It was not only the music from the guitars but the music of the body that Lillian heard—a continuous rhythm of life. There was a rhythm in the way the women lifted the water jugs onto their heads, and walked balancing them. There was a rhythm in the way the shepherds walked after their lambs and their cows. It was not just the climate, but the people themselves who exuded a more ardent life.
Hansen was looking out the taxi window with a detached and bored expression. He did not see the people. He did not notice the children who, because of their black hair cut in square bangs and their slanted eyes, sometimes looked like Japanese. He questioned Lillian on entertainers. What entertainers from New York or Paris or London should he bring to the Black Pearl?
The hotel was at the top of the hill, one main building and a cluster of small cottages hidden by olive trees and cactus. It faced the sea at a place where huge boiling waves were trapped by crevices in the rocks and struck at their prison with cannon reverberations. Two narrow gorges were each time assaulted, the waves sending foam high in the air and leaping up as if in a fury at being restrained.
The receptionist at the desk was dressed in rose silk, as if registering guests and handing out keys were part of the festivities. The manager came out, holding out his hand paternally, as though his immense bulk conferred on him a patriarchy, and said: “You are free to enjoy yourself tonight. You won’t have to start playing until tomorrow night. Did you see the posters?”
He led her to the entrance where her photograph, enlarged, faced her like the image of a total stranger. She never recognized herself in publicity photographs. “I look pickled,” she thought.
A dance was going on, on the leveled portion of the rock beside the hotel. The music was intermittent, for the wind carried some of the notes away, and the sound of the sea absorbed others, so that these fragments of mambos had an abstract distinction like the music of Erik Satie. It also made the couples seem to be dancing sometimes in obedience to it, and sometimes in obedience to the gravitations of their secret attractions.
A barefoot boy carried Lillian’s bags along winding paths. Flowers brushed her face as she passed. Both music and sea sounds grew fainter as they climbed. Cottages were set capriciously on rock ledges, hidden by reeds, or camouflaged in bougainvillea. The boy stopped before a cottage with a palm-leaf roof.
In front of it was a long tile terrace with a hemp hammock strung across it. The room inside had whitewashed walls and contained only a bed, a table, and a chair. Parasoling over the cottage was a giant tree which bore leaves shaped like fans. The encounter of the setting sun and rising moon had combined to paint everything in the changing colors of mercury.
As Lillian opened a bureau drawer, a mouse that had been making a nest of magnolia petals suddenly fled.
She showered and dressed hastily, feeling that perhaps the beauty and velvety softness of the night might not last, that if she delayed it would change to coldness and harshness. She put on the only dress she had that matched the bright flowers, an orange cotton. Then she opened the screen door. The night lay unchanged, serene, filled with tropical whisperings, as if leaves, birds, and sea breezes possessed musicalities unknown to northern countries, as if the richness of the scents kept them all intently alive.
The tiles under her bare feet were warm. The perfume she had sprayed on herself evaporated before the stronger perfumes of carnation and honeysuckle.
She walked back to the wide terrace where people sat on deck chairs waiting for each other and for dinner.
The expanse of sky was like an infinite canvas on which human beings were incapable of projecting images from their human life because they would seem out of scale and absurd.
Lillian felt that nature was so powerful it absorbed her into itself. It was a drug for forgetting. People seemed warmer and nearer, as the stars seemed nearer and the moon warmer.
The sea’s orchestration carried away half the spoken words and made talking and laughing seem a mere casual accompaniment, like the sound of birds. Words had no weight. The intensity of the colors made them float in space like balloons, and the velvet texture of the climate gave them a purely decorative quality like no other flowers. They had no abstract meaning, being received by the senses which only recognized touch, smell, and vision, so that these people sitting in their chairs became a part of a vivid animated mural. A brown shoulder emerging from a white dress, the limpidity of a smile in a tanned face, the muscular tension of a brown leg, seemed more eloquent than the voices.
This is an exaggerated spectacle, thought Lillian, and it makes me comfortable. I was always an exaggerated character because I was trying to create all by myself a climate which suited me, bigger flowers, warmer words, more fervent relationships, but here nature does it for me, creates the climate I need within myself, and I can be languid and at rest. It is a drug…a drug…
Why were so many people fearful of the tropics? “All adventurers came to grief.” Perhaps they had not been able to make the transition, to alchemize the life of the mind into the life of the senses. They died when their minds were overpowered by nature, yet they did not hesitate to dilute it in alcohol.
Even while Golconda lulled her, she was aware of several mysteries entering her reverie. One she called the sorrows of Doctor Hernandez. The other was why do exiles come to a bad end (if they did, of which she was not sure). From where she sat, she saw the Doctor arrive with his professional valise. But this burden he deposited at the hotel desk, and then he walked toward Lillian as if he had been seeking her.
“You haven’t had dinner yet? Come and have it with me. We’ll have it in the Black Pearl, so you will become familiar with the place where you are going to play every night.”
The Black Pearl had been built of driftwood. It was a series of terraces overhanging the sea. Red ship lanterns illumined a jazz band playing for a few dancers.
Because the hiss of the sea carried away some of the overtones, the main drum beat seemed more emphatic, like a giant heart pulsing. The more volatile cadences, the ironic notes, the lyrical half-sobs of the trombone rose like sea spray and were lost. As if the instrumentalists knew this, they repeated their climbs up invisible antennae into vast spaces of volatile joys and shrank the sorrows by speed and flight, decanting all the essences, and leaving always at the bottom the blood beat of the drums.
The Doctor was watching her face. “Did I frighten you with all my talk about sickness?”
“No, Doctor Hernandez, illness does not frighten me. Not physical illness. The one that does is unknown in Golconda. And I’m a convalescent. And in any case, it’s one which does not inspire sympathy.” Her words had been spoken lightly, but they caused the Doctor’s smooth face to wrinkle with anxiety. Anxiety? Fear? She could not read his face. It had the Indian sculptural immobility. Even when the skin wrinkled with some spasm of pain, the eyes revealed nothing, and the mouth was not altered.
She felt compelled to ask: “Are you unhappy? Are you in trouble?”
She knew it was dangerous to question those who were accustomed to doing the questioning, to being depended on (and well did Lillian know that those who were in the position of consolers, guides, healers, felt uncomfortable in any reversal), but she took the risk.
He answered, laughing: “No, I’m not, but if being unhappy would arouse your interest, I’m willing to be. It was tactless of me to speak of illness in this place created for pleasure. I nearly spoiled your pleasure. And I can see you are one who has not had too much of it, one of the underprivileged of pleasure! Those who have too much nauseate me. I don’t know why. I’m glad when they get dysentery or serious sunburns. It is as if I believed in an even distribution of pleasure. Now you, for instance, have a right to some…not having had very much.”