In the Country

by Mia Alvar

  “Of course,” he says.

  “I’m surprised you’re here and not there.”

  “I just came to pay my respects. I have a son too.”

  A refrain, from so many well-wishers: I have a son too. This time she doesn’t change the subject. “About that son, Naz. What’s his name?”

  “Oscar.”

  “Let me ask you something. If you were made to choose between Oscar—”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “I want to know. Someone told me men stay men while women become mothers first. Is that true?”

  “I suppose it depends on the man. And woman, for that matter.”

  “Gun to your head, what would you choose?”

  He shakes his head, lets out a puff of air. “My son. I’d choose my son.”

  What had she hoped to hear? “So you’d stop,” she confirms. “If they threatened you. You’d quit the lightning protests. No more street theater.”

  “Gun to my head, yes.” Naz crouches at the bedside. “But there is no gun to my head. And you didn’t marry me, Milagros.”

  He says this so gently she knows he means well. They’re not backstage at their college theater, Naz spitting out the words Serious Career. He’s older now. They all are.

  “Most of the people out at EDSA aren’t activists, or revolutionaries,” says Naz. “They just don’t want to miss a party. But there’d be no party without Jim. People like him made it happen.”

  In an instant Milagros sees her house from the outside, her family all aglow with Historical Significance. From far away it is still a beautiful thing. Her younger self would approve: Milagros hasn’t lived a small life, not since the nurses’ strike. She felt important then, at twenty-two. A human chain, they called her and her friends, at the doors of City Hospital. Small potatoes compared to what’s happening now. A barricade, they’re calling this sea stretching from Camp Crame to Camp Aguinaldo. Not just bodies but cars, buses, felled trees, streetlamps. Even garbage—that perennial Manila problem—conspiring in the movement.

  Still. “I don’t want a hero,” says Milagros, closing her eyes. “I want a son.”

  “Fair enough.” Naz gets up to leave her be. “I didn’t bring a card, or sweets,” he says. “Here’s what I’m good for. I’m just a dirty aging hippie, but I want to help.” A scattering, like beads, on the nightstand; she remembers the magic soybeans from his play so many years ago. She thinks of rosaries, the hippie turned religious in his old age.

  When she opens her eyes, there’s a mound of small bright pills on the nightstand. Nothing to lose. She swallows them down with a glass of water Vivi must have left for her. It tastes like river murk, as if Billy Batanglobo has been here again. She drifts awhile, staring at the ceiling. Then the sky. Her son dancing on the clothesline outside. Jaime! She swoops him up and they fly high above the house until the town and then the country is a speck, one in a swirl of a million carnival colors.

  There is only one other way—short of Billy’s solution—for Avalon Row and Jim and all these years to grow so small and far. She reaches under the mattress. She pauses over the forms before writing—in pencil, in case of mistakes—her first, her maiden/middle, her last name. Later she’ll confirm the right answers in ink, erase the rest.

  1984

  After they had parted ways in their twenties, Milagros saw Naz only once. He didn’t see her. She’d taken the children shoe shopping, in Quezon City, before the school year started; then to the Social Security building, where their father was covering the assassination hearings. Before they reached the steps, Jackie on Milagros’s hip and Jaime walking ahead, carrying his own new shoes, they heard a sound to chill the blood. One scream, and then another—wracked with torment, like a demon being dragged from its host. She clutched her children close and folded to the ground. By then the news had trained her for shootings and bombs, spontaneous fires.

  Jaime pointed at the foot of the steps. It was only a show. A papier-mâché vampire—with a familiar chignon and butterfly sleeves—was drinking the People’s blood. There was no mistaking Naz even in a dress, his face painted all white. He’d moved his plays off campus and onto the street, she later read. Lightning dramas, so called for all the time they took. By the time the Metrocom cars arrived, the actors had dispersed, and the water cannons’ afterspray soaked her children instead.

