“Excuse me,” Javier said.
Franz smiled and struck another match.
Isabel, putting on her straw hat and tying it under her chin with a kerchief of orange gauze, was standing before a group of amputated legs wearing high boots. Suddenly she laughed and skipped away, calling back: “Let’s pretend we’re enchanted!”
Franz laughed too and ran after her and caught her shoulder. Isabel held herself rigidly stiff. “Come touch me, Javier! Break the spell!”
Javier grinned and approached her. “Good, but be sure you realize that beside you is a witch who is rotting with age but has painted over the decay of her living face with a white skull mask. And with her, waiting for you, is her husband, surrounded by owls and spiders. So.” He took her in his arms and kissed her as her arms tightened around his neck and Franz, smoking, watched them. Javier closed his eyes. “No,” said Isabel. “Don’t pull back.” They kissed again and Franz watched them. Finally they separated from their kiss. They looked at Franz. Isabel’s face was young and happy. Javier’s was cold with snotty pride.
All three looked down and saw you far below making your way toward the ball court.
They descended the stairs. Halfway down, Javier stopped. He stretched his arm out and in the air traced the convolutions of the serpent.
“Are you talking to us?” Isabel smiled.
“Yes.”
“You’re really talking to us?” she repeated.
“Yes, yes.”
She went on smiling.
“If I understand you, you’re a silly.”
She caressed his arm.
“Well, yes,” said Javier. He touched his fingers to the pleats of his shirt. “Perchè sì fuggo questo chiaro inganno?”
* * *
Δ And when Javier looked down at the pavement he told himself that the morning was going to be hot. He had just left behind the revolving door of his office building and now he was passing some fruit stands and he stopped and observed the heaped displays of fruit and moved closer and with a stiff little finger touched a slice of papaya and its cluster of black seeds. He watched the fruit vender cut into the heart of a watermelon with a single machete stroke. He looked at two dogs chewing discarded orange peels. Juices ran from the wooden table down upon the dusty ground where, squatting on their heels, old market women with wrinkled immobile faces from time to time called their wares.
He put his hand into the inner pocket of his light gabardine jacket. He had chosen that gray jacket this morning because the paper had said that the day was going to be very warm and March in Mexico City can be warmer than warm, drier than dry, so dry that your skin and tongue feel that such liquids as fruit juices cannot exist, not even in the red heart of a melon. His hand touched the small leather carnet with its gold engraved letters, its properly sealed photograph, its very official, very important-looking ornate script: The bearer is an official of such and such center of studies of the Economic Commission for Latin America of the Organization of the United Nations. Which could be translated as a cubicle office behind gray-tinted glass that shut out the glare of the sun, a gray desk of steel with mountains of papers and reports printed in eight- and ten-point Bodoni, twenty-four quads, a well-fingered Charter of the United Nations — as if merely by touching it enough he could leave his personal imprint upon the world’s constitution — a matted, framed photograph of Dag Hammarskjöld on the wall, a revolving chair with black-leather cushion and back rest and armrests of some nickel-plated metal he did not know. That was what the little red-leather carnet said and he always kept it in his inner pocket, near his heart, so that when his fingers went there, where he thought his heart was, he could reassure himself twice with one touch. Now he pressed his fingers against his chest and attempted to discover whether his heart was beating evenly, regularly, properly, and then raised his hand to his collar — an Arrow shirt, Gordon type, Oxford cloth, button-down collar tabs, neck 15½, sleeves thirty-three inches — and felt the dry drops of sweat that undoubtedly were staining the collar, combining with the dust and the invisible but unclean, fumes-contaminated air to draw a dark circle there, and the cuffs too would be dirty and he would have no time to return to the apartment and change before going to that embassy cocktail party in the evening. But now at least he was free, he had gone out of his office without asking permission, had left his desk in disorder and had taken the elevator — Otis, automatic, smelling of chrome and leather — and had passed along the terrazzo hall and out the revolving door and without one backward glance had walked along the street to the market, imagining, as he always did, that it was a beach. For he enjoyed likening streets to a beach with towers and glass and doors and balconies, a beach that has no sea to spoil it, no tide to leave rotting fish and seaweed, no line of ocean meeting sky to distract the eye and