In the Country Read Free

by egg, cigarette by cigarette, people spending what they earned in a day to buy what they would use in the next.
    —
    That night I lay in my parents’ bedroom. Jet lag and the whir of an electric fan kept me awake. Somewhere above me a gecko made its loud clicking noise, and I was no longer used to the Manila heat. But I refused to sleep any closer to my father, even if it meant losing out on the AC.
    Down the hall, he groaned nonstop, as if to say, unless he slept, no one would.
    Growing up in this house, I used to hear other noises from him at night. I must have been four or five years old, lying where he did now, the first time a lowing through the wall made me sit up. Until it had echoed once or twice, I didn’t know the voice was his. My father sounded more like a flagellant on Good Friday, parading through the streets of Tondo. I thought my mother had found a way to strike back: that he was the one, this time, suffering and forced to beg.
    I rushed to the door they’d forgotten to close, and detected my parents’ shapes in the dark. He was sitting on the edge of the bed. Naked, but hidden from the waist down by my mother. She knelt, a sheet around her shoulders, wiping the floor with a washcloth. And though she was at his feet, though her shadow rose and fell as she cleaned, as if bowing to a king, my father did not look to be in charge at all. He peeled the lids off his eyes, unsticking his tongue from the roof of his mouth. His skin was waxen with sweat. Stripped and drained, limp and compromised—he could not have hit her, in this state.
    Then he saw me in the doorway. “What now?” he said, alert again, his fists starting to lock.
    My mother startled.
“Anak!”
She pointed past me, the wet washcloth covering her hand like a bandage. “Get out!”
    I ran out to the yard. Not to escape him, but because I knew he’d punish her for every second of my presence there.
    This was before I’d learned much about sex; I was too young to be disgusted by it. For a while after that, whenever I heard him groan in the darkness, I didn’t know enough to pull my pillow over my ears or run outside in embarrassment. Instead my father’s baying, and his stupor afterward, put me under a kind of spell. I’d listen through the cinder-block wall, believing he had fallen out of power, was in pain. Whatever else he might do to my mother, at any other hour, during this shimmering nighttime transaction
he
was the conquered one.
    —
    A swarm of aunts, uncles, cousins, and cousins’ children descended on the house early the next morning. I passed out all my
pasalubong,
or homecoming gifts: handheld digital games, pencil-and-stationery sets, duty-free liquor, nuts and chocolates I’d stockpiled on layovers in Honolulu and Tokyo. A
balikbayan
knew better than to show up empty-handed.
    After the gifts came the inquisition. How cold was it in America, how often did it snow? I kept my lines brief. I had a role to perform: the
balikbayan,
who worked hard and missed home but didn’t complain, who’d moved up in New York but wasn’t down on Manila. “You get used to the winters,” I said. I didn’t tell them I loved the snow, was built for the American cold, and felt, upon entering my first job in a thermostat-controlled pharmacy, that I’d come home. What did I miss most about the Philippines? “The food, and Filipinos,” I said. “Good thing the nurses always bring me
lumpia
and let me tag along to Sunday Mass.” But my days in New York never involved Mass or
lumpia:
outside of work, I spent my free time exercising at the gym, or cleaning my apartment on the twenty-eighth floor of a building made of steel and glass. What about women—was there someone? An American? “The hospital keeps me busy,” I said. “No one special enough yet to meet you.” I didn’t describe the women who sometimes spent the night with me, how they chattered nonstop, intimidated by the tidy home I kept. “Is this an apartment or a lab?”