“If you know what they mean, my two obsessions, then tell me, I would rather know. I know I have been deceiving myself. Before we began to talk tonight, when I first sat down with you, I thought to myself, ‘Now I will act like a dead man again, talk like a guide about my new pieces… ‘”
“We never cast off the self. It persists in living through our impersonal activities. When it is in distress it seeks to give messages through our activities.”
“Are you trying to say that I was one of the prisoners myself?”
“Yes, I would say that at some time or other you were in bondage, figuratively speaking, at least kept from doing what you wanted to do; your freedom was tampered with.”
“Yes, it’s true.”
“And every time you can get one of those jail doors open, you feel you are settling an account with some past jailer…or at least trying to, as I tried today…”
“Very true. At fifteen I had such a passion for archaeology that I ran away from home. I tried to get to Yucatan. The family sent police after me, who caught me and brought me back. From then on they kept me under watch.”
Then his look turned once more toward the square, and he relinquished this expedition into his personal life. His eyes became round again and fixed. He had no more to say.
Watching him, Lillian was reminded of the way animals took on the immobility and the color of a tree’s bark or a bush so as not to be detected. She smiled at him, but already he was far removed from the present, the personal, as if he had never talked to her, or known her.
She felt that imprisonment had deprived him of communication with his family, that it was his tongue he had lost then, a vital fragment of himself, and that no matter how many statues he unearthed and reconstructed, no matter how many fragments of history he reassembled, one part of him was missing and might never be found.
The marimba players interrupted their playing as if their instruments were a juke box that could not function without the proper amount of nickels, and began to ask for contributions.
In the morning it was the intense radium shafts of the sun on the seas that awakened her, penetrating the native hut. The dawns were like court scenes of Arabian magnificence. The tent of the sky took fire, a laminated coral, dispelling all the seashell delicacies which had preceded the birth of the sun, and it was a duel between fire and platinum. The whole sea would seem to have caught fire, until the incendiary dawn stopped burning. After the fire came a rearrangement of more subtle brocades, the turquoise and the coral separated, and transparencies appeared like curtains of the sheerest sari textiles. The rest of the day might have seemed shabby after such an opening, but not in Golconda. The dawn was merely the rain of colors from the sky which the earth and the sea would orchestrate all day, with fruits, flowers, and the dress of the natives. These were not merely spots of color, but always vividly shining and humid, as shining as human eyes, colors as alive as flesh tones.
Just as music was an unbroken chain in Golconda, so were the synchronizations of color. Where the flowers ended their jeweled displays, their pagan illuminated manuscripts, fruits took up the gradations. Once or twice, her mouth full of fruit, she stopped. She had the feeling that she was eating the dawn.
Lying in her hammock she could see both sea and the sunlight, and the rocks below between the stellated, swaying palms. From there too she could see the gardener at work with the tenderness which was the highest quality of the Mexican, a quality which made him work not just for a living, with indifference, but with a tenderness for the plants, a caressingness toward the buds, a swinging rhythm with the rake which made work seem like an act of devotion.
Her day wa free until it was time to play with the orchestra for the evening cocktails and dancing.
Before, she had had the feeling that festivities began only with the evening, with the jazz musicians, but now she saw that they began with the sun’s extravagance, and ended with a night which never closed up the flowers, or put the gardens to sleep, or made the birds hide their heads in their wings. The night came with such a softness that a new kind of life blossomed. If one touched the sea at night, sparks of phosphorous illuminated it, and sparkled under one’s step on the wet sand.
Sometimes, at the beach, the sea seemed not like water but a pool of mercury, so iridescent, so clinging. Swimming on her back, she could see the native musicians arrive, and she would swim ashore.
A guitarist, a violinist, a cellist, and a singer would cluster around an umbrella. The singer sang with such sweetness and tenderness that the hammocks stopped swaying. He enchanted not only the bathers, but the other musicians as well, and the cellist would close his heavy-lidded eyes and play with such a relaxed hand that his brown arm seemed to be held up not by the weight of the hand on the bow, but by some miraculous yogi means of suspension. The South Sea Island shirt seemed to contain no nerves or muscles. The violinist played with one string missing, but as the sea occasionally carried away a few of the notes anyway no one detected the missingones.
The waves, attracted by the music, would unroll like a bolt of silk, each time a little closer to the musicians, and aim at surrounding the peg of the cello dug deep into the sand. The cellist did not seem to be looking at the waves, yet each timethey moved to encircle his cello, he had already lifted itup in midair and continued to play uninterruptedly while the waves washed his feet, then retreated.
After the musicians came children carrying baskets on their heads, selling fruit and fried fish. Then came the old photographer with his old-fashioned accordion box camera, and a big black box cover for his head. He was so neatly dressed, his mustache so smoothly combed that he himself looked like an old photograph. Someone had touched up the old photographer until he had become a black and white abstraction of old age.
Lillian did not enjoy being photographed, and she sought to escape him by going for a swim. But he was a figure of endless patience, and waited silently, compact, brittle, and straight. The wrinkles of his face all ran upward, controlled by an almost perpetual smile. He was like the old gardener, so ritualistic in his work, so stylized in his dignity, that Lillian felt she owed him an apology: “I’m sorry I kept you waiting.”
“No harm done, no harm done,” he said gently, as he proceeded to balance his camera on the sand, and just before disappearing under the black cloth he said: “We all have much more time than we have life!”
Watching Lillian being photographed was Edward, the ex-violinist with red hair and freckles who lived in a trailer on the beach. His calendar of events was determined by his multiple marriages. “Oh, the explosion of the yacht? That happened at the time of my second wife.” Or if someone tried to recall when the American swimming champion had dived into the rocks: “Oh that was four wives back!” The wives disappeared, but the children remained. They were so deeply tanned it was difficult to distinguish them from the native children. Edward worked at odd jobs: designing fabrics, tending silver shops, or building a house for someone. At the time Lillian met him he was distributing Coca-Cola calendars all over Mexico. To his own amazement, the people loved them and hung them up on their walls. The last one, which he now unrolled to create a stir among the bathers, was an interpretation of a Mayan human sacrifice. The Yucatan pyramid was smaller than the woman, and the woman who was about to be sacrificed looked like Gypsy Rose Lee. The shaved and lean priest looked unequal to the task of annihilating such splendor of the body. The active volcano on the right-hand side was the size of the sacrificial virgin’s breast.
Tequila always brought out in Edward a total repudiation of art. He was emphatic about the fact that he had deserted the musical world of his own volition. “In this place music is not necessary. Golconda is full of natural music, dance music, singing music, music for living. The street vendors’ tunes are better than any modern composition. Life itself is full of rhythm, people sing while they work. I don’t miss concerts or my own violin at all!”