They were in the tenement section, a concentration of shacks built of odds and ends, newspapers on tin slabs, palm trees, driftwood, cartons, gasoline tins. The floors were dirt and hammocks served as beds. The cooking was done out of doors on braziers. No matter how poor the houses, they were camouflaged in flowers, and at each window hung a singing bird. And no matter how poor the laundry on the line was like a palette from which all the Mexican painters could have drawn their warmest, most burning colors.
Why did the plight of the American prisoner affect her so keenly? The knowledge of his being a stranger in a country whose language he did not speak? She visualized him in jail, drinking the polluted water which made all foreigners sick with dysentery, perhaps being bitten by mosquitoes injecting him with malaria.
All her protectiveness was aroused, so that even the guide no longer seemed like a pimp selling the intimate life of Golconda, but a man of kindness, capable of understanding that tourists could be in genuine trouble and not always absurdly rich and powerful figures.
The jail had been built inside a discarded and ruined church. The original windows were heavily barred. The original ochre and coral still remained on the walls and gave the prison a joyous air. The church bells were used to call the prisoners to meals, bedtime, or to announce an escaped convict.
The guide was familiar with the place. The guards did not stop playing cards when he entered. They needed shaves so badly that if they had not worn uniforms one might have taken them for prisonerslace retained a smell of incense which mixed with the smell of tobacco. Some of the stands which had supported statues now served as coat racks, and gun racks. Belts filled with cartridges were thrown over the holy water stoup. A single statue of the Virgin, the dark-faced one from Guadalupe, had been deemed sufficient to guard the jail.
“Buenos dias.”
“Muy buenos dias.”
“The lady is here to visit the American prisoner.”
One of the guards who had been asleep now pulled out his keys with vague hesitancies. He considered giving the keys to the guide and returning to his siesta, but suddenly his pride awakened and he decided to play his allotted role with exaggerated arrogance.
Inside, the walls of the prison were painted in sky blue. The ceilings retained their murals of nude angels, clouds, and vaporous young women playing harps. The cots were all occupied by sleeping prisoners. The American stood by the iron door of his cell watching the arrival of the visitor.
His thin, long-fingered hands held onto the bars of the cell door as if he would tear them down. But in his lean, unshaved face there was a glint of irony which Lillian interpreted as a show of courage. He was smiling.
“It was good of you to come,” he said.
“What can I do for you? Should I telephone the American consulate?”
“Other people have tried that but he will not bother. There are too many of us.”
“Too many of you?”
“Well, yes, Americans without papers, runaways from home, runaways from the draft, escaped criminals, displaced persons who claim to be Americans, ex-politicos, ex-gangsters, runaways from wives and alimony…”
“What happened to your papers?”
“I went for a swim one day. I left all my clothes on the beach. When I came back, all my clothes were gone, and with them my papers. So here I am.”
He kept his eyes on her face. They were red, probably from not sleeping. The amusement in them might have been a form a courage.
“But what can I do for you? How can I get you out? I’m not rich. I get a small salary for playing the piano at the Black Pearl. “
His eyes pleaded softly in contradiction to the clipped words. “The best way to help me is to give the guide fifty dollars. Can you spare that? He will fix things up and get me out. He knows the ropes. Can you manage that?”
“I can do that. But once you’re out, how will you get back home, and won’t you get caught again without papers?”
“Once I’m out I can hitchhike to Mexico City, and there go to the consulate. I can manage the rest, if you can get me out.”
Later on, having delivered the money, she felt immensely light, as if she had freed a part of herself. The prisoner would have haunted her. She knew by the exaggeration of her feelings that there must be some relationship between the condition of the prisoner and herself. What she had felt was more than sympathy for a fellow American. It may have been sympathy for a fellow prisoner.
To all appearances she was free. But free of what? Had she not lost her identity papers? Was not her voyage like that of the South American bird that walked over the sands rubbing out his tracks with a special feather that grew longer than the others, like a feather duster?
The past had been dissolved by the intensity of Golconda, by its light which dazzled the thoughts, closed the eyes of memory. Freedom from the past came with unfamiliar objects; none of them possessed any evocative power. From the moment she opened her eyes she was in a new world. The colors were all hot and brilliant, not the pearly greys and attenuated pastels of her homeland. Breakfast was a tray of fruit of a humid, fleshy quality never tasted before, and even the bread did not have the same flavor. There was an herb which they burned in the oven before inserting the bread which gave it a slight flavor of anise.
All day long there was not a single familiar object to carry her back into her past life. The first human being she saw in the morning was the gardener. She could see him through the half-shut bamboo blinds, raking the pebbles and the sand, not as if he was eager to terminate the task but as if raking pebbles and sand was the most pleasurable occupation and he wanted to prolong his enjoyment. Now and then he would stop to talk with a lonely little girl in a white dress who skipped rope all around him asking questions which he answered gently.
“What makes some butterflies have such beautiful colors on their wings, and others not?”
“The plain ones were born of parents who didn’t know how to paint.”
And even when familiar objects turned up, they did not turn up in their accustomed places. Like the giant Coca-Cola bottle made of wood placed in the middle of the bull ring before the bullfight began—a grotesque surrealist dream. Lillian had expected the bulls to charge it, but just before the bull was let out the attendants (who usually took care of carrying away the dead bull and sweeping over the bloody tracks) had come and toppled the bottle, and the six of them had carried it away on their shoulders—publicity’s defeated trophy.
So all was freedom: her hours, her time, and even the music she improvised at night, the jazz which allowed her to embroider on all her moods.
But there was one moment that was different, and it was the knowledge of this moment that perhaps created her feeling of kinship with the prisoner. That was the hour just before dinner, when she was freshly bathed and dressed, the hour when a genuine adventurer would reach the high point of his gambling wth the beauty of the night and feeclass="underline" Now the evening is beginning and I will discover a human being to court or to be courted by, an adventure with caprice and desire, and while gambling I might find love.
At this hour, when she took one last glance at the mirror, the screen door of her room seemed the locked door of a prison, the room an enclosure, only because she was a prisoner of anxiety: the moment before the unknown gamble with a relationship to other human beings paralyzed her with fear. Who would take her dancing? Would no one come, no one remember her existence? Would all the groups that formed in the evening forget to include her in their plans? Would she arrive at the terrace to find only the head of the Chicago stockyards for a dancing partner? Would she come downstairs and watch Christmas a bemused spectator of Diana’s provocations, and couples climbing into cars going to fiestas, and couples climbing the hill to attend the Sunday night dance on the rocks, and Doctor Hernandez appropriated by a movie star who was sure she had malaria?