“I didn’t realize it was so apparent.”
“It is not so apparent. Permit me to say I am unusually astute. Diagnostic habit. You appear free and undamaged, vital and without wounds.”
“Diagnostic clairvoyance, then?”
“Yes. But here comes our professional purveyor of pleasure. He may be more beneficent for you.”
Hansen sat down beside them and began to draw on the tablecloth. “I’m going to add another terrace, then I will floodlight the trees and the divers. I will also have a light around the statue of the Virgin so that everyone can see the boys praying before they dive.” His glance was cold, managerial. The sea, the night, the divers were all, in his eyes, properties of the night club. The ancient custom of praying before diving one hundred feet into a narrow rocky gorge was going to become a part of the entertainment.
Lillian turned her face away from him, and listened to the jazz.
Jazz was the music of the body. The breath came through aluminum and copper tubes, it was the body’s breath, and the strings’ wails and moans were echoes of the body’s music. It was the body’s vibrations which rippled from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme known to the musicians alone was like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others only peripheral improvisations. The plots, and themes of the music, like the plots and themes of our life, never alchemized into words, existed only in a state of music, stirring or numbing, exalting or despairing, but never named.
When she turned her face unwillingly towards Hansen, he was gone, and then she looked at the Doctor and said: “This is a drugging place…”
“There are so many kinds of drugs. One for remembering and one for forgetting. Golconda is for forgetting. But it is not a permanent forgetting. We may seem to forget a person, a place, a state of being, a past life, but meanwhile what we are doing is selecting a new cast for the reproduction of the same drama, seeking the closest reproduction to the friend, the lover, or the husband we are striving to forget. And one day we open our eyes, and there we are caught in the same pattern, repeating the same story. How could it be otherwise? The design comes from within us. It is internal.”
There were tears in Lillian’s eyes, for having made friends immediately not with a new, a beautiful, a drugging place, but with a man intent on penetrating the mysteries of the human labyrinth from which she was a fugitive. She was almost angered by his persistence. A man should respect one’s desire to have no past. But even more damaging was his conviction that we live by a series of repetitions until the experience is solved, understood, liquidated…
“You will never rest until you have discovered the familiar within the unfamiliar. You will go around as these tourists do, searching for flavors which remind you of home, begging for Coca-Cola instead of tequila, cereal foods instead of papaya. Then the drug will wear off. You will discover that barring a few divergences in skin tone, or mores, or language, you are still related to the same kind of person because it all comes from within you, you are the one fabricating the web.”
Other people were dancing around them, so obedient to the rhythms that they seemed like algae in the water, welded to each other, and swaying, the coloredskirts billowing, the white suits like frames to support the flower arrangements made by the women’s dresses, their hair, their jewels, their lacquered nails. The wind sought to carry them away from the orchestra, but they remained in its encirclement of sound like Japanese kites moved by strings from the instruments.
Lillian asked for another drink. But as she drank it, she knew that one of the drops of the Doctor’s clairvoyance had fallen into her glass, that a part of what he had said was already proved true. The first friend she had made in Golconda, choosing him in preference to the engineer and the nightclub manager, resembled, at least in his role, a personage she had known who was nicknamed “The Lie Detector”; for many months this man had lived among a group of artists extracting complete confessions from them without effort and subtly changing the course of their lives.
Not to yield to the Doctor’s challenge, she brusquely turned the spotlight on him: “Are you engaged in such a repetition now, with me? Have you left anyone behind?”
“My wife hates this place,” said the Doctor simply. “She comes here rarely. She stays in Mexico City most of the time, on the excuse that the children must go to good schools. She is jealous of my patients, and says they are not really ill, that they pretend to be. And in this she is right. Tourists in strange countries are easily frightened. More frightened of strangeness. They call me to reassure themselves that they will not succumb to the poison of strangeness, to unfamiliar foods, exotic flavors, or the bite of an unfamiliar insect. They do call me for trivial reasons, often out of fear. But is fear trivial? And my native patients do need me desperately… I bui beautiful house for my wife. But I cannot keep her here. And I love this place, the people. Everything I have created is here. The hospital is my work. And if I leave, the drug traffic will run wild. I have been able to control it.”
Lillian no longer resented the Doctor’s probings. He was suffering, and it was this which made him so aware of others’ difficulties.
“That’s a very painful conflict, and not easily solved,” she said. She wanted to say more, but she was stopped by a messenger boy with bare feet, who had come to fetch the Doctor on an emergency case.
Lillian and the Doctor sat in a hand-carved canoe. The pressure of the human hand on the knife had made uneven indentations in the scooped-out tree trunk which caught the light like the scallops of the sea shell. The sun on the high rims of these declivities and the shadows within their valleys gave the canoe a stippled surface like that of an impressionist painting, made it seem a multitude of spots moving forward on the water in ripples of changeable colors and textures.
The fisherman was paddling it quietly through the varied colors of the lagoon water, colors that ranged from the dark sepia of the red earth bottom to silver grey when the colors of the bushes triumphed over the earth, to gold when the sun conquered them both, to purple in the shadows.
He paddled with one arm. His other had been blown off when he was a young fisherman of seventeen first learning the use of dynamite sticks for fishing.
The canoe had once been painted in laundry blue. This blue had faded and become like the smoky blue of old Mayan murals, a blue which man could not create, only time.
The lagoon trees showed their naked roots, as though on stilts, an intricate maze of silver roots as fluent below as they were interlaced above, and overhung, casting shadows before the bow of the canoe so dense that Lillian could scarcely believe they would open and divide to let them through.
Emerald sprays and fronds projected from a mass of wasp nests, of pendant vines and lianas. Above her head the branches formed metallic green parabolas and enameled pennants, while the canoe and her body accomplished the magical feat of cutting smoothly through the roots and dense tangles.
The boat undulated the aquatic plants and the grasses that bore long plumes, and traveled through reflections of the clouds. The absence of visible earth made Lillian feel as if the forest were afloat, an archipelago of green vapors.
The snowy herons, the shell-pink flamingos meditated upon one leg like yogis of the animal world.
Now and then she saw a single habitation by the waterside, an ephemeral hut of palm leaves wading on frail stilts and a canoe tied to a toy-sized jetty. Before each hut, watching Lillian and the Doctor float by would be a smiling woman and several naked children. They stood against a backdrop of impenetrable foliage, as if the jungle allowed them, along with the butterflies, dragonflies, praying mantises, beetles, and parrots, to occupy only its fringe. The exposed giant roots of the trees made the children seem to be standing between the toes of Gulliver’s feet.