Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

By late January, Ligaya and my mother were frantic, and I was channeling my fears into the only place I could. In my stories, Andoy had injured his hand or voice or mouth; he’d argued with a carabao who got revenge by “losing” his balikbayan envelope; Al-Thunayan had assigned him, as his most trusted servant, to an emergency top secret project in the desert where contact with the outside world wasn’t possible. I made up one fat chance after another to explain his silence. I’d written my brother so often into danger, willing his real life to look more like fiction; the least I could do was try to write him out of it.

I was at home alone, typing away at one such story, when I heard knocking at our door and saw a pair of jeans and aviator glasses through the screen.

—

Andoy used to dream aloud of turning our mother into the kind of woman who watched game shows and soap operas all day, lifting her fingers only to sip cocktails or eat cake. “She’ll get too lazy to talk,” he said. “We’ll have to hang a whistle from her neck to call the servants with.”

We stretched the joke out. “Her hands will fatten up,” I said. “We’ll have to cut off all the rings you bought her. Melt them down into one ring, that barely fits her pinkie.” It tickled us to even think of her, our servant mother, at rest.

And yet, in a perverse way, in that first year of a new decade, Andoy’s dream came true. My mother did retire to the sofa. Clutching one of Andoy’s old bandannas, she watched TV for hours, bursting into tears at times I least expected: scenes where estranged soap-opera lovers reunited, moments when game-show contestants hit the jackpot.

In that same year Ligaya’s parents called, offering forgiveness and a place for her and the three children to live. But she surprised me too, by staying with my mother in our barangay. I thought their bickering would flare up again in no time, but it never really did. Instead, leaving the twins with a neighbor, Ligaya strapped the baby to her back and traced my mother’s daily route: to church, then house to house with a sewing basket and an offer to work at almost anything.

As far as they knew, Andoy was a victim, pure and simple. I told them (when they raised the inevitable questions, and asked me how much I knew) a tale of treachery and blackmail, with details lifted out of Genesis. I cast my brother as the decent Joseph, his lover as the wife of Potiphar, tugging at his clothes. I told them Andoy fled her advances, but not before she’d seized a work glove and the sooty rag he used to clean the cars. Your servant has insulted me, this Alia told her husband, waving the false evidence like a pair of flags.

And I, holding the truth inside me, returned to the dutiful path of the old scholarship girl. Around the time the envelopes stopped coming, I asked for my old jobs back at the library and cafeteria. “We miss you,” said one Katipunero as I stamped his book. He’d read some of my stories months before, shy as I still was about sharing them, and encouraged me to keep at it. “Come join us when your shift is done,” said another, as I served him lunch. He’d once promised to make room in the fall issue for me, if I had something good. I made all sorts of plans to see them, but got too busy. Most of them graduated later that year, replaced by younger boys I didn’t know. Whenever I walked past the student union, I avoided my old statue’s eyes. Everybody has to grow up sometime, I told him. Soon I was majoring in journalism again. A professor offered meals, a room, and fieldwork credits in exchange for my transcribing shelves of interviews she’d taped with politicians since the sixties. So I moved my books and clothes and typewriter to her town house close to campus. Once a week I still took the jeepney home to Salapi Road, to stock the fridge and pay some bills. This started as my private penance for deceiving them, Ligaya and my mother. But over time it just felt like a load that someone had to carry. They were “my” girls now.

Rejoining the ranks of the older, part-time scholar — early to class and early to work, always bypassing the student union — didn’t leave spare time for much, least of all something as frivolous as fiction. Except, of course, that I couldn’t sleep. At night, after class and work and studying, I lay awake, while my landlady professor snored next door. The guilt of lying to my family, and the grief of missing Andoy, did not exactly add up to a good night’s rest. And so I passed the time by writing.

It was always Andoy, or a version of him, that I wrote about. The same imagined brother that sustained me once we stopped hearing from the real one. This fictional Andoy called me from a pay phone in Bahrain, where friendly Filipino workers sheltered him and Alia after a bold, elaborate escape from Saudi. She left her cousins at the Suq and met our van on an unmarked road. This Andoy sent a tape from Abu Dhabi, saying he and Alia had bought new passports and work visas from an expert forger. Expensive, but love always is. This Andoy wrote home on an aerogram postmarked from Dubai, where he’d secured janitorial work at a hotel. If you work hard — and cheap enough, I’ve found — most bosses will keep any secret. Things didn’t always end well for this Andoy, either. In one draft, the strain of all that hiding broke him. In another, Alia Al-Thunayan saw love wasn’t much to live on after all, and grew to hate the man who’d plucked her from the comfort of her husband’s palace. I even had Andoy arrested, sent to prison, and deported by a Saudi judge back to Manila, never to see Alia again.

These Andoys went by other names, or none at all; but they had one thing, their survival, in common. At times I thought so long and deeply about other ways it might have gone for my brother that I almost sensed him, present in the room, with me. I never could get used to the “withdrawal,” as some Katipunero staffers called it: the rude comedown from having lived so thoroughly inside a story it felt real. But these stories weren’t. I could spend my whole life writing, version upon version, none of which would turn the man in jeans and aviators at our door into Andoy. That carabao would still arrive, not two months into 1980, prop the glasses on his head, and tell me, “You look like him.” This man would still open his palms to me, to show he had no envelope on him. What he had brought was news: that Andoy’s body had been found, alongside Alia’s, inside a destroyed Porsche that belonged to her husband, his employer. He’d lost control of the car after swerving off the road to avoid a collision. An accident — on a routine, if secret, drive between lovers, ending in a fate not far from what they might have suffered anyway, if anyone had found out what they were up to. Fiction didn’t have a prayer over facts like that. And yet, I felt it would have pleased Andoy to know that I still wrote. I could picture him, reading my words somewhere, chuckling at my attempts to save some version of his life. Who could say, then, that I had an altogether lousy or inadequate imagination? My brother got to live forever, in a sense.

1971

She called the strike on a Monday, the busiest day of the week. As strikes go, hers was poetry. Eighty nurses, their brown hands clasped around the Self-Sacrifice statue on the lawn outside of City Hospital. The chairman of the board’s white face, turning even whiter when he came out of his car and saw them. Milagros could have lived on that rush forever.

That morning, June 21, their cause was a simple one. At City Hospital, the native nurses, like Milagros, earned less than the American ones. Forty centavos to the peso, if you did the math; less, in some cases, if you weighed education and experience, skill and seniority. When she learned this, months before, Milagros had simply asked her own boss for a raise. I think you’ll agree from my performance reviews that I deserve one. Her boss liked her well enough to talk to her boss, who talked to her boss’s boss. A message of hand-tied sympathy came down. “I know it looks bad,” said Milagros’s boss. “But we’re talking two different standards of living. Take transportation. You ride the jeepney to work, correct? Four pesos round trip? Americans love their cars, and they’re too tall to stoop under the jeep entrance. Gas costs a fortune these days, and what about Christmastime? You’re where you need to be; they fly seven thousand miles or more.”