A city in ruins, as this ancient city was, was
more powerful and evocative because it had to be constructed anew by each
person, therefore enhanced into illimitable beauty, never destroyed or obscured
by the realism of the present, never rendered familiar and forced to expose its
flaws.
To gain such altitude it was necessary to learn
from the artist how to overlook, leave out, the details which weighed down the
imagination and caused crash landings.
Even the prisons, where one knew that scenes of
horror had taken place, acquired in the sun, under streams of ivy gently
bleached by time, a serenity, a passivity, a transmutation into resignation
which included forgiveness of man’s crimes against man. In time man will
forgive even the utmost cruelty merely because the sacred personal value of
each man is lost when the father, the mother, son or daughter, brother or
sister, wife of this man have ceased to exist—the ones who gave his life its
importance, its irreplaceable quality. Time, powerless to love one man,
promptly effaces him. His sorrows, torments, and death recede into impersonal
history, or evaporate into these poetic moments which the tourists come to
seek, sitting on broken columns, or focusing their cameras on empty ransacked
tombs, none of them knowing they are learning among ruins and echoes to
devaluate the importance of one man, and to prepare themselves for their own
disappearance.
The ancient city gave Lillian a constriction of
the heart. She was not given to such journeys into the past. To her it seemed
like a city mourning its dead, even though it could not remember those it mourned.
She saw it as the ruins of Chirico’s paintings and asked Michael: “But why the
heavy silence?”
“There’s no wind here,” said Michael.
It was true. The
windlessness
gave it the static beauty of a painting.
But there was another reason for the silence,
which she discovered only in the afternoon. She was taking a sunbath on the
terrace, alone.
The sun was so penetrating that it drugged her.
She fell asleep and had a dream. A large vulture was flying above the terrace,
circling over her, and then it swooped downward and she felt its beak on her
shoulder. She awakened screaming, sat up, and saw that she had not been
dreaming, for a vulture had marked her shoulder and was flying away slowly,
heavily.
Wherever vultures settled they killed the
singing birds. The absence of singing birds, as well as of the wind, was the
cause of that petrified silence.
She began to dislike the ancient city. The
volcano began its menacing upward sweep as neat as the edge of the city, and
rose so steeply and so high that its tip was hidden in the clouds. “I have been
up there,” said Michael. “I looked down into its gaping top and saw the earth’s
insides moldering.”
Michael said on Sunday: “I wish you would spend
all your free days here, every week.”
That evening he and Lillian, and other guests,
were sitting in the patio when suddenly there appeared in the sky what seemed
at first like a flying comet, which then burst high in the air into a shower of
sparks and detonations.
Lillian thought: “It’s the volcano!”
They ran to the outside windows. A crowd of
young men, carefully dressed in dark suits and gleaming white shirts, stood
talking and laughing. Fireworks illuminated their dark, smooth faces. The
marimbas played like a concert of children’s pianos, small light notes so gay
that they seemed the laughter of the instrument.
The fireworks were built in the shape of tall
trees, and designed to go off in tiers, branch by branch. From the tips of the
gold and red branches hung planets, flowers, wheels gyrating and then igniting,
all propelled into space bursting, splintering, falling as if the sun and the
moon and the stars themselves had been pierced open and had spilled their
jewels of lights, particles of delight.
Some of the flowers spilled their pollen of
gold, the planets flew into space, discarding ashes, the skeletons of their
bodies. But some of the chariot wheels, gyrating wildly, spurred by each
explosion of their gold spokes, wheeled themselves into space and never
returned in any form, whether gold showers or ashes.
When the sparkles fell like a rain of gold, the
children rushed to place themselves under them, as if the bath of gold would
transform their ragged clothes and lives into light.
Beside Lillian, Michael took no pleasure in the
spectacle. She saw him watching the students with an expression which had the
cold glitter of hunger, not emotion. Almost the cold glitter of the hunter
taking aim before killing.
“This is a fiesta for men only, Lillian. The
men here love each other openly. See, there, they are holding hands.”
Lillian translated this into: He wants it to be
thus, this is the way he wants it to be.
“They like to be alone, among men. They enjoy
being without women.” He looked at her this time with malice, as if to observe
the effect of his words on her.
“I lived in Mexico as a child, Michael. The
women are kept away from the street, from cafes, they are kept at home. But it
does not mean what you believe…”
They watched the young men so neatly dressed,
standing in the street with their faces turned toward the fireworks. Then they
noticed that across the street from Michael’s house one of the windows was
brightly lit and a very young girl
dresed
in white
stood behind the iron railing. Behind her the room was full of people, and the
marimbas were playing.
Then there was a silence. One of the young
students moved forward, stood under the young girl’s window with his guitar and
sang a ballad praising her eyes, smile, and voice.
She answered him in a clear, light voice,
accepting the compliment. The young student praised her again and begged
admittance to her home.
She answered him in a clear, light voice,
accepting this compliment too, smiled at him, but did not invite him in. This
meant that his ballad was not considered artful enough.
This was their yearly poetry tournament, at
which only excellence in verse counted. It was the bad poets who were left
outside to dance among themselves!
One of the student’s ballads finally pleased
the girl, and she invited him inside. Her family met him at the door. The other
students cheered.
Lillian said: “I’m going out to dance with the
bad poets!”
“No,” said Michael, “you can’t do that!”
“Why not?”
“It isn’t done here.”
“But I’m American. I don’t have to conform to
their traditions.”
Lillian went out. When she first appeared at
the door the students all stared at her in awe. Then they murmured with
pleasure: “The American is allowed to dance in the streets.”
