Summary
The summary of Paco’s time in Manila continues with the story of an afternoon when he was waiting in Concha’s hot living room. Feeling like he is being watched, he looks up to see Connie in the doorway. Connie says her mother is identifying the bodies of murdered friends at the morgue. Seeing he is sweating, Connie drives Paco to the country, where it might be cooler. In her yellow convertible, they go to a bamboo grove by a river. As soon as she stops, they kiss each other. Paco feels the relief of a “long-knotted ache in him sweetly easing.” But she pushes him away, asking if he thinks she is as easy as his mother. She slaps him when he tries to kiss her again, snapping him out of his trance. She laughs and starts the car, driving back to the city. Every night that week, she appears at the Manila-Hong Kong club. They smile and notice each other but don’t interact. The tragedy of her murdered friends shakes Concha and she won’t leave her home or see anyone.
Another night at another local club, Connie follows Paco. A gunfight breaks out between two men. Connie screams at the sight of a man lying shot before her. Paco swoops in and brings Connie to safety in the kitchen. She vomits all over the floor. In her car, Paco drives while she sobs and clings to his neck. At his hotel she doesn’t want to go in; instead he agrees to drive her to the Chinese quarter, where “the Manila Chinese are kenneled.” She buys a doll “for a thank-offering” from a store whose shutter she rattles until the owner opens it. Alone, Connie enters a temple for ten minutes, returning to the car without the doll. When he doesn’t see her the following nights at the club, he realizes the “kisses” on his neck were actually the sensation of her mouth moving in prayer. He realizes she said goodbye, not goodnight at their parting.
Two weeks later, she is waiting in her yellow car outside the club. The world around him loses impact. At his hotel, it seems they are going up together, but after a struggle in which she remains rooted to the seat, they drive again to the Chinese quarter. She buys another doll and goes to the temple. Paco follows her in and watches her lay the doll on the lap of an idol. The idol is “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. ”
In the car, she tells him she has two bellybuttons; Paco believes her immediately. He feels desire rather than repulsion. She asks to be taken home, but he insists she come to his hotel, saying she has played with him long enough. He laughs against her protests on the drive, but when they arrive she goes quietly with him. In his room she fights against him. Despite the violence of their actions, the narrator comments that they are “both game.” After much tears, sweat, and blood, Paco punches her in the jaw and she lies stiff on the floor. Her dress is torn off her breasts; Paco knows he could tear it a bit more to see her navels. He then sees her eyes gleaming and senses that it isn’t only her watching him. Another set of eyes have been watching the whole time they’ve been together. The realization and Connie’s bloody smile cause him to vomit. He realizes “she had won after all.”
Paco flees the room and runs in the streets, seeing the watchful eyes and ominous presences everywhere. He senses he is dragging her by the air, but then is relieved to see he is only clutching his coat. He looks across the water to the sleeping-woman mountains and sees Connie lying there. He panics and runs again, falling flat on his face and becoming unconscious. Two days later, he sails on a ship back to Hong Kong. The narration shifts to Paco telling Pepe that he left without seeing either Connie or her mother again. Breaking the band’s contract early meant he returned poorer and nastier than when he left. Pepe asks why Connie tells the lie about her navel. Paco says it is to shock and corrupt, and that she wants to “ruin your soul.” He says Connie and her mother are agents of the devil, working for each other as they share in the pleasure of watching a person “twist.” The revelation of the two navels then makes the person “go mad” as a damned soul. Pepe refutes the idea by saying the girl is troubled, and that claiming to have two navels is her way of saying she has a guardian angel.
The narrator reveals that hours have passed with Paco telling Pepe the story in the park; Mary took the children home and started a soup ages ago. Paco says Mary knows he is waiting to go back to the women, who aren’t through with him yet. He says it isn’t love, but an evil stranglehold. Pepe insists they should go back to Mary but Paco rudely insists on being left alone. Pepe gets up and walks away, reflecting on how Paco and his father both stepped through the mirror, like Alice from Alice in Wonderland, and now they can’t return. Pepe thinks about his father, by this time of day in bed but not sleeping. Pepe didn’t know what happened when his father returned to the newly sovereign Philippines after fifty years of exile, but, suddenly and unannounced a month later, he came back to Hong Kong a different man.
The story shifts to the day Pepe’s father had returned. He is frail and silent; after dinner, prepared by Pepe’s fiancée Rita Lopez, the old man goes to sleep. Pepe and his brother Tony, a religious friar wearing a white habit, feel as if someone has died. Their father’s vacant silence pervades the atmosphere in the apartment. Tony quotes their father’s long-standing claim that when he returned to his country he would say, “Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Dominc,” Latin for “Now let thy servant depart, Lord,” quoted from the Song of Simeon, taken from the Gospel of Luke in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. The brothers discuss how when the line came up in church as children they would smile at each other, both thinking of the river by the house in Manila that their father spoke of; the one he swam in despite the dead pigs and dogs floating in it.
Pepe reflects on how he, his brother, and his mother had betrayed and forsaken their father by dying in the mother’s case, turning to horse betting in Pepe’s case, and turning to God in Tony’s. They had “apostatized,” abandoning the father’s dream of returning to Manila, a cult he carried on with alone. Now the cult was over, leaving a vacant silence. Aloud, Pepe laments that they didn’t go with him to protect their father from whatever broke his heart.
