by Mia Alvar
Not a day in his life did Jaime Jr. ever sleep in the crib that had been finished in the nursery. She put him there only when she heard an unexpected knock at the door and thought a khaki might be coming to inspect the house. Once the threat had passed, she brought her son back to the master bed, where as a rule he slept, between Milagros and her mother. “Just until he sleeps through the night,” she said, but her new son’s heat and heft against her body became a sedative she needed. He was too small and soft to live above the railroad tracks.
Once the swelling in her ankles had gone down, Milagros returned to work. Just in time to attend the annual nurses’ conference at City Hospital. This year’s theme: “talent export.” Talent—sweeter than cane, lighter than timber, and cheaper than gold. “And on top of talent,” raved an undersecretary from the Department of Labor, in his speech to all the City nurses, “you speak English.” This gift from Uncle Sam was now theirs to offer the world: Filipino nurses could empty bedpans and run IVs anywhere on earth. Women Milagros had known in school and internship, at City Hospital and throughout the subdivision, had already scattered to Amsterdam and Los Angeles. Recruiters held special breakout sessions on the Middle East. The labor undersecretary quoted Papa himself, to big applause. “He says, and I quote, We encourage the migration. I repeat, this is a market we should take advantage of.” What was good for Melbourne and Dubai was good for Manila. “Instead of stopping them from going abroad, why don’t we produce more? I repeat, if they want one thousand nurses, we produce a thousand more.”
“I repeat, I repeat,” Milagros ranted to Jim, in jail. “What are we—deaf, his people, or a nation of idiots? Produce more? Were we built on an assembly line?”
“Every good dictator loves a brain drain,” Jim said.
“I’m not going anywhere,” said Milagros. Ever since Papa had splashed his slogan on billboards all over the city—NO PROGRESS WITHOUT DISCIPLINE!—Milagros really had become the angry daughter.
February 14, 1986
“Will Jaime come back for Valentine’s Day?” Jackie asks.
At four years old, Jackie expects the kind of Valentine’s Day she had last year. Cousins from as far away as Davao came to their party. In the yard, Vivi had spread bright green pandan leaves on tables. They’d feasted on fried rice and barbecue with their hands. Each child had a heart-shaped paper mailbox for cards and sweets. Milagros’s brother dressed as Elvis and crooned love songs at all the girls.
This year, Milagros wishes she could boycott Valentine’s Day. Protest’s all the rage now—not just for the ballot counters. Fifty opposition members have walked out of Parliament, not buying the sitting President’s self-proclaimed victory. The widow’s called a boycott of all banks and TV channels owned by loyalists. No more shopping at Rustan’s. No more drinking San Miguel beer, Coca-Cola, Sprite, Royal Tru-Orange. The archbishop himself won’t eat until the President steps down.
Milagros remembers her own strike in front of City Hospital. Is it possible, she wants to know, to picket one’s own life? If mothering’s a full-time job, as all her neighbors love to say, can’t she walk out on it too?
“No,” Milagros says to Jackie. “Valentine’s will be quiet this year. It wouldn’t be fair to have a party without him.”
In other countries, there are special ceremonies for guilt. Milagros wants to zigzag a sword through her bowels. To be a dark young bride and set herself aflame. There’s a tradition she’d uphold, this year. Jackie brings a valentine from school, made of red construction paper. Milagros tapes it to Jackie’s bedroom door. She remembered to ask Vivi to buy some candy and bubble gum this morning, but now Milagros can’t find it. She corners the gardener. “Did you eat Jackie’s gum?” She’s become someone who spits out questions and does not wait for answers.
She understands a bit of Papa’s paranoia now. Betrayal needs to happen only once to cloud your vision. After that, there could be poison in each cup, a bomb in every drawer. And it’s those closest to her who seem most suspect. Vivi. Gloria. Her own mother, who disappears each day to church. (So she says.) When Milagros pulls herself from bed, she walks sideways, her back against the wall.
1975
Milagros would have liked to hire a maid. Almost every house in Batanglobo Village had one. Young dalaga saving up for school, or old spinsters sending their siblings or nieces through it. “Tessie’s like my second pair of hands and eyes,” a neighbor would say. They slept on mats under mosquito nets on their employers’ living room floors. I couldn’t do it without her.
