Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

When she tunes back in, he’s still talking. “If I really thought the opposition could get it together by May, on their own, that’d be one thing.”

She stares at Copley Square’s ash-colored slush, dripping lampposts, ice-glazed trees.

“This is what deserves my energy, and all my focus, now. I’m going back, Mommy.”

She doesn’t feel it as a gut punch, not really. She can’t be too surprised. No one who knows him can honestly imagine he’d be happy here forever, at chalkboards and podiums, in a tweed jacket and suede elbow patches. So why is she struggling, a bit, to breathe? Old girl, you idiot. She met him almost half a century ago, and still she hasn’t learned.

Finish

Four months later, the old girl wants a word — sometimes she finds them, in German or Japanese, words that capture something Tagalog and English don’t — for preemptive nostalgia. She’s longed for this life in Boston all three of the years she’s been living it. This town, this house, this bed where they wake early on the morning of his flight out of Logan Airport.

“Mommy,” the old girl’s husband says, “what’s going to happen?”

But he knows what. At best, no sooner will he touch down in Manila than he’ll be cuffed and sent back to prison, for who knows how long.

At worst — well, he’s been talking about that for as long as they’ve been married, as long as he’s been in the public service.

They can’t shoot me; they’re afraid to make a hero of me. He has said that.

Then, in the same breath: Who would Rizal be without the firing squad? Just a brown man in coattails and a bowler hat, homesick in Madrid, yakking away about revolution this and independence that. I don’t want to be another sad, ranting, exiled old-timer.

It’s not a crystal ball he wants — just a little reassurance.

“You’re going to get on that plane,” says the old girl, “and we’re going to follow you.”

When I was in high school, long ago, my brother Andoy used to drop me off and pick me up from campus in a Cadillac. It wasn’t his, of course, any more than the rented uniform I wore was mine. And certainly we weren’t fooling anyone: not the neighbors in our barangay, not the nuns who’d given me a scholarship to their convent school in San Lorenzo. The car belonged to the family my brother worked for, as a live-in chauffeur. Each morning, Andoy woke before they did, put on his gloves and trousers in the dark, and drove from the suburbs to the slums to collect me. He’d already be muddling through traffic on EDSA Boulevard by the time I rose and got into my own X-shaped necktie and schoolgirl pleats.

Our mother was the one who washed and starched and pressed my uniform each night, as if that would fool the sugar heiresses and Senate daughters at my school into mistaking me for one of their own. Andoy knew better. Every morning, in the car, he gave me money for the school canteen and ate the bag lunch our mother had packed. He paid the dentist who filled my cavities and the orthodontist who straightened my teeth. On weekends we saw movies or played records on our father’s old phonograph, so when my classmates squealed over Leif Garrett or the Osmond Brothers, I’d know enough to squeal along.

I graduated in 1976, the same year that Andoy was fired from his driving job. His employer’s daughter, Ligaya, had just turned eighteen, and she and Andoy had been caught “celebrating” her birthday in the backseat of her father’s car. With Andoy unemployed and my mother scraping to feed us, I couldn’t go straight to college, even with a scholarship. We both spent the next twelve months mopping floors and stocking shelves to scare up rent and some tuition. I didn’t see an end in sight till Andoy told me, in May of 1977, that he’d found a better job.

“This time I want an Eldorado convertible,” I said. We’d just stepped off the jeepney on Salapi Road, whose pavement ended half a mile or so before our barangay began. Along with his old job, of course, we’d lost our access to the Cadillac. It depressed me to be riding jeepneys again, sardined thigh to thigh with strangers in a steel caravan painted up in circus colors, sometimes so crowded that brave young boys sat on the roof or hung on to the jeepney’s sides, the plastic-tarp “windows” flapping against them. After air-conditioning and leather seats, music from a cassette player, and my brother for a white-gloved chauffeur, it felt uncivilized to me to pass warm coins and damp bills forward to the driver, who even when we shouted para! sometimes barely slowed enough to let us jump from the doorless rear exit.

So I was thrilled to hear another family had hired him. “Where?” I asked, imagining another garage, another suburb of Manila. The aftermud of a typhoon sucked at our shoes as we walked home.

He said, “Saudi Arabia.”

I took this as a joke. “Now that’s a uniform,” I said. Peter O’Toole on a camel, in white robes and a head rope, was pretty much my whole idea of the Middle East.

“I’m serious.” He slowed his steps along the creek that flowed through our barangay. We called it that: the Creek. In fact it was an open sewage canal, wide enough to fit a pedicab and five or so feet deep, bringing the runoff from our houses through the next village and into the San Juan River. We threw our garbage in the Creek. We joked about what else wound up in there: unlucky cats lured by the fish-bone smell, tainted syringes, worse. No threat could crush a child’s tantrum faster than holding a toy — or, better yet, the squalling brat herself — above the Creek. After a flood, eggshells and beer-can tabs and bottle shards clung to the Creek’s banks, as if even trash hoped to escape. But the Creek did serve a purpose, outside of waste disposal: with everyone holding their breath and hustling past the stench as fast as they could, it was the one place in the barangay to have a private conversation.

“You’re gonna be a college girl,” said Andoy. “The textbooks will be heavier, and so will the tuition.” Driving taxis and limousines in Riyadh, he said, would pay him six times what he earned in Manila. He’d recoup his airfare and work visa fees in time, with some left over to send us, and save up for the driving school for rich expats he’d open when he returned home for good.

“But I’ll apply for scholarships,” I said, panicking at the thought of Manila without my brother in it. “A year from now, I’ll have enough to start part-time. If I can find a job in the library and cafeteria — and tutor, too, at night—”

“And study when?” He laughed, exposing a hole near the back of his mouth that still startled me. Years before, Andoy’s two right upper molars had rotted and fallen out. “Promise me you’ll take just one job, and save the wages for pocket money. Bus fare, if you want.”

We didn’t talk about his other reasons. Along with my textbooks and tuition, Andoy’s girlfriend, Ligaya, would be growing heavier too. She was already nineteen weeks heavier, to be exact, with Andoy’s twins.

“What exactly will you do in Saudi?” I asked.

“I told you — same as here,” said Andoy, “but for Arabs. Rich ones.”

“But what will you do,” I said, pointing at him, “in a place like Saudi?” This was still a few years before everybody’s father, uncle, nephew, son began to leave the Philippines for the Middle East, but already we’d heard stories, from the earliest recruits: men who’d gone to jail for looking at a woman the wrong way, unmarried sweethearts who couldn’t walk side by side in public, secret sex rooms that charged by the hour and were routinely raided by the police. Here in Manila, the decade of halter tops and hot pants suited Andoy just fine. The night before, he’d nuzzled up to Ligaya and caught her shoulder straps between his teeth. “Spaghetti for dinner,” Andoy said, “my favorite.” How would he get by in a country where women veiled themselves from head to toe in black?