by Nick Joaquin
“Si tui oblivero, Jerusalem. . . .”
But, now, a war had come and destroyed the house. It was waiting no longer. They might still go back, they could never go home now, thought Pepe Monson, more vividly remembering that house he had never seen (as he remarked to the woman standing beside him at the window) than any of the houses he had actually lived in.
“When my father was over there last year,” he said, “he went to see what was left of it. There wasn’t much—a piece of wall, a piece of the azotea—but the main stairway, which was all of stone, was quite intact; had even kept most of its balustrade. My father said it looked very sad: a stairway in a field of ruin, going up to nowhere. . . .”
But she saw it going up to the chandeliers and the noise of talk and fiddles.
“Whenever I see that broken stairway I feel your father waiting,” she said, smiling, and saw him standing at the top of the stairs, a fierce young man with whiskers, with a guitar strapped round a shoulder, bowing over her mother’s hand, whispering a word in her father’s ear, crouching down to greet her, a shy child in pigtails, taking her hands in his and asking was she friend or foe. He had led her to the dining room and had fed her grapes and ice-cream while they discussed the hardships of school life.
Before that year had ended he was in the field with Aguinaldo, and the gay armies of the Republic were advancing in triumph through the provinces. A few more years, and he and his general were pale fugitives, fleeing up rivers, through jungles, over mountains; the Yanqui soldiery hot on their heels. But he had resisted to the end—he and so many other splendid young men—resisting with the spirit when, bound and jailed, they could no longer resist with arms. Their general might submit; their general might take the oath of allegiance; their general might call on all the still embattled caudillos to come out and surrender—but these hardheaded young men flung at the Yanquis their gesture of spiritual resistance, preferring exile to submission. A foolish gesture, perhaps, and a futile one—but a beautiful, beautiful gesture nevertheless—and during those days that saw the failure of the Revolution and the establishment of new masters; when her father went about tight-lipped and stern-eyed, and her mother wept continually and put on black, and wailing people peeping through cracks in shut windows beheld what was left of their armies being led into prison camps by the Yanquis; all through those bleak black days that were the early springtime of her girlhood, the proud gesture of all those hardheaded young men had burst upon the deep gloom like holiday fireworks. People began to wear their grief with a smile, their defeat with a fine air. The conquering Yanguis might jeer at the quaint architecture, the primitive plumbing, the ceremonious manners; behind impassive faces, people shared a secret pride, a secret exultation, and a lengthening litany of names.
She remembered the night the news came that Doctor Monson too, though wounded and gravely ill, had chosen exile. She remembered her father standing up very straight, her mother kneeling, as though the Sacrament were passing by, and how she herself, a mere child, had understood what they saluted. She had fled to her room and had wept behind the locked door for the magnificent young man with fierce whiskers who had fed her grapes and ice-cream and had so deeply sympathized with her difficulties in arithmetic. . . .
“How I would love to see your father again!” she exclaimed. She had learned, as a child, the feel of greatness. She would always see her childhood as a page in an epic, brilliant with tears and splendid with heroes.
“I’m sure he would be delighted to see you, too,” said Pepe Monson. “Unfortunately,” he added, lowering his eyes, “he’s having a nap just now,” and frowned, for it was more than a nap his father was having. When he went to call his father to tiffin that noon he had found the old man slumped forward in his chair, unconscious, although his eyes were open and his mouth smiled. The third time this year that sort of thing had happened. . . . He had still to find out where his father got the drugs—from the Chinese house-boy possibly, and this would make the third house-boy he had discharged this year—but he thought the stuff more probably a left-over from previous medical supplies that his father had hidden around somewhere, although they, he and Tony, had repeatedly ransacked the cabinets in vain.
“Of course he hardly knows me,” said the señora, “but he would remember my parents.”
The honest vehemence of the memory was fast ebbing from her face; had laid waste its delicate style. She looked old, and so tired that he again suggested sitting down. Side by side on the sofa they discussed his father and her daughter.
“When I was a little girl people like your father were my conscience walking around in elegant clothes. . . .”
—When I was a little girl I thought everybody else had two navels, said a second voice in his ear while the first voice went on:
“They were a reference, a dictionary that I always had open before me. I could never doubt how a word like ‘virtue’ for instance was spelled. I might spell it with a ‘b’ because I wanted to, or without the ‘e’ because I thought it superfluous—but if I did I knew very well what I was doing and that it was wrong. I had no excuse. But young people now, like my poor Connie—”
“They have an excuse?” he suggested when she paused.
“Where’s the dictionary they’re to believe in?”
“How about the old ones?”
“And on whose authority—mine? Oh, I should have been to poor Connie what people like your father were to me. . . . You think she’s mad, don’t you?”
‘ “Don’t you think she might be sick?”
“Not more than everybody else.”
“—or unhappy.”
“Well, yes. She so wants to play the reckless sophisticate, but she has a conscience, poor girl, and it keeps her from doing the right things.”
‘ “Still, she did marry rather young.”
“Oh, she didn’t do that. I did it for her. I had to.”
And dropping her voice as she leaned intimately closer she began to explain why.
