Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

At home, in Batanglobo Village, the radio and TV blink off the air just as the President appears. His fifth inauguration in twenty years, silenced by static. A rebel sniper has hit three stations with one shot at a single transmitter. PLEASE STAND BY.

At the Herald offices, Jim fires off his tale of two inaugurations. A chaotic week: no one there to police Jim, to send him back to Entertainment where he belongs. (All the movie stars are at EDSA anyway, he’s noticed.) Not that it’s a free-for-all: there are new rules now. An editor has scrubbed his piece about the new President: striking out all mention of her inexperience, or her family fortune, playing up slain martyr’s widow, pious Catholic, and housewife instead. The same editor would like Jim to tone down what he’s said about the Club Filipino elite. The piece will end on feel-good lines from the widow’s inauguration speech, not on Jim’s wet-blanket questions about the country’s future.

Jim’s on hold with a friend from the Washington Post when he hears that helicopters have banked on the Pasig River. By the time he reaches the palace again, they’ve lifted off. With the First Family inside, people are saying, bound for Honolulu. How has all this happened in one day? After his years at Camp, where one minute looked so much like the next Jim could lose track of how many days or nights had passed, a short, full day is still a shock to him.

On Laurel Street, ribbon after yellow ribbon waves and waves. Jeepneys, with nowhere to move, have become snack bars, blaring music, offering shade. The archbishop has ended his hunger strike; his devoted nuns cut cake and scoop ice cream at the palace gates.

A good old-fashioned fiesta, the radio tells Milagros. She thinks of Jaime’s first birthday: the single dancing candle flame, ten chubby fingers in the frosting. The phone off its cradle so Jim could hear, and sing along from Camp.

With no one left there to protect, the Marines have left the palace grounds. Jim sees people cutting away at the barbed-wire fence, fiddling with the intercom and walkie-talkies in the guard tower. He walks into the mansion freely, no press pass or pat-down this time.

A typhoon couldn’t have left more wreckage. Capsized tables, scattered papers, curry gone cold in foil trays on the dining table. He passes the door of the chapel, where servants huddle in prayer. A wardrobe filled with slippery silk gowns and bulletproof brassieres tough and reptilian to his touch. A frigid meat locker whose shelves of beef are stamped STATESIDE.

Beside the king-size master bed, there’s a hospital gurney, an oxygen tank, and an IV stand, its bag three-quarters full. Adult diapers on the bathroom floor, soiled.

On the twenty-fifth of February 1986, thinks Jim, who can’t resist a juicy lede, sometime between his oath of office and his helicopter ride out of the country, the tenth President of the Republic of the Philippines shat himself. He shakes his head. It’s the kind of showy, self-satisfied hook Jim would have produced at fifteen, for his high school newspaper. Herald editors won’t go for it any more than the Jesuit priests did.

Within an hour, Jim’s quiet tour has ended. It seems like half of Manila has stormed the palace. Cries of Soubenir! Soubenir! bounce off the mahogany-paneled walls. Those who can’t make off with a military helmet or a high-heeled shoe settle for a radio, a plant. Jim threads his way against the stampede. Outside, people smile for pictures against streetlamps, under trees. He reaches for his Dictaphone, but when he bothers to stop someone for an interview— Who are you? Were you at EDSA, too? What brought you to the palace? — he feels like a Camp interrogator, and his subject’s in a rush to get inside.

Back at the Herald offices, the photo department is shredding pictures of the stampede, and filing others away. “While we’re at it,” he can hear the harried City Desk editor suggesting, “let’s brainstorm some other words? Stampede sounds so…negative.” Jim can hear the former President, his onetime godfather, call them all balimbing , ten-sided as star fruit. Wetting their fingertips to gauge the wind’s direction. No better than the politicians.

We are talking about your children here.

He stands abruptly — turning all his colleagues’ heads, never his style. Without saying good-bye he leaves the Herald newsroom.

At home, the door of the master bedroom is open, Milagros sitting on the edge of the bed. “Is it all true?” she asks, as Jim walks in. “We have a new President, and the old one’s in Hawaii?”

Jim nods.

She says, “I have something to tell you.”

“So do I.”

She waits for him to go first, so he does. No time to change their habits all at once.

“I love my work,” Jim says. “It was my life.”

But she already knows that part.

“So I mistook it for my whole life.”

She looks up.

“They say prison does something to you. And I do wonder. If I’d have made the same decisions, living in this house with you — with him — all these years.”

Milagros, now and forever the good student, takes a moment to review. The man she never questioned till a year ago, admitting to an error.

“Today was big — the biggest news day of my life. But I’m not going to write about the President. All I plan to write, when I go into that study tonight, is my resignation letter.”

She sees he means it. An offer that the Jim she married years ago would never have extended.

Recant. Stop the presses. Cease and desist. He’ll do it all, and more. She watches his mouth move. She even hears some words from it. Something about not expecting forgiveness, or even a response.

She doesn’t tell him it’s too late. They’ve fought enough already. After she found the letters, all they did was fight. She’s out of stones to throw at him. And yet.

A shred of her, still young and hopeful and capable of being inspired, considers it.

What could that life look like? She’d find work at another hospital, if City wouldn’t take her back. He’d learn, like anyone changing his field, new skills: write in other, safer genres; teach. Together they’d raise Jackie as their only child — and who’s to say there wouldn’t, after they had patched things up, be more? On paper, it seems possible.

But no.

This house would still be this house, Manila still the city where she had her son, this country still the country that took everything away. You couldn’t erase history, but you could close up chapters of it, just as in a textbook.

“Jim,” she says. Carefully, as if to an employer. I am leaving the country. A serious answer to a serious offer.

Jim nods, the fingers tenting at his forehead once again.

As with an employer — one who taught her things, one she’s sad to leave — Milagros goes on. About green cards and graduate school. She even shows him the pamphlets and the forms. Brown nurses smiling at the bedside of white patients who look to be better already.

And he responds in kind. Of course and opportunity.

Her eyes turn red. She senses there is more. In its effort not to cry her face looks like a young girl’s. But he must continue.

“I remember when I first met you.”

She hears only some of the rest — how smart she was, how glad he felt getting to know her. Her passion and her point of view. But his words do take her back, all the way to June 1971, on the lawn outside of City Hospital. The girl with the bandanna and the picket sign, who must have seemed like someone who’d do anything to prove a point. And didn’t that girl marry him? And take dictation, type, and print for him? As if it were her life’s mission, to tend the flame of his work like a priestess at some temple. That girl lived in this house, where a man had died; that girl married Jim inside a prison; that girl let her children play, sometimes, above a shelter where objects no safer than bombs were made. And now that girl’s son, her only son, is gone. But Jim is not the one — at least, he’s not primarily the one — Milagros blames.