In the Country (36 page)

“There was a time you'd have been glad,” Milagros said, “for any of your children to wind up a secretary.”

“I was thinking then of secretaries who get paid for their work,” said her mother.

Another time she pointed to the bags under Milagros's eyes.
Even housemaids and hospitality girls take a day off once in a while.
It was true Milagros had worked a double at the hospital, then hosted friends of Jim's for dinner.

Milagros needed her mother to wash her uniform at night and starch it in the morning. To feed Jaime while she worked at the hospital. So she held her tongue.

“Don't worry about me,” Milagros said. “Helping you with laundry and then waking up early to study trained me well. I don't get tired easily.”

“You worked late and studied early,” said her mother, “so you wouldn't spend your life doing this.”

February 19, 1986

Jim visits their room more often than you would think. He's been sleeping on a cot in the basement, though everyone pretends it's the long news days making him do that. They don't say much to one another. At most, Milagros asks him what's new, and he does for her what he does best: report.

“Jackie's had her bath,” says Jim. “Vivi's winding her down for bed.”

“Did people come through for Ma's candidate?” she asks. “I can't see the beer boycotters lasting more than a day.”

“They did, and how. There's been a run on all those banks. No one's buying copies of the
Bulletin.
Rustan's is so empty you could hear a pin drop.”

“Still,” she says, “I can't see him just stepping down. Can you?”

“We'll see if he has any choice. He's losing hearts and minds in D.C. fast. Although the Gipper still won't come out and tell his old friend to resign.”

These are safe subjects. They don't fight; they have fought enough. Some days, Jim offers a hand, and usually, Milagros takes it. But the old sympathies that used to course between them don't return. Her hand turns limp. She absents herself from her own flesh, the way the infant Jaime Jr.'s weight would slacken in her arms as she rocked him asleep.

1976

Jaime Jr. grew upward and out, with an appetite to match his size. Sweets would be his downfall—so Milagros thought. Pocky biscuit sticks, White Rabbit candies, whose rice-paper wrapping you could also eat, Sarsi cola. He loved all of it; spent, promiscuously, his pocket change. In a year or two, she'd have to rein it in. Before the fat jokes began, or the diabetes or the rotten teeth. One day the knuckle dimples and the wrist folds would not be cute. “Jaime can wait,” she sang, like a broken record.
Jaime knows how to wait.

At his third birthday party Jaime reached for a Shakey's pizza that had not yet cooled, giving himself second-degree burns.
Jaime! What did Mama say about waiting?
She started him at Ateneo preschool with two bandaged hands. Other parents threw them side stares: what child burns both hands on a Shakey's pizza? How much, exactly, was known about Jaime Reyes, Jr.'s
life at home
? Milagros couldn't blame them. She would have thought the same.
Impulse control,
she noted in her mind.
Teach him impulse control.

These were her worries then, at the age of twenty-seven: rotten teeth, pudgy fingers, shiny wrappers, caps of soda bottles. She taught Jaime to chew on fluoride tablets that foamed red in his mouth. She set rules: milk and vegetables before cake and candy. Inside the walls of 26 Avalon Row, teaching Jaime the Lord's Prayer and marking his height on the doorjamb of the nursery every six months kept her calm enough to face that other world, whose rules and routines weren't hers to make. Camp, where her husband lived, indefinitely; where neighbors landed every day; where guards frisked all thirty-seven, thirty-eight, then thirty-nine inches of her son for contraband pens and paper.

Almost four years after his arrest, Jim finally found out what he had done to get there.

“They call it rumormongering,” one of the lawyers said, meeting with Jim and Milagros in the theater. A new charge for a New Society.

Jim tented his fingers. Milagros imagined them cupping around someone's ear, Jim whispering as in a game of telephone.
Rumormongering.
Four years came down to this cooked-up, girlie-sounding crime.

“It's a capital offense now,” said the second lawyer. “But we think we can talk the press secretary down to ten years. That is, unless you're willing…”

She knew what
unless
meant, and wished the lawyers would leave while she and Jim conferred. But Jim did not send anyone away.

“…to publish a correction.”

“Ten years is a decade,” she said to Jim, like an idiot.

