In the Country (4 page)

In spite of what I'd told the staff, my father did not have a vast global fan club traveling to see him. No need to drag the wake on for days, as other Filipino families might for more beloved men: we would bury him later that second day. At the cemetery, a block of earth had been hollowed out for the grave. My aunts cooled themselves with lace fans, or brochures they'd lifted from the funeral parlor and folded into pleats. A priest read from his small black Bible.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
In this kind of heat the valley of the shadow of death sounded inviting.

My cousins' children broke flowers from the bouquet set on the coffin. Before the lid was closed and locked for good, I looked for the last time at my father's face, under its sheet of viewing glass. The mortician had not only restored the color but buoyed up the flesh itself, faking fullness in the hollows and droop. I could almost imagine that face moving again, the mouth stretching backward to spit. Nearby a headstone waited, even simpler than the banner on his flowers:
ESTEBAN SANDOVAL, SR. 1935−1998. SON
·
BROTHER
·
HUSBAND
·
FATHER.
My head ached, and my mouth felt dry; there was a grit behind my eyelids I couldn't blink away.

Now, at his grave, my mother wept into her white handkerchief. She still looked frail, the woman who cleared platters and pulled out chairs, who knelt at my father's feet and mopped up after him. Her tears affected me the way they always had. I swore to stop them; I'd do anything. I reached for her, then froze—afraid, for the first time in all my years consoling her, that I might cry myself. For years there'd been no question of how much she leaned on me, like any mother on her overseas son. It never dawned on me how much I'd leaned on her: to play her part, stick to the script. Her saintliness was an idea I loved more than I had ever hated him. I put my arms around her, making vow after silent vow. I'd never cut corners again, no matter what the value, who the victim; I would never violate any code, professional or otherwise. I would take her with me to New York. I would never leave her again. I'd bury the patches somewhere no one would find them, so long as she could always remain the mother I knew, not some stranger laughing in the dark.

My uncles turned a crank to lower their brother into the ground. They picked up shovels and began to bury him scoop by scoop. My mother passed her fan to me, then her handkerchief. It felt damp in my palm, the cloth worn thin and soft from all its time in the wash. She stepped forward to join her in-laws, struggling with the shovel's weight.

A smell of grass and earth took me back to the yard that once existed in Mabini Heights, and I half-expected an acacia tree to appear beside me, or my mother's voice to call me to dinner through the kitchen screen. I remembered how I used to climb that tree and sling a branch onto my shoulder, aiming sniper-style at the place in the house where my father might be standing. Another time I stabbed a fallen twig into the grass and twisted it, imagining his blood. But I'd fought tooth and nail to rise above that yard. Even in return for all the harm he'd done my mother, to harm him, to be
capable
of harm to him, was to honor what was in my blood. His blood. I trained myself into his opposite: competent, restrained
.
The hero in an old Tagalog movie did not win by stooping to revenge; there was a pristine, fundamental goodness in his soul that radiated out to crush the villain. Character and destiny—I believed in all of that, I guess.

My mother raised her foot and staked the spade into the ground. She heaved the dirt into the plot and made a noise, almost a grunt.
You don't know my strength!
Through all the melodramas that my family and I had seen over the years, in which the
bida
and the
kontrabida
crossed their swords over a woman, I never guessed that
she
might be the one to watch.

When Mrs. Mansour first came to the house, I thought she was alone. Naturally I could see only her face; the rest of her had been draped in the traditional black. But there was something modern about her right away, even ignoring the fact that she had arrived without a husband. She wore sunglasses—Chanel, I saw, as she approached—and deep red lipstick.

“Mrs. Sally Riva?” she said, removing the sunglasses.

