When she finally descended the staircase into
the hotel, she became an animated painting. Everyone’s eyes were drawn to her.
All the colors of Diego Rivera and Orozco were draped on her body. Sometimes
her dress seemed painted with large brushstrokes, sometimes roughly dyed like
the costumes of the poor. Other times she wore what looked like fragments of ancient
Mayan murals, bold symmetrical designs in charcoal outlines with the colors
dissolved by age. Heavy earrings of Aztec warriors, necklaces and bracelets of
shell, gold and silver medallions and carved heads and amulets, animals and
bones, all these caught the light as she moved.
It was her extreme liveliness that may have
prevented her from working upon a painting, and turned a passion for color and
texturesn
her own body.
Lillian saw her once, later, at a costume party
carrying an empty frame around her neck. It was Diana’s head substituted for a
canvas, her head with its slender neck, its tousled hair, tanned skin and
earth-colored eyes. Her appearance within an empty frame was an exact
representation of her history.
With the same care she took in dressing
herself, in creating tensions of colors and metals, once she had arrived at the
top of the staircase, she set out to attract all the glances, exposing the
delicately chiseled face belonging to a volatile person and incongruously set
upon a luxurious body which one associated with all the voluptuous reclining
figures of realistic paintings. When she was satisfied that every eye was on
her, she was content, and could devote herself to the second phase of her
activity.
First of all she thrust her breasts forward, as
if to assert that hers was a breathing, generous body, and not just a painting.
But they were in curious antiphony, the quick-turning sharp-featured head with
its untamed hair, and the body with its separate language, the language of the
strip
teaser
; for, after raising her breasts upward
and outward as a swimmer might before diving, she continued to undulate, and
although one could not trace the passage of her hand over various places on her
body, Lillian had the feeling that, like the strip
teaser
,
she had mysteriously called attention to the roundness of her shoulder, to the
indent of her waist. And what added to the illusion of provocation was that,
having dressed herself with the lavishness of ancient civilizations, she
proceeded gradually to strip herself. It was her artistic interpretation of
going native.
She would first of all lay her earrings on the
table and rub her ear lobes. The rings hurt her ears, which wanted to be free.
No eyes could detach themselves from this spectacle. She would remove her light
jacket, and appear in a backless sundress. After breakfast, on a chaise longue
on the terrace, she would lie making plans for the beach, but on this chaise
longue she turned in every ripple or motion which could escape immobility. She
took off her bracelets and rubbed the wrist which they had confined. She was
too warm for her beach robe. By the time she reached the beach even the bathing
suit had ceased to be visible to one’s eyes. By an act of prestidigitation,
even though she was now dressed as was every other woman on the beach, one
could see her as the naked, full, brown women of Gauguin’s Tahitian scenes.
Whoever had voted that she deserved a year to
dedicate herself to the art of painting had been wise and clairvoyant.
Illogically, with Diana Fred lost his fear of
women who laughed. Perhaps because Diana’s laughter was continuous, so that it
seemed, like the music of the guitars, an accompaniment to their days in
Golconda.
Every day Fred wanted Diana and Lillian to
accompany him in his visits to the cargo ships which were to sail him home. The
one that had accepted him was not ready yet. It was being loaded very slowly
with coconuts, dried fish, crocodile skins, bananas, and baskets.
They would walk the length of the wharf, watching
the fishermen catching tropical fish, or watching the giant turtle that had
been turned on its back so that it would not escape until it was time to make
turtle soup.
Watching the small ships preparing to sail,
questioning the captain who wore a brigand’s mustache, the mate who wore no
shirt, and obtaining no definite sailing date, the anxiety of Christmas reached
its culmination.
He had something to prove to himself which he
had not yet proved. He was simultaneously enjoying his adventure and constantly
planning to put an end to it.
When the captain allowed him to visit the ship
he would stand alone on its deck and watch Diana and Lillian standing on the
wharf. They waved goodbye in mockery and he waved back. And it was only at this
moment that he noticed how alive Lillian’s hair was, as if each curl were
weaving itself around his fingers, how slender Diana’s neck and inviting to the
hand, how full of light both their faces were, how their fluttering dresses
enveloped and caressed them.
Behind them rose the soft violet mountains of
Golconda. He had known intimately neither woman nor city and was already losing
them. Then he felt pain and a wild desire not to sail away. He would run down
the gangplank, pushing the porters to one side, run back once more to all the
trepidations they caused him by their nearness.
Neither Diana nor Lillian was helping him. They
both smiled so gaily, without a shadow of regret, and did not force him
tostay
, or cling to him. And in the deepest part of himself
he knew they were helping him to become a man by allowing him to make his own
decisions. That was part of the initiation. They would not steal his boyhood;
he must abdicate it.
He loved them both: Diana for incarnating the
spice, the color, and the fragrance of Golconda, and Lillian because her
knowledge of him seemed to incarnate him, and because she was like a powerful
current that transmitted life to him.
Just as he climbed the gangplank as a rehearsal
for his departure, he felt then that he was not ready to leave, so when he
returned to them he felt unready to live, painfully poised between
crystallizations. He could not follow Diana’s invitations into the unknown,
unfamiliar life of the senses, and he could not sail either.
An invisible race was taking place between
Diana’s offer of a reclining nude by a Gauguin and the ship’s departure. And as
if the ship, the captain, the mate, and the men who loaded it had known he was
not ready to leave, one day when he went to the pier at four o’clock as he did
every day, the ship was gone!
He could still see it on the horizon line, a
small black speck throwing off not quite enough smoke to conceal its departure.
