by Nick Joaquin
“Use your head, Mary—use your head! If I haven’t wanted to leave the house much, can’t you see it’s because I don’t want to run into those women?”
“Well, why not? Have you been raping them? both of them?”
“You went to see them—or her anyway. Why didn’t you ask?”
Her tense face altering: “We didn’t talk about you,” she announced haughtily.
“And what the devil did you talk about—nylons?”
“No—about my watercolors.”
The two men burst out laughing, and Paco, as he shook with laughter, propped his elbows on the windowsill and slowly slid down until he was sitting on the floor. “Mary, you’re wonderful!” he cried. “So you marched up there to ask that woman if I’d been raping her and she got you to talking about your watercolors instead—”
“Well, yes. She asked me what I did and seemed so interested when I told her that before I realized what was happening we were on our way to Rita’s curio store so she could have a look at my stuff. And, Paco, she bought two pieces: the one of Yaumati Ferry in the noon rush, and my pink and brown study of a Chinese funeral. She wants me to do her a tint of Our Lady appearing to the children in Fatima—for her bedroom, she says . . . Oh, stop sniggering, Pepe, or I’ll smash this pot on your head!”
“Oh, Mary, don’t! I’m not laughing at you, honest—the joke’s on me. What an absolute fool that woman made of me this afternoon! I sat there and let her pull and pull at my heartstrings—and she was only pulling my leg. And the way she talked about you, Paco, I’d never have thought you knew her well enough to rape her. I gathered, in fact, that she didn’t know you at all.”
“Did she say so?”
“She couldn’t even remember your name right.”
“The bitch.”
“But she doesn’t look it,” argued Mary with some warmth. “Even your cautious Rita, Pepe, was dazzled by her. She’s every inch the great lady. Monday afternoon, she was wearing a Chinese dress of black wool, slit at the knee, with a stiff collar and a golden dragon prancing up in front, but her jewels were authentic Javanese. She had been reading about the apparitions in Fatima and was carrying the book clasped to her breast, one finger stuck inside the pages to keep the place, and while we talked she seemed rather moody and kept getting up and sitting down again and referring to the book until finally nothing would do but she must read me out some passages that she said she didn’t understand. But what I heard in her voice was herself trying not to understand and denying that she understood and I felt really drawn to her, really sorry for her, and would have liked to rock her in my arms though I had on a shabby coat and my old beret, because her mild manner makes you forget what both of you are wearing—until afterward, and then you gasp. She’s a very small woman really—but what a vitality. How old is she—forty? fifty? You don’t notice her smallness, you’re not conscious of her age. I didn’t feel young or huge or shabby beside her—just my basic self. And I’m surprised you didn’t notice it, Pepe, but she’s deeply devout.”
“—because she dresses up in dragons and pagan jewels to meditate on the Virgin?”
“—because she meditates, in spite of the dragons and the jewelry.”
“I thought you were jealous of her, Mary.”
“Oh, nonsense,” she laughed, coloring a little. “Paco understands.”
“Of course I do, darling,” said Paco gravely, pushing himself up from the floor.
“—that I was frantic?”
“I’d feel worried if you weren’t.”
“And you haven’t actually been raping anybody, have you, dear?”
“Well, not all the way. . . .”
“I’m sorry I was frantic.”
“I’m sorry about your wash, Mary.”
“Here, don’t bother. I’ll pick them up myself—” And she jumped up to help him.
“Oh. Let’s just leave the whole damned mess,” he cried, “and go take the children out to the park, shall we?”
“The sun won’t last much longer.”
“We’ve got, uh, about an hour—or should I junk this watch. Coming along, Pepe old boy?”
“If I don’t make a crowd,” said Pepe, twisting around to grin at them, stooped head to head behind his chair, their arms loaded with the wash.
“He must enjoy watching the sexes fight,” said Mary.
“I’ll go get your beret and our babies,” said Paco.