I nodded. Only my birth certificate had ever called me Salvacion. I reached out to shake her henna-tipped hand, but Mrs. Mansour leaned in further, to kiss me on both cheeks. She smelled pleasantly of tangerine and something stronger, perhaps a spice. Once the outer gate had shut, she parted her
jilbab
to reveal a gold-embroidered bodice and a little daughter. “Here is Aroush,” said Mrs. Mansour. The child had been anchored on her hip and concealed by her clothes all along. Mrs. Mansour shifted Aroush's face to show me.

I was stunned. Back home in the Philippines I had been trained to work with all manner of “special” children. But I had never seen any child quite like the five-year-old Aroush. Her head swelled out dramatically at the forehead and crown, like a lightbulb. Faint brown smudges the size of thumbprints dotted her face. Along the left side of her neck grew a pebbly mass of tumors.

“Aroush, this lady is a teacher.
Hello, Teacher.
” Mrs. Mansour held Aroush's hennaed hand and made it wave. Through the rust-colored designs on her skin I could see more of the pebbly tumors.

I led them from the gate down a tile path to the house itself. A year had passed since my husband, Ed, and I had moved from the Philippines to Bahrain, and still I thought of these three stories as “the” house—not “our” house, certainly not “my.” Expatriate families like ours were well provided for: a car, a travel allowance, the promise of schooling if we were ever to have a child. Strangest of these provisions, to me, was the house. Too large for two people, it was outfitted with luxuries I never would have chosen: gold leather upholstery, curtains embroidered with camels and date trees, shelves and tables with brass frames and glass surfaces. Plush red carpeting covered every inch of floor except the bathrooms and the kitchen. We wanted for nothing, and none of it was ours.

Having grown up poor and Catholic, with the Beatitudes and tales of the first Filipino workers overseas swirling all around me, I still got nervous at the sight of luxury; I couldn't tell the difference between wealth and obscene, ill-gotten displays of it. In college, before Ed, I had dated a boy who railed against the president for exporting labor to the Middle East. To the editor of the
Metro Manila Herald,
he wrote about “the hidden cost of remittances” and said a peasant was a peasant was a peasant, whether on the rice fields or the oil fields, and that at least the Filipino rice farmer could come home every day and see his family. I thought of that old boyfriend sometimes, when I looked around my home at the life the oil fields had given us. Certainly we lived more like foremen than like farmers.

Mrs. Mansour stopped at a full-length mirror in the foyer. “Look here, little woman,” she said to Aroush. She lifted the girl's chin and draped the edge of her
jilbab
around the grotesque little face, so that two veiled heads were facing the mirror. “Who is that?” said Mrs. Mansour. Aroush grunted. I could see this was an established call-and-response between them, one of the few rituals in which a child like Aroush could be expected to react.

In the living room Mrs. Mansour spoke of the cool weather that day, which to me was not cool but merely less hot than usual, and of how much she adored people from my country, most of her household help being Filipino as well. Clearly we would circle for hours around the real purpose of her visit, unless I addressed it myself.

“Mrs. Mansour,” I said, “let me begin by telling you that I unfortunately don't speak any Arabic.”

“Of course,” said Mrs. Mansour. My friend Minnie had already informed her. But the language barrier, it turned out, did not disqualify me. Mrs. Mansour preferred it this way—for, unbelievably, she wanted Aroush to grow up bilingual.
Bilingue
was how she put it: Mrs. Mansour herself had learned French as a schoolgirl in Beirut. She supported Aroush's head against her chest as she spoke. With a clutched handkerchief, she caught a dribble of saliva from Aroush's mouth before it could land on their clothing.

I asked what else she expected out of Aroush's education.

“Mrs. Sally,” she replied, “you know of the deaf-blind Helen Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan?”

Aroush grunted.

“Teacher,
you
must be Annie Sullivan for my Aroush!”

I had been warned in advance about Mrs. Mansour's illusions. My friend Minnie worked as a maid for the Mansour family. “The child can't hold its own head up,” Minnie had said, “but Madame believes it will grow up to write poetry or cure cancer someday.” My friend had sucked her teeth, shook her head. “That must be something, no? To be so rich you think you can buy reality?”

