This was the moment which proved she was a prisoner of timidities and not a genuine adventurer, not a gambler who could smile when he lost, who could be invulnerable before an empty evening, or untouched by an evening spent with a drunken man who insisted on describing to her how the stockyards functioned, how the animals were killed.
This fantasy of disaster never actually took place. Several people always gathered around the piano when she played and waited for her to stop to offer her a drink and join them. But actual happenings never freed her of her inner imprisonment by fear, in anticipation of aloneness.
She would like to have seen the prisoner again but imagined he was already on his way to Mexico City. She had time to walk down to the Spanish restaurant on the square, which she preferred to the hotel. In the hotel she ate her own dinner in privacy. On the square she felt she had dinner with the entire city of Golconda, and shared a multitude of lives.
The square was the heart of the town. The church opened its doors to it on one side. The other sides were lined with cafes, restaurants with their tables on the sidewalk, a movie house; in the center was a bandstand surrounded by a small park with benches.
On the benches sat enraptured young lovers, tired hobos, men reading their newspapers while little boys shined their shoes. There was also a circle of vendors sitting on the sidewalk with their baskets full of candied fruit, colored fruit drinks, red and yellow cigarettes, and magazines. Old ladies with black shawls walked quietly in and out of the church, children begged, marimba players settled in front of each cafe and played as long as the pennies flowed. Singers stopped to sing. Little girls sold sea-shell necklaces and earrings. The prostitutes paraded in taffeta dresses with flowers in their black hair.
The flow of beggars was endlessly varied. They changed their handicaps. When they tired of portraying blindness they suddenly appeared with wooden legs. The genuine ones were terrifying, like nightmare figures: a child, shriveled and shrunken, lying on a little table with wheels which he pushed with withered hands; an old woman so twisted she resembled the roots of a very ancient tree; many of them sightless, with festering sores in place of eyes. But they resisted all professional help, as Doctor Hernandez had told her. They refused to bppeared win out of the streets, from the spectacles of religious processions, Indian fireworks, band concerts, or the flow of visitors in their eccentric costumes.
And among them now, sitting at a nearby table, was the American prisoner with the guide.
From the heightened tones of their voices, the numerous empty bottles of tequila on the table Lillian knew to what cause her donation for freedom had been diverted. They were beyond recognizing her. Unfocused eyes, vague gestures, revealed a Coney Island of the mind, with the whirlings, the crack-the-whips, the dark chambers of surprises, the deforming mirrors, the jet-plane trips, the death-defying motorcycles of drunkenness. Tongues rubberized, their words came out on oiled rollers, their laughter like sudden geysers.
Just as Lillian sat down there came to her table a short Irishman with an ageless face and round, absolutely fixed round eyes. Their roundness and fixity gave his face an expression of extreme innocence. He greeted her and asked her permission to sit down.
He wore white pants as the Mexicans did, a blue shirt open at the neck, and Spanish rope shoes, and talked briefly in such a monotone that it was difficult to hear what he said.
But his pockets were filled with small fragments from excavations: heads, arms, legs, snakes, flutes, pottery of various Indian origins. He would pull one of these objects out of his pocket and hold it for inspection in the palm of his hand. And quietly he would tell the history of the piece.
He never asked anyone to buy them, but if a tourist asked: “Will you sell it?” he assented sadly, as if it belonged to a private collection and he was only a courteous host.
Every time he saw Lillian he showed her one of the pieces and taught her how to distinguish between the periods, by whether the piece was clay or stone, by the slant of the eye, the headgear, the design of the jewels, so that she began to know the history of Mexico.
O’Connor never talked of anything but the new excavations he had attended, the history of the little fragments. And after that he would fall into a tropical trance.
The theatrical scenes on the square sufficed for his happiness—two sailors quarreling, lovers meeting, a Mexican family celebrating their daughter’s winning of the Carnival beauty-queen contest, men alone playing chess after dinner. He lived the life of others. Lillian could see him watching these people until he became them. He sat in his chair like a body empty of its spirit, and Lillian could sense him living the life of the lovers, the life of the sailors.
She felt he would understand the story of the prisoner and laugh with her at her gullibility. But he did not laugh. His eyes for the first time lost their glassy fixity. They moistened with emotion.
“I wish I had been able to warn you… I never imagined… To think you rescued the one prisoner who did not deserve it! I never told you… When I’m not working with excavators and anthropologists I spend all my time rescuing foreigners in trouble—a sailor who gets nto a brawl with a Mexican; a tourist whose car kills a donkey on the road. If they are poor, or if they strike a native, the Mexicans are apt to forget them in jail. This place is filled with people who don’t care what happens to others. They have come here for pleasure. They are running away from burdens. There’s something in the climate too. And now you… You went and rescued the one prisoner who makes a profession of this, who shares with the guide what the tourists give him, who lives on that, and then quickly returns to jail, to wait for more.”
Lillian laughed again, irrepressibly.
“I’m glad you’re laughing. I guess I have taken all this too seriously. It has seemed to me almost a matter of life and death, to get all the prisoners out. I never quite understood it. Sometimes I forget them for a few days, go on my expeditions, swim, travel. But always I return to the jail, to the jailed.”
“When you’re so intent on freeing others, you must be trying to free some part of yourself too.”
“I never gave it much thought…but the desperation with which I work, the amount of time I spent on this, as if it were a vice I had no control over… Opening jail doors, and searching for fragments of vanished civilizations. Never thought what it might mean… You see, I came here to forget myself. I had the illusion that if I engaged in impersonal activities, I would get rid of myself somewhere. I felt that an interest in the history of Mexico and salvaging prisoners meant I had abdicated my personal life. “
“Does it disturb you so much to think that perhaps your apparently impersonal activities actually represent a personal drama in which you yourself are involved? That you are merely re-enacting your intimate drama through others, expressing it through others?”
“Yes, it does disturb me. It makes me feel I have failed to escape from myself. Yet I have known all along that I failed in some way. Because I should have been content, alive, as people are when they give of themselves. Instead I have often felt like a depersonalized ghost, a man without a self, a zombie. It is not a good feeling. It’s like the old stories about the man who lost his shadow.”
“You never abdicate the self, you merely find new ways of manifesting its activities.”