Once when the earth showed itself on the right bank, Lillian saw on the mud the tracks of a crocodile that had come to quench his thirst. The scaly carapaces of the iguanas were colored so exactly like the ashen roots and tree trunks that she could not spot them until they moved. When they did not move they lay as still as stones in the sun, as if petrified.
The canoe pushed languid water lettuce out of the way, and water orchids, magnolias, and giant clover leaves.
A flowing journey, a contradiction to the persistent dream from which Lillian sought to liberate herself. The dream of a boat, sometimes large and sometimes small, but invariably caught in a waterless place, in a street, in the jungle, in the desert. When it was large it was in city streets, and the deck reached to the upper windows of the houses. She was in this boat and aware that it could not float unless it were pushed, so she would get down from it and seek to push it along so that it might move and finally reach water. The effort of pushing the boat along the street was immense, and she never accomplished her aim. Whether she pushed it along cobblestones or over asphalt, it moved very little, and no matter how much she strained she always felt she would never reach the sea. When the boat was small the pushing was less difficult; nevertheless she never reached the lake or river or the sea in which it could sail. Once the boat was stuck between rocks, another time on a mud bank.
Today she was fully aware that the dream of pushing the boat through waterless streets was ended. In Golconda she had attained a flowing life, a flowing journey. It was not only the presence of water, but the natives’ flowing rhythm: they never became caught in the past, or stagnated while awaiting the future. Like children, they lived completely in the present.
She had read that certain Egyptian rulers had believed that after death they would join a celestial caravan in an eternal journey toward the sun. Scientists had found two solar barques, which they recognized from ancient texts and mortuary paintings, in a subterranean chamber of limestone. The chamber was so well sealed that no air, dust, or cobwebs had been found in it. There were always two such barques—one for the night’s journey toward the moon, one for the day’s journey toward the sun.
In dreams one perpetuated these journeys in solar barques. And in dreams, too, there were always two: one buried in limestone and unable to float on the waterless routes of anxiety, the other flowing continuously with life. The static one made the voyage of memories, and the floating one proceeded into endless discoveries.
This canoe, thought Lillian, as she dipped her hand into the lagoon water, was to be her solar barque, magnetized by sun and water, gyrating and flowing, without strain or effort.
The Doctor’s thoughts had also been wandering through other places. Mexico City, where his wife was? His three small children? His past? His medical studies in Paris and in New York? His first book of poems, published when he was twenty years old?
Lillian smiled at him as if saying, you too have taken a secret into the past.
Simultaneously they returned to the present.
Lillian said: “There is a quality in this place which does not come altogether from its beauty. What is it? Is it the softness which annihilates all thought and lulls the body for enjoyment? Is it the continuity of music which prevents thoughts from arresting the flow of life? I have seen other trees, other rivers; they did not have the power to intoxicate the senses. Do you feel this? Does everyone feel this? Is this what kept South Seas travelers from ever returning home?”
“It does not affect everyone in the same way,” said the Doctor with bitterness in his voice, and Lillian realized he was thinking of his wife.
Was this the mystery in Doctor Hernandez’s life? A wife he could not win over to the city he liked, the life he loved?
She waited for him to say more. But he was silent, and his face had become placid again.
Her hand, which she had left in the waters of the lagoon to feel the gliding, the uninterrupted gentleness of the flowing, to assure herself of this union with a living current, she now felt she must lift, to prove to the Doctor that she shared his anxiety, and that his sadness affected her. She must surrender the pleasure of touching the flow of water, as if she were touching the flow of life within her, out of sympathy for his anguish.
As she lifted her hand and waited for the drops of water to finish dripping from it, a shot was heard, and water spattered over her. They all three sat still, stunned.
“Hunters?” she asked. She wanted to stand up and shout and wave so the hunters would know they were there.
The Doctor answered quietly: “They were not hunters. It was not a mistake. They intended to shoot me, but they missed.”
“But why? Why? You’re the most needed, the most loved man here!”
“I refuse to give them drugs. Don’t you understand? As a doctor I have access to drugs. They want to force me to give them some. Drugs for forgetting. And I have no right to do this, no right except in cases of great physical pain. That’s why when you compared Golconda to a drug I felt bitter. For some people, Golconda is not enough.”
The fisherman did not understand their talk in English. He said in Spanish, with a resigned air: “Bad hunters. They missed the crocodile. I could catch him with my bare hands and a knife. I often have. Without guns. What bad hunters!”
The swimming pool was at the lowest level of the hotel and only about ten feet above the sea, so that it was dominated by the roar of the waves hurling themselves against the rocks. The quietness of its surface did not seem like the quietness of a pool but more like that of a miniature bay formed within rocks which miraculously escaped the boiling sea for a few moments.
It did not seem an artificial pool dug into cement and fed by water pipes, but rather one of the sea’s own moods, one of the sea’s moments of response, an intermittent haven.
It was surrounded by heavy, lacquered foliage, and flowers so tenuously held that they fell of their own weight into the pool and floated among the swimmers like children’s boats.
It was an island of warm, undangerous water in which one man at least had sought eternal repose by throwing himself out of one of the overhanging hotel windows. Ever since that night the pool had been locked at midnight. Those who knew that the watchman preferred to watch the dancers on the square and that the gate could easily be leaped over, came to sit there in the evenings before going to sleep. The place was barred to any loud frivolity but open for secret assignations after dancing.
It was also Lillian’s favorite place before going to sleep. The gentleness of the water, its warmth, was the lulling atmosphere she had missed when she had passed from childhood to womanhood.
She felt an unconfessed need of receiving from some gentle source the reassurance that the world was gentle and warm, and not, as it may have seemed during the day, cold and cruel. This reassurance was never granted to the mature, so that Lillian told no one of the role the pool played in her life today. It was the same role played by another watchman whom she had heard when she was ten years old and living in Mexico while her father built bridges and roads. The town watchman, a figure out of the Middle Ages, walked the streets at night chanting: “All is well, all is calm and peaceful. All is well.”