by Nick Joaquin
And when at closing time one night, two weeks after they had parted, he came out of the club and saw the yellow convertible waiting and her face at the window, the world around him swiftly lost impact; the babble of departing folk faded remotely; the moonlight turned fluid and he found himself being washed into her car, his every step the graduated motion of a figure in a delayed movie. While the car swam through the moonlight they sat and swayed, now touching, now apart—like two reeds in a stream—and could not talk, could not hold out arms, so heavily whirled the waters around them. But when the car stood still before his hotel, the tides stopped too; he turned around and she met him and they flowed into each other’s flesh, their swarming arms entangled, their breath mingled. He opened the car’s door to bear her out and she strained to follow but seemed rooted to the seat, and swooned and sweated from the effort while he tugged in vain. They broke away from each other, weeping with frustration and bewilderment, and he groped and started the car and blindly, angrily drove through the moon-white streets, not knowing and not caring where they went, but when the black tenements of the Chinese quarter closed in about them he knew that they had been headed that way all the time.
They came to the shuttered stores and she bought her doll; then they drove on to the temple and she went inside; after a moment’s hesitation, he followed. The old Chinaman glanced up but did not stop him. He walked down the long dark corridor and came to a denlike chamber, strewn with straw mats, where guttering candles and a saucerful of joss sticks smoked before a warrior god. Connie was nowhere to be seen—but a Hong Kong boy knows his way around Chinese temples: he searched through the minor side-chapels until he found Connie, standing before a candlelit altar. She did not look around as he entered. The small room reeked of the wasting wax and the joss sticks. He stood behind her and looked over her shoulder at the god on the altar—an old fat god, with sagging udders, bald and white-bearded and squatting like a Buddha; and the sly look in its eyes was repeated by the two navels that winked from its gross belly. Connie had laid her doll on the idol’s lap. As she turned away from the altar, Paco backed off from her contact, feeling a furriness at the pit of his belly. Her bleak smile accepted his shrinking.
They went back to the car but did not drive away at once. The warm moonlight felt fresh after the musky gloom of the temple. They lighted cigarettes and his pointed silence prodded her to speak. When she told him she had two navels he believed her at once, and felt—not repulsion—but the heat-lightnings of a desire, feverish and electric, that charged his hands with eyes and his eyes with mouths. While she talked—her bowed head turned away; the cigarette glowing between her fingers—he imagined her in the posture of the idol and he stripped her and saw himself as the doll on her lap. Glancing up and catching the look on his face, she asked, alarmed, to be taken home. He smilingly informed her that she was coming back with him; that she had played with him long enough; that he was determined to find out that night what sort of a monster she was. When she darted up in panic he started the car, and burst out laughing as she flopped down across the seat. He continued to roar with laughter all the way back to the hotel; Connie was quiet. When they arrived at the hotel he grasped her arm but she asked to be released: she would come quietly. Her eyes had slitted with the sly look of her god.
They went up to his room and he locked the door. He was merry no longer; this was going to be serious work, not play. He took off his coat, and she was waiting for him—in the darkness, for they had not switched on the light and the windows were shuttered. As he approached she swung out a leg and hit him on the loins. He sank down and she sprang upon him and they grappled but not a cry escaped their shut lips. They battled grimly, silently, rolling up and down the floor, oozing sweat and bleeding from bruises; the hiss of their breath and the clatter of a chair as they knocked it down the only sounds in the dark room. She broke loose and tried to stagger up but he was clutching her strap and the dress ripped across her bosom as she jumped on his face. He suddenly rolled away and she bounced onto the floor but as he dived at her she kicked up both feet at his face and scrambled under a chair. She grabbed the chair and hurled it at him as he was groggily kneeling up and the chair knocked him down flat again. But as, bolting for the door, she leapt over him he reached out and caught her ankle and down she went, hitting her mouth on the floor. She jerked her leg off and clutched at a table’s edge to pull herself up but he was dragging himself up too over the other side of the table and they confronted each other, panting and dripping tears and sweat, but still game. He tipped the table over and she swerved but he was upon her before she could run, pinning her neck to the wall. She grabbed his hair and pulled; he tore free; she shot out a fist but he ducked; and when his fist exploded against her jaw she dropped to the floor and stayed there, stretched out stiff.
