In the Country (32 page)

Milagros wouldn't be so sure. “We thought the worst of them wouldn't harm a child.”

“Let me do this for you,” her mother insists. “Just tell me who you want up there, in Malacañang Palace.”

Sweet, too, that her mother, who has shared this house with her for thirteen years now, doesn't know exactly how Milagros—the old Milagros—would have voted. Jackie, with her antenna ears, would have known, at four years old, which box to check.

“Don't bother, Ma. I used to care about these things. But now I don't at all.”

1971

“You're famous!” said her brothers, three days into the nurses' strike. A
Herald
had landed at their door in the middle of the night. On page one, instead of a flood or volcano, instead of an election, instead of America: Milagros, in her bandanna, with her sign.
CITY SHOULD REWARD EXPERTS, NOT EXPAT$.

In fountain ink, under the headline, Jim had circled the date: June 23. From there Milagros followed his arrow to a tiny margin.
And the rest is history,
he'd written by hand.

The next morning, 160 nurses showed up at the picket line. “Never trusted any union,” one of them declared, “but fair is fair.” Some came from different hospitals, talking
alliances,
community.
Here and there a sympathetic doctor joined. “If we could do our jobs without them,” one said into Jim's Dictaphone, “wouldn't we?”
Herald
subscribers read of nursing students, bused in to City Hospital, giving out the wrong drugs in the wrong doses. Saw photos of the elderly with bedsores, waiting hours to be helped to the toilet. “What's lost in all this hoopla,” said the chairman, when Jim got him on the phone, “is the City Hospital standard of
patient care,
which ought to be these ladies' first priority. Or what's a nurse for?” A few readers wondered the same in letters to Jim's editor.
The City nurses made their point. At whose expense?
But Manila in 1971 had seen arrests on Burgos Drive, beatings in front of the U.S. embassy, deadly showdowns between students and riot police. Hearts and minds were predisposed to chant along with the young nurses.
Equal pay for equal work.
EXPERTS, NOT EXPAT$.
And the chairman of the board of City Hospital hated scenes more than he hated unions. On a rainy day in July, Milagros saw him cross the wet grass toward the picket line, asking for a word with her.

From then on you couldn't separate them with a water cannon. At night, Jim met the City Hospital patients Milagros called her kids. Some still had their hair, the chemo just begun. Others couldn't lift their eyelids. He shook hands with a boy whose tumor had grown into his spine, numbing both his legs. By August all the children in “Pedia-Onco” were playing reporter instead of doctor. Holding blood pressure pumps up to each other's faces for “interviews.” Scribbling leads and datelines in the diaries the social workers had left them.

Milagros learned shorthand and how to operate Jim's Dictaphone. During interviews she learned to listen past his subjects' answers, pay attention when they shifted in their seats, cleared their throats, blinked as if the air was dusty. She watched him bring a single pencil to story conferences while his colleagues bumbled with clipboards and fountain pens and briefcases. Jim tented his long fingers, with their trim, clean nails, before his mouth as he listened. He waited to speak, his posture a priest's.

She descended with him into the bowels of the
Herald
headquarters, where massive sheets of newsprint rolled above their heads. The earthy, even fecal smell of ink and wood pulp in her nostrils and her lungs. The presses chugging like a train along its track: a sound that filled her brain and rearranged her heartbeat, till it seemed
she
had become a press, her body printing heds and deks and sentences and stories.

He called her Jo, as if he knew she'd never answer to the likes of
sweetheart.
Who knew where the nickname came from? Maybe Josephine Bracken, José Rizal's Irish muse. Or the toughest of Alcott's Little Women, a tomboy with big plans, who wanted more than what her sisters wanted.
Jo
she didn't mind.

She had another boyfriend at the time: Narciso Beltran, who taught theater where they'd gone to college. The kind of boy who lived at the center of people's attention. Wolfish eyes. Outsize lips. A rasp in his voice that could bring out the nurse or mother in any woman. He never called himself an actor, though; he preferred
performer.
“As are we all,” he liked to add.
Life is a performance.

