Lillian had seen in the Doctor’s eyes a sadness which seemed out of proportion to the children’s irony. He watched them perform their doctor act. The patient was a beautiful movie star. She was covered with bandages. Doctor Hernandez’s daughter took this role. As soon as the “doctor” came near to her, she herself unwound all the bandages, threw herself upon him, embraced him and said: “Now that you have come I am not sick anymore.”
This morning as she walked, all these fragments had coalesced into the figure of a man in trouble, and Lillian understood that his persistence in making her confess was a defense against all that he himself wanted to confess.
At first she had not understood the game, nor his need. But she did now. And even if it meant that first of all (to play it as he wished it) she must confide in him, she was now willing, because it would liberate him of his secret. It was a habitual role for him to take: that of confessor. In any other role he would be uncomfortable.
The street climbed halfway up the hill, and there was the Doctor’s office. The waiting room was a patio, with wicker chairs placed between potted palms and rubber plants. Pink and purple bougainvillea trailed down the walls. A servant in bedroom slippers was mopping the mosaic floor. The nurse was not dressed like a nurse but, like all the native girls who worked in Golconda, she wore a party dress, a rose pastel taffeta which made her seem much more like a nurse to pleasure than to illness. There were ribbons in her hair, and sea-shell earrings on her ears.
“The Doctor has not yet arrived,” she said.
This was no unusual occurrence in the Doctor’s life. Added to the demands of his profession and their uncertain timing, was the natives’ own religion of timelessness. They absolutely refused to live in obedience to clocks, and it was always their mood that dictated their movements.
But Lillian felt an uneasiness which compelled her to walk instead of waiting patiently in the office.
She walked along the docks, watching the fishermen returning from their day’s work. Each boat that had made a large catch had a pennant waving on its mast. The wind caught the banners and imprinted on them the same ripples and billows as it did on the skirts of the women, and the ribbons on their hair.
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She sat down at a little cafe and had a dark coffee, watching the boats heaving up and down, and the families taking a walk with all their children. How they installed themselves in the present! They looked at everything that was happening as if nothing else existed, as if there were no work to be done, no home to return to. They abandoned themselves to the rhythm, let the wind animate scarves and hair, as if every undulation and ripple of color and motion hypnotized them into contentment.
By the time she returned to the Doctor’s office it was growing dark.
None of the patients showed uneasiness. But the nurse said: “I don’t understand. I called the Doctor’s home. He left there an hour ago saying he was coming straight to his office.”
Just as she turned on the electric lights, they went out again. This often happened in Golconda. The power was weak. But it increased Lillian’s anxiety, and to relieve it she decided to walk toward the Doctor’s home, hoping to meet him on the way.
The long walk uphill oppressed her. The electric lights were on again, but the houses grew farther apart from each other, the gardens darker and denser as she walked.
Then in an isolated field she noticed a car which had run into an electric pole. A group of people were gathered around it.
In the dark she could not see the color of the car. But she heard the screams of the Doctor’s wife.
Lillian began to tremble. He had tried to prepare her for this.
She continued to walk. She was not aware that she was weeping. The Doctor’s wife broke away from the group and ran toward Lillian, blindly. Lillian took her in her arms and held her, but the woman fought against her. Her mouth was contorted but no sounds came from it, as if her cries had been strangled. The wife fell on her knees and hid her face in Lillian’s dress.
Lillian could not believe in the Doctor’s death. She consoled the wife as if she were a child with an exaggerated sorrow. She heard the ambulance come, the one he had raised the funds to buy. She saw the doctors and the people around the car. She realized that it was his car’s hitting the pole that had cut off the electric current for a moment. The wife now talked incoherently: “They shot him, they finally shot him… They shot him and the car went against the pole. I wanted to get him away from here. Who would be capable of killing such a man? Who? Tell me. Tell me.”
Who would be capable of killing such a man? Who, thinking of the sick people who would need him and not find him, thinking how gently he took his short moments of pleasure without rebelling when they were interrupted. Thinking how deep his pleasure was in curing illness. Thinking how he had tried to control the drug traffic and refused to dispense dangerous forgetfulness. Thinking of his nights spent in studying drugs for remembrance, which were known to the Indians. As a port doctor, what underworld had he known which neither Lillian nor his wife could ever have known, but which his wife had sensed as dangerous.
Lillian was helping the wife up the hill, helping the woman who had hated the city he loved, and whose hatred was now justified by events.
“I have to prepare the children, but they are so young. What can I say to such young children about death?”
Lillian did not want to know whether he had bled, been cut by glass. It seemed to her that he alone knew how to bandage, how to stop bleeding, how to heal.
The siren of the ambulance grew fainter. People walked behind them in silence.
If it were true that what we practice on others is secretly what we wish practiced upon ourselves, then he had wanted, needed all the care he gave.
To the wife with her too-high heels, her coiled black hair, her dark and jealous eyes, her small hands and feet, what could he have confided when from the beginning she turned against the city and the sick people he loved?
Lillian did not believe in the death of Doctor Hernandez, and yet she heard the shot, she felt in her body the sound of the car hitting the pole, she knew the moment of death, as if all of them had happened to her.
He had something to say, which he had not said, and he had gone, taking with him his secrets.
If only Doctor Hernandez had not postponed that deeper, wilder talk which ran underground through the myths of dreams, shouted through architectural crevices, screamed eloquently through the eyes of statues, from the depths of all the ancient cities within ourselves, if he had not merely signaled distress like a deaf-mute…if only awareness had not appeared through the interstices of memory, between bars of lights and bars of shadows…if only human beings did not draw the blinds, don disguises, and live in isolation cells marked: not yet time for revelations…if only they had gone down together, down the caverns of the soul with picks, lanterns, cords, oxygen, X-rays, food, following the blueprints of all the messages from the geological depths where lay hidden the imprisoned self…
According to the definition, tropic meant a turning and changing, and with the tropics Lillian turned and changed, and she swung between the drug of forgetfulness and the drug of awareness, as the natives swung in their hammocks, as the jazz players swung into their rhythms, as the sea swung in its bed