Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

The math made some sense. But then Milagros went home, to the apartment whose rent she’d helped pay since she was old enough to work, and shouldered all on her own since college; the apartment she shared with her mother, who washed clothes for a living, and her brothers, and their wives and children. Her mother said, “You have a job.” (Her own brothers should be so lucky.) “Don’t waste your time wanting somebody else’s slice of pie. Be happy.” Good advice, for anyone in this life. But the numbers nagged, like a stitch in Milagros’s side. What if she wanted to drive a car to work? Travel at Christmastime? Live in a place of her own?

She started small, with crumbs of gossip. “I heard,” she whispered to a colleague, as they washed their hands together at a scrub sink, “Peggy Ryan pulled in twenty thousand pesos last year, even without a master’s. Know anything about it?” She stepped lightly around her co-workers’ squeamishness: about money, about Americans, about advanced degrees.

The story bled from nurse to nurse like dye. They met for lunch at a carinderia around the corner from City Hospital.

“I’ll just talk to my supervisor,” said one nurse. “Can’t we all?”

“I tried that,” said Milagros. “They don’t listen to one woman, by herself.”

So they voted, three to one, to start a union, with Milagros at its helm. Together they wrote memos, scheduled meetings, made jokes at the negotiation table. The greenest American does better than I, because I am brown. The chairman of the board liked that one. The chairman was fond of Milagros, he said. Impressed with Milagros. The chairman laughed Milagros and her little union right out of the conference room.

Milagros Sandoval, Registered Nurse, twenty-two years old, had no road map from there. Her mother was a laundress. Her father had hopped farm to farm for work. Growing up, Milagros learned to keep her head down, her boat steady. In college she had never joined a single protest. Maoists or Marxists, Young Patriots or Christian Socialists or Democratic Youth, were only obstacles on her campus course from class to job to library. All those long-haired, picketing boys and girls — that was how she thought of them, as children, next to her — blocked her path and made her late; their chants on land reform and U.S. bases sounded like nursery rhymes, like games for kids who never had to work. In 1969, her senior year, those kids accused the President of bribing and bullying his way to a second term, news that felt as far from Milagros as Armstrong’s moon landing. She couldn’t call those classmates for advice now. They had not exchanged numbers at graduation, and probably they would not even know her name.

But she was a quick study: Milagros Sandoval hated nothing in the world more than feeling like a beginner. She learned how to pitch nonbelievers who didn’t want to cause trouble. Buzzwords— worth and equal work —set the air crackling. When in mid-June yet another meeting went south, and ended with the chairman patting Milagros on her white cap, the union voted on its best last resort.

Refusal to negotiate in good faith, she keyed into a borrowed typewriter that night.

On strike until an agreement is reached.

It was not about the country yet, though hand grenades at Plaza Miranda two months later would send gurney after blood-soaked gurney into City Hospital. A year later still, strikes would be against the law altogether.

June 21 came before all that. June 21 was about these nurses, the value of one human’s sweat against another’s. And yet Milagros felt her world grow a few sizes, while the city, street, and small apartment where she grew up shrank. Until the union she’d thought no further than her own degree, her own job, her first proud payday, when she brought home eggs, bread, beer, and chocolate to her mother and her unemployed brothers.

Family, those waiting at home, turned out to be a sticking point, when union meetings lasted late into the night.

“My children need me,” said the older, married nurses.

“The union needs you too,” said Milagros.

“My children will forget what I look like,” they said.

“But this is how you want your children to remember you.” To Milagros it was a beautiful thought: the rules suspended for a time, toddlers subsisting on Cheez Whiz sandwiches and staying up late to watch their mothers on TV. Even Gloria Gambito, whose husband didn’t want her working in the first place, dared to bring her three-year-old daughter to the picket line, a STRIKE ’71 T-shirt reaching her ankles.

Jaime Reyes, a reporter for the Metro Manila Herald, came to City Hospital on the twenty-second. On his way to Ermita, to the Congress Building, a tip had reached him from the hospital. When he introduced himself—“Jaime Reyes,” he said; “call me Jim”—Milagros was holding too many things. A picket sign, a clipboard, a megaphone. She moved to shake his hand and dropped the picket sign. Not on purpose, not like a lady in bygone days dropping a handkerchief, but it may have looked that way because Jaime Reyes, call him Jim, was handsome. Tall and lean, like an athlete, with the slightest wave in his black hair. Seeing him, Milagros wished she knew more about makeup. She’d kept her hair as short as it had been in high school: wash and go.

Jim stooped to help her with the picket sign and read her Pentel-penned slogan aloud: CITY SHOULD REWARD EXPERTS, NOT EXPAT$. He gave her a look of amusement, or reverence, or both. “EXPAT$,” he repeated, tracing the dollar sign in the air with a finger. “That’s good.” Their palms met as he returned the sign, hers a little damp.

“How did you find out?” Jim asked. “About the wage gap, that is? I can’t imagine this was public information.”

“A friend in Payroll tipped me off,” Milagros said, laughing. “This is my Pentagon Papers, I guess.”

That made him smile again, in his amused and reverent way.

If she had ever joined a campus protest, she might have known of him. Jim Reyes had been a fixture at those picket lines, interviewing the long-haired marching children. But because she rarely opened a newspaper, she had never read his stories of the First Quarter Storm or the jeepney workers’ strike, his forecasts that the paint bombs and broken car windows and Molotov cocktails would backfire. Proof of a state of emergency. Exhibits in the President’s case for staying on in the palace past his legal term limits. Martial law —like the word cancer, in those days: widely murmured, barely understood. Least of all by someone like Milagros, who would have taken Jim’s warnings, if she’d read them, as just another reason to skip the campus picket lines altogether.

Her ignorance made the other nurses giggle. “ I called him here,” Janice Mendoza, fresh out of college, admitted. She’d met Jim at a rally on Mendiola Bridge the year before, when students tried to storm Malacañang Palace. “I was just swept up in what my friends were doing. But I kept his card. In case anything else should happen, he told us. Anything that he should know about.” Other nurses recognized him from TV. Movers and Shakers, a weekly who’s-who program not unlike a cockfight or a beauty pageant (Manila and its obsession with crowning champions, and ranking the Best and First and Most) had featured Jim one Sunday. Youngest Staff Writer ever at the Metro Manila Herald (Oldest, Most Prestigious daily in the city). “He skipped two grades,” said Yvette Locsin, “and finished Ateneo at eighteen.” “He’s from up north, an Ilocano,” said Asuncion Flores. If Milagros watched Movers and Shakers, she too would have heard about the first time he’d smelled newspaper ink and decided, at the age of five, that one day he would be a journalist. About the scholarship that brought him to high school in Manila, where he worked his way up from paper route to mail room at the Herald. She too might have held her breath when the interviewer asked after Jim’s bachelor status, seen Jim shake his head and laugh, embarrassed; maybe at the picket line she’d have checked his left hand, like the other nurses, to see if anything had changed.