He groped round the wall to the washbowl and washed his face and drank some water. His shirt hung in tatters, his face smarted with scratches; and he wanted to just lie down somewhere and die—but he groped back and stooped over her. She did not move but was conscious, for her sly eyes gleamed up at him, waiting for what he would do. Blood trickled from the corners of her mouth and her dress had been torn off her breasts and shoulders. He had only to reach down and rip the dress some more if he would discover her kinship with her monstrous idol—but as he stood over her in the dark room, her sly eyes gleaming up at him, his hot flesh went clammy with the feeling that there were other eyes peering out at them, eyes avidly fastened upon them, eyes that had been watching them all that night and all the other nights before and he could not doubt whose eyes they were. He felt the roots of his hairs straining tautly, his guts bloating; and as the warm vomit sourly flooded up his throat, the girl on the floor saw him shudder and double up (like that young man she had seen shot at the night club), one hand clutching his belly, the other hand clapped to his mouth—and her own bloody mouth smiled twistedly: she had won after all.
He staggered away and snatched his coat and ran out of the room and down to the street, past her car that waited at the curb, down white empty street after white empty street, fleeing faster and faster—for the eyes had followed, the eyes were everywhere; there was no escaping them in this evil city where rich and poor alike huddled in terror behind their beasts and their guns, where the crowds fled self-pursued and the teeming streets might any moment become stark deserts as the latest victim danced upon his blood: where ghosts were reported and signs appeared upon doors and black headlines swarmed in the air and apparitions waved warnings and a young girl whispered that she had two navels. . . .
But what was this horrible thing he had done? I’ve been dragging her all along with me, he gasped, and shuddered. I’ve been dragging her by the hair, he cried, and felt her hair in his hands. But when he stopped, horrified, and peered down at his hands he saw that it was his coat he clutched. It’s only your coat, you bloody fool, he shouted, laughing, and began to kiss the coat in relief. And noticing the ocean coolness around him, he realized that he was standing on the sea-side. He was alone, he had escaped; and as he faced his fever to the cold wind he knew a moment of sobbing relief. But looking up and seeing the mountains, his heart stopped, his eyes started out of his head, his throat screamed soundlessly. He had not escaped, he had not fled at all—for there she still was, stretched out under the sky, the sly look in her eyes and the bloody smile on her lips, and her breasts and shoulders naked. He wheeled around to flee, but his legs had liquefied and, as he flailed the air with his arms, the ground suddenly seesawed and slammed against his face; the moonlight blacked out: stars blazed; sand swelled in his mouth and waters roared in his ears—but the next moment there were no more stars, no more sand, no more waters, only a total stillness, a total void. . . .
Two days later he was on a ship, sailing back to Hong Kong.
“I left without seeing either of them again,” said Paco Texeira, lying on the grass in King’s Park, Pepe Monson sitting beside him, and the winter nig
ht settling like soup in the bowl-shaped park. All around the bowl’s brim, where twilight still glimmered, Pepe Monson saw the international clubhouses, each one packaged in fog, waiting in locked-up loneliness for Sunday’s exiles.
“It was damned hard,” Paco was saying, “to break with the band. The club’s manager wouldn’t release me from the contract and the men naturally thought I was doing them dirt. I couldn’t blame them. But I had to get away or go nuts. So I just bolted—and they can sue me if they want to. I didn’t even wait for the money I still had coming to me. I came back poorer than I left. Nastier, too. I felt as if I had sneaked off. It’s not a nice feeling: gives you what Mary calls the Boris Karloff look in the eye.”
“So that’s the end of the Tune Technicians,” said Pepe.
