The huts made of palm leaves recalled Africa. Some were pointed on top and on stilts. Others had slanting roofs, and the palm leaves extended far enough to create shadows all around the house.
The lagoon on the left of the road showed a silver surface which sometimes turned to sepia. It was half filled with floating lagoon flowers. Trees and bushes seemed like new vegetation, also on stilts, dipping twistroots into the water as the reeds dipped their straight and flexible roots. Herons stood on one leg. Iguanas slithered away, and parrots became hysterically gay.
Lillian’s eyes returned to the Doctor. His thoughts were elsewhere, so she looked at the American who had introduced himself as Hatcher. He was an engineer who had come to Mexico years before to build roads and bridges, and had remained and married a Mexican woman. He spoke perfect Spanish, and was a leathery-skinned man who had been baked by the sun as dark as the natives. The tropics had not relaxed his forward-juttingjaw and shoulders. He looked rigid, lean, hard-fleshed. His bare feet were in Mexican sandals, the soles made of discarded rubber tires. His shirt was open at the neck. But on him the negligent attire still seemed a uniform to conquer, rather than a way of submitting to, the tropics.
“Golconda may seem beautiful to you, but it’s spoiled by tourism. I found a more beautiful place farther on. I had to hack my way to it. I have a beach where the sand isso white it hurts the eyes like a snow slope. I’m building a house. I come to Golconda once a week to shop. I have a jeep. If you like you can drive out with me for a visit. Unless, like most Americans, you have come here to drink and dance…”
“I’m not free to drink and dance. I have to play every night with the jazz orchestra.”
“Then you must be Lillian Beye,” said the passenger who had not yet spoken. He was a tall blond Austrian who spoke a harsh Spanish but with authority. “I’m the owner of the Black Pearl. I engaged you.”
“Mr. Hansen?”
He shook her hand without smiling. He was fair-skinned.
The tropics had not been able to warm him or to melt the icicle-blue eyes.
Lillian felt that these three men were somehow interfering with her own tasting of Golconda. They seemed intent on giving her an image of Golconda she did not want. The Doctor wanted her to notice only that the children were in need of care, the American wanted her to recoil from tourism, and the owner of the Black Pearl made the place seem like a night club.
The taxi stopped for gasoline. An enormously fat American, unshaved for many days, rose from a hammock to wait on them.
“Hello, Sam,” said Doctor Hernandez. “How is Maria? You didn’t bring her to me for her injection.”
Sam shouted to a woman dimly visible inside the palm leaf shack. She came to the door. Her long black shawl was fastened to her shoulders and her baby was cradled in the folds of it as if inside a hammock.
Sam repeated the Doctor’s question. She shrugged her shoulders: “No time,” she said and called: “Maria!”
Maria came forward from a group of children, carrying a boat made out of a coconut shell. She was small for her age, delicately molded, like a miniature child, as Mexican children often are. In the eyes of most Mexican painters, these finely chiseled beings with small hands and feet and slender necks and waists become larger than nature, with the sinews and muscles of giants. Lillian saw them tender and fragile and neat. The Doctor saw them ill.
The engineer said to Lillian: “Sam was sent here twenty years ago to build bridges and roads. He married a native. He does nothing but sleep and drink.”
“It’s the tropics,” said Hansen.
“You’ve never been to the Bowery,” said Lillian.
“But in the tropics all white men fall apart.”
“I’ve heard that but I never believed it. Any more than I believe all adventurers are doomed. I think such beliefs are merely an expression of fear, fear of expatriation, fear of adventure.”
“I agree with you,” said the Doctor. “The white man who falls apart in the tropics is the same one who would fall apart anywhere. But in foreign lands they stand out more because they are few, and we notice them more.”
“And then at home, if you want to fall apart, there are so many people to stop you. Relatives and friends foil your attempts! You get sermons, lectures, threats, and you are even rescued.”
The Austrian laughed: “I can’t help thinking how much encouragement you would get here.”
“You, Mr. Hatcher, didn’t disintegrate in the tropics!”
Hatcher answered solemnly: “But I am a happy man. I have succeeded in living and feeling like a native.”
“Is that the secret, then? It’s those who don’t succeed in going native, in belonging, who get desperately lonely and self-destructive?”
“Perhaps,” said the Doctor pensively. “It may also be that you Americans are work-cultists, and work is the structure that holds you up, not the joy of pure living.”
His words were accompanied by a guitar. As soon as one guitar moved away, the sound of another took its place, to continue this net of music that would catch and maintain you in flight froms adness, suspended in a realm of festivities.
Just as every tree carried giant brilliant flowers playing chromatic scales, runs and trills of reds and blues, so the people vied with them in wearing more intense indigoes, more flaming oranges, more platinous whites, or else colors which resembled the purple insides of mangoes, the flesh tones of pomegranates.
The houses were covered with vines bearing bell-shaped flowers playing coloraturas. The guitars inside of the houses or on the doorsteps took up the color chromatics and emitted sounddth=h evoked the flavor of guava, papaya, cactus figs, anise, saffron, and red pepper.
Big terra-cotta jars, heavily loaded donkeys, lean and hungry dogs, all recalled images from the Bible. The houses were all open; Lillian could see babies asleep in hammocks, holy pictures on the white stucco walls, old people on rocking chairs, and photographs of relatives pinned on the walls together with old palm leaves from the Palm Sunday feast.
The sun was setting ostentatiously, with all the pomp of embroidered silks and orange tapestries of Oriental spectacles. The palms had a naked elegance and wore their giant plumes like languid feather dusters sweeping the tropical sky of all clouds, keeping it as transparent as a sea shell.
Restaurants served dinner out in the open. On one long communal table was a bowl of fish soup and fried fish. Inside the houses people had begun to light the oil lamps which had a more vivacious flicker than candles.
The Doctor had been talking about illness. “Fifteen years ago this place was actually dangerous. We had malaria, dysentery, elephantiasis, and other illnesses you would not even know about. They had no hospital and no doctor until I came. I had to fight dysentery alone, and teach them not to sleep in the same bed with their farm animals.”
“How did you happen to come here?”
“We have a system in Mexico. Before obtaining their degrees, young medical students have to have a year of practice in whatever small town needs them. When I first came here I was only eighteen. I was irresponsible and a bit sullen at having to take care of fishermen who could neither read nor write nor follow instructions of any kind. When I was not needed, I read French novels and dreamed of the life in large cities which I was missing. But gradually I came to love my fishermen, and when the year was over I chose to stay.”
The eyes of the people were full of burning life. They squatted like Orientals next to their wide flat baskets filled with fruits and vegetables. The fruit was not piled negligently but arranged in a careful Persian design of decorative harmonies. Strings of chili hung from the rafters, chili to wake them from their dreams, dreams born of scents and rhythms, and the warmth that fell from the sky like the fleeciest blanket. Even the twilight came without a change of temperature or alteration in the softness of the air.