In the Country

by Mia Alvar

  “After eight years of marriage,” joked Milagros, “you finally have a wife!”

  Now there was garlic rice with fried eggs and sweet pork sausage every morning. Vivi washed the dishes after every meal, so that Milagros could help Jaime with his homework. Vivi kept the house so they could live in it. Vivi used the newspapers, once shredded, to line Soba’s dog kennel.

  By late August, Milagros was pregnant again. Two children, bracketing martial law like bookends.

  February 22, 1986

  Milagros catches some television on her way from the bed to the bathroom and back. City Hospital has already accepted her letter of resignation. This is her only commute now: between the radio in the bedroom, patching straight in to the rebels’ camp, and the TV in the living room, still run by the President.

  On Channel Four, he tells the rebels to surrender. That, or face artillery attacks, from troops already parked outside their camp.

  Milagros avoids the kitchen table, where flowers, cards, and pastries still arrive every day, and returns to her bedroom. She has banned all guests, other than Gloria.

  But her mother can’t say no to a priest. She knocks and swings open the bedroom door. Pale, lanky Father Duncan stands beside her.

  “What if I weren’t decent, Ma?”

  “I’m sorry, iha.” Her mother dips her head to the priest. “Father,” she says, meaning, She’s all yours. Then she leaves.

  “They’ve called in the big guns,” says Milagros. “I’m that hopeless.”

  “They didn’t call. I wanted to come.”

  “But who’s at Ateneo, teaching the boys Latin?”

  “It’s Saturday.” He sees a chair against the wall. “May I?”

  Milagros motions to it and turns up the radio. “Were you there?”

  Father Duncan nods, raises his voice over the volume. “Nothing there yet but a few sandbags. They wouldn’t stand up to little Jackie’s toy wheelbarrow. I did see one boy holding up a sign that said, MAKE LABAN NOT WAR. That made me smile.”

  Laban: to fight, resist. And LABAN: Lakas ng Bayan, or “Strength of the Nation,” the widow’s opposition party. She’s heard it translated on the radio as “People Power,” but likes it better in Tagalog. More muscular, more like a fist. “LABAN NOT WAR?” she repeats. “That’s good.” She does not ask, How old was the kid, and who gave him that sign? His parents?

  Father Duncan lays a warm, pastoral hand on hers. On the radio, a rebel’s wife asks for the people’s prayers. And if possible send bread, not sacks of bigas. There’s really no way to cook rice at Camp.

  Milagros winces. She remembers this. How your thoughts get smaller the more scared you are. “When Jaime went missing,” she tells Father Duncan, “I kept wondering if there was anyone to remind him to cut his fingernails. My son was kind of a slob, you know. His nails grew fast and got so dirty.” Now the Marines might execute her husband, and Mrs. Rebel wants to talk about rice.

  “He was a good boy,” says the priest.

  Milagros almost says, Not a star student like Jim, your favorite, then stops herself. “What can I do for you, Father?”

  “I came because I saw Jim at EDSA,” says Father Duncan. “In his element, somewhat. You can imagine. Interviewing the crowds, trying to sneak into Camp. But something struck me as…lonely about him, today. I’ve never seen that, not even when we were both locked up.”

  At the mention of her husband, Milagros takes her hand away.

  “Of course I thought of Jaime, but not just Jaime. I also thought of you. How his work depends on you, your life together.”

  So the priest has come to recommend his former student, urge his wife to join Team Jim again. With that old behind-every-great-man rigmarole. They’re all the same to her now, this fraternity of men, who televise their hunger strikes, print articles after they’re told to stop. They prize their causes and their names, their principles and legacies, above all. They eat the rice without wondering how it got cooked and to their table. They name sons after themselves and never once worry about those sons’ fingernails.

  “His grief may not look like yours,” says Father Duncan. “But you’d know, if you talked to him, that he’s grieving too. Sharing grief helps dissipate it—you know that, from where you’ve worked. The more you hoard a grief, the bigger it grows.”

  She says nothing, doesn’t even remember falling asleep. The priest has left by the time she wakes to more voices on the radio—politicians, “concerned citizens”—all saying get to EDSA now. What exactly will they do, Milagros wonders, when the tanks come? Will the rebel soldiers give them guns?

