In the Country (35 page)

As she clicked the keys she sometimes set a stopwatch, the one she used at City Hospital, to test her speed, make a game of it. It was silence she couldn't stand. Silence like a radio in September. When she had finished, she went underground and fed the stencils to the mimeo, which churned out one sheet at a time—forty-six copies of Jim's opinions a minute. But still, it chugged like a train; her heartbeat caught up to its rumble, as it had when Jim first brought her to the
Herald
headquarters. To replace the ink, she slid a barrel, heavier than her brother's old guitar, across the grooved belly of the machine until it clicked with satisfying decision into place. She shivered in the basement, cold and gray as a stone church, and warmed her fingers on the finished copies that came out.

In the theater and in letters, Milagros and Jim hoped that
Papa
would sound, to the untrained ear, like just another member of their family. Back in September, Milagros had had no idea just how much the President would live up to his code title. Papa watched over them always, everywhere: from the avenues and highways that now bore his name, to the mountain where his face was carved, Rushmore-style.
The OmniPresident
—as Jim said, and as Milagros later typed. She thought of her own papa, living in the provinces with his second family, missing all her birthdays and graduations. She could see it then. The constabulary thugs, the teenage Barangay Youth: the hole in their lives had been the hole in hers. Who could blame them for wanting the discipline, an ever-present guardian? She had longed for one too.

And this child, growing in her now: how long would he go without one?

For symmetry's sake, they called the First Lady
Mama.

At Camp, Jim jogged in the mornings. He played chess against himself in the afternoons. Seeing his old Latin professor had him rereading Catullus, translating Horace again.
This will sound odd,
he wrote Milagros,
but Camp does have its moments.
There was, on the inside, all the time you could want, for things life and work outside didn't allow. No ringing phones at Camp, no meetings, no deadlines. Nothing to sign and nothing to complete. “Don't get me wrong,” he clarified, in person. “It
is
a military jail.” But at dusk sometimes the calm and quiet took on shades of Eden.

February 9, 1986

Gloria, her old friend from the picket line, smuggles in the pamphlets and the application forms. Keeping any kind of text from Jim pains Milagros, a little. Once upon a time she smuggled papers in the waistband of her skirt, for him.

These pamphlets are the second-ever secret she has kept from Jim. The first happened only last month, when she drove day and night, trying to find Jaime. She talked to khaki after khaki, even the most thuggish and intimidating: she had nothing, in her search, to lose. It came to her on one of those drives to open a checking account Jim didn't know about, socking away for bribes she might need, that might save Jaime. She'll need that money now.

YOUR CAP IS A PASSPORT
!
sings the front of one brochure. In the photo, a brown nurse takes a white man's blood pressure. Otherwise, the brochure is dry, plainspoken. No real sparkle or romance to the Visiting Nurse Exchange Program. Nurses, having slogged their way through chemistry and pharmacology, know how to tear through tiny black print for the main idea. Colors or pictures—who needs them? Who, besides diehards like Milagros and Jim, wouldn't go to the States in a heartbeat? That shiny, organized place where buses run on schedule and bosses pay you well? Who would pass that up for this corrupt and sloppy zoo, where—as the radio reports now—three million ballots have vanished, despite a record turnout at the polls?
Vote counters have walked out on the Commission on Elections,
the announcer says,
claiming they've been bullied to cook the returns.
Milagros dials down the volume and flips the brochure.

Bullet points lay out the perks. A work visa and help getting a green card. Housing placement, community resources. Advice on graduate school and “professional development.” A one-time stipend to cover moving expenses. One-way airfare.

What are you waiting for?
she seems to be reading, over and over again.
What in the world is keeping you here?

1973

Jim wrote letters, but only on Camp paper, with Camp pens. Guards held on to Milagros's bag—and any pens or paper in it—on their Sunday visits. Not for her, then, the soft, so-called pregnancy brain that struggled with facts and figures. Her memory, that deep-sea trawl she had perfected in algebra and Spanish and human anatomy, through exams and interviews and board certifications, stayed sharp. Also she had learned from the best, shadowing Jim at
Herald
meetings, armed only with a pencil.

