On this particular evening, Colonel Galpa’s attention was captivated by a large indigo lizard with delicate black markings on its face that from several feet away resembled the fanciful mask of a harlequin. When he examined it at close range, bending so that his head was level with its own, it stared back at him, unblinking and serene, its pupils expanding to cover nearly all the retinal surfaces, so that the eyes resembled tiny orange suns in total eclipse. He derived from the stare a startling sense of energy and presence, its intensity such as one might receive from looking into the eyes of a child. Though he assumed this to be a misapprehension, the result of fatigue, the longer he regarded the lizard, the sharper this impression became.
“Who are you?” he asked playfully.
The lizard craned its neck toward him, and the colonel felt as if a hook had snagged in the silk of his soul and was tugging gently, seeking to draw him forth, like a thread drawn through the eye of a needle. Dizzy, he straightened, and felt instantly steadier. Still curious, he bent again to the lizard, and again was possessed by the sense that he was in danger of spilling out of his body. A checkup, he thought, might be in order. The dizziness could be a symptom of some difficulty with the inner ear. With a last glance at the lizard, he switched off the light and got into bed, where he lay awake for a while watching the frilly shadow of a palmetto frond nodding on the white sheets. The idle churning of his thoughts dredged up recent memories, trivial plans, old preoccupations. He recalled a woman with whom he had danced in Trujillo; he decided that after breakfast he would return to his room and unplug his phone; and he saw a sectioned-off panel of deep blue sky, sunlight dazzling the scuffmarks on a plastic canopy, and felt an immense vibration. He closed his eyes against this vision, concentrated on the darkness behind his lids, but did not pray.
In the morning, before even the most zealous of the bureaucrats were awake, Colonel Galpa set forth along the beach, heading for the Drive-In Puerto Rico. It was his favorite place in Puerto Morada, a bar-restaurant constructed of lime green concrete block, three walls and a metal awning that was rolled down each night to make a fourth, with a service bar and a jukebox inside, a room out back where the owner lived, and a wooden deck out front, furnished with red picnic tables, where one could sit shaded by coco palms, and gaze out across the Caribbean. The place had no discernable connection with either drive-ins or Puerto Rico, except for the fact that it faced eastward toward that captive island, and thus most people assumed that the name reflected the idiosyncratic nature of its proprietor, Tomas Quu, an elderly Miskitia Indian reputed to be an hechicero, one who listened to the spirits and could work small charms. A wizened man with a long gray braid and a face as wrinkled and dark as an avocado, he had once been a soldier and had, according to rumor, performed his duty with exceptional valor. On occasion the colonel tried to draw him out on his experiences, but Tomas was not inclined to speak on the subject. That morning the old man was on his knees inside the restaurant, painting a corner of the mural that spread across the rear wall.
This mural, the work of many years, depicted in bright, primitive imagery the history of the country from earliest times—Mayan pyramids and minor conquistadors; Yankee traders and soldiers of fortune, the most famous of whom had been executed in front of Santa Maria del Onda, the cathedral that shadowed the heart of the town; the white ships of the fruit company that had controlled the politics of the region; volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, the great hurricane of 1998, and so on. The thing the colonel liked best about the mural was that his role in history was represented by a tiny gray airplane suspended in a lozenge of turquoise, with no reference to missiles or enemy aircraft. The thing he liked least was that on each successive visit he discovered that Tomas had added horrid details: a young girl curled up around the syringe protruding from her arm; the bodies of several dead children strung up like fish and a man masked by a bandana standing proudly beside them, his rifle ported. Emblems of the country’s recent unfortunate leap into the modern world. To his surprise, the colonel saw that Tomas had painted a lizard on an unexploited section of the wall, in the lower right-hand corner, a lizard very like the specimen that had caught his attention the night before, indigo, with delicate black markings and orange eyes. Beneath the lizard was an uncompleted face, bearded and pale, with one glaring eye and a sketched-in eyebrow—the space where the second eye should have been was occupied by the lizard’s tail. Tomas rarely included the face of a specific man or woman in the mural, yet this had the look of a portrait in progress.
“Oye, Tomas!” The colonel took a seat on the deck. “Por favor, un café!”
The old man glanced toward the colonel and shaded his eyes. He waved and spoke to someone in the shadows. Then he went back to his painting. Soon a barefoot brown-skinned girl wearing an embroidered blouse and a long red skirt brought coffee and a sweet roll, and the colonel sat happily watching combers rolling in from the deep green swells beyond Punta Manabique, regarding the palm-lined ochre curve of the beach and the town set along it, the stucco and tile of the tourist places, the grim eminence of the cathedral thrusting up from the central plaza, and the rusted tin roofs of Barrio Clarin, in front of which a small herd of piebald cows had strayed onto the sand and were nudging at mounds of seaweed in hopes of uncovering something edible.
When Tomas quit work on the mural he joined the colonel at his table and the colonel told him that he had recently seen a lizard resembling the one in the mural.
“How odd,” said Tomas. “For there are no such lizards. It is a magical creature born in the imagination.”
“My imagination… or yours?”
“We are of the same blood. Our imaginations sing the same song. What is in my mind, lives also in yours, needing only to be awakened.”
“Well, there is at least one flesh-and-blood lizard. I saw it clinging to the wall of my room last night.”
“One is very like none,” Tomas said. “There is only the slightest difference between these values. The difference between the ordinary and the magical. It is easy to mistake the two.”
The colonel decided that Tomas was playing with him, let the subject drop, and asked who the half-completed face was intended to represent.
“Satan.” Tomas spat over the railing to indicate distaste.
“So…” The colonel leaned back and tilted his face to the sun. “Satan is a gringo, eh?”
“Pale, yes. A gringo, no,” said Tomas. “But like you he is a colonel.”
Colonel Galpa saw that the old man was not joking and asked him to explain.
“Surely you have heard of him?” Tomas asked, and when the colonel said he had not, the old man said, “It is too pleasant a day to speak of such things.”
A romantic song, strings and guitars underscoring a passionate tenor, issued from the jukebox inside the restaurant, and the girl who had served them could be seen dancing by herself, her head inclined to one side, holding her long skirt up to her ankles. The sun had risen high enough to illuminate the crates of lime and orange and grape and strawberry soda stacked beside the jukebox, causing the bottles to glow with gemmy brilliance.
“I know what you are thinking,” Tomas said. “You are thinking how beautiful women are when they are sad, and how that sadness might give way to something more beautiful yet if a man with the proper respect and temper were to happen along. Be wary, my friend. Let a woman wound you with her sadness, and you will carry that wound until the day of your death.”
“When was the last time you were with a woman?” the colonel asked.