  “I don’t get it,” said Jaime (as lots of viewers said regarding Naz’s plays, if she remembered right). “Why would the police stop a show?” He tried to rescue his new shoe box from a hole in the drenched paper bag while Milagros pat-dried Jackie—who was squealing with delight, no less than if they’d stumbled on an open fire hydrant on a humid day—with her own shirt. When Jim came down the steps, she felt glad to have chosen him, again, over someone like Naz. No mistaking Jim’s prose for poetry, whether he wrote it under his own name or not. Code names like Mama and Papa, Ate and Kuya, were the closest he came to metaphor. Day after day this past year he’d sat in on these hearings, listening to experts and eyewitnesses, studying bullet trajectory and blood samples so that his readers wouldn’t have to. Tomorrow, he’d cover the parliamentary campaigns, interview candidates and voters, report the final tallies. When he wrote it all down, he would call it copy, nothing more.

  February 24, 1986

  Billy Batanglobo’s at her window when the radio signal goes out. Feedback and static. He looks her way, tries to fiddle with the dial. “You’ll make it worse,” Milagros tells him, as he drips water on the speakers. She can’t hear radio static and feedback without remembering September in this house, 1972, the smell of Biscuit-colored paint making her dizzy. The more things change, she thinks. The party’s over. She imagines the President, back on their TV tonight. What proclamation number are they up to now?

  “We don’t need it,” Billy Batanglobo says, turning the radio off. “I’ll tell you what I saw. Thousands camped outside the rebel gates, ready to block the army tanks when they come.” Billy goes on: buses parked crosswise in the street, tires set ablaze, makeshift altars. As if any one of them could stop a tank, or a gunship raining missiles from the air. Yet colonel after sergeant has defected to the rebel side. Billy lulls Milagros to sleep listing their names and ranks, accompanied by trickling river water and radio static.

  By morning her neighbors have gathered in the living room again. Her mother worries her way through the rosary while Jackie plays with her jackstones. On TV, the President looks to be sweating. Complete control of the situation. As for his former defense minister and army chief, the constitution will deal with them. The law of the land does not allow rebellion.

  The jaunty horns of “Mambo Magsaysay.” Milagros rushes back into the bedroom. Billy Batanglobo looks up from her bed, its sheets soaked through.

  We need more people at the barricades, the radio announcer says. Our brothers and sisters have been teargassed around Camp Crame.

  “Can you believe these army boys?” says Billy. “For years they marched in loyalty parades and shoved civilians around. Now they have the nerve to ask us to protect them.”

  Billy’s the first, since Jaime’s been gone, who seems to need her consolation, rather than the other way around. She reaches for his cold, prune-wrinkled hand.

  Helicopters descend toward Camp, the rebels braced for rocket fire. But the airmen come out waving white flags, their fingers flashing L-for-LABAN. Civilians cheer. The rebel leaders come out for a hug. Then the chief commodore of the navy defects. On the Pasig River a boat about-faces its guns onto Malacañang Palace.

  If you’re listening, and healthy, we want you at EDSA.

  I have a personal message from the general: you are needed at the barricades.

  “Part of me does want to be there,” she tells Billy—something she would not admit to anyone else. “I started a union once, you know. Yelled into a megaphone, all that. I don’t mind marching for the right cause. I could be one of those people at the barricades, easy.”

  “I see you more
as one of the rebels,” Billy says. “Sergeant Major Milagros Reyes, defecting to the U.S.A. You just haven’t told your commander yet. Or, like these guys, you’re planning to surprise him.”

  “It’s not defecting. I just can’t live here, and stay alive. What other way is there?”

  He grips her hand and pulls her to her knees at the bedside. He glares, through river silt and seeping water.

  “I can’t do that,” she says. “I have a daughter.”

  “What good will you do her, abroad? We still have no idea what kind of country you’re leaving her in. EDSA could turn bloody any minute. But the generals will probably get off without a scratch. Like you. They don’t care what happens to the sheep, as long as their own hides are saved. The lambs, I should say.”

  “You’re wrong about me,” says Milagros, and to prove it she stands, pulling away from Billy Batanglobo. But his grip is tight, his eyes and the soaked bed, standing in a pool of water on the floor, compelling her to join him. She pries off his fingers, soily around the nails and cuticles, and goes to the living room.

  “Jackie.” Milagros crouches beside her daughter.

  Jackie looks up from her rubber balls and plastic stars, a game she still is young enough to think was named for her. The TV’s still on, but Vivi’s in the kitchen now, her mother doing laundry out back, the neighbors gone.