  The more you hoard a grief.

  Why should she share? The world has not been generous with her.

  1982

  Jacqueline Reyes arrived two months early. Under local anesthesia, Milagros felt the doctor’s scalpel zip her open layer by layer, like a silk purse. Gloved hands swimming busily inside her. A four-pound, three-ounce creature needing two sound smacks before wailing. Her undergrown lungs went straight into distress. The doctor put her—purple, sputtering—into an incubator. In poor shape herself, Milagros needed a blood transfusion. Only a week later did she get to the NICU to reach her own glove through the incubator hatch and feel Jackie’s tiny digits wrap around her index finger.

  That was the most contact they had. None of the brass-band fanfare that had greeted Jaime Jr.’s birth.

  After Jackie came home, Milagros’s milk broke her out in hives. Only a lactose-free formula agreed with her. Jackie had finicky tastes, like the princess in the pea-and-mattress story, thin-skinned to anything common. She cried if the person holding the bottle adjusted his arm. She cried when she startled herself awake at night. Once old enough to sit upright, she’d stamp her palms against a grown-up’s shoulders and push back to examine his or her face. Prove yourself, her scowl seemed to demand.

  With Jaime Jr., Milagros feared excess. Raising a soft sort of man who couldn’t waddle up stairs without wheezing. With Jackie, she feared deficiencies. The wispy appetite that made her spit after every nibble. Disorders like anemia and jaundice.

  Milagros tried to call her Jacqueline, but the world insisted on Jackie, or in some cases even Jacks, like the common street game, rubber balls and plastic stars hanging in net bags at every sari-sari store. And for all her littleness, her refusal to eat, her rashes and her weak lungs, Jackie did have something of the gutter rat about her: the wiry alertness, the stops and starts and darting side glances. In this way Milagros should have known that Jackie’d be the one to survive, the way a rodent could swim through pipes and chew through steel.

  February 23, 1986

  By some miracle Gloria makes it through the traffic to see her again. “I ran into your husband at the gate,” says Gloria. She doesn’t touch the canvas tote strapped to her shoulder. “We talked for a while.”

  “Oh?” says Milagros. No use changing the subject; experience has taught her that when people say they talked for a while with Jim, armored tanks won’t stop them from saying more.

  “He asked me if I’d gone to the barricades yet,” Gloria says. “ ‘Yet?’ I said. ‘You talk like it’s a given.’ My husband would kill me! Jim said he couldn’t understand that. He’d seen me right there, at City Hospital, when we went on strike. Remember?”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “Right. The stakes are higher now, I told Jim. Back then I could have lost my job. Now I could die, or my children could.” Gloria, hearing herself, panics. “I mean—”

  “Did you bring them?” says Milagros. “The application forms?”

  Gloria takes a folder from her bag and sets it on the nightstand, right beside the radio. “He said that wouldn’t happen. He said, what’s more likely is that you’ll live another fifty years or so. Your children will grow up to ask you where you were on February twenty-third, nineteen eighty-six. What will you tell them? That you played it safe? That history was happening, and all you wanted was to save your hide? They’l
l ask, What was it like? And you will have to say, Go read a book on it, because you weren’t there.”

  “He says a lot of things.” Milagros’s heart clenches, fist-like. “He has a way with words. But guess who’ll never ask where we were February twenty-third, nineteen eighty-six?”

  That shuts Gloria up for a while. Then she says, “My mother told me life doesn’t happen to men the same way that it happens to a woman. It’s a mistake to think that, she said. A woman has her child, and she becomes a mother first. A man stays first a man. Especially a man like Jim.”

  Turns out Manila people still do what their archbishop tells them, says the radio. They’ve flocked to the rebels with batteries, cigarettes, and flashlights. Colgate has sent toothpaste; Palmolive, soap. And food, of course! We are Pinoys, aren’t we?

  “Sounds like you’ve made up your mind,” says Milagros, seeing an older Gloria, in the future, telling her children, We were too excited to be scared. “Have fun at EDSA.”

