by Anais Nin
Between the trees, now and then there appeared the figure of a workman with a machete. White pants, naked torso, sandals, and a straw hat, bending over their cutting. When they heard the car they straightened up and watched them with somber eyes.
Once one of them signaled Hatcher to stop. Lillian saw him grow tense. Then they pushed before them a frightened child. “Will you take him? He’s too small to walk all the way.”
“Climb over the bottles,” said Hatcher.
But the child was too frightened. He clung to the extra tire in the back, and when the jeep slowed down before a deep ravine, he leaped off and disappeared into the forest.
“Here is my place,” said Hatcher, and turned left up a hill until he reached a plateau. On this open space he had built a roof on posts, with only one wall in the back. The cooking was done out of doors. A Mexican woman was bending over her washing. She only came when Hatcher called her. She was small and heavy, and sad-faced, but she gave Hatcher a caressing look and a brilliant warm smile. Toward the visitors she showed only a conscious effort at politeness.
“You must excuse us, the place is not finished yet. My husband works alone, and has a lot to do.”
“Bring the coffee, Maria,” said Hatcher. She left them sitting around a table on the terrace, staring at an unbelievable stretch of white sand, dazzling white foam spraying a gigantic, sprawling vegetation which grew to the very edge of the sand. Birds sang deliriously, and monkeys gave humorous clown cries in the trees. The colors all seemed purer, and the whole place as if uninhabited by man.
Maria came with coffee in a thermos. Hatcher patted her shoulder and looked gratefully at her.
“She is the most marvelous wife,” he said.
“And he is a wonderful husband,” said Maria. “Mexican husbands never go around telling everyone they are married. Whenever Harry goes to Golconda, he keeps telling everyone about his wife.”
And then, turning to Lillian, she added in a lower tone, while Hatcher talked with the young doctor: “I don’t know why he loves me. I am so short and squatty. He was once married to someone like you. She was tall, and she had long, pointed, painted nails. He never talks about her. I worked for him, at first. I was his secretary. We are going to build a beautiful place here. This is only the beginning.”
Against the wall at the back they had their bedroom. Lillian could imagine them together. She was sure that he lay with his head on his wife’s breast. She was compliant, passive, devoted.
Lillian wondered if he were truly happy. He seemed so intent on affirming his happiness. He was not tranquil, nor capable of contemplation. He named all the beauties of his place, summoned them. When he mentioned America, his mouth grew bitter. He missed nothing. American women… He stopped himself, as if aware for the first timthat Lillian was one of them. His eyes alighted on Lillian’s nails. “I hate painted nails,” he said. Until now he had been friendly. Something, a shadow of a resemblance, a recall, had sent him for a moment into the city beneath the city, the subterranean chambers of memory. But he leaped back into the present to describe all the work that had yet to be done.
“As you can see, it is still very primitive.”
On the terrace, several camp beds were set side by side, as in an army barracks, with screens between them.
“I hope you won’t mind sleeping out of doors.”
The Mexican doctor was leaving. “Tomorrow I will be driving back with friends who are spending a few days in Golconda. If you want us to, we will pick you up.”
Lillian wanted to walk to the beach. She left the Hatchers discussing dinner, and followed a trail down the hill. The flowers which opened their violet red velvety faces toward her were so eloquent, they seemed about to speak. The sand did not seem like sand, but like vaporized glass, which reflected lights. The spray and the foam from the waves was of a whiteness impossible to match. The sea folded its layers around her, touched her legs, her hips, her breasts—a liquid sculptor, the warm hands of the sea all over her body.
She closed her eyes.
When she came out and put on her clothes she felt reborn, born anew. She had closed the eyes of memory. She felt as though she were one of the red flowers, that she would speak only with the texture of her skin, the tendrils of hair at the core, remain open, feel no contractions ever again.
She thought of the simplified life. Of cooking over a wood fire, of swimming every day, of sleeping out of doors in a cot without sheets with only a Mexican wool blanket. Of sandals, and freedom of the body in light dresses, hair washed by the sea and curled by the air. Unpainted nails.