“Her father’s in the government, you know, and when Connie was still in school there were some stupid charges against him—bribery, and using up the public funds, and having his daughter on the government payroll although she was just a schoolgirl who had never been inside an office. It was all just envious talk, of course, and soon blew over: you know how politicians love to play pranks on each other, they’re such rogues. I never paid the matter any attention myself in spite of all the usual fuss the newspapers made. But the more sensational ones had carried Connie’s picture as the girl who was gypping the public of its money so she could study in an expensive exclusive private school—just their usual brutal vulgarity, you can see—but poor Connie seems to have been upset. She suddenly turned up at home looking haunted.
“I was at my dressing table, I remember, having my nails manicured in a hurry—I was going out somewhere and I was late—and of course I felt a bit annoyed as well as surprised when Connie popped up in the room. She was a boarder in that school and came home only on Sundays, but it wasn’t a Sunday, and it was after dark too. But Connie would explain nothing with the maid in the room. To humor her, I sent the maid away; but to keep everything casual, I went right on doing my face while the girl raved. She said she had run away from school and didn’t ever want to go back—that she absolutely refused to be educated on ‘stolen money.’ Imagine. I nearly swallowed my lipstick. I turned around on the stool to look at her: she was in that dreadful uniform of theirs, with clamps on her teeth and her hair sticking damply down her neck like an old mop. For a moment I was tempted to laugh at the little goose. But I made her sit down, and talked it over very solemnly with her, although I knew I was going to be ages late to wherever it was I was going.
“I told her that people who had our advantages must expect to be envied and reviled by people who were not so fortunate; and that there were many things grown-ups did which couldn’t properly be ju
dged by young people until the young people were grown-ups themselves; and that moreover it wasn’t ‘stolen money.’ Do you know what she said? She said no, it wasn’t stolen money, it was ‘blood sucked from the people.’ She had picked up all those frightful phrases from the newspapers of course but she insisted that they were insults the girls at school flung in her face. I immediately made inquiries—it’s a very careful school—and I found that Connie was lying. Nobody had said anything. Most of the girls there are daughters of politicians too and are so used to hearing nasty things said of their fathers and mothers they don’t think it’s anything unusual, or to be ashamed of. So I told Connie she must learn their spirit, and packed her back.
“She went off—but not to school—simply disappeared. For a week we had the police looking for her. They finally found her, working as dishwasher in a chopsuey joint in the Chinese quarter. I had to go and fetch her myself, she wouldn’t let the police touch her, she kept denying her name and actually seemed to have forgotten who she was, until she saw me. I don’t think I have experienced anything so sordid in my life. The Chinese were screaming all over the place: they had heard what an important man my husband is and the panic had spread through the neighborhood. When I arrived the police had to club at the crowds to let my car pass through and when I stepped out at the chopsuey joint the Chinese who owned it came rushing out and began whining and groveling at my feet. They looked awful: the police had been beating them up and their heads were bloody. I was taken to the kitchen, and there sat my poor Connie, on a stool, in the center of the room, with the entire police department massed around her.
“She was wearing a repulsive dress that she had bought at some market and she had painted her face and had had her hair cut. I was raging with fury, you can imagine, but I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the poor thing and I was afraid she might make a scene. I never make scenes. But the moment she saw me approaching she got up from the stool and hid her face in her hands. I told her she had been very naughty and should be grateful to all those nice policemen and I made her say thank you to them. Then I looked at my watch and said we must be going because it was lunchtime and I smiled around at everybody while Connie followed me out to the car. On the way home I said nothing and she said nothing. I had not kissed her nor taken her hand; I wouldn’t touch her; I wanted her to feel my fury—but she seemed to feel nothing, sitting there with her hands folded on her lap and her painted face a blank and that repulsive dress making her look like a cheap taxi-dancer on a dull night.
“Neither her father nor I had ever punished her before but when we got home I made her father give her a good old-fashioned spanking. I was dreadfully frightened: she might have fallen into worse hands. I resolved to marry her off, after a long trip abroad. She still refused to return to school anyway and seemed willing enough to be married.”
“Is her husband her age?” asked Pepe Monson.
“He’s thirty—but a very young thirty.”
“And she’s happy with him?”
“She was happy with him.”
“Oh.”
“There’s a bandleader here—Texaco or something.”
“Paco Texeira?”
“Do you know him?”
“He’s a Hong Kong boy. We were in grade-school together.”
“Well, he was playing recently in Manila and Connie became very infatuated with him. If she’s here now it’s to chase him some more. . . .”
Her vexation had revived and she did not care who saw it. As she launched into a spirited account of her daughter’s affair with the bandleader, Pepe vainly sought amidst the cold glitter of white furs and barbaric earrings the sentimental old woman he had almost begun to like.
When he protested: “But Paco’s married—” she leaned away and her amused eyes considered him ironically, her gold coins swinging.
He thought of Mary Texeira, who was tall and brown-haired: a great walker and mountain climber; an expert watercolorist (she organized outdoor classes in drawing during the summers); and the devoted mother of three. Dear good Mary might have no chic but he could not imagine her just fading away beside women like the señora de Vidal and her daughter. He could not, in fact, imagine Mary beside those women at all; it seemed so improper his cheeks burned.
