Summary
In the second section of the novel, Pepe meets the woman’s mother, the señora de Vidal, or “Concha.” It is later in the afternoon and the fog has cleared. Standing and watching boats out the window, Concha tells him her daughter isn’t thirty but eighteen, and has been married for a year. She says she is “quite, quite sure she has only one navel.” Concha wears a white fur jacket and gold coins on her ears. She looks relaxed although vexed. She laughs at him for being pompous.
He asks if she usually lets her daughter run around telling lies. She almost snaps as she says she isn’t her husband. The narrator comments that they are venting their vexation with the daughter at each other. They both suddenly laugh. Concha tells that him her daughter, Connie, is married to Macho Escovar. Macho has sent her cables to say nothing is wrong between them, Connie simply wandered away. Concha didn’t know Connie was in Hong Kong until she ran into Kikay, who told her Connie had been looking for Pepe’s number. She asks where Connie is.
Pepe says he arranged to meet Connie that afternoon so she could consult with a friend of his. Concha then says she knew his father—their families were old friends. She speaks of the magnificent house his father’s family had in Binondo, an older part of Manila. Great men assembled there to talk, dance, argue, plot revolutions. Her mother took her there as a child. They discuss how the house was destroyed in the last war. The narrator comments that Pepe’s father used to talk about the house “waiting for us to come home” when they would go to the beach. His father described the house in Binondo, the river running behind it, the villagers selling goods near it. Pepe and his brother would ask when they were going home, and the father would reply that only God knows. But now the house is gone—a house Pepe remembers more vividly than any of the houses he had actually lived in.
Concha shares a memory of Pepe’s father feeding her grapes and ice cream in the house. The image contrasts with the narrator commenting on how, later that same year, Pepe’s father was fighting with Aguinaldo (the revolutionary and president of the Philippines who led forces against Spain and the U.S. in the late 1800s) while the armies of the Republic advanced in triumph through the provinces.
A few years later, Pepe’s father and Aguinaldo had become “pale fugitives” fleeing the across countryside and jungle to escape the Yanqui (Spanish spelling of “Yankee,” i.e. American) soldiers. Rather than submit, the revolutionaries chose exile. Concha remembers the night the news came to her parents that Doctor Monson had chosen exile. Her mother had kneeled while her father stood up straight. Though only a child, she understood what they saluted, having felt his greatness.
Concha asks to meet him again, but Pepe says his father is napping. In truth, he found his father slumped forward earlier that day with his eyes open, a smile on his face. It was the third time such a thing had happened that year. Pepe wonders where his father got the drugs from—from the Chinese houseboy perhaps, meaning he’d have to fire him. But maybe the drugs were his leftover medical supplies. Concha remarks that people like Pepe’s father were her “conscience” as a young girl. She laments that young people like her daughter don’t have such figures of authority to look up to.
Pepe ventures that Connie may be mentally ill. Her mother says not more than anyone else. Concha explains that her husband was in the papers for getting involved in a bribery and misuse of public funds scandal. Connie had been in boarding school, and suddenly returned home one day saying she refused to be educated on “stolen money” and “blood sucked from the people.” Her mother sent her back to the school, telling her to be more like the other politicians’ daughters, who were used to learning of corruption in the news.
Instead, Connie had disappeared, and was later found working as a dishwasher in a chop suey restaurant in the Chinese quarter. To remove Connie, Concha brought in the entire police department, causing something like a riot in the neighborhood. She brought her daughter home, letting her silence speak for her fury. Connie’s father spanked her and her mother resolved to marry her off. She says Connie’s husband is a “young thirty” and that she was happy with him until she Paco Texeira, a bandleader with whom Connie became infatuated while he was touring in Manila. Concha says Connie is in Hong Kong to chase him some more.
As Concha details the affair, Pepe thinks of Mary, Paco’s devoted wife and mother of three. He cannot imagine Mary being disregarded for women like Concha and Connie. Smiling, Concha says, “It’s all very shocking, isn’t it?” Pepe thinks of Concha and Connie visiting him like elite pilgrims stopping at a wayside inn on their pilgrimage to the “clean table” of the Texeiras’ marriage.
Analysis
In the second section of the novel, Joaquin develops the major themes of parent-child relationships and ruin. Hours after Pepe’s surreal experience speaking with Connie, he meets Connie’s mother, Concha. Like Connie, Concha displays her wealth in her attire, wearing expensive fur and silk garments and wearing “gold coins” in her ears. Unlike Connie, Concha has a cold, unwelcoming demeanor.
The scene begins with an instance of situational irony as Concha refutes her daughter’s account of events, claiming that Connie is actually eighteen (not thirty), has been married for a year (not a day), and that she only has one navel. The condescending manner in which she addresses Pepe suggests she thinks he is foolish for having believed the tall tales her daughter spun. Pepe responds with his own annoyance, taking issue with Concha for letting her teenage daughter run around telling lies. The tension between the two soon breaks, however, as they realize they are both frustrated with Connie, not each other.
In more amicable tones, Pepe and Concha discuss Concha’s childhood familiarity with Pepe’s father and family in Manila. In contrast to the overpriced Hong Kong apartment that he now shares with his son, Pepe’s father once lived in a grand house in Binondo. The theme of fantasy versus reality arises as Pepe tells Concha that he paradoxically remembers it more vividly than any of the houses he has actually lived in himself, so rich were his father’s stories of the house in Binondo.
The theme of ruin enters the story as Pepe and Concha comment on how the magnificent Binondo house was destroyed in WWII. Concha remembers a time when she would visit the house as a girl and Pepe’s father fed her grapes and ice cream. In the space of a year, the political situation in the Philippines changed drastically, and Pepe’s father began fighting the Spanish colonial forces alongside General Aguinaldo in 1896. After becoming allied with the United States, the revolutionary soldiers wound up embroiled in the Philippine-American war in 1899. The conflict saw Pepe’s father become a “pale fugitive” fleeing the American soldiers in the jungle and countryside. He then chose to remain in exile in Hong Kong rather than submit to the Americans, even while Aguinaldo, upon capture, pledged his allegiance to the United States. The image of Pepe’s father as a nationalist war hero contrasts sharply with the ruined man he has become, stoned on opium in the next room of the Hong Kong apartment.
Touching on the theme of parent-child relationships, Concha suggests Connie doesn’t have a generation to look up to in the way Concha looked up to Pepe’s father’s generation. As a teenager, Connie was appalled to learn of her father’s corrupt dealings and left boarding school to work as a dishwasher. The moral path she chose did not please her mother, who brought in the police and made a scene in order to humiliate her daughter and remove her from the seedy Chinese quarter. As a punishment, Connie was married off to Macho.
At the end of the section, Concha reveals that Connie is probably in Hong Kong because she is chasing after Paco Texeira, a bandleader Pepe has been friends with since childhood. Pepe is disturbed by the news that Paco could have been involved in an affair with an emotionally disturbed high-society woman like Connie when he has a down-to-Earth wife, Mary, and children. With this revelation, Pepe’s sense of reality as being predictable and stable further dissolves around him.
