Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

In Riyadh he shared a flat with nine men — gardeners, servants, or drivers like him, or construction workers on the pipeline being built from Saudi’s oil wells to refineries offshore. I could pass for a Moro now, he wrote home on an aerogram as thin as onionskin, about the way the desert sun had darkened him.

I skipped my afternoon classes, gliding through campus, landing on a grassy quad here and a flight of stone steps there to add a paragraph or sentence. At home, my mother begged me to consider the electric bill as I wrote by the kitchenette bulb through the night. I barely ate or slept for two days. If someone had predicted, a year earlier, that my brother would inspire me one day to write fiction, for fun, I would not have believed them. Now it felt both new and fated to me, a thing I didn’t know I’d always meant to do.

The words came easily, at first. It made me happier than I’d ever been to sketch out scenes in my notebook and type them up. “Aren’t you in a good mood,” said Ligaya, and then: “Did a man finally notice you, by some miracle?”

And then I read my draft again, stacking the masterwork in my head up against the mess I’d made on the page, and sank into despair. “Whoever he is, he’s not worth it,” said my mother, as I moaned and wallowed facedown on the sofa. That night the same pages I had filled in a manic fever were torn into shreds, floating in the Creek.

The summer passed like this. From the clouds of inspiration to the gutters of dejection and self-loathing and back again, over and over. My grades, meanwhile, slipped in only one direction. By the time I failed a term paper in psychology, after ditching class to write the day it was assigned, I decided that my problem was I hadn’t read enough. And the hole in my apprenticeship was too wide to close in my free time. I resolved, like a determined suitor, to get serious. In the middle of my sixth semester in college, I dropped my journalism major and took up English literature with a special focus on creative writing.

“Shifty?” asked my mother.

“Shift ee, ” I said, the registrar’s term for students who switched majors. “It happens all the time. The average student changes twice or more before graduation.” I admitted that the switch would set me back a few semesters.

“How much longer?” said my mother.

“How much more money is the question,” said Ligaya.

I couldn’t blame them. What would I want next? A room on campus? A semester abroad?

Rather than sell Andoy on my craziness, I released him. I’m going part-time again, I wrote to Jeddah. I’ll pay my own way, take another decade to finish if I have to.

He called as soon as he received my letter. “It says here it just hit you,” he said. “One day you knew.”

“It’s true.” I knew how cracked this made me sound.

“Now it keeps you up at night. You feel awake for the first time. Like you’d been sleepwalking through life before.”

Instead of answering, I pictured him in Al-Thunayan’s servant quarters, standing by the phone, untangling the cord. Everything appeared to be a shade of desert sand — the walls, the carpet, and the telephone; a yellow pencil, dented by different teeth; a yellow notepad filled with scribbled messages. Squares of yellow light checkered the hall from the doorways of the shared bedrooms off it. There’d be a smell of instant noodles and dirty laundry, as in boys’ dormitories I had visited; and from opposite ends of the hallway, the sounds of a communal TV and a running toilet.

“Congratulations!” he said.

“Congratulations?”

“Now you know what it’s like.”

“To change my major?”

“To fall in love.” Andoy laughed. “I always wondered who it would be. What boy could keep up with the toughest girl I know? I should have guessed: it wouldn’t be someone for you. At least not a living someone. It would be Shakespeare, and José Rizal, and the Katipunero outside the student union.”

I cringed. “It sounds ridiculous,” I said. “Forget it.”

“No!” said Andoy. “Listen. I’m no scholar, but love I know about. That’s my major.”

“I’ll never get a decent job.” His optimism had me arguing against myself.

“Relax! Love’s a miracle, not a disaster. Who said it would be easy, or convenient? But if you can’t sacrifice everything for love, what else is there?”

“It’ll take more time.”

“And money — yes, love does.” He laughed again. “You’ll learn that quick.”

He did have one condition. “I want to meet this new love of yours,” said Andoy. Anything I wrote, he said, I was to send him a copy.

—

In Jeddah, Andoy told me, every Filipino line cook and janitor seemed to know about Abdul Ghaffar Al-Thunayan. Some saw him as an almost mythical creature: the fair, generous master, rare as a genie or an oasis in the Rubʿ al-Khali desert. Al-Thunayan fed his servants well, paid them on time, let them hang on to their own passports and work permits. And for all his wealth, Al-Thunayan chose to have just one wife, Alia, and treated her like the princess that she, by blood, actually was.

At his new job, when he wasn’t driving Al-Thunayan’s family, my brother washed and waxed the cars, dusted and vacuumed their insides, balmed the leather seats with oil. Privately, he christened each one with a Filipino name. He called this BMW Dolphy; that Jaguar, Imelda. He kept the keys to every car and the code to the garage’s security alarm. Family or friends who wished to borrow cars from Al-Thunayan — from oil associate to minor prince — went through Andoy first.

Best of all, Al-Thunayan let him “exercise” each car as he saw fit. My brother drove to the coast at dusk to watch the sky change colors over the Red Sea. Or he took the other servants downtown on their days off, to eat fast food and hear the Filipino waiters hoot in admiration. “A Rolls-Royce with anaconda-skin seats!” he said. “My friends can’t pick their jaws up off the floor.”

I drank these details in, writing one Andoy-inspired character after another. When I mailed him all my drafts, as promised, Andoy was tickled by the attention. “I guess I’m going to be famous after all,” he said. That year he answered more of my questions about his life in Saudi Arabia than would fit onto the page.

Other readers (I took my first fiction workshop that semester) were more critical. I couldn’t just record Andoy’s experiences, my classmates said. Good fortune like my brother’s did not make for a story. Where was the conflict? The danger? Fiction needs trouble , or else it’s just description, wrote my professor in the margin of one draft, underlining “trouble” twice.

“Does Al-Thunayan have a temper?” I asked my brother.

“Not that I’ve seen.”

“But every prince has got his warts,” I insisted, quoting that same professor. “What does Al-Thunayan do if a servant makes a mistake?”

“I want to help you,” Andoy said. “But he’s a good man, and he hires good people. You’ll have to make up your own trouble. It is fiction, isn’t it?”

I tried. I wrote about what might happen to my fictional chauffeur if vandals keyed a Bentley under his watch, or stole the stereo. I wrote about the chauffeur’s friends nicking the gold-flecked paint by accident, or staining the anaconda leather with their jars of black-market siddique. Goofy scenarios, but they did give me some confidence in my own imagination. I began to see that Andoy’s luck could last in real life while I embellished it with fictional disasters. I stopped searching for the hidden dangers in his tapes and letters home.