Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

As she clicked the keys she sometimes set a stopwatch, the one she used at City Hospital, to test her speed, make a game of it. It was silence she couldn’t stand. Silence like a radio in September. When she had finished, she went underground and fed the stencils to the mimeo, which churned out one sheet at a time — forty-six copies of Jim’s opinions a minute. But still, it chugged like a train; her heartbeat caught up to its rumble, as it had when Jim first brought her to the Herald headquarters. To replace the ink, she slid a barrel, heavier than her brother’s old guitar, across the grooved belly of the machine until it clicked with satisfying decision into place. She shivered in the basement, cold and gray as a stone church, and warmed her fingers on the finished copies that came out.

In the theater and in letters, Milagros and Jim hoped that Papa would sound, to the untrained ear, like just another member of their family. Back in September, Milagros had had no idea just how much the President would live up to his code title. Papa watched over them always, everywhere: from the avenues and highways that now bore his name, to the mountain where his face was carved, Rushmore-style. The OmniPresident —as Jim said, and as Milagros later typed. She thought of her own papa, living in the provinces with his second family, missing all her birthdays and graduations. She could see it then. The constabulary thugs, the teenage Barangay Youth: the hole in their lives had been the hole in hers. Who could blame them for wanting the discipline, an ever-present guardian? She had longed for one too.

And this child, growing in her now: how long would he go without one?

For symmetry’s sake, they called the First Lady Mama.

At Camp, Jim jogged in the mornings. He played chess against himself in the afternoons. Seeing his old Latin professor had him rereading Catullus, translating Horace again. This will sound odd, he wrote Milagros, but Camp does have its moments. There was, on the inside, all the time you could want, for things life and work outside didn’t allow. No ringing phones at Camp, no meetings, no deadlines. Nothing to sign and nothing to complete. “Don’t get me wrong,” he clarified, in person. “It is a military jail.” But at dusk sometimes the calm and quiet took on shades of Eden.

February 9, 1986

Gloria, her old friend from the picket line, smuggles in the pamphlets and the application forms. Keeping any kind of text from Jim pains Milagros, a little. Once upon a time she smuggled papers in the waistband of her skirt, for him.

These pamphlets are the second-ever secret she has kept from Jim. The first happened only last month, when she drove day and night, trying to find Jaime. She talked to khaki after khaki, even the most thuggish and intimidating: she had nothing, in her search, to lose. It came to her on one of those drives to open a checking account Jim didn’t know about, socking away for bribes she might need, that might save Jaime. She’ll need that money now.

YOUR CAP IS A PASSPORT! sings the front of one brochure. In the photo, a brown nurse takes a white man’s blood pressure. Otherwise, the brochure is dry, plainspoken. No real sparkle or romance to the Visiting Nurse Exchange Program. Nurses, having slogged their way through chemistry and pharmacology, know how to tear through tiny black print for the main idea. Colors or pictures — who needs them? Who, besides diehards like Milagros and Jim, wouldn’t go to the States in a heartbeat? That shiny, organized place where buses run on schedule and bosses pay you well? Who would pass that up for this corrupt and sloppy zoo, where — as the radio reports now — three million ballots have vanished, despite a record turnout at the polls? Vote counters have walked out on the Commission on Elections, the announcer says, claiming they’ve been bullied to cook the returns. Milagros dials down the volume and flips the brochure.

Bullet points lay out the perks. A work visa and help getting a green card. Housing placement, community resources. Advice on graduate school and “professional development.” A one-time stipend to cover moving expenses. One-way airfare.

What are you waiting for? she seems to be reading, over and over again. What in the world is keeping you here?

1973

Jim wrote letters, but only on Camp paper, with Camp pens. Guards held on to Milagros’s bag — and any pens or paper in it — on their Sunday visits. Not for her, then, the soft, so-called pregnancy brain that struggled with facts and figures. Her memory, that deep-sea trawl she had perfected in algebra and Spanish and human anatomy, through exams and interviews and board certifications, stayed sharp. Also she had learned from the best, shadowing Jim at Herald meetings, armed only with a pencil.

Outside, she ingested all the news she could — even the candy-coated praise releases, as Jim called them, from the press secretary himself. She who once never had time for headlines and broadcasts now craved them like an addict. She worked at City Hospital until her due date, her legs swollen as she waited at security checkpoints throughout Manila. Some khakis eyed her belly as if she might be smuggling a bomb in there. And some waved her through without laying a hand on even her bag, as if she might faint or bleed or go into labor on their watch.

In May, Milagros gave birth to a son, Jaime Reyes, Jr., an epic butterball at nine pounds, ten ounces. Numbers that made friends and colleagues clench their faces in sympathy. The neighbors came and filled the nursery with Pepe and Pilar books, a wooden abacus, shape sorters and stacking rings, a foam floor puzzle of the alphabet. Never too early. Like Milagros, they’d all gotten where they were by worshiping the god of Education. They can torch your house and rob you blind, went the saying, but they can’t take Education from you. Education made the rough places plain, as Horace Mann had promised, as the Thomasites had preached. Never mind that Education didn’t always save them all. When Billy Batanglobo, the scholarship boy who’d dreamed up their little village in American graduate school, drowned; when the body of a student activist turned up not far from Diliman, her fingernails removed and skin checkered with ice-pick wounds, Milagros and her neighbors still kept the faith.

Not a day in his life did Jaime Jr. ever sleep in the crib that had been finished in the nursery. She put him there only when she heard an unexpected knock at the door and thought a khaki might be coming to inspect the house. Once the threat had passed, she brought her son back to the master bed, where as a rule he slept, between Milagros and her mother. “Just until he sleeps through the night,” she said, but her new son’s heat and heft against her body became a sedative she needed. He was too small and soft to live above the railroad tracks.

Once the swelling in her ankles had gone down, Milagros returned to work. Just in time to attend the annual nurses’ conference at City Hospital. This year’s theme: “talent export.” Talent — sweeter than cane, lighter than timber, and cheaper than gold. “And on top of talent,” raved an undersecretary from the Department of Labor, in his speech to all the City nurses, “you speak English.” This gift from Uncle Sam was now theirs to offer the world: Filipino nurses could empty bedpans and run IVs anywhere on earth. Women Milagros had known in school and internship, at City Hospital and throughout the subdivision, had already scattered to Amsterdam and Los Angeles. Recruiters held special breakout sessions on the Middle East. The labor undersecretary quoted Papa himself, to big applause. “He says, and I quote, We encourage the migration. I repeat, this is a market we should take advantage of. ” What was good for Melbourne and Dubai was good for Manila. “Instead of stopping them from going abroad, why don’t we produce more? I repeat, if they want one thousand nurses, we produce a thousand more.”