“The road to the right goes into Cholula,” said Javier.
* * *
Δ Javier said: I won’t pay attention to you. I’ll go back to Isabel’s room. No, I’ll stop in the corridor and look through the keyhole. Darkness. I’ll open the door gently, and you won’t wake. You always succeed in disappointing me. And that isn’t easy. You are lying there whispering, not asleep. You didn’t deserve my worry. Now I’ll be quiet not for you but for myself. I’ll tiptoe barefoot across the room. Barefoot because I left my shoes in Isabel’s room. I forgot them. Into the bathroom like a shadow in the night. I won’t turn on the light. I’ll find my pills and take one. I can tell them by their size. There, I’ll swallow it. I don’t want a stomach spasm and I know that one is coming. The pill will stop it. I’ll sit on the john and wait. Think about something else. Just as I do when I make love. There are problems I must consider, solve, that’s why they pay me. And Monday I’ll be back in the office. I have to check those recommendations before they are sent to New York. I’ll stress that high prices for imports must not be established unless simultaneously prices of raw materials are regulated. Request the Economic and Social Council to submit its findings to the General Assembly. Aaaahhh, there now. And Goodchild is scheming to be promoted over me. I’ll have to go to New York to fight that. The Ministry of Foreign Relations will stand behind me, I think. They can’t be allowed to discriminate against Latin Americans. Oh, no. Resolution … in my briefcase, Resolution Three-forty-one, section twelve. Let’s have it, make it serve for something now and then. Aaaah, again. What day’s today? Wednesday. Wednesday, not Holy Thursday. Wednesday? Yes, let it serve for something finally. No, it’s Sunday. Only Sunday. When do they perform the Passion? Every goddamn day. Every day, hunger, then agony. Will there ever be a day that won’t be the same? The day I die, maybe. We’re all going to die. And Ligeia will be beside me, forcing me to understand that in loving all life we also loved all death. And at last I’ll be able to laugh at her, stop listening to her, be alone with my fear that I may know I’m dying, be aware of it. Damn, I’m going to have to take another pill. Yes, to die consciously, certain of death in the moment of death. Before eternity can be discerned. Another wait, longer than this one. To be dead waiting for eternity to put in its appearance, which it refuses to do, to go on, dead, waiting. And Ligeia will have been right and death will simply be another life with the same old rules. I remember a Bosch painting in the museum in Rotterdam. Figures in paradise, but paradise has its own hell, a hell that in turn opens upon another abyss even blacker. No way out. No way. For in our imaginations are all possibilities, and our imaginations go where we go. Harvard. The river Charles in summer, swimming with sun-puffed condoms. And I in love with Ligeia. I thought you understood. It was there, then. Have you ever realized how I loved you, distant but at every moment present in my imagination? Nature represented, remembered, not nature itself, which was what you wanted to be. My Attic Stella, distant, motionless, frozen, beyond reach, complete, a woman who could contain and satisfy all my hunger for variety, my mental polygamy …
* * *
Δ A world of ants was there and Javier wanted to give it his attention, Elizabeth, because although minuscule, it contained everything. He began to follow the ants and his path became the entire length of the island of Delos, for the ants had taken possession of it all. They carried miscroscopic bits of marble. That fascinated him. Little by little, a grain at a time, as the centuries had passed they had carried away the dwelling place of Hermes and the temple of Isis. And you didn’t want to look at the ants, you stopped in the House of Masks, fascinated, in turn, by the floor mosaic of Bacchus. You interrupted and distracted Javier, forcing him to look at what you began to explain to him, as if it were not present before his eyes: the panther, at once grave and vital, one claw raised and an acanthus necklace, while the God astride him holds a lance of peace (ribbons and laurel) and a mirror. He rides there examining himself, narcissistically. Androgynous Dionysus, pearls at his throat, his chest covered, his belly naked, his hips broad, his robe rolled and falling down over the loins of the panther. The ants, you told me, streamed through the panther’s yellow eye, gnawing it, blinding it, and Javier stared at them and followed them and did not notice the mosaic masks, the alternating devils and angels with false faces; he went out into the debris of walls, columns, streets, pediments, temples, porticoes, from which Apollo’s light was to have been born. Ants and the wind and the sun and the thistles had built a second Delos that you explored without a guide. Open to the sky, Delos of the lost faces, eroded away if not beheaded. Pagan Isis in the center of the simplicity of a temple of two columns and two buttresses, a contrived simplicity that contrasted with the confused richness of the striated rocks and the yellow thistles above which rose the foreign sanctuary of the second Pantheon. Chameleons jumped among the rocks, brown as the stone itself, or stretched on scattered statues of Cleopatra and her husband Dioscurides, Artemis and her deer, Cybele, the great phallus of porous marble set erect above enormous testes. The water in the pools among the ruins and at the bottom of the cistern was stagnant. Javier observed details while you raised your eyes and searched for some totality that would encompass everything, some tactile, audible unity in this lifeless world that possesses no surviving or resurrected being in what you are accustomed to. Delos is not a museum. It is not the ancient preserved for modern appreciation. Nor is it a point of contrast that can sharpen the definitions of a life foreign to it, a past which, Javier wrote in his notebook, if it could be held by or included within the contemporary rat race might perhaps console us for certain of our lacks. Nor is it even a ruin that grows alongside the lives, indifferent to the old stone, of the descendants, fishermen and peasants, of the ancient faces; there are no descendants, no one lives on Delos, in Delos there is only Delos, not man, there is only what time and the wind and the sun and the ants have made of what Delos was. Nevertheless, Delos is not dead. And your eyes, Elizabeth-Ligeia, insisted that morning on grasping everything, fusing everything and carrying away a complete picture of the dry mountains and the bare rocks that here, as in all Greece, are the objects toward which the marble arms stretch to rescue, here beside the sun and the sea, from impenetrable sadness and distance. Ah, Dragoness, here again you insisted on creating a mirage. You, Dragoness, the young wife, are dreaming on top of Mount Cynthus. If Javier looks down to see the minute concrete reality, you break in and force him to look up, at the dream. Your fantasy obtrudes upon his observation and thought. You move side by side, his slacks touching your skirt, and you feel compelled, driven, to drag him down to that sufficient lie which offers us consolation and inflicts upon us paralysis …
“Did you believe that it was later? No, right there and then. There, there…”
… descending among the stones toward the distant and beautiful point of the island, you both approached it that hot September morning, naked and sweating beneath the burning sun, with the same fear. He held your hand and would have liked to find an answer for you, but your questions that afternoon when you returned to Mykonos on the Meltemi, rocked by an Aegean which had begun to lose summer’s calm, the patched and mended canvas sails swelling, your unspoken questions would not permit him to answer.
“And just what overwhelming thought was it that came to you in the ruins of Delos, Ligeia, and made it possible for your make-believe to become mere bitching as we were eating in that restaurant on the dock?”