Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

These days, watching the news was not so different from doing rounds at City Hospital. “Papa’s fat,” Milagros told Jim. “Red patches all across his face. They’re calling it an allergy.” In her living room, Milagros and the neighbors floated their own diagnoses during every speech and proclamation. Stabbing his swollen fingers into the air, the President reminded her of Vienna sausages, all the cans of food they’d panic-hoarded in the days leading to martial law.

The city, too, showed symptoms, flaring up. After seven years of DISCIPLINE and PROGRESS, Manila was bursting into flames: at the Sulo Hotel, in the floating casino on Manila Bay, at Rustan’s department store. With the Partido Komunista grown thousands strong since 1972, Jim wrote that the Philippines had finally become the country — dangerous, divided, terror-prone — that Papa claimed it was, back when he’d cried state of emergency. The fears of bombs and chaos, a city on fire, come to pass.

A bad heart saved their Kuya from the firing squad, for now. He flew to Dallas for surgery, then on to teach in Boston. The Church of Best and Youngest, First and Most, prayed for him. Another wonder boy in exile.

February 22, 1986

What is it like, for Papa — the OmniPresident, as Jim has written — to learn his own men have been plotting against him?

Milagros hears reports from Camp Aguinaldo, the army headquarters where the defense minister is holed up, surrounded by sympathetic troops. Then the chief of the armed forces lands in a helicopter, to join him.

Ideas of betrayal — in here, out there — bleed into each other.

Between long naps she can hear Vivi’s voice. Your mother says, she’s telling Jackie, your father says. What little seeds is she planting? Milagros has inklings all the time now, has grown a detective’s gut. She opens a drawer and rummages through the pink plastic rollers. When was the last time she used rollers? But now there are strands of hair stuck inside, curlier than her own, a tinge of fake auburn. Vivi’s hair.

When the defense minister and army chief take the mic themselves, it’s to declare war on the palace.

He is not the President to whom we pledged our service.

We appeal to the Armed Forces and National Police to join us in this crusade for better government.

Reports have circulated of our impending arrest. We plan to die here fighting.

“If you can deceive me like this, what else are you capable of!” Milagros holds the roller out to show Vivi the kink in the strand, the faint smell of coconut oil.

At nine o’clock, the archbishop is on the air. I ask all my brothers and sisters listening to go to Camp Crame and Camp Aguinaldo to support our two good friends. Leave your homes now. Bring food if you can.

Our two good friends.

They’re all friends, aren’t they? Milagros thinks.

After you pray tonight, start fasting, says the archbishop. Don’t eat until I tell you. We’re at war here, and you the soldiers.

1981

Two weeks after New Year’s firecrackers blazed across Manila, Milagros and her neighbors watched the President on TV, reciting Proclamation 2045.

A sound economy.

A secure nation.

The end of martial law.

Afterward, the First Lady sobbing into a white handkerchief and singing to the crowd. “Why’s she crying?” asked Jaime.

A neighbor said, “Her happy days are over.”

An anticlimax, nothing like the spine-chilling beginning, nine years before. Milagros now took presidential words for what they were. Shapes on paper, sounds on a screen. The gaps between sound economy and the unemployment lines stretching to Saudi Arabia and America; between secure nation and the bombs that seemed to go off every other day in Manila — these were the spaces she and her neighbors lived in.

So when the lawyer called to say Jim’s name was on a list, she wrote off the words— pardon, release —as only words. She had a job to go to, and a superstitious streak. Her mother shopped and cleaned as for a party — but with the neighbors, Milagros hedged. They say I’ll have my husband back on the thirty-first. I’ll believe it when I see it. When the day came, she picked Jaime up from school and came home to a crowded living room, the neighbors toasting with beer and pulutan, and Jim, holding court among them. The room quieted and Jim turned with a smile, raising his bottle.

“You’re back” was all she could say.

Jaime did not let go of her hand as Jim embraced her and she wept. Years ago she’d have felt shy, reuniting before other people, but conjugal visits with guards outside the door had cured that. Her neighbors cheered.

“Why are you crying?” Jaime asked.

“Because I’m happy, ” sobbed Milagros, and she was. Happy. Overwhelmed. “Say welcome home, Papa.”

“Welcome home, Papa.” Sideways, Jaime eyed the man who’d just, as far as he was concerned, made his mother cry. The man who’d never, in his almost eight years, driven him to school or played catch in the yard with him as other fathers did.

Somehow she forgot to plan for Jim’s first night in the master bedroom since 1972. Without waiting to be asked, her mother brought a straw mat and mosquito net into the living room to sleep there. But Jaime, before the last of the neighbors left, tucked himself in where he’d always slept, his whole life: in the master bed.

Jim and Milagros stood at the foot of the bed, looking at him.

“He’s old enough to sleep on his own,” Jim whispered.

“I don’t disagree. But where?”

“We’ve got an extra room.”

“You mean the nursery?”

“Yes.” He laughed. “The room where children sleep.”

“The room with a bomb shelter underneath the bed?”

“Former bomb shelter. Now an office.”

Milagros shook her head. “How will that work? Reporters waking him at night to pop open the trundle bed?”

“We can put another bed in there. And nine is old enough to know what kind of work his father does.”

“He’ll be eight in May.” She wondered, without asking, how old that was in fatherless years. Rather than argue, she picked Jaime up. Walking him into the nursery did confirm how big he’d grown, how heavy: too old for his parents’ bed, too old to be carried, really. She put him in the trundle, with misgivings.

In the master bedroom, they undressed. Only they had spent eight years in confined spaces, desire scheduled to one day a month. Now the space they had to move and stretch and wrap around each other felt extravagant and awkward. Inhibitions she had shed so quickly in the prison guards’ presence returned, with her mother and son nearby. They went about it silently: her body in a bed with Jim, her mind in the nursery, where her son was sleeping alone for the first time, without knowing it. When they fell asleep, she dreamed of the trundle bed collapsing hellward, Jaime swallowed by a pit of flames. She woke, sat up, could hear Jaime bawling in the next room, as if they’d shared the nightmare. Without rousing Jim for permission, she rushed to the nursery and brought her son back to the master bed. Throughout the night she tossed and turned, first facing her husband, then her son, one’s snores and then the other’s kicks keeping her up.

For weeks she struggled to fit the two halves of her life back together. Separating Jim and their marriage from all she had to do at home and at the hospital was how she’d managed not to break down at the nurses’ station, or lie awake all night in their bed. She’d lived her life with him only in designated rooms, boxes of time: the Sunday theater, the conjugal cabins, the basement where she printed all his work. Now here he was, colliding into everything she didn’t know she’d been protecting from him.