“It isn’t the first time a human being has had two wishes, diametrically opposed,” said Doctor Palas.
In the car, driving back in the violent sun, no one talked. The light filled the eyes, the mind, the nerves, the bones, and it was only when they drove through shade that they came out of this anesthesia of sunlight. In the shade they would find women washing clothes in the river, children swimming naked, old men sitting on fences, and the younger men behind the plough, or driving huge wheeled carts pulled by white Brahma bulls. In the eyes of the Mexicans there were no questions, no probings; only resignation, passivity, endurance, patience. Except when one of them ran amok.
Lillian could feel as they did at times. There were states of being which resembled the time before the beginning of the world, unformed, undesigned, unseparated. Chaos. Mountains, sea and earth undifferentiated, nebulous, intertwined. States of mind and feeling which would never appear under any spiritual X-ray. Dense, invisible, inaccessible to articulate people. She would live here, would be lost. At every moment of anxiety, of probing, she would slip into the sea for rebirth. Her body would be restored to her. She would feel her face as a face, fleshy, sunburned, warm, and not as a mask concealing a flow of thoughts. She would be given back her neck as a firm, living, palpitating, warm neck, not as a support for a head heavy with fever and questions. Her whole body would be restored to her, breasts relaxed, no longer compressed by the emotions of the chest, legs restored, smooth and gleaming. All of it cool, smooth, washed of thought.
She would plunge back with these people into silence, into meditation and contemplation. When she washed her clothes in the river she would feel only the flow of the water, the sun on her back. The light of the sun would fill every corner of her mind and create refractions of light and color and send messages to her senses which would dissolve into humid shining fields, purple mountains, and the rhythms of the sea and the Mexican songs.
No thoughts like the fingers of a surgeon, feeling here and there, where is the pain, where did destruction spring from, what cell has broken, where is the broken mirror that distorts the images of human life?
Chaos was rich, destructive, and protective, like the dense jungle they had traveled through. Could she return to the twilight marshes of a purely natural, inarticulate, impulsive world, feel safe there from inquiry and exposure?
But in this jungle, a pair of eyes, not her own, had followed and found her. Her mother’s eyes. She had first seen the world through her mother’s eyes, and seen herself through her mother’s eyes. Children were like kites, at first they did not have vision, they did not see themselves except reflected in the eyes of the parents. Lillian seen through her mother’s eyes.
Her mother was a great lady. She wore immaculate dresses, was always pulling on her gloves. She had tidy hair which the wind could not disarrange, she wore veils, perfume. Lillian’s outbursts of affection were always curtailed because they threatened this organization. “Don’t wrinkle my dress. You will tear my veil. Don’t muss my hair.” And once when Lillian had buried her face in the folds of her dress and cried: “Oh, Mother, you smell so good,” she had even said: “Don’t behave like a savage.” If this is a woman, thought Lillian, I do not want to be one. Lillian was impetuous, but this barrier had driven her into an excess, into exaggerations of her tumultuousness.
She threw her clothes about, she soiled and crumpled up her dresses. Her hair was never tidy. At the same time, she felt that this was the cause of her mother’s coolness. She did not want this coldness. She thought she would rather be chaotic, and stutter and be rough but warm. When she disobeyed, when she ran amok, she felt she was rescuing her warmth and naturalness from her mother’s formal hands. And at the same time she felt despair, that because she was as she was, and unable to be like HER, she would never be loved. She took to music passionately, and there too her wildness, her lack of discipline, hampered her playing. In music too there was a higher organization of experience. Yes, she knew that, she was undisciplined and wayward. Only today, traveling through Mexico, a country of warmth, of naturalness, and looking into eyes that did not criticize, did she realize she had never yet used her own eyes to look at herself.
Her mother, a very tall woman with critical eyes. She had eyes like Lillian’s, a vivid electric blue. Lillian looked into them for everything. They were her mirror. She thought she could read them clearly, and what she saw made her uneasy. There were never any words. Only her eyes. Was this dissatisfaction due to other causes? She used her eyes to stop Lillian when Lillian wanted to draw physically close to her. It was a kind of signal. Her mother had told her only much later that she did think her an awkward and ardent child, chaotic, impulsive, did think how emotional she was, how she could not civilize her. Those were her mother’s words.
Lillian had never seen herself with her own eyes. Children do not possess eyes of their own. You retained as upon a delicate retina, your mother’s image of you, as the first and the only authentic one, her judgment of your acts.
They had reached a place of shade by the river. They had to wait for the barge to take them across. They got out of the car and sat on the grass. A woman was hanging her laundry on the branches of a low tree, and the blues, oranges, pinks looked like giant flowers wilted by tropical rains.
Another woman approached them with a basket on her head. She took it down with calm, deliberate gestures and put before them a neatly arranged pile of small fried fish.
“Do you have any beer?” asked Doctor Palas.
The houses by the river did not have any walls. They were palm leaves on four palm trunks. A woman was pushing a small hammock monotonously to keep a baby asleep. Children were playing aked in the dust and by the edge of the river.
It was Doctor Palas‘ friends who noticed that the radiator was leaking profusely. They would never reach Golconda. They would be lucky if they reached San Luis, on the other side of the river.
Lillian was thinking that at this time Diana, Christmas, and her other friends were starting on a colorful safari to the beach.
The barge drifted in slowly, languidly. The men who had pushed it wiped the perspiration from their shoulders. In their dark red-brown eyes, fawn eyes, there were always specks of gold. From the sun, or from some deep Indian irony. Catastrophe always made them laugh. Was it a religion unknown to Lillian? A dog half drowned once, at the beach, made them laugh. The leaking radiator, the stranded tourists. And this was New Year’s Eve. They would not reach Golconda for the fireworks and street dances.
San Luis was a village of dirt streets, shacks, in which bands of pigs were left to find their nourishment in the garbage, and bands of children followed the foreigners asking for pennies. There was only a square, with a church of gold and blue mosaics, a cafe, a grocery, a garage. They took the car there and Doctor Palas translated for them. Lillian understood the palaver. It consisted, on the Indian side, in avoiding a direct answer to a simple question: “When will the car be ready?” As if a direct answer would bring down on them some fatal wrath, some superstitious punishment. It was impossible to say. Would they care to sit at the cafe while they waited? It was four o’clock. They sat there until six. Doctor Palas went back to the garage several times. In between he sought to continue with Lillian an intimate conversation in Spanish which his American friends would not understand. Without knowing the trend of meditation that Lillian had embarked on, on the theme of eyes, the eyes of her mother with which she had looked at herself, it was her eyes he praised, and her hair. Her eyes which were not her own when she looked at herself. But when she looked at others, she saw them with love, with compassion. She truly saw them. She saw the American couple, uncomfortable, not understanding this mixture of dirt and gaiety. The children took delight in chasing away the pigs and imitating their cries.