Lillian had always waited for this watchman to pass before going to sleep. No matter how tense she had been during the day, no matter what catastrophes had taken place in school, or in the street, or at home, she knew that this moment would come when the watchman would walk all alone in the darkened streets swinging his lantern and his keys, crying monotonously, “All is well, all is well and calm and peaceful.” No sooner had he said this and no sooner had she heard the jangling keys and seen the flash of his lantern on the wall of her room, than she would fall instantly asleep.
Others who came to the pool were of the fraternity who liked to break laws, who liked to steal their pleasures, who liked the feeling that at any time the hotel watchman might appear at the top of the long stairs; they knew his voice would not carry above the hissing sea, and that as he was too lazy to walk downstairs he would merely turn off the lights as if this were enough to disperse the transgressors. To be forced to swim in the darkness and slip away from the pool in darkness was not, as the watchman believed, a punishment, but an additional pleasure.
In the darkness one became even more aware of the softness of the night, of pulsating life in the muscles, of the pleasure of motion. The silence that ensued was the silence of conspiracy and at this hour everyone dropped his disguises and spoke from some realm of innocence preserved from the corrosion of convention.
The Doctor would come to the pool, leaving his valise at the hotel desk. He talked as if he wanted to forget that everyone needed him, and that he had little time for pleasure or leies, who li But Lillian felt that he never rested from diagnosis. It was as if he did not believe anyone free of pain, and could not rest until he had placed his finger on the core of it.
Lillian now sat in one of the white string chairs that looked like flattened harps, and played abstractedly with the white cords as if she were composing a song.
The Doctor watched her and said: “I can’t decide which of the two drugs you need: the one for forgetting or the one for remembering.”
Lillian abandoned the harp chair and slipped into the pool, floating on her back and seeking immobility.
“Golconda is for forgetting, and that’s what I need,” she said, laughing.
“Some memories are imbedded in the flesh like splinters,” said the Doctor, “and you have to operate to get them out.”
She swam underwater, not wanting to hear him, and then came up nearer to where he sat on the steps and said: “Do I really seem to you like someone with a splinter in her flesh?”
“You act like a fugitive.”
She did not want to be touched by the word. She plunged into the deep water again as if to wash her body of all memories, to wash herself of the past. She returned gleaming, smooth, but not free. The word had penetrated and caused an uneasiness in her breast like that caused by diminished oxygen. The search for truth was like an explorer’s deep-sea diving, or his climb into impossible altitudes. In either case it was a problem of oxygen, whether you went too high or too low. Any world but the familiar neutral one caused such difficulty in breathing. It may have been for this reason that the mystics believed in a different kind of training in breathing for each different realm of experience.
The pressure in her chest compelled her to leave the pool and sit beside the Doctor, who was looking out to sea.
In the lightest voice she could find, and with the hope of discouraging the Doctor’s seriousness, she said: “I was a woman who was so ashamed of a run in my stocking that it would prevent me from dancing all evening…”
“It wasn’t the run in your stocking…”
“You mean… other things… ashamed… just vaguely ashamed…”
“If you had not been ashamed of other things you would not have cared about the run in your stocking…”
“I’ve never been able to describe or understand what I felt. I’ve lived so long in an impulsive world, desiring without knowing why, destroying without knowing why, losing without knowing why, being defeated, hurting myself and others… All this was painful, like a jungle in which I was constantly lost. A chaos.”
“Chaos is a convenient hiding place for fugitives. You are a fugitive from truth.”
“Why do you want to force me to remember? The beauty of Golconda is that one does not remember…”
“In Eastern religions there was a belief that human beings gathered the sum total of their experiences on earth, to be examined at the border. And according to the findings of the celestial customs officer one would be directed either to a new realm of experience, or back to re-experience the same drama over and over again. The condemnation to repetition would only cease when one had understood and transcended the old experience.”
“So you think I am condemned to repetition? You think that I have not liquidated the past?”
“Yes, unless you know what it is you ran away from…”
“I don’t believe this, Doctor. I know I can begin anew here.”
“So you will plunge back into chaos, and this chaos is like the jungle we saw from the boat. It is also your smoke screen.”
“But I do feel new…”
The Doctor’s expression at the moment was perplexed, as if he were no longer certain of his diagnosis; or was it that what he had discovered about Lillian was so grave he did not want to alarm her? He very unexpectedly withdrew at the word “new,” smiled with indulgence, raised his shoulders as if he had been persuaded by her eloquence, and finally said: “Maybe only the backdrop has changed.”
Lillian examined the pool, the sea, the plants, but could not see them as backdrops. They were too charged with essences, with penetrating essences like the newest drugs which altered the chemistry of the body. The softness entered the nerves, the beauty surrounded and enveloped the thoughts. It was impossible that in this place the design of her past life should repeat itself, and the same characters reappear, as the Doctor had implied. Did the self which lived below visibility really choose its characters repetitiously and with only superficial variations, intent on reproducing the same basic drama, like a well-trained actor with a limited repertory?
And exactly at the moment when she felt convinced of the deep power of the tropics to alter a character, certain personages appeared who seemed to bear no resemblance to the ones she had left in the other country, personages whom she received with delight because they were gifts from Golconda itself, intended to heal her of other friendships, other loves, and other places.
The hitchhiker Fred was a student from the University of Chicago who had been given a job in the hotel translating letters from prospective guests. Lillian called him “Christmas,” because at everything he saw which delighted him—a coppery sunrise or a flamingo bird, a Mexican girl in her white starched dress or a bougainvillaea bush in full bloom—he would exclaim: “It’s like Christmas!”
He was tall and blond but undecided in his movements, as if he were not sure yet that his arms and legs belonged to him. He was at that adolescent age when his body hampered him, as though itY” height=a shell he was seeking to outgrow. He was still concerned with the mechanics of living, unable as yet to enjoy it. For him it was still an initiation, an ordeal. He still belonged to the Nordic midnight sun; the tropical sun could not tan him, only freckle him. Sometimes he had the look of a blond angel who had just come from a Black Mass. He smiled innocently although one felt sure that in his dreams he had undressed the angels and the choir boys and made love to them. He had the small smile of Pan. His eyes conveyed only the wide expanse of desert that lay between human beings, and his mouth expressed the tremors he felt when other human beings approached him. The eyes said: do not come too near. But his body glowed with warmth. It was his mouth, compressed and controlled, which revealed his timidity.