by Nick Joaquin
“I was walking with my doll one hot day in our garden and we came to a pond with goldfish in it. I decided that Minnie—Minnie was my doll—that she wanted a wash. So we sat down by the pond and I discovered that she had only one navel. I felt so sorry I cried, rocking her naked little body in my arms, trying to comfort her, and promising not to throw her away like the others. And then I became thoughtful. The day was growing dark all around me, it was going to rain. But whom was I sorry for? Which of us was wrong? I sat very still by that pond, my tears flowing and the raindrops starting to fall. I carefully examined Minnie again and when I found that she had other parts missing I grew calmer—but I had grown crafty too. Nobody must know that I suspected. Poor Minnie would have to be sacrificed because I had torn her clothes off and could not put them back again. I hardly noticed the thunderstorm as I hunted around for a string and a big stone. I tied the stone to Minnie, kissed her for the last time, and dropped her into the pond. I threw in my bracelet too. Then I ran home soaking wet and told the grownups that a thief had grabbed me and had stolen my bracelet and doll. They didn’t believe me of course—there are always armed guards planted all over our house: if you pushed a chair you bruised a detective—but everybody pretended to believe; nothing happened to me; except, that night, in my dreams, the goldfish ate up poor Minnie, and I was there in the pond, watching, and was not sorry. After that was like Eve after the apple. I was very careful about keeping myself well covered up especially when there were other children around being careless. I found out about them, they never found out about me.”
“How about your family?” he asked.
She said she was an only child. “Mother knows, of course. I don’t know about father. When mother or the maids gave me a bath they put on such matter-of-fact faces I was often tempted to point at myself and giggle. I knew that they knew that I knew, but we all pretended that I didn’t and that they didn’t. The setup was perfect for blackmail: I never had to threaten them aloud. If you beget a monster of a child it could prove you were rather monstrous yourself. I did what I pleased and was never punished. Can you imagine what kind of a childhood it was? If it was a childhood at all. . . .”
But once past the teens—“when you know how just one pimple can be such a torment: so think what I went through”—she had become indifferent. She had realized it was silly to squander thought and tears on so trivial an oddity; she stopped worrying. “My one big scare was when it became stylish to bare the midriff. Imagine! They would have been like pigs’ eyes peering out. . . .” But she had taken ill and stayed in bed until the style staled. She had fallen in love with several boys who wanted to marry her but she had always drawn back: she dreaded a husband’s eyes on her secret. “He might be horrified—I could never have stood that—or he might say I had cheated.” So she had put off and put off marrying—until, suddenly, she was thirty, and she turned frantic.
“I could see myself getting older, painting myself thicker—a regular hard-boiled veteran, up to my neck in clubs and charities—having affairs with younger and ever younger men and sneaking off on ‘combined-business-and-pleasure’ trips abroad. . . . Ugh! That sort of freelancing may be slick but it’s not everybody’s bowl of rice. So I swept a most eligible man off his feet—and married him, this morning.”
It was quite a wedding, the way she described it. She assured him it would be in all the papers—“and not on the society page either. On the front page.”
“Are your people important?” he asked.
“Father’s one of the sacred elders in the government, mother’s a famous beauty, and my husband has four or five generations of sugar money behind him. But that’s not why. About the front page, I mean. ‘Bride of the Season Marches Off the Scene Too Soon.’ ‘. . . Running up the stairs in her charming Paris gown, the bride then laughingly hurled the bouquet at her husband’s face, to the astonishment of a cosmopolitan crowd. . . .’”
“Did you?” he asked uneasily, and she laughed at him.
“No—of course not. We were having a very noisy breakfast at my house afterward, with all those cosmopolitan people, and he looked at me and I looked at him and he said shouldn’t we run over to his apartment and start packing because we were going off on an American honeymoon. I hadn’t slept for nights worrying over that moment. I thought: he’ll uncover and discover and everything will be over. And I remembered the little girl crying by the pond and Minnie naked and all the world suddenly dark. . . . But I smiled bravely and said yes to him, only I would have to run up and change first. So I ran up and changed and slipped down the backway and into a taxi and off to the airport where I took a plane. And here I am.”
“Here” was Hong Kong, in midwinter, on Kowloon side.
And why here? wondered Pepe Monson, removing bewildered eyes from her face and looking rather dazedly around the room; feeling the room’s furniture hovering vaguely—the faded rug on the floor; the sofa near the doorway, against the wall; the two small Filipino flags crossed under a picture of General Aguinaldo; the bust of the Sacred Heart upon the bookshelf, between brass candlesticks; the tamaraw head above each of the two shut windows . . .
Fog bulged against the windowpanes, as though elephants were wedging past. Hawkers, four stories below, sounded miles away—or whispering halfheartedly. Pepe Monson was grateful for the elephants and hushed hawkers but would have preferred the usual view at the window—of the harbor, gay with junks and ferry-boats; of the downtown buildings standing up in white ranks across the water, in the noon sun, the island’s rock delicately ostentatious behind them, with toylike houses necklacing the various peaks or stacked like steps up the slopes or snuggling into private shelves and niches down the sides. But there was a fog and no view, and the lights were on in the cold room, but the cold was only a mist her mouth made to the woman sitting before his desk, insulated in black furs to her ears, her hat’s brim cutting an angle of shadow across her face, and pearls gleaming at her throat when she leaned forward.