“—and of Tex the Bandleader,” said Paco, his forehead wrinkling. “Nobody’s going to trust me again after what I did. I’ll have to teach me another trade. . . .”
“I wonder what drives her to tell a lie like that?”
“Connie?”
“—about the navel stuff.”
“Oh, just to shock, of course, and to corrupt. She’s not after one’s body, she wants to ruin your soul.”
“Oh, come now, Paco.”
“They’re both agents of the devil—she and her mother. They work as a team: the mother catches you and plays with you until you’re just a bloody rag; then she feeds you over to her daughter.”
“I’d say they were working against each other, not with each other.”
“They work for each other. Whenever I was with one of them I could feel the other watching greedily. They share each other’s pleasure, watching you twitch. And when they’ve screwed you up to the breaking point the daughter springs her abominable revelation—and you go mad and run amuck. And there’s one more soul that’s damned.”
“No, Paco—no.”
“What do you know about them? You’ve only seen them once.”
“But I think you’re wrong. About the daughter, especially. I think she’s just a scared girl, desperately trying to save herself.”
“And so she runs around saying she’s got two navels—”
“I’m beginning to see it’s her way of saying she’s got a guardian angel. . . .”
“Oh, you poor sap, Pepe—to be taken in by that little girl act of hers!”
“Well, weren’t you?”
“Oh, yes. Oh, yes indeed.”
“And you really haven’t got over it yet, have you?”
“No,” said Paco woodenly and, rolling over, lay very still with his face on the grass.
They were alone in the park. Mary had taken the children home; it was colder, and time for supper. She had told them to follow in a moment: the soup would be waiting. . . . The moment had become hours.
Pepe said: “We had better go. Mary has been waiting and waiting.”
Paco did not move. When he felt Pepe’s hand on his shoulder he said dully, not lifting his face from the grass: “Oh, leave me alone.”
“But Mary will be worried.”
“I can’t go home.”
“Don’t be silly, Paco.”
“It’s no use. She knows I’m just waiting to go back.”
“To those women?”
“They’re not through with me yet.”
“Are you in love with them?”
Paco lifted his face from the grass. “They’re waiting for me,” he smiled. “They’ve followed me. If I were in love with them I’d have gone to them by now.”
“If you’re not in love with them you wouldn’t be afraid to go.”
“It’s not love—how could it be? I know they’re vile, I know they’re evil. But they’ve got some kind of a hold on me—oh, a strangle-hold, I know. But I also know that, sooner or later, when they call I’ll come running. And Mary knows, too. We’re both of us just waiting.”
“Paco, you’ve got your own will—”
“No, I lost that over there, too. . . . Oh, leave me alone!”
“It’s too cold to stay out here anymore—”
“I don’t mind.”
“—and Mary’s waiting.”
“You go and tell her not to wait. Tell her I’ve got a headache and need this air. I’ll be along in a moment.”
“Then I’ll wait for you.”
“Oh, go away—damn you—go away!”
“Okay, man.”
Pepe stood up and, after a glance at Paco, who was lying very still again on his face, walked away across the park. The light fog, always a gleaming sheet a step away, made him feel like Alice, stepping through mirrors. But it wasn’t I who stepped through the mirror, he thought. It was father and Paco—and the glass broke. They can’t step back anymore; not father anyway. . . .
His father would have had supper by now and would be in bed, but not sleeping. He hardly slept at night; just lay there very still, with staring eyes, in the dark room—as Paco now lay very still on his face, with eyes open, down there on the grass. His father had said little about what he had seen on the other side of the mirror. But that was hardly father who came back, thought Pepe, remembering the stranger’s footfalls he had been alarmed to hear in his father’s room when his father should still have been in Manila.
When the great news came that the flag of his country waved at last in sovereign solitude, his father was ill and could not attend the inauguration of the Republic. It was a year before he could make the momentous voyage home. He had wanted no one to accompany him; this voyage, the great dream of a lifetime, he desired to make alone. Pepe had deferred his marriage—he and Rita Lopez had been engaged since the end of the war—because the old man had expressed the wish that they should be married in their old house in Manila. His father would arrange to have the house rebuilt at once; Pepe was to follow with his bride. The old man, when he set off, looked like a young bridegroom himself: stiff and vigorous; and waving at last to his sons with unconcealed exultation as his ship pulled off from the wharves, bearing him home again after half a century of exile.
Less than a month later, he was back, suddenly and unannounced. Pepe, one stormy afternoon, after a muddy round at the racetrack stables in Happy Valley, came home and heard someone moving about in his father’s room. He did not recognize the fumbling footsteps. Without waiting to take off his dripping coat and galoshes, he hurried to the room and found the old man there, shakily pushing a chair around, and looking so frail, so altered, he might have been away for years, not for a month. Pepe, after one look at his father’s face, was careful not to express surprise.
“When did you arrive, Papa?” he asked as he kissed the old man’s cheek.
“Just this afternoon. I took an airplane.”
“You should have cabled.”
“I left in great haste.”
Pepe, stripping off his rubbers, waited for explanations. None came. His father complained about the dust in his room; hearing the quaver in his voice, Pepe started. Besides, the room was clean.
“I’ll tell the boy to tidy up here,” he said. “Let’s go and have tea.”
“I must wash first,” said the old man.
But when Pepe came back to the room he found the old man asleep, folded up in a chair, his head fallen on the chair’s arm. Pepe called up his brother Tony and Rita Lopez, bidding them to supper but warning them that something was wrong: they must not press the old man with questions.
During supper that night, the old man was silent—not with the brooding silence of the old days but with a silence as vacant as the look he cast on the bright table, festive with flowers and champagne to celebrate his return. Immediately after dessert, he asked to be excused; he felt tired from the trip, he said, and wished to retire early. He kissed Rita on the cheek, and his two sons accompanied him to his room, where they helped him undress and put him to bed.
&nb
sp; When they returned to the living room (which was also Pepe’s office) Rita was bringing in coffee. They felt tired, and too shocked to speak—as though somebody had suddenly died. They pulled the sofa up to a window, sat down in a row, and sipped the coffee in silence, watching the rain pouring outside and the ferry-boat lights twinkling back and forth in the storm. When they started to speak they whispered.
“But he must have been writing you boys,” said Rita. “What did he say?”
“Nothing that explains this,” replied Pepe.
“Father’s letters are as reserved as his talk,” added Tony, with a smile. Tony was in his white friar’s habit; he had not had time to change into the black soutane the religious wear in Hong Kong when they go out in public. “But I began to smell something,” he continued, “when the first letter came, and then the second, and then the last one—but still no mention about his being able to say at last: ‘Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Dominc.’”
He grinned at Pepe over Rita’s head as he chanted the Latin words, the opening line of the Song of Simeon, and Pepe bleakly smiled back. When they were kids their father took them every evening to attend Compline—over at the cathedral on Sundays; up at the Dominicans on weekdays—just to hear that song. He told them that the words meant: “Now let thy servant depart, Lord”—and he said that when he had at last returned to his own country he would, like Simeon, be able to say: “Nunc dimittis . . .”
“That’s the Canticle at Vespers, isn’t it?” asked Rita, seated between the brothers, sipping her coffee. She used to sing with the cathedral choir.
“The Canticle at Compline,” corrected Tony.
“Compline, yes. The Song of Simeon—when everybody stands up.”
“But you and I,” smiled Tony to his brother, “would peer around and wink at each other.”
“We would be thinking,” explained Pepe to Rita, “of a river in Manila we had promised each other to go swimming in—because the Nunc Dimittis always made us think of going home, and going home always made us think of that river, and of the dead pigs and dogs that father said it was always full of.” He paused; then added: “But though we winked and smiled we felt just as deeply, just as seriously about that song as father himself.”