One of the student’s ballads finally pleased the girl, and she invited him inside. Her family met him at the door. The other students cheered.
Lillian said: “I’m going out to dance with the bad poets!”
“No,” said Michael, “you can’t do that!”
“Why not?”
“It isn’t done here.”
“But I’m American. I don’t have to conform to their traditions.”
Lillian went out. When she first appeared at the door the students all stared at her in awe. Then they murmured with pleasure: “The American is allowed to dance in the streets.”
A bolder one asked her to dance. She glided off with him. The marimbas played with a tinkle of music boxes, the resonances of Tibetan bells, and sometimes like Balinese cymbals. The fireworks lighted up the sky and faces.
Other students pressed around her, waiting for a dance. They offered her a flower to wear in her hair. Tactfully, they made a wall against the students who were drunk, shielding her. She passed from the arms of one student to another. As she passed she could see Michael’s face at the window, cold and angry.
The dances grew faster and the change of partners swifter. They sang ballads in her ears.
As the evening wore on she began to tire because of the cobblestones, and she became a little frightened too, because the students were growing more ardent and more intoxicated. So she began to dance toward the house where Michael stood waiting. They realized she was seeking to escape, and the ones she had not yet danced with pressed forward, pleading with her. But she was out of breath and had lost one heel, so she moved eagerly toward the door. Michael opened it and closed it quickly after her. The students knocked on the door and for a moment she feared they would knock it down.
Then she noticed that Michael was trembling. He looked so pale, drawn, unhappy that Lillian ne asked him tenderly: “What is it, Michael? What is it, Michael? Did you mind my going out to dance? Did you mind that your fantasy about a world without women was proved not true? Why don’t you come with me? We’re invited to the Queen’s house.”
“No, I won’t go.”
“I don’t understand you, Michael. You make it so clear that you want a world without women.”
“I don’t look upon you as a woman.”
“Then why should you mind if I go to a party?”
“I do mind.”
She remembered that she had come because he seemed in distress; she had come to help him and not to hurt him.
“I’ll stay with you, then.”
They sat in the courtyard, alone.
If the city we choose, thought Lillian, represents our inner landscape, then Michael has selected a magnificent tomb, to live among the ruins of his past loves. The beauty of his house, his clothes, his paintings, his books, seem like precious jewels, urns, perfumes, gold ornaments such as were placed in the tombs of Egyptian kings.
“A long time ago,” said Michael, “I decided never to fall in love again. I have made of desire an anonymous activity.”
“But not to feel…not to love…is like dying within life, Michael.”
The burial of emotion caused a kind of death, and it was this cadaver of his feelings he carried within him that gave him, in spite of his elegance, and the fairness of his coloring, a static quality, like that of the ancient city itself.
“Soon the rains will come,” he said. “The house will grow cold and damp. The roads will become impassable. I had hoped your engagement at the hotel would last until then.”
“Why don’t you come back to Golconda then?”
“This place suits my present mood,” said Michael. “The gaiety and liveliness of Golconda hurts me, like too much light in my eyes.”
“What a strange conversation, Michael, in this patio that reminds me of the illustrations for the Thousand and One Nights—the fountain, the palm tree, the flowers, the mosaic floor, the unbelievable moon, the smell of roses. And here we sit talking like a brother and sister stricken by some mysterious malady. All the dancing and pleasure are taking place next door, nearby, and we are exiled from it…and by our own hand.”
At night her room looked like a nun’s cell, with its whitewashed walls, dark furniture, and the barred windows. She knew she would not stay, that what Michael wanted to share with her was a withdrawal from the world.
In the darkness she heard whisperings. Michael was talking vehemently, and someone was saying: “No, no.” Then she heard a chair being pushed. Was it Michael courting one of the young students? Michael who had said lightly: “All I ask, since I can’t keep you here, is that in your next incarnation you be born a boy, and then I will love you.”
One day in Golconda she saw a bus passing by that bore the name of San Luis, the town near Hatcher’s place and she climbed on it.
It was brimming full, not only with people, but with sacks of corn, chickens tied together, turkeys in baskets, church chairs in red velvet, a mail sack, babies in arms.
On the front seat sat the young bullfighter she had seen at the arena the Sunday before. He was very young and very slim. His dark hair was now wild and free, not sleek and severely tied as it was worn by bullfighters. In the arena he had seemed taut, all nerves and electric resilience. In his white pants and slack shirt he looked vulnerable and tender. Lillian had seen him wildly angry at the bull, had seen him challenge the bull recklessly because, during one of the passes, it had torn his pants with its horns, had undressed him in public. This small patch of flesh showing through the turquoise brocaded pants, this human, warm flesh glowing, exposed, had made the scene with the bull more like a sensual scene, a duel between aggressor and victim, and the tension had seemed less that of a symbolic ritual between animal strength and male strength than that of a sexual encounter.
This vulnerable exposure had stirred the women, but injured the bullfighter’s dignity, made him a thousand times angrier, wilder, more reckless…
The bus driver was teasing him. He said he was going to visit his parents in San Luis. The bus driver thought he was going to visit Maria. The bullfighter did not want to talk. Next to him sat a very old woman, all in black, asleep with a basket of eggs on her knees. When the bus stopped someone got on carrying candelabras.
“Are they moving the whole church?” asked the man carrying turkeys. But though he was standing, he did not dare sit on one of the red velvet praying chairs. He was bartering with the man who carried chickens. The bag filled with corn undulated with each bump on the road. Finally a very small hole was made in the hemp by so much friction, and a few grains of corn began to fall out. At this the chickens, who were all tied together, began to crane their necks, and to mutiny. The owner of the bag became angry and, not finding a way to repair it, sat next to it on the floor with his hand on the hole.
In another seat sat an English woman with a young Mexican girl. The woman was a school teacher. Her English clothes were wearing out; they were mended, patched, but she would not change to Mexican clothes. She wore a colonial hat on her sparse yellow hair. The books she carried were completely yellow and brittle, the corners all chewed, the covers disintegrating.
At each station the bus stopped for the bus driver to deliver letters and messages. In exchange for this he was given a glass of beer. “Tell Josefa her daughter had a son yesterday. She’ll write later. She wants you to comet>
A man climbed in. His pants were held up with a string. His straw hat looked as if the cows had chewed on the edges until they had reached the unappetizing stains of sweat. His shirt had never been washed. He was selling cactus figs.
At the next stop a priest arrived on his bicycle. He had tied his robe with strings so it would not get caught in the wheels. When he jumped off he forgot to liberate himself, and as he began to run toward the bus he fell on the white dusty road. But nobody laughed. They helped him get his chairs and candelabras out of the bus and placed them on the side of the road. The women then picked them up and balancing them on their heads, followed the priest on his bicycle, in the wave of the dust he raised.