Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

Then: “If things get rough for me, I’ll need to be close to home for moral support, or worse — to have somewhere to be laid up.”

His Harvard colleagues must be smart enough to see it. Her husband wants that last incline in Newton known as Heartbreak Hill, and then the finish line. He wants the glory.

As Kit says, “Hahtbreak Hill, Dad? That’s hahd coah.”

“You’re all invited here after the race,” the old girl hears him saying. “My wife will cook enough to feed a whole Olympic village.”

In Brookline that evening, the old girl buys a potted laurel tree. Bitbit will use its leaves to string together a garland to hang around his neck, and a crown.

Speaking Engagements

He never mentions Atatürk anymore, or Syngman Rhee, or Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. Strongmen, who he once believed could do great things in a poor country so long as people had more to eat than they remembered having before. But in America, he knows, that dog won’t hunt. Now he’s shelved all dictators, like action figures he’s outgrown. When he brings up Franco, and Juan Perón, and the shah, it’s in cautionary tales: men on the wrong side of history, bad bets.

This shift began in jail, of course. He read Thoreau in his cell. He read Gandhi’s Satyagraha in South Africa. Since the film came out he’s been watching Ben Kingsley on repeat, laying himself down before the police horses.

She sits in most of these audiences, clapping along, telepathically feeding him lines from the speeches she typed. The man who once confessed a soft spot for Sun Tzu, now a champion of nonviolent resistance. The man who once quoted The Prince by heart, now the inspiration to all freedom-loving people of the world. The man who made no secret of his plan, in 1969, to style himself as the President’s loudest critic ( hit him hard when and wherever I can; the only way to keep my name in print till I can run against him ), now the man at the podium claiming no ambition greater than to fight for his beloved Filipinos even if it ruins him.

How much he loves the Filipinos — that part is not a line, not a lie. He loves them all: poor or vulgar, greedy or corrupt. He loves the death-row inmates at the New Bilibid Prison, the prostitutes in Ermita with their tragic teeth, the karaoke gangsters who start knife fights over songs they’ve claimed as their exclusive turf. “You’ve got to hand it to them,” the old girl’s husband will say, about pickpockets in Makati who can slit a purse seam silently, or snatch a pair of earrings that the owner won’t miss until her bleeding earlobes itch, “they’re nothing if not good at what they do.”

He even smiles, sometimes, about the First Lady, who’s visited him in the States, once at the old girl’s house. She went on and on about how much the Reagans love her, how she put the Philippines on the map. Well, I can’t argue with that. He keeps a gold cross the First Lady gave him before he left Manila, emblem of the cozy and unwholesome bond between them. He shakes his head over the President’s latest convoluted proclamation. But he does get people to believe this legalistic mumbo jumbo, doesn’t he? As if they were two unruly children run amok in Malacañang Palace— minds of their own; what can you do? — not powers that be who jailed him for eight years.

At times he sounds less like a hero than like a long-suffering wife: the Philippines might be this or that, but the Philippines can’t help it. And neither can he: the Philippines is his.

Before the audience leaves, the moderators of these speeches almost always point the old girl out. They say behind every great man, and all that. She stands and bows and smiles and waves.

Proposal

When they pick up his bib — the one thing she can’t do without him — it’s pep talk time.

“Spring’s right around the corner,” says the old girl. Copley Square glitters, still slushy from the last storm. “These trees will start turning for you by race day.”

“Once you turn onto Boylston, you’ll have a few blocks to go — that’s it! The kids will all be at the finish, waiting for you, calling you their hero.” The old girl’s even giving herself chills.

“Bitbit’s already sewn the letters on your shirt. Strangers will be chanting your name.”

Her husband smiles a gloomy smile. “They’ll probably mispronounce it.”

“So?” They stand above the barren, icy ditch — a babbling fountain in the summertime. “You’ll know who they’re talking about.”

He says nothing.

“Right here you’ll get your medal. Popsy’s going to take the pictures — not that any of us will ever forget it. Imagine the people back home. ‘Harvard na, marathon pa !’ they’ll say.”

The old girl’s husband shakes his head. “I’m thinking I should not run at all.”

“Why would you say that?”

“You were right. I’m no spring chicken anymore. A little arrogant to think I could just take this up.”

She never said that. After twenty-eight years, it seems, she didn’t have to.

“You’re not so old,” the old girl says, not wanting to discourage him from a dream by now she’s bought into. You’ve caught the bug!

“Training takes up too much time,” he’s saying. “We have more important things to think about right now.”

Inside, she feels herself adjusting, one more time. Don’t worry, Dad. We’ll still watch from our balcony. Better for your foot to heal. So he took the long way around to her point of view: so what?

The bronze statue of Copley, with his palette and paintbrushes; the church behind them; and the tint of the dusk sky take her back, all of a sudden, to Manila. Another walk after another dinner with their families — their early dates, if you could call them dates, had mostly been just that. Around this time of day, on one walk, they sat beneath the statue of Rajah Sulayman, with the church behind them and Manila Bay before. He simply asked, “How do you feel about October?” Counting on assumptions that had already passed between them. And she said, “As long as it’s not late October, too close to All Souls’ Day. When death is on people’s minds.”

“Things are bad back home,” her husband says now. “Maybe worse since martial law was, quote-unquote, ‘lifted.’ More debt, more deaths…”

She doesn’t mean to tune out, let her mind wander, but as he goes on about successors and juntas and the President’s dialysis machine, she can’t help it. She’s wondering which of his colleagues will jockey for the Heartbreak Hill spot now. She’s remembering the year she left New York for good, for Manila — daydreaming, as her law professors droned about property taxes and civil procedure, of the American future she’d forfeited. It’s morning in New York, she’d think. Mary Ann’s alarm clock would be going off; the old girl would be boiling coffee for the both of them. Her not-yet husband, back from Korea, teased her about having an American accent. Come to think of it, he always brought up America jealously. I don’t suppose that’s a problem in America, he said, about the stench wafting from the bay toward Malate Church. As if America were some rival suitor. And in a way, it was. When he asked, “How about October?” she didn’t hesitate over some other man she’d rather marry, but flashed instead to New York in the fall, its leaves on fire, and the bachelorette rent she had planned to split with Mary Ann. A life of purer solitude than she has known: she could have been (and happily) the spinster teacher, the aging nun. Back then not every bride-to-be in Manila wore a ring, but he produced one, saying that after so much time in America he thought she’d expect it. She’s remembering he had to place it on her pinkie finger — that’s how small he thought she was. She’s thinking how a marathon is like a marriage: the long haul, the ups and downs, the tests of endurance and faith, the humbling, undiscovered country. Even entering with eyes wide open (and who, of everyone she’s known, has ever been more pragmatic than the old girl?) guaranteed nothing, only injuries you couldn’t predict, potholes and pitfalls and dark hours no sane person would sign up for willingly.