Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

Afterward, Andoy and I walked out to dump the chicken bones and paper plates into the Creek. “Do all the carabao party like this when they come home?” I said. “What will you have left?”

“Left for what? What am I working for if not my girls?” He put an arm around my shoulder and lowered his voice. “Actually, I’ve been meaning to tell you something.”

The last time I’d heard him whisper, in this keyed-up and conspiring way, it was to tell me he had fallen for Ligaya. “You can’t be serious. In Saudi ?” I groaned. “You’re a father now, you said yourself!”

“Not that!” He laughed. “Although you could say I got lucky.”

He’d driven, many times, a man named Abdul Ghaffar Al-Thunayan from the airport to his palace in Al Nasiriyah. When his limousine broke down one day, with Al-Thunayan in the back, Andoy was worried. Al-Thunayan, who sat on the Ministry of Oil and had ties to the royal House of Saud, was an important customer. Displeasing him would not go over well with Andoy’s boss. But Andoy peeked under the limo’s hood, tightened the battery cables, and fiddled with the spark plugs till the engine purred again.

His passenger took notice. “I have great passion for cars,” Al-Thunayan said, as Andoy dropped him off. “I like my Corniche convertible, but Maserati is also excellent.”

A week later Andoy’s boss told him he was free. Al-Thunayan had bought him out of his driving contract and moved him west, into the servants’ wing of his mansion in Jeddah. My brother took over for a retiring Indian chauffeur, but he would also occupy a new post, as personal custodian of Al-Thunayan’s luxury car collection.

Needless to say, he would be earning more. “Enough for you to go full-time,” said Andoy. “No more tingi -style education. Have fun, be a college kid, get involved in some campus life, all right? That’s an order.”

How my brother knew from full-time student and campus life —things I’d barely dreamed about myself — I had no clue.

When we got back inside, he chased Ligaya up the stairs. She giggled as they closed the door, and then the phonograph drowned out their voices. The twin I carried stopped her gurgling long enough to smile at me. Her sister fell asleep in my mother’s lap. This kind of peace seemed possible in our house, the month Andoy was home.

—

In June, I quit my cafeteria job and gave up all but two shifts at the library. These were the new terms of what my brother called the Abdul Ghaffar Al-Thunayan Scholarship. I flailed, that first day of the semester, at doing as the campus natives did: their slow and easy amble through the grass was harder than it looked, and sitting on the quad, against a tree, made my spine ache. I went and studied them from a bench instead. A boy, reading the campus daily newspaper on the other end of the bench, reached across to clamp his hand on my knee. I froze in fear. This must be flirting, I thought, despairing that only “college kids” who lived the “campus life” knew how to handle it.

The boy just smiled, pointing his chin at my knee. My leg had been bouncing nervously against the bench since I’d sat down. “Sorry,” I said. He nodded and went back to reading. I was too embarrassed to move again till after he stood, leaving his paper behind.

I picked it up, scanning headlines about an Independence Day earthquake, the ongoing trial of former Senator Aquino, a teenage housemaid named Rosy Lacaba. The second page contained instructions, below the masthead, for prospective student reporters.

Why hadn’t I thought of it before? The perfect solution — a necessary notch on my résumé that still fulfilled Andoy’s mandate for Life Outside the Classroom.

The next day, per instructions, I brought a steno notebook and ballpoint pen to the campus daily’s headquarters, on the fourth floor of the student union. Don’t blame me, I thought, looking up as I passed the Katipunero on his pedestal. This wasn’t my idea.

But Room 401 was locked. I checked the paper again, not knowing yet what I’d later find out: that its editors and reporters no longer met in the student union, that they had gone underground after running afoul of both the university chancellor and the national Office of the Press Secretary too many times. I didn’t know the paper met in secret now, in the off-campus apartments of its alumni, who believed that any savvy would-be journalist should easily sniff out as much.

I did hear voices, though, and followed them to the other end of the hall. There, under a cloud of smoke, twelve boys were sitting on the floor, around a braided rug. They seemed dressed for some other time and climate, in plaid wool pants, velvet jackets with large buttons and thick piping, floppy printed cravats. A podium in the corner held a plaster bust of José Rizal; in the opposite corner, a second podium held a thick unabridged dictionary, open to the middle.

“If I wanted to eat chop suey, I’d go to Señor Woo’s,” said one boy in a top hat, flinging a typed manuscript onto the floor. “It’d be more satisfying, too. Is this a story? Is it enough to take old sermons and pop songs, comic books and teaching manuals, and call it a story?”

Another boy held up his hand, in its fraying fingerless glove. “What other way is there to write about this country?” he replied. “Three hundred years under Spain, via Acapulco. Thirty years under the Americans and three under the Japanese. A history of fragments and confusion—‘chop suey’ is the only style that captures it.”

A third boy argued one could write about confusion without actually confusing the reader. A fourth insisted that old standards of clarity in prose no longer had relevance to how we live today. “Is that what fiction’s after, then — real life today?” said a fifth. “That’s not why I read stories. If I just wanted facts shoved in my face, I’d go and read the campus paper.”

By now I knew I’d come to the wrong place and backed away. A shrill bell rang, and a sixth boy pulled a brass chain from the pocket of his tweed jacket. “We’re out of time,” he said.

They were still split down the middle: six of them for publishing the story, six against. A rolled-up manuscript was tossed in my direction, and all twelve faces turned. “What do you think?” asked the timekeeper, looking at me as he shut off the alarm and wound the dial.

Now that they had seen me, I was too proud to retreat. As far out of my depth as I was, I stooped to skim the first few pages at my feet, which took me on a kind of romp — through artifacts and documents that stood, it seemed, for the history of the Philippines. Lines translated from a Spanish zarzuela. Menu items, such as stewed prunes and “college pudding,” served on the 1901 USS Thomas voyage from San Francisco to Manila Bay. I couldn’t tell if these fragments were real or fabricated, or some combination of both. The author, whose name was blacked out in the top-left corner with a marker, had what I could only call a casual relationship with grammar, chronology, punctuation, historical accuracy, and most other courtesies a reader might expect.

I didn’t care much for the story, but I had the urge to mimic them, these boys, adopt their earnest style of arguing the way I’d tried to sit and walk the campus like a full-timer. “It is a mess,” I told them, “but what’s wrong with that? Whoever wrote this took away the narrator and left some room for me. I’m not a child. Why hand the story to me on a platter? Why shouldn’t it be up to us to piece together our own history?”

With that, somehow, I passed. The tie was broken, and the boys moved aside to make space for me. We spent a half hour on each of three remaining stories, the seconds ticking like a toy heart in the tweed pocket of the boy to my left. I sat and watched and chimed in now and then, feeling like an interloper at some mad tea party. Even when I told them I had landed there by accident, from the journalism department, they just congratulated and welcomed me to what they called the dark side.