Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

These days Jim was paying close attention to a Camp inmate who slept ten cells away from him. They’d crossed paths years before at the Congress Building. A senator who never met a camera or mic he didn’t love: Jim had taped him calling the regime a garrison state, the First Lady our latter-day Eva Perón. A presidential hopeful (any fool who followed politics in Manila knew it), dropping chestnuts for voters to repeat at dinner and remember at the polls. The 1973 election would have been his big chance, but for the Proclamation and arrest that landed him at Camp, with Jim, who could not convince the guards to allow a private interview. And so the Reyeses could only watch the former senator and his wife from a distance in the theater on Sundays, praying at Mass, talking. They code-named him Kuya, or big brother; and his wife Ate, big sister, for symmetry’s sake. At least I didn’t marry a politician, Milagros thought. Kuya had refused a trial— kangaroo court was his chestnut now, and trumped-up charges —and taken solitary confinement, a hunger strike, and finally a death sentence, instead. There but for the grace of… For all the trouble Jim was in, Milagros thought, another woman’s husband had it worse.

February 22, 1986

The first time Billy Batanglobo — the dead man who designed this house — appears to her, she senses him in her skin, the spread of cold pinpricks along her back. From her bed, facing the wall, she hears a dripping sound, smells fetid Pasig River water. And when she turns he’s standing in her doorway: the bloated, water-rotted version of the man she’s seen in Ateneo yearbooks, whose name still surfaces now and then inside their mailbox.

“We threw all your mail away,” she says. She’s not afraid of ghosts. Especially not one in soaked Levi’s, his muddy Adidas leaving puddles on the floor as he approaches, his polo shirt clinging to his swollen gut.

Nineteen men have been arrested and detained at Fort Bonifacio for an attempted coup and an assassination plot against the President and First Lady.

“I swam ashore while it was still dark,” Billy Batanglobo tells her, the water leaking from his ears and nose. “And there were navy boats already parked from the bay to Guadalupe, guarding the palace.”

“You were well out of it,” Milagros says, meaning Manila.

“And now you want out too,” says Billy. “You’d like America. I stayed for seven years, and only left so I could re-create it here.” He sits on the edge of the bed, close to her knees, but Milagros doesn’t shift away from him. “But I should warn you. You can leave a place, but places have a way of not leaving you. I learned that after Vietnam. You won’t forget what happened here, no matter where you go or how you try.” His body makes a damp print in the sheets, and still she doesn’t move. Something about him, foul and decaying as he is, attracts her.

“Jim and I defiled your house,” she says, again to prove she’s not afraid. “We weren’t even married yet. Your body wasn’t cold. We christened every room in your precious little model home.”

Billy Batanglobo laughs, also unafraid. “And that’s the kind of memory I mean,” he says. “The kind that will hit you, on a sidewalk in New York or wherever, so hard you have to sit down on the curb to catch your breath. And who’s to say you deserve to forget? You, about to leave your daughter, in a country that still doesn’t know its own fate?” Billy leans over, seizes her wrists with sopping, pruned fingers, bringing his face so close she smells his gassy river breath and sees the veins through his stretched, almost translucent skin; and then, as the cold water drips from his face onto hers, she is afraid. She closes her eyes. “There is one way to forget— truly forget — everything.”

“Jim doesn’t believe you drowned yourself,” Milagros whispers, without opening her eyes.

“Does it matter? I’m gone, aren’t I? You can come with me.”

He repeats the invitation twice, three times, lying beside her in the master bed and holding her until the words sound like a lullaby, a consolation. She dreams of forgetting as Billy forgot: by floating, and then sinking. She wakes alone. The sheets are dry. She checks the living room: Billy’s not there; no one is. All she hears is Jim, on the phone in his study, with the door open. “Asylum in the States,” he says. “That’s what I’m hearing.”

She walks the corridor, expecting a puddle any second. But the floor is dry too. She knows then Billy Batanglobo’s hers alone; no one else invited to his world.

“You can drive out there and see it for yourself,” she hears Jim saying. “Marines at the gates. Water cannon trucks and Scorpion tanks, on every road that could possibly lead to the palace.”

1979

Sunday after Sunday they met in the theater, where wives wept and husbands spoke low, and families sang to drown out their fear. They went to Father Duncan’s makeshift Mass, exchanged code words. Before sunset Milagros would collect her son from the playground and leave.

But once a month, in a cabin on the other side of Camp, they let Jim’s wife stay overnight. These visits flew. In the dark, Milagros and Jim shed the slow careful pace of theater Sundays along with their clothes. Codes and signs had no place in that cell. They did not talk politics. If they spoke, they did so in rough commands, single syllables, cries or grunts or sighs that were not words at all. On the first of these visits, she’d brought towels to drape over the surveillance camera and to line the doorjamb. But once she knew how fast the time went, she did not care what anyone saw or heard.

They talked about Being Careful. She was already raising a child alone.

“No,” said Milagros. “I want one place in our life where we can act free.”

But she didn’t get pregnant. She came home to only one child waiting at the door. The child who followed her around like a lamb and bleated sadly when she had to go to work. The child who never questioned why the room that held his toys was not the room he slept in at night. All he wanted was to be near her. As well as she came to know her husband at Camp, she was convinced no son and mother ever were as close as she and Jaime were. She knew she’d have to cut the strings someday. But for now, Milagros held tight.

She did attempt to drill him for grade one as all the other mothers would. Jaime would look up from the flash card or the workbook, his puppy eyes pleading. Let’s ditch this boring business and play hide-and-seek. Now and then she put her foot down. Some things he simply had to learn. But most times she relented. We’ll try again tomorrow. When they went outside to walk Soba together, Milagros held the leash. As newlyweds Milagros and Jim had agreed: no chores until the age of six. Play is the work of the child, a schoolteacher-neighbor was fond of saying, and the Montessori slogan felt as powerful to them as Makibaka! or Fight the Power.

“Mama,” Jaime would say at bedtime, “you know everything, don’t you?”

“Mama, I wish we could stay home from school and work tomorrow.”

“Mama, you’re my best friend.”

He didn’t care about politics. Life with Jaime Jr. was all cuddles, all games, all splashing Soba with the garden hose. The dummy shelter under the yard was his playground, the chute leading down from its round hatch his slide. It smelled like mold down there, and runoff from monsoons sometimes inched up from the dirt floor to Jaime’s calves, but he loved it. And when the khakis came sniffing, Jaime showed them how his voice bounced off the round steel tunnel and the cot that he believed was there for him. When she had to cut off his cartoons to watch the news, she could send him down to entertain himself for ages with the walkie-talkies, the first-aid kit, the yellow Geiger counter Billy Batanglobo had left behind.