  “It is a nice night to be out.” Gloria shrugs. Through the sheer curtain Milagros sees the almost full moon, its light landing on the folder on the nightstand by the radio.

  1983

  Within Jackie’s first year, routine ruled the weekday afternoons. Milagros rose before dawn for the early shift at City Hospital: a way to reunite with Jackie by afternoon and be with both her children until bedtime. At seven-thirty the school bus came for Jaime. Vivi attended to the clothes and meals and dust and baby. Milagros was home before the bus brought Jaime back at four o’clock. Bedtime was at ten, after prayers and two or three storybooks.

  Bedtime for a young Milagros had varied with the moods of the man next door, who liked to hit his wife when drunk and make loud love to her when sober. The one routine she’d ever witnessed was that man’s son, Boyet, coming outside every morning to do what he called his Exercise. Slow, drooling, soft-in-the-brain Boyet. Neighbors liked to whisper that his father, convinced the unborn Boyet wasn’t his, had been extra heavy with his hands throughout the pregnancy. That she had tried and failed to get rid of Boyet. That Boyet had these reasons to thank for his large, lopsided head, the mouth that could barely cry Ma! and Pa! Boyet did his Exercise by the gutter in their barangay. Milagros could see him from her window: bending to the side, the front, the back. Arms up to the sky, fingertips down to the ground. Twist left, twist right. She heard him wailing sometimes through the wall they shared.

  Now Jim and Milagros shared walls with no one, and Avalon Row was not the world of their parents. There were pet vaccines here, and the cinder blocks stood up against typhoons.

  That same year, their Kuya was rumored to be coming home, after three years abroad. All over Manila people tied yellow ribbons around trees, after the song. Hoping the exiled former senator might run for President, at last.

  The day of his return, Milagros had a typical shift at City Hospital, no busier than any other. At quitting time, she saw nurses, parents, doctors, and sick children’s siblings packed into the waiting room. A room that saw its share of grief, for sure. Milagros heard the muffled cries of one mother against one nurse’s shoulder, figuring another child—not one of hers—had died.

  Which child was it? A favorite among the staff, judging by the crowd. The nurses wept so openly it embarrassed Milagros a little. Pull yourself together, Alma! Effie, that’s enough! These parents and doctors still had to trust them with IVs and dosage charts, after all. But a certain Dr. Tuazon was crying too. She neared the room: some parents were consoling nurses, not the other way around; some parents whose children were doing better, consoled each other. All of them repeating facts, phrases they couldn’t bring themselves to believe yet. Shot dead. Broad daylight. Cold blood. She understood, finally, when one of the nurses turned to her at the doorway, shaking her head and holding out her hand, inviting Milagros to share in the shock. Those not crying or embracing watched the black-and-white TV on the wall. Kuya, the former senator, facedown on the airport tarmac, steps from the plane that had flown him home.

  When the screen blanked—multicolored bars, PLEASE STAND BY—Milagros called Jim from the nurses’ station. But he wasn’t at the Herald, of course. He’d planned to be at the airport. He’d been invited. Shoulder to shoulder, Milagros imagined him, with the photographers who’d captured Kuya on the ground.

  That night, in his study, Jim played back a tape from Kuya’s Hong Kong “press-con,” just before he boarded for Manila. I am wearing a bulletproof vest, but if they shoot me in the head, I’m a goner. Instructions to his entourage to think fast with their cameras and mics. In three–four minutes it could all be over.

  I may not be able to talk to you again after this.

  “We weren’t quick enough,” Jim said. No capture of the death itself, the shooting. Only the lifeless bodies afterward: Kuya’s, and nearby the man gunned down seconds after him, pegged as his murderer.

  The Betamax tape they got hold of later that week said DUPLICATE COPY. A label, a command. Just before they pressed play, the children came into the living room. Jaime holding Jackie, new to walking, by the wrists, stooping to help her toddle forward. “Can we watch too?” he asked.