“So by my math,” said Jim, “I've got six left.” She'd heard that prison aged a man, but by some miracle her husband looked the same. His face hadn't weathered like an old shoe, as some husbands' in the subdivision were starting to. He'd lost a little weight perhaps, a few pounds, which on his frame looked like more. Every day, next to a guard who took the blade back after, he still shaved his face clean.

“That's if you trust them,” she said.

“Your wife makes a good point,” said Lawyer Number Three. It was the lawyers who were growing old, the shadows darkening under their eyes. “It took this long to get a charge. Do you expect them to keep their word, when ten years are up?”

“Thank you,” said Jim. “You've explained the alternative.”

“Jim,”
she said. “Are you sure?”

He gave her the look he'd given in the yard when the khakis took him away. But they had a son now, didn't they? They'd lived apart longer than they'd lived together.

No matter; the discussion had ended. The lawyers looked at her with pity, so she tried a joke. “Rumormongering!” she cried. “
Tsismis,
in other words. If gossip is a crime now, they should arrest half of Manila. Why isn't my mother in jail?”

The first of the three lawyers resigned that day. A few weeks later, the second left for America. The third said, “I'll stay and fight for you,” but looked like all he wanted was a nap. Milagros understood they were alone now, in this life of theirs. Every Sunday, while her mother was at church near Batanglobo Village, Milagros and Jaime Jr. went to the theater.

“Hello there, little man,” was how Jim often greeted their son.

“No” was what Jaime had to say to his father. He hid behind Milagros's leg.

“Jaime, that's your papa. Say hello.”

“That's all right,” said Jim. He gave Jaime a smile. “We can dispense with the formalities.”

Jaime slowly yielded handshakes, hugs, high fives. Just before they left, maybe a kiss. Father Duncan said a quick-and-dirty Mass, with SkyFlakes and a gallon drum of Welch's grape juice. But Jaime never liked the theater, preferred the courtyard where the other prisoners' children played. Which was just as well. Jim had business to attend to with Milagros.

His sentences came out whole—forged, as she had also seen during the Billy Batanglobo project, in the calm factory of Jim's mind—and punctuated. Along with code names, Jim spoke in a full-body sign language that escaped the guards. For each paragraph break, he leaned back or forward in his chair. She had an excuse now to stare at the tented fingers she had always loved: a tap of his left fingertips to his right meant a comma. Right index fingertip to left was a colon; pinkie to pinkie a semi. He bent his knuckles and locked his fingers together for a period.

“I don't know how you do it,” a neighbor in the subdivision said. “What's a marriage, if you can't wake up next to each other in the morning?” But Milagros felt no woman ever knew her husband as well as she knew Jim, watching and reading him as she did.

Watching his hands move, she'd remember how they'd moved on her. She was in trouble when, in need of other signals, he actually did touch her. To open a set of quotation marks, his right hand took Milagros's left; to close them, his left her right. Now and then he traced his fingertips along her brow, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear and finishing along her jaw and at her chin, the approximate shape of a question mark. She closed her eyes then, the signal for him to repeat what he had said, more slowly; she would concentrate on getting it this time. Very rarely did he flick the end of her nose with his fingertip, in exclamation, and when he did he almost always shook his head no, the signal to erase. By the time he crossed his leg under the table, making sure he brushed Milagros's shin along the way, to say the piece was finished,
she
was finished too.

She stood on clumsy knees, sometimes skipping the good-bye embrace, afraid that would undo her altogether. She rushed out of the theater, grabbed their son from the courtyard, and drove home, shaking all the way. After depositing Jaime with her mother, she made it to the study Jim had yet to use, the only room at 26 Avalon Row that had a lock. In private, she wept. Once she recovered, remembering her task, she unlocked the door and washed her face in the hall.

It was her professional self who returned to his study after that, to feed the stencil sheets into the typewriter and tap out his new byline, Mia E. Jersey. An anagram, easy enough to unscramble. He did nothing, either, to disguise the style familiar to any of his onetime
Herald
readers. Taunting the regime, currying disfavor. It shocked her how short the pieces turned out to be, on paper. Her hours in the theater with Jim felt so much fuller than the palm-size square of text she'd later type onto the page (single-spaced, and framed by thick white margins, as Jim liked it); and clone on the mimeograph; and pass on to the neighbors, who passed them on in turn, to people headed for America or elsewhere, who sometimes brought them to Jim's friends at foreign papers, some of whom reprinted them.