• • •
When Paco Texeira took his band to Manila they had a contract to play at two night clubs there on alternate weeks for a minimum six months. His band, which was called “Tex’s Tune Technicians,” had been organized during the war and had done brisk business in occupation Hong Kong because, with the many cabarets that were still operating unable to import their musicians any longer from Manila, Paco’s band, composed mostly of stranded Filipinos, was the freshest wartime Hong Kong could have of American jazz handled the Filipino way. The Tune Technicians were really expert technically and kept turning up, throughout those three years of the gnawed root and the rationed gruel, with witty variations of very tired prewar tunes—but their value was chiefly nostalgic; when the war was over and Manila orchestras resumed their monopoly of the orient’s nightspots all the way from Calcutta to Canton and from Shanghai down to Surabaya, Paco found it harder to get prestigious engagements for his band, even in the restaurant and cabaret boom of postwar Hong Kong. He had been given the Manila contract because the two night clubs they were to play at were being opened by a Chinese millionaire (with Filipino fronts) who wanted to cash in on the swelling tourist trade in Manila by giving its night club set two places—the “Manila-Hong Kong” and the “Boulevard Shanghai”—which would be reminiscent of nightlife in those cities; and who therefore wanted dancebands fresh from Hong Kong and Shanghai to accentuate an atmosphere to be created by Chinese prints, lanterns, and mirrors on the walls, Chinese cigarette girls on the aisles, White Russian hostesses on the dance floor, and armed Bombay bouncers under the tables.
Paco, since late adolescence, had spent most of his nights listening to Manila stations on the short wave (to the great discomfort first of his mother and later of his wife, since Paco used an amplifier; although they had learned never to complain, because he was a fretful listener) and he could name all the major Manila orchestras of the last ten years; describe their present and past styles, and the intervening evolution; and could even remember the different night clubs they had played for and at what stage of their careers—but their music existed by itself in his mind and had no scenery behind it and few faces in front. The faces were of the bandleaders who had at one time or another played in Hong Kong and whom he had tried to congratulate for their ingenious re-creations of American jazz until he found that the bandleaders were quite unconscious of re-creating American jazz, of translating it for the oriental, which was what his ears told him they were doing but which they resentfully denied, preferring to consider themselves faithful approximations of their chosen American maestros. The general belief indeed that Filipinos alone in all the orient had an ear for American rhythms and could reproduce them with the least spiritual damage accounted for their monopoly of the orient’s bandstands but did not explain how American rhythms had been made sufficiently comprehensible in the first place (even granting the effects of the movies as cultural bulldozers) to be understood by the Hindu, the Chinese, and the Malay, unless it could be proved—and Paco thought it quite obvious, merely natural, certainly inevitable, and all to the good—that even in Filipino hands and even when those hands were being most deliberately groovy (not using that term in its swing language sense, of course), the indigenous music of the modern world did suffer a sea-change—a sea-change that might make American aficionados wince but gave to their too fearfully Jules Vernish rhythms a homely bamboo murmurousness instantly recognizable to the Hindu, the Chinese, and the Malay; the F
ilipinos being in this department (as well as in a number of others) the agents between East and West, building the Harlem gods a bamboo habitation this side of the Pacific.
In spite of his obsession with Filipino jazz, however, and in spite moreover of his Filipino blood, Paco had never felt any curiosity about nor the least affection for the country of his musician father; and when he went to Manila, was stirred by no sentiments of filial piety. Unlike the Monson boys, who were always conscious of being Filipinos, exiles, and the sons of a patriot, Paco was a guileless cosmopolitan and would have felt at home—or rather, would have failed to notice that he was at the North Pole as long as he had his piano, his drums, a good radio, some people to play football with, and Mary. But then his musician father (whose name was De la Cruz; Paco carried his mother’s name) had never lulled him to sleep, like the Monson boys’ father, with stories of the old country, and was away from home so much of the time that when he finally died in Harbin, Paco, who was thirteen at the time and had not seen his father for the last five years, could remember his face only from a photograph hanging over the bureau in his room.