  “Your brother isn’t coming back,” says Milagros.

  Jackie spins one of the stars on its short axis. It whirls before rattling to a stop.

  “Jaime is dead,” says Milagros.

  Jackie raises her arms in the air, bounces one ball and then the other as hard and high as she can.

  “Do you know what dead means?” Milagros shouts over the TV, catching both balls and holding them aside, out of Jackie’s reach. It looks as though the President has lost at least one channel. On screen, a policeman lays down his badge and billy club, stands on the hood of his car, and plays the national anthem on his whistle. Students and nuns cheer.

  Jackie’s finger presses on the knobbed end of a single jack, flipping it over. It lands, again and again, with a series of clicks, always at an angle. Click. Click-click. Click-click-click. Clickety-click.

  “Jackie!” Milagros grabs her daughter’s hands, holds them to the floor. She has read Kübler-Ross, a gift among the cards and pastries. She will deliver this lesson whether Jackie wants to hear it or not. Stumbling through a speech about things that look like endings but are beginnings in disguise, Milagros asks if Jackie knows how a caterpillar makes a cocoon, then turns into a butterfly. “Does that make sense, Jackie?”

  “Yes,” says Jackie, nodding and nodding. She is frightened and wants to get back to her game.

  She hugs her daughter with such clumsy force that Jackie tumbles backward to the floor when she lets go.

  From the bedroom she can hear Jackie start up again, flipping the jackstone. Click-click, clickety-click.

  Jacks, they all call her. Maybe the name will self-fulfill. Maybe she will land like this—right side up, no matter which way she tumbles.

  1985

  They enrolled twelve-year-old Jaime at Ateneo, alma mater to Jim and Billy Batanglobo, to their dead Kuya and every other husband or father in the village. One day, Milagros realized, Father Duncan might even teach him Latin. But was he ready, her sweet soft boy, for high school at a place like that? Alumni bragged about the days they had to copy pages from the unabridged Webster’s or kneel on rock salt in the school yard, punishments that toughened boys into men. Jaime still woke with a start sometimes, reaching for his little sister’s cheek, then his mother’s. I had a bad dream and just wanted to make sure of you. His own cheeks had retained the baby fat that, for most, melted away in grade school. He never met an ice milk or turon he didn’t love. Please, Ma, just a half slice more?

  Milagros thought of the Americans and their whole business with junior high. Could the American school in Taguig City be better, for Jaime? She went as far as sending for a brochure. Jaime could take his time, through sixth and seventh and eighth grades, with boys and girls. But she knew better than to expect a debate. One night her mother fried milkfish in the front yard, and Milagros threw the forms into the fire. She did not bring up Taguig City with Jim that day, or any other. Jaime, like his father, would be an Ateneo boy.

  He started getting stomachaches—right after breakfast, just before the school bus. “Can Soba come with me to Ateneo?” he asked, knowing the answer. “What about Jackie?” He stared down at their smiles, waved from the bus window, looking bound for prison Camp.

  Well, he did have to grow up, didn’t he? Milagros came down hard to help him. If he threw up after breakfast on a school day, she made him brush his teeth again, while Vivi ironed a new uniform. She peered into the chaos of his canvas knapsack every night. You can do better than that. She watched him sort by size—textbook, notebook, pencil case, calculator—and timed him, like a sergeant. She should have taken greater care with him in grade school, motivated him with more gold stars. So sloppy, wrote his teacher in the margin of one notebook. Much of the hassle of bringing up Jaime could be summed up by So sloppy.

  Once her son was sorted, late at night, Milagros helped her husband, typing Jim’s latest reports on a movement that called itself RAM. Reform the Armed Forces. Outside his Entertainment beat, Jim had visited with the vice chief of the army. Between movie-star interviews, Jim talked to junior officers who complained about the flimsy shorts and rubber slippers they were sent to squelch insurgencies in, while aging bureaucrats who outranked them got rich behind desks. In a barong, Jim snuck out of red-carpet premieres to buy drinks for American diplomats, who were using the word coup. Jim brought home copies of undated warrants to arrest RAM leaders, CIA briefs on how useful RAM could be at the U.S. bases.

