In the Country: Stories

by Mia Alvar

Adults I had relied on to explain the world and my life to me—especially when children made that world and life so hostile—had kept the truth from me, then wrecked the fantasy that had replaced

But for one brief moment, in the rain and mud, I saw a world where everyone was struggling in the body he or she’d been given. That world and struggle seemed bearable to me, and even beautiful.

The pinpricks—quick and sharp along your arches—started at sixteen, the year you left your family’s farm for Manila, to nanny and clean house for a city cousin who had married well.

I’m the crusty old one—I like novels long enough to age you while you read them. Ninety-nine percent of books should have been thirty-three percent shorter, she would say.

He was four years too young to run for President, in 1969—finding his youth (people had called him Wonder Boy) a liability, for once. He’d had to wait, another skill he didn’t have in spades. And by the time the wait was over, the Philippines was under martial law—a welcome reprieve, thought the old girl at first, from campaigns altogether. “We’ll find a way,” the old girl’s husband tells her cheerfully. He thinks like a Manila politician, still. As if they can bribe someone at the BAA. “We’ll grease the wheel somehow.”

When he got his fellowships to teach at Harvard and MIT, they linked into a four-mile cluster of Filipino expat households stretching from the Jesuit priests at Boston College to the nurses at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Manilachusetts, some have called it. They’re the ones who found the old girl and her husband their own red-brick colonial on Commonwealth,

when they came, in 1980. And—no use denying it—his name means something different in Manilachusetts than it does in Manila. Hero. Freedom fighter. Prisoner of conscience. Some still even call her husband Senator in greeting, as if no time has passed since 1972, unlike the fair-weather friends who started taking the long way around their house on Times Street, in Quezon City, and kept their children from her children, as if bad political luck were a communicable disease, which of course it is.

“Since when do frat boys scare you?” The old girl brings him a face towel and a glass of water. At Ateneo, he was an Upsilon Sigma Phi brother himself.

understands. The banality of dying in a car, because of someone’s carelessness, is what terrifies her husband. Oblivion. Obscurity. That he should meet his end because somebody failed to think of him, rather than thinking too much of him. “Did they ask after me?” he wanted to know, throughout his years in prison. “Does anyone remember my name?”

She has never worried about other women. If she had to guess, she thinks there may have been flings, enough to keep up with his Congress buddies, the way men smoke cigars at baptisms or drink Johnnie Black because men do. But never a real love affair.

“I’ll wear the flag,” he says. “Either Bitbit will sew a cape out of it for me, or else I’ll find blue shoes, red socks, a yellow headband.

I’m here for my husband, she’s said, in other contexts. He’s the politician. But he’s not “the runner” yet; in fact he’s only slightly more a runner than the old girl is.

One thing no maid ever did—in Chestnut Hill, or Concepcion, or Manila—was serve the old girl’s husband and his guests in the parlor. That, everyone knows, is a job for the wife. High-born and well-schooled though she may be, only the old girl can pass through, a ghost carrying a tray.

Her personality—pamparampam, they call it, like the trumpet fanfare that feels like it should announce her arrival in any room—seems built for shoulder pads.

Whatever Dad earns on a speech goes right back into the Movement for a Free Philippines, but Popsy has the family-man instinct toward “blowouts” and pasalubong on payday. Those

Something about Dad’s prison term froze their little family in 1972. They live together on Comm Ave to make up for lost time. She sometimes imagines coming to Boston years ago, if they’d had the savvy to skip town before Proclamation 1081.

By this time people in their circle had discussed martial law long enough to channel their anxiety into domestic jokes. To bratty children: Daddy’s going to lay the martial law on you. About philandering husbands: What will he do once there’s a curfew?

Was he behind those Plaza bombings, one year earlier? She’s never asked, not to this day. There are degrees of being “behind” something, anyway. He didn’t throw the hand grenades onto the podium, where all the major candidates in his party were standing. He couldn’t have killed those people. He was with the old girl, celebrating his goddaughter’s despedida de soltera.

The old girl’s husband acted as the others did: alarm, confusion, anger. She has no reason to connect the watch to the grenades in any way. Why should she?

For three months, in Manila, no one would tell the old girl where he was. And then in April, as abruptly as they’d taken him, he was back. When he saw her, he wept. Not some stoic pallbearer’s solitary macho tear, either. A full, blubbering breakdown. To speak, to say her name, took him a few tries.

shenanigans. In truth, he’d been out of the game so long. Losing this race, she felt, might crush her husband even more than health issues, or anything the President might do.

“Don’t want to turn into some Filipino Ahab, obsessed with spearing Malacañang Palace,” he said, and the old girl wondered if he’d really read all of Moby-Dick in jail. “It’s not the only way to help people, is it?” “Of course not,” said the old girl, trying not to sound too excited. You loved being a reporter. You loved running my father’s hacienda. Maybe you’ll publish this book, and travel the world to talk about it.

Now he’s shelved all dictators, like action figures he’s outgrown. When he brings up Franco, and Juan Perón, and the shah, it’s in cautionary tales: men on the wrong side of history, bad bets.

How much he loves the Filipinos—that part is not a line, not a lie. He loves them all: poor or vulgar, greedy or corrupt. He loves the death-row inmates at the New Bilibid Prison, the prostitutes in Ermita with their tragic teeth, the karaoke gangsters who start knife fights over songs they’ve

She went on and on about how much the Reagans love her, how she put the Philippines on the map. Well, I can’t argue with that. He keeps a gold cross the First Lady gave him before he left Manila, emblem of the cozy and unwholesome bond between them.

At times he sounds less like a hero than like a long-suffering wife: the Philippines might be this or that, but the Philippines can’t help it. And neither can he: the Philippines is his.

