doing. But I kept his card. In case anything else should happen, he told us. Anything that he should know about.” Other nurses recognized him from TV. Movers and Shakers, a weekly who’s-who program not unlike a cockfight or a beauty pageant (Manila and its obsession with crowning champions, and ranking the Best and First and Most) had featured Jim one Sunday. Youngest Staff Writer ever at the Metro Manila Herald (Oldest, Most Prestigious daily in the city). “He skipped two grades,” said Yvette Locsin, “and finished Ateneo at eighteen.” “He’s from up north, an Ilocano,” said Asuncion Flores. If Milagros watched Movers and Shakers, she too would have heard about the first time he’d smelled newspaper ink and decided, at the age of five, that one day he would be a journalist. About the scholarship that brought him to high school in Manila, where he worked his way up from paper route to mail room at the Herald. She too might have held her breath when the interviewer asked after Jim’s bachelor status, seen Jim shake his head and laugh, embarrassed; maybe at the picket line she’d have checked his left hand, like the other nurses, to see if anything had changed.
Instead, she met him for the first time on the grass in front of City Hospital, where he asked, under the bronze statue, if she’d considered greener pastures. “Saudi Arabia needs nurses,” he said. “So does America. It’s a booming market abroad. People making three, four times what even Peggy Ryan does here.”
But Milagros never wanted to leave Manila. Even as a young girl with no money she had wanted to stay here. In the same way she had ridden out high school calculus and college chemistry: she thought that she could crack Manila, that if she worked at it enough the city would reward her; only sissies quit. She stopped herself from saying this to Jim. Talk of mastery, ambition, had no place on a picket line. A union leader had to talk of solidarity. Everyone rising together, not racing to the top.
“Migration’s not for me” is what she said. “And Saudi Arabia’s no excuse for shabby treatment at home. ‘Love it or leave it’ is not a sound workplace policy.”
“But don’t you think,” Jim pressed, “given the chance, that all these nurses would leave City in a heartbeat, for a land of milk and honey? Sidewalks paved with gold or diamonds, depending on whom you ask? The chubby envelopes they could send home?”
“I don’t think so,” said Milagros, deciding she could speak for them. “Your mother gets sick, you don’t leave her for a healthier mother. She’s your mother!”
He gave her that amused, reverent look for the third time. It seemed they weren’t so much on the same page as in the same paragraph or sentence, even from that first day.
February 6, 1986
Milagros’s mother has an idea. “Tell me what you think,” she says.
“Let me guess,” says Milagros, who hasn’t left the house for weeks. “I should go shopping. I should treat myself to a fancy dinner and cocktails with some friends. A massage and a manicure at Aling Betchie’s salon. At the very least, get out of bed, go outside, take a walk and get some air. Am I right, Ma?” Tragedy has freed her from good manners; she doesn’t care how her words land.
“Those are good ideas too,” says Milagros’s mother. “But I was thinking something else. And you don’t have to lift a finger for it. See, shortly after Jaime…”
Milagros lets her stutter. She’s through helping people say it.
“Shortly afterwards, you know, I registered to vote.”
“You?” It’s been three months since the President, feeling heat from both the opposition and Washington, D.C., made his announcement on TV. A snap election. Milagros wouldn’t have bet on her mother noticing. Her mother, who has voted as often in her life as she’s read Russian novels or listened to Italian opera. “I didn’t know you cared, Ma.”
“I don’t, really.” Her mother laughs shyly, touches Milagros on the cheek. “But you do, iha. I registered for you. I know it’s hard for you to get out of this bed—I can’t imagine. For all the bad luck I’ve had in my life, knock wood, none of my kids…”
She still can’t say it. Milagros shuts her eyes.
“What I mean is, rest here for as long as you’d like. But I know this matters to you. You haven’t missed an election since you married. So tell me who you want, and I’ll vote for you. All right? Even better if you remember how the paper looks, and where I should write what.”
Milagros imagines her mother, hunched over a booth, arthritic fingers bringing the ballot closer to her cloudy eyes. Casting a vote for the first time in her seventy years, on her daughter’s behalf. Once again her own eyes fill. Small, unexpected things set her off now. The name Jaime, on the other hand, the word death, leaves her cold and silent. But it doesn’t matter. To anyone who sees her crying, she cries only for him.
“You’re sweet, Ma,” says Milagros. “But voting’s dangerous. You check a box on a little card, next thing you know there’s a rifle at your head and some thug telling you to try again.” From her nightstand radio she knows just how many people want it to be different, this time. An army of poll watchers, thousands strong and still recruiting everywhere from her old college campus to the remotest bukid. Senators and congressmen sent over by America to keep an eye on things. But she’s seen hope and good intentions spark like this, and sputter out, before.
