When she turned her face unwillingly towards
Hansen, he was gone, and then she looked at the Doctor and said: “This is a
drugging place…”
“There are so many kinds of drugs. One for
remembering and one for forgetting. Golconda is for forgetting. But it is not a
permanent forgetting. We may seem to forget a person, a place, a state of
being, a past life, but meanwhile what we are doing is selecting a new cast for
the reproduction of the same drama, seeking the closest reproduction to the
friend, the lover, or the husband we are striving to forget. And one day we
open our eyes, and there we are caught in the same pattern, repeating the same
story. How could it be otherwise? The design comes from within us. It is
internal.”
There were tears in Lillian’s eyes, for having
made friends immediately not with a new, a beautiful, a drugging place, but
with a man intent on penetrating the mysteries of the human labyrinth from
which she was a fugitive. She was almost angered by his persistence. A man
should respect one’s desire to have no past. But even more damaging was his
conviction that we live by a series of repetitions until the experience is
solved, understood, liquidated…
“You will never rest until you have discovered
the familiar within the unfamiliar. You will go around as these tourists do,
searching for flavors which remind you of home, begging for Coca-Cola instead
of tequila, cereal foods instead of papaya. Then the drug will wear off. You
will discover that barring a few divergences in skin tone, or mores, or language,
you are still related to the same kind of person because it all comes from
within you, you are the one fabricating the web.”
Other people were dancing around them, so
obedient to the rhythms that they seemed like algae in the water, welded to each
other, and swaying, the
coloredskirts
billowing, the
white suits like frames to support the flower arrangements made by the women’s
dresses, their hair, their jewels, their lacquered nails. The wind sought to
carry them away from the orchestra, but they remained in its encirclement of
sound like Japanese kites moved by strings from the instruments.
Lillian asked for another drink. But as she
drank it, she knew that one of the drops of the Doctor’s clairvoyance had
fallen into her glass, that a part of what he had said was already proved true.
The first friend she had made in Golconda, choosing him in preference to the
engineer and the nightclub manager, resembled, at least in his role, a
personage she had known who was nicknamed “The Lie Detector”; for many months
this man had lived among a group of artists extracting complete confessions
from them without effort and subtly changing the course of their lives.
Not to yield to the Doctor’s challenge, she
brusquely turned the spotlight on him: “Are you engaged in such a repetition
now, with me? Have you left anyone behind?”
“My wife hates this place,” said the Doctor
simply. “She comes here rarely. She stays in Mexico City most of the time, on
the excuse that the children must go to good schools. She is jealous of my
patients, and says they are not really ill, that they pretend to be. And in
this she is right. Tourists in strange countries are easily frightened. More
frightened of strangeness. They call me to reassure themselves that they will
not succumb to the poison of strangeness, to unfamiliar foods, exotic flavors,
or the bite of an unfamiliar insect. They do call me for trivial reasons, often
out of fear. But is fear trivial? And my native patients do need me
desperately… I
bui
beautiful house for my wife. But I
cannot keep her here. And I love this place, the people. Everything I have
created is here. The hospital is my work. And if I leave, the drug traffic will
run wild. I have been able to control it.”
Lillian no longer resented the Doctor’s
probings
. He was suffering, and it was this which made him
so aware of others’ difficulties.
“That’s a very painful conflict, and not easily
solved,” she said. She wanted to say more, but she was stopped by a messenger
boy with bare feet, who had come to fetch the Doctor on an emergency case.
Lillian and the Doctor sat in a hand-carved
canoe. The pressure of the human hand on the knife had made uneven indentations
in the scooped-out tree trunk which caught the light like the scallops of the
sea shell. The sun on the high rims of these declivities and the shadows within
their valleys gave the canoe a stippled surface like that of an impressionist
painting, made it seem a multitude of spots moving forward on the water in
ripples of changeable colors and textures.
The fisherman was paddling it quietly through
the varied colors of the lagoon water, colors that ranged from the dark sepia
of the red earth bottom to silver grey when the colors of the bushes triumphed
over the earth, to gold when the sun conquered them both, to purple in the
shadows.
He paddled with one arm. His other had been
blown off when he was a young fisherman of seventeen first learning the use of
dynamite sticks for fishing.
The canoe had once been painted in laundry
blue. This blue had faded and become like the smoky blue of old Mayan murals, a
blue which man could not create, only time.
The lagoon trees showed their naked roots, as
though on stilts, an intricate maze of silver roots as fluent below as they
were interlaced above, and overhung, casting shadows before the bow of the
canoe so dense that Lillian could scarcely believe they would open and divide
to let them through.
Emerald sprays and fronds projected from a mass
of wasp nests, of pendant vines and lianas. Above her head the branches formed
metallic green parabolas and enameled pennants, while the canoe and her body
accomplished the magical feat of cutting smoothly through the roots and dense
tangles.
The boat undulated the aquatic plants and the
grasses that bore long plumes, and traveled through reflections of the clouds.
The absence of visible earth made Lillian feel as if the forest were afloat, an
archipelago of green vapors.
The snowy herons, the shell-pink flamingos
meditated upon one leg like yogis of the animal world.
Now and then she saw a single habitation by the
waterside, an ephemeral hut of palm leaves wading on frail stilts and a canoe
tied to a toy-sized jetty. Before each hut, watching Lillian and the Doctor
float by would be a smiling woman and several naked children. They stood
against a backdrop of impenetrable foliage, as if the jungle allowed them,
along with the butterflies, dragonflies, praying mantises, beetles, and
parrots, to occupy only its fringe. The exposed giant roots of the trees made
the children seem to be standing between the toes of Gulliver’s feet.
