In the Country

by Mia Alvar

  Jim placed a cheek against her forehead, the old wives’ way of taking temperature.

  “Maybe we should take a vacation,” she said. “You know I’ve never been to Baguio? We could use the fresh air.”

  “And leave Manila?” He took his face away from hers. “Your mother gets sick, you leave her for a healthier mother?”

  Milagros looked down. The floor seemed to wobble underneath her, as if they lived on the sea.

  —

  The President broke his silence the next day. Curfew is established from twelve o’clock midnight to four o’clock in the morning. “We aren’t children, Papa,” Milagros told the TV, and that became their code name for him.

  If you offend the New Society, you shall be punished like the rest of the offenders.

  “I better get to the office,” said Jim. But the television answered, I have also issued general orders for the government in the meantime to control media and other means of dissemination of information as well as all public utilities. And I asked the international and domestic communications, corporations, and carriers to desist from transmitting any messages without the permission of my office through the Office of the Press Secretary.

  “He can’t do that,” said Milagros. “Can he?”

  Two days later, four khaki-uniformed officers led Jim out of 26 Avalon Row to a Metrocom car. Utang na loob, it turned out, had its limits. “What’s the charge?” Jim asked. He looked Milagros in the eye, as if the question was for her. “Gentlemen? The charge?” The student in her stood upright, understanding she’d been given an assignment. She watched and took note, for him.

  “Just come with us, boss,” said the officers, in the voice one uses with a senile or demented man. They led him without handcuffs, more like bodyguards than policemen.

  “Why can’t I go with him?” Milagros said, as a third officer restrained her from following.

  Jim shook his head at Milagros. The assignment, he seemed to be reminding her. She said no more, just watched him walk to the police car like a man who’d planned on this trip all along. Nothing clumsy or uncertain in him. She could see now why some colleagues jokingly called him Capitán. And his certainty—of himself, the course ahead—calmed her too. Milagros had grown up thinking strong, decisive men were a myth, like the mountain fairy Maria Makiling or the magical Adarna bird. Her brothers had never been in charge. Her father couldn’t take them down the street without losing his way. But in this moment, with Jim, she felt sure and safe. She didn’t worry. As the typhoon of history made landfall on their doorstep, she could train her eyes on this sane man, and follow him.

  —

  After the arrest, Jim’s breakfast newspapers stopped arriving, as if he’d moved away or never lived there. Milagros checked their names on the mailbox, to make sure. To spook her even more, Billy Batanglobo’s mail kept coming, weeks and months after his death. When the papers trickled in again, one by one, weeks later, they were striated with black bars. Sometimes a word was struck out, sometimes an entire graf, as Jim would call it. A person did this, Milagros realized, in wonder: these black bars were someone’s job. Probably they gave this person a nameplate and a hollow title. Media Verification Officer. Someone’s child had grown into a bureaucrat with a necktie, squeaking Pentel pens across newsprint.

  She had reason to consider people’s children and what they grew into. Milagros was pregnant. That fevered ache, the egg yolk in her joints, were signals from a child, about to make Milagros its mother.

  She picked up twelve- and sixteen-hour shifts at the hospital, afraid to be alone at home too long. When Alicia and Cesar Resurreccion, her neighbors on Neverland Street, packed off for America, she bought their Yamaha piano, its black lacquered case scratched only a little. A piano was heavy and took up space. A piano meant lessons for their child, scheduled on the same day of every week in the same corner of the living room. Her own father had played a guitar, her brother a horn—self-taught dabblers, their instruments like snails, housed in form-fitting shells. Built to be packed up and lifted at a moment’s notice, surviving eviction and transit. But a piano stayed put. She ran her fingertips across the keyboard, warming the notes. She pressed them one by one, left to right and back again. The evenings were still too quiet.

  At a pet store near City Hospital she bought a Japanese spitz whose eyes shone like vinyl. Soba was the name she gave it. Pet stores too flew in the face of her childhood: the only pets she’d ever known were accidental, temporary. Strays that wandered in off the street, the pig she suspected her brothers had stolen—all were sold or killed as the family needed.

