Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

And that was how I joined the campus fiction journal: as a sort of challenge to myself, a game. The magazine was called The Katipunero, like the statue outside. I’d seen it before in the library, where every three months I would bring its newest issue out onto the periodicals shelf. The heavy, lead-gray cover, textured to resemble slate. The loopy calligraphy of its letterpress title. The Katipunero was like that: all preciousness and pretense. Those Victorian getups; those boys, who also called themselves Katipuneros and wrote fiction of their own in their spare time, though everyone knew that, after graduating, they would forsake such things to join their fathers’ banks and firms. Outside of class they didn’t need to work for money; instead they spent their spare time analyzing paragraph breaks and “pee oh vee” as if the cure for cancer depended on it. A kind of smirking fascination brought me back to the student union every week, to pick up new submissions from the tray next to José Rizal and read them on the jeepney home, at lunch, even on the grass; to type rejection slips and bring them to the campus post office; to bring pieces I liked to the editors’ attention; to offer my two cents at the weekly meeting.

The Katipuneros stayed up late to pull off an issue each quarter. Afterward they spent the university’s money and some of their own to throw a launch party. I passed out flyers that most students threw away behind my back, hung posters that would disappear beneath other posters the next day, sound-tested microphones in the cafés where student authors read their work aloud. I drank a lot and smoked a little at these parties, feeling as the only girl that I had to keep up. (“Most girls prefer poetry or journalism to us,” one of the Katipuneros told me, when I asked if there’d ever been a Katipunera before.) After the cafés closed, they spilled into the dormitories to prolong such life-and-death debates as whether literature had social duties, as Salvador Lopez believed, or whether art’s only obligation was to art itself, as Jose Garcia Villa did. I even lost my virginity to one of the editors, behind the common-room sofa in his dorm, after the others had gone home or fallen asleep.

—

Faking my way among the Katipuneros also gave me an escape from the barangay. At home my mother, sick of slaving for Ligaya, had started to stick up for herself. But Ligaya wouldn’t go down without a fight, and every day after Andoy’s visit from Saudi, I witnessed one.

“You should have thought of that before,” my mother said, hearing Ligaya complain of morning sickness.

“Before what?”

My mother eyed Ligaya’s belly. “Andoy’s had a million girlfriends. You think you’re the first? You’re just the first to get yourself in trouble.”

“My self in trouble!” Ligaya almost choked. “Of course. I did this to myself. So I could get my hooks into the son of an unemployed seamstress.”

Another time, Ligaya alleged our home was unsafe for children. “We live in a death trap,” she said, once the twins were crawling. They were always slipping on the wet floor, or picking up dust bunnies and trying to eat them.

“Nothing’s wrong with this place, if you watch your kids,” said my mother. “I brought two children up here.”

“I wouldn’t brag about your children’s upbringing if I were you.”

“Now my children weren’t brought up right? A girl in college, and a son, who’ll go as far as Saudi to support his wife and kids?”

“His wife! His wife !” Ligaya howled, as if she’d heard a punch line, holding her still-ringless hand against her ribs.

They bickered in that same style about money, about Andoy, about child rearing and housekeeping. Eventually my mother would turn on the TV to drown out Ligaya’s voice. At full volume, the soap operas bled into their arguments, so that sometimes I could hardly tell whether a plate had shattered in my own house or an actress on the screen had flung it. The noise would set the babies wailing. Ligaya stormed upstairs and slammed the door (or had the evil landlord on TV slammed it?). Music blared from the phonograph, angering the babies even more.

I feared catching their rages, like the infections that bounced back and forth between my nieces. When Ligaya gave birth to a third daughter, in February, I nearly moved into the student union. “Off to work,” I’d say and make tracks as soon as the bickering began. Each time I passed the Katipunero, he looked less like a hostile guard and more like my redeemer. The brass plaque beneath him contained an old Tagalog word for freedom, and he stood for mine.

—

By March most students cleared the campus for vacation — except the Katipuneros, who insisted on a summer issue; and me, who still had credits to make up from my part-time days. With fewer writers around to contribute, we had to lift our policy against publishing staff work. The managing editor wrote a story called “McKinley Road,” in which a wealthy businessman left his wife, children, and mansion for a secretary. In the copy editor’s story, “Keys to the City,” evil typewriters rose up against and killed the leading lights of Philippine literature, one by one. An associate editor wrote about a seventeenth-century Colettine nun with supernatural powers. And one of my fellow readers wrote about a colony of fruit bats fleeing the destruction of their home forest for a new place to live.

These were good stories, and reading them, I had to admit that the Katipuneros were more than spoiled blowhards. The literary magazines and novels they read instead of studying for class; their half-hour critiques; their drunken post-midnight debates about whether, for instance, the English language, as a souvenir of American imperialism, could ever be the basis of a truly national literary tradition or whether Filipino literature had a future only in the local vernacular — all of that had added up to something, which was their own art, or the not-unpromising beginnings of it. The Katipuneros exceeded their own standard for student work. And their devotion to a magazine that turned no profit, whose readership nobody measured, their passionate arguments over what belonged in it, was not a game. They’d given themselves over to exactly what Andoy had wished on me: an enterprise without a practical end. They were amateurs, in the classic sense of the word: they did it all for love.

It came to me that next to them I was the dilettante. I didn’t sit around in a top hat or a velvet jacket, but I drank their whiskey and passed judgment on their craft, all the while never trying to make something of my own.

But if I were to write myself, then what about? I knew nothing about businessmen and secretaries, evil typewriters or supernatural nuns or fruit bats in the forest — and those were just the ideas that were taken. Pausing before the plaster Katipunero outside the student union again, I felt gloomy, as unwelcome in his world as ever. But for the first time, I looked at his face and fist and bare feet up close. Till then I’d had him sewn up with ideas about wealthy full-time students; I’d never taken stock of his disheveled, common clothes. The Katipunero, I realized, was poor. The muscles showing through his torn camisa de chino belonged not to some fop who sat in classrooms and cafés all day but to a peasant “son of sweat,” who’d plowed and planted, dug and hoed since he could stand.

Of course he rose above those circumstances to become a founding hero of the nation. Anyone who’d taken grade-school civics or read the plaque at his feet could tell you that. But now I wondered about others like him — the majority of sons of sweat, who didn’t end up making history. I couldn’t write their stories — not exactly, having never seen a farm or country field in all my life. But I knew something about city peasants — Manila sons of sweat like Andoy, whose experiences came to me in letters and cassette tapes, conversations on the phone or with the carabao. Before I knew what I was doing, I had found a bench beside the student union and started writing in my notebook: