In the Country (15 page)

Annelise was my neighbor, if you measured the distance in steps. I lived on a quiet hill in the town of Monte Ramon. She lived in the ravine below, among squatters in tin-roofed shacks who drank from the same narrow creek where they bathed. My mother's house, a
casita
in the Spanish Colonial style, had guest rooms, well-manicured hibiscus shrubs, and wrought-iron gates the servants needed keys to enter. These servants—a maid, a gardener, and a laundress—came from the ravine. One March afternoon, my mother fired the laundress. “The poor get so lazy in old age,” she complained—and Annelise's mother came to fill the vacancy.

So before I met Annelise, I met her mother. When she arrived, the new laundress stooped—to greet me closely, or so I assumed at first. She had on what we call a duster, the kind of sack-shaped dress ordained for housework. Her veiny, brittle-looking shins could have belonged to a much older woman. And the stoop I had assumed was for my benefit turned out to be her usual way of standing. To greet our new servant, my mother floated down the stairs wearing pearls and a shiny robe. She smiled, her teeth as white as when she was sixteen and crowned Miss Monte Ramon, the favorite local beauty. What teeth the laundress had were rotten. And unlike the laundress, who walked with a haste that suggested there were too few hours in the day to earn a living, my mother was not given much to walking at all, but could more often be found reclining: prone on our dark velvet sofa, or taking siesta upstairs, where only her gentleman guests were allowed to disturb her.

I was always conscious of the ways people moved through the world, because of my own condition. Where others have legs, I have only the beginnings of legs; below that, a semblance of ankles; and finally two misshapen knobs, smooth as stones worked over by water. I got around in an old manual wheelchair that once belonged to my grandfather. The reason for my handicap was neither accident nor illness. No: when I was very young, my mother told me of its mystical and far stranger origin.

My mother's father, Daniel Wilson, was an American GI who came to Monte Ramon in 1944. Our town had been invaded by the Japanese, and my grandfather was among the troops sent out to liberate us. As a soldier he helped evacuate the wooden statue of the Virgin of Monte Ramon—the gilt, gem-encrusted patroness of our town—from her church into the nearby mountains. This was to keep her safe from wartime desecration; yet strangely it was those carrying her who felt protected as they ventured deep into the forests and mountain trails. She became known, after that journey, as Our Lady of Safety.

At the height of the liberation, during a battle in the forest, my grandfather happened upon an Axis land mine and lost both his legs. America flew him home and nursed him at a veterans' hospital as the war was ending. Once healed, Daniel Wilson traveled back to help rebuild Monte Ramon and seek out a girl he'd met during his first visit. He arrived just in time for what became the very first Festival of the Virgin. Pilgrims came from all over the Philippines to make offerings to Our Lady, now salvaged from her mountain hideaway and safely reensconced in her church. Daniel spotted his girl (who would become my grandmother) in a parade, waving from a float of beauty queens. She descended from the float and placed a garland of
sampaguita
around his neck. One year later, they had my mother.

I never met this American grandfather, who died in 1963. But just before she gave birth to me, my mother had a vision. The deceased Daniel Wilson spoke to her, dressed in camouflage and lying in the forest where he'd lost his legs.
Although I am dead,
Daniel told my mother,
I shall live on through my grandson.
He told my mother to name me after him,
her
father, not after the boyfriend who would end up deserting her. Daniel Wilson would not reveal specifics, but said I would be different from other children and remind my mother every day of the family's legacy of pride and courage. And so I arrived: with a telltale lightness to my skin, and the vague buds of feet and toes that never quite articulated themselves.

My mother told this story often when she was not too tired. Its ending left her eyes lacquered with tears. She would gaze tenderly at her parents' wedding portrait: a fair-haired soldier in a wheelchair, Purple Heart pinned neatly to his uniform, and a Filipina bride standing behind him, her white-gloved hand on his shoulder. My mother saw no need to replace Daniel Wilson, Sr.'s old wheelchair for an electric model. “What was good enough for a man like Dad is good enough for us,” she said. (He was always Dad or Daddy to her—never Papa, or Tatay.) “Who needs a Motorette when you've got an heirloom like this? And who needs an ordinary father when you've got such a
grand
father?” My mother smiled at her own pun. As it happened, my “ordinary” father had left us soon after my birth, and was said to be living these days in Manila.

