Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

“I repeat, I repeat,” Milagros ranted to Jim, in jail. “What are we — deaf, his people, or a nation of idiots? Produce more? Were we built on an assembly line?”

“Every good dictator loves a brain drain,” Jim said.

“ I ’m not going anywhere,” said Milagros. Ever since Papa had splashed his slogan on billboards all over the city — NO PROGRESS WITHOUT DISCIPLINE! — Milagros really had become the angry daughter.

February 14, 1986

“Will Jaime come back for Valentine’s Day?” Jackie asks.

At four years old, Jackie expects the kind of Valentine’s Day she had last year. Cousins from as far away as Davao came to their party. In the yard, Vivi had spread bright green pandan leaves on tables. They’d feasted on fried rice and barbecue with their hands. Each child had a heart-shaped paper mailbox for cards and sweets. Milagros’s brother dressed as Elvis and crooned love songs at all the girls.

This year, Milagros wishes she could boycott Valentine’s Day. Protest’s all the rage now — not just for the ballot counters. Fifty opposition members have walked out of Parliament, not buying the sitting President’s self-proclaimed victory. The widow’s called a boycott of all banks and TV channels owned by loyalists. No more shopping at Rustan’s. No more drinking San Miguel beer, Coca-Cola, Sprite, Royal Tru-Orange. The archbishop himself won’t eat until the President steps down.

Milagros remembers her own strike in front of City Hospital. Is it possible, she wants to know, to picket one’s own life? If mothering’s a full-time job, as all her neighbors love to say, can’t she walk out on it too?

“No,” Milagros says to Jackie. “Valentine’s will be quiet this year. It wouldn’t be fair to have a party without him.”

In other countries, there are special ceremonies for guilt. Milagros wants to zigzag a sword through her bowels. To be a dark young bride and set herself aflame. There ’s a tradition she’d uphold, this year. Jackie brings a valentine from school, made of red construction paper. Milagros tapes it to Jackie’s bedroom door. She remembered to ask Vivi to buy some candy and bubble gum this morning, but now Milagros can’t find it. She corners the gardener. “Did you eat Jackie’s gum?” She’s become someone who spits out questions and does not wait for answers.

She understands a bit of Papa’s paranoia now. Betrayal needs to happen only once to cloud your vision. After that, there could be poison in each cup, a bomb in every drawer. And it’s those closest to her who seem most suspect. Vivi. Gloria. Her own mother, who disappears each day to church. (So she says.) When Milagros pulls herself from bed, she walks sideways, her back against the wall.

1975

Milagros would have liked to hire a maid. Almost every house in Batanglobo Village had one. Young dalaga saving up for school, or old spinsters sending their siblings or nieces through it. “Tessie’s like my second pair of hands and eyes,” a neighbor would say. They slept on mats under mosquito nets on their employers’ living room floors. I couldn’t do it without her.

But Milagros had to watch every centavo. She swept her own floor, washed her own dishes, unclogged her own toilet. Jaime went through formula, then jars of pureed Gerber vegetables, like a high-powered vacuum, and outgrew toys and T-shirts faster than she could wash them. There was the mortgage, lawyers’ fees. A refrigerator that kept guests in sandwiches and beer. A husband out of work. Soba, no longer a puppy, needed fancier kibbles, a longer leash, a stronger flea shampoo. The mimeo ink. Paper. Repairs. She paid black-market prices for the foreign newspapers, magazines, and journals that no longer came through their mailbox. Above all, she tipped.

From the time of Jim’s arrest, Milagros had tipped deliverymen (those duck-egg vendors, painters, piano tuners), security guards, police officers, soldiers, librarians, bus drivers, taxi drivers, wives estranged from powerful men, black sheep disowned by blue-blood families, children. Tips was what she and Jim called these bribes, in the Camp theater. Did you remember to tip that bellhop yesterday? The same word Jim and his colleagues had once used for leads and clues. “A tip for a tip,” said Milagros, thanking a source as they touched palms. She tipped people for addresses, locations, directions. She tipped drivers to bypass their appointed routes and wait while she completed her errands to take her home. She tipped secretaries for their bosses’ files; she tipped interns for footage, for cassettes, for transcripts; she tipped phone operators for records; she tipped cashiers for receipts. The price tag varied. A few shiny centavos or sari-sari candies for the child who might point her to the right house. Upward of fifty thousand pesos to the khaki who looked the other way on a shipment of black-market ink. Tips were a line item in the household budget.

Her mother had now lived longer in their house than Jim ever had. The woman Milagros thought she’d rescued, when she pinned on her first nursing cap, from a lifetime of laundry tubs and ironing boards, came out of retirement to work for her daughter. She rocked Jaime Jr., who tipped the scales at over thirty pounds now, to sleep; or chased him as he learned to crawl and walk. It gnawed at Milagros to watch her mother’s aging back bend to the kitchen sink and stove, to see her raw fingers grip a broom. The only payment she could offer was to bear, without a fight, the things her mother had to say about her husband.

Her mother doubted Jim, was harder on Milagros’s man than she had ever been on her own. All the things she might have said about Milagros’s father reared up belatedly, against Jim. She didn’t read Jim’s articles. It was enough to know that they had cost him a job and landed him in jail. Her daughter may as well have taken up with any common criminal off the street.

“You worked how hard on your degree, only to become his secretary?” said her mother, seeing Milagros stay up after her night shift to type.

“There was a time you’d have been glad,” Milagros said, “for any of your children to wind up a secretary.”

“I was thinking then of secretaries who get paid for their work,” said her mother.

Another time she pointed to the bags under Milagros’s eyes. Even housemaids and hospitality girls take a day off once in a while. It was true Milagros had worked a double at the hospital, then hosted friends of Jim’s for dinner.

Milagros needed her mother to wash her uniform at night and starch it in the morning. To feed Jaime while she worked at the hospital. So she held her tongue.

“Don’t worry about me,” Milagros said. “Helping you with laundry and then waking up early to study trained me well. I don’t get tired easily.”

“You worked late and studied early,” said her mother, “so you wouldn’t spend your life doing this.”

February 19, 1986

Jim visits their room more often than you would think. He’s been sleeping on a cot in the basement, though everyone pretends it’s the long news days making him do that. They don’t say much to one another. At most, Milagros asks him what’s new, and he does for her what he does best: report.

“Jackie’s had her bath,” says Jim. “Vivi’s winding her down for bed.”

“Did people come through for Ma’s candidate?” she asks. “I can’t see the beer boycotters lasting more than a day.”

“They did, and how. There’s been a run on all those banks. No one’s buying copies of the Bulletin. Rustan’s is so empty you could hear a pin drop.”

“Still,” she says, “I can’t see him just stepping down. Can you?”