  It didn’t occur to Milagros, as she typed and transcribed and copied, that Jim’s reports on RAM could offend the palace any more than other things he’d written. Already he’d done disappearances and killings, Parliament’s motion to impeach the President for padding his Swiss bank accounts with treasury pesos. She’d expected trouble then, those stories landing in the wrong hands. Khakis at her door again, taking Jim’s elbows. Follow us, boss. Sunday visits, with two kids in tow this time, back in the cold stone theater. But for a good five months no khakis came. Maybe that Bastille-style spectacle had been real after all. Maybe they’d been freer than she thought.

  Looking back, she’d say she should have known. That RAM would be the last straw. That the OmniPresident would object most to a story where his name hardly appeared, that already counted him out. That the man they called Papa would punish them, above all, for giving his most wayward, disobedient children the spotlight.

  —

  “Walking Soba is your job,” she told Jaime, speaking as she would to a grown man. That afternoon, he’d begged her to come along on the errand. But Milagros had been doubling down on this, as on the knapsack, wanting to grow her son up a little. “Look around. Everyone in this house has a job to do, and everyone’s doing it.” She was in Jim’s study, balancing the checkbook; Vivi in the kitchen, prepping dinner.

  “Jackie isn’t,” said Jaime.

  “Jackie’s three. To play is her work. You are twelve years old, and responsible for Soba.”

  And you need the exercise, she didn’t add.

  Off he lumbered: first into the nursery, where she could hear Jackie refusing. Then he was outside, with a grumble, Soba’s bell tinkling. The dog came back an hour later, without her leash or collar, without Jaime.

  She called Ruel, Jaime’s best friend. But Jaime hadn’t stopped at his house, hadn’t seen or spoken to Ruel since lunch. She called Oliver Castro, who walked his own cocker spaniel every day around the village too. She called Jim. She left Vivi with Jackie and got into the brown Ford Escort, driving past the church, the playground, out of Batanglobo Village and all the way to the school. But the school had sent her son home on the bus hours before. The school had
done its job.

  It made Milagros ill to think someone had watched her son and memorized his afternoons. Back at Avalon Row her eyes and throat burned. Vivi brewed soup. Jackie sat in Milagros’s lap as she dialed mother after mother. Had they seen Jaime? Did he by chance stop to play with Kokoy or Eddie or Paolo on his walk, and forget to call home? You know how selfish kids can be! Surely she had met these other mothers at school plays or parent-teacher meetings, but she knew their names and numbers only from the Xeroxed class directory. Who’s selfish now? Snips of strangers’ conversations—weekend beach plans, debt collections—kept cutting into the Manila party line. Vivi found Milagros banging the receiver against the table. In her gentle business manner, as if nothing in this crazy world could surprise her, Vivi took the phone from her and hung it up. You could use some soup, ma’am. Vivi was right. The ginger and the garlic soothed her throat. Thank God, Milagros would think many times throughout, for Vivi. By the time Jim came home, she’d drunk three cups of Vivi’s soup and was bouncing her knee so hard that Jackie had scrambled off it into Vivi’s arms.

  Imagining Jaime’s captor was so easy it hurt. Over the years Milagros’s own brothers, strapped for cash, had accepted every kind of odd job on earth. What threats or offers had been made in exchange for Jaime? His captor might have been a father too, thinking only of his sons, their mouths to feed.

  After they drove together a second time through the city, she came home with Jim’s gray suit jacket over her own clothes, exhausted. Beside her Jim gave off the oily smell of someone up all night. Jackie was at the door. Milagros looked away from her and went to bed.

  “Jaime is in the country, visiting relatives,” she could hear Jim saying. “Don’t ask your mother about it.”

  —

  In the days after, Milagros kept hearing things. A scratch at the door, a footfall on the grass. The gate would rattle, setting her on her feet; in seconds she’d unlatched it and swept her head left and right along Avalon Row. Nothing. Back inside she’d think: Jaime could be anywhere. One last sweep through the house might even turn him up. She sat beside Jackie and her alphabet, leaving her mind at the gate. When she looked down, she saw that her writing was a mad stranger’s: k’s and v’s deteriorating, across the page, into squiggles.