In the Country

by Mia Alvar

  Later that week, on Meet the Press, the President, addressing Herald allegations—Con-Con bribery, staged assassinations. “They call us politicians balimbing,” he said. “But I think it’s the media who are most like star-shaped fruit.” Without naming his grown godson, Manong Freddie looked—to Milagros, who watched him on the Pedia-Onco waiting room TV—truly wounded, as by a brother. “No fewer than ten faces,” said the President. “And zero loyalty.”

  February 7, 1986

  Vivi, the live-in maid and nanny, wakes her with water. That Vivi can splash water on her amo’s face speaks of her particular status in this family. It’s how she wakes the kids, also, when they are lazy.

  Milagros sits up. The radio’s still on. She never turns it off—after thirteen years as a reporter’s wife, the instinct to keep up hasn’t died. Besides, she can’t stand total silence. The National Movement for Free Elections needs your help, the announcer urges. Go now to one of these embattled polling stations. Guard the ballot boxes to make sure everyone who votes is counted.

  “Get up, ma’am,” says Vivi. “You can lie down again later, but first take a bath. Ma’am.”

  Already in the bathroom there’s a drum filled with warm water.

  “At least don’t smell like a sad woman,” says Vivi. “Ma’am.”

  Once Vivi passes the tabo, Milagros pours small pailfuls on herself. Her skin feels tender, almost insulted by the water. She takes her time, giving Vivi a chance to change the sheets, open the window, air out the master bedroom. Over a month now she’s slept on and off in there, not rising except for the bathroom, changing her clothes only when Vivi (no one else can) makes her.

  After she dries off and gets into clean clothes and sheets, back in the bedroom, Milagros waits for the cutoff, for the familiar feedback, snuffing out the radio announcer. One order from the President to his press secretary, one visit from their “muscle,” would kill the station’s power faster than you could say PLEASE STAND BY. But on the broadcast goes, the Election Day blow-by-blow. As in a regular democracy. Broadcasts and elections a birthright.

  Her mother and Vivi have both said, Why don’t you turn it off, if it upsets you? But Milagros isn’t sure it does.

  I beg you, if you have the luxury of time and transportation, the announcer says, stop listening to me. Turn my voice off now. Get to your polling station. You owe it to your country to help out. A year ago this woman might be dead, or jailed, within the hour. It’s like Jim said: the President’s gotten too weak to give orders. Or other men, too strong to follow them.

  1972

  A Friday, near shift’s end. Milagros found Jim in the Pedia-Onco lounge, watching The Porky Pig Show on TV, waiting for her. Not smiling. Not really watching Porky Pig, either, but leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. Fingers tented at his temples, forcing his head to hold some news it didn’t want. A grief-pose. Milagros knew it from the City Hospital fathers. The ones who couldn’t always cry at first.

  He needed her near him. A friend had died. Once Milagros had handed off her beds to the next nurse, Jim drove her to a subdivision outside Manila proper. “He was my Ateneo brother,” he said, as they passed a sign: BATANGLOBO VILLAGE—DRIVE CAREFULLY. “We were the scholarship boys. Me from up north, Billy from just outside the U.S. air base in Tacloban. He taught me Waray-Waray, I taught him Ilocano, so we had each other to speak dialect with when we were homesick.”

  Through her window Milagros saw dogs on leashes, bikes with training wheels. This was not Forbes Park, where she imagined rich men keeping wives and mistresses in separate wings of their Spanish Colonial mansions. Nor was it the Smokey Mountain landfill, where the poor rummaged for anything to eat or sell. Here, a low wall separated one single-story house from the next. A gate in front kept each yard from the street.

  “We want Twenty-six Avalon Row,” said Jim. “His mother called me, inconsolable. Can’t touch or even look at Billy’s things.” It fell to Jim to clear out Billy’s house and sell it.

  Signs: ATLANTIS AVENUE, BRIGADOON ALLEY, EDEN STREET. “An awful lot for streets to live up to,” Milagros said. ELYSIUM, NARNIA, OZ, VALHALLA.

