Summary
The narrator explains that Paco’s band, The Tune Technicians, had played in Manila on a six-month contract with a club. Started during WWII and composed of “stranded Filipinos,” Paco’s band plays American jazz. Since adolescence, Paco has listened most nights to Manila stations on a short-wave radio, making him an expert on the Manila orchestras and styles they play.
Paco finds that Filipinos, unique among other Asian nationalities, have an ear for American rhythms, although he perceives those sounds, when recreated, to be modified when translated for Hindu, Chinese, and Malay ears. In this way, he thinks of Filipino jazz musicians as “the agents between East and West, building the Harlem gods a bamboo habitation this side of the Pacific.”
Despite his obsession with Filipino jazz, Paco has never felt curiosity about or affection for his father’s country. Unlike the Monson boys, Paco was never lulled to sleep with stories of the homeland. His mother, who was from Macau, settled in Hong Kong and became the manager of a clothes factory to support her son, her husband being too ill to work. Paco’s father, once a vaudeville pianist, died when Paco was thirteen. The sight of his mother rushing home in a wretched coat with groceries under her arms and talking to herself about schemes for making money would provoke Paco, as a boy, to provoke fights with other boys. At home, he would bully his mother as well. He hardened himself against her tears.
Paco would look at a photograph of his father at a piano in the 1920s and think of him playing corny tunes. The only time Paco could recall his father talking about Manila was when he spoke of how the mountains were taller and more dramatic than the bald, wrinkled hills one could hike in Hong Kong. The first time Paco went to Manila, years later, he saw a mountain range that looked like a sleeping woman. During the visit, whenever Paco looked at the range, “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.” After a month in the newly intriguing city of Manila, Paco met the señora de Vidal, and saw her with the same shock of recognition as when he saw the sleeping woman mountains.
After meeting at the Manila-Hong Kong club where Paco was playing, Paco and Concha met at her house—a white Spanish mansion—every day to discuss her interest in Hong Kong and his in Manila. Paco had no intention of sleeping with a woman old enough to be his mother, and she indicated no ulterior motive in spending time with him.
Concha brought him to slums and barrios, and to the homes of nationalistic families, giving him a sense of “the feel of the country in the old days.” Paco liked her impartial, dry ruthlessness, a contrast to his mother’s tender bearing. Mary was similarly dry and unsentimental, so like Paco that they might be twins. He wrote to Mary to tell her about his friendship with Concha without difficulty. Mary smiled anxiously while reading them.
As his friendship with Concha deepened, people around them would joke about him being her “latest fancy boy.” People would clear space to strand them together in social situations. His band members “developed a special smile for him, which he could feel widening as he turned his back.” He punched his saxophonist once in anger; the bandmates complained that he was skipping rehearsals to take Concha shopping.
Paco broke off their friendship, ignoring her calls, letters, and visits to his hotel. Taking in the city alone, Paco sensed death and doom in the air. The mansions sat indifferently on the avenues while others lived in squalid hovels. There was an unreality in both worlds: “the people who occupied them did not seem to be living there at all.”
Paco now saw in everyone, rich and poor, a denial of the grim reality of people cramping into tenements and defecating in the street. Rich and poor alike ignored these circumstances because both were under the influence of the Great American Dream, thinking of themselves as Hollywood celebrities.
After avoiding her for a week, Paco began to spend time with Concha again. But he was sulky and nervous around her, and she was more attentive and deferential. Without having been lovers, they looked more like lovers than before. Paco suffered under the sense he was being watched at all times. He stopped writing to Mary. His contract with the club had three months left.
Analysis
The fourth part of the novel moves back in time several months. In an omniscient digression that sees Paco displace Pepe as the protagonist of the book, the narrator reveals how Paco honed his talent as a musician, eventually accepting a six-month performance contract that brought him to his fateful meeting with Concha and Connie while in Manila.
Further developing the themes of parent-child relationships, postcolonial Filipino identity, and intercultural transmission, the narrator comments on the ironic circumstance of how Paco mastered the Filipino version of American jazz music despite never having lived in the Philippines or the United States. As a young person, he listens to short-wave radio broadcasts from Manila jazz clubs. He trains his ear to recognize the subtle stylistic influence of American jazz that has been “translated” for Asian listeners. He comes to think of Filipinos as being uniquely suited to performing this intercultural translation, because of their history of colonization by Western nations. This quality is captured in the metaphor of Filipinos having created a “bamboo habitation” for the musical style most popularly associated with Harlem, the Black cultural heart of New York City.
Ironically, Paco’s fascination with Filipino music does not extend into curiosity about the country itself. In contrast to Pepe, Paco was not raised on the dream of returning to the homeland. Instead, Paco’s musician father was largely absent through his childhood, eventually dying while Paco was still young. Paco’s relationship with his mother was strained by a misogynistic contempt for how pathetic she appeared to him as an impoverished single mother struggling to support her family. The coldheartedness he cultivates against his mother is replicated in his relationship with Mary, whom he repeatedly shouted at in the previous scene.
While his own mother was “wet,” Paco appreciates the dryness of Concha. While on contract to play at local clubs in Manila, Paco strikes up a friendship with Concha, having no intention of sleeping with her. Their relationship—revolving around social visits and running errands—comes to resemble a dignified parent-child relationship Paco might have liked to have had when he was younger. However, insinuations and teasing lead Paco to rethink the time he spends with Concha. His anger shows itself again when he punches one of his bandmates who has been ridiculing his relationship with the older woman.
The themes of reality versus fantasy and wealth disparity enter the story when Paco briefly cuts off contact with Concha. Alone in Manila, he comes to see the city's desperate poverty alongside extravagant wealth as a type of sickness that infects everyone around him. It disgusts him to realize he was lured into the willfully ignorant world of the rich during his time with Concha. He sees everyone, both the rich and the poor of Manila, as being motivated by the same American-influenced obsession with status. Living in fantasies informed by films, the people of Manila are dissociating from the actual lived realities. After this epiphany, Paco returns to his friendship with Concha feeling self-conscious and as though they are being observed.