  At “Camp,” as she and Jim called the military prison where he ended up, Jim had a private cell. A strange concession, like the cops who called their suspect Boss and skipped the handcuffs. They even let him write letters. These were “checked for errors” before posting from Camp, but their code names for martial law—Marsha Ley, Alex Marshall, Maria Lopez—somehow escaped notice. In her letters back to Jim she made jokes at her own expense. The panic buying has spun out of control, she wrote, regarding Soba and the piano. Maria Lopez is a husband’s worst nightmare.

  In the middle bedroom, she replaced Billy Batanglobo’s drafting table with a writing desk for Jim. She found lithographs of Marcelo H. del Pilar and Thomas Jefferson and hung them on opposite walls, facing off as for a debate. Between the door and the desk, she hammered a row of iron nails, hooking on the last one a hundred and some odd press passes he’d kept. She imagined the umbrella and the suit jacket that would join them one day soon, again.

  As she worked and shopped, drove and planned, she started to suspect that she, in all of this, was being watched. Which car it was she couldn’t say; and when she turned, she saw no one behind her. But some mist of surveillance hung over Avalon Row. She feared not danger but judgment: the invisible officer laughing at her housekeeping skills. Would the Metrocom have left Jim alone if they’d seen lace curtains in the windows, or gumamela in the garden? She scrubbed the sinks at demon speed and buffed the floors with halved coconut shells. I’m a better housewife than I’ll ever be, she wrote Jim, and you’re not here to benefit.

  Near the end of her first trimester, Milagros’s own mother took pity on her and moved in, to keep Milagros company and help with the chores.

  —

  Visiting hours were from eleven to six on Sundays, in the prison amphitheater. The theater, they came to call it—like any other place a family might spend its weekend afternoon. Milagros cooked him pork rolls, pancit, milkfish stuffed with vegetables: painstaking dishes worthy of a baptismal party or Christmas. “Enjoy it while you can,” she said. “I’d never cook like this for a man outside of prison.” A radio was allowed, so long as they tuned it to music and not the news. She brought her mother and her brothers, who excelled at feasting in a dark hour. They sang songs, played Pik Pak Boom—anything but silence. And the guards couldn’t resist a party any more than her brothers could. As soon as they inspected the Tupperware boxes and bamboo steamers, they accepted plates of their own, chowing down on dumplings right alongside the Sandovals and Reyeses. Over the next few weeks, they went from greeting Milagros with a nod to saluting her, as a joke.

  Caught up in that carnival atmosphere, tinged as it was with an End of Days feeling, Milagros and Jim decided to make it official. Milagros’s brother read aloud about Adam and Eve in the garden. “Isn’t that bad luck,” said her mother, “the way that story ends?” But Milagros liked the word helpmeet and pictured herself with Jim in the L-shaped yard, tagging every tree and flower and insect together. Father Duncan, a priest who’d taught Jim Latin at Ateneo, married them in the theater.

  While the family danced around them, Jim stood behind her and measured her growing girth with his hands. “I have a plan,” he said. Milagros closed her eyes. On their wedding day, couldn’t the plan wait? She wanted to stand there, with her new husband’s palms on her belly, thinking of Adam and Eve on Avalon Row. Jim’s plans, she knew, would yank her
back here, to this prison, amid khaki uniforms and black bars. Then she opened her eyes, ashamed to be thinking so small.

  He’d been writing in his cell. Short pieces, which he’d need her help getting into print and to the right readers. She should expect deliveries, over the next few days, at 26 Avalon Row.

  Until the arrest, Jim and Milagros had never really meant to keep the second bomb shelter a secret. They’d planned to host a housewarming, maybe: unveil it for the neighbors, repurpose it as a guest or play or storage room. But now it was clear Billy Batanglobo had left Jim more than a subject and a house. Milagros went home and studied the blueprints. She pulled the nested bed out on its wheels. Then she flipped a lever underneath the outer bed to hinge it open like a lid off the floor. She practiced descending the steel rungs of the chute, and reaching for the switch that closed the hatch and bed above her, until she could do it with her eyes closed, in five seconds flat. And one night, when her mother fried milkfish out in the yard, she added Billy’s blueprints to the open flame.

  Code sentences began to surface in Jim’s letters. He would drop them, oddly worded, apropos of nothing, into otherwise plain paragraphs. According to Maria Lopez, duck eggs are good for pregnant women. When the duck-egg vendor comes, buy at least a dozen. And so the duck-egg vendor came, with pulleys and ink rollers in his cart. Milagros led him underground, where he began to build a mimeograph. She felt a guilty craving, then, for real duck eggs.

