by Nick Joaquin
Paco had no intention of snuggling up with a married woman old enough to be his mother—nor by the least flick of an eyelash did she ever indicate she had anything up her sleeve except a lady’s arm. If he was Tex to her she was never Concha to him; though they were daily together they were seldom alone together. She was an active clubwoman: in the mornings Paco drove her to hospitals, orphanages, committees, conventions, cultural lectures, and mah-jongg sessions. In the afternoons she took him for tours through the slum barrios of the city, so he might savor the style and swagger of what she called “los majos de Manila”; or out to the country, so he might see carabaos and hear folk music; or to the homes of intensely nationalistic families, so he might catch—among the lavender and old lace; the ikons and family albums and interior patios; the elaborate baroque furniture and the framed daguerreotypes of mustachioed patriots—a feel of the country in the old days. In the evenings they met at whichever night club he was playing, where, arriving late with people picked up from the night’s parties, not dancing much and remaining cool and composed while folk rioted, she sat and nibbled watermelon seeds until the club closed, when she would collect Paco and a dozen other persons for a midnight snack at her house.
Intimate with no one, she yet needed a crowd always around her; the door shutting at dawn on the last guest oppressed her like a coffin’s lid. Locked in her room, she paced the floor and prayed, wringing her hands but unable to weep; and quietly rocked herself to sleep, crouched at the bedside or collapsed on the floor. She would wake up the next morning completely refreshed. She had bathed and breakfasted and had called up Paco to plan their day together when their companions of the night before still lay comatose in darkened chambers.
Paco liked her for her flat impartial sandpaper ruthlessness which, though harsh on first impression, did not leave rough edges on one’s feelings but a tingling smoothness. The moist childhood with his mother had cloyed his loins with piteousness; he liked his women dry, and had found so congenial a wife in Mary because Mary too (though she might look so tender-hearted) hugged a thrift of sentiment as grim as his own. He and she had stepped over the prostrate bodies of their respective families to marry: she, abandoning a boozy father whom she had quietly supported since she was fifteen because he considered himself too hopelessly an artist to work; he, abandoning his uncomplaining mother to a pension and her relatives in Macao. He never had to feel his way around Mary: she was so much himself as to seem his twin; and in the first weeks of his friendship with the señora de Vidal he found no difficulty in writing Mary about it. Mary, reading the letters in Hong Kong, rather anxiously smiled at his ingenuousness.
He said that he found the señora a refreshing haven of neutrality but really meant that he liked feeling at home among her tea-cups and having her fine car to drive around as though it were his own. He did not think much of the people she ran around with but he enjoyed their collective sparkle and audacity. He had never met her husband nor any of her children—she had had four sons by her first marriage; a daughter by her second—but this absence of her family seemed natural enough since she spoke of them very freely and so often—her husband had made such-and-such a speech; her two sons that were killed in the war had been posthumously decorated; her daughter Connie, recently married, was learning to cook—that Paco sometimes felt they were all in the next room, awaiting a cue to come in . . . though they were never in the next room; and he realized that if she too had indeed stepped over her family, her duty to them fulfilled, to do some private living, she was not making conversational mountains out of her step for nosey people to climb and explore. Paco was not nosey; she could omit even the molehills: the ground was always clearing before them. Yet their relationship, which should have ranged unhampered over more and more cleared ground, since they had refused from the start all the dense hedging between men and women, became—as Paco grew aware of the eyes around them—increasingly stalled and static instead: an isolation on a desert island.
He fumed to find his private life becoming public jest.
—Who’s the son of a Turk?
—Oh, that’s Concha Vidal’s latest fancy boy.
The moment he entered a room where she was, the movement of people knowingly stranded them together, but pruriently encircled. Even the members of his band had developed a special smile for him, which he could feel widening as he turned his back. Once, his nerves snapping, he swung a fist at the saxophonist, disrupting a morning rehearsal. His apology dropped like a pebble on the bandsmen; he had always been aloof with them: they were now frankly hostile. They complained that he skipped rehearsals to take his querida shopping.