When she arrived Maria had set the table. The lights were weak bulbs hanging from a string. The generator was working and could be heard. But the trees were full of fireflies, crickets, and pungent odors.
“If you want to wash the salt off, there is a creek just down toward the left, and a natural pool. Take a candle.”
“No, I like the salt on my skin.”
On the table were dishes of black beans, rice, and tamales.
And again coffee in the thermos bottle.
After dinner Hatcher wanted to show Lillian all of the half-built house. She saw their bedroom, with its white-washed walls and flowered curtains. And behind the wall a vast storage room.
“He is very proud of his storage room,” said Maria.
It was enormous, as large as the entire front of the house. As large as a supermarket. With shelves reaching to the ceiling. Organized, alphabetized, catalogued.
Every brand of canned food, every brand of medicine, every brand of clothing, glasses, work gloves, tools, magazines, books, hunting guns, fishing equipment.
“Will you have cling peaches? Asparagus? Quinine?” He was swollen with pride. “Magazines? Newspapers?”
Lillian saw a pair of crutches on a hook at the side of the shelf. His eyes followed her glance, and he said without embarrassment: “That’s in case I should break a leg.”
Lillian did not know why the place depressed her. She suddenly felt deeply tired. Maria seemed grateful to be left alone with her husband. They went into their bedroom in the back, and Lillian sat on her cot at the front of the open terrace, and undressed behind a screen.
She had imagined Hatcher free. That was what had depressed her. She had been admiring him for several weeks as a figure who had attained independence, who could live like a native, a simplified existence with few needs. He was not even free of his past, of his other wife. The goodness of this one, her warmth, her servitude, only served to underline the contrast between her and the other. Lillian had felt him making comparisons between her and his Mexican wife. The other still existed in his thoughts. It may even have been why he invited Lillian the very first day in the taxi.
She couldn’t sleep, having witnessed Hatcher’s umbilical ties with his native land’s protectiveness. (America alone could supply crutches if one broke one’s leg, America alone could cure him of malaria, America-the-mother, America-the-father had been transported into the supplies shed, canned and bottled.) He had been unable to live here naked, without possessions, without provisions, with his Mexican mother and the fresh fruits and vegetables in abundance, the goat’s milk, and hunting.
Close the eyes of memory…but was she free? Hatcher’s umbilical cord had stirred her own roots. His fears had lighted up these intersections of memory which were like double exposures. Like the failed photograph of the Mayan temple, in which by an accident, a failure to turn a small key, Lillian had been photographed both standing up and lying down, and her head had seemed to lie inside the jaws of a giant king snake of stone, and the stairs of the pyramid to have been built across her body as if she had been her own ghostly figure transcending the stone.
The farther she traveled into unknown places, unfamiliar places, the more precisely she could find within herself a map showing only the cities of the interior.
This place resembled none other, with its colonnade of palm-tree trunks, its walled back set against the rocks
, its corrugated roof on which monkeys clowned. The cactus at night took shapes of arthritic old men, bearded scarecrows of the tropics, and the palms were always swaying with a rhythm of fans in the heat, of hammocks in the shade.
Was there no open road, simple, clear, unique? Would all her roads traverse several worlnd herimultaneously, bordered by the fleeting shadows of other roads, other mountains? She could not pass by a little village in the present without passing as well by some other little village in some other country, even the village of a country she had wished to visit once and had not reached!
Lillian could see the double exposure created by memory. A lake once seen in Italy flowed into the lagoon which encircled Golconda, a hotel on a snowy mountain in Switzerland was tied to Hatcher’s unfinished mountain home by a long continuous cable, and this folding cot behind a Mexican screen lay alongside a hundred other beds in a hundred other rooms, New York, Paris, Florence, San Francisco, New Orleans, Bombay, Tangiers, San Luis.
The map of Mexico lay open on her knees, but she could not find the thick jungle line which indicated her journeys. They divided into two, four, six, eight skeins.
