Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

“What do you mean, you cannot take it? This is French perfume, very expensive,” my mother was telling the maid. Payday had arrived, it seemed, and my mother once again lacked cash to give the servants outright. The maid, a girl so young she still wore her hair in two braids, looked at her feet, but kept her hands clasped behind her back, resolved not to accept my mother’s half-empty bottle. The gardener held an ivory nesting doll in one hand but seemed to be waiting, however meekly, for more.

Dr. Delacruz approached them from behind my chair.

“Where have you been?” my mother demanded — whether of me or of Dr. Delacruz I wasn’t sure. The doctor whispered to the servants, handing each of them a sheaf of peso notes from his pocket. After the gardener set the doll gently upon our coffee table, both servants hurried past me and out of the house.

In my concern for Annelise I had forgotten how lonely and fragile my mother could become during fiesta season. “I was visiting my friend,” I said, “at the hospital.”

“The labandera ’s daughter?” My mother laughed. “The squatter child with the ‘feminine problems’? You be careful of squatters, anak. People from the ravine see a boy with a big house, a nice garden, and—”

“That’s enough,” interrupted Dr. Delacruz. “Danny has been a great friend to Annelise.”

“And so have you!” she replied. “Another outcast only the Messiah of Monte Ramon could love! You think I don’t know how you’ve been encouraging my son, bringing her here to use our water and foul up our house? I can smell her from upstairs!”

Despite my shame at getting caught, I thought of Reyna and Joe again, the turning point in Pusong Sinugatan when they were on the verge of love but didn’t know it yet. They too had shouted at each other, seemed ready to come to blows, just moments before their first kiss.

“Look at this house.” My mother pointed to the ceiling. A leak from her upstairs bathtub had made a growing stain in the plaster, damp and beginning to smell like mold. “My phone’s been cut off, too. But I suppose I have to be a labandera ’s daughter to expect help!”

“Was he a phantom that just paid your servants?” said Dr. Delacruz. “I’ve been getting your son home every day. I’ve brought you food—”

“Oh, the servants’ dinuguan has nothing to do with this!”

“The servants!” Dr. Delacruz laughed. “That’s right, it’s the servants who eat the dinuguan. Because your ‘delicate American stomach’ can’t handle native grub. You know, it’s all this make-believe that’s the problem. It’s not the house that needs fixing.”

My mother huffed air out of her mouth, dismissing him.

“Anak,” said the doctor, kneeling suddenly to address me, “I’ve always wanted to help you. There are prosthetics we could try, or better chairs. But your mother says no to all that.”

“Because this chair is an heirloom,” said my mother, “and Danny is proud of his grandfather.”

Dr. Delacruz ignored her. “ Anak, your mother was sick in the mornings while she was expecting you. So sick she came to me for help.”

My mother’s eyes grew wide.

There was a German pill, said Dr. Delacruz, which women in both Europe and America had taken for my mother’s symptoms. “It calmed their nausea and helped them sleep.”

I was confused. Their union was taking a long time and veering in a direction I hadn’t foreseen. I scrambled to reword my prayers to the Virgin, to be more specific, to make sure she understood my exact fantasy. But it was difficult to pray — or hear my thoughts at all, for that matter — in our living room that evening. The skin of my mother’s face seemed to have tightened to the bone, and turned nearly as white.

By the time she was expecting me, Dr. Delacruz continued, Westerners had lost interest in the miracle pill. Large shipments were made to pharmacies in Manila when it would no longer sell in Europe and America. My mother, in her suffering, begged Dr. Delacruz for a prescription. That was all she needed; with it, her American father could obtain any Western drug she wanted, even ones not readily available in Monte Ramon.

“I should have taken more time,” said the doctor, “done more research. But after my own wife’s death, I simply couldn’t stand by and watch a pregnant woman suffer without taking action. So I wrote the prescription. The day you were born, I saw my mistake.”

My mother looked pale and stunned, as if we had been robbed and found ourselves in a sala emptied of its sofa, its cabinet, its sepia portrait of my grandparents.

“It’s my everlasting penance,” said Dr. Delacruz. “If there’s anything you want or need, Danny, I’ll do my best for you. And for your mother, too. I can’t forgive myself. But I can’t lie to you either, anak. These fairy stories that her father’s war heroism begat a son with no legs…Even children deserve to know the truth.” He stood up. “You poor boy,” he added, in a voice laden with regret, and left the house.

His words and his departure sent me reeling, as if I’d been pushed downhill to the ravine at high speed, losing all control, nothing below to catch or save me. The idea I’d been polishing like a precious stone slipped from my hands. And with it, all ideas that had carried and sustained me through the years seemed to be crumbling too. If I’d been wrong about Dr. Delacruz and my grandfather, it seemed possible I might be wrong about my mother. It seemed possible for the first time that the defects of our bodies — mine, Annelise’s, anyone’s — were errors of nature, caused and cured by science, nothing more.

“Don’t believe him,” said my mother, falling to her knees in the doctor’s place. “Who is he? I am your mother; believe me. ” All this kneeling was starting to remind me, perversely, of the children who mocked me at school. There was nothing left for us to do, my mother said, but pray. She threw herself forward, weeping on the empty fabric of my trousers. She crossed herself and gazed tearfully at her parents’ wedding portrait, looking for a moment to be praying to them.

But I didn’t feel like praying. My palms simply refused to meet. They went, instead, to the wheels of my chair and pulled, retreating from my mother. I turned my back to her — a first. “Danny,” I heard her call as I pushed myself to the foot of the stairs. I could hear her calling still as I pitched myself onto the steps and started climbing like a crab, on my knuckles and the heels of my hands, up to the forbidden room.

And what did I find there? Only the light, which had seemed otherworldly when it streamed down through the seldom-opened door, but which came from the sun — the same plain sun that shone on all Monte Ramon, no more than that. Only a bed that took up most of the room. A chest of drawers, clothes draped on the backs of chairs, and trinkets cluttered on surfaces — no big secret to settle my confusion. Still, I searched. I opened the drawers, rummaged through the silks and laces, pulled aside the wardrobe doors where dresses fell from their hangers, tore the lids off boxes and capsized them so that chains and beads and buttons clattered to the floor. I would have flipped the mattress if I’d had the strength, or torn the framed photographs off the walls if I were tall enough. By the time I reached the vanity, whose mirror was just low enough to show me my reflection — and my mother, coming through the doorway, weeping — I was not afraid to pull at it, and watch it crash to pieces on the floor.

In a radionovela I’d have found a key, a clue that would unlock a season’s worth of mysteries. I found only my own shame and exhaustion. The room looked like a thief or vandal had attacked it. I felt sorry for disturbing all my mother’s belongings, which she’d expressly made off-limits to me, and for denying her the trusting, dutiful son she’d always had. But something had been taken from me, too. 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 it. I turned back toward the stairs. I did not wish to look at another adult now, let alone console my mother. I wanted consolation for myself, and knew only one source for it.