Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

Now that her husband has grown old and frail and needs such care as she once gave their children, Vilma Bustamante wonders if, after he dies, Baby and her child might turn up, claiming a connection. We have all imagined it: a click of heels across the parlor floor, a scent of Opium overwhelming the condolence wreaths. She would be older now. Her child, like all of ours, would be grown up. Would he or she look fair, like the American half of her, or would we see our husband’s features right away? Our guesses as to what the years have been for Baby vary, like the paths we’ve taken around the globe. Not all of us believe she wound up in Olongapo for good. Luz Salonga has pictured her repenting, like a modern Magdalene, her flame-red hair under a wimple. Rowena Cruz believes the nursery, not the nunnery, redeemed her, and that Baby found her calling as a mother. Paz Evora would like to think that Baby went to school and on to a career. We know these images have more to do with our own obsessions than with any Baby that existed or exists. We know the likelihood of seeing her this way is slim. And still we picture it, every so often: this rare reunion with our distant past, the chance to look at her again and maybe recognize our selves.

Annelise was my neighbor, if you measured the distance in steps. I lived on a quiet hill in the town of Monte Ramon. She lived in the ravine below, among squatters in tin-roofed shacks who drank from the same narrow creek where they bathed. My mother’s house, a casita in the Spanish Colonial style, had guest rooms, well-manicured hibiscus shrubs, and wrought-iron gates the servants needed keys to enter. These servants — a maid, a gardener, and a laundress — came from the ravine. One March afternoon, my mother fired the laundress. “The poor get so lazy in old age,” she complained — and Annelise’s mother came to fill the vacancy.

So before I met Annelise, I met her mother. When she arrived, the new laundress stooped — to greet me closely, or so I assumed at first. She had on what we call a duster, the kind of sack-shaped dress ordained for housework. Her veiny, brittle-looking shins could have belonged to a much older woman. And the stoop I had assumed was for my benefit turned out to be her usual way of standing. To greet our new servant, my mother floated down the stairs wearing pearls and a shiny robe. She smiled, her teeth as white as when she was sixteen and crowned Miss Monte Ramon, the favorite local beauty. What teeth the laundress had were rotten. And unlike the laundress, who walked with a haste that suggested there were too few hours in the day to earn a living, my mother was not given much to walking at all, but could more often be found reclining: prone on our dark velvet sofa, or taking siesta upstairs, where only her gentleman guests were allowed to disturb her.

I was always conscious of the ways people moved through the world, because of my own condition. Where others have legs, I have only the beginnings of legs; below that, a semblance of ankles; and finally two misshapen knobs, smooth as stones worked over by water. I got around in an old manual wheelchair that once belonged to my grandfather. The reason for my handicap was neither accident nor illness. No: when I was very young, my mother told me of its mystical and far stranger origin.

—

My mother’s father, Daniel Wilson, was an American GI who came to Monte Ramon in 1944. Our town had been invaded by the Japanese, and my grandfather was among the troops sent out to liberate us. As a soldier he helped evacuate the wooden statue of the Virgin of Monte Ramon — the gilt, gem-encrusted patroness of our town — from her church into the nearby mountains. This was to keep her safe from wartime desecration; yet strangely it was those carrying her who felt protected as they ventured deep into the forests and mountain trails. She became known, after that journey, as Our Lady of Safety.

At the height of the liberation, during a battle in the forest, my grandfather happened upon an Axis land mine and lost both his legs. America flew him home and nursed him at a veterans’ hospital as the war was ending. Once healed, Daniel Wilson traveled back to help rebuild Monte Ramon and seek out a girl he’d met during his first visit. He arrived just in time for what became the very first Festival of the Virgin. Pilgrims came from all over the Philippines to make offerings to Our Lady, now salvaged from her mountain hideaway and safely reensconced in her church. Daniel spotted his girl (who would become my grandmother) in a parade, waving from a float of beauty queens. She descended from the float and placed a garland of sampaguita around his neck. One year later, they had my mother.

I never met this American grandfather, who died in 1963. But just before she gave birth to me, my mother had a vision. The deceased Daniel Wilson spoke to her, dressed in camouflage and lying in the forest where he’d lost his legs. Although I am dead, Daniel told my mother, I shall live on through my grandson. He told my mother to name me after him, her father, not after the boyfriend who would end up deserting her. Daniel Wilson would not reveal specifics, but said I would be different from other children and remind my mother every day of the family’s legacy of pride and courage. And so I arrived: with a telltale lightness to my skin, and the vague buds of feet and toes that never quite articulated themselves.

My mother told this story often when she was not too tired. Its ending left her eyes lacquered with tears. She would gaze tenderly at her parents’ wedding portrait: a fair-haired soldier in a wheelchair, Purple Heart pinned neatly to his uniform, and a Filipina bride standing behind him, her white-gloved hand on his shoulder. My mother saw no need to replace Daniel Wilson, Sr.’s old wheelchair for an electric model. “What was good enough for a man like Dad is good enough for us,” she said. (He was always Dad or Daddy to her — never Papa, or Tatay.) “Who needs a Motorette when you’ve got an heirloom like this? And who needs an ordinary father when you’ve got such a grand father?” My mother smiled at her own pun. As it happened, my “ordinary” father had left us soon after my birth, and was said to be living these days in Manila.

—

I tried to hold the stalwart image of Daniel Wilson, Sr., in my thoughts each morning when I went to school. My books were bound by a leather strap, which I would grasp between my teeth, while my arms pumped at the steel rings of my grandfather’s old wheelchair. When I was younger, my schoolmates could be violently, unimaginatively cruel: there was a day they shoved me to the ground and ran away with my chair, leaving me to crawl hand over stump about a quarter mile until I found it. Sometimes they hobbled on their knees, in amputee fashion, beside me. They were often caught, of course, and punished by the priests; and so they soon discovered ways of mocking me that didn’t risk lashings or demerits. Recently they’d christened me Manny — to rhyme with my nickname, Danny, but also short for manananggal. The manananggal, a mythical vampire, could detach from her own legs and fly her torso freely into the night, feasting with a forked tongue on the wombs of unsuspecting women. Whenever those other boys aped me or called me Manny, I thought of medals and uniforms, of the Bataan Death March, of my grandfather bleeding in a nameless wood. Did I think it would be a cakewalk, the road to glory? Was it easy for Daniel Wilson, Sr., to risk life and limb for the freedoms of his Little Brown Brothers? Of course not! “Christian children bear their burdens,” a priest once said to me, “and suffering burnishes our lives to a high radiance.”