The Woman Who Had Two Navels

♣♣♣♣/♣♣♣♣♣

Brothers Pepe and Tony Monson grow up in Hong Kong despite being full-blooded Filipinos, the reason for which is their father’s exile brought about by his days of being a rebel in the Philippines during the second World War. Tony opts for a life of religious seclusion as a priest in a convent atop a hill while Pepe ends up being a veterinarian for horses. One day, Filipina socialite Connie Escobar knocks at their door and tells Pepe a cock-and-bull story of having been wed that day in Manila and flying off to Hong Kong to run away from her groom. She also has two navels, so she claims. Later that day, the bewildered doctor also gets a visit from Connie’s mother, Concha Vidal, yet another socialite who rebuts her daughter’s narration and says that she has been married for quite some time now and that her husband is also in Hong Kong looking for her.

Not going to lie, Nick Joaquin did write elegant prose, even though I thought I saw two grammar slips in there in the form of the wrong third person possessive, which seems to be common for Filipinos writing in English due to Tagalog pronouns not being gender-specific. Despite the trippy and free-flowing storyline, reading this novel just felt like a mandatory endeavor, which is strange because to some extent it technically is, as far as required readings in high school or university are concerned. The thing is, I wasn’t really forced by anyone to tackle Nick Joaquin. I read him of my own volition, yet it felt inexplicably compulsory.

The reading experience was buoyed by the weird premise and the symbolisms it harbored. Reading several analyses later on, there are talks of legacy and heritage. I never fully understood what the two navels were for, metaphorically at least, even though I was entertaining the thought of it being a mark of struggle, perhaps internal, as if being dragged by two opposing forces. Life and death? Reputation and desire? Spanish and American colonialism, although this one feels a bit of a stretch? I don’t really know. The easiest explanation is simple paranoia or psychotic break, a justification for Connie Escobar’s weirdness.

Personally, it was the psychotic angle that really drew me in. There is one part towards the end of the novel where the settings just collapse on each other as if you were in an acid trip or a surreal dream, the kind that wakes you up in the middle of the night gasping for air. This effect is easily achieved in cinema via VFX, but hard to pull off in writing. You really need to be a gifted storyteller to whisk your reader away in a dream sequence this vivid. This might be a turn off for some because at some point it gets confusing and hard to follow. It is one hell of a ride, though, if you just let the author take you anywhere his imagination would permit.

Another thing I enjoyed was the setting, at least those set pieces bringing us back to the family history during the change of colonizing regimes: from Spanish to American; and then from American to Japanese. It is always interesting to hear tales from this specific period of Philippine history because you get a feel of the prevalent attitudes during those times of uncertainty. How did the elite fare? How was it for those lower down the societal hierarchy? How did they all survive and adjust to the new normal? In this regard, Joaquin really did a great job with his descriptions, particularly in capturing the zeitgeist through his characters.

While there are chapters that hark back to a bygone era, the primary storyline unfolds in Hong Kong, which to some extent the descriptions of which I find a bit lacking. Or perhaps it was just a Hong Kong that I barely know, one of past prestige that is becoming more of a memory lately. It’s not as if Connie and friends would suddenly go to Ocean Park or Disneyland. Even then, it feels as though the choice of setting was purely dictated by plot convenience, considering how most exiles from that era were indeed exiled in HK. It’s just that, it failed to become its own character, easily replaceable by any other city and nobody would even notice.