He had gone to look at the photograph when the news came, after having stood about awkwardly, unable to feel anything, while his mother sobbed against the door, clutching the telegram in one hand and her apron in the other, for she had been preparing breakfast. Now she was crying in a hurry; she must not be late to work. She was superintendent in a Chinese clothes factory—a dimly smallish woman with the alarming smiles of a polite person feeling seasick and trying not to show it—and was originally from Macao, where Paco spent his boyhood summers with her family. The first years of her marriage, when she had accompanied her husband in his dreary odyssey through the cabarets of the orient, had been a nightmare of dirty trains and cargo steamers, cheap hotels, hunger, the sluttish bickerings of vaudeville folk of all races, and the dishonesty of absconding managers. She had been a convent-school girl in peaceful, clean, and pious Macao and she never got over her horror of the company into which she found herself thrown by her marriage. After Paco was born she had refused to follow her husband anymore; she settled in Hong Kong, and went to work to bring up her child, since the boy’s father seldom had any money to send and indeed had to be supported himself whenever, ill or without a job, he came to stay with his family in Hong Kong until the illness or the joblessness had been remedied. But she would not let Paco, when he was older, sell papers or shine shoes; he was going to school at the Christian Brothers and was always provided with good clothes and pocket-money; and in the squalid apartments from which they were always moving away because the drains stank or because the cracked walls crawled with bugs or because a prostitute had moved next door or because the apartments above had been raided for opium smokers, the single bedroom was always given to Paco, while she fixed up a corner in the living room, behind the piano, with a couch and a dresser for herself.
She endured meekly her boy’s coldness and brusque temper because she thought it arose from shame of their poverty—but he bullied her from compassion. When he saw her hurrying home in the cold streets, in her wretched coat, a bag of groceries clutched tightly under each arm and her face feverishly working because of the wild schemes for making money that she was always turning over in her head, his child’s heart would be so touched with pity that he would fall in fury upon the boys with whom he had been playing, provoke a quarrel and a fight, and arrive home even more savage than usual, barking at his frightened mother and reducing her to tears with some cruel remark, that she must be a crazy woman to walk about in public talking to herself. He had early hardened himself against her tears; she was always crying anyway, and over the silliest rot—but even when it was the death of his father that wrung her sobs he still could not bring himself to approach and console her; could only stand and watch her awkwardly until her sobs had subsided and she leaned limply against the door, hiding her face in the apron. Then he went to his room and sat down on the bed and looked at the photograph of his father hanging over the bureau.
The photograph had been taken when his father was still a vaudeville pianist in Manila and showed him in a tight striped suit of the ’20s, sitting at a piano, his hands on the keyboard, his young face turned sidewise to grin at the photographer. The tunes that his father was probably playing at that piano began to jingle in Paco’s ears—“Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby” and “Somebody Stole My Girl” and “The Sheik of Araby” and “I Wonder What Became of Sally”—making him smile, because they were being played in the fast jerky style with corny flourishes that his father had long outgrown but liked to burlesque when at home, for his private fun and the nostalgia. Paco idly turned the piano into a bed and stretched out the grinning young man on it and then animated the studio backdrop into a raging Siberian winter storm—but even after he had told himself that his father had probably died more of hunger than of pneumonia (since the manager of the troupe he had last been working for had run away with an Hawaiian belly dancer and all the troupe’s money) he still could stir up no feeling for the grinning young man in the tight striped suit dying on top of the piano. So he tried to remember what he could of his father talking but though he heard his father’s voice very clearly no words were distinct until he remembered that he and a crowd that included Mary and the Monson boys and Rita Lopez had planned to go mountain climbing that afternoon and was wondering if it would still be seemly of him to go along with them with his father just dead when he suddenly heard his father talking very distinctly about mountains. He had asked his father if he might climb the mountains when he was bigger and his father had laughed and said that even a baby could climb these mountains in Hong Kong: they were so bald and wrinkled they looked like old dogs that had lost their hair, and so small you could climb up to their tops and down again in half an hour—not like the mountains back in the Philippines that took days and even weeks to climb and were thick with trees and shrubbery and dangerous with wild animals. Then he had begun to tell Paco about a range of mountains just across Manila Bay that looked like a woman stretched out in sleep.
