Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

This life-size, concrete man on a pedestal was supposed to be a Katipunero, or rebel from the 1896 uprising against Spain. He held a red flag in his right hand and a bolo knife in his left, his open mouth a cry to arms. But I saw him more as a security guard: watching for intruders, waving his bolo to keep girls like me out of the student union, that exclusive realm of monthly club dues and “activities” that didn’t earn a grade or paycheck.

My partial scholarship was in journalism. I’d never cared for newspapers, but I disliked children and sick people even more. (Teaching and nursing were my other scholarship options.) It had been five years since the President declared martial law, and rules had been cemented about who could print what, and where. One famous editor had said that finding decent Filipino reporters was easier in prison or abroad than in a newsroom in Manila. (No one heard from him again.) But I cared less about press freedom than I cared about myself. If media posts kept opening whenever “real” journalists offended Marcos, that left more for me. I would have followed any marching orders that led out of the barangay.

Of course, I knew enough to keep these bleak and bitter motives to myself.

—

Two months after my brother left, a man came to our door in denim (not just jeans, but a vest and jacket too) and gold-framed aviator glasses. His hair was like a soldier’s: short, cropped close enough to show his scalp; his tennis shoes and T-shirt so white they hurt my eyes.

“Your carabao, ” he called himself: our water buffalo, our beast of burden. His skin was not quite carabao -dark, but close. And rather than a plow or produce cart, he’d brought a woven straw box full of envelopes from men he knew in Saudi. “Something smells delicious, Tita,” he told my mother. She plated up some rice and fish for him.

He told us his name and parents’ province, what job had brought him to Saudi and how long ago. My mother fixed her eyes on him, as if by staring deep enough she’d locate Andoy there. “We have good times, considering,” he said. His shared flat in Riyadh, for instance, overlooked the public plaza known as Chop Chop Square. “Who needs TV when you’ve got ringside tickets to that?” He raised his arms to show us how the executioner would wield his sword over the accused. We must have cringed; he cut the demonstration short. He cleared his throat and left it at “You know Pinoys. Easily entertained.” He reached into his neckband to reveal a gold cross on a chain, purchased in secret from an Indian dealer. “It’s a crime to wear it there,” he said, stroking his neck as if thinking of Chop Chop Square again. “But I feel safer with it on than not.” He tucked it back into his shirt.

Ligaya glowed around him, a sudden charming hostess. “I’d offer you some San Miguel,” she said, “if we had any. You miss the taste, I bet.” His visit was the most time I had seen her spend downstairs with us. She even smiled and thanked my mother for the food.

I puffed up too, made jokes to get my own kind of attention. “Make sure my brother knows that beer is all she meant,” I said, “when she offered you what you can’t get in Saudi.” He laughed.

Before leaving, the carabao gave us Andoy’s envelope. He didn’t blink when I turned from the table to count what was inside it. He must have hoped, when it was his turn to send money home, that his own wife or sister would do the same. Standing from the meal, he rubbed his stomach. “I’ll need two seats on my flight back to Saudi,” he joked, “if everyone I see today feeds me like this.”

After that, they came every two months, on leave between their own contracts. They worked with Andoy or lived with him; they had socialized at parties in the workers’ village or worshiped together at a secret Mass held in a basement. Each time, my mother set a place at the table; Ligaya glowed and flirted; I joked around and counted money; the carabao ate and told stories and complained, before leaving, about needing two plane seats for his return to Saudi. Each time they wore the uniform I came to call the Saudi suit: the aviators, the white T-shirt and spotless sneakers, the gull-shaped Levi’s stitch on their back pockets as they turned toward their next delivery. Ray-Ban, Adidas, Jockey—“Stateside” brands, about as far from Peter O’Toole’s thob and head rope as I could have imagined. They even smelled the same: like cigarette smoke and crumpled cash. Through them, Andoy remitted half his pay to us, while he lived on a quarter and saved the rest for his return.

Ligaya gave birth in September. Standing in for my brother, I stared at her flushed and puffy face; her plastic cap and sweat-soaked gown; her swollen ankles as they thrashed against steel stirrups that, in my eyes, might as well have had a ball and chain and gang of fellow prisoners attached. I pitied her, and every woman in the ward that day — not just the wailing ones in labor but the nurses at their service and the twin girls who emerged, all smeared in blood and fury, from between Ligaya’s legs.

My mother’s hope — that babies would smooth out Ligaya’s nature; that nursing, cradling, bathing, and swaddling them would calm their mother, too — turned out to be in vain. Ligaya had a new and longer catalog of gripes now. “They refuse to drink,” she sobbed, jamming the bottles to their infant mouths. She mourned the changes they had wreaked upon her figure. “They’re here to stay,” she wailed, in underwear, tracing the stretch marks on her waist and hips.

The twins inherited Ligaya’s lungs and her talent for misery. They screamed whether we put them down or picked them up, whether we spoke to or sang to or ignored them. Illness and infections plagued them: thrush, clogged noses, pinkeye, diarrhea. I chased their mucus and secretions, wiping noses, backsides; wetting washcloths to dislodge dried crusts. “This is Sisyphean, ” I said, kneeling to scrub the floor or furniture. As if anyone understood. As if my fancy new college-speak could elevate me from the muck.

—

In May, another carabao with dark skin, military hair, aviators, and denim came to our door. Our mother was boiling rice at the stove. “Save some for me,” the carabao called through the screen; and there was no mistaking Andoy’s voice.

I ran to him, the textbook falling from my lap, and Andoy dropped his suitcases. “You reek like a carabao, too,” I said, my cheek against the smoke-and-money smell of his shoulder.

Our mother couldn’t speak. She touched his face, confirming him the way a blind man would. “It’s gone,” she finally said, when her fingers reached his hair.

Ligaya played indifferent, unlidding the rice and cooing to her babies. When she turned, she held them out like puppets. “We’re not supposed to talk to strangers,” she squeaked for them. “Who are you?”

Andoy grinned. His daughters, who had fussed and squirmed all day, blinked silently at him, docile as dolls. “I’ll show you who I am,” he said, taking them into his right arm and winging his left around Ligaya. With a dip, he planted the kind of kiss on her I’d seen in pictures of American victory parades after the war.

“Idiot!” Ligaya yelped, smiling.

He’d brought gifts home from Saudi: gold earrings for Ligaya and the twins, a rug for the upstairs room, a brass coffeepot with a swan-shaped spout. But more came after. From the electronic bazaar in Quiapo, he bought me a digital wristwatch and a typewriter with its own carrying case. Between deliveries to other families of carabao, he found my mother an electric cooker that could steam rice without her supervision. By the weekend, we had a color TV set. Neighbors came to watch John and Marsha on our sofa. Our mother made adobo and pineapple ham, while Ligaya served up the San Miguel and Johnnie Walker Black she’d always wanted to offer the other carabao.