She saw young Doctor Palas not yet humanly connected with the poor as Doctor Hernandez was.
“Will you go dancing with me tonight?”
“If we get to Golconda,” said Lillian, laughing. “I hope the Hungarian violinist will sweep them off their feet, so they will, not notice my absence.”
At seven o’clock the streets were silent and it began to grow dark. The owner of the cafe was a fair-faced Spaniard with the manners of a courtier. He was helping them to pass the time. He had sent for a guitar player and a singer. He had fixed them a dinner.
When all of them realized they would not be leaving that night, that the car seemed to be losing vigor rather than regaining it, he came and talked to them with vehemence.
“San Luis looks quiet now, but it is only because they are dressing for New Year’s Eve. Pretty soon they will all be out in the streets. There l be dancing. But the men will drink heavily. I advise you not to mix with them. The women know when to leave. Gradually they disappear with the children. The men continue drinking, and soon they begin to shoot at mirrors, at glasses, at bottles, at anything. Sometimes they shoot at each other. I entreat you, Senores y Senoras to stay right here. I have clean rooms I can let you have for the night. Stay in our rooms. I strongly advise you…”
The rooms he showed them gave on a peaceful patio fun of flowers and fountains. Lillian was tempted to go out with the Doctor, at least to dance a while. But traditional protectiveness toward women made him obstinately refuse to take the risk. At ten o’clock the fireworks, the music, and the shouts and quarrels began. They went to their rooms. Lillian’s room was like a white nun’s cell. Whitewashed walls, a cot buried in white mosquito netting, no sheets or blankets. The walls did not reach to the ceiling, to let the air through, and her shutter door let in all the sounds of the village. After the fireworks, the shooting began. The cafe owner had been wise.
It was in such rooms that Lillian always made the devastating discovery that she was not free. Out in the sun, with others, swimming or dancing, she was free. But alone, she was still in that underground city of her childhood. Even though she knew the magic formula: life is dreamed, life is a nightmare, you can awaken, and when you awaken you know the monsters were self-created.
If she could have danced with Doctor Palas, maintained the speed of elation, sat at a table and let him rest his hand lightly on her bare arm, participated in a carnival of affection.
All of them with navigation troubles. The American couple fearful of unfamiliarity. Doctor Palas lonely.
I can see, I can see that it is in this distorted vision of the world’s proper proportions that lies the secret of our fears. We make the animals bigger with our fears. We make our creations and our loves smaller, we shrink by our vision, and enlarge and shrink according to the whims of our interchangeable vision, not according to an immutable law of growth. The size of each world we live in is individual and relative, and the objects and people vary in each EYE.
Lillian remembered when she had believed that her mother was the tallest woman on earth, and her father the heaviest man. She remembered that her mother never had a wrinkle on her dress, or a lock of hair out of place, and was always putting on her gloves as if she were a noted surgeon about to operate. Her presence was antiseptic, particularly in Mexico, where she was unsuited to the humanity of the life, the acceptance of flaws, spots, stains, wrinkles. Children changed the size of all they saw, but so did the parents, and they continued to see one small.
She was too cold to fall asleep. The wind from the mountain had descended upon San Luis as soon as the sun had set.
I see my parents smaller, they have assumed a natural size. My father must have been like Hatcher, terribly afraid of a strange country on which he was dependent for a living. But how could my mother’s whistle have penetrated through all those underground passages? There must have been an echo!
If she still could hear this whistle, there must be echoes in the soul. But she was regaining her own eyes, and with these eyes, with her own vision, she would return home.
The patio was full of birds in cages. The noises of the fiesta kept them awake too. Why should it be among these shadows, these furtive illuminations, these descending passageways that her true self would hide? Driven so far below the surface! She was now like those French speleologists who had descended thousands of feet into the earth and found ancient caves covered with paintings and carvings. But Lillian carried no searchlight and no nourishment. Nothing but the wafer granted to those who believe in symbolism, a wafer in place of bread. And all she had to follow were the inscriptions of her dreams, half-effaced hieroglyphs on half-broken statues. And no guide in the darkness but a scream through the eyes of a statue.
In the morning she returned to life above the ground. Outside in the patio there was a washstand, and the water in the pitcher was cool spring water. The mirror was broken, and the towel had been used by many people. But after the loneliness of the night’s journey Lillian was happy to use a collective towel and to see her face in two pieces which could be made to fit together again. She had made a long journey, the journey of the smile and the eyes. There were no decorations for such discoveries. The journey had in reality taken only three months. According to the calendar her trip had taken only the time of an engagement in a night club. The voyage underground had taken longer, and had taken her farther. She would return to Golconda to drink her last cup of flowing gold, iridescent water, sun and air, to pack her treasures, her geological discoveries, the statues which, once unearthed, had become so eloquent.
When they arrived at Golconda it was the end of the New Year celebrations. The streets were still littered with confetti. The street vendor’s baskets were empty, and they were sleeping beside them rolled in their ponchos. The scent of malabar was in the air, and that of burnt fireworks.
Lillian walked down the hill to the center of town, past the old woman in black who sold colored fruit juices and white coconut candy, past the church with its wide doors open so that she could see the bouquets of candle lights and the women praying while they fanned their faces. Cats and dogs were allowed to stray in and out, the workmen continued to work on their scaffolds while Mass was being said, the children were allowed to cry, or were fed right there while lying in the black shawls slung from their mother’s necks like hammocks.
She walked in a glittering sunlight that annihilated all thought, that left only the eyes awake, and a procession of images marching through the retina, no thoughts around them, no thoughts interpreting them.
She walked more heavily on her heels, on flat sandals, as the natives walked, and although she weighed exactly the same as when she had first arrived, a medium weight, she felt heavier, and more aware of her body. The swimming, the sun, the air, all contributed to sculpture a firm, elastic, balanced body, free in its movements.
She was preparing herself to talk to the Doctor, as he had wanted her to talk. She had awakened with a clear image of the Doctor’s character.
ernandez in the taxi, the first day, concerned over his village’s state of health, aware of others’ moods and needs, unable to forget the secret sorrow of his own life. Doctor Hernandez probing into her life with a doctor’s conviction of his right to probe, and evading her questions.
She had seen him in his home, in a Spanish setting, and met his wife, who had come for one of her brief visits. Under a semblance of Latin submission, under her thoughtfulness in serving him his drink, saving him from telephone calls, there was a mockery in his wife’s attitude toward his patients. This had been instilled in the children who played the game of “being a doctor” differently from other children; they expressed distaste for his profession. The sick were not really sick, and the sick who came from the poor, with the desperate illnesses that attacked the undernourished natives, both children and wife totally ignored.