I tried to hold the stalwart image of Daniel Wilson, Sr., in my thoughts each morning when I went to school. My books were bound by a leather strap, which I would grasp between my teeth, while my arms pumped at the steel rings of my grandfather's old wheelchair. When I was younger, my schoolmates could be violently, unimaginatively cruel: there was a day they shoved me to the ground and ran away with my chair, leaving me to crawl hand over stump about a quarter mile until I found it. Sometimes they hobbled on their knees, in amputee fashion, beside me. They were often caught, of course, and punished by the priests; and so they soon discovered ways of mocking me that didn't risk lashings or demerits. Recently they'd christened me Manny—to rhyme with my nickname, Danny, but also short for
manananggal.
The
manananggal,
a mythical vampire, could detach from her own legs and fly her torso freely into the night, feasting with a forked tongue on the wombs of unsuspecting women. Whenever those other boys aped me or called me Manny, I thought of medals and uniforms, of the Bataan Death March, of my grandfather bleeding in a nameless wood. Did I think it would be a cakewalk, the road to glory? Was it easy for Daniel Wilson, Sr., to risk life and limb for the freedoms of his Little Brown Brothers? Of course not! “Christian children bear their burdens,” a priest once said to me, “and suffering burnishes our lives to a high radiance.”

Daniel Wilson, Sr., also helped me to endure the sordid claims that schoolmates made about my mother. Once, in grade five, I stood up to my tormentors, informing them that I was descended from an American war hero. “You'd all be speaking Nippongo now if it weren't for my grandfather,” I said to the other boys. I told them of my mother's vision and how my birth had confirmed it. My classmates' jaws fell open. The school yard turned so quiet I was certain I had put the insults to rest at last. But then from someone's mouth there came a sound like a balloon deflating, and everyone began to laugh and slap their knees harder than ever. “How precious!” “That is rich!” “What a grand inheritance!” “The baby's got his mother's eyes, and his
lolo
's stumps!” Then a boy named Luis Amador said: “That's a good theory, Manny. But I've got a better one. You didn't get this handicap from your grandfather. You got it from your mother—who earns her living on her knees!” To what seemed like a million voices cheering, Luis genuflected and bobbed his head like a chicken in a coop.

It was true my mother had friends in Monte Ramon's finest men: engineers; police officers; even, on one occasion, the mayor. These guests showed their gratitude to my mother in various ways. Bright flowers adorned our mantel every week. After a brownout, our lights were among the first in town to be restored. A priest from my own school gave her a
payneta
comb, carved from coconut wood into the shape of a lady's fan. “Oh, Father,” my mother breathed, fingering the comb's scalloped edges, “you are
too
generous.” She coiled her hair—cola-colored hair with streaks of copper in it—above her nape, and secured it with the comb. Even the dentist offered us his services for free—a welcome gift, as my teeth ached often from the weight of my books and other belongings. Countless men in Monte Ramon were good to my mother. I refused to believe, however, that she could somehow be degrading herself in the exchange. In her own words, my mother repaid her friends with “company and comfort—that's all,” and I did not consider it my province as a son to challenge her.

I suppose that there were reasons, as many as the hills in our town of Monte Ramon, to doubt my mother's stories; and reasons, as variegated as the stones that sparkled on our Virgin's robes, to doubt my mother herself. But what were reasons in the face of faith? I believed her—honoring, as the commandment taught me, both my mother and that greater, universal parent Himself.

In the month of March, every year since 1947, the town held a fiesta to honor our Virgin. Pilgrims flooded Monte Ramon to pay her homage, and men carried the statue of Our Lady from her church into the mountains and back again in a parade that commemorated her odyssey to safety during the war. Vendors sold roasted cashews and jars of coconut caramel along the streets.

