Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

“We’ll see if he has any choice. He’s losing hearts and minds in D.C. fast. Although the Gipper still won’t come out and tell his old friend to resign.”

These are safe subjects. They don’t fight; they have fought enough. Some days, Jim offers a hand, and usually, Milagros takes it. But the old sympathies that used to course between them don’t return. Her hand turns limp. She absents herself from her own flesh, the way the infant Jaime Jr.’s weight would slacken in her arms as she rocked him asleep.

1976

Jaime Jr. grew upward and out, with an appetite to match his size. Sweets would be his downfall — so Milagros thought. Pocky biscuit sticks, White Rabbit candies, whose rice-paper wrapping you could also eat, Sarsi cola. He loved all of it; spent, promiscuously, his pocket change. In a year or two, she’d have to rein it in. Before the fat jokes began, or the diabetes or the rotten teeth. One day the knuckle dimples and the wrist folds would not be cute. “Jaime can wait,” she sang, like a broken record. Jaime knows how to wait.

At his third birthday party Jaime reached for a Shakey’s pizza that had not yet cooled, giving himself second-degree burns. Jaime! What did Mama say about waiting? She started him at Ateneo preschool with two bandaged hands. Other parents threw them side stares: what child burns both hands on a Shakey’s pizza? How much, exactly, was known about Jaime Reyes, Jr.’s life at home ? Milagros couldn’t blame them. She would have thought the same. Impulse control, she noted in her mind. Teach him impulse control.

These were her worries then, at the age of twenty-seven: rotten teeth, pudgy fingers, shiny wrappers, caps of soda bottles. She taught Jaime to chew on fluoride tablets that foamed red in his mouth. She set rules: milk and vegetables before cake and candy. Inside the walls of 26 Avalon Row, teaching Jaime the Lord’s Prayer and marking his height on the doorjamb of the nursery every six months kept her calm enough to face that other world, whose rules and routines weren’t hers to make. Camp, where her husband lived, indefinitely; where neighbors landed every day; where guards frisked all thirty-seven, thirty-eight, then thirty-nine inches of her son for contraband pens and paper.

Almost four years after his arrest, Jim finally found out what he had done to get there.

“They call it rumormongering,” one of the lawyers said, meeting with Jim and Milagros in the theater. A new charge for a New Society.

Jim tented his fingers. Milagros imagined them cupping around someone’s ear, Jim whispering as in a game of telephone. Rumormongering. Four years came down to this cooked-up, girlie-sounding crime.

“It’s a capital offense now,” said the second lawyer. “But we think we can talk the press secretary down to ten years. That is, unless you’re willing…”

She knew what unless meant, and wished the lawyers would leave while she and Jim conferred. But Jim did not send anyone away.

“…to publish a correction.”

“Ten years is a decade,” she said to Jim, like an idiot.

“So by my math,” said Jim, “I’ve got six left.” She’d heard that prison aged a man, but by some miracle her husband looked the same. His face hadn’t weathered like an old shoe, as some husbands’ in the subdivision were starting to. He’d lost a little weight perhaps, a few pounds, which on his frame looked like more. Every day, next to a guard who took the blade back after, he still shaved his face clean.

“That’s if you trust them,” she said.

“Your wife makes a good point,” said Lawyer Number Three. It was the lawyers who were growing old, the shadows darkening under their eyes. “It took this long to get a charge. Do you expect them to keep their word, when ten years are up?”

“Thank you,” said Jim. “You’ve explained the alternative.”

“Jim,” she said. “Are you sure?”

He gave her the look he’d given in the yard when the khakis took him away. But they had a son now, didn’t they? They’d lived apart longer than they’d lived together.

No matter; the discussion had ended. The lawyers looked at her with pity, so she tried a joke. “Rumormongering!” she cried. “ Tsismis, in other words. If gossip is a crime now, they should arrest half of Manila. Why isn’t my mother in jail?”

The first of the three lawyers resigned that day. A few weeks later, the second left for America. The third said, “I’ll stay and fight for you,” but looked like all he wanted was a nap. Milagros understood they were alone now, in this life of theirs. Every Sunday, while her mother was at church near Batanglobo Village, Milagros and Jaime Jr. went to the theater.

“Hello there, little man,” was how Jim often greeted their son.

“No” was what Jaime had to say to his father. He hid behind Milagros’s leg.

“Jaime, that’s your papa. Say hello.”

“That’s all right,” said Jim. He gave Jaime a smile. “We can dispense with the formalities.”

Jaime slowly yielded handshakes, hugs, high fives. Just before they left, maybe a kiss. Father Duncan said a quick-and-dirty Mass, with SkyFlakes and a gallon drum of Welch’s grape juice. But Jaime never liked the theater, preferred the courtyard where the other prisoners’ children played. Which was just as well. Jim had business to attend to with Milagros.

His sentences came out whole — forged, as she had also seen during the Billy Batanglobo project, in the calm factory of Jim’s mind — and punctuated. Along with code names, Jim spoke in a full-body sign language that escaped the guards. For each paragraph break, he leaned back or forward in his chair. She had an excuse now to stare at the tented fingers she had always loved: a tap of his left fingertips to his right meant a comma. Right index fingertip to left was a colon; pinkie to pinkie a semi. He bent his knuckles and locked his fingers together for a period.

“I don’t know how you do it,” a neighbor in the subdivision said. “What’s a marriage, if you can’t wake up next to each other in the morning?” But Milagros felt no woman ever knew her husband as well as she knew Jim, watching and reading him as she did.

Watching his hands move, she’d remember how they’d moved on her. She was in trouble when, in need of other signals, he actually did touch her. To open a set of quotation marks, his right hand took Milagros’s left; to close them, his left her right. Now and then he traced his fingertips along her brow, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear and finishing along her jaw and at her chin, the approximate shape of a question mark. She closed her eyes then, the signal for him to repeat what he had said, more slowly; she would concentrate on getting it this time. Very rarely did he flick the end of her nose with his fingertip, in exclamation, and when he did he almost always shook his head no, the signal to erase. By the time he crossed his leg under the table, making sure he brushed Milagros’s shin along the way, to say the piece was finished, she was finished too.

She stood on clumsy knees, sometimes skipping the good-bye embrace, afraid that would undo her altogether. She rushed out of the theater, grabbed their son from the courtyard, and drove home, shaking all the way. After depositing Jaime with her mother, she made it to the study Jim had yet to use, the only room at 26 Avalon Row that had a lock. In private, she wept. Once she recovered, remembering her task, she unlocked the door and washed her face in the hall.

It was her professional self who returned to his study after that, to feed the stencil sheets into the typewriter and tap out his new byline, Mia E. Jersey. An anagram, easy enough to unscramble. He did nothing, either, to disguise the style familiar to any of his onetime Herald readers. Taunting the regime, currying disfavor. It shocked her how short the pieces turned out to be, on paper. Her hours in the theater with Jim felt so much fuller than the palm-size square of text she’d later type onto the page (single-spaced, and framed by thick white margins, as Jim liked it); and clone on the mimeograph; and pass on to the neighbors, who passed them on in turn, to people headed for America or elsewhere, who sometimes brought them to Jim’s friends at foreign papers, some of whom reprinted them.