Summary
Narrated in the past tense by an unnamed third-person omniscient narrator and set in Hong Kong and the Philippines, The Woman Who Had Two Navels opens with a scene in which Connie Escovar asks Pepe Monson to perform surgery to correct her two navels (bellybuttons). Her urgency and seriousness makes Pepe believe her. However, he says he is “only a horse doctor.”
Connie insists it is urgent. She turns coy when the doctor asks her her age, whether she is married, and if she has kids. She is polished in appearance and prim in manner, wearing a black hat pulled low. She says she was married only that morning.
Her face blank, she digresses to tell the story of how she found out she was different for having two navels. She thought of herself as normal until the age of five, when she brought her doll, Minnie, to the backyard pond of her house to wash her. Upon taking the doll’s clothes off, she saw only one navel. She reacted by tying a stone to the doll and throwing her in the pond, along with her bracelet.
She explains that she told her parents a thief had taken Minnie and the bracelet, which her parents didn’t believe because the house was always surrounded by guards. She dreamt of the doll being eaten by goldfish that night. From that point on, she hid her navels from other children. Her parents and their housemaids knew, but that was fine. As a teenager she didn’t fixate the way one might expect. Instead, she became indifferent. When it was fashionable to wear clothes that exposed the midriff, she stayed in bed until the trend passed.
The woman avoided marriage but had affairs, wearing ever thicker makeup, until that morning when she married a “most eligible man” she had swept off his feet. They were meant to leave for an American honeymoon, but instead, out of fear of her husband uncovering her secret, she taxied to the airport and flew to “Hong Kong, in midwinter, on Kowloon side.”
The doctor—whose name is now revealed to be Pepe Monson—wonders why she came here. In a daze he looks around the room. The furniture seems to hover, including the Filipino flags crossed under a picture of General Aguinaldo. Thick fog pushes against the windows like elephants walking past, obscuring the usual view of the harbor. He asks why the woman came to him.
She replies that she heard from Kikay Valero that he did a wonderful job on her horse. Also, he too is Filipino—“a fellow-countryman,” though he was born in Hong Kong. He explains that he always wanted to go to the Philippines but instead studied in England and Argentina. His father wouldn’t let him go to their home country because his father was in the uprisings against Spain and the Americas; when both uprisings failed, he settled in Hong Kong and swore not to return until the Philippines were free.
The woman says it is now free. He replies that his father visited the country last year, but returned to Hong Kong. Pepe thinks about his father, who is wrapped in a shawl in the next room, sitting with a hopeless look in his eyes. He then reflects on the strangeness of the woman wearing black furs and gleaming pearls before him—a woman with two navels who is making all the furniture seem to hover. He shivers and sits up, blinking away tears. She reaches for her cigarette case and says that her mother is in Hong Kong on business.
Analysis
Nick Joaquin opens The Woman Who Had Two Navels by introducing readers to the “woman” of the novel’s title, Connie Escovar. Young, wealthy, and beautiful, Connie dazzles Pepe Monson when she arrives at his modest Hong Kong apartment/office in search of an operation that could correct the two bellybuttons she claims to have. With this dreamlike, reality-bending inciting incident, Joaquin sets the story in motion while establishing the major themes of reality versus fantasy, fatalism, and postcolonial Filipino identity.
When Connie tells Pepe of her two navels, he immediately believes her—an unlikely reaction given the bizarreness of her supposed condition. However, there is something compelling about Connie that draws Pepe in. Having introduced the dreamlike atmosphere of the book, Joaquin, through Connie’s voice, deepens the symbolic significance of her supposed two navels. Connie tells Pepe she discovered her difference in childhood, a detail that speaks to her fatalistic belief that she has been marked for a life of inner turmoil and split allegiances since she was young.
Connie claims she concealed the shameful fact of her two navels from the world through adolescence, eventually growing into the role of a high-society woman in the mold of her mother. However, upon marrying an “eligible” man, Connie panicked before her honeymoon and fled to Hong Kong to see if Pepe could correct her congenital deformity. With these details, Joaquin suggests that Connie’s two navels, if not literally real, are a symbol for her feeling that inner forces are dividing her between the life laid out for her and the life she might choose for herself.
When Connie finishes speaking, the point of view returns to Pepe, who finds that Connie’s presence is having an increasingly surreal impact on his environment. The furniture seems to hover around her, an instance of visual imagery that shows the line between a grounded reality and a dreamlike hallucination is blurring. Connie’s reason for coming to Pepe—that she heard from another Filipino that he is good horse doctor—is also difficult to believe.
Shifting the story into a more concrete realm, Joaquin touches on the theme of postcolonial Filipino identity as Pepe and Connie discuss Pepe and Pepe’s father’s relationship to the homeland from which Connie has come. Pepe has never been to the Philippines himself because his father, a rebel living in exile in Hong Kong, refused to return until the country became independent. Connie points out that the country is free now, a fact Pepe knows all too well. His father sits with a vacant expression in the next room. For reasons yet to be disclosed in the narrative, Pepe’s father’s experience of revisiting the homeland was so destabilizing that returned to Hong Kong a husk of his former self.
