#681 The Kontrabida- Mia Alvar
A man travels home to Manila for the first time in ten years. He has been in America working as a pharmacist and sending home remittance to his enfeebled father. His father is now dying so he made the trip. He is loving and protecting of his mother, who he feels has been oppressed and subjugated by his overbearing and sometimes violent father. In fact, he sees the same violence is himself. This is why, he tells himself, that he hasn’t had children.
“Anytime a woman opened her mouth and I could imagine myself clapping a hand over it, pinning her to the bed, I knew that my father breathed somewhere inside of me. I couldn’t risk repeating his life.”
His father dies while he is there, perhaps due to some of the medicine he brought from his hospital. He sees different sides of his mother than he ever has, she has more strength than he’s ever known.
This is the first story in Alvar’s 2015 debut collection, In The Country.
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