She’s thinking how a marathon is like a marriage: the long haul, the ups and downs, the tests of endurance and faith, the humbling, undiscovered country.

She’s longed for this life in Boston all three of the years she’s been living it. This town, this house, this bed where they wake early on the morning of his flight out of Logan Airport. “Mommy,” the old girl’s husband says, “what’s going to happen?”

Then, in the same breath: Who would Rizal be without the firing squad? Just a brown man in coattails and a bowler hat, homesick in Madrid, yakking away about revolution this and independence that. I don’t want to be another sad, ranting, exiled old-timer. It’s not a crystal ball he wants—just a little reassurance. “You’re going to get on that plane,” says the old girl, “and we’re going to follow you.”

Our mother was the one who washed and starched and pressed my uniform each night, as if that would fool the sugar heiresses and Senate daughters at my school into mistaking me for one of their own.

it felt uncivilized to me to pass warm coins and damp bills forward to the driver, who even when we shouted para! sometimes barely slowed enough to let us jump from the doorless rear exit.

In convent school I’d known a few girls like Ligaya, girls whose parents had some money but didn’t quite play golf in Forbes Park. (Her father owned some fancy cars, as Andoy put it, but his wife was always on his case to sell one.) Ligaya was stunning, even by my brother’s standards: rosy and pouty, long and slim but round where it counted, with skin like a steamed pork bun.

Since then the First Lady, who’d led this initiative herself, had moved on to concert halls and galleries. The crown jewel of the planned upgrade—a concrete promenade to cover up the open Creek—never materialized.

The desert sun tanned him in no time, as it had his friends. We all could pass for Moros now, he wrote home, on an aerogram as thin as onionskin.

I was only one year older, but would age faster than them still, paying tingi or “retail”-style for a few credits each semester, the way my mother bought garlic by the clove or shampoo by the foil sachet. My classmates didn’t look down on me so much as fail to see me altogether, as I stamped their books and served their lunches, as constant and inconsequential to their landscape as the statue in front of their student union.

It had been five years since the President declared martial law, and rules had been cemented about who could print what, and where. One famous editor had said that finding decent Filipino reporters was easier in prison or abroad than in a newsroom in Manila. (No one heard from him again.) But I cared less about press freedom than I cared about myself. If media posts kept opening whenever “real” journalists offended Marcos, that left more for me. I would have followed any marching orders that led out of the barangay.

His shared flat in Riyadh, for instance, overlooked the public plaza known as Chop Chop Square. “Who needs TV when you’ve got ringside tickets to that?” He raised his arms to show us how the executioner would wield his sword over the accused. We must have cringed; he cut the demonstration short. He cleared his throat and left it at “You know Pinoys. Easily entertained.”

I came to call the Saudi suit: the aviators, the white T-shirt and spotless sneakers, the gull-shaped Levi’s stitch on their back pockets as they turned toward their next delivery. Ray-Ban, Adidas, Jockey—“Stateside” brands, about as far from Peter O’Toole’s thob and head rope as I could have imagined.

The twins inherited Ligaya’s lungs and her talent for misery. They screamed whether we put them down or picked them up, whether we spoke to or sang to or ignored them. Illness and infections plagued them: thrush, clogged noses, pinkeye, diarrhea. I chased their mucus and secretions, wiping noses, backsides; wetting washcloths to dislodge dried crusts. “This is Sisyphean,” I said, kneeling to scrub the floor or furniture. As if anyone understood. As if my fancy new college-speak could elevate me from the muck. —

Faking my way among the Katipuneros also gave me an escape from the barangay. At home my mother, sick of slaving for Ligaya, had started to stick up for herself. But Ligaya wouldn’t go down without a fight, and every day after Andoy’s visit from Saudi, I witnessed one.

Each time I passed the Katipunero, he looked less like a hostile guard and more like my redeemer. The brass plaque beneath him contained an old Tagalog word for freedom, and he stood for mine.

And their devotion to a magazine that turned no profit, whose readership nobody measured, their passionate arguments over what belonged in it, was not a game. They’d given themselves over to exactly what Andoy had wished on me: an enterprise without a practical end. They were amateurs, in the classic sense of the word: they did it all for love.

But I knew something about city peasants—Manila sons of sweat like Andoy, whose experiences came to me in letters and cassette tapes, conversations on the phone or with the carabao.

So when his trouble really started, I missed it. I didn’t notice the shift, as he continued to invoke her in his letters, from Al-Thunayan’s wife to Madame to Alia. If I thought of her at all, I thought of a black veil, nothing more. He’d praised too many legs and lips over the years for me to recognize, in this case, desire for what he couldn’t see. By the time I reopened the letters and replayed the tapes, by the time I realized the warts I should have looked out for were his, not Al-Thunayan’s, it was much too late. The eyes of Al-Thunayan’s wife are hard to describe. I know Madame is nearby from the clinking sound of jewelry on her wrists and ankles. When I drive Alia into town, the car afterwards smells like honey and roses.

Then we took the jeepney: from Antipolo to Santa Rosa; from Marikina to Laguna; from tin shantytowns to houses with clay roofs and living room pianos in neighborhoods so tony I could hardly believe the people there relied, as we did, on a son or brother overseas.

saw what an essential trade was taking place. My brother’s health and cheerfulness told them their own beloved boys were well. And he would bring their rosy performances of family life back to his friends in Jeddah. Walking through

But men so silent and invisible overseas must have loved this guarantee of being seen at home.

“What I told you about love is true. It’s never easy or convenient.” His smile faded. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, as if the dust and garbage smells of our neighborhood, the mud and sewage, were precious memories he wanted to preserve.

He and Alia, the wife of his Saudi employer, hadn’t planned it. And when they felt it, they tried to suppress it. “But it took over us,”

We kept hearing from him until November. Then a month passed without word from him.