Outside, she ingested all the news she could—even the candy-coated praise releases, as Jim called them, from the press secretary himself. She who once never had time for headlines and broadcasts now craved them like an addict. She worked at City Hospital until her due date, her legs swollen as she waited at security checkpoints throughout Manila. Some khakis eyed her belly as if she might be smuggling a bomb in there. And some waved her through without laying a hand on even her bag, as if she might faint or bleed or go into labor on their watch.

In May, Milagros gave birth to a son, Jaime Reyes, Jr., an epic butterball at nine pounds, ten ounces. Numbers that made friends and colleagues clench their faces in sympathy. The neighbors came and filled the nursery with Pepe and Pilar books, a wooden abacus, shape sorters and stacking rings, a foam floor puzzle of the alphabet.
Never too early.
Like Milagros, they'd all gotten where they were by worshiping the god of Education.
They can torch your house and rob you blind,
went the saying,
but they can't take Education from you.
Education made the rough places plain, as Horace Mann had promised, as the Thomasites had preached. Never mind that Education didn't always save them all. When Billy Batanglobo, the scholarship boy who'd dreamed up their little village in American graduate school, drowned; when the body of a student activist turned up not far from Diliman, her fingernails removed and skin checkered with ice-pick wounds, Milagros and her neighbors still kept the faith.

Not a day in his life did Jaime Jr. ever sleep in the crib that had been finished in the nursery. She put him there only when she heard an unexpected knock at the door and thought a khaki might be coming to inspect the house. Once the threat had passed, she brought her son back to the master bed, where as a rule he slept, between Milagros and her mother. “Just until he sleeps through the night,” she said, but her new son's heat and heft against her body became a sedative she needed. He was too small and soft to live above the railroad tracks.

Once the swelling in her ankles had gone down, Milagros returned to work. Just in time to attend the annual nurses' conference at City Hospital. This year's theme: “talent export.” Talent—sweeter than cane, lighter than timber, and cheaper than gold. “And on top of talent,” raved an undersecretary from the Department of Labor, in his speech to all the City nurses, “you speak English.” This gift from Uncle Sam was now theirs to offer the world: Filipino nurses could empty bedpans and run IVs anywhere on earth. Women Milagros had known in school and internship, at City Hospital and throughout the subdivision, had already scattered to Amsterdam and Los Angeles. Recruiters held special breakout sessions on the Middle East. The labor undersecretary quoted Papa himself, to big applause. “He says, and I quote,
We encourage the migration. I repeat, this is a market we should take advantage of.
” What was good for Melbourne and Dubai was good for Manila.
“Instead of stopping them from going abroad, why don't we produce more? I repeat, if they want one thousand nurses, we produce a thousand more.”

“I repeat, I repeat,”
Milagros ranted to Jim, in jail. “What are we—deaf, his people, or a nation of idiots?
Produce more?
Were we built on an assembly line?”

“Every good dictator loves a brain drain,” Jim said.

“
I
'm not going anywhere,” said Milagros. Ever since Papa had splashed his slogan on billboards all over the city—
NO PROGRESS WITHOUT DISCIPLINE
!
—Milagros really had become the angry daughter.

February 14, 1986

“Will Jaime come back for Valentine's Day?” Jackie asks.

At four years old, Jackie expects the kind of Valentine's Day she had last year. Cousins from as far away as Davao came to their party. In the yard, Vivi had spread bright green
pandan
leaves on tables. They'd feasted on fried rice and barbecue with their hands. Each child had a heart-shaped paper mailbox for cards and sweets. Milagros's brother dressed as Elvis and crooned love songs at all the girls.

This year, Milagros wishes she could boycott Valentine's Day. Protest's all the rage now—not just for the ballot counters. Fifty opposition members have walked out of Parliament, not buying the sitting President's self-proclaimed victory. The widow's called a boycott of all banks and TV channels owned by loyalists. No more shopping at Rustan's. No more drinking San Miguel beer, Coca-Cola, Sprite, Royal Tru-Orange. The archbishop himself won't eat until the President steps down.

