THE WOMAN WHO HAD TWO NAVELS
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an ear for American rhythms and could reproduce them with the least
spiritual damage accounted for their monopoly of the orient's band–
stands but did not explain how American rhythms had been made suf–
ficiently comprehensible in the first place (even granting the effects
of the movies as cultural bulldozers) to be understood by the Hindu,
the Chinese and the Malay, unless it could be proved-and Paco
thought it quite obvious, merely natural, certainly inevitable, and all
to the good-that even in Filipino hands and even when those hands
were being most deliberately groovy (not using that term in its swing
language sense, of course), the indigenous music of the modern world
did suffer a sea-change-a sea-change that might make American afi–
cionados wince but gave to their too fearfully Jules Verneish rhythms
a homely bamboo murmurousness instantly recognizable to the Hindu,
the Chinese and the Malay; the Filipinos being in this department
(as well as in a number of others) the agents between East and West,
building the Harlem gods a bamboo habitation this side of the Pacific.
In spite of his obsession with Filipino jazz, however, and in spite
moreover of his Filipino blood, Paco had never felt any curiosity about
nor the least affection for the country of his musician father; and
when he went to Manila, was stirred by no sentiments of filial piety.
Unlike the Monson boys, who were always conscious of being Filipinos,
exiles, and the sons of a patriot, Paco was a guileless cosmopolitan
and would have felt at home--or rather, would have failed to notice
that he was at the North Pole as long as he had his piano, his drums,
a good radio, some people to play football with, and Mary. But then
his musician father (whose name was De la Cruz; Paco carried his
mother's name) had never lulled him to sleep, like the Monson boys'
father, with stories of the old countree, and was away from home so
much of the time that when he finally died in Harbin, Paco, who was
thirteen at the time and had not seen his father for the last five
years, could remember his face only from a photograph hanging over
the bureau in his room.
He had gone to look at the photograph when the news came, after
having stood about awkwardly, unable to feel anything, while his
mother sobbed against the door, clutching the telegram in one hand
and her apron in the other, for she had been preparing breakfast.
Now she was crying in a hurry; she must not be late to work. She
was superintendent in a Chinese clothes factory-a dimly smallish
woman with the alarming smiles of a polite person feeling seasick and
trying not to show it-and was originally from Macao, where Paco
spent his boyhood summers with her family. The first years of her
