Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

Annelise was descending the bamboo steps and walking across the dirt. The squatters dipped their fingers into buckets and sprinkled her with water. Young children splashed her with glee. She trained her gaze a few paces before her, as if balancing a basket on her head. She stopped at my chair. “It’s a tradition,” she said, with a flicker of embarrassment upon her face, slight as the mist of water on her arms and cheeks, and evaporating as quickly. “They don’t let girls bathe in the creek during our time of month. So when it’s over, they do this. I hate it, but that’s life in the ravine.”

I thought of the maid that my mother had let go because of her smell. Once again I was at the foot of those stairs, catching perfumed air and sunlight from a momentary crack in the doorway. “You can use our house, Annelise,” I said, without thinking. As soon as I’d offered it, I knew it wouldn’t be easy. My mother wouldn’t abide it. She would have to be upstairs with a guest, or think that Annelise had come to do the wash again in her mother’s place. But I wanted to give Annelise something, since I had nothing for her pain.

Dr. Delacruz patted my shoulder. “Annelise, your partner is a gentleman,” he said. “I might have to fight him for the title of Messiah of Monte Ramon.” He scraped some dirt from my left wheel with the tip of his shoe.

Dr. Delacruz helped us accomplish it. A few weeks later, the next time Annelise was banned from the creek, and girls at school said vicious things about her smell, Dr. Delacruz brought her up the hill to my house. “How many times will she send you to do her job for her?” my mother asked about the labandera, adding that she’d expect a discount for less experienced hands. Once we knew that my mother was occupied upstairs, Dr. Delacruz and I would take over the wash. We scrubbed and wrung, while Annelise finished her bath and then rested on the sofa with a hot water bottle, her face clenched against the pain. As soon as we heard my mother’s door open upstairs, we switched places with Annelise.

Around this time, so much of which I spent with the doctor in the labahan behind our house, an idle wish began. “Pass me that bleach, anak, ” said Dr. Delacruz, and for the first time in my life I paused over the word. Adults called us anak or “son” or “my child” all the time, but Dr. Delacruz said it with such soft regard as to sound literal. I began to imagine him as my father, living in this house, or any house, with me, married to my mother. A pipe dream — or was it? Now that Annelise had introduced me to her radionovela, I saw exchanges between Dr. Delacruz and my mother in a new light. This was courtship, from another angle. In Pusong Sinugatan, Reyna ended up in the arms of the one suitor she’d tried the hardest to fight off. And Joe had been admired by every woman about town except the one he loved most, which only strengthened his resolve to win her. He waited patiently, persisted for as long as he had to. Likewise, perhaps the reason Dr. Delacruz never remarried all these years since his wife’s death was that he only wanted to marry my mother. My imagination, once ignited, went wild. If Dr. Delacruz married my mother, she’d have all the comfort and company she needed in him. All the men who passed me by in the sala without so much as a second look would step aside. Why else would Dr. Delacruz spend so much time with me, and in our house? Even granting how many people in Monte Ramon he cared for, why should my life, and my mother’s, be of such special concern to him?

—

The fiesta was approaching. Church bells rang and cannons fired throughout our school days now, rousing us in the morning and distracting us from classroom lectures. Both were being fine-tuned for the ceremonies.

Annelise decided that she and I would bring our petitions to the Virgin early. During fiesta month, she reasoned, the Virgin fielded so many requests for love or health or babies or luck that we ought to lay our concerns at her feet before the others overwhelmed her. We set out with votive candles, a box of matches, and bananas from a tree outside my mother’s house.

They kept the four-hundred-year-old statue behind glass in the church, but a plaster replica of her stood on a roofed pedestal outside. The Virgin’s nose was fine and strong, her mouth tiny, her eyes bold. Annelise lay her palm on the Virgin’s robe, which was brocaded with gold paint.

She had a theory about praying. “You must be specific,” Annelise told me. “Vague prayers end badly. There was a man who traveled up here from Manila and asked the Virgin for money. No specifics, just money. On his way home children threw worthless coins at him. They thought he was a beggar in his raggedy clothes. Well, he prayed for money, and he got it! The Virgin needs specifics. ” She set her votive down before the statue.

I lit my own candle, and then a prayer came to me as easily as the tune of a familiar song. I prayed for Dr. Delacruz to become my father. I prayed that he would win my mother’s heart at last, with all the gifts and dishes he brought us and the amount of time and care he lavished on me. I prayed that she would come around, as Reyna had with Joe in Pusong Sinugatan, to the one suitor she had overlooked. I asked the Virgin for a soap-operatic surprise that would change my life. Was this specific enough? Annelise was crossing herself already; I had no time to revise. We ate two of the bananas and placed the rest beside the candles. We looked up at the Virgin’s face as if to read her answer, but her weathered plaster expression remained still.

—

Finally the day of the fiesta came. Bright streamers laced the avenues, which filled with tourists escaping the Manila heat, as well as pilgrims from beyond the capital. On the day of the parade, my classmates and I went to Safety to fetch our partners. Annelise had tucked sprigs of baby’s breath into her thick hair and wore a light blue dress — left behind at the convent, she said, by a Safety alumna. As we headed from the campus to the church, Annelise smelled powdery and immaculate. She seemed well. I could not help but think that some specific prayer of hers had been answered.

Six townsmen, Dr. Delacruz among them, took the Virgin down from her glass case in the church and perched her on a wooden boat. The real Virgin was both darker and brighter than the plaster decoy to whom Annelise and I had prayed. Wood grain striped her varnished cheeks, and the jewels in her robe were real. Garlands of sampaguita dangled from the boat’s rim. Parishioners loaded the hull with offerings of mangoes, bananas, pineapples, and coconuts. As they brought the Virgin of Monte Ramon into the streets, her crown trapped and seemed to magnify the sunlight. A throng of pilgrims followed close behind, holding candles. The flame-specked worshipers appeared from far away like a train extending the Virgin’s gown.

Behind the pilgrims glided the elaborate float of Miss Monte Ramon and her ladies-in-waiting. College boys in stiff white barong s escorted these reigning beauty queens of our town. The speakers on their float warbled a folk song in praise of the sampaguita flower. Our group marched behind, boys on the left, girls on the right. The pace of a parade suited me. I wasn’t struggling to catch up with anyone, and the spectators seemed too deep in the pageant queens’ thrall to stare at me or point fingers. Behind us, the elementary school children sang about the wonders of Monte Ramon, from its hills to its Virgin to its local sweets.

After the parade, Annelise and I bought suman and unraveled its leaves to bite into the sweet, sticky rice packed inside. We vowed to taste everything along Monte Ramon’s main street. Halfway through our mission, Annelise complained of an upset stomach. We laughed at our foolishness and called ourselves takaw mata, more greed in the eyes than room in the belly. We made our way down the littered street, feeling full.