Naz, as people called him, had been her one link to the campus tribe of long-haired boys and girls. On the same stages where he'd once played Lear and Oedipus and Cyrano de Bergerac, he now coached a new generation of leading men, staging plays Milagros didn't always understand.
Indirection is the only language I trust,
Naz liked to say about his style. Just before she broke it off, Milagros watched his Filipino take on
Jack and the Beanstalk,
set in the foothills of the Mayon volcano. The giant bellowed in military-industrial language; the farmers and the magic soybeans stood for labor and capital. That night she told Naz.
I've decided to focus more on my job than on my social life.
He wasn't fooled. “There's someone else,” he guessed, and Milagros didn't lie. “I see,” Naz said, when he asked who Jim Reyes was. “You want to marry someone with a Serious Career.”

Sneering words, that sounded as if purged from his throat with a finger. The grandson of a sugar baron, Naz could afford to sneer at institutions. Jim's people in the north had been farmers and servants. Degrees and titles, memberships and mottos, Jim's press passes and Milagros's City Hospital ID, were false idols to someone like Naz, knickknacks only squares and parents worshiped.

“No one's said anything about
marry,
” she said. But Naz wasn't wrong.

Until Jim she hadn't planned it.
I enjoy being
paid
for my work,
she used to say, against marriage. Throat cultures, spinal taps—those things compelled her more than caring for a man did. To the question of children she would say:
No man I know strikes me as worth repeating.
She had a pocket full of answers just like that, before she met Jim.

Jim grew up where the President had: on a rice farm up north. “Back then I called him Manong Freddie,” Jim said, of the plantation owner's eldest grandson. Jim's own grandfather had plowed the muddy, mosquito-infested paddies in rubber boots and a
salakot
hat. Jim's father and Jim himself would have been fated to do the same, until the day Jim's father, as a teenager, long before Jim was born, saved the infant President from a house fire. “This
utang na loob
will not be forgotten,” Freddie's father had said at the time, and it wasn't. Jim's father moved up from the soil to the garage as the family driver, the kind of trusted servant close enough to live in the family's house, eating at their tables, washing at their sinks.
Utang na loob:
a debt of the heart, an unrepayable soul-debt. By Jim's birth and baptism, Freddie had graduated from law school, and visited home in time to stand as Jim's godfather. Jim went to school on the family dime, collecting gold stars and 100s while his godfather won a seat in Congress, picking up a paper route in town while other farm children his age were still planting rice seedlings. When their roads improved, the townspeople took it as a personal gift from the new congressman, a wink at the family driver to whom he owed his life.

At the 1961 inaugural, Freddie, now a senator, introduced his godson Jim, now a City Desk reporter at the
Herald,
as “the man whose father saved me.” They shared memories of fishing in the Padsan River, village disputes over cattle,
traysikel
rides in town. Catching sight of each other at a “press-con” would yield a nod, a smile, a warm clasp of the shoulder. And even when Jim pressed his godfather on politics—in '65, when he switched parties just in time to run for President; in '66, barely sworn in, when he sent troops into Saigon, a move he'd blocked while he was in the Senate—these challenges felt academic, like staged classroom debates between their younger selves: the lawyer and his journalism-student godson.

Milagros had to doubt Jim's other stories of his first days in Manila: stories of a hayseed struggling to decode restaurant menus and working hard to lose his country accent. What place or language could ever claim Jim? To her he was original as Adam. Near a colony of tin shacks by the Pasig River, she watched him rescue a basketball from mud and shoot hoops with half-naked children. Hours later he stood at an Ateneo podium in his best
barong,
to accept a medal for alumni who had done the school, and the country, proud.

That summer, the
Herald
sent Jim to the “Con-Con,” a convention on proposed changes to the 1935 Constitution. One by one, he heard from delegates what they'd received from Malacañang Palace in exchange for what it called “correct” votes. One senator's nephew, guaranteed a spot at the Military Academy. A grant, no strings attached, to a congressman building a bridge in his hometown. And for the others, envelopes of cash. At the palace, beluga caviar and Dom Pérignon and a slideshow of the questions on the table at the Con-Con, and the “best responses.”