Milagros wouldn’t be so sure. “We thought the worst of them wouldn’t harm a child.”
“Let me do this for you,” her mother insists. “Just tell me who you want up there, in Malacañang Palace.”
Sweet, too, that her mother, who has shared this house with her for thirteen years now, doesn’t know exactly how Milagros—the old Milagros—would have voted. Jackie, with her antenna ears, would have known, at four years old, which box to check.
“Don’t bother, Ma. I used to care about these things. But now I don’t at all.”
1971
“You’re famous!” said her brothers, three days into the nurses’ strike. A Herald had landed at their door in the middle of the night. On page one, instead of a flood or volcano, instead of an election, instead of America: Milagros, in her bandanna, with her sign. CITY SHOULD REWARD EXPERTS, NOT EXPAT$.
In fountain ink, under the headline, Jim had circled the date: June 23. From there Milagros followed his arrow to a tiny margin. And the rest is history, he’d written by hand.
The next morning, 160 nurses showed up at the picket line. “Never trusted any union,” one of them declared, “but fair is fair.” Some came from different hospitals, talking alliances, community. Here and there a sympathetic doctor joined. “If we could do our jobs without them,” one said into Jim’s Dictaphone, “wouldn’t we?” Herald subscribers read of nursing students, bused in to City Hospital, giving out the wrong drugs in the wrong doses. Saw photos of the elderly with bedsores, waiting hours to be helped to the toilet. “What’s lost in all this hoopla,” said the chairman, when Jim got him on the phone, “is the City Hospital standard of patient care, which ought to be these ladies’ first priority. Or what’s a nurse for?” A few readers wondered the same in letters to Jim’s editor. The City nurses made their point. At whose expense? But Manila in 1971 had seen arrests on Burgos Drive, beatings in front of the U.S. embassy, deadly showdowns between students and riot police. Hearts and minds were predisposed to chant along with the young nurses. Equal pay for equal work. EXPERTS, NOT EXPAT$. And the chairman of the board of City Hospital hated scenes more than he hated unions. On a rainy day in July, Milagros saw him cross the wet grass toward the picket line, asking for a word with her.
—
From then on you couldn’t separate them with a water cannon. At night, Jim met the City Hospital patients Milagros called her kids. Some still had their hair, the chemo just begun. Others couldn’t lift their eyelids. He shook hands with a boy whose tumor had grown into his spine, numbing both his legs. By August all the children in “Pedia-Onco” were playing reporter instead of doctor. Holding blood pressure pumps up to each other’s faces for “interviews.” Scribbling leads and datelines in the diaries the social workers had left them.
Milagros learned shorthand and how to operate Jim’s Dictaphone. During interviews she learned to listen past his subjects’ answers, pay attention when they shifted in their seats, cleared their throats, blinked as if the air was dusty. She watched him bring a single pencil to story conferences while his colleagues bumbled with clipboards and fountain pens and briefcases. Jim tented his long fingers, with their trim, clean nails, before his mouth as he listened. He waited to speak, his posture a priest’s.
She descended with him into the bowels of the Herald headquarters, where massive sheets of newsprint rolled above their heads. The earthy, even fecal smell of ink and wood pulp in her nostrils and her lungs. The presses chugging like a train along its track: a sound that filled her brain and rearranged her heartbeat, till it seemed she had become a press, her body printing heds and deks and sentences and stories.
He called her Jo, as if he knew she’d never answer to the likes of sweetheart. Who knew where the nickname came from? Maybe Josephine Bracken, José Rizal’s Irish muse. Or the toughest of Alcott’s Little Women, a tomboy with big plans, who wanted more than what her sisters wanted. Jo she didn’t mind.
She had another boyfriend at the time: Narciso Beltran, who taught theater where they’d gone to college. The kind of boy who lived at the center of people’s attention. Wolfish eyes. Outsize lips. A rasp in his voice that could bring out the nurse or mother in any woman. He never called himself an actor, though; he preferred performer. “As are we all,” he liked to add. Life is a performance.
Naz, as people called him, had been her one link to the campus tribe of long-haired boys and girls. On the same stages where he’d once played Lear and Oedipus and Cyrano de Bergerac, he now coached a new generation of leading men, staging plays Milagros didn’t always understand. Indirection is the only language I trust, Naz liked to say about his style. Just before she broke it off, Milagros watched his Filipino take on Jack and the Beanstalk, set in the foothills of the Mayon volcano. The giant bellowed in military-industrial language; the farmers and the magic soybeans stood for labor and capital. That night she told Naz. I’ve decided to focus more on my job than on my social life. He wasn’t fooled. “There’s someone else,” he guessed, and Milagros didn’t lie. “I see,” Naz said, when he asked who Jim Reyes was. “You want to marry someone with a Serious Career.”