Lillian was walking through the market. It was
like walking through an Oriental bazaar. Gold filigree from Spain, silk scarves
from India, embroidered skirts from Japan, glazed potteries from Africa,
engraved copper from Morocco, sculptures from Egypt, herbs and incense from
Arabia. At the time Golconda was an important seaport, every country had
deposited some of its riches there. When it was no longer visited, the Mexicans
themselves had created variations upon these themes, adding inventions of their
own.
Cages containing tropical birds were
panoplied
with striped awnings like the tents of ancient
maharajahs. From them the Mexicans had inherited the art of training birds to
pick out of their hands tiny folded papers containing predictions for the
future.
Lillian gave her pennies to the man and asked
for one of the messages. The bird very delicately selected, from a handful, a
message that read: “You will find what you are seeking.” Lillian smiled. She
wondered whether among those tiny folded papers the bird might pick up a
message telling her
what
it was she was seeking. She decided to squander
a few more pennies. But the Mexican bird trainer refused to let her try again.
“It’s bad luck to question destiny twice. If it gives you two answers you will
be confused.”
Beside her stood a man who was well known in
Golconda as a guide. She had always disliked him. Not because she condemned his
trade of selling Golconda to the spectators who could not discover it for
themselves, not because she lacked sympathy for the strangers who wanted to
witness others’ weddings, others’ fiestas, as paying guests, but because wherever
he stood, at the hotel entrance, at the ticket agencies, at the bullfight
entrance, he had the air of a pimp, a pimp who was ashamed of what he was
selling, as if Golconda were not a radiant city but a package of obscene post
cards. It was the suggestive way he had approached her the first time,
whispering: “Would you like to attend a genuine Mexican wedding?” as though he
were saying: “Would you like me to procure for you a fine young man?”
It may be that Lillian identified his yellow
face, his averted eyes, and his constantly nibbling lips with prying, with the
spectator, with all peripheral living. And yet, she thought, blushing, I am
quite willing to seek guidance for my inward journeys. To ask of a trained bird
that he should pick out of a pile of folded papers guidance for my inward
journeys!
This thought caused her to look at the guide
with more tolerance, and he sensed her weakening defenses. This made him take a
step forward and whisper to her shoulder, which was on the level of his eyes:
“I have something to show you that will really interest you. It isn’t just an
ordinary tourist sight, believe me. It is a fellow American in trouble. You’re
an American woman, aren’t you? I was told about you. You came to Mexico as a
child with your American father who was an engineer. You speak Spanish
fluently, and you understand our ways. I saw you at church with a handkerchief
on your head to show respect for our customs. But you are American, I know.
Would you feel sorry for an American in real trouble? Would you like to help?”
Lillian struggled with her distrust of the
guide, whose lizard-colored eyes remained fixed on the freckles on her
shoulders.
“What kind of trouble?”
“Well, he was caught without papers, traveling
in the bus to Yucatan. So they put him in jail, here, where he started from.
He’s been in jail one year now.”
“A year? And nothing was done for him?”
The guide’s mouth, which seemed to nibble and
chew at words rather than utter them, nibbled in the void, uttering no word
while he was thinking.
“An American trapped in a foreign country, who
cannot speak Spanish. You might at least talk with him?”
“And nothing has been done? Nobody has done
anything? Hasn’t he appealed to the American consulate?”
The guide mimicked a gesture of indifference,
not content with shrugging the imaginary weight off his shoulders, but also
washing his hands of it, and when turning away and taking several steps
indicating detachment from the problem. It was almost as if he were
anticipating any gesture of indifference Lillian might make.
“Where is this jail?”
He walked furtively ahead of her. Whether or
not he felt ashamed of taking strangers through the scenes of his native
village, ashamed to be paid for invading burials and weddings, he walked as if
he were leading them all to places of ill fame, as perhaps he had.
The other tourists treated him with unusual
cordiality. They felt isolated and mistook him for a bridge of friendship
between themselves and the natives. They fraternized with him as if he were a mediator
as well as an interpreter. They drank with him and slapped his back.
But Lillian saw him as the deforming mirror
which corrupted every relationship between tourist and native. Only the plight
of the American prisoner drove her to follow him through streets she had never
crossed before, beyond the market and behind the bullring.
They were in the tenement section, a
concentration of shacks built of odds and ends, newspapers on tin slabs, palm
trees, driftwood, cartons, gasoline tins. The floors were dirt and hammocks
served as beds. The cooking was done out of doors on braziers. No matter how
poor the houses, they were camouflaged in flowers, and at each window hung a
singing bird. And no matter how poor the laundry on the line was like a palette
from which all the Mexican painters could have drawn their warmest, most
burning colors.
Why did the plight of the American prisoner
affect her so keenly? The knowledge of his being a stranger in a country whose
language he did not speak? She visualized him in jail, drinking the polluted
water which made all foreigners sick with dysentery, perhaps being bitten by
mosquitoes injecting him with malaria.
All her protectiveness was aroused, so that
even the guide no longer seemed like a pimp selling the intimate life of
Golconda, but a man of kindness, capable of understanding that tourists could
be in genuine trouble and not always absurdly rich and powerful figures.
The jail had been built inside a discarded and
ruined church. The original windows were heavily barred. The original ochre and
coral still remained on the walls and gave the prison a joyous air. The church
bells were used to call the prisoners to meals, bedtime, or to announce an
escaped convict.
The guide was familiar with the place. The
guards did not stop playing cards when he entered. They needed shaves so badly
that if they had not worn uniforms one might have taken them for
prisonerslace
retained a smell of incense which mixed with
the smell of tobacco. Some of the stands which had supported statues now served
as coat racks, and gun racks. Belts filled with cartridges were thrown over the
holy water stoup. A single statue of the Virgin, the dark-faced one from
Guadalupe, had been deemed sufficient to guard the jail.