These days Jim was paying close attention to a Camp inmate who slept ten cells away from him. They'd crossed paths years before at the Congress Building. A senator who never met a camera or mic he didn't love: Jim had taped him calling the regime
a garrison state,
the First Lady
our latter-day Eva Perón.
A presidential hopeful (any fool who followed politics in Manila knew it), dropping chestnuts for voters to repeat at dinner and remember at the polls. The 1973 election would have been his big chance, but for the Proclamation and arrest that landed him at Camp, with Jim, who could not convince the guards to allow a private interview. And so the Reyeses could only watch the former senator and his wife from a distance in the theater on Sundays, praying at Mass, talking. They code-named him Kuya, or big brother; and his wife Ate, big sister, for symmetry's sake.
At least I didn't marry a politician,
Milagros thought. Kuya had refused a trial—
kangaroo court
was his chestnut now, and
trumped-up charges
—and taken solitary confinement, a hunger strike, and finally a death sentence, instead.
There but for the grace of…
For all the trouble Jim was in, Milagros thought, another woman's husband had it worse.

February 22, 1986

The first time Billy Batanglobo—the dead man who designed this house—appears to her, she senses him in her skin, the spread of cold pinpricks along her back. From her bed, facing the wall, she hears a dripping sound, smells fetid Pasig River water. And when she turns he's standing in her doorway: the bloated, water-rotted version of the man she's seen in Ateneo yearbooks, whose name still surfaces now and then inside their mailbox.

“We threw all your mail away,” she says. She's not afraid of ghosts. Especially not one in soaked Levi's, his muddy Adidas leaving puddles on the floor as he approaches, his polo shirt clinging to his swollen gut.

Nineteen men have been arrested and detained at Fort Bonifacio for an attempted coup and an assassination plot against the President and First Lady.

“I swam ashore while it was still dark,” Billy Batanglobo tells her, the water leaking from his ears and nose. “And there were navy boats already parked from the bay to Guadalupe, guarding the palace.”

“You were well out of it,” Milagros says, meaning Manila.

“And now you want out too,” says Billy. “You'd like America. I stayed for seven years, and only left so I could re-create it here.” He sits on the edge of the bed, close to her knees, but Milagros doesn't shift away from him. “But I should warn you. You can leave a place, but places have a way of not leaving you. I learned that after Vietnam. You won't forget what happened here, no matter where you go or how you try.” His body makes a damp print in the sheets, and still she doesn't move. Something about him, foul and decaying as he is, attracts her.

“Jim and I defiled your house,” she says, again to prove she's not afraid. “We weren't even married yet. Your body wasn't cold. We christened every room in your precious little model home.”

Billy Batanglobo laughs, also unafraid. “And that's the kind of memory I mean,” he says. “The kind that will hit you, on a sidewalk in New York or wherever, so hard you have to sit down on the curb to catch your breath. And who's to say you deserve to forget? You, about to leave your daughter, in a country that still doesn't know its own fate?” Billy leans over, seizes her wrists with sopping, pruned fingers, bringing his face so close she smells his gassy river breath and sees the veins through his stretched, almost translucent skin; and then, as the cold water drips from his face onto hers, she
is
afraid. She closes her eyes. “There
is
one way to forget—
truly
forget—everything.”

“Jim doesn't believe you drowned yourself,” Milagros whispers, without opening her eyes.

“Does it matter? I'm gone, aren't I? You can come with me.”

He repeats the invitation twice, three times, lying beside her in the master bed and holding her until the words sound like a lullaby, a consolation. She dreams of forgetting as Billy forgot: by floating, and then sinking. She wakes alone. The sheets are dry. She checks the living room: Billy's not there; no one is. All she hears is Jim, on the phone in his study, with the door open. “Asylum in the States,” he says. “That's what I'm hearing.”