turned
changed
Lillian was journeying homeward.
The other travelers were burdened with Mexican baskets, serapes, shawls, silver jewelry, painted clay figurines and Mexican hats.
Lillian carried no objects, because none of them would have incarnated what she was bringing back, the softness of the atmosphere, the tenderness of the voices, the caressing colors and the whispering presence of an underworld of memory which had serpentined under her every footstep and which was the past she had not been able to forget. Her husband and her children had traveled with her. Had she not loved Larry in the prisoner she had liberated? Her first image of Larry had been of him standing behind a garden iron grille, watching her dance. He was the only one of her fellow students she had forgotten to invite to her eighteenth birthday party. He had stood with his hands on the railing as the prisoner had stood in the Mexican jail, and she had seen him as a prisoner of his own silence and self-effacement. It was Larry and not the fraudulent prisoner she had wanted to liberate. Had she not loved her own children in Edward’s children, kissed Lietta’s freckles because they were Adele’s freckles, sat up with them evenings because their loneliness was her children’s loneliness?
She was bringing back new images of her husband Larry, as if while she were away, some photographer with a new chemical had made new prints of the old films in which new aspects appeared she had never noticed before. As if a softer Lillian who had absorbed some of the softness of the climate, some of the relaxed grace of the Mexicans, some of their genius for happiness had felt her senses sharpened, her vision more focused, her hearing more sensitive. As the inner turmoil quieted, she saw others more clearly. A less rebellious Lillian had become aware that when Larry was not there she had either become him or had looked for him in others.
If she had not talked to Doctor Hernandez it was because he had been seeking to bring to the surface what he knew to be her incompletely drowned marriage.
Doctor Hernandez. As she sat in the airplane, she saw him bending over his doctor’s bag unrolling bandages. She could not reconstruct his face. He turned away from her because she had not given him the confidence he asked for. This fleeting glimpse of him appeared as if on glass, and vanished, dissolved in the sun.
Diana had told Lillian just before she left: I believe I know the real cause of his death. He felt alone, divided from his wife, dealing only in the casual, intermittent friendships with people who changed every day. It was not a bullet which killed him. He was too deeply trained to combat death, to consider death as a private enemy, to accept suicide. But he brought it about in such a roundabout way, in so subtle a way that he could delude himself that he had no hand in his own death. HE COULD HAVE AVOIDED THE CONFLICT WITH THE DRUG SMUGGLERS. It was not his responsibility. He could have left this task to the police, better equipped to handle them. Something impelled him to seek danger, to challenge these violent men. ALMOST TO INVITE THEM TO KILL HIM. I often warned him, and he would smile. I knew what was truly killing him: an accumulation of defeats, the knowledge that even his wife loved in him the doctor and not the man. Did you know that she had been near death when they met, that he had cured her, and that even after their marriage it was his care of others that she was jealous of? To you he may have seemed beloved, but in his own eyes all the love went to the Doctor with the miraculous valise. Golconda was a place for fluctuating friendships, so many strangers passing through for a few days. Once he reproached me bitterly for my mobility and flexibility.
“You never hang on,” he said. “This constant flow suits your fickle temperament. But I would like something deeper and more permanent. The more gaiety there is around me, the more alone I feel.”
And Lillian must have added to his feeling. She had failed to give him that revelation of herself which he had wanted, a gift which might have enabled him to confide too. He was suffering from denials she had not divined. And how tired he must have been of people’s disappearances. They came to Golconda, they sat at the beach with him, they had dinner with him, they talked with him for the length of a consultation, and then left for other countries. What a relief it may have been to have become at last the one who left!
Diana was certain that he had subtly sought out his death. And now to this image Lillian could add others which until now had not fitted in. The image of his distress magnetized a series of impressions caught at various times but abandoned like impressionistic fragments which did not coagulate. The shutters of the eyes opening to reveal anxiety, discouragement, solitude, all the more somber by contrast with the landscape of orange, turquoise, and gold. He seemed to flow with all the life currents of Golconda. She had accepted only the surface evidence. But the selves of Doctor Hernandez which had lived in the periphery, backstage, now emerged unexpectedly. And with them all the invisible areas of life, his and hers, and others’, which the eyes of the psyche sees but which the total self refuses to acknowledge, when at times these “ghosts” contain the living self and it is the personage on the stage who is empty and somnambulistic. It was as if having begun to see the true Doctor Hernandez, solitary, estranged from his wife and his children by her jealousy and hatred of Golconda immersed only in the troubled, tragic life of a pleasure city, she could also see for the first time, around the one-dimensional profile of her husband, a husband leaving for work, a father bending over his children, an immense new personality. It was Larry, the prisoner of his own silences which she had liberated the day she visited the fraudulent one in jail. It was Larry’s silent messages she had been able to read through the bars of the Mexican jail. Once the vision becomes dual, or triple, like those lenses which fracture the designs one turns them on but also repeats them to infinity in varied arrangements, she could see at least two Larrys, one bearing an expression of hunger and longing which had penetrated her the day of her birthday party more deeply than the gaiety of her dancing partners, the other as the kind father and husband who dispensed care and gifts and tenderness perhaps as Doctor Hernandez had done, while desiring some unattainable pleasure.
Another image of Larry which appeared through the thick glass window of the plane, was of him standing behind the glass partition of a television studio. Lillian had been playing with an orchestra for a recording and Larry had sat in the recording room. He had forgotten that she could not hear him, and when the music had ended had stood up and talked, smiling and gesturing, in an effort to convey his enthusiasm for the music. The perplexed expression of her face urged him to magnify his gestures, to exaggerate the expression of his face, to dramatize beyond his usual manner, hoping that by a mime of his entire body and face he could transmit a message without the help of words.
At the time the scene had been baffling to Lillian, but only today did she understand it. She had failed to hear Larry, because he did not employ the most obvious means of communication. These two images seemed like a condensation of the drama of their marriage. First her response to his mute needs, his mute calling to her, and then her failure to discern his message. He had been a prisoner of his own silences, and these silences she had interpreted as absences.
He had answered her needs! What she had required of love was something that should never be expected of a human being, a love so strong that it might neutralize her self-disparagement, a love that would be occupied day and night with the reconstruction of a lovable Lillian, an image she would tear down as quickly as he created it. A love of such mathematical precision, occupied in keeping an inward balance between her self-caricature and a Lillian she might accept. A love tirelessly repeating: Lillian you are beautiful, Lillian you are wonderful, Lillian you are generous, and kind, and inspiring, while she, on the other side of the ledger made her own entries: Lillian, you were unjustly angry, you were thoughtless, you hurt someone’s feelings, you were not patient with your child.