Sneering words, that sounded as if purged from his throat with a finger. The grandson of a sugar baron, Naz could afford to sneer at institutions. Jim’s people in the north had been farmers and servants. Degrees and titles, memberships and mottos, Jim’s press passes and Milagros’s City Hospital ID, were false idols to someone like Naz, knickknacks only squares and parents worshiped.
“No one’s said anything about marry,” she said. But Naz wasn’t wrong.
Until Jim she hadn’t planned it. I enjoy being paid for my work, she used to say, against marriage. Throat cultures, spinal taps—those things compelled her more than caring for a man did. To the question of children she would say: No man I know strikes me as worth repeating. She had a pocket full of answers just like that, before she met Jim.
—
Jim grew up where the President had: on a rice farm up north. “Back then I called him Manong Freddie,” Jim said, of the plantation owner’s eldest grandson. Jim’s own grandfather had plowed the muddy, mosquito-infested paddies in rubber boots and a salakot hat. Jim’s father and Jim himself would have been fated to do the same, until the day Jim’s father, as a teenager, long before Jim was born, saved the infant President from a house fire. “This utang na loob will not be forgotten,” Freddie’s father had said at the time, and it wasn’t. Jim’s father moved up from the soil to the garage as the family driver, the kind of trusted servant close enough to live in the family’s house, eating at their tables, washing at their sinks. Utang na loob: a debt of the heart, an unrepayable soul-debt. By Jim’s birth and baptism, Freddie had graduated from law school, and visited home in time to stand as Jim’s godfather. Jim went to school on the family dime, collecting gold stars and 100s while his godfather won a seat in Congress, picking up a paper route in town while other farm children his age were still planting rice seedlings. When their roads improved, the townspeople took it as a personal gift from the new congressman, a wink at the family driver to whom he owed his life.
At the 1961 inaugural, Freddie, now a senator, introduced his godson Jim, now a City Desk reporter at the Herald, as “the man whose father saved me.” They shared memories of fishing in the Padsan River, village disputes over cattle, traysikel rides in town. Catching sight of each other at a “press-con” would yield a nod, a smile, a warm clasp of the shoulder. And even when Jim pressed his godfather on politics—in ’65, when he switched parties just in time to run for President; in ’66, barely sworn in, when he sent troops into Saigon, a move he’d blocked while he was in the Senate—these challenges felt academic, like staged classroom debates between their younger selves: the lawyer and his journalism-student godson.
Milagros had to doubt Jim’s other stories of his first days in Manila: stories of a hayseed struggling to decode restaur
ant menus and working hard to lose his country accent. What place or language could ever claim Jim? To her he was original as Adam. Near a colony of tin shacks by the Pasig River, she watched him rescue a basketball from mud and shoot hoops with half-naked children. Hours later he stood at an Ateneo podium in his best barong, to accept a medal for alumni who had done the school, and the country, proud.
That summer, the Herald sent Jim to the “Con-Con,” a convention on proposed changes to the 1935 Constitution. One by one, he heard from delegates what they’d received from Malacañang Palace in exchange for what it called “correct” votes. One senator’s nephew, guaranteed a spot at the Military Academy. A grant, no strings attached, to a congressman building a bridge in his hometown. And for the others, envelopes of cash. At the palace, beluga caviar and Dom Pérignon and a slideshow of the questions on the table at the Con-Con, and the “best responses.”
Yes to a new Parliament, replacing Congress, whereby a former President could come back as Prime Minister.
No to a ban on ex-Presidents running again after two terms.
Yes to the right of any President or Prime Minister to rule by decree.
The story earned Jim his first “love letter” from the Office of the Press Secretary. “I must be doing something right,” he told Milagros. You are therefore urged to adjust your claims against the administration, she read, and to issue the proper errata to the Metro Manila Herald articles published on the following dates. Atop the page floated a yolk-yellow sun, borrowed from the country’s flag, inside a bright blue wheel: a seal so cheerful she could swear she’d seen something like it on one of her kids’ Get Well Soon cards.
Instead of “adjusting,” Jim covered the bombings at Plaza Miranda in August. Two hand grenades thrown at a Liberal Party rally, sending that party’s senators and Senate hopefuls to City Hospital. In September, he looked into what the palace called an attempt on the new defense minister’s life, shots fired at his Ford sedan behind the Wack Wack golf course. A driver whose story didn’t match his boss’s. Bystanders and a bodyguard, who saw things differently. The President, who blamed Communists—for this as for Plaza Miranda—but didn’t, Jim noticed, arrest or even question any.