Every day Fred wanted Diana and Lillian to accompany him in his visits to the cargo ships which were to sail him home. The one that had accepted him was not ready yet. It was being loaded very slowly with coconuts, dried fish, crocodile skins, bananas, and baskets.
They would walk the length of the wharf, watching the fishermen catching tropical fish, or watching the giant turtle that had been turned on its back so that it would not escape until it was time to make turtle soup.
Watching the small ships preparing to sail, questioning the captain who wore a brigand’s mustache, the mate who wore no shirt, and obtaining no definite sailing date, the anxiety of Christmas reached its culmination.
He had something to prove to himself which he had not yet proved. He was simultaneously enjoying his adventure and constantly planning to put an end to it.
When the captain allowed him to visit the ship he would stand alone on its deck and watch Diana and Lillian standing on the wharf. They waved goodbye in mockery and he waved back. And it was only at this moment that he noticed how alive Lillian’s hair was, as if each curl were weaving itself around his fingers, how slender Diana’s neck and inviting to the hand, how full of light both their faces were, how their fluttering dresses enveloped and caressed them.
Behind them rose the soft violet mountains of Golconda. He had known intimately neither woman nor city and was already losing them. Then he felt pain and a wild desire not to sail away. He would run down the gangplank, pushing the porters to one side, run back once more to all the trepidations they caused him by their nearness.
Neither Diana nor Lillian was helping him. They both smiled so gaily, without a shadow of regret, and did not force him tostay, or cling to him. And in the deepest part of himself he knew they were helping him to become a man by allowing him to make his own decisions. That was part of the initiation. They would not steal his boyhood; he must abdicate it.
He loved them both: Diana for incarnating the spice, the color, and the fragrance of Golconda, and Lillian because her knowledge of him seemed to incarnate him, and because she was like a powerful current that transmitted life to him.
Just as he climbed the gangplank as a rehearsal for his departure, he felt then that he was not ready to leave, so when he returned to them he felt unready to live, painfully poised between crystallizations. He could not follow Diana’s invitations into the unknown, unfamiliar life of the senses, and he could not sail either.
An invisible race was taking place between Diana’s offer of a reclining nude by a Gauguin and the ship’s departure. And as if the ship, the captain, the mate, and the men who loaded it had known he was not ready to leave, one day when he went to the pier at four o’clock as he did every day, the ship was gone!
He could still see it on the horizon line, a small black speck throwing off not quite enough smoke to conceal its departure.
Lillian was walking through the market. It was like walking through an Oriental bazaar. Gold filigree from Spain, silk scarves from India, embroidered skirts from Japan, glazed potteries from Africa, engraved copper from Morocco, sculptures from Egypt, herbs and incense from Arabia. At the time Golconda was an important seaport, every country had deposited some of its riches there. When it was no longer visited, the Mexicans themselves had created variations upon these themes, adding inventions of their own.
Cages containing tropical birds were panoplied with striped awnings like the tents of ancient maharajahs. From them the Mexicans had inherited the art of training birds to pick out of their hands tiny folded papers containing predictions for the future.
Lillian gave her pennies to the man and asked for one of the messages. The bird very delicately selected, from a handful, a message that read: “You will find what you are seeking.” Lillian smiled. She wondered whether among those tiny folded papers the bird might pick up a message telling her what it was she was seeking. She decided to squander a few more pennies. But the Mexican bird trainer refused to let her try again. “It’s bad luck to question destiny twice. If it gives you two answers you will be confused.”
Beside her stood a man who was well known in Golconda as a guide. She had always disliked him. Not because she condemned his trade of selling Golconda to the spectators who could not discover it for themselves, not because she lacked sympathy for the strangers who wanted to witness others’ weddings, others’ fiestas, as paying guests, but because wherever he stood, at the hotel entrance, at the ticket agencies, at the bullfight entrance, he had the air of a pimp, a pimp who was ashamed of what he was selling, as if Golconda were not a radiant city but a package of obscene post cards. It was the suggestive way he had approached her the first time, whispering: “Would you like to attend a genuine Mexican wedding?” as though he were saying: “Would you like me to procure for you a fine young man?”
It may be that Lillian identified his yellow face, his averted eyes, and his constantly nibbling lips with prying, with the spectator, with all peripheral living. And yet, she thought, blushing, I am quite willing to seek guidance for my inward journeys. To ask of a trained bird that he should pick out of a pile of folded papers guidance for my inward journeys!
This thought caused her to look at the guide with more tolerance, and he sensed her weakening defenses. This made him take a step forward and whisper to her shoulder, which was on the level of his eyes: “I have something to show you that will really interest you. It isn’t just an ordinary tourist sight, believe me. It is a fellow American in trouble. You’re an American woman, aren’t you? I was told about you. You came to Mexico as a child with your American father who was an engineer. You speak Spanish fluently, and you understand our ways. I saw you at church with a handkerchief on your head to show respect for our customs. But you are American, I know. Would you feel sorry for an American in real trouble? Would you like to help?”
Lillian struggled with her distrust of the guide, whose lizard-colored eyes remained fixed on the freckles on her shoulders.
“What kind of trouble?”
“Well, he was caught without papers, traveling in the bus to Yucatan. So they put him in jail, here, where he started from. He’s been in jail one year now.”
“A year? And nothing was done for him?”
The guide’s mouth, which seemed to nibble and chew at words rather than utter them, nibbled in the void, uttering no word while he was thinking.
“An American trapped in a foreign country, who cannot speak Spanish. You might at least talk with him?”
“And nothing has been done? Nobody has done anything? Hasn’t he appealed to the American consulate?”
The guide mimicked a gesture of indifference, not content with shrugging the imaginary weight off his shoulders, but also washing his hands of it, and when turning away and taking several steps indicating detachment from the problem. It was almost as if he were anticipating any gesture of indifference Lillian might make.
“Where is this jail?”
He walked furtively ahead of her. Whether or not he felt ashamed of taking strangers through the scenes of his native village, ashamed to be paid for invading burials and weddings, he walked as if he were leading them all to places of ill fame, as perhaps he had.
The other tourists treated him with unusual cordiality. They felt isolated and mistook him for a bridge of friendship between themselves and the natives. They fraternized with him as if he were a mediator as well as an interpreter. They drank with him and slapped his back.
But Lillian saw him as the deforming mirror which corrupted every relationship between tourist and native. Only the plight of the American prisoner drove her to follow him through streets she had never crossed before, beyond the market and behind the bullring.