“I'll need to know more about your daughter's history,” I said.

Aroush had been born at full term, the third of the Mansours' children and the only girl. At first the only trait to mark her as unusual was a largish head. The thumbprints did not appear until she was a year old, the skin growths some months later. The Mansours began keeping Aroush indoors, out of public view. “Often people do not love difference,” said Mrs. Mansour. She, on the other hand, surprised herself by how much she cherished Aroush's limitations at first. Aroush was the pliant and portable child every young girl imagined when she played at motherhood: you could dress Aroush and position Aroush and tote Aroush around like a doll. She provided no resistance—a welcome quality, said Mrs. Mansour, after years spent raising boys.

But by the time she turned two, Aroush had yet to grab on to things, roll to her side, sit up, raise her head, make sounds other than grunting or crying, or hit any of the milestones that had come naturally to Mrs. Mansour's sons. Thrusting her tongue by reflex allowed milk and soft foods to fall into her throat and be swallowed, but she had never mastered even an elementary sucking. The Mansours traveled to London, where a battery of tests pointed to a rare, profoundly unlucky combination of cerebral palsy and von Recklinghausen's disease. Her mental age would never advance beyond infancy. Language, of the conventional spoken variety at least, was not in the cards.

“So they said.” Mrs. Mansour shrugged. She took Aroush's hand in hers and gazed fondly at the henna.

In any other place, with any other parent, this might have been the time to discuss “realistic expectations.” But I was here in Bahrain, with Mrs. Mansour. I thought of Minnie, who cleaned the Mansours' house in Saar six days a week. I thought of my husband, working on the pipeline to Saudi Arabia all afternoon in the desert heat. Mrs. Mansour's hopes put me in a position to mend an injury, correct an imbalance. I took a deep breath, then fed her all the bright teacherly clichés I could muster. I talked of
needs
and
environment
and
response. “Education,”
I said, “comes from the Latin
ducere,
‘to lead'; and
e-,
‘out of.' ‘To lead out of,' ” I said. With my hands I made an ushering gesture.

Mrs. Mansour nodded, her eyes misting. Her face seemed familiar yet unreal, as if I had seen her before, but in a dream. As a child in Sunday school I used to read about certain queens in the Bible, women I pictured with dark eyes and crimson mouths, elegant and proud and doomed. Mrs. Mansour looked like that. Her skin, pale and smooth, was made paler still by the black veil that framed it.

“This is never so true as with the special child,” I continued. “You lead her out into the world. You lead her out of her own self.”

“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Mansour. “I believe this. I believe this for my girl.” She looked down at Aroush and smiled. “Teacher, shall we talk about money?”

We settled on an hourly rate of fifty dinars: only fair, we agreed, given my level of specialized study and experience. In truth, I had never been paid so well. Certainly I had never earned money for feeding a fantasy. Mrs. Mansour issued my first check right then, to cover any supplies needed in Aroush's first week. Before leaving she noted the bookshelves in the foyer, crammed tight with Ed's engineering manuals and textbooks I had kept since college. “A house of readers,” said Mrs. Mansour, with a nod of approval. “So are we. For me, to buy a car is desireful; to buy a book is needful.”

Until she used those words, it hadn't occurred to me to see these books as trophies—but they were, no less than a car, or even a house, would be for other people. I could have sold or given them away back home, but used up precious cargo space to bring them here. It wasn't as if Ed or I ever cracked them, these days. But our parents had cleaned floors to put us through college: these books stood for how far their sacrifice had sent us.

Aroush would come at eight o'clock every morning, like a regular child to regular school.

“I just can't imagine Mrs. Mansour with three children,” I told my friend Minnie the next day. “She seems too young. Or, more than young: ageless. Her complexion is like bone china.” Absently I ran my fingertips along a shawl whose peacock-feather pattern changed from blue to green and back in the light.

