At everything new he marveled, but with persistent reference to the days of his childhood which had given him a permanent joy. Every day was Christmas day; the turtle eggs served at lunch were a gift from the Mexicans, the opened coconut spiked with rum was a new brand of candy.
His only anxiety centered around the problem of returning home. He did not have time enough to hitchhike back; it had taken him a full month to get here. He had no money, so he had decided to work his way back on a cargo ship.
Everyone offered to contribute, to perpetuate his Christmas day. But a week after his arrival he was already inquiring about cargo ships which would take him back home in time to finish college, and back to Shelley, the girl he was engaged to.
But about Shelley there was no hurry, he explained. It was because of Shelley that he had decided to spend the summer hitchhiking. He was engaged and he was afraid. Afraid of the girl. He needed time, time to adventure, time to become a man. Yes, to become a man. (He always showed Shelley’s photograph, and there was nothing in the tilted-up nose, the smile, and her soft hair to frighten anyone.)
Lillian asked him: “Couldn’t Shelley have helped you to become a man?”
He had shrugged his shoulders. “A girl can’t help a boy to become a man. I have to feel I am one before I marry. And I don’t know anything about myself…or about women…or about love… I thought this trip would help me. But I find I am afraid of all girls. It was not only Shelley.”
“What is the difference between a girl and a woman?”
“Girls laugh. They laugh at you. That’s the one thing I can’t bear, to be laughed at.”
“They’re not laughing at you, Christmas. They’re laughing because they wish to hide their own fears, to appear free and light, or they laugh so you won’t think they take you too seriously. They may be laughing from pleasure, to encourage you. Think how frightened you would be if they did not laugh, if they looked at you gravely and made you feel that their destiny was in your hands, a matter of life and death. That would frighten you even more, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, much more.”
“Do you want me to tell you the truth/font>
“Yes, you have a way of saying things which makes me feel you are not laughing at me.”
“If…you experimented with becoming a man before you married your girl, you might also find that it was because you were a boy that she loved you…that she loves you for what you are, not for what you will be later. She might love you less if you changed…”
“What makes you think this?”
“Because if you truly wanted to change, you would not be so impatient to leave. Your mind is fixed on the departure times of cargo ships!”
When he arrived at the pool Lillian could almost see him carrying his two separate and contradictory wishes, one in each hand. But at least while he was intent on juggling them without losing his balance, he no longer felt the pain of not living, of a paralysis before living.
His smile at Lillian was charged with gratitude. Lillian was thinking that the primitives were wiser in having definitely established rituals: at a certain moment, determined by the calendar, a boy becomes a man.
Meanwhile Fred was using all his energy in rituals of his own: he had to master water skiing, he had to be the champion swimmer and diver, he must initiate the Mexicans into his knowledge of jazz, he had to outdo everyone in going without sleep, in dancing.
Lillian had said: “Fears cannot bear to be laughed at. If you take all your fears, one by one, make a list of them, face them, decide to challenge them, most of them will vanish. Strange women, strange countries, strange foods, strange illnesses.”
While Fred dived many times into the pool conscientiously, Diana arrived.
Diana had first come to Mexico at the age of seventeen when she had won a painting fellowship. But she had stayed, married, and built a house in Golconda. Most of the time she was alone; her husband worked and traveled.
She no longer painted, but collected textiles, paintings, and jewelry. She spent her entire morning getting dressed. She no longer sat before an easel, but before a dressing table, and made an art of dressing in native textiles and jewels.
When she finally descended the staircase into the hotel, she became an animated painting. Everyone’s eyes were drawn to her. All the colors of Diego Rivera and Orozco were draped on her body. Sometimes her dress seemed painted with large brushstrokes, sometimes roughly dyed like the costumes of the poor. Other times she wore what looked like fragments of ancient Mayan murals, bold symmetrical designs in charcoal outlines with the colors dissolved by age. Heavy earrings of Aztec warriors, necklaces and bracelets of shell, gold and silver medallions and carved heads and amulets, animals and bones, all these caught the light as she moved.
It was her extreme liveliness that may have prevented her from working upon a painting, and turned a passion for color and texturesn her own body.
Lillian saw her once, later, at a costume party carrying an empty frame around her neck. It was Diana’s head substituted for a canvas, her head with its slender neck, its tousled hair, tanned skin and earth-colored eyes. Her appearance within an empty frame was an exact representation of her history.
With the same care she took in dressing herself, in creating tensions of colors and metals, once she had arrived at the top of the staircase, she set out to attract all the glances, exposing the delicately chiseled face belonging to a volatile person and incongruously set upon a luxurious body which one associated with all the voluptuous reclining figures of realistic paintings. When she was satisfied that every eye was on her, she was content, and could devote herself to the second phase of her activity.
First of all she thrust her breasts forward, as if to assert that hers was a breathing, generous body, and not just a painting. But they were in curious antiphony, the quick-turning sharp-featured head with its untamed hair, and the body with its separate language, the language of the strip teaser; for, after raising her breasts upward and outward as a swimmer might before diving, she continued to undulate, and although one could not trace the passage of her hand over various places on her body, Lillian had the feeling that, like the strip teaser, she had mysteriously called attention to the roundness of her shoulder, to the indent of her waist. And what added to the illusion of provocation was that, having dressed herself with the lavishness of ancient civilizations, she proceeded gradually to strip herself. It was her artistic interpretation of going native.
She would first of all lay her earrings on the table and rub her ear lobes. The rings hurt her ears, which wanted to be free. No eyes could detach themselves from this spectacle. She would remove her light jacket, and appear in a backless sundress. After breakfast, on a chaise longue on the terrace, she would lie making plans for the beach, but on this chaise longue she turned in every ripple or motion which could escape immobility. She took off her bracelets and rubbed the wrist which they had confined. She was too warm for her beach robe. By the time she reached the beach even the bathing suit had ceased to be visible to one’s eyes. By an act of prestidigitation, even though she was now dressed as was every other woman on the beach, one could see her as the naked, full, brown women of Gauguin’s Tahitian scenes.
Whoever had voted that she deserved a year to dedicate herself to the art of painting had been wise and clairvoyant.
Illogically, with Diana Fred lost his fear of women who laughed. Perhaps because Diana’s laughter was continuous, so that it seemed, like the music of the guitars, an accompaniment to their days in Golconda.