  Milagros and Jim exchanged a look. Agreed without words, as they often had at Camp. The newspapers had been there at breakfast: Kuya’s body on the tarmac, at the kitchen table in between the white cheese and warm pan de sal. No doubt the Ateneo priests at Jaime’s school would say something, if they had not already, about their fallen Eagle, at morning chapel or assembly. And whatever parents said on phones and in kitchens in Batanglobo Village would be overheard and then repeated on playgrounds and at recess. Far better for the Reyeses to get ahead of what the kids would learn by accident.

  Besides, children were also citizens.

  “This is not a movie,” Milagros began, in her hospital voice. “It’s real, and might upset you. Do you understand?” She’d seen enough needles at City give the lie to This won’t hurt a bit. “A man has died,” Milagros said. “Someone shot him with a gun at the airport last Sunday.”

  Jaime recognized his name from lawn signs and the news and Ateneo. “Who shot him? Why?”

  “We don’t know.” Jaime sat beside his mother, latching on to her elbow with both his hands, as frightened at age ten of the TV as he’d been at three of underbed monsters. His scalp, to Milagros, smelled innocent. “There were many people in this country who liked him. Some liked him so much they wanted him to run for President. But not everybody did.”

  These were the euphemism years, when the dead had disappeared or been salvaged, when Presidents had allergies, not autoimmune diseases; when people were in safe houses, not prisons. Papa’s habit of renaming was the one issue on which she’d seen Jim lose his cool. Words have meanings, she had heard him say, his voice almost cracking. You can’t just slap a sign on hell and call it paradise. Between their parents’ lottery-ticket dreams and the First Lady’s poetry about the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, frankly, the Reyeses were down on euphemism.

  The four of them watched Kuya rise from his plane seat, shake hands with khakis who had come aboard to greet him. Jovial as before, perhaps a little rounder in the cheeks. (Did three years of American food do that to him?) Hi, boss, you could make him out saying to one of the soldiers. The khakis braced him on either side and led him to the exit.

  The door shut behind him, on the other passengers. A perfect ending, in a way. Shadows of his entourage banged on the exit. Weak, wifely voices. Hoy! After that, nothing. Only the disembodied shouts, and shots, outside. Only his body on the tarmac afterward.

  Jim was rewinding the tape and pressing play again. Jackie had planted herself on the floor in front of the TV, the silhouette of her thin pigtail straight as an antenna against the screen. “Hoy!” she shouted with the entourage, pointing at the exit door closing behind Kuya.

  “Can we watch something else?” asked Jaime.

  They changed the channel. The Greatest American Hero, Jaime’s favorite. A clumsy superhero
, another crash landing.

  “It’s a hell of a strategy,” Milagros said.

  “Every Catholic loves a martyr,” said Jim.

  Their Kuya had studied his nation’s history, the lives and deaths of Lapu-Lapu and José Rizal and Christ himself. He smiled and strolled exitward, as though accompanied by old drinking buddies. As if he knew his fate, and the country’s future. That he would die. That afterward, people would untie the yellow ribbons from their trees and tie them around their heads, warrior-style. That they’d take to the streets.

  She smuggled transcripts, copied tapes. As a family they followed Kuya’s funeral cortege along Times Street, with two million others, in time to military drum taps. Jackie threw a bitter tantrum, wailing and kicking Milagros in the ribs, when Jaime and her father went forward to view the coffin without her. Kuya’s body still dressed in his bloodstained shirt. Jaime, for his part, fainted.

  At home, Milagros went back to managing the Little Golden Books and puppy kennel, while Jim traveled to Bulacan to visit with the alleged murderer’s family. They’d watched in August as military men took him—son and father, petty criminal—four days before Kuya’s homecoming. Milagros should have known then that she and Jim had seen, in the same tape, two different stories. They both saw Kuya leave the plane. They both saw his body splayed across the tarmac. But only she was haunted by the weak wifely voices in between, crying out Hoy! Only she had imagined her own fist banging against the exit.

  February 23, 1986

  Naz, her old college boyfriend, of all people, arrives at the house. So her mother’s taking all comers now.

  “I meant to visit much sooner,” he says. “The traffic—it’s like Christmas Eve out there. Everybody wants to get to EDSA.”

  Milagros doesn’t raise her head from the pillow. “You’ll forgive me, Naz, for not playing hostess.”