In the Country: Stories

by Mia Alvar

In my stories, Andoy had injured his hand or voice or mouth; he’d argued with a carabao who got revenge by “losing” his balikbayan envelope; Al-Thunayan had assigned him, as his most trusted servant, to an emergency top secret project in the desert where contact with the outside world wasn’t possible. I made up one fat chance after another to explain his silence.

And yet, in a perverse way, in that first year of a new decade, Andoy’s dream came true. My mother did retire to the sofa.

In that same year Ligaya’s parents called, offering forgiveness and a place for her and the three children to live. But she surprised me too, by staying with my mother in our barangay.

Your servant has insulted me, this Alia told her husband, waving the false evidence like a pair of flags.

This started as my private penance for deceiving them, Ligaya and my mother. But over time it just felt like a load that someone had to carry. They were “my” girls now.

It was always Andoy, or a version of him, that I wrote about. The same imagined brother that sustained me once we stopped hearing from the real one.

I could spend my whole life writing, version upon version, none of which would turn the man in jeans and aviators at our door into Andoy.

That carabao would still arrive, not two months into 1980, prop the glasses on his head, and tell me, “You look like him.” This man would still open his palms to me, to show he had no envelope on him. What he had brought was news: that Andoy’s body had been found, alongside Alia’s, inside a destroyed Porsche that belonged to her husband, his employer. He’d lost control of the car after swerving off the road to avoid a collision.

Fiction didn’t have a prayer over facts like that. And yet, I felt it would have pleased Andoy to know that I still wrote. I could picture him, reading my words somewhere, chuckling at my attempts to save some version of his life. Who could say, then, that I had an altogether lousy or inadequate imagination? My brother got to live forever, in a sense.

She called the strike on a Monday, the busiest day of the week. As strikes go, hers was poetry. Eighty nurses, their brown hands clasped around the Self-Sacrifice statue on the lawn outside of City Hospital.

one. At City Hospital, the native nurses, like Milagros, earned less than the American ones. Forty centavos to the peso, if you did the math; less, in some cases, if you weighed education and experience, skill and seniority.

So they voted, three to one, to start a union, with Milagros at its helm. Together they wrote memos, scheduled meetings, made jokes at the negotiation table. The greenest American does better than I, because I am brown.

All those long-haired, picketing boys and girls—that was how she thought of them, as children, next to her—blocked her path and made her late; their chants on land reform and U.S. bases sounded like nursery rhymes, like games for kids who never had to work.

Proof of a state of emergency. Exhibits in the President’s case for staying on in the palace past his legal term limits. Martial law—like the word cancer, in those days: widely murmured, barely understood. Least of all by someone like Milagros, who would have taken Jim’s warnings, if she’d read them, as just another reason to skip the campus picket lines altogether.

she thought that she could crack Manila, that if she worked at it enough the city would reward her; only sissies quit.

Talk of mastery, ambition, had no place on a picket line. A union leader had to talk of solidarity. Everyone rising together, not racing to the top.

“I don’t think so,” said Milagros, deciding she could speak for them. “Your mother gets sick, you don’t leave her for a healthier mother. She’s your mother!” He gave

The name Jaime, on the other hand, the word death, leaves her cold and silent. But it doesn’t matter. To anyone who sees her crying, she cries only for him.

“Don’t bother, Ma. I used to care about these things. But now I don’t at all.”

The grandson of a sugar baron, Naz could afford to sneer at institutions. Jim’s people in the north had been farmers and servants. Degrees and titles, memberships and mottos, Jim’s press passes and Milagros’s City Hospital ID, were false idols to someone like Naz, knickknacks only squares and parents worshiped.

At the 1961 inaugural, Freddie, now a senator, introduced his godson Jim, now a City Desk reporter at the Herald, as “the man whose father saved me.”