Paco grimly broke off with the señora. He ignored her at the night club and eluded her over the telephone. She wrote to ask what was wrong: he did not reply. She came herself to his hotel: he was always out.
He had resumed his solitary explorations of the city but what he now saw increased his discomfort: the heat-dazzling panic-edgy streets darkened in his brains with doom, dirt, danger, disease, and violent death. Some venom was at work here, seeping through all the layers, cankering in all directions. The señora’s world of mansions might sit uneasily on its avenues; the hovels of the poor squatted no less nervously on their gutters. The avenue matrons might not get up from a mah-jongg session for days and nights except to eat and relieve nature; the gutter matrons breakfasted, lunched, supped, and suckled their babies right at the gaming tables, and frequently relieved nature there too. And the young people who emerged each morning from the world of bugs in your bed, pigs and poultry in the rooms, and gutters sluggish with excrement and drowned rats, were no less brushed, polished, plucked, painted, perfumed, silk-shirted, nylon-hosed, wristwatched, and bejeweled than the spoiled darlings in the world of the avenues.
Paco sensed an unreality in both worlds: the people who occupied them did not seem to be living there at all. They denied the locale—but their denial was not the asceticism of the mystic nor the vision of the reformer, but merely the aversion of the opium eater. They stepped over reality as they stepped across their gutters with the transient frown of the tourist, the neutral disgust of the foreigner. Their drugged eyes denied the garish imitation mansions no less than the patched-up tenements where four or five families lived huddled together in each room and did their cooking, eating, and washing in the foul passages; where there were no lavatories and the people used the unspeakable roofless public outhouses—or any corner of the sidewalk. They denied the heat and the dust and the rats as well as the not quite authentic glitter of the downtown smart shops and the swanky clubs—for in the world of their minds, they moved with cool expertness, rich and poor, among marble halls and ivory baths and luxurious wardrobes; through streets that were all Park Avenues, where every building was an Empire State, and every car a Rolls-Royce; where the men were all Pierpont Morgans, and all the women unaging, unfading Betty Grables. One might have to eat cold rice and squat on a pail in the outhouse and sleep on a bug-ridden floor: one sighed and pressed a scented handkerchief to one’s nose and invoked the vicarious magic of one’s wristwatch (just what all the Wall Street tycoons are wearing now) or of one’s evening dress (just what all the New York hostesses are wearing now) against the cold rice, the rank pail, the buggy floor. . . . One smiled and floated away, insulated from all the drab horror of inadequate reality by the ultra-perfect, colossal, stupendous, technicolored magnificence of the Great American Dream.
But the strain showed in their faces—in their shifty eyes and cold sweat and anxious smiles; in the way they tried to walk—and the frantic way they danced; never for pleasure, never with ease, one eye always on the audience, sweating from the violence of their exertions and from sheer terror of not being up-to-the-minute, of not making an impression, of not being able to do what everybody else was doing. . . . So they jerked harder, and laughed more naughtily, and sweated agonized—while, alone at her table, the señora de Vidal sat and nibbled watermelon seeds, remai
ning cool and composed while the room rioted, and chatting with people round about—until Paco began to feel that though he fled her and she sat still, he never escaped, he never moved at all: she was always there behind him, smiling at his back, and nibbling watermelon seeds.
After only a week, he stopped fleeing and she tracked him down.
He was presently escorting her again everywhere, defiantly—for were he and she (she asked) the sort of persons to let wagging tongues wave them this way and that? But he had glimpsed the panic beneath her poise, and had felt the ground sway at his feet: their desert island was mined. Neutrals no longer, they fixed boundaries and could not resume the various commerce of the early days. He was sulky and nervous with her; she was more attentive, more deferential toward him; so that, without ever having been lovers, they looked more like lovers than before.
—Pero mira que tio tan turco-turco!
