All the personages had been there, not to be described in words but by a series of images. The prisoner had touched her only because he vaguely echoed the first image of Larry as he appeared behind the iron gate. Even if this prisoner had been fraudulent, his acting had been good enough to reawaken in Lillian her feelings towards the first Larry she had known, a Larry in trouble, a trouble which she deeply shared, was married to, not only by empathy but by affinity. She had disguised it by throwing herself into life and relationships, by appearing fearless and passionate, and it had taken the true freedom of Golconda, its fluid, soft, flowing life, to expose her own imprisonment, her own awkwardness. She had been more mated to Larry than she had known. She had been as much afraid, only fear had made her active, leaping and courting and loving and giving and seeking, but driven by the same fear which made Larry recoil into his home and solitude. In losing this first intuitive knowledge she had of the bond between them, she had also lost a truth about herself. She had been taken in by the myth of her courage, the myth of her warmth and flow. And it was the belief in this myth which had caused her to pass judgment on the static quality of Larry, concealing the static elements in herself.
One night Doctor Hernandez, Fred, Diana, and Edward had decided to visit the native dance halls of Golconda which opened on small, unpaved streets behind the market. They leaped across an open trench of sewer water, onto a dirt floor, and sat at a table with a red oilcloth. Tropical plants growing out of gasoline cans partly veiled them from the street. Red bulbs strung on wires cast charcoal shadows and painted the skins in the changing tones of leaping flames. A piano out of tune gave out a sound of broken glass. The drums always dominated the melodies, whether songs or juke boxes, insistent like the drums of Africa. The houses being like gardens with roofs, the various musics mingled: guitars, a Cuban dance orchestra, a woman’s voice. But the dancers obeyed the drums.
The skins matched all the tones of chocolate, coffee, and wood. There were many white suits and dresses, and many of those flowered dresses which in the realm of printed dresses stand in the same relation as the old paintings of flowers and fruit done by maiden aunts to a Matisse, or a Braque. They had been unwilling to separate themselves from their daily fare in food, the daily appearance of a dining table.
All the people she had seen in Golconda were there: taxi drivers, policemen, shopkeepers, truck drivers, life savers, beach photographers, lemon vendors, and the owner of the glass bottom boat. The men danced with the prostitutes of Golconda, and these were the girls Lillian had seen sewing quietly at windows, selling fruit at the market, and they brought to their evening profession the same lowered eyes, gentle voices, and passive quietude. They were dressed more enticingly, showed more shoulders and arms, but not provocatively. It was the men who drank and raised their voices. The policemen had tied their gun halters to their chairs.
The natives danced in bare feet, and Lillian kicked off her sandals. The dirt floor was warm and dry, and just as the night she had danced on the beach with the sea licking her toes, she felt no interruption between the earth and her body as if the same sap and rhythm ran through both simultaneously: gold, green, watery, or fiery when you touched the core.
Everyone spoke to Doctor Hernandez. Even tottering drunk, they bowed with respect.
A singer was chanting the Mexican plainsong, a lamentation on the woes of passion. Tequila ran freely, sharpened by lemon and salt on the tongue. The voices grew husky and the figures blurred. The naked feet trampled the dirt, and the bodies lost their identities and flowed into a single dance, moved by one beat. The heat from the bowels of the earth warmed their feet.
Doctor Hernandez frowned and said: “Lillian, put your sandals on!” His tone was protective; she knew he could justify this as a grave medical counsel. But she felt fiercely rebellious at anyone who might put an end to this magnetic connection with others, with the earth, and with the dance, and with the messages of sensuality passing between them.
With Fred, too, whom she had once baptized “Christmas,” she was unaccountably angry. Because he looked pale and withdrawn, and because he was watching, not entering. He kept his shoes on, and not even the melodic jubilance of the singer could dissolve this peregrine, this foreign visitor. And then it was no longer Fred who sat there, spectator and fire extinguisher, but all those who had been an obstacle to her efforts to touch the fiery core.
The plants which overflowed into the dance hall and brud the shoulders, uninvited guests from the jungle, the sharp stinging scent of tequila, the milk of cactus, the cries of the street like the cries of animals in the forest, bird, monkey, the burning eyes of the urchins watching through the leaves almost as phosphorescent as the eyes of wildcats; the water of the sewers running through the trench hissing like a fountain, the taxis throwing their headlights upon the dancers, beacons of a tumultuous sea of the senses, the perspiration on the shirt backs, the touch of toes more intimate than the touch of hands, the round tables seeming to turn like Ouija boards of censurable messages, every message a caress, all this orchestration of the effulgence of the tropics served to measure by contrast these moments of existence which did not bloom completely, moments lived dimly, conjunctions and fusions which did not take place.
Larry and she had touched at one point, caught a glimpse of their undisguised self, but had not fused completely. Poor receptivity, poor connections, and at times no contact at all. Lillian knew now that it was an illusion that one lived in full possession of one’s body. It could slip away from one. She could see Fred achieving this by impermeability to the sensuality of the place and people.
“Put your sandals on!” repeated Doctor Hernandez, and Lillian translated it: he wanted to protect her from promiscuity. That had been his role. She must defy him from causing more short circuits, more disconnections. And she must defy Fred, who, as in those dreams in which the identity is not clear, became all the ones who had not answered her love and particularly the first one, Gerard. When Fred danced with her, clumsily, soberly, she looked down at his boots as a sign of deliberate insulation, and she pushed him away and said: “Your shoes hurt me.”
The time was past when her body could be ravished from her by visitations from the world of guilt. Such pleasurable sensations as a kiss on the inside of her arm, in the nook within the elbow, given by a stranger at a dance had been enough at one time to cause sudden departures. But no one could break now her feeling of oneness with Golconda. She had betrayed Larry with all the voluptuous textures, pungent smells, and with pleasure.
The girls had noticed that Lillian would not dance with Fred, and they came to sit at his side. One of them wore a black satin dress with an edge of white lace which seemed like a petticoat making an indiscreet appearance. The other a shawl which was slipped off her shoulders constantly as by an invisible hand. One had the expression of a schoolgirl intent upon her work. Her hair was still damp from the beach, and hung straight down like a Tahitian’s. The other smiled and rested a fine-boned, delicate, small hand upon Fred’s knees. Then she leaned over and, still smiling, whispered in his ear a request which made the blood rush to Fred’s face, and his body stiffen with panic. The girl on his left, her small earrings trembling, and her medal of the Virgin engraved in blue lacquer which she held between her fingers like a cigarette, added: “The two of us? More exciting?”