Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

Around the time Jim and Milagros bought 26 Avalon Row from Billy’s family and moved in, the fears of martial law had risen to a fever pitch in Batanglobo Village — what it would mean not just on paper, and in presidential speeches, but in their real and daily lives. Food rationing? A massacre like in Taiwan? They imagined blood and fire in the streets, maybe a famine. In four hundred years their country had been conquered twice — three times if you counted the Japanese. Chaos was part of its mythology. Waves of panic buying swept through the neighborhood. In the supermarket Milagros stocked up on rice, sardines, instant Nescafé. Cans of evaporated milk. Bricks of desiccated glass noodles.

Living with Jim hadn’t seemed to Milagros, at the time, like a political decision. Over morning coffee Jim skimmed up to twelve newspapers, at the very least the Spanish- and English-language ones. These were not underground papers. He loved Latin verbs, Associated Press style sheets, the Constitution, phrases like due process. He wasn’t a man who hoped to bomb or dismantle anything.

For the cinder-block walls, they chose a paint color called Biscuit. They were listening to the news (Milagros understood from the beginning that they would always be listening to, or reading, or talking about the news) of an embassy bombing in London, and painting the cinder blocks Biscuit, when the radio turned to static.

They had purchased rice, sardines, and Nescafé; milk and desiccated noodles. They’d prepared for an explosion, people screaming in the streets. Not a silence like this. Feedback from the speakers felt, after all the neighborhood whispers, like the first mishap after the broken mirror or the black cat: their bad luck finally begun. Still, Jim came down from his stepladder to adjust the dial and antenna, as if static were the issue. He turned the radio off and on. Finally he stood and looked down, like a City Hospital doctor would when one of her kids had passed.

“That’s what martial law sounds like, I guess,” he said.

Congress closed; then the printing presses. When they learned this — later, of course; phones were dead that night, and the neighbors knew less than they did — the thought of all those quiet, empty offices depressed them most of all.

That night Milagros felt sick. “I never get sick,” she told Jim. “Work in a hospital long enough and you grow strong as a horse.” But now there was no denying the fever or fatigue, quivering like egg yolk in her joints. “The smell of paint must be getting to me.”

Jim placed a cheek against her forehead, the old wives’ way of taking temperature.

“Maybe we should take a vacation,” she said. “You know I’ve never been to Baguio? We could use the fresh air.”

“And leave Manila?” He took his face away from hers. “Your mother gets sick, you leave her for a healthier mother?”

Milagros looked down. The floor seemed to wobble underneath her, as if they lived on the sea.

—

The President broke his silence the next day. Curfew is established from twelve o’clock midnight to four o’clock in the morning. “We aren’t children, Papa,” Milagros told the TV, and that became their code name for him.

If you offend the New Society, you shall be punished like the rest of the offenders.

“I better get to the office,” said Jim. But the television answered, I have also issued general orders for the government in the meantime to control media and other means of dissemination of information as well as all public utilities. And I asked the international and domestic communications, corporations, and carriers to desist from transmitting any messages without the permission of my office through the Office of the Press Secretary.

“He can’t do that,” said Milagros. “Can he?”

Two days later, four khaki-uniformed officers led Jim out of 26 Avalon Row to a Metrocom car. Utang na loob, it turned out, had its limits. “What’s the charge?” Jim asked. He looked Milagros in the eye, as if the question was for her. “Gentlemen? The charge?” The student in her stood upright, understanding she’d been given an assignment. She watched and took note, for him.

“Just come with us, boss,” said the officers, in the voice one uses with a senile or demented man. They led him without handcuffs, more like bodyguards than policemen.

“Why can’t I go with him?” Milagros said, as a third officer restrained her from following.

Jim shook his head at Milagros. The assignment, he seemed to be reminding her. She said no more, just watched him walk to the police car like a man who’d planned on this trip all along. Nothing clumsy or uncertain in him. She could see now why some colleagues jokingly called him Capitán. And his certainty — of himself, the course ahead — calmed her too. Milagros had grown up thinking strong, decisive men were a myth, like the mountain fairy Maria Makiling or the magical Adarna bird. Her brothers had never been in charge. Her father couldn’t take them down the street without losing his way. But in this moment, with Jim, she felt sure and safe. She didn’t worry. As the typhoon of history made landfall on their doorstep, she could train her eyes on this sane man, and follow him.

—

After the arrest, Jim’s breakfast newspapers stopped arriving, as if he’d moved away or never lived there. Milagros checked their names on the mailbox, to make sure. To spook her even more, Billy Batanglobo’s mail kept coming, weeks and months after his death. When the papers trickled in again, one by one, weeks later, they were striated with black bars. Sometimes a word was struck out, sometimes an entire graf, as Jim would call it. A person did this, Milagros realized, in wonder: these black bars were someone’s job. Probably they gave this person a nameplate and a hollow title. Media Verification Officer. Someone’s child had grown into a bureaucrat with a necktie, squeaking Pentel pens across newsprint.

She had reason to consider people’s children and what they grew into. Milagros was pregnant. That fevered ache, the egg yolk in her joints, were signals from a child, about to make Milagros its mother.

She picked up twelve- and sixteen-hour shifts at the hospital, afraid to be alone at home too long. When Alicia and Cesar Resurreccion, her neighbors on Neverland Street, packed off for America, she bought their Yamaha piano, its black lacquered case scratched only a little. A piano was heavy and took up space. A piano meant lessons for their child, scheduled on the same day of every week in the same corner of the living room. Her own father had played a guitar, her brother a horn — self-taught dabblers, their instruments like snails, housed in form-fitting shells. Built to be packed up and lifted at a moment’s notice, surviving eviction and transit. But a piano stayed put. She ran her fingertips across the keyboard, warming the notes. She pressed them one by one, left to right and back again. The evenings were still too quiet.

At a pet store near City Hospital she bought a Japanese spitz whose eyes shone like vinyl. Soba was the name she gave it. Pet stores too flew in the face of her childhood: the only pets she’d ever known were accidental, temporary. Strays that wandered in off the street, the pig she suspected her brothers had stolen — all were sold or killed as the family needed.

At “Camp,” as she and Jim called the military prison where he ended up, Jim had a private cell. A strange concession, like the cops who called their suspect Boss and skipped the handcuffs. They even let him write letters. These were “checked for errors” before posting from Camp, but their code names for martial law — Marsha Ley, Alex Marshall, Maria Lopez — somehow escaped notice. In her letters back to Jim she made jokes at her own expense. The panic buying has spun out of control, she wrote, regarding Soba and the piano. Maria Lopez is a husband’s worst nightmare.