The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic

by Nick Joaquin

  Or has the spell broken for him at last? For his retablo is broken, the cathedral is broken, and the city he knew has been wiped out by magic more practical and effective than any he ever dreamt of.

  . . . And just as soon as the Liberation Forces opened the Walled City to the public, I went to see what war had left us of our heritage from four centuries. Nothing had been left—except the oldest and most priceless jewel of all: St. Augustine’s. The Puerta Postiga still stands, but most of the city walls have been leveled to the ground and the cathedral is a field of rubble. Into what city (I wondered) would St. Sylvestre now make his annual entry? In what cathedral would he say his Mass? The retablo of the Pastoral Adoration has been smashed into pieces and dispersed into dust. Does that release Mateo the Maestro from his enchantment—or must he still, on New Year’s eve, reassemble a living body from stone fragments to fulfill his penance of a thousand years?

  Later, I told this story to some GI friends, who straightway clamored that a buddy of theirs, while stationed in the Walled City, had actually witnessed this entry and Mass of St. Sylvestre on New Year’s eve, 1945. Unfortunately, the buddy had gone home to the States; but I took down his address and immediately wrote him, begging for a full account. His name is Francis Xavier Zhdolajczyk and he lives on Barnum Street in Brooklyn.

  Here is the letter he sent me:

  “. . . I didn’t know all that about living a thousand years or I might have acted otherwise. If that stuff is true—what a chance I missed! We were camped just outside the walls—on the grassland between the walls and the Port Companies. That night—it was New Year’s eve—I’d come back to camp early because I was feeling homesick. I was all alone in our tent, the other boys were still downtown celebrating. I lay awake a long time thinking of the war and of the folks back home and when was I going to see them. Around midnight I woke up from a doze and heard music. So I stuck my head out and I saw a kind of parade coming up the road. I wasn’t surprised then and I wasn’t surprised at anything afterward. I just told myself that you people must be having one of your New Year’s celebrations and wasn’t it too bad your churches were all smashed up. But I turned my head just then—and there was the Walled City, and it wasn’t smashed up at all. The walls were whole all the way and I could even see some kind of knights in armor moving on top of them. Behind the walls I could clearly see a lot of rooftops and church towers and they were none of them smashed up at all.

  I told you about not being surprised—I wasn’t. I simply felt I should go and take a look. So I dressed fast and ran out. The parade had stopped at a gate in the wall and a bishop was opening the gate and bells began ringing. There was another crowd waiting inside and they had a bishop too and the two bishops kissed and then they all went through the gate and I followed. Nobody took any notice of me. Inside, it was a real city, an old city, and hundreds of bells were ringing and they had a park with fountains all around and beside the park was a cathedral. Everybody was going in there, so I did too.

  You never saw such a sight! The bishops were saying Mass and it was all lighted up and the air swelled good like high mountain air and the music was so pretty you wanted to cry. Then I said to myself: what a picture you could take of this, to send home. But I hadn’t brought my camera and I decided to get it. So I ran out and down the street and past the open gate and into our camp. Nobody was around. I got my camera and raced back. When I reached the cathedral I could see that the Mass was ending. I aimed for a nice view—but right when I was going to snap the shutter the bells stopped ringing and—just like that—it all disappeared. The bright lights was only moonlight and the music was only the wind. There was no crowd and no bishops and no altar and no cathedral. I was standing on a stack of ruins and there was nothing but ruins around. Just blocks and blocks of ruins stretching all around me in the silent moonlight . . .”

  THE SUMMER SOLSTICE

  The Moretas were spending St. John’s Day with the children’s grandfather, whose feast day it was. Doña Lupeng awoke feeling faint with the heat, a sound of screaming in her ears. In the dining room the three boys, already attired in their holiday suits, were at breakfast, and came crowding around her, talking all at once.

  “How long you have slept, Mama!”

  “We thought you were never getting up!”

