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.”
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.
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.