Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

She descended with him into the bowels of the Herald headquarters, where massive sheets of newsprint rolled above their heads. The earthy, even fecal smell of ink and wood pulp in her nostrils and her lungs. The presses chugging like a train along its track: a sound that filled her brain and rearranged her heartbeat, till it seemed she had become a press, her body printing heds and deks and sentences and stories.

He called her Jo, as if he knew she’d never answer to the likes of sweetheart. Who knew where the nickname came from? Maybe Josephine Bracken, José Rizal’s Irish muse. Or the toughest of Alcott’s Little Women, a tomboy with big plans, who wanted more than what her sisters wanted. Jo she didn’t mind.

She had another boyfriend at the time: Narciso Beltran, who taught theater where they’d gone to college. The kind of boy who lived at the center of people’s attention. Wolfish eyes. Outsize lips. A rasp in his voice that could bring out the nurse or mother in any woman. He never called himself an actor, though; he preferred performer. “As are we all,” he liked to add. Life is a performance.

Naz, as people called him, had been her one link to the campus tribe of long-haired boys and girls. On the same stages where he’d once played Lear and Oedipus and Cyrano de Bergerac, he now coached a new generation of leading men, staging plays Milagros didn’t always understand. Indirection is the only language I trust, Naz liked to say about his style. Just before she broke it off, Milagros watched his Filipino take on Jack and the Beanstalk, set in the foothills of the Mayon volcano. The giant bellowed in military-industrial language; the farmers and the magic soybeans stood for labor and capital. That night she told Naz. I’ve decided to focus more on my job than on my social life. He wasn’t fooled. “There’s someone else,” he guessed, and Milagros didn’t lie. “I see,” Naz said, when he asked who Jim Reyes was. “You want to marry someone with a Serious Career.”

Sneering words, that sounded as if purged from his throat with a finger. The grandson of a sugar baron, Naz could afford to sneer at institutions. Jim’s people in the north had been farmers and servants. Degrees and titles, memberships and mottos, Jim’s press passes and Milagros’s City Hospital ID, were false idols to someone like Naz, knickknacks only squares and parents worshiped.

“No one’s said anything about marry, ” she said. But Naz wasn’t wrong.

Until Jim she hadn’t planned it. I enjoy being paid for my work, she used to say, against marriage. Throat cultures, spinal taps — those things compelled her more than caring for a man did. To the question of children she would say: No man I know strikes me as worth repeating. She had a pocket full of answers just like that, before she met Jim.

—

Jim grew up where the President had: on a rice farm up north. “Back then I called him Manong Freddie,” Jim said, of the plantation owner’s eldest grandson. Jim’s own grandfather had plowed the muddy, mosquito-infested paddies in rubber boots and a salakot hat. Jim’s father and Jim himself would have been fated to do the same, until the day Jim’s father, as a teenager, long before Jim was born, saved the infant President from a house fire. “This utang na loob will not be forgotten,” Freddie’s father had said at the time, and it wasn’t. Jim’s father moved up from the soil to the garage as the family driver, the kind of trusted servant close enough to live in the family’s house, eating at their tables, washing at their sinks. Utang na loob: a debt of the heart, an unrepayable soul-debt. By Jim’s birth and baptism, Freddie had graduated from law school, and visited home in time to stand as Jim’s godfather. Jim went to school on the family dime, collecting gold stars and 100s while his godfather won a seat in Congress, picking up a paper route in town while other farm children his age were still planting rice seedlings. When their roads improved, the townspeople took it as a personal gift from the new congressman, a wink at the family driver to whom he owed his life.

At the 1961 inaugural, Freddie, now a senator, introduced his godson Jim, now a City Desk reporter at the Herald, as “the man whose father saved me.” They shared memories of fishing in the Padsan River, village disputes over cattle, traysikel rides in town. Catching sight of each other at a “press-con” would yield a nod, a smile, a warm clasp of the shoulder. And even when Jim pressed his godfather on politics — in ’65, when he switched parties just in time to run for President; in ’66, barely sworn in, when he sent troops into Saigon, a move he’d blocked while he was in the Senate — these challenges felt academic, like staged classroom debates between their younger selves: the lawyer and his journalism-student godson.

Milagros had to doubt Jim’s other stories of his first days in Manila: stories of a hayseed struggling to decode restaurant menus and working hard to lose his country accent. What place or language could ever claim Jim? To her he was original as Adam. Near a colony of tin shacks by the Pasig River, she watched him rescue a basketball from mud and shoot hoops with half-naked children. Hours later he stood at an Ateneo podium in his best barong, to accept a medal for alumni who had done the school, and the country, proud.

That summer, the Herald sent Jim to the “Con-Con,” a convention on proposed changes to the 1935 Constitution. One by one, he heard from delegates what they’d received from Malacañang Palace in exchange for what it called “correct” votes. One senator’s nephew, guaranteed a spot at the Military Academy. A grant, no strings attached, to a congressman building a bridge in his hometown. And for the others, envelopes of cash. At the palace, beluga caviar and Dom Pérignon and a slideshow of the questions on the table at the Con-Con, and the “best responses.”

Yes to a new Parliament, replacing Congress, whereby a former President could come back as Prime Minister.

No to a ban on ex-Presidents running again after two terms.

Yes to the right of any President or Prime Minister to rule by decree.

The story earned Jim his first “love letter” from the Office of the Press Secretary. “I must be doing something right,” he told Milagros. You are therefore urged to adjust your claims against the administration, she read, and to issue the proper errata to the Metro Manila Herald articles published on the following dates. Atop the page floated a yolk-yellow sun, borrowed from the country’s flag, inside a bright blue wheel: a seal so cheerful she could swear she’d seen something like it on one of her kids’ Get Well Soon cards.

Instead of “adjusting,” Jim covered the bombings at Plaza Miranda in August. Two hand grenades thrown at a Liberal Party rally, sending that party’s senators and Senate hopefuls to City Hospital. In September, he looked into what the palace called an attempt on the new defense minister’s life, shots fired at his Ford sedan behind the Wack Wack golf course. A driver whose story didn’t match his boss’s. Bystanders and a bodyguard, who saw things differently. The President, who blamed Communists — for this as for Plaza Miranda — but didn’t, Jim noticed, arrest or even question any.

Later that week, on Meet the Press, the President, addressing Herald allegations — Con-Con bribery, staged assassinations. “They call us politicians balimbing, ” he said. “But I think it’s the media who are most like star-shaped fruit.” Without naming his grown godson, Manong Freddie looked — to Milagros, who watched him on the Pedia-Onco waiting room TV — truly wounded, as by a brother. “No fewer than ten faces,” said the President. “And zero loyalty.”