In the Country (37 page)

She walks the corridor, expecting a puddle any second. But the floor is dry too. She knows then Billy Batanglobo's hers alone; no one else invited to his world.

“You can drive out there and see it for yourself,” she hears Jim saying. “Marines at the gates. Water cannon trucks and Scorpion tanks, on every road that could possibly lead to the palace.”

1979

Sunday after Sunday they met in the theater, where wives wept and husbands spoke low, and families sang to drown out their fear. They went to Father Duncan's makeshift Mass, exchanged code words. Before sunset Milagros would collect her son from the playground and leave.

But once a month, in a cabin on the other side of Camp, they let Jim's wife stay overnight. These visits flew. In the dark, Milagros and Jim shed the slow careful pace of theater Sundays along with their clothes. Codes and signs had no place in that cell. They did not talk politics. If they spoke, they did so in rough commands, single syllables, cries or grunts or sighs that were not words at all. On the first of these visits, she'd brought towels to drape over the surveillance camera and to line the doorjamb. But once she knew how fast the time went, she did not care what anyone saw or heard.

They talked about Being Careful. She was already raising a child alone.

“No,” said Milagros. “I want one place in our life where we can act free.”

But she didn't get pregnant. She came home to only one child waiting at the door. The child who followed her around like a lamb and bleated sadly when she had to go to work. The child who never questioned why the room that held his toys was not the room he slept in at night. All he wanted was to be near her. As well as she came to know her husband at Camp, she was convinced no son and mother ever were as close as she and Jaime were. She knew she'd have to cut the strings someday. But for now, Milagros held tight.

She did attempt to drill him for grade one as all the other mothers would. Jaime would look up from the flash card or the workbook, his puppy eyes pleading.
Let's ditch this boring business and play hide-and-seek.
Now and then she put her foot down. Some things he simply had to learn. But most times she relented.
We'll try again tomorrow.
When they went outside to walk Soba together, Milagros held the leash. As newlyweds Milagros and Jim had agreed: no chores until the age of six.
Play is the work of the child,
a schoolteacher-neighbor was fond of saying, and the Montessori slogan felt as powerful to them as
Makibaka!
or Fight the Power.

“Mama,” Jaime would say at bedtime, “you know everything, don't you?”

“Mama, I wish we could stay home from school and work tomorrow.”

“Mama, you're my best friend.”

He didn't care about politics. Life with Jaime Jr. was all cuddles, all games, all splashing Soba with the garden hose. The dummy shelter under the yard was his playground, the chute leading down from its round hatch his slide. It smelled like mold down there, and runoff from monsoons sometimes inched up from the dirt floor to Jaime's calves, but he loved it. And when the khakis came sniffing, Jaime showed them how his voice bounced off the round steel tunnel and the cot that he believed was there for him. When she had to cut off his cartoons to watch the news, she could send him down to entertain himself for ages with the walkie-talkies, the first-aid kit, the yellow Geiger counter Billy Batanglobo had left behind.

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.

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.