  “The developer had fun with it, I guess,” said Jim. They found 26 Avalon Row: a bungalow with a red-clay roof and cinder-block walls. An L-shaped yard around the front and side. Out back was the labahan with its stone sink, drain, and clotheslines. Years ago, Milagros’s mother had worked at such a sink, scrubbing at the stains of strangers. Jim let himself in with a key.

  “Billy went to college in the States,” said Jim. “I used to get postcards from him: Hollywood Boulevard, the Ford Motor factory in Detroit, the NASA space station.” Milagros listened—once again, as bereaved parents had trained her to. The stories that they told to bring the dead back. Story after conjuring story, until the raspy voice, the dimpled hands, the child took shape in the room between them and Milagros, as Billy took shape now between her and Jim, and entered 26 Avalon Row with them. “We wrote letters to each other, too. Fighting about Joe McCarthy, the U.S. military bases at Clark and Subic, Nixon. Communist, he called me once. I called him Joe ’Kano, like G.I. Joe and Amerikano rolled into one.”

  They brought cardboard boxes from the backseat of Jim’s car into the house of a man who lived alone. The master bedroom had only an army cot in it. A smaller bedroom next to this, only a drafting table by the wall. Milagros saw a blueprint on it of some slanted structure, like an escalator. The title block was signed Guillermo Batanglobo, ARCHITECT. The smallest room looked out on the labahan at the back. A child’s trundle bed against the far wall had no toys or books around it.

  “Was Billy short for Guillermo?” Milagros asked.

  Jim nodded.

  “Billy Batanglobo. It was his village.”

  They went back to the drafting table. “Billy came home with a master’s degree and a belief in suburbs. Privacy, the kind you can’t get in the city. More home for less money. Grass and fresh air within driving distance of a job in Manila. Batanglobo Village was his lab. He tested all of those ideas here, on his house, first.”

  “They’re nice ideas,” Milagros said. “I see why he believed in them.”

  “But then he went beyond front yards and two-car garages.” Jim turned to the blueprint. “The whole time he was living in this house, Billy was testing out another American idea.” Milagros looked more closely. A round hatch in the grass, the chute slanting into the earth. She traced the grass with her finger: “Is that—?”

  “The yard,” said Jim.

  “Billy Batanglobo was afraid of a bomb?” she said.

  Jim nodded. “If the Americans thought the Soviets would drop one from five thousand miles away, what was to stop Mao or the Vietcong from targeting the U.S. bases here? Or getting what’s left of our Huks to do it? He got so paranoid that he decided this one wasn’t deep enough or strong enough. One bad typhoon and it’d be an aquarium down there.”

  Jim turned to the next blueprint, all squares and right angles this time: a forty-foot ladder leading down into a suite with a bathroom, a kitchen sink.

  “This one’s floodproof,” said Jim. “A custom-made Manila shelter.”

  “Where is it?” Milagros asked, feeling a chill over her skin.

  Jim pointed to an inset drawing of the trundle bed, opening onto its side.

  “Jim,” Milagros whispered, “how did Billy die?” It occurred to her for the first time that Jim hadn’t said.

  Jim shook his head, over and over. She reached for his hand. “Officially,” Jim finally managed to say, “he took his own life.”

  She waited for the unofficial answer.

  When the President sent Philcag, a civilian action group, to Saigon, Billy had been first in line to volunteer. “No surprise there,” said Jim. But the letters he received from Billy just weeks later: those were a surprise. Full of news about civilian deaths and crop destruction, POW torture. Then, a phone call from 26 Avalon Row: Billy had gone AWOL. This village—everything that I’ve believe
d—is a complete lie.

  “We talked for a while,” said Jim. “I convinced him not to burn this house down.” Instead, Billy applied for conscientious objector status. Writing the press, the palace, anyone who’d listen. Our vain mission in Vietnam. A puppet President who’ll keep sending our boys there just to stay in Washington’s good graces.

  For all the times he’d wished Billy and he could agree on something, Jim was worried about this Billy. This angry, haunted Billy. And for good reason, it turned out. Within two weeks of Billy’s call from 26 Avalon Row, he disappeared. Then, just before she found Jim in Pedia-Onco, watching Porky Pig, police found Billy’s body in the Pasig River.

