Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

When the screen blanked — multicolored bars, PLEASE STAND BY — Milagros called Jim from the nurses’ station. But he wasn’t at the Herald, of course. He’d planned to be at the airport. He’d been invited. Shoulder to shoulder, Milagros imagined him, with the photographers who’d captured Kuya on the ground.

That night, in his study, Jim played back a tape from Kuya’s Hong Kong “press-con,” just before he boarded for Manila. I am wearing a bulletproof vest, but if they shoot me in the head, I’m a goner. Instructions to his entourage to think fast with their cameras and mics. In three — four minutes it could all be over.

I may not be able to talk to you again after this.

“We weren’t quick enough,” Jim said. No capture of the death itself, the shooting. Only the lifeless bodies afterward: Kuya’s, and nearby the man gunned down seconds after him, pegged as his murderer.

The Betamax tape they got hold of later that week said DUPLICATE COPY. A label, a command. Just before they pressed play, the children came into the living room. Jaime holding Jackie, new to walking, by the wrists, stooping to help her toddle forward. “Can we watch too?” he asked.

Milagros and Jim exchanged a look. Agreed without words, as they often had at Camp. The newspapers had been there at breakfast: Kuya’s body on the tarmac, at the kitchen table in between the white cheese and warm pan de sal. No doubt the Ateneo priests at Jaime’s school would say something, if they had not already, about their fallen Eagle, at morning chapel or assembly. And whatever parents said on phones and in kitchens in Batanglobo Village would be overheard and then repeated on playgrounds and at recess. Far better for the Reyeses to get ahead of what the kids would learn by accident.

Besides, children were also citizens.

“This is not a movie,” Milagros began, in her hospital voice. “It’s real, and might upset you. Do you understand?” She’d seen enough needles at City give the lie to This won’t hurt a bit. “A man has died,” Milagros said. “Someone shot him with a gun at the airport last Sunday.”

Jaime recognized his name from lawn signs and the news and Ateneo. “Who shot him? Why?”

“We don’t know.” Jaime sat beside his mother, latching on to her elbow with both his hands, as frightened at age ten of the TV as he’d been at three of underbed monsters. His scalp, to Milagros, smelled innocent. “There were many people in this country who liked him. Some liked him so much they wanted him to run for President. But not everybody did.”

These were the euphemism years, when the dead had disappeared or been salvaged, when Presidents had allergies, not autoimmune diseases; when people were in safe houses, not prisons. Papa’s habit of renaming was the one issue on which she’d seen Jim lose his cool. Words have meanings, she had heard him say, his voice almost cracking. You can’t just slap a sign on hell and call it paradise. Between their parents’ lottery-ticket dreams and the First Lady’s poetry about the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, frankly, the Reyeses were down on euphemism.

The four of them watched Kuya rise from his plane seat, shake hands with khakis who had come aboard to greet him. Jovial as before, perhaps a little rounder in the cheeks. (Did three years of American food do that to him?) Hi, boss, you could make him out saying to one of the soldiers. The khakis braced him on either side and led him to the exit.

The door shut behind him, on the other passengers. A perfect ending, in a way. Shadows of his entourage banged on the exit. Weak, wifely voices. Hoy! After that, nothing. Only the disembodied shouts, and shots, outside. Only his body on the tarmac afterward.

Jim was rewinding the tape and pressing play again. Jackie had planted herself on the floor in front of the TV, the silhouette of her thin pigtail straight as an antenna against the screen. “Hoy!” she shouted with the entourage, pointing at the exit door closing behind Kuya.

“Can we watch something else?” asked Jaime.

They changed the channel. The Greatest American Hero, Jaime’s favorite. A clumsy superhero, another crash landing.

“It’s a hell of a strategy,” Milagros said.

“Every Catholic loves a martyr,” said Jim.

Their Kuya had studied his nation’s history, the lives and deaths of Lapu-Lapu and José Rizal and Christ himself. He smiled and strolled exitward, as though accompanied by old drinking buddies. As if he knew his fate, and the country’s future. That he would die. That afterward, people would untie the yellow ribbons from their trees and tie them around their heads, warrior-style. That they’d take to the streets.

She smuggled transcripts, copied tapes. As a family they followed Kuya’s funeral cortege along Times Street, with two million others, in time to military drum taps. Jackie threw a bitter tantrum, wailing and kicking Milagros in the ribs, when Jaime and her father went forward to view the coffin without her. Kuya’s body still dressed in his bloodstained shirt. Jaime, for his part, fainted.

At home, Milagros went back to managing the Little Golden Books and puppy kennel, while Jim traveled to Bulacan to visit with the alleged murderer’s family. They’d watched in August as military men took him — son and father, petty criminal — four days before Kuya’s homecoming. Milagros should have known then that she and Jim had seen, in the same tape, two different stories. They both saw Kuya leave the plane. They both saw his body splayed across the tarmac. But only she was haunted by the weak wifely voices in between, crying out Hoy! Only she had imagined her own fist banging against the exit.

February 23, 1986

Naz, her old college boyfriend, of all people, arrives at the house. So her mother’s taking all comers now.

“I meant to visit much sooner,” he says. “The traffic — it’s like Christmas Eve out there. Everybody wants to get to EDSA.”

Milagros doesn’t raise her head from the pillow. “You’ll forgive me, Naz, for not playing hostess.”

“Of course,” he says.

“I’m surprised you’re here and not there.”

“I just came to pay my respects. I have a son too.”

A refrain, from so many well-wishers: I have a son too. This time she doesn’t change the subject. “About that son, Naz. What’s his name?”

“Oscar.”

“Let me ask you something. If you were made to choose between Oscar—”

“Don’t do that.”

“I want to know. Someone told me men stay men while women become mothers first. Is that true?”

“I suppose it depends on the man. And woman, for that matter.”

“Gun to your head, what would you choose?”

He shakes his head, lets out a puff of air. “My son. I’d choose my son.”

What had she hoped to hear? “So you’d stop,” she confirms. “If they threatened you. You’d quit the lightning protests. No more street theater.”

“Gun to my head, yes.” Naz crouches at the bedside. “But there is no gun to my head. And you didn’t marry me, Milagros.”

He says this so gently she knows he means well. They’re not backstage at their college theater, Naz spitting out the words Serious Career. He’s older now. They all are.

“Most of the people out at EDSA aren’t activists, or revolutionaries,” says Naz. “They just don’t want to miss a party. But there’d be no party without Jim. People like him made it happen.”

In an instant Milagros sees her house from the outside, her family all aglow with Historical Significance. From far away it is still a beautiful thing. Her younger self would approve: Milagros hasn’t lived a small life, not since the nurses’ strike. She felt important then, at twenty-two. A human chain, they called her and her friends, at the doors of City Hospital. Small potatoes compared to what’s happening now. A barricade, they’re calling this sea stretching from Camp Crame to Camp Aguinaldo. Not just bodies but cars, buses, felled trees, streetlamps. Even garbage — that perennial Manila problem — conspiring in the movement.