The bus seats were of plain hardwood. The bus jumped like a bronco on the rocky, uneven, half-gutted road. Lillian had difficulty staying in her seat. The bullfighter was gently sleeping, and did not seem like the same young man who had suffered a symbolic rape before thousands of people.
Talking to the conductor in a stream of tinkly words like a marimba was a little girl of seven who resembled Lietta, Edward’s oldest daughter. Lillian felt all through her body a dissolution of tenderness for Lietta, who, even though she was so deeply tanned, as dark as a Mexican child, had a transparency and openness Lillian loved. As if children were made of phosphorous, and one saw the light shining in them. The transparent child. Her own little girl at home had had this. And then one day they lose it. How? Why? One day for no perceptible reason, they close their thoughts, veil their feelings, and one can no longer read their faces openly as before. The transparent child. Such a delight to look into open naked feelings and thoughts.
The little girl who talked to the bus driver did not mind that he was not listening. Her eyes were so large that it seemed she must see more than anyone, and reveal more of herself than any child. But her eyes were heavily fringed with eyelashes, and she was watching the road.
Lillian herself must have been transparent once, and how did this heavy wall build up, these prison walls, these silences? Unaware of this great loss, the loss of the transparent child, one becomes an actor whose profession it is to manipulate his face so that others may have the illusion they are reading his soul. Illusion. How she had loved the bullfighter’s fury at the bull, this gentle and tender young man sleeping now, so angry he had almost hurled himself upon its horns.
When did opaqueness set in? Mistrust, fear of judgment. The bus was passing through a tunnel.
Lietta. Lillian could not tell if she was trying to understand Lietta, or her own children, or the Lietta she had once been. She remembered watching Lietta’s diminutive nose twitching almost imperceptibly when she was afraid, when one of the dazzling women approached her father, for instance. Dream of the transparent child.
The bus was like a bronco. Would they be able to stay on it? In the darkness of the tunnel she lost the image of Lietta in her blue bathing suit and found herself at the same age, herself and other children she had played with, in Mexico, at the time her father was building bridges and roads. The beginning the whistling by which her mother called her in from playing. She had a powerful whistle. The children could hear it, no matter how far they went. Their playground was a city beneath the city, which had been partly excavated to build a subway like the American subway, and then abandoned. Cities in other centuries, once buried in lava, which ran underneath the houses, gardens, streets. Where it ran under streets there were grilles to catch the rainwater, but most of the time these grilles only served to bring in a diffuse light. People walked over them without knowing they were walking over another city. The neighborhood children had brought mats, candles, toys, shawls, and lived there a life which because of its secrecy seemed more intense than any above the ground. They had all been forbidden to go there, had been warned of wells, sewers, underground rivers.
The children all stayed together and never ventured farther than the lighted passageways. They were fearful of getting lost.
From all the corners of the underground city Lillian could hear her mother calling when it was time to come home. She had never imagined she might disregard her mother’s whistle. But one day she was learning from a Mexican playmate how to cut animals and flowers out of paper for a fiesta, and was so surprised by the shapes that appeared that when the whistle came, she decided not to hear it. Her brothers and sisters left. She went on cutting out ships, stars, lanterns, suns, and moons. Then suddenly her candle gave out.
Trailing all her streams of paper with her, she walked toward the opening that gave onto their garden wall, trusting in her memory. But the place was dark. Under her feet the clay was dry and soft. She walked confidently, until she felt the clay growing wet. She did not remember any wet clay in the places where they played. She became frightened. She remembered the stories about wells, rivers, sewers. The knowledge that people were walking about free right above her head, without knowing that she was there, augmented her fear. She had never known the exact meaning of death. But at this moment, she felt that this was death. Right above her her family was sitting down to dinner. She could faintly hear voices. But they could not hear her. Her brothers and sisters were sworn to secrecy and would not tell where she was.
She shouted through one of the grilled openings, but the street was deserted at that moment and no one answered. She took a few more steps into the wet clay and felt that her feet were sinking deeper. She stumbled on a piece of wood. With it she struck at the roof, and continued to call. Some of the dirt was loosened and fell on her. And at this she sat down and wept.
And just as she had begun to feel that she was dying, her mother arrived carrying a candle and followed by her brothers and sisters.
(When you do not answer the whistle of duty and obedience, you risk death all alone in the forgotten cities of the past. When you engage in the delights of creating pink, blue, white animals and towers, ships and starry stems, you court solitude and catastrophe.
When you choose to play in a realm far away from the eyes of parents, you court death.)
For some Golconda was the city of pleasure which one should be punished for visiting or for loving. Was this the beginning of the adventurers’ superstitions, the secret of their doomed exiles from home?
Her father never smiled. He had so much dark hair, even along his fingers. He drank and was easily angered, particularly at the natives. The tropics and the love of pleasure were his personal enemies. They interfered with the building of roads and bridges. Roads and bridges were the most important personages in his life.
Lillian’s mother did not smile either. Hers was the house of no-smile, from her father because the building of bridges and roads was such a grave matter which the natives would not take seriously, and from her mother because the children were growing up as “savages.” All they were learning was to sing, dance, paint their faces, make their own toys as the Mexican children did, adopt stray donkeys and goats, and to smile. The Mexican children smiled in such a way that Lillian felt they were giving all they had, all of themselves, in that one smile. So much was said about “economy” in her house that there was perhaps also an economy of smiles! Did one have to be sparing of them, give half-smiles, small sidelong smiles, crumbs of smiles? Were the Mexican children living in the present recklessly, without thought of the future, and would these dazzling smiles wear out?
A cyclone carried away one of Lillian’s father’s bridges. He felt personally offended, as if nature had flaunted his dedication to his work. A flood undermined a road. Another personal affront from the realm of nature. Was it because of this that they returned home? Or because there was shooting in the streets, minor revolutions every now and then?
Once during a school concert at which Lillian was playing the piano, there was a shot in the audience. It was intended for the President but merely put out the lights. While people screamed to get out, Lillian had calmly finished her piece. It she had stayed in Mexico, would she have been so different?