  “They said suicide.” Jim began to shake his head again, bringing his fingers to his temples. “I don’t believe it. Billy would have talked to me.”

  Milagros reached for Jim and kissed him, in the empty bedroom. She was glad to comfort him, if that’s what you could call it, to lie down by the drafting table with him, to calm him all the way to sleep after.

  At dawn he woke wanting to write, and she took dictation on Billy Batanglobo’s vellum sketchpad. He thought Billy deserved a profile in the Herald’s Sunday magazine. His arc from Joe ’Kano to paranoid survivalist to conscientious objector to drowning victim in just thirty years. No editor, Milagros still asked Jim why he left out the second bomb shelter. “One shelter gets the point across,” Jim said. He wanted to spare Billy’s memory, his mind, the judgment of outsiders. Instead, Jim mentioned other “suicides”: four Philcag Filipinos, in the last six months, who’d come home questioning their place in Vietnam—no history of suicide attempts between them, not even a tendency to wander.

  Between the writing and dictation and typing and editing, he and Milagros came together: in the master bedroom, on the trundle, even on the floor of the basement, that bare, unfurnished safe haven that Billy had created before deciding all his fears had been bogus.

  She woke early, before Jim, on Monday and took a last walk through the house—touching the bathroom doorknob, turning on the nursery light, running the kitchen faucet. Despite the grief and loss that hung over it like a net, she liked it here in Billy Batanglobo’s house, and would be sad to leave. She imagined the family that would move into it: a lawyer and a teacher, maybe; or a doctor and a housewife. One son, one daughter. What used to be the basement bomb shelter would be their playroom when it rained outside. There was enough yard for a dog to play endless rounds of fetch in, and bury countless bones.

  While Jim slept, she began to pack up what was in the kitchen cupboards. All weekend long the favor they had come to do Billy’s family had been forgotten. She stacked white bowls, each blue at the rim. Billy must have eaten cornflakes from them, the cornflakes that still sat in a box on top of the refrigerator, using the single spoon that had long dried on the dish rack.

  “We work well together here,” Jim said, startling her from the doorway as she unhooked pots and pans, as quietly as she could, from the wall. “Don’t we?”

  Milagros turned around. “I was thinking the same thing.”

  They were both wearing a dead man’s clothes. She had combed her hair with her fingers; they had used Billy’s toothpaste and soap, and gone into his dresser drawer to replace her uniform and Jim’s work shirt. They hadn’t planned to spend the weekend there together, away from home.

  “What if we are home?” said Jim.

  February 8, 1986

  “I voted for her,” says Milagros’s mother. “The widow.”

  “What made you decide?” asks Milagros. “Her platform to eliminate crony capitalism and reform the military? Or did you just go with the candidate that has the strongest popular mandate?”

  She hasn’t been this cruel to her mother since high school.

  “I don’t know about all that,” says her mother. “I just like her face. She has a sweet voice, too.”

  “And she prays,” says Milagros, unable to stop. “Don’t forget about that. If not for the five children, she’d practically be a nun.”

  “You’re angry. I don’t blame you.” Her mother, caught up in the opposition fever, in her own way, has pinned a yellow ribbon to her shirt. But who’s counting? asks the radio announcer, about the election returns. I mean this literally. You’ve got two groups, both calling themselves official. On one side, the Commission on Elections, hailing the widow “Madam President.” On the other, Parliament, appointed by the President himself, has given it to their old boss by a landslide.

  “I hope your vote is counted, Ma,” Milagros says. “And I hope this person you admire doesn’t let you down.”

  “I doubt I’ll live long enough for anyone to let me down anymore,” says her mother.

  The People and I have won, and we know it, the widow says. Any victory announced by the palace will be as cooked up as the President’s fake war medals. She vows to get her fans together for street protests if she’s cheated.

  That night, Milagros tries, for the third time in three weeks, to join Vivi and her mother for dinner. Milagros could get through it if not for her daughter. Jackie clings to information like a dog beside the kitchen table. Any fact you throw her gets sucked dry.

  “Jaime Jr. is on vacation,” says Milagros, fresh out of answers.

