Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

So when his trouble really started, I missed it. I didn’t notice the shift, as he continued to invoke her in his letters, from Al-Thunayan’s wife to Madame to Alia. If I thought of her at all, I thought of a black veil, nothing more. He’d praised too many legs and lips over the years for me to recognize, in this case, desire for what he couldn’t see. By the time I reopened the letters and replayed the tapes, by the time I realized the warts I should have looked out for were his, not Al-Thunayan’s, it was much too late.

The eyes of Al-Thunayan’s wife are hard to describe.

I know Madame is nearby from the clinking sound of jewelry on her wrists and ankles.

When I drive Alia into town, the car afterwards smells like honey and roses.

—

My twin nieces could identify a pair of jeans and aviator glasses before their second birthday. “Cow!” they cried from their playpen that May, pointing to our screen door. Their infant pronunciation of carabao had stuck.

It was Andoy, their own father, at the door. They held their palms out to him, a trick we’d taught them to amuse the carabao.

“How is my brother, Cow?” I said, as he met his baby daughter. The twins, who recognized his uniform more than his face, kept saying “Cow” and play-begging to him, a sight that gave me such sad visions of a litter suckling at some giant teat that I had to joke around to keep from crying. “We hear they’re treating him like dirt out there. He must be wasting away.”

In fact, Andoy had put on weight. His cheeks looked fuller, with a flush to them, like he’d been jogging in the sun. “He’s miserable,” said Andoy, grinning. “The one thing keeping him alive is his kid sister, who he swears will be a famous writer someday. He’ll retire rich, off her.”

Andoy wanted to make his deliveries first thing in the morning. By the time I woke up, he’d already come back from the bank, dressed in his denim and white shoes. He beckoned me to help. At the kitchen table, he went down a list of names and riyal contributions, converting them on a calculator into pesos, which I doled into envelopes. We matched cassette tapes, photographs, and cards to the amounts and put them in a straw tampipi box. Then we took the jeepney: from Antipolo to Santa Rosa; from Marikina to Laguna; from tin shantytowns to houses with clay roofs and living room pianos in neighborhoods so tony I could hardly believe the people there relied, as we did, on a son or brother overseas. Aging mothers squinted hard at Andoy, as if they could blur their own sons into being. Wives and girlfriends perked up in his presence. Children gaped at the stranger they were told to kiss because “he knows your father,” and I even recognized myself, in teens who surfaced from their textbooks long enough to crack a joke and count the money. Like all the carabao I’d met, my brother sat and ate more than he wanted, fed them Saudi trivia they’d likely heard before. I saw what an essential trade was taking place. My brother’s health and cheerfulness told them their own beloved boys were well. And he would bring their rosy performances of family life back to his friends in Jeddah. Walking through each barangay with him, into the swarm of children shouting Carabao! ; seeing people through each screen door rise, when he appeared, in hope and recognition; I finally understood the purpose of the Saudi suit. I’d always thought it heavy for Manila, not to mention a billboard for thieves. But men so silent and invisible overseas must have loved this guarantee of being seen at home.

After our final stop, Andoy wanted to buy presents for the children. We picked up roller skates and tricycles in Quiapo, toys for children older than his own. “You know the twins don’t even know how to use a spoon and fork yet,” I protested.

“I miss a lot of firsts,” he said. “At least this way I’ll leave them with the right equipment.” His ideas for his girls, their childhood — much like campus life and full-time course load for me — seemed to have originated somewhere far outside the lives of anyone we knew. The movies, maybe.

I fell asleep on our way home. Andoy held my hand as I dismounted, woozy, from the jeepney. Then he helped the women after me, standing like a footman in the road. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that he’d turned, the way our mother had years ago, into a servant for life.

“We need a Cadillac next time to get to all those houses,” I said, remembering the days he used to chauffeur me to convent school. “Being a carabao is more exhausting than it looks.”

“It’s not so bad.” My brother slowed his steps along the Creek, our old signal to talk in private, where the others wouldn’t hear.

“Make it quick,” I said. “The Creek smells extra ripe tonight.” I was so used to his good news by then that I added, “Let me guess. Al-Thunayan adopted you? Or bought you a Cadillac of your own?”

Andoy laughed and shook his head. Then he said, “What I told you about love is true. It’s never easy or convenient.” His smile faded. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, as if the dust and garbage smells of our neighborhood, the mud and sewage, were precious memories he wanted to preserve.

He and Alia, the wife of his Saudi employer, hadn’t planned it. And when they felt it, they tried to suppress it. “But it took over us,” my brother said. A fragile conspiracy among the other house servants gave them time alone together. “Not that it ever feels like enough.”

“You’re in love?” I said stupidly, my voice and hands shaking.

“I’ll still provide for all my girls,” said Andoy. “I’ll still come home to see you every chance I get. This won’t change anything.”

But I couldn’t believe that. Not after all the carabao stories I’d heard over the years. My brother’s love affair broke more Saudi laws than I could count.

“You said yourself how lucky you’ve been there,” I said. “Your amo treats you well. And now you want to test that luck? For what?”

“If you knew her, you wouldn’t need to ask.”

“Why don’t you introduce us, then? Invite her to the barangay for tea. I’ll tour her along the Creek. Show her where we keep our pet rats.” I had an urge to smack him, but didn’t. “What were you thinking?”

He shook his head again. “I had to stop thinking.” He’d lain awake too many nights, he said, thinking: about the religious police, about the lashings men he knew endured in prison, about the public plaza with its granite tiles and chessboard-size drain. Risks he chose to take, for love.

When we got home I didn’t breathe a word of Andoy’s trouble to my mother, who was chopping onions by the stove; or to Ligaya, who was folding washcloths while her babies cooed and gurgled in their pen. I didn’t speak of it that night or the rest of the month, even to Andoy. As long as I didn’t mention his dalliance aloud, even after he left Manila for the third time, I believed I could contain his story, leave it unfinished at the point where he had told me he was in love and reassured me everything would be all right. I could just will this craziness with Alia to run its course, like all his love affairs.

For months, it worked. The envelopes arrived, on schedule, through the carabao. Andoy called home and wrote, made plans for the future with us while carrying on five thousand miles away with Alia, like any man who had a ship in more than one port.

We kept hearing from him until November. Then a month passed without word from him. At Christmas, we received no phone call or black-market greeting card, the kind he used to buy from an Indian grocer who kept a secret stash under the register. We didn’t hear from him on New Year’s Eve, the start of a new decade, when the children, as they did each year after using up their store-bought firecrackers, hurled matches into the Creek until a bright hedge of fire blazed through the barangay. I’d done this as a child myself, never once considering the danger. Even the youngest of us, I think, got the symbolism: new beginnings, our village cauterizing itself clean of all the past year’s garbage. But that year, the year Andoy went silent, the flames only looked like hell to me, and smelled like what they were: a gutter of filthy gases burning.