entice it into voyaging too impossibly far. And if he was afraid now to look back — and he was afraid, the first conscious fear that morning — undoubtedly it was because he feared he would not see his footsteps in the sand of the sidewalk’s concrete. Why had he run away from his office? His heart, which a moment ago had been obedient and correct, began to thump with an alarming violence, and a sickening sensation moved down from it toward that center in his solar plexus from whence radiated a vegetative life that doubtless had been awakened by this, his fifth cigarette of the morning, ousted from hiding, set free to spread like fear or hope through the complex conduits and interconnections of his nervous system which now, like a stranger in a strange land, had become alien to the body containing it. No, his nerves were not good this morning. They were tense, trembling. And somewhere in his cerebrum lay a tiny all-powerful lobule that needed only to be nudged, touched, just lightly pricked or even just slightly numbed, and he would lose the vestige of freedom that still, after centuries of evolution and years of marriage, remained to him, become as mechanical as a Pavlovian pup, reacting with whatever terror or fury or submissiveness that destroying hand armed with a steel punch or a chicken feather might care to have him display: be dominated, dominated absolutely and helplessly, impotent to make use of the ideas he had acquired so laboriously, the personality he had defined and formed so hopefully during forty and more long years; helpless even to make use of his most primitive sensuality. Well, that was a nightmare, but one that he faced, thank God, only in his waking fantasies. Much worse was his sleeping nightmare of the ocean. A dream of fear, fear of going too near the ocean, of entering it and dying drowned with a kind of unconscious happiness and abandonment: he would be absolutely passive, he would move neither his arms nor his legs, the waves would surge over him and the black sand would suck him down, and he would not oppose them. A most terrible nightmare. Yet a fear that also was imaginary. Not imaginary was the violent beating of his heart. It might be bearable, however, if it were limited to itself, if it did not make cold sweat bead in his palms, bind his knees with a weight he could not carry, cause his head to whirl with a vertigo he could overcome only by stopping and bracing a hand against a green post and fixing his eyes steadily on the unlit tube of a neon sign. Maybe if he closed his eyes? No, for the darkness he would create would merely spin with mocking lights that would neither settle his vertigo nor distract his hearing from the shrill and discordant racket of the market crowd walking among the booths and stands, carrying naked chickens by the feathered head, weighing pigs’ feet on the palm of a hand, sniffing at white cheese, arguing over prices, blowing whistles, shaking
matraca rattles, stuffing twenty-centavo coins into the incessant jukebox, popping open bottles of beer. He wanted peace and there was no peace, neither around nor within him, no silence, no calm, no hidden inner cloister where even his own voice would not be heard relating the terror of his nightmare about the sea; there was no door, no way out, he had to meet everything head on, as bluntly as a fist. That was why he had left the apartment so early this morning and gone early to the office and then escaped from it to the street: he had hoped that just to walk the sidewalks, to move one foot after the other, to see passing windows and faces might give him the calm he would need to get through one more day of the old tension, the old crises. But now the acids in his stomach had begun to move up and down again, up to give a bitter metallic taste to his mouth, down to gnaw the irritated labyrinthine coils in his belly where every X ray these days revealed clearly and unmistakably the zigzag of a spasm that reached all the way to the top of the colon. He left the market and raised his eyes to the blue unclean sky. A dust storm was imminent, the sky was trembling with it. And he had gone out of the office without telling anyone where he would be or when he would return. Slowly, dawdling, he walked along looking at shop windows. Those that were opaque with reflected glare he passed. Those that were transparent he examined, standing near the glass with his brows knitted: shoes of black patent leather, of alligator, of buckskin. Socks of nylon, silk, wool. Short-sleeved sports shirts decorated with colored piping. Dress shirts with labels guaranteeing that they would not shrink when laundered. Shirts with round collars, shirts with wide collars, striped shirts, colored shirts, white shirts yellowed by too long exposure to the sunlight. Behind them, smiling varnished manikins with blond wool hair and painted dark eyes and gleaming teeth, dressed in leather jackets, in gabardine business jackets, in pleated