“But what on earth made you come here to me?” he asked. “Had you heard about me?”
“—from Kikay Valero. She said you did a wonderful job on her horse. So I thought I would look you up. Besides, you’re a fellow-countryman. You are, aren’t you?”
“My father is a Filipino, and so was my mother. I suppose I am too, though I was born over here and have never been over there.”
“Did you never want to go?”
“Oh, most awfully. I wanted to study there but my father wouldn’t let me. I went to England instead—and then to the Argentine, for the cattle stuff.”
He understood her careless glance around the room. When she caught his eye, she flushed and he smiled.
“At home,” she hurried to explain, “you would have an office that showed you had been abroad.”
“Maybe I will, when I go there.”
“Why wouldn’t your father let you?”
“He was in the revolution against Spain and in the resistance against the Americans, and when both uprisings failed he came and settled here and swore not to go home, neither himself nor his sons, until it was a free country again.”
“Well, it is now.”
“And he did go back, last year. But he didn’t stay long. Now we’re trying to persuade him to make another visit.”
“But why wouldn’t he stay? Was he frightened?”
She had leaned forward and the pearls gleamed.
Her face blurred before him as, growing sad, he thought of his father in the next room, sitting in an armchair, a shawl around his shoulders and his feet propped up on a stool and no hope at all in the quiet eyes fixedly staring ahead. . . .
The girl’s eyes were fixedly staring ahead too, and he drew back—though there was all the table between them—rather alarmed by the intensity of her regard and having fleetingly felt how odd that there should be in this room with him, making its furniture hover; that there shou
ld be seated before his desk, making its papers uneasy—in black furs and a black hat, with gray gloves on her hands and pearls at her throat—a woman who had two navels. But her eyes stopped short of him; the pause was hers alone; she had forgotten her question and was not awaiting the answer that he (the room having organized itself again around his old desk) was about to speak when she suddenly shivered and came to.
Sitting up and blinking away the tears while she fetched out her cigarette case, she remarked that her mother was in Hong Kong, too.
“Oh, does she live here?”
“No—just over on business.”
• • •
The señora de Vidal said: “But she’s not thirty, she is only eighteen—and she’s been married almost a year now, not just this morning. And I’m quite, quite sure she has only one navel. . . .”
She paused—to bite off an involuntary smile; then begged him please to continue.
Pepe Monson disconsolately cleared his throat.
The señora was in furs too; she was belted up in a white fur jacket and wore a polka-dotted scarf round her neck and gold coins on her ears. She was smaller than her daughter, more neatly a piece—as though scissored entire from a style page and managed to look relaxed although vexed. She had refused the seat by the table—remained standing at the window, watching the ferry-boats (it was later in the afternoon and the fog had lifted) while she listened to his account of her daughter’s visit that noon. The account, as he went on with it, began to sound more and more weird to him—and to her too, evidently, in spite of her vexation. She kept biting off smiles; kept glancing at him round the corner of an eye. Undoubtedly, she was laughing at him for having been taken in so easily and probably supposed him to have been charmed out of his wits. Actually, she was laughing because this pompous, pompous (and rather shabby) young man tickled her nostalgic bone. His bespectacled scrutiny reduced her to child size: repaired her skin; returned her into a schoolgirl’s frock; and restored her old pigtails. . . .
Guessing only the laughter, he privately fumed. Quick to smell the weather, she was instantly all formality. She deplored the misuse of his time but promised to see to it that a proper fee—
“But do you usually let your daughter run around telling indecent lies like that?” he cut in coldly.
“I don’t let her run around, I’m not her husband—”
She stopped short, aware that she had almost snapped.
The pause snottily informed them that, childishly, they were venting their vexation with her daughter at each other. They both suddenly laughed—then smiled at each other for having laughed. He moved away from the door to share the window with her, while, with the plaintive intonations now of an old acquaintance, she continued:
“I’ve had cables from the poor Macho—Macho’s her husband, Macho Escovar—and he tells me there’s nothing at all the matter between them. Connie simply wandered away. He thought she might have joined me here but I never knew Connie was here until I ran across Kikay Valero and Kikay told me Connie had been hunting up your number. Did she say where she was staying?”
“She said she had just arrived. We arranged to meet in town this afternoon. I was taking her to consult a friend of mine.”
“Then, would you please tell her—”
“But, of course, I don’t mean to go anymore.”
“No—of course not.”
“I’m sorry.”
She hung fire a moment. Then, turning around from the window, swinging her gold coins, and tipping her face up to his male height, she radiantly announced that she knew his father.
He registered astonished pleasure.