But Milagros had to watch every centavo. She swept her own floor, washed her own dishes, unclogged her own toilet. Jaime went through formula, then jars of pureed Gerber vegetables, like a high-powered vacuum, and outgrew toys and T-shirts faster than she could wash them. There was the mortgage, lawyers’ fees. A refrigerator that kept guests in sandwiches and beer. A husband out of work. Soba, no longer a puppy, needed fancier kibbles, a longer leash, a stronger flea shampoo. The mimeo ink. Paper. Repairs. She paid black-market prices for the foreign newspapers, magazines, and journals that no longer came through their mailbox. Above all, she tipped.
From the time of Jim’s arrest, Milagros had tipped deliverymen (those duck-egg vendors, painters, piano tuners), security guards, police officers, soldiers, librarians, bus drivers, taxi drivers, wives estranged from powerful men, black sheep disowned by blue-blood families, children. Tips was what she and Jim called these bribes, in the Camp theater. Did you remember to tip that bellhop yesterday? The same word Jim and his colleagues had once used for leads and clues. “A tip for a tip,” said Milagros, thanking a source as they touched palms. She tipped people for addresses, locations, directions. She tipped drivers to bypass their appointed routes and wait while she completed her errands to take her home. She tipped secretaries for their bosses’ files; she tipped interns for footage, for cassettes, for transcripts; she tipped phone operators for records; she tipped cashiers for receipts. The price tag varied. A few shiny centavos or sari-sari candies for the child who might point her to the right house. Upward of fifty thousand pesos to the khaki who looked the other way on a shipment of black-market ink. Tips were a line item in the household budget.
Her mother had now lived longer in their house than Jim ever had. The woman Milagros thought she’d rescued, when she pinned on her first nursing cap, from a lifetime of laundry tubs and ironing boards, came out of retirement to work for her daughter. She rocked Jaime Jr., who tipped the scales at over thirty pounds now, to sleep; or chased him as he learned to crawl and walk. It gnawed at Milagros to watch her mother’s aging back bend to the kitchen sink and stove, to see her raw fingers grip a broom. The only payment she could offer was to bear, without a fight, the things her mother had to say about her husband.
Her mother doubted Jim, was harder on Milagros’s man than she had ever been on her own. All the things she might have said about Milagros’s father reared up belatedly, against Jim. She didn’t read Jim’s articles. It was enough to know that they had cost him a job and landed him in jail. Her daughter may as well have taken up with any common criminal off the street.
“You worked how hard on your degree, only to become his secretary?” said her mother, seeing Milagros stay up after her night shift to type.
“There was a time you’d have been glad,” Milagros said, “for any of your children to wind up a secretary.”
“I was thinking then of secretaries who get paid for their work,” said her mother.
Another time she pointed to the bags under Milagros’s eyes. Even housemaids and hospitality girls take a day off once in a while. It was true Milagros had worked a double at the hospital, then hosted friends of Jim’s for dinner.
Milagros needed her mother to wash her uniform at night and starch it in the morning. To feed Jaime while she worked at the hospital. So she held her tongue.
“Don’t worry about me,” Milagros said. “Helping you with laundry and then waking up early to study trained me well. I do
n’t get tired easily.”
“You worked late and studied early,” said her mother, “so you wouldn’t spend your life doing this.”
February 19, 1986
Jim visits their room more often than you would think. He’s been sleeping on a cot in the basement, though everyone pretends it’s the long news days making him do that. They don’t say much to one another. At most, Milagros asks him what’s new, and he does for her what he does best: report.
“Jackie’s had her bath,” says Jim. “Vivi’s winding her down for bed.”
“Did people come through for Ma’s candidate?” she asks. “I can’t see the beer boycotters lasting more than a day.”
“They did, and how. There’s been a run on all those banks. No one’s buying copies of the Bulletin. Rustan’s is so empty you could hear a pin drop.”
“Still,” she says, “I can’t see him just stepping down. Can you?”
“We’ll see if he has any choice. He’s losing hearts and minds in D.C. fast. Although the Gipper still won’t come out and tell his old friend to resign.”
These are safe subjects. They don’t fight; they have fought enough. Some days, Jim offers a hand, and usually, Milagros takes it. But the old sympathies that used to course between them don’t return. Her hand turns limp. She absents herself from her own flesh, the way the infant Jaime Jr.’s weight would slacken in her arms as she rocked him asleep.
1976
Jaime Jr. grew upward and out, with an appetite to match his size. Sweets would be his downfall—so Milagros thought. Pocky biscuit sticks, White Rabbit candies, whose rice-paper wrapping you could also eat, Sarsi cola. He loved all of it; spent, promiscuously, his pocket change. In a year or two, she’d have to rein it in. Before the fat jokes began, or the diabetes or the rotten teeth. One day the knuckle dimples and the wrist folds would not be cute. “Jaime can wait,” she sang, like a broken record. Jaime knows how to wait.
At his third birthday party Jaime reached for a Shakey’s pizza that had not yet cooled, giving himself second-degree burns. Jaime! What did Mama say about waiting? She started him at Ateneo preschool with two bandaged hands. Other parents threw them side stares: what child burns both hands on a Shakey’s pizza? How much, exactly, was known about Jaime Reyes, Jr.’s life at home? Milagros couldn’t blame them. She would have thought the same. Impulse control, she noted in her mind. Teach him impulse control.
These were her worries then, at the age of twenty-seven: rotten teeth, pudgy fingers, shiny wrappers, caps of soda bottles. She taught Jaime to chew on fluoride tablets that foamed red in his mouth. She set rules: milk and vegetables before cake and candy. Inside the walls of 26 Avalon Row, teaching Jaime the Lord’s Prayer and marking his height on the doorjamb of the nursery every six months kept her calm enough to face that other world, whose rules and routines weren’t hers to make. Camp, where her husband lived, indefinitely; where neighbors landed every day; where guards frisked all thirty-seven, thirty-eight, then thirty-nine inches of her son for contraband pens and paper.
Almost four years after his arrest, Jim finally found out what he had done to get there.
“They call it rumormongering,” one of the lawyers said, meeting with Jim and Milagros in the theater. A new charge for a New Society.
Jim tented his fingers. Milagros imagined them cupping around someone’s ear, Jim whispering as in a game of telephone. Rumormongering. Four years came down to this cooked-up, girlie-sounding crime.
“It’s a capital offense now,” said the second lawyer. “But we think we can talk the press secretary down to ten years. That is, unless you’re willing…”
She knew what unless meant, and wished the lawyers would leave while she and Jim conferred. But Jim did not send anyone away.
“…to publish a correction.”
“Ten years is a decade,” she said to Jim, like an idiot.
“So by my math,” said Jim, “I’ve got six left.” She’d heard that prison aged a man, but by some miracle her husband looked the same. His face hadn’t weathered like an old shoe, as some husbands’ in the subdivision were starting to. He’d lost a little weight perhaps, a few pounds, which on his frame looked like more. Every day, next to a guard who took the blade back after, he still shaved his face clean.
“That’s if you trust them,” she said.
“Your wife makes a good point,” said Lawyer Number Three. It was the lawyers who were growing old, the shadows darkening under their eyes. “It took this long to get a charge. Do you expect them to keep their word, when ten years are up?”
“Thank you,” said Jim. “You’ve explained the alternative.”
“Jim,” she said. “Are you sure?”
He gave her the look he’d given in the yard when the khakis took him away. But they had a son now, didn’t they? They’d lived apart longer than they’d lived together.
No matter; the discussion had ended. The lawyers looked at her with pity, so she tried a joke. “Rumormongering!” she cried. “Tsismis, in other words. If gossip is a crime now, they should arrest half of Manila. Why isn’t my mother in jail?”
The first of the three lawyers resigned that day. A few weeks later, the second left for America. The third said, “I’ll stay and fight for you,” but looked like all he wanted was a nap. Milagros understood they were alone now, in this life of theirs. Every Sunday, while her mother was at church near Batanglobo Village, Milagros and Jaime Jr. went to the theater.