  “But school’s not over yet,” says Jackie.

  “So many questions!” snaps Milagros. She who once swore to be the kind of mother who encouraged questions. “Is this what I get for sending you to school like you wanted?”

  “But you said before—”

  “Forget what I said before,” says Milagros. “Jaime’s away.”

  If mothering were an official job, someone would have docked her pay or fired Milagros months ago. She avoids her own daughter—bathes while Jackie’s at school, pees while she’s asleep—the way a late-arriving worker ducks the boss.

  At the hospital, once upon a time, she was the patron saint of siblings. The young survivors—the ones that parents, drowning in their oceanic grief, forgot. “Your brother is dead,” Milagros would tell these lost little spares. She stooped to look into their wide dry eyes: “Do you know what dead means?” She gave them words their parents couldn’t bear to contemplate, not yet.

  Who will take up Jackie’s cause? Milagros knows how to work hard at a job. But she can’t be both grieving parent and sensible nurse. Tama na! Sobra na! crowds are chanting at the palace. Enough already! It’s too much! So she feels at home, with Jackie. Enough questions, too many needs. Milagros wants to shake the girl by her small shoulders. She can’t forgive her for being so young and knowing so little. The only words Milagros wants to say would harm her:

  Mama doesn’t want to see you.

  I can’t be your mother right now.

  You don’t understand! Come back when you are older, and finally intelligent.

  1972–1973

  In Batanglobo Village lived doctors and lawyers, teachers and engineers. Schooled on the sweat of their parents. Theirs was a poor country, with just a handful of rich people. And less than a handful—a pinch, maybe a sliver—of people neither rich nor poor, who had some talent and a little luck on their side. A tribe of men and women special in their ordinariness. They found their frontier in Batanglobo Village, and settled it as proudly as if no one else had ever attempted mortgages or marriages before them. Their sedans blazed a trail, lined with flower beds. They pushed their strollers as if touching down on the moon.

  Around the time Jim and Milagros bought 26 Avalon Row from Billy’s family and moved in, the fears of martial law had risen to a fever pitch in Batanglobo Village—what it would mean not just on paper, and in presidential speeches, but in their real and daily lives. Food rationing? A massacre like in Taiwan? They imagined blood and fire in the streets, maybe a famine. In four hundred years their country had been conquered twice—three times if you counted the Japanese. Chaos was part of its mythology. Waves of panic buying swept through the neighborhood. In the supermarket Milagros stocked up on rice, sardines, i
nstant Nescafé. Cans of evaporated milk. Bricks of desiccated glass noodles.

  Living with Jim hadn’t seemed to Milagros, at the time, like a political decision. Over morning coffee Jim skimmed up to twelve newspapers, at the very least the Spanish- and English-language ones. These were not underground papers. He loved Latin verbs, Associated Press style sheets, the Constitution, phrases like due process. He wasn’t a man who hoped to bomb or dismantle anything.

  For the cinder-block walls, they chose a paint color called Biscuit. They were listening to the news (Milagros understood from the beginning that they would always be listening to, or reading, or talking about the news) of an embassy bombing in London, and painting the cinder blocks Biscuit, when the radio turned to static.

  They had purchased rice, sardines, and Nescafé; milk and desiccated noodles. They’d prepared for an explosion, people screaming in the streets. Not a silence like this. Feedback from the speakers felt, after all the neighborhood whispers, like the first mishap after the broken mirror or the black cat: their bad luck finally begun. Still, Jim came down from his stepladder to adjust the dial and antenna, as if static were the issue. He turned the radio off and on. Finally he stood and looked down, like a City Hospital doctor would when one of her kids had passed.

  “That’s what martial law sounds like, I guess,” he said.

  Congress closed; then the printing presses. When they learned this—later, of course; phones were dead that night, and the neighbors knew less than they did—the thought of all those quiet, empty offices depressed them most of all.

  That night Milagros felt sick. “I never get sick,” she told Jim. “Work in a hospital long enough and you grow strong as a horse.” But now there was no denying the fever or fatigue, quivering like egg yolk in her joints. “The smell of paint must be getting to me.”