The church stood between my school, General Douglas MacArthur Preparatory, and our sister school, the Academy of Our Lady of Safety. Tradition held that when the boys of “Doug Prep” and the girls of “Safety” were thirteen, we met and prepared to escort each other in the March parade. Half a school year's preparation led up to this, and the Safety girls arrived at our campus on a bright Tuesday in October. My classmates kept their hands in their pockets and their eyes on their shoes. The nuns and priests who had taught us Comportment told us now to introduce ourselves and make small talk. In my wheelchair, I sat apart from everyone.

“What's the matter with you, Manny?” Ruben Delacruz called out to me. “Haven't you been taught that a gentleman stands up in the presence of ladies?” His friends ate that one up. Ruben was our unofficial school prince, blessed with a screen-idol smile and a supernatural ease in everything from basketball to elocution. He was also the son of our one and only Dr. Delacruz, a man beloved in Monte Ramon. Dr. Delacruz ministered to a scraped knee with the same gentle attention as to a severe pneumonia. Every few years, when my back became afflicted with a pressure ulcer, Dr. Delacruz gave me antibiotics and applied the saltwater rinses with his own hands. An outbreak of influenza in the town, two years before, had Dr. Delacruz making house calls even to the grimiest parts of the ravine, with no concern for his own safety. It was these qualities that earned him the nickname the Messiah of Monte Ramon.

Dr. Delacruz's late wife was said to have died giving birth to Ruben. Other boys—like Renato Cazar, whose mother had succumbed to cancer; and Vince Santiago, whose father had run off to Cebu with a younger woman—were teased and shunned for their family situation, as if being half-orphaned was a disease anyone could catch. And other boys—like Oscar Padilla, whose father was a lawyer to accused criminals, and Nemecio Ferrer, whose father was a debt collector—seemed stained by their parents' work and clientele. Having both misfortunes would have surely doomed any other boy, but not Ruben. Somehow he'd fixed it early on so no one dared mention Dr. Delacruz's patients or the late Mrs. Delacruz's death to him; in fact, in Ruben's case, his father's work and mother's absence seemed only to heighten the air of specialness that hung about him always.

“Give Manny a zero in Comportment, Father O'Connor,” said Pedro Katigbak, though not loudly enough for Father O'Connor to hear. I stared down into my school trousers. The laundress had pressed a crisp, straight crease down each leg, long past the point where it mattered.

The girls, on their patch of campus green, paid little attention to us boys. In their pinafores and Peter Pan collars, they had formed a circle, singing:

Negrita of the mountain,

what kind of food do you eat?

What kind of dress do you wear?

I remembered hearing “Negrita's Song” in primary school, when we learned about mountain tribes like the Batak and the Aeta. The nuns took notice and put a stop to the chanting. Then some of my classmates, led by the brave Ruben Delacruz, started to approach the girls, and I saw Annelise for the first time.

Though a schoolgirl in uniform herself, she was unlike the others. She did not blush or chat with her classmates, or glance at us from the corners of her eyes every so often. Instead, she was reading a book. Anyone who was not a child was tall to me, but this girl, in particular, loomed. Her cinnamon-dark complexion stood out against the regulation white, and tight, spongy curls bloomed from her head, unpinned and unribboned. As if she sensed me looking, she glanced up and directly at me, displaying a blunt wide nose my mother would have called “native.”

After some secret chatter the girls brought their new boy acquaintances to Annelise. “How do you do, Negrita?” Ruben said, extending his hand as for a formal introduction. “Tell me: what kind of food do you eat, up there in the mountains?” Other boys followed suit, so that the insults of “Negrita's Song” could seem from far away like small talk. The girls grew red holding in their laughter. Before long both boys and girls had crowded around her. There was no response from our teachers, this time; they mistook the huddle for a social success, and smiled in our direction.

I had longed for the day when my schoolmates would find a new target, a victim other than me. Now that she was here—a girl, who seemed unfazed by the teasing—I felt none of the relief I'd expected. I felt only shame at my own school-yard weakness, and a deep curiosity about this girl they called the Negrita.

A few days later, when Annelise came to our doorstep, she struck the brass knocker despite the key her mother had lent her. I was midway through my daily push-ups, which I did against the armrests of my chair to keep the steering muscles strong. I wiped away the sweat above my lip and caught my breath as I wheeled myself to the front door.