In the Country: Stories

by Mia Alvar

Ever since my childhood in the seventies, when so much of that middle class fled Marcos and martial law, houses had been left unfinished or carved up for different uses. Squatters set up camp amid the scaffolding and roofless rooms. Families took in boarders or relatives. Our house had changed too: on its right, a gray unpainted cinder-block cell had been added, taking up what used to be a yard.

The sari-sari compromised what I imagine was the dream of my parents, who grew up poor: a green buffer between the world and their world.

Next to it, I felt gigantic. I hunched my shoulders as I followed my mother inside. I was convinced, walking behind her, that the dishes on the shelves were rattling.

my father’s doctor began to speak in a code we both understood: pain management instead of treatment; not recovery but comfort in his last days.

My money turned from doxorubicin and radiotherapy to oxygen tanks, air-conditioning, the dark brown bottle of morphine. Still, I expected my father to survive. For all the years I’d spent wishing him dead, it was my mother’s role in the family drama, not his, to suffer. Esteban has got some heavy hands, the family always said. Loretta is a saint.

The vast and open yard of my childhood amounted now to just ten feet from the screen door to the wicket, and barely six across. Sacks of rice, tanks of soy sauce, and bricks of dry glass noodles, stacked against the walls, narrowed it even more.

“He isn’t built to work under someone,” my mother had said. “It’s just not his nature, answering to another man.” I said nothing, just sent the money they needed to start. The sari-sari gave her a loophole, at least, in his law against her working outside the house.

When he struck her face with the underside of our telephone until she wept and begged, first for forgiveness and then for mercy, she sent me outside, into the grass of the yard, where twigs from the acacia tree would have fallen overnight.

Jet lag and the whir of an electric fan kept me awake. Somewhere above me a gecko made its loud clicking noise, and I was no longer used to the Manila heat. But I refused to sleep any closer to my father, even if it meant losing out on the AC.

I thought my mother had found a way to strike back: that he was the one, this time, suffering and forced to beg.

I took on “Kawawang Cowboy” (Pathetic Cowboy), a Tagalog satire of “Rhinestone Cowboy,” to show I remembered my Tagalog and to cover my lack of singing talent with silliness. “A pathetic cowboy,” I sang. “I wish I could afford some bubble gum / Instead of dried-up salty Chinese plum….”

My mother was pressing a washcloth to his forehead. “You’re a CEO, not a slave,” I said. “No more scurrying around. You’ve got a business to run.”

Kiss! Kiss! they insisted, not with any delight or romantic excitement but in a nearly hostile way, heckling the protagonists and the plot to quit stalling and hurry along to the payoff.

death his face had gone thuggish again, the underbite and squashed nose giving him as aggressive and paranoid a look as ever. In forty, fifty, sixty years this was how I might die: with my worst impulses petrified on my face.

But I felt calmer than I had the night before; there was no mystery. She’d served him to the end. I should have known she would.

opened the drawer where we’d stored the yellow box. Six Succorol patches left, of the thirty I’d brought. Five days had passed since I’d arrived, four since I’d given them to her.

Of the other twenty that were missing, how many had she sold? Had she sold some in the nights before as well, while I slept? How many would it take to finish off a dying man?

If she had killed him, I had handed her the weapon. If I’d kept track, a closer eye on the supply, I might have caught it all sooner. What kind of pharmacist lets days go by without taking inventory? Someone incompetent as well as criminal. Like him, in other words.

I would never leave her again. I’d bury the patches somewhere no one would find them, so long as she could always remain the mother I knew, not some stranger laughing in the dark.

But I’d fought tooth and nail to rise above that yard. Even in return for all the harm he’d done my mother, to harm him, to be capable of harm to him, was to honor what was in my blood. His blood. I trained myself into his opposite: competent, restrained. The hero in an old Tagalog movie did not win by stooping to revenge; there was a pristine, fundamental goodness in his soul that radiated out to crush the villain. Character and destiny—I believed in all of that, I guess.

Through all the melodramas that my family and I had seen over the years, in which the bida and the kontrabida crossed their swords over a woman, I never guessed that she might be the one to watch.

I still got nervous at the sight of luxury; I couldn’t tell the difference between wealth and obscene, ill-gotten displays of it.

said a peasant was a peasant was a peasant, whether on the rice fields or the oil fields, and that at least the Filipino rice farmer could come home every day and see his family. I

“That must be something, no? To be so rich you think you can buy reality?”

truth, I had never been paid so well. Certainly I had never earned money for feeding a fantasy.

