The second glass of tequila unleashed reminiscences of concert halls, and the Museum of Modern Art, as if they had been his residence prior to Golconda. With the third glass came a lecture on the superfluity of art. “For example, here, with the lagoon, the jungle, you do not need the collages of Max Ernst, his artificial lagoons and swamps. With the deserts and sand dunes, the bleaching bones of cows and donkeys, there is no need of Tanguy’s desert scenes and bleaching bones. And with the ruins of San Miguel what need do we have of Chirico’s columns? I lack nothing here. Only a wife willing to live on bananas and coconut milk.”
“When I felt cold,” said Lillian, “I used to go to the Tropical Birds and Plants Department at Sears Roebuck. It was warm, humid, and pungent. Or I would go to look at the tropical plants in the Botanical Gardens. I was looking for Golconda then. I remember a palm tree there which grew so tall, too tall for the glass dome, and I would watch it pushing against the glass, wishing to grow beyond it and be free. I think of this caged palm tree often while I watch the ones of Golconda sweeping the skies.”
But at the third glass of tequila, Edward’s talk grew less metallic, and his glance would fall on his left hand where a finger was missing. Everyone knew, but he never mentioned it, that this was the cause of his broken career as a violinist.
Everyone knew too that his children were loved, nourished, and protected by all in Golconda. They had mysteriously accepted an interchangeable mother, one with many faces and speaking many languages, but for the moment it was Lillian they had adopted, as if they had sensed that in her there was a groove for children, already formed, once used, familiar, and which they found comfortable. And Lillian wondered at their insight, wondered how they knew that she had once possessed, and lost, children of the same age.
How did they know she had already kissed such freckles on the nose, such thin elbows, braided such tangled hair, and known where to find missing shoes? It was not only that they allowed her toy the missing mother, but that they seemed intent on filling an empty niche in her, on playing the missing children.
She and the children embraced each other with a knowledge of substitution which added to their friendship, a familiarity the children did not feel with their other temporary mothers.
To her alone they confessed their concern with their father’s next choice of a wife. They examined each newcomer gravely, weighing her qualifications. They had observed one infallible sign: “If she loves us first,” they explained, “Father doesn’t like it. If she loves him first, then she doesn’t want us around.”
An airline’s beauty queen arrived at the beach. She walked and carried herself as if she knew she were on display and should hold herself as still as possible, arranged for others’ eyes as if to allow them to photograph her. The way she held herself and did not look at others made her seem an image cut out of a poster which incited young men to go to war. A surface unblurred, unruffled, no frown of thought to mar the brow, she exposed herself to others’ eyes with no sign of recognition. She neither transmitted nor received messages to and from the nerves and senses. She walked toward others without emitting any vibrations of warmth or cold. She was a plastic perfection of hair, skin, teeth, body, and form which could not rust, or wrinkle, or cry. It was as if only synthetic elements had been used to create her.
Edward’s children were uneasy with this girl because they imagined their father would be spellbound by the perfect image she presented, the clear blue eyes, the graceful hair, the flawless profile. But soon she made her own choice of companion and it was the ex-Marine who had been pensioned off for exposing himself voluntarily to an experiment with the atom bomb, and had been damaged inside. No one dared to ask, or even to imagine the nature of the injury. He himself was laconic: “I got damaged inside.” No injury was apparent. He was tall, strong, and blond, with so rich a coloring he could not take the sun. His blue eyes matched those of the American airline’s beauty queen; both were untroubled and designed to be admired. He was reluctant to tell his story, but when he drank he would admit: “I offered myself as a volunteer to be stationed as close as possible…and I got damaged, that’s all.”
Neither one had seemed to make any movement toward the other, but as if they had both been moving in the same sphere, at the same altitude, with the same spectator’s detachment, they encountered each other and continued to walk together. They did not keep their eyes fastened on each other as the Mexican lovers did.
They both carried cameras, and they methodically photographed everything. But as for themselves, it was as if they agreed to reveal nothing of themselves by word or gesture.
Edward treated them casually, like walking posters, like one-dimensional cut-outs. But Lillian believed their facade to be a disguise like any other. “They’re just not acquainted with their own selves,” she said.
“Will you introduce them?” asked Edward ironically.
“But you know that’s a dangerous thing to do. They wouldn’t recognize each other; they would treat me like a trespasser, and their unrecognized selves like house breakers.”
“It is dangerous to confront people with an image of themselves they do not wish to acknowledge.”
These words reawakened in her the sense of danger and mystery she felt each time she saw Doctor Hernandez. She remembered his saying: “I get bored with physical illness, which I have fought for fifteen years. As an amateur detective of secret lives, I entertain myself.”
Another time he had said: “I’m fully aware, of course, that you’ve thrown me off the scent by involving me in the secret lives of all your friends in place of your own. But I will tell you one shocking truth. It’s not the sun you’re basking in, it’s my people’s passivity and fatalism. They believe the character of man cannot be altered or tampered with, that man is nature, unpredictable, uncontrollable. They believe whatever he is should be accepted along with poverty, illness, death. The concept of effort and change is unknown. You are born poor, good or bad, or a genius, and you live with that just as you live with your relatives.”
“Do people ever run amok in Golconda? As they do in Bali or Africa, or the South Sea Islands?”
“Yes, they do. Because having based all their lives on resignation, acceptance, humility, passivity, when they find them selves in a trap, they do not know how to defeat it; they only know how to grab a revolver or a knife and kill.”
“No one searches for reasons, no one prods?”
“Except me. And I will be punished for it. Whoever tampers with this empathy with animals, this osmosis with light, this absence of thought, is always made the victim of people’s hatred of awareness.”
“You have anesthetics for physical pain. Why not for anxiety, then?”
“Because they do not care.”
There was a masquerade dance on the Mexican general’s yacht.
From its decks fireworks exploded into the bay, and the rowboats which took the guests up to the ladder had to sail courageously through a shower of comet tails.
The Mexican general was the only one who was not disguised. He awaited his guests at the top of the ladder, greeted them with an embrace; his circumference was so wide that all Lillian was able to kiss in response to his embrace was one of the medals on his chest.
From behind masks, feathers, paint, spangles, all Lillian could see at first were eyes, sea-eyes, animal-eyes, earth-eyes, eyes of precious stones. Fixed, mobile, fluid, some were easily caught by a stare, others escaped all but a fleeting spark.