One by one, he heard from delegates what they’d received from Malacañang Palace in exchange for what it called “correct” votes. One senator’s nephew, guaranteed a spot at the Military Academy. A grant, no strings attached, to a congressman building a bridge in his hometown. And for the others, envelopes of cash. At the palace, beluga caviar and Dom Pérignon and a slideshow of the questions on the table at the Con-Con, and the “best responses.” Yes to a new Parliament, replacing Congress, whereby a former President could come back as Prime Minister. No to a ban on ex-Presidents running again after two terms. Yes to the right of any President or Prime Minister to rule by decree.

Without naming his grown godson, Manong Freddie looked—to Milagros, who watched him on the Pedia-Onco waiting room TV—truly wounded, as by a brother. “No fewer than ten faces,” said the President. “And zero loyalty.”

“I voted for her,” says Milagros’s mother. “The widow.” “What made you decide?” asks Milagros. “Her platform to eliminate crony capitalism and reform the military? Or did you just go with the candidate that has the strongest popular mandate?”

The only words Milagros wants to say would harm her: Mama doesn’t want to see you. I can’t be your mother right now. You don’t understand! Come back when you are older, and finally intelligent.

The President broke his silence the next day. Curfew is established from twelve o’clock midnight to four o’clock in the morning. “We aren’t children, Papa,” Milagros told the TV, and that became their code name for him. If you offend the New Society, you shall be punished like the rest of the offenders.

Two days later, four khaki-uniformed officers led Jim out of 26 Avalon Row to a Metrocom car. Utang na loob, it turned out, had its limits. “What’s the charge?”

Milagros had grown up thinking strong, decisive men were a myth, like the mountain fairy Maria Makiling or the magical Adarna bird. Her brothers had never been in charge. Her father couldn’t take them down the street without losing his way. But in this moment, with Jim, she felt sure and safe. She didn’t worry. As the typhoon of history made landfall on their doorstep, she could train her eyes on this sane man, and follow him.

After the arrest, Jim’s breakfast newspapers stopped arriving,

At “Camp,” as she and Jim called the military prison where he ended up, Jim had a private cell. A strange concession, like the cops who called their suspect Boss and skipped the handcuffs. They even let him write letters. These were “checked for errors” before posting from Camp, but their code names for martial law—Marsha Ley, Alex Marshall, Maria Lopez—somehow escaped notice.

Milagros cooked him pork rolls, pancit, milkfish stuffed with vegetables: painstaking dishes worthy of a baptismal party or Christmas.

Code sentences began to surface in Jim’s letters. He would drop them, oddly worded, apropos of nothing, into otherwise plain paragraphs. According to Maria Lopez, duck eggs are good for pregnant women. When the duck-egg vendor comes, buy at least a dozen.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Billy’s not there; no one is. All she hears is Jim, on the phone in his study, with the door open. “Asylum in the States,” he says. “That’s what I’m hearing.”

After seven years of DISCIPLINE and PROGRESS, Manila was bursting into flames: at the Sulo Hotel, in the floating casino on Manila Bay, at Rustan’s department store.

A bad heart saved their Kuya from the firing squad, for now. He flew to Dallas for surgery, then on to teach in Boston. The Church of Best and Youngest, First and Most, prayed for him. Another wonder boy in exile.

The more you hoard a grief. Why should she share? The world has not been generous with her.

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.

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.

We were too excited to be scared. “Have fun at EDSA.”

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.

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.

“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 the country things are different,” said Milagros. “Here in the city there’s a giant lady who eats children for dinner. You just look at her the wrong way,” she said, “or laugh too loudly and poof!

“My father saved this man’s life,” Jim said. “He’s not about to trifle with my son’s. In all my years at Camp, why do you think I had a private cell to read and think in? All the others, even some women, were shoved around, at least.

“He can’t emulate you if he’s not here,” Milagros said. “Just stop the presses! Where’s the fun in being a newsman if you can’t, at least once in your life, say Stop the presses?”