Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

“I’m going to be a father now,” he said. “Saudi’s the best place for me.”

—

Before Ligaya, there was Rose; before Rose, there were Vangie, Monica, and Teresita. “She’s the one,” Andoy would declare each time, clutching his chest as if Cupid had hit the bull’s-eye. He knelt at their windows with our father’s guitar, crooning till the neighbors complained. I offer you no wealth or high ambition, went one of his favorite Tagalog ballads, beyond the promise of my everlasting love.

“You sang that to Rose,” I said, after one serenade. “And to Vangie, and Aurora, and Belen.”

Andoy laughed, flashing that gap behind his teeth — the one flaw, people said, in his otherwise good looks. Looks he’d reportedly inherited from our father, along with the musical gift that had him strumming those kundiman by ear. “You’ll understand,” he told me, “when you fall in love.”

That closed the discussion. Love was unknown territory to me: I couldn’t challenge him on it any more than I could question what he said about our father, who had taken off for good before my birth; or what our mother told us of life in Manila during the war. I had to take them at their word.

“She puts the sun to shame,” he’d say. “I looked at her and every part of me was ringing.”

Even more than beauty, what really made my brother weak was danger, obstacles — the chance to break a rule or cross a line or overcome some hideous odds for love. Vangie had a boyfriend. Aurora was engaged. His best friend already had an eye on Rose. Teresita was a decade and a half his senior; Belen lived in another province.

“I can’t have her and I have to have her,” he’d said most recently, after falling for the boss’s daughter.

I said, “You’ve been listening to too many radionovelas with Ma.”

—

In convent school I’d known a few girls like Ligaya, girls whose parents had some money but didn’t quite play golf in Forbes Park. (Her father owned some fancy cars, as Andoy put it, but his wife was always on his case to sell one.) Ligaya was stunning, even by my brother’s standards: rosy and pouty, long and slim but round where it counted, with skin like a steamed pork bun. Pregnancy seemed only to exaggerate those looks. Her hair had grown, with mermaid luster, to her waist. Even her growing belly didn’t so much mar her figure as match it, curve for curve. This new look, of course, appalled Ligaya’s parents, who had thought that firing Andoy would put an end to the affair. Seeing, in the flesh, how much she’d disobeyed them left them no choice but to kick her out.

So Ligaya came to live with us. When she arrived, with her matching crocodile trunk and train case, she burst into tears. “It’s a swamp,” she sobbed. “I’m going to live in a swamp.”

It was a swamp; we didn’t need Ligaya to tell us that. Every day my mother washed what clothes we owned and hung them from the banister to dry. Water trickling from the sleeves and hems kept the floor wet. Steam issued from the iron my mother used on the dried clothes, and from the rice she cooked at lunch and dinner, and from the pots of water that we boiled when it flowed brown or orange from our faucets. All that moisture gave the house a smell, so constant we’d forgotten it, of mold.

Nine years before, a “slum upgrade” had turned the scrap shacks of our barangay into two-story homes, one room below and one above. We had electricity and plumbing now, concrete blocks instead of tin-and-plywood walls, furniture and some appliances, a bathroom with a faucet and flush toilet at the foot of the stairs. Since then the First Lady, who’d led this initiative herself, had moved on to concert halls and galleries. The crown jewel of the planned upgrade — a concrete promenade to cover up the open Creek — never materialized. And like all the neighbors’ houses, ours deteriorated faster than it had improved. Rust had spread its scabs over the bathroom floor and walls. The vent built into the wall above the kitchenette to air out cooking smells became a nest for rats, who chewed through the wire mesh and made a racket with their shrieking every night.

We did feel sorry enough to give Ligaya the upstairs room. Having shared the bed there for nine years, my mother and I moved to the sofa and a straw mat on the ground floor. After she had settled in, Ligaya told us “too much up-and-down” could harm the twins. This meant that someone had to bring her meals upstairs to her and bus the dishes after. And someone was my mother. Ligaya saw her as a slave, which enraged me. (I must have felt I was the only one who had the right to treat my mother like a slave.) Ligaya couldn’t quite adjust to life without a gardener, a housemaid, or a nanny (not to mention a chauffeur). Of course, she didn’t feel that climbing up and down the stairs to walk outside, take the jeepney to Makati, and visit all the shops she could no longer afford to patronize, like a mourner visiting a grave, would harm the twins.

As for my mother, she was too used to taking orders to push back, at least not right away. For six years now, ever since the trouser factory where she once worked had closed, she’d been calling herself a traveling seamstress, making “house calls” after church each morning in some nearby, nicer towns. But most houses there had help already. If she didn’t happen on a garden party or a child-care crisis that could use an extra hand right then and there, the best she could hope for was a guilt-plagued housewife who could give her pity money. When I was thirteen, still accompanying her on these rounds, I saw people draw their shades as we approached, my mother’s sewing basket of no more use to them than a bundle on some hobo’s stick.

After that, I had a terror of becoming her, the multipurpose servant a few lucky scraps away from living on the street. I refused to serve Ligaya hand and foot. At the same time, I remembered enough from the jungle kingdom of high school not to fight with someone like Ligaya and insist she pull her weight. Instead, watching them both while I did homework on the sofa, I pretended they were strangers, who had little to do with me. I imagined I was a reporter on assignment, paid to watch and cover subjects in a house that wasn’t mine. Servant work has turned, I scribbled in a notebook, looking at my mother, from what she once did for a living to who she is for life. I had no doubt that both my living and my life would be different. She holds a grudge against the world, I wrote of Ligaya, for defaulting on its promises to beautiful women. It didn’t occur to me that I’d been counting on similar promises, made to smart girls who studied hard.

—

In Riyadh, my brother shared a flat with nine men — Filipino gardeners or servants or drivers like him, or men helping to build the pipeline from Saudi’s oil wells to refineries offshore. The desert sun tanned him in no time, as it had his friends. We all could pass for Moros now, he wrote home, on an aerogram as thin as onionskin.

When he called for the first time, from a pay phone in a downtown hotel, I told him that I liked having a sister for a change. “Why didn’t we think of replacing you sooner?” I’d never lied this way for anybody’s sake before. I must have wanted him to feel, five thousand miles away, that he was working toward a good cause. School, I wrote, because I knew he’d eat it up, has it all over the real world.

I’d started college that June. When I arrived on campus, among freshmen who had come at sixteen and would leave by twenty, I felt of a different species altogether: discipula laboranda plebeia, the ancient, part-time scholarship girl. I was only one year older, but would age faster than them still, paying tingi or “retail”-style for a few credits each semester, the way my mother bought garlic by the clove or shampoo by the foil sachet. My classmates didn’t look down on me so much as fail to see me altogether, as I stamped their books and served their lunches, as constant and inconsequential to their landscape as the statue in front of their student union.