—Cuidao, chica: es el nuevo steady de la Vidal.
Paco suffered from the strain of the relationship—and from a feeling that he was being watched all the time, everywhere. He had stopped writing to Mary. The contract with the night clubs still had three months to go.
• • •
One hot afternoon he was waiting for the señora in her living room: she was out but was expected. He had drawn the curtains against the sun, for his head ached with the heat; and as he lay in the darkened room, sprawled on his face upon the piled cushions of a sofa, he suddenly had the feeling, more sharply than usual, of being watched. Looking up, he saw a girl standing in the doorway. He knew instantly that she was the daughter. As he rose she came into the room and said that she was Connie Escovar. She announced that her mother would probably not be coming home that afternoon: a dreadful thing had happened. Some friends of hers, ladies of great social importance, had been murdered by bandits in the provinces. Their bodies had just arrived, horribly mutilated, and her mother had been called to the morgue to help identify them.
While she talked Paco watched her face—they were standing very close in the dark room—and a smile appeared on the corners of his mouth. He was feeling more and more sure that it was this girl he had felt watching—not only just now but all the time before. He saw her coolly remarking his twitching mouth, his narrowed eyes. She asked if he were ill. Scooping the sweat off his brow, he swore at the heat. She offered to drive him out to the country where it might be cooler.
Her car was a yellow convertible. She drove while Paco smoked; they did not converse. They fled the broiling suburbs and emerged into open country. She jumped the car off the road and they rustled over grass till they came to a grove of bamboos and a river. The moment she stopped the car, at the river’s edge, he shoved his arms around her and a wave of unspeakable relief convulsed his taut frame. He saw her eyelids swooning, her mouth soundlessly sighing open, as his face swooped down, as their bodies collided, gravitated. The shock of her mouth stunned his mind with such impact, abrupt tears scalded his eyes. But as, moaning, he moved his mouth over her chin, her ears, her tight throat, and felt the long-knotted ache in him sweetly easing, sweetly uncoiling at last, she opened her eyes and, groaning, pushed him away. He hovered in hunger, not quite conscious, blurrily baffled—the tears in his eyes and the moan in his throat—but she had sat up and fetched out her compact and was frowning at her face in the mirror. Bending, he pressed his mouth to her shoulder; she brusquely nudged him off. He grabbed her wrist so suddenly the compact shot out of her hands; whirling, she slapped him across the mouth. He toppled backward, hit his head on the car’s door, and snapped out of the trance. He gaped in amazement at her vicious face. She said, spitting out the words: did he think she was as easy a job as her mother? As he tried to push himself up she suddenly started the car and burst laughing when he flopped down again. She continued to shake with laughter all the way back to the city; Paco was quiet. As the highway fanned out into streets she asked, controlling her mirth and turning her mocking face toward him: where would he like to be dropped?
That night she appeared at the “Manila-Hong Kong.” Paco smilingly ignored her. She was there every night that week; he could locate her without turning around: wherever she was, the racket was loudest. She danced snatchily; she traveled among the tables: she laughed and chattered at the top of her voice—but whenever he turned around he caught her eye. His own smiling look stepped right through her.
The señora did not show up. Paco heard that she was ill and was receiving no one: she had been deeply shaken by the tragedy of her friends. He did not visit her, he did not even call her up. He felt ill himself from the spiteful desire to get the daughter in his clutches—but in his dreams, restless with flying landscapes, the woman he hunted had two faces; and though he sweated to catch her he dreaded every moment lest she stop and turn her other face around.