Once when the earth showed itself on the right
bank, Lillian saw on the mud the tracks of a crocodile that had come to quench
his thirst. The scaly carapaces of the iguanas were colored so exactly like the
ashen roots and tree trunks that she could not spot them until they moved. When
they did not move they lay as still as stones in the sun, as if petrified.
The canoe pushed languid water lettuce out of
the way, and water orchids, magnolias, and giant clover leaves.
A flowing journey, a contradiction to the
persistent dream from which Lillian sought to liberate herself. The dream of a
boat, sometimes large and sometimes small, but invariably caught in a waterless
place, in a street, in the jungle, in the desert. When it was large it was in
city streets, and the deck reached to the upper windows of the houses. She was
in this boat and aware that it could not float unless it were pushed, so she
would get down from it and seek to push it along so that it might move and
finally reach water. The effort of pushing the boat along the street was
immense, and she never accomplished her aim. Whether she pushed it along
cobblestones or over asphalt, it moved very little, and no matter how much she
strained she always felt she would never reach the sea. When the boat was small
the pushing was less difficult; nevertheless she never reached the lake or
river or the sea in which it could sail. Once the boat was stuck between rocks,
another time on a mud bank.
Today she was fully aware that the dream of
pushing the boat through waterless streets was ended. In Golconda she had
attained a flowing life, a flowing journey. It was not only the presence of
water, but the natives’ flowing rhythm: they never became caught in the past,
or stagnated while awaiting the future. Like children, they lived completely in
the present.
She had read that certain Egyptian rulers had
believed that after death they would join a celestial caravan in an eternal
journey toward the sun. Scientists had found two solar
barques
,
which they recognized from ancient texts and mortuary paintings, in a
subterranean chamber of limestone. The chamber was so well sealed that no air,
dust, or cobwebs had been found in it. There were always two such
barques
—one for the night’s journey toward the moon, one
for the day’s journey toward the sun.
In dreams one perpetuated these journeys in
solar
barques
. And in dreams, too, there were always
two: one buried in limestone and unable to float on the waterless routes of
anxiety, the other flowing continuously with life. The static one made the
voyage of memories, and the floating one proceeded into endless discoveries.
This canoe, thought Lillian, as she dipped her
hand into the lagoon water, was to be her solar
barque
,
magnetized by sun and water, gyrating and flowing, without strain or effort.
The Doctor’s thoughts had also been wandering
through other places. Mexico City, where his wife was? His three small
children? His past? His medical studies in Paris and in New York? His first
book of poems, published when he was twenty years old?
Lillian smiled at him as if saying, you too
have taken a secret into the past.
Simultaneously they returned to the present.
Lillian said: “There is a quality in this place
which does not come altogether from its beauty. What is it? Is it the softness
which annihilates all thought and lulls the body for enjoyment? Is it the
continuity of music which prevents thoughts from arresting the flow of life? I
have seen other trees, other rivers; they did not have the power to intoxicate
the senses. Do you feel this? Does everyone feel this? Is this what kept South
Seas travelers from ever returning home?”
“It does not affect everyone in the same way,”
said the Doctor with bitterness in his voice, and Lillian realized he was
thinking of his wife.
Was this the mystery in Doctor Hernandez’s
life? A wife he could not win over to the city he liked, the life he loved?
She waited for him to say more. But he was
silent, and his face had become placid again.
Her hand, which she had left in the waters of
the lagoon to feel the gliding, the uninterrupted gentleness of the flowing, to
assure herself of this union with a living current, she now felt she must lift,
to prove to the Doctor that she shared his anxiety, and that his sadness
affected her. She must surrender the pleasure of touching the flow of water, as
if she were touching the flow of life within her, out of sympathy for his
anguish.
As she lifted her hand and waited for the drops
of water to finish dripping from it, a shot was heard, and water spattered over
her. They all three sat still, stunned.
“Hunters?” she asked. She wanted to stand up
and shout and wave so the hunters would know they were there.
The Doctor answered quietly: “They were not
hunters. It was not a mistake. They intended to shoot me, but they missed.”
“But why? Why? You’re the most needed, the most
loved man here!”
“I refuse to give them drugs. Don’t you
understand? As a doctor I have access to drugs. They want to force me to give
them some. Drugs for forgetting. And I have no right to do this, no right
except in cases of great physical pain. That’s why when you compared Golconda
to a drug I felt bitter. For some people, Golconda is not enough.”
The fisherman did not understand their talk in
English. He said in Spanish, with a resigned air: “Bad hunters. They missed the
crocodile. I could catch him with my bare hands and a knife. I often have.
Without guns. What bad hunters!”
The swimming pool was at the lowest level of
the hotel and only about ten feet above the sea, so that it was dominated by
the roar of the waves hurling themselves against the rocks. The quietness of
its surface did not seem like the quietness of a pool but more like that of a
miniature bay formed within rocks which miraculously escaped the boiling sea
for a few moments.
It did not seem an artificial pool dug into cement and fed by water pipes, but
rather one of the sea’s own moods, one of the sea’s moments of response, an
intermittent haven.
It was surrounded by heavy, lacquered foliage,
and flowers so tenuously held that they fell of their own weight into the pool
and floated among the swimmers like children’s boats.
It was an island of warm,
undangerous
water in which one man at least had sought eternal repose by throwing himself
out of one of the overhanging hotel windows. Ever since that night the pool had
been locked at midnight. Those who knew that the watchman preferred to watch
the dancers on the square and that the gate could easily be leaped over, came
to sit there in the evenings before going to sleep. The place was barred to any
loud frivolity but open for secret assignations after dancing.