Smiling, the señora averted polite eyes from his blush. She said, “It’s all very shocking, isn’t it?” She added that she was glad some people still took marriage seriously. . . .
Still thinking of the Texeiras, he saw the clean table of their marriage being approached at the edges by ominous furs, pearls, and gold coins—as though a rustic altar were drawing pilgrimages. And what with pilgrims dropping in all day—the señora now, her daughter this morning—he had begun to feel like a wayside inn himself.
• • •
“I’ve had them pointed out to me,” said Mary Texeira, “and, yes, they’re both equally stunning. You’d think they were sisters if they ever appeared together. But it’s the mother that’s the real beauty—dead-white skin and dead-black hair and a glitter of ornaments—like one of those jeweled madonnas in Spanish churches. How could you ever have liked the daughter better, Pepe? Oh, I grant you she’s more in the current idiom—but she looks rather cruel, don’t you think? Although I hear there’s no choosing between the pair of them. They’re jewel thieves, people here say, or gem smugglers perhaps. I’ve asked Paco if it’s true but he won’t talk about them although he saw quite a lot of them when he was over in Manila and they’ve been writing him such letters. . . . Don’t gape at me, Pepe. Paco himself gave me those letters to read. I didn’t want to, but he insisted. You did, darling, didn’t you?”
“I wish you’d shut up, Mary, and let Pepe drink his tea in peace.”
“Am I being a bore, Pepe?”
“Absolutely not. I’m all agog.”
“There, you see. Pepe’s my own buddy boy and his mamma’s going to cut him more cake. Which reminds me—Paco, will you see if the babies have finished their tea?”
“We’d be hearing them if they had. How’s your father, Pepe?”
“Not any better. Tony thinks we ought to put him in a nursing home, but I feel rather sorry for the old man. He’s been quietly going to pieces since he came back from that trip to Manila. I wish to God he’d never gone at all but it was the great dream of his life. . . . No, Mary—no more tea, thanks.”
“Here, have a cigarette. It’s just a Chinese brand, alas. We’re very, very poor right now. That’s why Paco had to go and work in Manila—and I wish to God he’d never gone either—”
“Do shut up, Mary.”
“—and what did he get for it anyway? Just a Boris Karloff look in the eye. I don’t mind doing my own cleaning and cooking besides looking after the babies; I don’t mind this sardine can of an apartment—it’s cute, Pepe, isn’t it? Just pretend you don’t feel my wash dripping over our heads—and we’re grateful to have a place like this with housing what it currently is in Hong Kong even if we do have to climb up those four filthy flights of stairs very carefully because they’re liable to break down any moment now. . . . Are you and your father still in that poky apartment on the waterfront?”
“Alas, yes. The stairs are just as dark and filthy: the rent’s a king’s ransom.”
“But you were planning to move to Manila—”
“That was the idea when father went there last year. He was going to arrange about having our house there rebuilt, and I was to follow. But since he came back there’s been no more talk of moving.”
“How you and Tony used to lord it over us when we were kids because of that going home stuff—”
“We were brought up on the dream.”
“Your poor father, Pepe—”
“I suppose he had to wake up sometime.”
“Do you know—I’ve begun to wonder a lot what it’s like in Manila. We all of us more or less belong over there,
but only Paco here—and your father, Pepe—have gone back—and see what it did to them. . . . But when I went to see the lovely señora de Vidal she assured me it’s quite a nice little place really—much warmer, of course, and rather dusty. . . . Why are you giving me that Karloff look again, Paco? Oh, you didn’t know I’d been to see your señora de Vidal? Goodness, hasn’t she told you yet? I was sure she’d let you know first thing—”
“Oh, damn it all!” gasped Paco, leaping so suddenly from the piano stool he bumped his head against the lines of washing strung across the cramped room, snapping them. He kicked aside the damp clothes fallen on the floor as he walked to the window, where he stood and trembled, his back to the room, his fists thrust into his pockets. He was lean and hard-bodied, with very black curly hair and a sharp swart profile; like Mary—who sat at the tea table, crumbling a biscuit into a cup—he was part Portuguese, part Filipino.
Hunched over the other side of the table, sadly knocking ash off his cigarette into a saucer, Pepe Monson noted again how like brother and sister the Texeiras looked (especially as they were at the moment wearing identical dark blue turtleneck sweaters)—like the stock twins of Italian romances, he was telling himself, when the dark twin faced around from the window and asked quietly:
“When did you go, Mary?”
“Monday afternoon,” she demurely replied, not lifting her head, her soft brown hair swaying down her cheeks.
“And why didn’t you tell me?”
“If we still told each other everything I wouldn’t have gone at all. But we’ve started to hide, we’ve started to lie—so how could I tell you? I just went.”
“But why, Mary—why?”
She looked up quickly and her dark eyes flashed.
“Because I was worried, because I was frightened. You’ve been so strange since you came back. And then those letters—Do you know, Pepe: he’s hardly left the house since he arrived. He takes a very early morning walk and then shuts himself up in here, all day. You’d think he was a wanted man—”