His father’s family (she continued) and her family were old friends. “And when I was in school your father was the school’s physician. I remember that the older girls were quite in love with him and kept praying for fevers. He was such a handsome, a magnificent gentleman. Your father’s family had a famous house in Binondo—Binondo’s one of the oldest parts of Manila, the most labyrinthine—and your house was famous because our great men loved to assemble there—to talk, to dance, to quarrel, to plot revolutions. Mother took me there a few times. I was just a child in pigtails and my eyes popped out with bashfulness. . . .”
She was seeing—as she radiantly rattled away, her eyes never leaving his face, her gold coins dancing—the carriages filing down the cobbled street and pausing to let people out at the open doorway that had a great globe of light shining above it. Stepping out of their carriage, she had lifted her eyes to the balconies at the upper-story windows. Behind the curtains chandeliers blazed, fiddles were busy, and shadows of people came and went, gesticulating. Up there on the tiled roof that rose black and white in the moonlight but would glow red at noon she had seen pigeons roosting. “Make haste, girl,” said her mother, standing under the globe of light. “Come, jump,” said her father, holding out his arms. Walking up the stairs between her parents she had kept turning her face right and left to watch the seashells marching up in twos. . . . It was a courteous cordial house—an old, old house even then, and this last war had finally destroyed it, along with all the dear labyrinth of Binondo.
She said: “It’s not there anymore—your father’s house. . . .”
He nodded: they had heard it was gone. And because he had begun to like her: “It was waiting for us to come home,” he added, and felt his father’s bony fingers on his hair; saw his father on the beach, seated on the sand, and booming: “The house of our fathers is waiting for us to come home!”
When his mother was still alive and they lived out Stanley way, they went swimming during the summers, the four of them that were all the family, to Deep Water Bay. He and his younger brother Tony wore trunks but their father wore an old pair of trousers and his pajama jacket while their mother wore a straw hat and sat on the sand and knitted. She did not at all care for salt water but was the most eager for these afternoons at the beach because the water always started his father talking about “home” and talking about home always relaxed his father who tended to brood. There was always a fleet of junks along the shore and the bathers were mostly dowdy family groups like their own: English, Chinese, Portuguese—Deep Water, in spite of its elegant white sand, is not fashionable; its currents and changing levels are too dangerous—but he and Tony and their father could race each other all the way to an island across the bay that was an hour’s fast swim going and coming back, although coming back they would feel so exhausted they could only crawl up the warm white sand to where his mother sat knitting beside the lunch basket and a rubber tire she always took along just in case she felt like a dip. While she handed the sandwiches around his father would tell them about the waters back home he had swum in when a boy. But what he most loved to talk about was the river that ran right behind their house in Binondo.
He would describe how their house in Binondo had a large stone azotea behind, with steps going right down to the water, and how you could go out on that azotea and buy everything you needed—rice, fish, honey, eggs, live poultry, feed for the horses, fruits and vegetables—from villagers rowing into town in small boats that looked something like American Indian canoes. The villagers’ voices were what woke you up in the morning and his father would jump up from bed and run to the window and it would be just light enough to see the small boat down there on the river and the two people it carried: the husband sitting behind and rowing; the wife standing up in front, facing the river, her hands on her hips, and her body turning this way and that as, very clearly, very solemnly, her melodious voice lingering on each syllable, she described her wares to the sleeping houses. His father would snatch a towel and run down to the azotea. On other azoteas, on both sides of the river, other boys would be stripping for an early dip and hallooing at each other. The water was never very clean—“but that never stopped us,” said his father, seated on the sand, eating a sandwich; and with one of his rare smiles he would add:
“And I hope that a few dead pigs or dogs floating around will not stop you boys from enjoying that river when we go home.”
Sprawled on their bellies on the white sand, at their parents’ feet, he and Tony would ask: “But when are we going home, Papa? When are we going to see our own land?” And if his father was in a good mood he would smile and groan: “Only God knows. We must move Him with our silence. Quomodo cantabo canticum Domini in terra aliena?” But if troubled in spirit, a mild sarcasm would strain the fine skin tighter against the sharp bones of his face as he replied drily: “Soon, perhaps. The news is getting better and better.” And his mother would quickly become very inquisitive about the house in Binondo: were its floors of good wood? how many bedrooms did it have? could the cousins be trusted to take good care of it until they came home?
She had never seen the house herself; she was much younger than his father—a ship captain’s daughter whom he had met and married here in Hong Kong when he had begun to realize that the exile he had imposed on himself and had at first so confidently supposed would last only a couple of years might actually last all his lifetime. He had married desiring sons; quietly resolved that he should at least go home in the persons of his sons if—which God forbid!—it were his fortune to go home only as the dead bones and ashes that they, his sons, would carry back with them, to be buried in their own land, when it should at last be the free land for which, when a young man, he had fought so long and so bitterly.
Seated on the foreign sands of a foreign shore, beside a young wife, his two sons sprawled on their bellies at his feet, he had boomed, placing a hand on the head of each boy:
“The house of our fathers is waiting for us to come home!”
And as, awed, they stared at him he had lifted his eyes from their faces to the horizon and murmured: