by Anais Nin
San Luis was a village of dirt streets, shacks, in which bands of pigs were left to find their nourishment in the garbage, and bands of children followed the foreigners asking for pennies. There was only a square, with a church of gold and blue mosaics, a café, a grocery, a garage. They took the car there and Doctor Palas translated for them. Lillian understood the palaver. It consisted, on the Indian side, in avoiding a direct answer to a simple question: “When will the car be ready?” As if a direct answer would bring down on them some fatal wrath, some superstitious punishment. It was impossible to say. Would they care to sit at the café while they waited? It was four o’clock. They sat there until six. Doctor Palas went back to the garage several times. In between he sought to continue with Lillian an intimate conversation in Spanish which his American friends would not understand. Without knowing the trend of meditation that Lillian had embarked on, on the theme of eyes, the eyes of her mother with which she had looked at herself, it was her eyes he praised, and her hair. Her eyes which were not her own when she looked at herself. But when she looked at others, she saw them with love, with compassion. She truly saw them. She saw the American couple, uncomfortable, not understanding this mixture of dirt and gaiety. The children took delight in chasing away the pigs and imitating their cries.
She saw young Doctor Palas not yet humanly connected with the poor as Doctor Hernandez was.
“Will you go dancing with me tonight?”
“If we get to Golconda,” said Lillian, laughing. “I hope the Hungarian violinist will sweep them off their feet, so they will, not notice my absence.”
At seven o’clock the streets were silent and it began to grow dark. The owner of the café was a fair-faced Spaniard with the manners of a courtier. He was helping them to pass the time. He had sent for a guitar player and a singer. He had fixed them a dinner.
When all of them realized they would not be leaving that night, that the car seemed to be losing vigor rather than regaining it, he came and talked to them with vehemence.
“San Luis looks quiet now, but it is only because they are dressing for New Year’s Eve. Pretty soon they will all be out in the streets. There l be dancing. But the men will drink heavily. I advise you not to mix with them. The women know when to leave. Gradually they disappear with the children. The men continue drinking, and soon they begin to shoot at mirrors, at glasses, at bottles, at anything. Sometimes they shoot at each other. I entreat you, Señores y Señoras to stay right here. I have clean rooms I can let you have for the night. Stay in our rooms. I strongly advise you…”
The rooms he showed them gave on a peaceful patio fun of flowers and fountains. Lillian was tempted to go out with the Doctor, at least to dance a while. But traditional protectiveness toward women made him obstinately refuse to take the risk. At ten o’clock the fireworks, the music, and the shouts and quarrels began. They went to their rooms. Lillian’s room was like a white nun’s cell. Whitewashed walls, a cot buried in white mosquito netting, no sheets or blankets. The walls did not reach to the ceiling, to let the air through, and her shutter door let in all the sounds of the village. After the fireworks, the shooting began. The café owner had been wise.
It was in such rooms that Lillian always made the devastating discovery that she was not free. Out in the sun, with others, swimming or dancing, she was free. But alone, she was still in that underground city of her childhood. Even though she knew the magic formula: life is dreamed, life is a nightmare, you can awaken, and when you awaken you know the monsters were self-created.
If she could have danced with Doctor Palas, maintained the speed of elation, sat at a table and let him rest his hand lightly on her bare arm, participated in a carnival of affection.
All of them with navigation troubles. The American couple fearful of unfamiliarity. Doctor Palas lonely.
I can see, I can see that it is in this distorted vision of the world’s proper proportions that lies the secret of our fears. We make the animals bigger with our fears. We make our creations and our loves smaller, we shrink by our vision, and enlarge and shrink according to the whims of our interchangeable vision, not according to an immutable law of growth. The size of each world we live in is individual and relative, and the objects and people vary in each EYE.
Lillian remembered when she had believed that her mother was the tallest woman on earth, and her father the heaviest man. She remembered that her mother never had a wrinkle on her dress, or a lock of hair out of place, and was always putting on her gloves as if she were a noted surgeon about to operate. Her presence was antiseptic, particularly in Mexico, where she was unsuited to the humanity of the life, the acceptance of flaws, spots, stains, wrinkles. Children changed the size of all they saw, but so did the parents, and they continued to see one small.
She was too cold to fall asleep. The wind from the mountain had descended upon San Luis as soon as the sun had set.
I see my parents smaller, they have assumed a natural size. My father must have been like Hatcher, terribly afraid of a strange country on which he was dependent for a living. But how could my mother’s whistle have penetrated through all those underground passages? There must have been an echo!
If she still could hear this whistle, there must be echoes in the soul. But she was regaining her own eyes, and with these eyes, with her own vision, she would return home.
The patio was full of birds in cages. The noises of the fiesta kept them awake too. Why should it be among these shadows, these furtive illuminations, these descending passageways that her true self would hide? Driven so far below the surface! She was now like those French speleologists who had descended thousands of feet into the earth and found ancient caves covered with paintings and carvings. But Lillian carried no searchlight and no nourishment. Nothing but the wafer granted to those who believe in symbolism, a wafer in place of bread. And all she had to follow were the inscriptions of her dreams, half-effaced hieroglyphs on half-broken statues. And no guide in the darkness but a scream through the eyes of a statue.
In the morning she returned to life above the ground. Outside in the patio there was a washstand, and the water in the pitcher was cool spring water. The mirror was broken, and the towel had been used by many people. But after the loneliness of the night’s journey Lillian was happy to use a collective towel and to see her face in two pieces which could be made to fit together again. She had made a long journey, the journey of the smile and the eyes. There were no decorations for such discoveries. The journey had in reality taken only three months. According to the calendar her trip had taken only the time of an engagement in a night club. The voyage underground had taken longer, and had taken her farther. She would return to Golconda to drink her last cup of flowing gold, iridescent water, sun and air, to pack her treasures, her geological discoveries, the statues which, once unearthed, had become so eloquent.
When they arrived at Golconda it was the end of the New Year celebrations. The streets were still littered with confetti. The street vendor’s baskets were empty, and they were sleeping beside them rolled in their ponchos. The scent of malabar was in the air, and that of burnt fireworks.
Lillian walked down the hill to the center of town, past the old woman in black who sold colored fruit juices and white coconut candy, past the church with its wide doors open so that she could see the bouquets of candle lights and the women praying while they fanned their faces. Cats and dogs were allowed to stray in and out, the workmen continued to work on their scaffolds while Mass was being said, the children were allowed to cry, or were fed right there while lying in the black shawls slung from their mother’s necks like hammocks.
She walked in a glittering sunlight that annihilated all thought, that left only the eyes awake, and a procession of images marching through the retina, no thoughts around them, no thoughts interpreting them.
She walked more heavily on her heels, on flat sandals, as the natives walked, and although she weighed exactly the same as when she had first arrived, a medium weig
ht, she felt heavier, and more aware of her body. The swimming, the sun, the air, all contributed to sculpture a firm, elastic, balanced body, free in its movements.
She was preparing herself to talk to the Doctor, as he had wanted her to talk. She had awakened with a clear image of the Doctor’s character.
ernandez in the taxi, the first day, concerned over his village’s state of health, aware of others’ moods and needs, unable to forget the secret sorrow of his own life. Doctor Hernandez probing into her life with a doctor’s conviction of his right to probe, and evading her questions.
She had seen him in his home, in a Spanish setting, and met his wife, who had come for one of her brief visits. Under a semblance of Latin submission, under her thoughtfulness in serving him his drink, saving him from telephone calls, there was a mockery in his wife’s attitude toward his patients. This had been instilled in the children who played the game of “being a doctor” differently from other children; they expressed distaste for his profession. The sick were not really sick, and the sick who came from the poor, with the desperate illnesses that attacked the undernourished natives, both children and wife totally ignored.
Lillian had seen in the Doctor’s eyes a sadness which seemed out of proportion to the children’s irony. He watched them perform their doctor act. The patient was a beautiful movie star. She was covered with bandages. Doctor Hernandez’s daughter took this role. As soon as the “doctor” came near to her, she herself unwound all the bandages, threw herself upon him, embraced him and said: “Now that you have come I am not sick anymore.”
This morning as she walked, all these fragments had coalesced into the figure of a man in trouble, and Lillian understood that his persistence in making her confess was a defense against all that he himself wanted to confess.
At first she had not understood the game, nor his need. But she did now. And even if it meant that first of all (to play it as he wished it) she must confide in him, she was now willing, because it would liberate him of his secret. It was a habitual role for him to take: that of confessor. In any other role he would be uncomfortable.
The street climbed halfway up the hill, and there was the Doctor’s office. The waiting room was a patio, with wicker chairs placed between potted palms and rubber plants. Pink and purple bougainvillea trailed down the walls. A servant in bedroom slippers was mopping the mosaic floor. The nurse was not dressed like a nurse but, like all the native girls who worked in Golconda, she wore a party dress, a rose pastel taffeta which made her seem much more like a nurse to pleasure than to illness. There were ribbons in her hair, and sea-shell earrings on her ears.
“The Doctor has not yet arrived,” she said.
This was no unusual occurrence in the Doctor’s life. Added to the demands of his profession and their uncertain timing, was the natives’ own religion of timelessness. They absolutely refused to live in obedience to clocks, and it was always their mood that dictated their movements.
But Lillian felt an uneasiness which compelled her to walk instead of waiting patiently in the office.
She walked along the docks, watching the fishermen returning from their day’s work. Each boat that had made a large catch had a pennant waving on its mast. The wind caught the banners and imprinted on them the same ripples and billows as it did on the skirts of the women, and the ribbons on their hair.
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She sat down at a little café and had a dark coffee, watching the boats heaving up and down, and the families taking a walk with all their children. How they installed themselves in the present! They looked at everything that was happening as if nothing else existed, as if there were no work to be done, no home to return to. They abandoned themselves to the rhythm, let the wind animate scarves and hair, as if every undulation and ripple of color and motion hypnotized them into contentment.
By the time she returned to the Doctor’s office it was growing dark.
None of the patients showed uneasiness. But the nurse said: “I don’t understand. I called the Doctor’s home. He left there an hour ago saying he was coming straight to his office.”
Just as she turned on the electric lights, they went out again. This often happened in Golconda. The power was weak. But it increased Lillian’s anxiety, and to relieve it she decided to walk toward the Doctor’s home, hoping to meet him on the way.
The long walk uphill oppressed her. The electric lights were on again, but the houses grew farther apart from each other, the gardens darker and denser as she walked.
Then in an isolated field she noticed a car which had run into an electric pole. A group of people were gathered around it.
In the dark she could not see the color of the car. But she heard the screams of the Doctor’s wife.
Lillian began to tremble. He had tried to prepare her for this.
She continued to walk. She was not aware that she was weeping. The Doctor’s wife broke away from the group and ran toward Lillian, blindly. Lillian took her in her arms and held her, but the woman fought against her. Her mouth was contorted but no sounds came from it, as if her cries had been strangled. The wife fell on her knees and hid her face in Lillian’s dress.
Lillian could not believe in the Doctor’s death. She consoled the wife as if she were a child with an exaggerated sorrow. She heard the ambulance come, the one he had raised the funds to buy. She saw the doctors and the people around the car. She realized that it was his car’s hitting the pole that had cut off the electric current for a moment. The wife now talked incoherently: “They shot him, they finally shot him… They shot him and the car went against the pole. I wanted to get him away from here. Who would be capable of killing such a man? Who? Tell me. Tell me.”
Who would be capable of killing such a man? Who, thinking of the sick people who would need him and not find him, thinking how gently he took his short moments of pleasure without rebelling when they were interrupted. Thinking how deep his pleasure was in curing illness. Thinking how he had tried to control the drug traffic and refused to dispense dangerous forgetfulness. Thinking of his nights spent in studying drugs for remembrance, which were known to the Indians. As a port doctor, what underworld had he known which neither Lillian nor his wife could ever have known, but which his wife had sensed as dangerous.
Lillian was helping the wife up the hill, helping the woman who had hated the city he loved, and whose hatred was now justified by events.
“I have to prepare the children, but they are so young. What can I say to such young children about death?”
Lillian did not want to know whether he had bled, been cut by glass. It seemed to her that he alone knew how to bandage, how to stop bleeding, how to heal.
The siren of the ambulance grew fainter. People walked behind them in silence.
If it were true that what we practice on others is secretly what we wish practiced upon ourselves, then he had wanted, needed all the care he gave.
To the wife with her too-high heels, her coiled black hair, her dark and jealous eyes, her small hands and feet, what could he have confided when from the beginning she turned against the city and the sick people he loved?
Lillian did not believe in the death of Doctor Hernandez, and yet she heard the shot, she felt in her body the sound of the car hitting the pole, she knew the moment of death, as if all of them had happened to her.
He had something to say, which he had not said, and he had gone, taking with him his secrets.
If only Doctor Hernandez had not postponed that deeper, wilder talk which ran underground through the myths of dreams, shouted through architectural crevices, screamed eloquently through the eyes of statues, from the depths of all the ancient cities within ourselves, if he had not merely signaled distress like a deaf-mute…if only awareness had not appeared through the interstices of memory, between bars of lights and bars of shadows…if only human beings did not draw the blinds, don disguises, and live in isolation cells marked: not yet time for revelations…if only they had gone down together, down th
e caverns of the soul with picks, lanterns, cords, oxygen, X-rays, food, following the blueprints of all the messages from the geological depths where lay hidden the imprisoned self…
According to the definition, tropic meant a turning and changing, and with the tropics Lillian turned and changed, and she swung between the drug of forgetfulness and the drug of awareness, as the natives swung in their hammocks, as the jazz players swung into their rhythms, as the sea swung in its bed
turned
changed
Lillian was journeying homeward.
The other travelers were burdened with Mexican baskets, serapes, shawls, silver jewelry, painted clay figurines and Mexican hats.
Lillian carried no objects, because none of them would have incarnated what she was bringing back, the softness of the atmosphere, the tenderness of the voices, the caressing colors and the whispering presence of an underworld of memory which had serpentined under her every footstep and which was the past she had not been able to forget. Her husband and her children had traveled with her. Had she not loved Larry in the prisoner she had liberated? Her first image of Larry had been of him standing behind a garden iron grille, watching her dance. He was the only one of her fellow students she had forgotten to invite to her eighteenth birthday party. He had stood with his hands on the railing as the prisoner had stood in the Mexican jail, and she had seen him as a prisoner of his own silence and self-effacement. It was Larry and not the fraudulent prisoner she had wanted to liberate. Had she not loved her own children in Edward’s children, kissed Lietta’s freckles because they were Adele’s freckles, sat up with them evenings because their loneliness was her children’s loneliness?
She was bringing back new images of her husband Larry, as if while she were away, some photographer with a new chemical had made new prints of the old films in which new aspects appeared she had never noticed before. As if a softer Lillian who had absorbed some of the softness of the climate, some of the relaxed grace of the Mexicans, some of their genius for happiness had felt her senses sharpened, her vision more focused, her hearing more sensitive. As the inner turmoil quieted, she saw others more clearly. A less rebellious Lillian had become aware that when Larry was not there she had either become him or had looked for him in others.
