Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

She didn’t budge on Jaime in the master bedroom. All right, Jo. I work better at night anyway. Instead, she and Jim stole mornings in the basement, Jaime still asleep, before Milagros’s early shifts at the hospital. The basement felt familiar to their bodies. Slowly, then, he clicked back into place at 26 Avalon Row.

The Metro Manila Herald invited Jim back, but not into his old post. They could only offer him something in Entertainment. “And so the charge comes true,” he said. “Jim Reyes, gossipmonger.” Reporters at the City Desk, meanwhile, passed their time on praise releases from Malacañang Palace. Might as well try writing with their hands tied behind their office chairs. But he — still the scholarship boy, the company man, after all — held on to his job, and waited for the dead Herald ’s resurrection.

For the first time in their marriage they were both working outside the house again. If she closed her eyes and just breathed in the normal-seeming air, she could believe no time at all had passed. They were the newlyweds they might have been years ago, if history had been different.

What her mother had to say about Jim and his work took on a different flavor. Every time Jim stayed up or out late — to toast a colleague, see a source, pore over public records with a young and eager journalism student — the innuendo from her mother would begin. “ Journalism student —is that the code these days? And what’s he teaching her?” Or “All that time out in the world, and in his study. How much could that leave for a wife and son?” She found gaps in Jim’s stories, reminding Milagros when he’d said nine o’clock and didn’t pull into the garage till eleven.

Milagros knew all about looking the other way. But only when it came to Jim’s work. At home, after his day at the Herald, he kept writing. His first piece, dictated to her in the transformed study that once held Billy Batanglobo’s drafting table, took a microscope to Proclamation 2045. The fine print, where the old rules all hid, in effect: the President’s emergency powers, the right to redeclare martial law as he saw fit. Why the pomp and trouble, then, of setting men like Jim free? The Pope, said Jim. The Pope, who’d gotten cold feet about visiting Manila, on account of what he called the regime’s unchristian human-rights record. A big gesture had been needed to change the Pope’s mind back.

The Herald wouldn’t print this. And when a smaller paper, with braver editors, would, its offices were raided and shut down before press time. So Milagros mimeo’d and mailed it out, like the ones before. Still under the name Mia E. Jersey, like a double-living comic-book superhero.

To silence her mother, Milagros gave her a retirement gift. “You’re free, Ma,” she said. “You deserve it.” And so, to 26 Avalon Row, came Vivi, a small woman ill-fitted with big features. Barely taller than the broom they gave her, most of her face taken up by eyes and teeth. Delicate wrists, a man’s hands. On her first day, a mouse darted out from under the refrigerator, and without pause or fumble Vivi struck it with the stick end of the broom: one blow, dead.

They had only a vague sense of where Vivi was from: the provinces, as city people said. Inherited from an amo who had fled the country in the last year of martial law. In all tasks, Vivi’s mouth helped Vivi’s hands. A front tooth hinged out farther than the rest, most likely from this habit of using her teeth as fingers: gripping the clothespins, folding the dish towels, struggling with stubborn plastic packaging.

“After eight years of marriage,” joked Milagros, “you finally have a wife!”

Now there was garlic rice with fried eggs and sweet pork sausage every morning. Vivi washed the dishes after every meal, so that Milagros could help Jaime with his homework. Vivi kept the house so they could live in it. Vivi used the newspapers, once shredded, to line Soba’s dog kennel.

By late August, Milagros was pregnant again. Two children, bracketing martial law like bookends.

February 22, 1986

Milagros catches some television on her way from the bed to the bathroom and back. City Hospital has already accepted her letter of resignation. This is her only commute now: between the radio in the bedroom, patching straight in to the rebels’ camp, and the TV in the living room, still run by the President.

On Channel Four, he tells the rebels to surrender. That, or face artillery attacks, from troops already parked outside their camp.

Milagros avoids the kitchen table, where flowers, cards, and pastries still arrive every day, and returns to her bedroom. She has banned all guests, other than Gloria.

But her mother can’t say no to a priest. She knocks and swings open the bedroom door. Pale, lanky Father Duncan stands beside her.

“What if I weren’t decent, Ma?”

“I’m sorry, iha. ” Her mother dips her head to the priest. “Father,” she says, meaning, She’s all yours. Then she leaves.

“They’ve called in the big guns,” says Milagros. “I’m that hopeless.”

“They didn’t call. I wanted to come.”

“But who’s at Ateneo, teaching the boys Latin?”

“It’s Saturday.” He sees a chair against the wall. “May I?”

Milagros motions to it and turns up the radio. “Were you there?”

Father Duncan nods, raises his voice over the volume. “Nothing there yet but a few sandbags. They wouldn’t stand up to little Jackie’s toy wheelbarrow. I did see one boy holding up a sign that said, MAKE LABAN NOT WAR. That made me smile.”

Laban: to fight, resist. And LABAN: Lakas ng Bayan, or “Strength of the Nation,” the widow’s opposition party. She’s heard it translated on the radio as “People Power,” but likes it better in Tagalog. More muscular, more like a fist. “LABAN NOT WAR?” she repeats. “That’s good.” She does not ask, How old was the kid, and who gave him that sign? His parents?

Father Duncan lays a warm, pastoral hand on hers. On the radio, a rebel’s wife asks for the people’s prayers. And if possible send bread, not sacks of bigas. There’s really no way to cook rice at Camp.

Milagros winces. She remembers this. How your thoughts get smaller the more scared you are. “When Jaime went missing,” she tells Father Duncan, “I kept wondering if there was anyone to remind him to cut his fingernails. My son was kind of a slob, you know. His nails grew fast and got so dirty.” Now the Marines might execute her husband, and Mrs. Rebel wants to talk about rice.

“He was a good boy,” says the priest.

Milagros almost says, Not a star student like Jim, your favorite, then stops herself. “What can I do for you, Father?”

“I came because I saw Jim at EDSA,” says Father Duncan. “In his element, somewhat. You can imagine. Interviewing the crowds, trying to sneak into Camp. But something struck me as…lonely about him, today. I’ve never seen that, not even when we were both locked up.”

At the mention of her husband, Milagros takes her hand away.

“Of course I thought of Jaime, but not just Jaime. I also thought of you. How his work depends on you, your life together.”

So the priest has come to recommend his former student, urge his wife to join Team Jim again. With that old behind-every-great-man rigmarole. They’re all the same to her now, this fraternity of men, who televise their hunger strikes, print articles after they’re told to stop. They prize their causes and their names, their principles and legacies, above all. They eat the rice without wondering how it got cooked and to their table. They name sons after themselves and never once worry about those sons’ fingernails.