A bolder one asked her to dance. She glided off
with him. The marimbas played with a tinkle of music boxes, the resonances of
Tibetan bells, and sometimes like Balinese cymbals. The fireworks lighted up
the sky and faces.
Other students pressed around her, waiting for
a dance. They offered her a flower to wear in her hair. Tactfully, they made a
wall against the students who were drunk, shielding her. She passed from the
arms of one student to another. As she passed she could see Michael’s face at
the window, cold and angry.
The dances grew faster and the change of
partners swifter. They sang ballads in her ears.
As the evening wore on she began to tire
because of the cobblestones, and she became a little frightened too, because
the students were growing more ardent and more intoxicated. So she began to
dance toward the house where Michael stood waiting. They realized she was
seeking to escape, and the ones she had not yet danced with pressed forward,
pleading with her. But she was out of breath and had lost one heel, so she
moved eagerly toward the door. Michael opened it and closed it quickly after her.
The students knocked on the door and for a moment she feared they would knock
it down.
Then she noticed that Michael was trembling. He
looked so pale, drawn, unhappy that Lillian ne asked him tenderly: “What is it,
Michael? What is it, Michael? Did you mind my going out to dance? Did you mind
that your fantasy about a world without women was proved not true? Why don’t
you come with me? We’re invited to the Queen’s house.”
“No, I won’t go.”
“I don’t understand you, Michael. You make it
so clear that you want a world without women.”
“I don’t look upon you as a woman.”
“Then why should you mind if I go to a party?”
“I do mind.”
She remembered that she had come because he
seemed in distress; she had come to help him and not to hurt him.
“I’ll stay with you, then.”
They sat in the courtyard, alone.
If the city we choose, thought Lillian,
represents our inner landscape, then Michael has selected a magnificent tomb,
to live among the ruins of his past loves. The beauty of his house, his
clothes, his paintings, his books, seem like precious jewels, urns, perfumes,
gold ornaments such as were placed in the tombs of Egyptian kings.
“A long time ago,” said Michael, “I decided
never to fall in love again. I have made of desire an anonymous activity.”
“But not to feel…not to love…is like dying
within life, Michael.”
The burial of emotion caused a kind of death,
and it was this cadaver of his feelings he carried within him that gave him, in
spite of his elegance, and the fairness of his coloring, a static quality, like
that of the ancient city itself.
“Soon the rains will come,” he said. “The house
will grow cold and damp. The roads will become impassable. I had hoped your
engagement at the hotel would last until then.”
“Why don’t you come back to Golconda then?”
“This place suits my present mood,” said
Michael. “The gaiety and liveliness of Golconda hurts me, like too much light
in my eyes.”
“What a strange conversation, Michael, in this
patio that reminds me of the illustrations for the Thousand and One Nights—the
fountain, the palm tree, the flowers, the mosaic floor, the unbelievable moon,
the smell of roses. And here we sit talking like a brother and sister stricken
by some mysterious malady. All the dancing and pleasure are taking place next
door, nearby, and we are exiled from it…and by our own hand.”
At night her room looked like a nun’s cell,
with its whitewashed walls, dark furniture, and the barred windows. She knew
she would not stay, that what Michael wanted to share with her was a withdrawal
from the world.
In the darkness she heard whisperings. Michael
was talking vehemently, and someone was saying: “No, no.” Then she heard a
chair being pushed. Was it Michael courting one of the young students? Michael
who had said lightly: “All I ask, since I can’t keep you here, is that in your
next incarnation you be born a boy, and then I will love you.”
One day in Golconda she saw a bus passing by
that bore the name of San Luis, the town near Hatcher’s place and she climbed
on it.
It was brimming full, not only with people, but
with sacks of corn, chickens tied together, turkeys in baskets, church chairs
in red velvet, a mail sack, babies in arms.
On the front seat sat the young bullfighter she
had seen at the arena the Sunday before. He was very young and very slim. His
dark hair was now wild and free, not sleek and severely tied as it was worn by
bullfighters. In the arena he had seemed taut, all nerves and electric
resilience. In his white pants and slack shirt he looked vulnerable and tender.
Lillian had seen him wildly angry at the bull, had seen him challenge the bull
recklessly because, during one of the passes, it had torn his pants with its
horns, had undressed him in public. This small patch of flesh showing through
the turquoise brocaded pants, this human, warm flesh glowing, exposed, had made
the scene with the bull more like a sensual scene, a duel between aggressor and
victim, and the tension had seemed less that of a symbolic ritual between
animal strength and male strength than that of a sexual encounter.
This vulnerable exposure had stirred the women,
but injured the bullfighter’s dignity, made him a thousand times angrier,
wilder, more reckless…
The bus driver was teasing him. He said he was
going to visit his parents in San Luis. The bus driver thought he was going to
visit Maria. The bullfighter did not want to talk. Next to him sat a very old
woman, all in black, asleep with a basket of eggs on her knees. When the bus
stopped someone got on carrying candelabras.
“Are they moving the whole church?” asked the
man carrying turkeys. But though he was standing, he did not dare sit on one of
the red velvet praying chairs. He was bartering with the man who carried
chickens. The bag filled with corn undulated with each bump on the road. Finally
a very small hole was made in the hemp by so much friction, and a few grains of
corn began to fall out. At this the chickens, who were all tied together, began
to crane their necks, and to mutiny. The owner of the bag became angry and, not
finding a way to repair it, sat next to it on the floor with his hand on the
hole.