Milagros remembers her own strike in front of City Hospital. Is it possible, she wants to know, to picket one's own life? If mothering's a full-time job, as all her neighbors love to say, can't she walk out on it too?

“No,” Milagros says to Jackie. “Valentine's will be quiet this year. It wouldn't be fair to have a party without him.”

In other countries, there are special ceremonies for guilt. Milagros wants to zigzag a sword through her bowels. To be a dark young bride and set herself aflame.
There
's a tradition she'd uphold, this year. Jackie brings a valentine from school, made of red construction paper. Milagros tapes it to Jackie's bedroom door. She remembered to ask Vivi to buy some candy and bubble gum this morning, but now Milagros can't find it. She corners the gardener. “Did you eat Jackie's gum?” She's become someone who spits out questions and does not wait for answers.

She understands a bit of Papa's paranoia now. Betrayal needs to happen only once to cloud your vision. After that, there could be poison in each cup, a bomb in every drawer. And it's those closest to her who seem most suspect. Vivi. Gloria. Her own mother, who disappears each day to church. (So she says.) When Milagros pulls herself from bed, she walks sideways, her back against the wall.

1975

Milagros would have liked to hire a maid. Almost every house in Batanglobo Village had one. Young
dalaga
saving up for school, or old spinsters sending their siblings or nieces through it. “Tessie's like my second pair of hands and eyes,” a neighbor would say. They slept on mats under mosquito nets on their employers' living room floors.
I couldn't do it without her.

But Milagros had to watch every centavo. She swept her own floor, washed her own dishes, unclogged her own toilet. Jaime went through formula, then jars of pureed Gerber vegetables, like a high-powered vacuum, and outgrew toys and T-shirts faster than she could wash them. There was the mortgage, lawyers' fees. A refrigerator that kept guests in sandwiches and beer. A husband out of work. Soba, no longer a puppy, needed fancier kibbles, a longer leash, a stronger flea shampoo. The mimeo ink. Paper. Repairs. She paid black-market prices for the foreign newspapers, magazines, and journals that no longer came through their mailbox. Above all, she tipped.

From the time of Jim's arrest, Milagros had tipped deliverymen (those duck-egg vendors, painters, piano tuners), security guards, police officers, soldiers, librarians, bus drivers, taxi drivers, wives estranged from powerful men, black sheep disowned by blue-blood families, children.
Tips
was what she and Jim called these bribes, in the Camp theater.
Did you remember to tip that bellhop yesterday?
The same word Jim and his colleagues had once used for leads and clues. “A tip for a tip,” said Milagros, thanking a source as they touched palms. She tipped people for addresses, locations, directions. She tipped drivers to bypass their appointed routes and wait while she completed her errands to take her home. She tipped secretaries for their bosses' files; she tipped interns for footage, for cassettes, for transcripts; she tipped phone operators for records; she tipped cashiers for receipts. The price tag varied. A few shiny centavos or
sari-sari
candies for the child who might point her to the right house. Upward of fifty thousand pesos to the khaki who looked the other way on a shipment of black-market ink. Tips were a line item in the household budget.

Her mother had now lived longer in their house than Jim ever had. The woman Milagros thought she'd rescued, when she pinned on her first nursing cap, from a lifetime of laundry tubs and ironing boards, came out of retirement to work for her daughter. She rocked Jaime Jr., who tipped the scales at over thirty pounds now, to sleep; or chased him as he learned to crawl and walk. It gnawed at Milagros to watch her mother's aging back bend to the kitchen sink and stove, to see her raw fingers grip a broom. The only payment she could offer was to bear, without a fight, the things her mother had to say about her husband.

Her mother doubted Jim, was harder on Milagros's man than she had ever been on her own. All the things she might have said about Milagros's father reared up belatedly, against Jim. She didn't read Jim's articles. It was enough to know that they had cost him a job and landed him in jail. Her daughter may as well have taken up with any common criminal off the street.

“You worked how hard on your degree, only to become his secretary?” said her mother, seeing Milagros stay up after her night shift to type.