  “Do we leave at once, huh? Are we going now?”

  “Hush, hush, I implore you! Now look: your father has a headache, and so have I. So be quiet this instant—or no one goes to Grandfather.”

  Though it was only seven by the clock the house was already a furnace, the windows dilating with the harsh light and the air already burning with the immense, intense fever of noon.

  She found the children’s nurse working in the kitchen. “And why is it you who are preparing breakfast? Where is Amada?” But without waiting for an answer she went to the backdoor and opened it, and the screaming in her ears became a wild screaming in the stables across the yard. “Oh, my God!” she groaned and, grasping her skirts, hurried across the yard.

  In the stables Entoy, the driver, apparently deaf to the screams, was hitching the pair of piebald ponies to the coach.

  “Not the closed coach, Entoy! The open carriage!” shouted Doña Lupeng as she came up.

  “But the dust, señora—”

  “I know, but better to be dirty than to be boiled alive. And what ails your wife, eh? Have you been beating her again?”

  “Oh no, señora: I have not touched her.”

  “Then why is she screaming? Is she ill?”

  “I do not think so. But how do I know? You can go and see for yourself, señora. She is up there.”

  When Doña Lupeng entered the room, the big half-naked woman sprawled across the bamboo bed stopped screaming. Doña Lupeng was shocked.

  “What is this, Amada? Why are you still in bed at this hour? And in such a posture! Come, get up at once. You should be ashamed!”

  But the woman on the bed merely stared. Her sweat-beaded brows contracted, as if in an effort to understand. Then her face relaxed, her mouth sagged open humorously and, rolling over on her back and spreading out her big soft arms and legs, she began noiselessly quaking with laughter—the mute mirth jerking in her throat; the moist pile of her flesh quivering like brown jelly. Saliva dribbled from the corners of her mouth.

  Doña Lupeng blushed, looking around helplessly; and seeing that Entoy had followed and was leaning in the doorway, watching stolidly, she blushed again. The room reeked hotly of intimate odors. She averted her eyes from the laughing woman on the bed, in whose nakedness she seemed so to participate that she was ashamed to look directly at the man in the doorway.

  “Tell me, Entoy: has she been to the Tadtarin?”

  “Yes, señora. Last night.”

  “But I forbade her to go! And I forbade you to let her go!”

  “I could do nothing.”

  “Why, you beat her at the least pretext!”

  “But now I dare not touch her.”

  “Oh, and why not?”

  “It is the day of St. John: the spirit is in her.”

  “But, man—”

  “It is true, señora. The spirit is in her. She is the Tadtarin. She must do as she pleases. Otherwise, the grain would not grow, the trees would bear no fruit, the rivers would give no fish, and the animals would die.”

  “Naku, I did not know your wife was so powerful, Entoy.”

  “At such times she is not my wife: she is the wife of the river, she is the wife of the crocodile, she is the wife of the moon.”

  • • •

  “But how can they still believe such things?” demanded Doña Lupeng of her husband as they drove in the open carriage through the pastoral countryside that was the arrabal of Paco in the 1850s.

  Don Paeng, drowsily stroking his mustaches, his eyes closed against the hot light, merely shrugged.

 
“And you should have seen that Entoy,” continued his wife. “You know how the brute treats her: she cannot say a word but he thrashes her. But this morning he stood as meek as a lamb while she screamed and screamed. He seemed actually in awe of her, do you know—actually afraid of her!”

  Don Paeng darted a sidelong glance at his wife, by which he intimated that the subject was not a proper one for the children, who were sitting opposite, facing their parents.

  “Oh, look, boys—here comes the St. John!” cried Doña Lupeng, and she sprang up in the swaying carriage, propping one hand on her husband’s shoulder while with the other she held up her silk parasol.

  And “Here come the men with their St. John!” cried voices up and down the countryside. People in wet clothes dripping with well-water, ditch-water and river-water came running across the hot woods and fields and meadows, brandishing cans of water, wetting each other uproariously, and shouting, “San Juan! San Juan!” as they ran to meet the procession.

  Up the road, stirring a cloud of dust, and gaily bedrenched by the crowds gathered along the wayside, a concourse of young men clad only in soggy trousers were carrying aloft an image of the Precursor. Their teeth flashed white in their laughing faces and their hot bodies glowed crimson as they pranced past, shrouded in fiery dust, singing and shouting and waving their arms: the St. John riding swiftly above the sea of dark heads and glittering in the noon sun—a fine, blonde, heroic St. John: very male, very arrogant: the Lord of Summer indeed; the Lord of Light and Heat—erect and goldly virile above the prone and female earth—while the worshippers danced and the dust thickened and the animals reared and roared and the merciless fires came raining down from the skies—the vast outpouring of light that marks this climax of the solar year—raining relentlessly upon field and river and town and winding road, and upon the joyous throng of young men against whose uproar a couple of seminarians in muddy cassocks vainly intoned the hymn of the noon god:

  “That we, thy servants, in chorus

  May praise thee, our tongues restore us. . . .”

  But Doña Lupeng, standing in the stopped carriage, looking very young and elegant in her white frock, under the twirling parasol, stared down on the passing male horde with increasing annoyance. The insolent man-smell of their bodies rose all about her—wave upon wave of it—enveloping her, assaulting her senses, till she felt faint with it and pressed a handkerchief to her nose. And as she glanced at her husband and saw with what a smug smile he was watching the revelers, her annoyance deepened. When he bade her sit down because all eyes were turned on her, she pretended not to hear; stood up even straighter, as if to defy those rude creatures flaunting their manhood in the sun.

  And she wondered peevishly what the braggarts were being so cocky about? For this arrogance, this pride, this bluff male health of theirs was (she told herself) founded on the impregnable virtue of generations of good women. The boobies were so sure of themselves because they had always been sure of their wives. All the sisters being virtuous, all the brothers are brave, thought Doña Lupeng, with a bitterness that rather surprised her. Women had built it up: this poise of the male. Ah, and women could destroy it, too! She recalled, vindictively, this morning’s scene at the stables: Amada naked and screaming in bed while from the doorway her lord and master looked on in meek silence. And was it not the mystery of a woman in her flowers that had restored the tongue of that old Hebrew prophet?

  “Look, Lupeng, they have all passed now,” Don Paeng was saying. “Do you mean to stand all the way?”

  She looked around in surprise and hastily sat down. The children tittered, and the carriage started.

  “Has the heat gone to your head, woman?” asked Don Paeng, smiling. The children burst frankly into laughter.

  Their mother colored and hung her head. She was beginning to feel ashamed of the thoughts that had filled her mind. They seemed improper—almost obscene—and the discovery of such depths of wickedness in herself appalled her. She moved closer to her husband, to share the parasol with him.

  “And did you see our young cousin Guido?” he asked.

  “Oh, was he in that crowd?”

  “A European education does not seem to have spoiled his taste for country pleasures.”

  “I did not see him.”

  “He waved and waved.”

  “The poor boy. He will feel hurt. But truly, Paeng, I did not see him.”

  “Well, that is always a woman’s privilege.”

  • • •

  But when that afternoon, at the grandfather’s, the young Guido presented himself, properly attired and brushed and scented, Doña Lupeng was so charming and gracious with him that he was enchanted and gazed after her all afternoon with enamored eyes.

  This was the time when our young men were all going to Europe and bringing back with them, not the Age of Victoria, but the Age of Byron. The young Guido knew nothing of Darwin and evolution; he knew everything about Napoleon and the Revolution. When Doña Lupeng expressed surprise at his presence that morning in the St. John’s crowd, he laughed in her face.

  “But I adore these old fiestas of ours! They are so romantic! Last night, do you know, we walked all the way through the woods, I and some boys, to see the procession of the Tadtarin.”

  “And was that romantic too?” asked Doña Lupeng.

  “It was weird. It made my flesh crawl. All those women in such a mystic frenzy! And she who was the Tadtarin last night—she was a figure right out of a flamenco!”

  “I fear to disenchant you, Guido—but that woman happens to be our cook.”

  “She is beautiful.”

  “Our Amada beautiful? But she is old and fat!”

  “She is beautiful—as that old tree you are leaning on is beautiful,” calmly insisted the young man, mocking her with his eyes.

  They were out in the buzzing orchard, among the ripe mangoes; Doña Lupeng seated on the grass, her legs tucked beneath her, and the young man sprawled flat on his belly, gazing up at her, his face moist with sweat. The children were chasing dragonflies. The sun stood still in the west. The long day refused to end. From the house came the sudden roaring laughter of the men playing cards.

  “Beautiful! Romantic! Adorable! Are those the only words you learned in Europe?” cried Doña Lupeng, feeling very annoyed with this young man whose eyes adored her one moment and mocked her the next.

  “Ah, I also learned to open my eyes over there—to see the holiness and the mystery of what is vulgar.”

  “And what is so holy and mysterious about—about the Tadtarin, for instance?”

  “I do not know. I can only feel it. And it frightens me. Those rituals come to us from the earliest dawn of the world. And the dominant figure is not the male but the female.”

  “But they are in honor of St. John.”

  “What has your St. John to do with them? Those women worship a more ancient lord. Why, do you know that no man may join in those rites unless he first puts on some article of women’s apparel and—”

  “And what did you put on, Guido?”

  “How sharp you are! Oh, I made such love to a toothless old hag there that she pulled off her stocking for me. And I pulled it on, over my arm, like a glove. How your husband would have despised me!”

  “But what on earth does it mean?”

  “I think it is to remind us men that once upon a time you women were supreme and we men were the slaves.”

  “But surely there have always been kings?”

  “Oh, no. The queen came before the king, and the priestess before the priest, and the moon before the sun.”

  “The moon?”

  “—who is the Lord of the women.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the tides of women, like the tides of the sea, are tides of the moon. Because the first blood—But what is the matter, Lupe? Oh, have I offended you?”
<
br />   “Is this how they talk to decent women in Europe?”

  “They do not talk to women, they pray to them—as men did in the dawn of the world.”

  “Oh, you are mad! mad!”

  “Why are you so afraid, Lupe?”

  “I, afraid? And of whom? My dear boy, you still have your mother’s milk in your mouth. I only wish you to remember that I am a married woman.”

  “I remember that you are a woman, yes. A beautiful woman. And why not? Did you turn into some dreadful monster when you married? Did you stop being a woman? Did you stop being beautiful? Then why should my eyes not tell you what you are—just because you are married?”

  “Ah, this is too much now!” cried Doña Lupeng, and she rose to her feet.

  “Do not go, I implore you! Have pity on me!”

  “No more of your comedy, Guido! And besides—where have those children gone to! I must go after them.”

  As she lifted her skirts to walk away, the young man, propping up his elbows, dragged himself forward on the ground and solemnly kissed the tips of her shoes. She stared down in sudden horror, transfixed—and he felt her violent shudder. She backed away slowly, still staring; then turned and fled toward the house.

  • • •

  On the way home that evening Don Paeng noticed that his wife was in a mood. They were alone in the carriage: the children were staying overnight at their grandfather’s. The heat had not subsided. It was heat without gradations: that knew no twilights and no dawns; that was still there, after the sun had set; that would be there already, before the sun had risen.

  “Has young Guido been annoying you?” asked Don Paeng.

  “Yes! All afternoon.”

  “These young men today—what a disgrace they are! I felt embarrassed as a man to see him following you about with those eyes of a whipped dog.”

  She glanced at him coldly. “And was that all you felt, Paeng? Embarrassed—as a man?”