She was speeding at the same rhythm along several dusty roads, as a child with parents, as a wife driving her husband, as a mother taking her children to school, as a pianist touring the world, and all these roads intersected noiselessly and without damage.
Swinging between the drug of forgetfulness and the drug of awareness, she closed her eyes, she closed the eyes of memory.
When she awakened she saw first of all a casuarina tree with orange flowers that seemed like tongues of flames. Between its branches rose a thin wisp of smoke from Maria’s brasero. Maria was patting tortillas between her hands with an even rhythm and at the same time watching over genuine American pancakes saying: “Senorita, I have tortillas a La Americana for you.”
The table was set in the sun, with Woolworth dishes and oilcloth and paper napkins.
The young doctor had arrived with his friends. They would take her back to Golconda.
Maria was gazing at Lillian pensively. She was trying to imagine that a woman just like this one had hurt Hatcher so deeply that he never talked about it. She was trying to imagine the nature of the hurt. She knew that Hatcher no longer loved that woman. But she knew also that he still hated her, and that she was still present in his thoughts.
Lillian wanted to talk to her, help her exorcise the American woman with the painted nails. But Hatcher would be lonely without his memories, lonely without his canned asparagus, and his American-made crutches. Did he truly love Maria, with her oily black hair, her maternal body, her compassionate eyes, or did he love her for not being his first wife?
He looked at Lillian with hardness. Because she did not want to stay? Could she explain that she had spent the night in the subterranean cities of memory, instead of outside in the spicy, lulling tropical night?
Doctor Palas had been called during the night, and was in a bad humor. His friends had found the new beach hotel lacking in comfort. “The cot had a large stain, as if a crime had been ommitted there. The mosquito netting had a hole, and we were bitten by mosquitoes. And in the morning we had to wash our faces from a pail of water. We gave some pennies to the children. They were so eager that they scratched our hands. And only fish and black beans to eat, even for breakfast. “
“Some day,” said Hatcher, “when my place is built, it will attract everyone. I am sure the movie colony will come.”
“But I thought you came here to be isolated, to enjoy a primitive life, a simple life.”
“It isn’t the first time a human being has had two wishes, diametrically opposed,” said Doctor Palas.
In the car, driving back in the violent sun, no one talked. The light filled the eyes, the mind, the nerves, the bones, and it was only when they drove through shade that they came out of this anesthesia of sunlight. In the shade they would find women washing clothes in the river, children swimming naked, old men sitting on fences, and the younger men behind the plough, or driving huge wheeled carts pulled by white Brahma bulls. In the eyes of the Mexicans there were no questions, no probings; only resignation, passivity, endurance, patience. Except when one of them ran amok.
Lillian could feel as they did at times. There were states of being which resembled the time before the beginning of the world, unformed, undesigned, unseparated. Chaos. Mountains, sea and earth undifferentiated, nebulous, intertwined. States of mind and feeling which would never appear under any spiritual X-ray. Dense, invisible, inaccessible to articulate people. She would live here, would be lost. At every moment of anxiety, of probing, she would slip into the sea for rebirth. Her body would be restored to her. She would feel her face as a face, fleshy, sunburned, warm, and not as a mask concealing a flow of thoughts. She would be given back her neck as a firm, living, palpitating, warm neck, not as a support for a head heavy with fever and questions. Her whole body would be restored to her, breasts relaxed, no longer compressed by the emotions of the chest, legs restored, smooth and gleaming. All of it cool, smooth, washed of thought.
She would plunge back with these people into silence, into meditation and contemplation. When she washed her clothes in the river she would feel only the flow of the water, the sun on her back. The light of the sun would fill every corner of her mind and create refractions of light and color and send messages to her senses which would dissolve into humid shining fields, purple mountains, and the rhythms of the sea and the Mexican songs.
No thoughts like the fingers of a surgeon, feeling here and there, where is the pain, where did destruction spring from, what cell has broken, where is the broken mirror that distorts the images of human life?
