Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

February 7, 1986

Vivi, the live-in maid and nanny, wakes her with water. That Vivi can splash water on her amo ’s face speaks of her particular status in this family. It’s how she wakes the kids, also, when they are lazy.

Milagros sits up. The radio’s still on. She never turns it off — after thirteen years as a reporter’s wife, the instinct to keep up hasn’t died. Besides, she can’t stand total silence. The National Movement for Free Elections needs your help, the announcer urges. Go now to one of these embattled polling stations. Guard the ballot boxes to make sure everyone who votes is counted.

“Get up, ma’am,” says Vivi. “You can lie down again later, but first take a bath. Ma’am.”

Already in the bathroom there’s a drum filled with warm water.

“At least don’t smell like a sad woman,” says Vivi. “Ma’am.”

Once Vivi passes the tabo, Milagros pours small pailfuls on herself. Her skin feels tender, almost insulted by the water. She takes her time, giving Vivi a chance to change the sheets, open the window, air out the master bedroom. Over a month now she’s slept on and off in there, not rising except for the bathroom, changing her clothes only when Vivi (no one else can) makes her.

After she dries off and gets into clean clothes and sheets, back in the bedroom, Milagros waits for the cutoff, for the familiar feedback, snuffing out the radio announcer. One order from the President to his press secretary, one visit from their “muscle,” would kill the station’s power faster than you could say PLEASE STAND BY. But on the broadcast goes, the Election Day blow-by-blow. As in a regular democracy. Broadcasts and elections a birthright.

Her mother and Vivi have both said, Why don’t you turn it off, if it upsets you? But Milagros isn’t sure it does.

I beg you, if you have the luxury of time and transportation, the announcer says, stop listening to me. Turn my voice off now. Get to your polling station. You owe it to your country to help out. A year ago this woman might be dead, or jailed, within the hour. It’s like Jim said: the President’s gotten too weak to give orders. Or other men, too strong to follow them.

1972

A Friday, near shift’s end. Milagros found Jim in the Pedia-Onco lounge, watching The Porky Pig Show on TV, waiting for her. Not smiling. Not really watching Porky Pig, either, but leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. Fingers tented at his temples, forcing his head to hold some news it didn’t want. A grief-pose. Milagros knew it from the City Hospital fathers. The ones who couldn’t always cry at first.

He needed her near him. A friend had died. Once Milagros had handed off her beds to the next nurse, Jim drove her to a subdivision outside Manila proper. “He was my Ateneo brother,” he said, as they passed a sign: BATANGLOBO VILLAGE — DRIVE CAREFULLY. “We were the scholarship boys. Me from up north, Billy from just outside the U.S. air base in Tacloban. He taught me Waray-Waray, I taught him Ilocano, so we had each other to speak dialect with when we were homesick.”

Through her window Milagros saw dogs on leashes, bikes with training wheels. This was not Forbes Park, where she imagined rich men keeping wives and mistresses in separate wings of their Spanish Colonial mansions. Nor was it the Smokey Mountain landfill, where the poor rummaged for anything to eat or sell. Here, a low wall separated one single-story house from the next. A gate in front kept each yard from the street.

“We want Twenty-six Avalon Row,” said Jim. “His mother called me, inconsolable. Can’t touch or even look at Billy’s things.” It fell to Jim to clear out Billy’s house and sell it.

Signs: ATLANTIS AVENUE, BRIGADOON ALLEY, EDEN STREET. “An awful lot for streets to live up to,” Milagros said. ELYSIUM, NARNIA, OZ, VALHALLA.

“The developer had fun with it, I guess,” said Jim. They found 26 Avalon Row: a bungalow with a red-clay roof and cinder-block walls. An L-shaped yard around the front and side. Out back was the labahan with its stone sink, drain, and clotheslines. Years ago, Milagros’s mother had worked at such a sink, scrubbing at the stains of strangers. Jim let himself in with a key.

“Billy went to college in the States,” said Jim. “I used to get postcards from him: Hollywood Boulevard, the Ford Motor factory in Detroit, the NASA space station.” Milagros listened — once again, as bereaved parents had trained her to. The stories that they told to bring the dead back. Story after conjuring story, until the raspy voice, the dimpled hands, the child took shape in the room between them and Milagros, as Billy took shape now between her and Jim, and entered 26 Avalon Row with them. “We wrote letters to each other, too. Fighting about Joe McCarthy, the U.S. military bases at Clark and Subic, Nixon. Communist, he called me once. I called him Joe ’Kano, like G.I. Joe and Amerikano rolled into one.”

They brought cardboard boxes from the backseat of Jim’s car into the house of a man who lived alone. The master bedroom had only an army cot in it. A smaller bedroom next to this, only a drafting table by the wall. Milagros saw a blueprint on it of some slanted structure, like an escalator. The title block was signed Guillermo Batanglobo, ARCHITECT. The smallest room looked out on the labahan at the back. A child’s trundle bed against the far wall had no toys or books around it.

“Was Billy short for Guillermo?” Milagros asked.

Jim nodded.

“Billy Batanglobo. It was his village.”

They went back to the drafting table. “Billy came home with a master’s degree and a belief in suburbs. Privacy, the kind you can’t get in the city. More home for less money. Grass and fresh air within driving distance of a job in Manila. Batanglobo Village was his lab. He tested all of those ideas here, on his house, first.”

“They’re nice ideas,” Milagros said. “I see why he believed in them.”

“But then he went beyond front yards and two-car garages.” Jim turned to the blueprint. “The whole time he was living in this house, Billy was testing out another American idea.” Milagros looked more closely. A round hatch in the grass, the chute slanting into the earth. She traced the grass with her finger: “Is that—?”

“The yard,” said Jim.

“Billy Batanglobo was afraid of a bomb?” she said.

Jim nodded. “If the Americans thought the Soviets would drop one from five thousand miles away, what was to stop Mao or the Vietcong from targeting the U.S. bases here? Or getting what’s left of our Huks to do it? He got so paranoid that he decided this one wasn’t deep enough or strong enough. One bad typhoon and it’d be an aquarium down there.”

Jim turned to the next blueprint, all squares and right angles this time: a forty-foot ladder leading down into a suite with a bathroom, a kitchen sink.

“This one’s floodproof,” said Jim. “A custom-made Manila shelter.”

“Where is it?” Milagros asked, feeling a chill over her skin.

Jim pointed to an inset drawing of the trundle bed, opening onto its side.

“Jim,” Milagros whispered, “how did Billy die?” It occurred to her for the first time that Jim hadn’t said.

Jim shook his head, over and over. She reached for his hand. “Officially,” Jim finally managed to say, “he took his own life.”

She waited for the unofficial answer.

When the President sent Philcag, a civilian action group, to Saigon, Billy had been first in line to volunteer. “No surprise there,” said Jim. But the letters he received from Billy just weeks later: those were a surprise. Full of news about civilian deaths and crop destruction, POW torture. Then, a phone call from 26 Avalon Row: Billy had gone AWOL. This village — everything that I’ve believed — is a complete lie.