THE WOMAN WHO HAD TWO NAVelS
403
He moved away from the door to share the window with her, while,
with the plaintive intonations now of an old acquaintance, she
continued:
"I've had cables from poor Macho-Macho's her husband,
Macho Escovar-and he tells me there's nothing at all the matter
between them. Connie simply wandered away. He thought she might
have joined me here but I never knew Connie was here until I ran
across Kikay Valero and Kikay told me Connie had been hunting
up your number. Did she say where she was staying?"
"She said she had just arrived. We arranged to meet in town
this afternoon. I was taking her to consult a friend of mine."
"Then, would you please tell her-"
"But, of course, I don't mean to go any more."
"No-of course not."
"I'm sorry."
She hung fire a moment. Then, turning around from the win–
dow, swinging her gold coins, and tipping her face up to his male
height, she radiantly announced that she knew his father.
He registered astonished pleasure.
His father's family (she continued) and her family were old
friends. "And when I was in school your father was the school's
physician. I remember that the older girls were quite in love with
him and kept praying for fevers. He was such a handsome, a magnifi–
cent gentleman. Your father's family had a famous house in Binondo
-Binondo's one of the oldest parts of Manila, the most labyrinthine
-and your house was famous because our great men loved to as-
semble there-to talk, to dance, to quarrel, to plot revolutions.
Mother took me there a few times. I was just a child in pigtails and
my eyes popped out with bashfulness ..."
She was seeing-as she radiantly rattled away, her eyes never
leaving his face, her gold coins dancing- the carriages filing down
the cobbled street and pausing to let people out at the open door–
way that had a great globe of light shining above it. Stepping out
of their carriage, she had lifted her eyes to the balconies at the upper–
story windows. Behind the curtains chandeliers blazed, fiddles were
busy, and shadows of people came and went, gesticulating. Up there
on the tiled roof that rose black and white in the moonlight but