Yes
to a new Parliament, replacing Congress, whereby a former President could come back as Prime Minister.

No
to a ban on ex-Presidents running again after two terms.

Yes
to the right of any President or Prime Minister to rule by decree.

The story earned Jim his first “love letter” from the Office of the Press Secretary. “I must be doing something right,” he told Milagros.
You are therefore urged to adjust your claims against the administration,
she read,
and to issue the proper errata to the
Metro Manila Herald
articles published on the following dates.
Atop the page floated a yolk-yellow sun, borrowed from the country's flag, inside a bright blue wheel: a seal so cheerful she could swear she'd seen something like it on one of her kids' Get Well Soon cards.

Instead of “adjusting,” Jim covered the bombings at Plaza Miranda in August. Two hand grenades thrown at a Liberal Party rally, sending that party's senators and Senate hopefuls to City Hospital. In September, he looked into what the palace called an attempt on the new defense minister's life, shots fired at his Ford sedan behind the Wack Wack golf course. A driver whose story didn't match his boss's. Bystanders and a bodyguard, who saw things differently. The President, who blamed Communists—for this as for Plaza Miranda—but didn't, Jim noticed, arrest or even question any.

Later that week, on
Meet the Press,
the President, addressing
Herald
allegations—Con-Con bribery, staged assassinations. “They call us politicians
balimbing,
” he said. “But I think it's the media who are most like star-shaped fruit.” Without naming his grown godson, Manong Freddie looked—to Milagros, who watched him on the Pedia-Onco waiting room TV—truly wounded, as by a brother. “No fewer than ten faces,” said the President. “And zero loyalty.”

February 7, 1986

Vivi, the live-in maid and nanny, wakes her with water. That Vivi can splash water on her
amo
's face speaks of her particular status in this family. It's how she wakes the kids, also, when they are lazy.

Milagros sits up. The radio's still on. She never turns it off—after thirteen years as a reporter's wife, the instinct to keep up hasn't died. Besides, she can't stand total silence.
The National Movement for Free Elections needs your help,
the announcer urges.
Go now to one of these embattled polling stations. Guard the ballot boxes to make sure everyone who votes is counted.

“Get up, ma'am,” says Vivi. “You can lie down again later, but first take a bath. Ma'am.”

Already in the bathroom there's a drum filled with warm water.

“At least don't smell like a sad woman,” says Vivi. “Ma'am.”

Once Vivi passes the
tabo,
Milagros pours small pailfuls on herself. Her skin feels tender, almost insulted by the water. She takes her time, giving Vivi a chance to change the sheets, open the window, air out the master bedroom. Over a month now she's slept on and off in there, not rising except for the bathroom, changing her clothes only when Vivi (no one else can) makes her.

After she dries off and gets into clean clothes and sheets, back in the bedroom, Milagros waits for the cutoff, for the familiar feedback, snuffing out the radio announcer. One order from the President to his press secretary, one visit from their “muscle,” would kill the station's power faster than you could say
PLEASE STAND BY
. But on the broadcast goes, the Election Day blow-by-blow. As in a regular democracy. Broadcasts and elections a birthright.

Her mother and Vivi have both said,
Why don't you turn it off, if it upsets you?
But Milagros isn't sure it does.

I beg you, if you have the luxury of time and transportation,
the announcer says,
stop listening to me. Turn my voice off now. Get to your polling station. You owe it to your country to help out.
A year ago this woman might be dead, or jailed, within the hour. It's like Jim said: the President's gotten too weak to give orders. Or other men, too strong to follow them.

1972

A Friday, near shift's end. Milagros found Jim in the Pedia-Onco lounge, watching
The Porky Pig Show
on TV, waiting for her. Not smiling. Not really watching Porky Pig, either, but leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. Fingers tented at his temples, forcing his head to hold some news it didn't want. A grief-pose. Milagros knew it from the City Hospital fathers. The ones who couldn't always cry at first.