  Soon she could locate those sentences in Jim’s letters as expertly as she could find, in the crease of a sick child’s arm, the one vein that rebounded to her touch. She palpated her way through each letter until the code rose from the page. An answer to a question she had never asked. Advice toward repairs the house didn’t need.

  I won’t have you finishing the walls all on your own, in your delicate condition. The walls had been done, all Biscuit-colored, for months. The painter who arrived had ink and rubber blankets inside his tin cans.

  Ask the Mercados next door to recommend a piano tuner. She and the so-called piano tuner had a close call. Not fifteen minutes after he’d arrived, a khaki officer came to the door. “Sorry to disturb, ma’am. We’re looking for a male suspect, about five-seven. Have you seen this man?”

  Milagros shook her head at the police sketch of a stranger. “Not him, or anyone. It’s been quiet here.”

  The khaki, looking past her head into the living room, asked if he could trouble her for a glass of water—It’s so hot outside—and a moment on her sofa.

  Just as she had seated him and turned on the electric fan, out came the “piano tuner,” asking if she knew where Jim kept a wrench. “Of course when I say quiet I am not counting Tony,” said Milagros. “Tony is part of the furniture. Is there hope for the piano, Tony? Can you fix it in time?” She placed a hand on her belly.

  Tony opened the lid of the instrument and toyed with a few strings. He pressed a key, with a thinking frown on his face, pressed another. Pure luck that the khaki had no clue about pianos. Pure luck that he stood and thanked Milagros for the water, without peering into the nursery, where the trundle bed lay on its side, the basement shelter open.

  After that Jim canceled the deliveries. Too risky. Milagros had to pick up the parts herself.

  If Soba’s loss of appetite is keeping you awake at night, then take her to the vet. My colleague used to rave about his golden retriever’s doctor in Makati. In Makati men loaded the trunk of her Ford Escort with stencils and paper, while Soba’s body throbbed lightly in her arms.

  Piece by piece a crib came together in the nursery, while the mimeograph was assembled underground.

  How Jim reached these men, Milagros didn’t know. But all of them held bits of what he planned to say. Their shorthand filled the backs of invoices, receipts, Soba’s prescription. At night, Milagros waited till her mother was asleep. When it was quiet, except for the patrol cars and the geckos, she went into Jim’s study. Typing by candlelight at first, then—having memorized the text beforehand—in the dark. She came to know the keys by heart, down to the distance between R and E, the way the space bar jammed with too much pressure. The dark brought back her mornings as a schoolgirl, waking before her brothers and dressing at dawn. How many breakfasts had she eaten, how many books packed, in the dark, by sense and muscle memory? How many evenings had the lights gone out over her homework, because no one had bothered with the bill? So many that in time her body memorized a link between homework and electricity themselves: if the teenage Milagros rested or stopped working some vast and complex circuit outside of her would die too. She was the conduit. And so she worked until the lights flickered back on. She kept reading, kept studying, kept dreaming of a home where the power never went out, not for that reason. That home was hers now, yet on nights like this, there seemed to have been no break at all between Avalon Row and girlhood.

  As she clicked the keys she sometimes set a stopwatch, the one she used at City Hospital, to test her speed, make a game of it. It was silence she couldn’t stand. Silence like a radio in September. When she had finished, she went underground and fed the stencils to the mimeo, which churned out one sheet at a time—forty-six copies of Jim’s opinions a minute. But still, it chugged like a train; her heartbeat caught up to its rumble, as it had when Jim first brought her to the Herald headquarters. To replace the ink, she slid a barrel, heavier than her brother’s old guitar, across the grooved belly of the machine until it clicked with satisfying decision into place. She shivered in the basement, cold and gray as a stone church, and warmed her fingers on the finished copies that came out.

  In the theater and in letters, Milagros and Jim hoped that Papa would sound, to the untrained ear, like just another member of their family. Back in September, Milagros had had no idea just how much the President would live up to his code title. Papa watched over them always, everywhere: from the avenues and highways that now bore his name, to the mountain where his face was carved, Rushmore-style. The OmniPresident—as Jim said, and as Milagros later typed. She thought of her own papa, living in the provinces with his second family, missing all her birthdays and graduations. She could see it then. The constabulary thugs, the teenage Barangay Youth: the hole in their lives had been the hole in hers. Who could blame them for wanting the discipline, an ever-present guardian? She had longed for one too.