What mortified me was the change in Minnie’s aspect when she learned I was—as she saw it—a rich woman; she retreated so quickly from small talk to bows and helpless apologies.

Servitude had become a habit and posture of her body, in a way that felt painfully familiar: it really could have been my own mother bowing and apologizing to me there, at a fish stall in Manama’s Central Market.

And work was not a matter of choice for Minnie, who sent her wages home to a sick mother and school-age relatives in Manila. In

It felt strange for all that activist fervor on behalf of working people to have gone down the gold-fixtured toilet and matching bidet of this house, once Ed and I moved here.

It seemed in college that if a girl was not rich, or beautiful enough to marry rich, then there were two honorable ways for her to survive: nursing, or teaching.

Here in Bahrain, where my daily stresses were so few, where television or groceries provided the most taxing strains on my attention, I’d grown more and more aware of what came with Ed’s constant, indestructible love.

She applauded. “Now a flashlight; in time, a telescope. Isn’t that right, Teacher?” “We have lots of work to do,” I said carefully, “before we start thinking about telescopes.” Mrs. Mansour gave no indication that she heard me or understood.

teaching I would sometimes hide behind jargon this way, learning quickly that a crowd of syllables could soothe the most anxious parent. It seemed to work on Mrs. Mansour, who smiled again and handed me a velvet pouch.

I’d given Mrs. Mansour undue hope with Minnie’s grievances in mind. To act out on the job itself was just the natural next step. How far could I go, for the workers’ sake? I stopped preparing

My lies grew. At the end of each day, when Mrs. Mansour came, I overstated Aroush’s every twitch and reflex, claiming successes that were unlikely.

I had a renewed hope that one day I could bring Aroush to respond to her own name, to hold a ball with both hands, to point to objects when I named them. I felt like a teacher again: not necessarily heroic, but useful.

“What did you expect?” he said. “She comes from a race that cuts off people’s body parts for petty crimes.”

His view of Arabs and Indians, and our place among them, was no different. Could he be right? Was there some brutal form of discipline I didn’t know about, involving spray bottles, and why would Aroush need it?

Had things changed, he wanted to know, since I started working for Mrs. Mansour? Between him and me? Did I feel that he had changed? No, I virtually pleaded with him, nothing had changed; I wanted him to believe, as ever, that I was on his team. “You never wanted a child,” he said again, as proof. At

“Not the strike. Aroush,” she said. “My husband, he says she is a test. A trial from God, which one day He will reward us for this difficulty. My parents, they think she is adhab. A punishment. Pentance, Teacher, in your Book.”

“I wanted to be in London. In the shops. Away from her.” I could hear a hot tremble in her voice. “So maybe it is true. Maybe I am being punished.”

I offered. Then I added, softly, “No one ever sat with a howling child and didn’t think for a moment she might be in hell.”

“It’s not just the money. Of course I thought of the people back home, but also: what would I do with myself if I wasn’t working? What would I do with my hands? It’s for young people, these rallies, this strike.”

“Can you imagine,” I said to Minnie, “if you had to go on living after your life had stopped? If, at a certain age, that was it—the best you’d ever do—the most you’d ever accomplish?”

was eighteen when I came here. I’m forty now. I’ve never done much besides clean rich Arabs’ houses.” Minnie turned to look toward the parking lot, so that even years later I would wonder if I’d heard correctly what came next. “I’ll probably die in uniform”—she sighed regretfully—“with a dustrag in one hand and a spray bottle of cleaning fluid in the other.”

I had underestimated her: what looked like a lifetime of toil and taking orders had contained subversions no one, until now, had seen. She’d been silently striking all along; she didn’t need my protection. What

You’ve been through a lot, I could say, but the child isn’t the one who put you through it. Of course Aroush would be the one to pay the price; Aroush, the only one less powerful than Minnie, the only one who couldn’t punish Minnie back. Aroush, who’d done nothing to deserve punishment.

“It is like Paradise.” A kind of paradise was what she paid me for, after all: the dream of Aroush’s bright future. She replaced the sunglasses atop her cheekbones, a warning I understood: that whatever I wished to illuminate, she was happy in the dark.

What I had thought of as deception was my duty. If I cared to keep Aroush in my life, this was the service I had to keep providing, whether or not I’d thought better of it.

From a distance perfect strangers could assume that Mrs. Mansour was my amo, and I a servant at her feet.