That night, Pepe stays in the room next to his father while Tony brings Rita home. He thinks of the old man lying with his eyes open, not sleeping. At dawn he meets his father in the hall. His father says he can’t sleep because of all the dust, and because everywhere he steps he crushes a crab. Pepe’s heart pounds as his father repeats “dust and crabs” while rocking in a chair. He makes his father a cup of coffee and sits with him. When Pepe repeatedly asks how his father enjoyed the trip to Manila, his father won’t reply. Then his father shouts for Pepe to leave him alone and go away.
The novel ends with Pepe walking out of King’s Park, having just left Paco on the grass. Paco is now saying the same thing as his father had. At the edge of the park, Pepe looks up at the Texeiras' apartment building and thinks of Mary. Like her, Pepe now knows that although she and he hadn’t stepped through any mirrors themselves, they were not safe from what seeped through the cracks from “the other side.” Concha, Connie, Paco, his father—all had come through. Pepe realizes he is surrounded by broken glass and ghosts deprived of their will. He recalls Paco saying he will go running when called; his father stepping on imagined crabs; Connie saying she has two navels; Concha saying people like Pepe’s father were her conscience as a girl; his father repeating “dust and crabs.” Because of the broken mirror, his world is no longer safe. He shivers against the wind and hurries to the lighted doorways and windows; toward Mary waiting with her soup.
Analysis
The last part of the novel returns to Paco’s feeling that he is being watched. In the scene where he finally meets Connie, Paco realizes he is literally being watched by Concha’s daughter standing in the doorway. Bizarrely and tragically, Concha is away identifying the bodies of several of her high-society friends who were murdered by bandits—or so Connie claims. In this instance of dramatic irony, the reader knows more about Connie, and her habit of telling lies, than Paco, leading the reader to distrust what Connie tells him.
As though drawn to her by forces beyond his control, Paco kisses Connie in her convertible. However, she resists his sexual advance and slaps him in the face. The physical violence snaps Paco out of his “trance.” Despite the strange interaction between them, Connie watches Paco play jazz. After keeping their distance, the two are brought together again when a gunfight in a jazz club traumatizes Connie. She relies on Paco for physical comfort, but again resists his attempt to turn their connection into something sexual. Instead, Connie wants to go to the Chinese quarter, where she buys a doll that she brings into a temple. In this instance of dramatic irony, the reader remembers how Connie, as a girl, sank her doll, Minnie, in her backyard pond upon discovering that the doll only had one navel. Paco, meanwhile, remains in the dark as to why Connie is behaving as she is.
Believing for two weeks that he may not see Connie again, Paco’s sense of reality is distorted when she appears outside the club one night to pick him up. His visual field becomes blurred and watery, and he feels as though he is impelled, like water drawn down by gravity, to sit in her car. Again, Connie resits his attempts to bring her to his hotel room. Instead, she goes to the Chinese quarter and brings him inside the temple. In another instance of dramatic irony, the reader knows the significance of the idol with two navels. Paco soon learns that Connie herself believes she has two navels. Like Pepe, Paco believes her without hesitation. The revelation only increases his desire for her.
But upon getting Connie into his hotel room, Paco is unable to consummate his desire. His struggle with Connie becomes increasingly violent, resulting in blood and torn clothing. At the moment he thinks he has the better of her and that he could rip the rest of her dress to see her navels, he realizes other eyes are watching him. In an instance of situational irony, he realizes he hasn’t won against her, and that forces beyond his control have been mediating his entire relationship with her. The shock causes him to vomit, and he flees the hotel, eventually falling unconscious on the beach. He soon after leaves for Hong Kong.
Speaking to Pepe, Paco contextualizes his revelation in the hotel with Connie as evidence that Connie and Concha have been collaborating to torture him because they are evil. He thinks of Connie’s story about her two navels, and decides that its purpose is to shock and corrupt people like him. Pepe refutes the idea, having a more sympathetic impression of Connie: he believes Connie tells the story because she is emotionally disturbed and would like to believe she has a guardian angel watching over her, thus the idol in the temple. Paco’s pessimistic belief that he is bound to be drawn back to Connie and Concha, who aren’t finished with him, speaks to his fatalism. Rather than think of himself as capable of exercising enough willpower to make his own decisions, he believes he is fated to return to Manila when the women call him.
At the end of the novel, Pepe leaves Paco to despair alone in the park. Pepe considers how Paco has come back from Manila a ruined figure, just as his father did. Like Paco, Pepe’s father cut his trip to Manila short, having had his fantasy of his home in Binondo so thoroughly shattered that he became a changed man. Pepe thinks of his father’s dream of returning home as having been like a cult that Pepe and his other family members eventually abandoned, leaving Pepe’s father to carry the burden of the grief alone.
Pepe concludes his thinking by comparing the situation with Paco and his father to the literary figure of Alice, who went through a mirror into a world where regular logic was inverted. Doctor Monson, the once proud and heroic father, is a ruined, drug-addicted ghost of himself, Paco, the humble husband and father, is obsessed with a rich woman’s emotionally disturbed daughter. As Filipinos seeking to define themselves in a postcolonial context where cultural influences clash and contradict, everyone Pepe knows is susceptible to the reality-distorting forces that ruined Paco and his father. In a world where the barrier between reality and fantasy has been broken, Pepe thinks of himself and Mary and Rita as not being safe from the glass shards and ghosts that have been unleashed in the breaking. With this pessimistic outlook, Pepe shares in the same fatalism that affects Paco, believing that it is only a matter of time before devastation reaches him.