  And this child, growing in her now: how long would he go without one?

  For symmetry’s sake, they called the First Lady Mama.

  At Camp, Jim jogged in the mornings. He played chess against himself in the afternoons. Seeing his old Latin professor had him rereading Catullus, translating Horace again. This will sound odd, he wrote Milagros, but Camp does have its moments. There was, on the inside, all the time you could want, for things life and work outside didn’t allow. No ringing phones at Camp, no meetings, no deadlines. Nothing to sign and nothing to complete. “Don’t get me wrong,” he clarified, in person. “It is a military jail.” But at dusk sometimes the calm and quiet took on shades of Eden.

  February 9, 1986

  Gloria, her old friend from the picket line, smuggles in the pamphlets and the application forms. Keeping any kind of text from Jim pains Milagros, a little. Once upon a time she smuggled papers in the waistband of her skirt, for him.

  These pamphlets are the second-ever secret she has kept from Jim. The first happened only last month, when she drove day and night, trying to find Jaime. She talked to khaki after khaki, even the most thuggish and intimidating: she had nothing, in her search, to lose. It came to her on one of those drives to open a checking account Jim didn’t know about, socking away for bribes she might need, that might save Jaime. She’ll need that money now.

  YOUR CAP IS A PASSPORT! sings the front of one brochure. In the photo, a brown nurse takes a white man’s blood pressure. Otherwise, the brochure is dry, plainspoken. No real sparkle or romance to the Visiting Nurse Exchange Program. Nurses, having slogged their way through chemistry and pharmacology, know how to tear
through tiny black print for the main idea. Colors or pictures—who needs them? Who, besides diehards like Milagros and Jim, wouldn’t go to the States in a heartbeat? That shiny, organized place where buses run on schedule and bosses pay you well? Who would pass that up for this corrupt and sloppy zoo, where—as the radio reports now—three million ballots have vanished, despite a record turnout at the polls? Vote counters have walked out on the Commission on Elections, the announcer says, claiming they’ve been bullied to cook the returns. Milagros dials down the volume and flips the brochure.

  Bullet points lay out the perks. A work visa and help getting a green card. Housing placement, community resources. Advice on graduate school and “professional development.” A one-time stipend to cover moving expenses. One-way airfare.

  What are you waiting for? she seems to be reading, over and over again. What in the world is keeping you here?

  1973

  Jim wrote letters, but only on Camp paper, with Camp pens. Guards held on to Milagros’s bag—and any pens or paper in it—on their Sunday visits. Not for her, then, the soft, so-called pregnancy brain that struggled with facts and figures. Her memory, that deep-sea trawl she had perfected in algebra and Spanish and human anatomy, through exams and interviews and board certifications, stayed sharp. Also she had learned from the best, shadowing Jim at Herald meetings, armed only with a pencil.

  Outside, she ingested all the news she could—even the candy-coated praise releases, as Jim called them, from the press secretary himself. She who once never had time for headlines and broadcasts now craved them like an addict. She worked at City Hospital until her due date, her legs swollen as she waited at security checkpoints throughout Manila. Some khakis eyed her belly as if she might be smuggling a bomb in there. And some waved her through without laying a hand on even her bag, as if she might faint or bleed or go into labor on their watch.

  In May, Milagros gave birth to a son, Jaime Reyes, Jr., an epic butterball at nine pounds, ten ounces. Numbers that made friends and colleagues clench their faces in sympathy. The neighbors came and filled the nursery with Pepe and Pilar books, a wooden abacus, shape sorters and stacking rings, a foam floor puzzle of the alphabet. Never too early. Like Milagros, they’d all gotten where they were by worshiping the god of Education. They can torch your house and rob you blind, went the saying, but they can’t take Education from you. Education made the rough places plain, as Horace Mann had promised, as the Thomasites had preached. Never mind that Education didn’t always save them all. When Billy Batanglobo, the scholarship boy who’d dreamed up their little village in American graduate school, drowned; when the body of a student activist turned up not far from Diliman, her fingernails removed and skin checkered with ice-pick wounds, Milagros and her neighbors still kept the faith.