That was about the only time Paco could remember that his father had told him something definite about the country he had come from, and he remembered it again when from the railing of the ship that was taking him to Manila for the first time, to play at the two night clubs, he had looked up and suddenly seen, with a shock of recognition, a range of mountains that looked like a woman sleeping. He had clutched the railing as he gazed at the mountains in astonished delight, thinking of himself as a boy, seated on the bed, staring at his father’s photograph, and trying to stir up some feeling over his father’s death, while out in the kitchen his mother whimpered and rattled a coffee pot, preparing breakfast. The astonishment had renewed itself all the time he was in Manila, every time he looked up and suddenly saw the sleeping woman outlined against the sky—and it changed the indifference with which he had come to his father’s country into a stirring of clan-emotion—a glow, almost, of homecoming.
By the time he met the señora de Vidal he had become deeply interested in Manila and was ready to be interested in any woman who most piquantly suggested that combination of primitive mysticism and slick modernity which he felt to be the special temper of the city and its people: pert girls dancing with abandon all night long in the cabarets and fleeing in black veils to hear the first Mass at dawn; boys in the latest loudest Hollywood styles, with American slang in their mouths and the crucifix on their breasts; streets ornate with movie palaces and jammed with traffic through which leaf-crowned and barefooted penitents carried a Black Christ in procession—and always, up there above the crowds and hot dust and skeleton ruins and gay cabarets: the mountains, and the woman sleeping in a silence mighty with myth and mystery—for she was the ancient goddess of the land (said the people) sleeping out the thousand years of bondage; but when at last she awoke, it would be a Golden Age again for the land: no more suffering; no more toil; no rich and no poor. So that when Paco first m
et the señora de Vidal (he had been playing in Manila over a month by that time, and had been learning the city block by block and street by street) he had felt the same shock of recognition as when, glancing up from the ship’s railing, he had suddenly seen the range of mountains that looked like a woman sleeping.
Not that the señora looked as though she might be sleepwalking. She was fully awake, completely alive—but completely without flurry. Her poise was her verve: she did what she wanted without bravado attitudes. She called Paco to her table the first night she appeared at the “Manila-Hong Kong”—he was always being called to tables between numbers to be asked about Hong Kong personages—but the señora was not interested in establishing mutual acquaintances; she was interested in Hong Kong itself, where, she explained, she had spent her second honeymoon and many happy vacations before the war; she had been there several times recently, but always only for a few hours, passing through on her way to Europe or America; and she wanted to know: had the war greatly changed Hong Kong? But when he started to tell her she interrupted to ask what he looked so happy, so excited about—as she could not help noticing (she said) all evening. Paco laughed, and clicked into step: he told her all about his journeys of discovery through the streets of Manila—until it was time to return to the bandstand. She was with several young girls whom she had introduced as not her daughters; she danced a few times with the girls’ young men but mostly sat alone at the table, nibbling salted watermelon seeds, and chatting with people round about.
Before she left, a little past midnight, she called Paco again and suggested that—since he was curious about Manila; and she, about Hong Kong—they should meet and trade information. He agreed; she gave him her card; and late the next morning—and every day after that—they met at her house, which was a white Spanish mansion in a suburb of tree-lined avenues, very prodigal with pavement, and of newly built mansion villas, whose terraced lawns were unfortunately cluttered with signs that warned: “DANGER—The Dogs Are Savage!” and “BEWARE—There Are Armed Guards Watching This Area Night and Day!”