Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

Instead, she met him for the first time on the grass in front of City Hospital, where he asked, under the bronze statue, if she’d considered greener pastures. “Saudi Arabia needs nurses,” he said. “So does America. It’s a booming market abroad. People making three, four times what even Peggy Ryan does here.”

But Milagros never wanted to leave Manila. Even as a young girl with no money she had wanted to stay here. In the same way she had ridden out high school calculus and college chemistry: she thought that she could crack Manila, that if she worked at it enough the city would reward her; only sissies quit. She stopped herself from saying this to Jim. Talk of mastery, ambition, had no place on a picket line. A union leader had to talk of solidarity. Everyone rising together, not racing to the top.

“Migration’s not for me” is what she said. “And Saudi Arabia’s no excuse for shabby treatment at home. ‘Love it or leave it’ is not a sound workplace policy.”

“But don’t you think,” Jim pressed, “given the chance, that all these nurses would leave City in a heartbeat, for a land of milk and honey? Sidewalks paved with gold or diamonds, depending on whom you ask? The chubby envelopes they could send home?”

“I don’t think so,” said Milagros, deciding she could speak for them. “Your mother gets sick, you don’t leave her for a healthier mother. She’s your mother!”

He gave her that amused, reverent look for the third time. It seemed they weren’t so much on the same page as in the same paragraph or sentence, even from that first day.

February 6, 1986

Milagros’s mother has an idea. “Tell me what you think,” she says.

“Let me guess,” says Milagros, who hasn’t left the house for weeks. “I should go shopping. I should treat myself to a fancy dinner and cocktails with some friends. A massage and a manicure at Aling Betchie’s salon. At the very least, get out of bed, go outside, take a walk and get some air. Am I right, Ma?” Tragedy has freed her from good manners; she doesn’t care how her words land.

“Those are good ideas too,” says Milagros’s mother. “But I was thinking something else. And you don’t have to lift a finger for it. See, shortly after Jaime…”

Milagros lets her stutter. She’s through helping people say it.

“Shortly afterwards, you know, I registered to vote.”

“You?” It’s been three months since the President, feeling heat from both the opposition and Washington, D.C., made his announcement on TV. A snap election. Milagros wouldn’t have bet on her mother noticing. Her mother, who has voted as often in her life as she’s read Russian novels or listened to Italian opera. “I didn’t know you cared, Ma.”

“I don’t, really.” Her mother laughs shyly, touches Milagros on the cheek. “But you do, iha. I registered for you. I know it’s hard for you to get out of this bed — I can’t imagine. For all the bad luck I’ve had in my life, knock wood, none of my kids…”

She still can’t say it. Milagros shuts her eyes.

“What I mean is, rest here for as long as you’d like. But I know this matters to you. You haven’t missed an election since you married. So tell me who you want, and I’ll vote for you. All right? Even better if you remember how the paper looks, and where I should write what.”

Milagros imagines her mother, hunched over a booth, arthritic fingers bringing the ballot closer to her cloudy eyes. Casting a vote for the first time in her seventy years, on her daughter’s behalf. Once again her own eyes fill. Small, unexpected things set her off now. The name Jaime, on the other hand, the word death, leaves her cold and silent. But it doesn’t matter. To anyone who sees her crying, she cries only for him.

“You’re sweet, Ma,” says Milagros. “But voting’s dangerous. You check a box on a little card, next thing you know there’s a rifle at your head and some thug telling you to try again.” From her nightstand radio she knows just how many people want it to be different, this time. An army of poll watchers, thousands strong and still recruiting everywhere from her old college campus to the remotest bukid. Senators and congressmen sent over by America to keep an eye on things. But she’s seen hope and good intentions spark like this, and sputter out, before.

“I’ll take my chances,” says her mother. “Thugs won’t bother an old woman.”

Milagros wouldn’t be so sure. “We thought the worst of them wouldn’t harm a child.”

“Let me do this for you,” her mother insists. “Just tell me who you want up there, in Malacañang Palace.”

Sweet, too, that her mother, who has shared this house with her for thirteen years now, doesn’t know exactly how Milagros — the old Milagros — would have voted. Jackie, with her antenna ears, would have known, at four years old, which box to check.

“Don’t bother, Ma. I used to care about these things. But now I don’t at all.”

1971

“You’re famous!” said her brothers, three days into the nurses’ strike. A Herald had landed at their door in the middle of the night. On page one, instead of a flood or volcano, instead of an election, instead of America: Milagros, in her bandanna, with her sign. CITY SHOULD REWARD EXPERTS, NOT EXPAT$.

In fountain ink, under the headline, Jim had circled the date: June 23. From there Milagros followed his arrow to a tiny margin. And the rest is history, he’d written by hand.

The next morning, 160 nurses showed up at the picket line. “Never trusted any union,” one of them declared, “but fair is fair.” Some came from different hospitals, talking alliances, community. Here and there a sympathetic doctor joined. “If we could do our jobs without them,” one said into Jim’s Dictaphone, “wouldn’t we?” Herald subscribers read of nursing students, bused in to City Hospital, giving out the wrong drugs in the wrong doses. Saw photos of the elderly with bedsores, waiting hours to be helped to the toilet. “What’s lost in all this hoopla,” said the chairman, when Jim got him on the phone, “is the City Hospital standard of patient care, which ought to be these ladies’ first priority. Or what’s a nurse for?” A few readers wondered the same in letters to Jim’s editor. The City nurses made their point. At whose expense? But Manila in 1971 had seen arrests on Burgos Drive, beatings in front of the U.S. embassy, deadly showdowns between students and riot police. Hearts and minds were predisposed to chant along with the young nurses. Equal pay for equal work. EXPERTS, NOT EXPAT$. And the chairman of the board of City Hospital hated scenes more than he hated unions. On a rainy day in July, Milagros saw him cross the wet grass toward the picket line, asking for a word with her.

—

From then on you couldn’t separate them with a water cannon. At night, Jim met the City Hospital patients Milagros called her kids. Some still had their hair, the chemo just begun. Others couldn’t lift their eyelids. He shook hands with a boy whose tumor had grown into his spine, numbing both his legs. By August all the children in “Pedia-Onco” were playing reporter instead of doctor. Holding blood pressure pumps up to each other’s faces for “interviews.” Scribbling leads and datelines in the diaries the social workers had left them.

Milagros learned shorthand and how to operate Jim’s Dictaphone. During interviews she learned to listen past his subjects’ answers, pay attention when they shifted in their seats, cleared their throats, blinked as if the air was dusty. She watched him bring a single pencil to story conferences while his colleagues bumbled with clipboards and fountain pens and briefcases. Jim tented his long fingers, with their trim, clean nails, before his mouth as he listened. He waited to speak, his posture a priest’s.