Chaos was rich, destructive, and protective, like the dense jungle they had traveled through. Could she return to the twilight marshes of a purely natural, inarticulate, impulsive world, feel safe there from inquiry and exposure?
But in this jungle, a pair of eyes, not her own, had followed and found her. Her mother’s eyes. She had first seen the world through her mother’s eyes, and seen herself through her mother’s eyes. Children were like kites, at first they did not have vision, they did not see themselves except reflected in the eyes of the parents. Lillian seen through her mother’s eyes.
Her mother was a great lady. She wore immaculate dresses, was always pulling on her gloves. She had tidy hair which the wind could not disarrange, she wore veils, perfume. Lillian’s outbursts of affection were always curtailed because they threatened this organization. “Don’t wrinkle my dress. You will tear my veil. Don’t muss my hair.” And once when Lillian had buried her face in the folds of her dress and cried: “Oh, Mother, you smell so good,” she had even said: “Don’t behave like a savage.” If this is a woman, thought Lillian, I do not want to be one. Lillian was impetuous, but this barrier had driven her into an excess, into exaggerations of her tumultuousness.
She threw her clothes about, she soiled and crumpled up her dresses. Her hair was never tidy. At the same time, she felt that this was the cause of her mother’s coolness. She did not want this coldness. She thought she would rather be chaotic, and stutter and be rough but warm. When she disobeyed, when she ran amok, she felt she was rescuing her warmth and naturalness from her mother’s formal hands. And at the same time she felt despair, that because she was as she was, and unable to be like HER, she would never be loved. She took to music passionately, and there too her wildness, her lack of discipline, hampered her playing. In music too there was a higher organization of experience. Yes, she knew that, she was undisciplined and wayward. Only today, traveling through Mexico, a country of warmth, of naturalness, and looking into eyes that did not criticize, did she realize she had never yet used her own eyes to look at herself.
Her mother, a very tall woman with critical eyes. She had eyes like Lillian’s, a vivid electric blue. Lillian looked into them for everything. They were her mirror. She thought she could read them clearly, and what she saw made her uneasy.
There were never any words. Only her eyes. Was this dissatisfaction due to other causes? She used her eyes to stop Lillian when Lillian wanted to draw physically close to her. It was a kind of signal. Her mother had told her only much later that she did think her an awkward and ardent child, chaotic, impulsive, did think how emotional she was, how she could not civilize her. Those were her mother’s words.
Lillian had never seen herself with her own eyes. Children do not possess eyes of their own. You retained as upon a delicate retina, your mother’s image of you, as the first and the only authentic one, her judgment of your acts.
They had reached a place of shade by the river. They had to wait for the barge to take them across. They got out of the car and sat on the grass. A woman was hanging her laundry on the branches of a low tree, and the blues, oranges, pinks looked like giant flowers wilted by tropical rains.
Another woman approached them with a basket on her head. She took it down with calm, deliberate gestures and put before them a neatly arranged pile of small fried fish.
“Do you have any beer?” asked Doctor Palas.
The houses by the river did not have any walls. They were palm leaves on four palm trunks. A woman was pushing a small hammock monotonously to keep a baby asleep. Children were playing aked in the dust and by the edge of the river.
It was Doctor Palas’ friends who noticed that the radiator was leaking profusely. They would never reach Golconda. They would be lucky if they reached San Luis, on the other side of the river.
Lillian was thinking that at this time Diana, Christmas, and her other friends were starting on a colorful safari to the beach.
The barge drifted in slowly, languidly. The men who had pushed it wiped the perspiration from their shoulders. In their dark red-brown eyes, fawn eyes, there were always specks of gold. From the sun, or from some deep Indian irony. Catastrophe always made them laugh. Was it a religion unknown to Lillian? A dog half drowned once, at the beach, made them laugh. The leaking radiator, the stranded tourists. And this was New Year’s Eve. They would not reach Golconda for the fireworks and street dances.
