Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

—

Daniel Wilson, Sr., also helped me to endure the sordid claims that schoolmates made about my mother. Once, in grade five, I stood up to my tormentors, informing them that I was descended from an American war hero. “You’d all be speaking Nippongo now if it weren’t for my grandfather,” I said to the other boys. I told them of my mother’s vision and how my birth had confirmed it. My classmates’ jaws fell open. The school yard turned so quiet I was certain I had put the insults to rest at last. But then from someone’s mouth there came a sound like a balloon deflating, and everyone began to laugh and slap their knees harder than ever. “How precious!” “That is rich!” “What a grand inheritance!” “The baby’s got his mother’s eyes, and his lolo ’s stumps!” Then a boy named Luis Amador said: “That’s a good theory, Manny. But I’ve got a better one. You didn’t get this handicap from your grandfather. You got it from your mother — who earns her living on her knees!” To what seemed like a million voices cheering, Luis genuflected and bobbed his head like a chicken in a coop.

It was true my mother had friends in Monte Ramon’s finest men: engineers; police officers; even, on one occasion, the mayor. These guests showed their gratitude to my mother in various ways. Bright flowers adorned our mantel every week. After a brownout, our lights were among the first in town to be restored. A priest from my own school gave her a payneta comb, carved from coconut wood into the shape of a lady’s fan. “Oh, Father,” my mother breathed, fingering the comb’s scalloped edges, “you are too generous.” She coiled her hair — cola-colored hair with streaks of copper in it — above her nape, and secured it with the comb. Even the dentist offered us his services for free — a welcome gift, as my teeth ached often from the weight of my books and other belongings. Countless men in Monte Ramon were good to my mother. I refused to believe, however, that she could somehow be degrading herself in the exchange. In her own words, my mother repaid her friends with “company and comfort — that’s all,” and I did not consider it my province as a son to challenge her.

I suppose that there were reasons, as many as the hills in our town of Monte Ramon, to doubt my mother’s stories; and reasons, as variegated as the stones that sparkled on our Virgin’s robes, to doubt my mother herself. But what were reasons in the face of faith? I believed her — honoring, as the commandment taught me, both my mother and that greater, universal parent Himself.

—

In the month of March, every year since 1947, the town held a fiesta to honor our Virgin. Pilgrims flooded Monte Ramon to pay her homage, and men carried the statue of Our Lady from her church into the mountains and back again in a parade that commemorated her odyssey to safety during the war. Vendors sold roasted cashews and jars of coconut caramel along the streets.

The church stood between my school, General Douglas MacArthur Preparatory, and our sister school, the Academy of Our Lady of Safety. Tradition held that when the boys of “Doug Prep” and the girls of “Safety” were thirteen, we met and prepared to escort each other in the March parade. Half a school year’s preparation led up to this, and the Safety girls arrived at our campus on a bright Tuesday in October. My classmates kept their hands in their pockets and their eyes on their shoes. The nuns and priests who had taught us Comportment told us now to introduce ourselves and make small talk. In my wheelchair, I sat apart from everyone.

“What’s the matter with you, Manny?” Ruben Delacruz called out to me. “Haven’t you been taught that a gentleman stands up in the presence of ladies?” His friends ate that one up. Ruben was our unofficial school prince, blessed with a screen-idol smile and a supernatural ease in everything from basketball to elocution. He was also the son of our one and only Dr. Delacruz, a man beloved in Monte Ramon. Dr. Delacruz ministered to a scraped knee with the same gentle attention as to a severe pneumonia. Every few years, when my back became afflicted with a pressure ulcer, Dr. Delacruz gave me antibiotics and applied the saltwater rinses with his own hands. An outbreak of influenza in the town, two years before, had Dr. Delacruz making house calls even to the grimiest parts of the ravine, with no concern for his own safety. It was these qualities that earned him the nickname the Messiah of Monte Ramon.

Dr. Delacruz’s late wife was said to have died giving birth to Ruben. Other boys — like Renato Cazar, whose mother had succumbed to cancer; and Vince Santiago, whose father had run off to Cebu with a younger woman — were teased and shunned for their family situation, as if being half-orphaned was a disease anyone could catch. And other boys — like Oscar Padilla, whose father was a lawyer to accused criminals, and Nemecio Ferrer, whose father was a debt collector — seemed stained by their parents’ work and clientele. Having both misfortunes would have surely doomed any other boy, but not Ruben. Somehow he’d fixed it early on so no one dared mention Dr. Delacruz’s patients or the late Mrs. Delacruz’s death to him; in fact, in Ruben’s case, his father’s work and mother’s absence seemed only to heighten the air of specialness that hung about him always.

“Give Manny a zero in Comportment, Father O’Connor,” said Pedro Katigbak, though not loudly enough for Father O’Connor to hear. I stared down into my school trousers. The laundress had pressed a crisp, straight crease down each leg, long past the point where it mattered.

The girls, on their patch of campus green, paid little attention to us boys. In their pinafores and Peter Pan collars, they had formed a circle, singing:

Negrita of the mountain,

what kind of food do you eat?

What kind of dress do you wear?

I remembered hearing “Negrita’s Song” in primary school, when we learned about mountain tribes like the Batak and the Aeta. The nuns took notice and put a stop to the chanting. Then some of my classmates, led by the brave Ruben Delacruz, started to approach the girls, and I saw Annelise for the first time.

Though a schoolgirl in uniform herself, she was unlike the others. She did not blush or chat with her classmates, or glance at us from the corners of her eyes every so often. Instead, she was reading a book. Anyone who was not a child was tall to me, but this girl, in particular, loomed. Her cinnamon-dark complexion stood out against the regulation white, and tight, spongy curls bloomed from her head, unpinned and unribboned. As if she sensed me looking, she glanced up and directly at me, displaying a blunt wide nose my mother would have called “native.”

After some secret chatter the girls brought their new boy acquaintances to Annelise. “How do you do, Negrita?” Ruben said, extending his hand as for a formal introduction. “Tell me: what kind of food do you eat, up there in the mountains?” Other boys followed suit, so that the insults of “Negrita’s Song” could seem from far away like small talk. The girls grew red holding in their laughter. Before long both boys and girls had crowded around her. There was no response from our teachers, this time; they mistook the huddle for a social success, and smiled in our direction.

I had longed for the day when my schoolmates would find a new target, a victim other than me. Now that she was here — a girl, who seemed unfazed by the teasing — I felt none of the relief I’d expected. I felt only shame at my own school-yard weakness, and a deep curiosity about this girl they called the Negrita.

—

A few days later, when Annelise came to our doorstep, she struck the brass knocker despite the key her mother had lent her. I was midway through my daily push-ups, which I did against the armrests of my chair to keep the steering muscles strong. I wiped away the sweat above my lip and caught my breath as I wheeled myself to the front door.