“Hello there, little man,” was how Jim often greeted their son.
“No” was what Jaime had to say to his father. He hid behind Milagros’s leg.
“Jaime, that’s your papa. Say hello.”
“That’s all right,” said Jim. He gave Jaime a smile. “We can dispense with the formalities.”
Jaime slowly yielded handshakes, hugs, high fives. Just before they left, maybe a kiss. Father Duncan said a quick-and-dirty Mass, with SkyFlakes and a gallon drum of Welch’s grape juice. But Jaime never liked the theater, preferred the courtyard where the other prisoners’ children played. Which was just as well. Jim had business to attend to with Milagros.
His sentences came out whole—forged, as she had also seen during the Billy Batanglobo project, in the calm factory of Jim’s mind—and punctuated. Along with code names, Jim spoke in a full-body sign language that escaped the guards. For each paragraph break, he leaned back or forward in his chair. She had an excuse now to stare at the tented fingers she had always loved: a tap of his left fingertips to his right meant a comma. Right index fingertip to left was a colon; pinkie to pinkie a semi. He bent his knuckles and locked his fingers together for a period.
“I don’t know how you do it,” a neighbor in the subdivision said. “What’s a marriage, if you can’t wake up next to each other in the morning?” But Milagros felt no woman ever knew her husband as well as she knew Jim, watching and reading him as she did.
Watching his hands move, she’d remember how they’d moved on her. She was in trouble when, in need of other signals, he actually did touch her. To open a set of quotation marks, his right hand took Milagros’s left; to close them, his left her right. Now and then he traced his fingertips along her brow, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear and finishing along her jaw and at her chin, the approximate shape of a question mark. She closed her eyes then, the signal for him to repeat what he had said, more slowly; she would concentrate on getting it this time. Very rarely did he flick the end of her nose with his fingertip, in exclamation, and when he did he almost always shook his head no, the signal to erase. By the time he crossed his leg under the table, making sure he brushed Milagros’s shin along the way, to say the piece was finished, she was finished too.
She stood on clumsy knees, sometimes skipping the good-bye embrace, afraid that would undo her altogether. She rushed out of the theater, grabbed their son from the courtyard, and drove home, shaking all the way. After depositing Jaime with her mother, she made it to the study Jim had yet to use, the only roo
m at 26 Avalon Row that had a lock. In private, she wept. Once she recovered, remembering her task, she unlocked the door and washed her face in the hall.
It was her professional self who returned to his study after that, to feed the stencil sheets into the typewriter and tap out his new byline, Mia E. Jersey. An anagram, easy enough to unscramble. He did nothing, either, to disguise the style familiar to any of his onetime Herald readers. Taunting the regime, currying disfavor. It shocked her how short the pieces turned out to be, on paper. Her hours in the theater with Jim felt so much fuller than the palm-size square of text she’d later type onto the page (single-spaced, and framed by thick white margins, as Jim liked it); and clone on the mimeograph; and pass on to the neighbors, who passed them on in turn, to people headed for America or elsewhere, who sometimes brought them to Jim’s friends at foreign papers, some of whom reprinted them.
These days Jim was paying close attention to a Camp inmate who slept ten cells away from him. They’d crossed paths years before at the Congress Building. A senator who never met a camera or mic he didn’t love: Jim had taped him calling the regime a garrison state, the First Lady our latter-day Eva Perón. A presidential hopeful (any fool who followed politics in Manila knew it), dropping chestnuts for voters to repeat at dinner and remember at the polls. The 1973 election would have been his big chance, but for the Proclamation and arrest that landed him at Camp, with Jim, who could not convince the guards to allow a private interview. And so the Reyeses could only watch the former senator and his wife from a distance in the theater on Sundays, praying at Mass, talking. They code-named him Kuya, or big brother; and his wife Ate, big sister, for symmetry’s sake. At least I didn’t marry a politician, Milagros thought. Kuya had refused a trial—kangaroo court was his chestnut now, and trumped-up charges—and taken solitary confinement, a hunger strike, and finally a death sentence, instead. There but for the grace of…For all the trouble Jim was in, Milagros thought, another woman’s husband had it worse.