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PARTISAN REVIEW
father's photograph, and trying to stir up some feeling over his father's
death, while out in the kitchen his mother whimpered and rattled a
coffee pot, preparing breakfast. The astonishment had renewed itself all
the time he was in Manila, every time he looked up and suddenly saw
the sleeping woman outlined against the sky-and it changed the in–
difference with which he had come to his father's country into a stirring
of clan-emotion-a glow, almost, of homecoming.
By the time he met the senora de Vidal he had become deeply in–
terested in Manila and was ready to be interested in any woman who
most piquantly suggested that combination of primitive mysticism and
slick modernity which he felt to be the special temper of the city and
its people: pert girls dancing with abandon all night long in the
ca:barets and fleeing in black veils to hear the first Mass at dawn; boys
in the latest loudest Hollywood styles, with American slang in their
mouths and the crucifix on their breasts; streets ornate with movie
palaces and jammed with traffic through which leaf-crowned and
barefooted penitents carried a Black Christ in procession-and always,
up tllere above the crowds and hot dust and skeleton ruins and gay
cabarets: the mountains, and the woman sleeping in a silence mighty
with myth and mystery-for she was the ancient goddess of the land
(said the people) sleeping out the thousand years of bondage; but
when at last she awoke, it would be a Golden Age again for the land:
no more suffering; no more toil; no rich and no poor. So that when
Paco first met the senora de Vidal (he had been playing in Manila
over a month by that time, and had been learning the city block by
block and street by street) he had felt the same shock of recognition
as when, glancing up from the ship's railing, he had suddenly seen
the range of mountains that looked like a woman sleeping.
Not that the senora looked as though she might be sleepwalking.
She was fully awake, completely alive-but completely without flurry.
Her poise was her verve: she did what she wanted without bravado
attitudes. She called Paco to her table the first night she appeared at
the "Manila-Hong Kong"-he was always being called to tables be–
tween numbers to be asked about Hong Kong personages-but the
senora was not interested in establishing mutual acquaintances; she
was interested in Hong Kong itself, where, she explained, she had spent
her second honeymoon and many happy vacations before the war; she
had been there several times recently, but always only for a few hours,
passing through on her way to Europe or America; and she wanted
to know: had the war greatly changed Hong Kong? But when he
started to tell her she interrupted to ask what he looked so happy, so