We were browsing Abdullah's Gift and Novelty Shop for toys I could use with my new student. It was Minnie's day off. She'd been the Mansours' maid for sixteen years, starting before Aroush's eldest brother was born. “Oysters,” Minnie said. “That's her secret. Madame eats one every night, to keep herself beautiful. And her skin cream, from Paris, has caviar in it.” Minnie followed me through the store with her hands clasped behind her back. She herself touched nothing, as if to do so would require a special kind of permission not likely to be granted.

I picked up a twin-bell alarm clock and set it to ring.

“What is that for?” Minnie pointed with her chin.

“Testing her response to sound,” I said.

“You think there's a problem with her hearing?”

“No. But I'll need to stimulate it if she's ever going to”—I cleared my throat—“acquire language.”

“Aroush acquire language! Are we talking about the same child?”

I sighed. “I'm not sure Mrs. Mansour is.”

“Well, who are you to argue, at fifty dinars an hour—right?”

The first time we met, Minnie and I had also been shopping, at the Central Market in Manama. I went there in the middle of the day to avoid crowds. A vendor was weighing my bag of prawns when Minnie approached and told me that I looked familiar; hadn't she met me before? “Who is your
amo
?” she asked. (Who was my master, she meant, my employer; whose maid was I?) I explained with a laugh that I was not a maid but an oil wife and that the only house I cleaned was my own. We were both embarrassed—Minnie fearing, of course, that she had offended me. But I didn't care about that. What mortified me was the change in Minnie's aspect when she learned I was—as she saw it—a rich woman; she retreated so quickly from small talk to bows and helpless apologies. She was under five feet tall, and small-boned, like my mother. Servitude had become a habit and posture of her body, in a way that felt painfully familiar: it really could have been my own mother bowing and apologizing to me there, at a fish stall in Manama's Central Market. In Bahrain I often missed my mother—craved her company and pitied her life, more than I ever had back home—and meeting Minnie felt like a reunion in some dream where my own mother thought she recognized me, then didn't.

I told Minnie that anyone could have made the same mistake. Recently I had read, in the
Manama Times,
about the wife of a Philippine ambassador, who was ordered out of the swimming pool at a Dubai country club. “The lifeguard told her only guests—no domestic helpers—were allowed there,” I said. “A diplomat's wife! So at least I'm in good company.” I would have gone on and on, just to put Minnie at ease.

Finally she did open up, coming back around to the idea of a friendship with me. This was during Ramadan, and Minnie was tired. “Their holy month is hell on me,” she said. “Every year I wonder if I'll make it to Eid. Fasting makes them cranky in the daytime, and their breath stinks. Then they run you off your feet at sundown and before dawn.” And while they slept off their feast, Minnie would dust, mop, scrub, sweep, and wax the house to perfection as on any other morning.

“You should see it,” Minnie said, of the Mansour estate. “Forget
house. Palace
is more like it.”

Months later Minnie found out that I had a degree in special education. It turned out that the mistress of the house she cleaned was seeking a private teacher for her daughter. “What's ‘special' about her?” I asked.

Minnie shuddered at the question. “Let's put it this way,” she said. “Money doesn't buy everything.” Then she described Aroush, who had spent most of her five years in her bedroom, its windows opening onto a terrace where she was taken for fresh air. Only the family and servants like Minnie—who changed the sheets and dusted there daily, and performed a thorough cleaning once a week—were allowed to enter Aroush's bedroom. Likewise, any teacher for Aroush would have to be foreign (that is, not an Arab), because the Mansours did not want word of their daughter's condition to spread within their own community.

At Abdullah's I paid for two bags' worth of plush toys, rattles, blocks, pacifiers, teething rings, and cups with training spouts. I had forty dinars to spare. Minnie checked the tag on the blue-green shawl I had admired earlier. “Forty exactly,” she announced with glee. “It's destiny.” When I hesitated, she said, “Oh, Sally. Madame won't ask you for a receipt.”