When he shifted his band to the “Boulevard Shanghai” the following week, Connie followed—and she was there the night one young man shot another young man because they both wanted to sit on the same chair. The atmosphere, earlier that evening, had been tensed up by the appearance of two rival political bosses with their henchmen. The club’s manager came running up and told Paco to cut out the intermissions, to keep right on playing—loud. The politicians occupied tables on opposite sides of the room. Timid folk fled; braver ones—Connie among them—remained and danced nervously, waiting for the shooting to begin. Nothing happened. The politicians kept getting up and crossing the room to offer each other drinks; they smiled and shook hands and thumped each other’s backs; at midnight, they and their unsmiling constabulary very peacefully departed. But the few customers left behind, scared and disappointed, quickly developed ugly tempers. A quarrel over places, between two young men, ended with both of them whipping out pistols and firing—and with the unluckier one staggering headlong across the dance floor, doubled up and clutching his rent belly, and dropping down just a foot away from where Connie had flung herself flat on the floor. She screamed at the blood and Paco jumped up from behind a drum and ran to pick her up while people clamored and stumbled over chairs and tables in their frantic flight to the doors.
Paco dragged the girl out to the kitchen where he stood her up and shook her until she stopped shrieking. She swayed away from his hold and vomited all over the kitchen floor. He made her drink some water and she flung herself on his breast and sobbed wildly. He took off his coat and wrapped it around her and took her out to her car. A light drizzle was falling, blurring up the moonlight. He drove around the wet streets, one arm holding the girl to his breast, until she had sobbed herself out. Then he stopped the car and made her dry her face and gave her a cigarette. They smoked sitting apart; they felt rather shy of each other. He was ashamed, remembering her girlish terror, of his male spite; she shamefacedly remembered his tenderness. Then she threw away the cigarette and crept back to his breast and he put an arm around her and leaned his mouth on her hair. When she offered up her face he kissed her damp eyes and the rim of her nose and her quivery lips. He reached out with his free hand and started the car moving and she asked: where were they going. When he said that his hotel was just a few blocks away she put her arms around his neck and he could feel her mouth closing and unclosing against his neck as they sped through the gleaming streets. But when they arrived at his hotel she clung tighter to him and would not go down. Appetite collapsing from weariness, he agreed to drive her home but she asked him to take her to the Chinese quarter first.
They drove through the cramped slums where the Manila Chinese are kenneled: wet walls, wet cobbles, bridges arching over stagnant canals, craggy tenements dripping rain into tight twisting streets, a raggedness of black roofs and the arrowy silhouette of a pagoda soaring in the rainy moonlight. She bought a doll at a shop whose locked shutters she rattled until the owner opened up; she told Paco that she needed the doll for a thank-offering. She directed him through winding alleyways till they came to a small square, enclosed on three sides by buildings and o
n the other side by a muddy canal choked up with water lilies and spanned by the rickety wooden bridge over which they had come. She made him stop at the middle building, which was of stone and had an open balustraded porch in front, three steps up from the street, with a pair of stone lions flanking the top step. Paco saw it was a temple. In the open doorway, just clear of the rain, sat an old bearded Chinaman, sucking a long pipe; down the darkness behind him, candles remotely flickered. Connie got out with the doll—she would not let Paco accompany her—and ran up the porch, nodded to the Chinaman, and passed into the darkness. When she came out, in about ten minutes, she was no longer carrying the doll. She did not say where she had been and he did not ask. He drove her to her house where, alighting, she said he could take the car with him: she would send someone to pick it up the next day.
When she did not turn up at the club the following nights, he remembered that she had said goodbye, not good night, as he drove away, too fatigued by the night’s emotions to take notice. He remembered the wistful shut, open, and shut again of the word in her mouth, and how she had turned away quickly when he dully looked up from the wheel. He remembered her tears in the moonlight and the wet wind in her hair and how tenderly she had brooded over the doll, cradled in her arms, and the shrewd peace in her face when she came out of the dark temple. He remembered her mouth closing and unclosing against his throat as they drove to his hotel and he knew now that she had been praying frantically all the time: those were prayers that he had thought were kisses. He felt no curiosity; he had forgotten his resentment and spite; he only knew that his bones were being borne helplessly flowing in a magnetic flood and that he must fight the currents; that he must not be dragged to her, but she to him—for the gravity pulled as suavely her way as his and must ultimately bear her swaying against him.