She closed her eyes.
When she came out and put on her clothes she felt reborn, born anew. She had closed the eyes of memory. She felt as though she were one of the red flowers, that she would speak only with the texture of her skin, the tendrils of hair at the core, remain open, feel no contractions ever again.
She thought of the simplified life. Of cooking over a wood fire, of swimming every day, of sleeping out of doors in a cot without sheets with only a Mexican wool blanket. Of sandals, and freedom of the body in light dresses, hair washed by the sea and curled by the air. Unpainted nails.
When she arrived Maria had set the table. The lights were weak bulbs hanging from a string. The generator was working and could be heard. But the trees were full of fireflies, crickets, and pungent odors.
“If you want to wash the salt off, there is a creek just down toward the left, and a natural pool. Take a candle.”
“No, I like the salt on my skin.”
On the table were dishes of black beans, rice, and tamales.
And again coffee in the thermos bottle.
After dinner Hatcher wanted to show Lillian all of the half-built house. She saw their bedroom, with its white-washed walls and flowered curtains. And behind the wall a vast storage room.
“He is very proud of his storage room,” said Maria.
It was enormous, as large as the entire front of the house. As large as a supermarket. With shelves reaching to the ceiling. Organized, alphabetized, catalogued.
Every brand of canned food, every brand of medicine, every brand of clothing, glasses, work gloves, tools, magazines, books, hunting guns, fishing equipment.
“Will you have cling peaches? Asparagus? Quinine?” He was swollen with pride. “Magazines? Newspapers?”
Lillian saw a pair of crutches on a hook at the side of the shelf. His eyes followed her glance, and he said without embarrassment: “That’s in case I should break a leg.”
Lillian did not know why the place depressed her. She suddenly felt deeply tired. Maria seemed grateful to be left alone with her husband. They went into their bedroom in the back, and Lillian sat on her cot at the front of the open terrace, and undressed behind a screen.
She had imagined Hatcher free. That was what had depressed her. She had been admiring him for several weeks as a figure who had attained independence, who could live like a native, a simplified existence with few needs. He was not even free of his past, of his other wife. The goodness of this one, her warmth, her servitude, only served to underline the contrast between her and the other. Lillian had felt him making comparisons between her and his Mexican wife. The other still existed in his thoughts. It may even have been why he invited Lillian the very first day in the taxi.
She couldn’t sleep, having witnessed Hatcher’s umbilical ties with his native land’s protectiveness. (America alone could supply crutches if one broke one’s leg, America alone could cure him of malaria, America-the-mother, America-the-father had been transported into the supplies shed, canned and bottled.) He had been unable to live here naked, without possessions, without provisions, with his Mexican mother and the fresh fruits and vegetables in abundance, the goat’s milk, and hunting.
Close the eyes of memory…but was she free? Hatcher’s umbilical cord had stirred her own roots. His fears had lighted up these intersections of memory which were like double exposures. Like the failed photograph of the Mayan temple, in which by an accident, a failure to turn a small key, Lillian had been photographed both standing up and lying down, and her head had seemed to lie inside the jaws of a giant king snake of stone, and the stairs of the pyramid to have been built across her body as if she had been her own ghostly figure transcending the stone.
The farther she traveled into unknown places, unfamiliar places, the more precisely she could find within herself a map showing only the cities of the interior.
This place resembled none other, with its colonnade of palm-tree trunks, its walled back set against the rocks, its corrugated roof on which monkeys clowned. The cactus at night took shapes of arthritic old men, bearded scarecrows of the tropics, and the palms were always swaying with a rhythm of fans in the heat, of hammocks in the shade.
Was there no open road, simple, clear, unique? Would all her roads traverse several worlnd herimultaneously, bordered by the fleeting shadows of other roads, other mountains? She could not pass by a little village in the present without passing as well by some other little village in some other country, even the village of a country she had wished to visit once and had not reached!
Lillian could see the double exposure created by memory. A lake once seen in Italy flowed into the lagoon which encircled Golconda, a hotel on a snowy mountain in Switzerland was tied to Hatcher’s unfinished mountain home by a long continuous cable, and this folding cot behind a Mexican screen lay alongside a hundred other beds in a hundred other rooms, New York, Paris, Florence, San Francisco, New Orleans, Bombay, Tangiers, San Luis.
The map of Mexico lay open on her knees, but she could not find the thick jungle line which indicated her journeys. They divided into two, four, six, eight skeins.
She was speeding at the same rhythm along several dusty roads, as a child with parents, as a wife driving her husband, as a mother taking her children to school, as a pianist touring the world, and all these roads intersected noiselessly and without damage.
Swinging between the drug of forgetfulness and the drug of awareness, she closed her eyes, she closed the eyes of memory.
When she awakened she saw first of all a casuarina tree with orange flowers that seemed like tongues of flames. Between its branches rose a thin wisp of smoke from Maria’s brasero. Maria was patting tortillas between her hands with an even rhythm and at the same time watching over genuine American pancakes saying: “Senorita, I have tortillas a La Americana for you.”
The table was set in the sun, with Woolworth dishes and oilcloth and paper napkins.
The young doctor had arrived with his friends. They would take her back to Golconda.
Maria was gazing at Lillian pensively. She was trying to imagine that a woman just like this one had hurt Hatcher so deeply that he never talked about it. She was trying to imagine the nature of the hurt. She knew that Hatcher no longer loved that woman. But she knew also that he still hated her, and that she was still present in his thoughts.
Lillian wanted to talk to her, help her exorcise the American woman with the painted nails. But Hatcher would be lonely without his memories, lonely without his canned asparagus, and his American-made crutches. Did he truly love Maria, with her oily black hair, her maternal body, her compassionate eyes, or did he love her for not being his first wife?
He looked at Lillian with hardness. Because she did not want to stay? Could she explain that she had spent the night in the subterranean cities of memory, instead of outside in the spicy, lulling tropical night?
Doctor Palas had been called during the night, and was in a bad humor. His friends had found the new beach hotel lacking in comfort. “The cot had a large stain, as if a crime had been ommitted there. The mosquito netting had a hole, and we were bitten by mosquitoes. And in the morning we had to wash our faces from a pail of water. We gave some pennies to the children. They were so eager that they scratched our hands. And only fish and black beans to eat, even for breakfast. “
“Some day,” said Hatcher, “when my place is built, it will attract everyone. I am sure the movie colony will come.”
“But I thought you came here to be isolated, to enjoy a primitive life, a simple life.”