Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

“Mrs. Sally Riva?” she said, removing the sunglasses.

I nodded. Only my birth certificate had ever called me Salvacion. I reached out to shake her henna-tipped hand, but Mrs. Mansour leaned in further, to kiss me on both cheeks. She smelled pleasantly of tangerine and something stronger, perhaps a spice. Once the outer gate had shut, she parted her jilbab to reveal a gold-embroidered bodice and a little daughter. “Here is Aroush,” said Mrs. Mansour. The child had been anchored on her hip and concealed by her clothes all along. Mrs. Mansour shifted Aroush’s face to show me.

I was stunned. Back home in the Philippines I had been trained to work with all manner of “special” children. But I had never seen any child quite like the five-year-old Aroush. Her head swelled out dramatically at the forehead and crown, like a lightbulb. Faint brown smudges the size of thumbprints dotted her face. Along the left side of her neck grew a pebbly mass of tumors.

“Aroush, this lady is a teacher. Hello, Teacher. ” Mrs. Mansour held Aroush’s hennaed hand and made it wave. Through the rust-colored designs on her skin I could see more of the pebbly tumors.

I led them from the gate down a tile path to the house itself. A year had passed since my husband, Ed, and I had moved from the Philippines to Bahrain, and still I thought of these three stories as “the” house — not “our” house, certainly not “my.” Expatriate families like ours were well provided for: a car, a travel allowance, the promise of schooling if we were ever to have a child. Strangest of these provisions, to me, was the house. Too large for two people, it was outfitted with luxuries I never would have chosen: gold leather upholstery, curtains embroidered with camels and date trees, shelves and tables with brass frames and glass surfaces. Plush red carpeting covered every inch of floor except the bathrooms and the kitchen. We wanted for nothing, and none of it was ours.

Having grown up poor and Catholic, with the Beatitudes and tales of the first Filipino workers overseas swirling all around me, I still got nervous at the sight of luxury; I couldn’t tell the difference between wealth and obscene, ill-gotten displays of it. In college, before Ed, I had dated a boy who railed against the president for exporting labor to the Middle East. To the editor of the Metro Manila Herald, he wrote about “the hidden cost of remittances” and said a peasant was a peasant was a peasant, whether on the rice fields or the oil fields, and that at least the Filipino rice farmer could come home every day and see his family. I thought of that old boyfriend sometimes, when I looked around my home at the life the oil fields had given us. Certainly we lived more like foremen than like farmers.

Mrs. Mansour stopped at a full-length mirror in the foyer. “Look here, little woman,” she said to Aroush. She lifted the girl’s chin and draped the edge of her jilbab around the grotesque little face, so that two veiled heads were facing the mirror. “Who is that?” said Mrs. Mansour. Aroush grunted. I could see this was an established call-and-response between them, one of the few rituals in which a child like Aroush could be expected to react.

In the living room Mrs. Mansour spoke of the cool weather that day, which to me was not cool but merely less hot than usual, and of how much she adored people from my country, most of her household help being Filipino as well. Clearly we would circle for hours around the real purpose of her visit, unless I addressed it myself.

“Mrs. Mansour,” I said, “let me begin by telling you that I unfortunately don’t speak any Arabic.”

“Of course,” said Mrs. Mansour. My friend Minnie had already informed her. But the language barrier, it turned out, did not disqualify me. Mrs. Mansour preferred it this way — for, unbelievably, she wanted Aroush to grow up bilingual. Bilingue was how she put it: Mrs. Mansour herself had learned French as a schoolgirl in Beirut. She supported Aroush’s head against her chest as she spoke. With a clutched handkerchief, she caught a dribble of saliva from Aroush’s mouth before it could land on their clothing.

I asked what else she expected out of Aroush’s education.

“Mrs. Sally,” she replied, “you know of the deaf-blind Helen Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan?”

Aroush grunted.

“Teacher, you must be Annie Sullivan for my Aroush!”

I had been warned in advance about Mrs. Mansour’s illusions. My friend Minnie worked as a maid for the Mansour family. “The child can’t hold its own head up,” Minnie had said, “but Madame believes it will grow up to write poetry or cure cancer someday.” My friend had sucked her teeth, shook her head. “That must be something, no? To be so rich you think you can buy reality?”

“I’ll need to know more about your daughter’s history,” I said.

Aroush had been born at full term, the third of the Mansours’ children and the only girl. At first the only trait to mark her as unusual was a largish head. The thumbprints did not appear until she was a year old, the skin growths some months later. The Mansours began keeping Aroush indoors, out of public view. “Often people do not love difference,” said Mrs. Mansour. She, on the other hand, surprised herself by how much she cherished Aroush’s limitations at first. Aroush was the pliant and portable child every young girl imagined when she played at motherhood: you could dress Aroush and position Aroush and tote Aroush around like a doll. She provided no resistance — a welcome quality, said Mrs. Mansour, after years spent raising boys.

But by the time she turned two, Aroush had yet to grab on to things, roll to her side, sit up, raise her head, make sounds other than grunting or crying, or hit any of the milestones that had come naturally to Mrs. Mansour’s sons. Thrusting her tongue by reflex allowed milk and soft foods to fall into her throat and be swallowed, but she had never mastered even an elementary sucking. The Mansours traveled to London, where a battery of tests pointed to a rare, profoundly unlucky combination of cerebral palsy and von Recklinghausen’s disease. Her mental age would never advance beyond infancy. Language, of the conventional spoken variety at least, was not in the cards.

“So they said.” Mrs. Mansour shrugged. She took Aroush’s hand in hers and gazed fondly at the henna.

In any other place, with any other parent, this might have been the time to discuss “realistic expectations.” But I was here in Bahrain, with Mrs. Mansour. I thought of Minnie, who cleaned the Mansours’ house in Saar six days a week. I thought of my husband, working on the pipeline to Saudi Arabia all afternoon in the desert heat. Mrs. Mansour’s hopes put me in a position to mend an injury, correct an imbalance. I took a deep breath, then fed her all the bright teacherly clichés I could muster. I talked of needs and environment and response. “Education,” I said, “comes from the Latin ducere, ‘to lead’; and e-, ‘out of.’ ‘To lead out of,’ ” I said. With my hands I made an ushering gesture.

Mrs. Mansour nodded, her eyes misting. Her face seemed familiar yet unreal, as if I had seen her before, but in a dream. As a child in Sunday school I used to read about certain queens in the Bible, women I pictured with dark eyes and crimson mouths, elegant and proud and doomed. Mrs. Mansour looked like that. Her skin, pale and smooth, was made paler still by the black veil that framed it.

“This is never so true as with the special child,” I continued. “You lead her out into the world. You lead her out of her own self.”

“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Mansour. “I believe this. I believe this for my girl.” She looked down at Aroush and smiled. “Teacher, shall we talk about money?”