by Anais Nin
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.
In another seat sat an English woman with a young Mexican girl. The woman was a school teacher. Her English clothes were wearing out; they were mended, patched, but she would not change to Mexican clothes. She wore a colonial hat on her sparse ye
llow hair. The books she carried were completely yellow and brittle, the corners all chewed, the covers disintegrating.
At each station the bus stopped for the bus driver to deliver letters and messages. In exchange for this he was given a glass of beer. “Tell Josefa her daughter had a son yesterday. She’ll write later. She wants you to comet>
A man climbed in. His pants were held up with a string. His straw hat looked as if the cows had chewed on the edges until they had reached the unappetizing stains of sweat. His shirt had never been washed. He was selling cactus figs.
At the next stop a priest arrived on his bicycle. He had tied his robe with strings so it would not get caught in the wheels. When he jumped off he forgot to liberate himself, and as he began to run toward the bus he fell on the white dusty road. But nobody laughed. They helped him get his chairs and candelabras out of the bus and placed them on the side of the road. The women then picked them up and balancing them on their heads, followed the priest on his bicycle, in the wave of the dust he raised.
The bus seats were of plain hardwood. The bus jumped like a bronco on the rocky, uneven, half-gutted road. Lillian had difficulty staying in her seat. The bullfighter was gently sleeping, and did not seem like the same young man who had suffered a symbolic rape before thousands of people.
Talking to the conductor in a stream of tinkly words like a marimba was a little girl of seven who resembled Lietta, Edward’s oldest daughter. Lillian felt all through her body a dissolution of tenderness for Lietta, who, even though she was so deeply tanned, as dark as a Mexican child, had a transparency and openness Lillian loved. As if children were made of phosphorous, and one saw the light shining in them. The transparent child. Her own little girl at home had had this. And then one day they lose it. How? Why? One day for no perceptible reason, they close their thoughts, veil their feelings, and one can no longer read their faces openly as before. The transparent child. Such a delight to look into open naked feelings and thoughts.
The little girl who talked to the bus driver did not mind that he was not listening. Her eyes were so large that it seemed she must see more than anyone, and reveal more of herself than any child. But her eyes were heavily fringed with eyelashes, and she was watching the road.
Lillian herself must have been transparent once, and how did this heavy wall build up, these prison walls, these silences? Unaware of this great loss, the loss of the transparent child, one becomes an actor whose profession it is to manipulate his face so that others may have the illusion they are reading his soul. Illusion. How she had loved the bullfighter’s fury at the bull, this gentle and tender young man sleeping now, so angry he had almost hurled himself upon its horns.
When did opaqueness set in? Mistrust, fear of judgment. The bus was passing through a tunnel.
Lietta. Lillian could not tell if she was trying to understand Lietta, or her own children, or the Lietta she had once been. She remembered watching Lietta’s diminutive nose twitching almost imperceptibly when she was afraid, when one of the dazzling women approached her father, for instance. Dream of the transparent child.
The bus was like a bronco. Would they be able to stay on it? In the darkness of the tunnel she lost the image of Lietta in her blue bathing suit and found herself at the same age, herself and other children she had played with, in Mexico, at the time her father was building bridges and roads. The beginning the whistling by which her mother called her in from playing. She had a powerful whistle. The children could hear it, no matter how far they went. Their playground was a city beneath the city, which had been partly excavated to build a subway like the American subway, and then abandoned. Cities in other centuries, once buried in lava, which ran underneath the houses, gardens, streets. Where it ran under streets there were grilles to catch the rainwater, but most of the time these grilles only served to bring in a diffuse light. People walked over them without knowing they were walking over another city. The neighborhood children had brought mats, candles, toys, shawls, and lived there a life which because of its secrecy seemed more intense than any above the ground. They had all been forbidden to go there, had been warned of wells, sewers, underground rivers.
The children all stayed together and never ventured farther than the lighted passageways. They were fearful of getting lost.
From all the corners of the underground city Lillian could hear her mother calling when it was time to come home. She had never imagined she might disregard her mother’s whistle. But one day she was learning from a Mexican playmate how to cut animals and flowers out of paper for a fiesta, and was so surprised by the shapes that appeared that when the whistle came, she decided not to hear it. Her brothers and sisters left. She went on cutting out ships, stars, lanterns, suns, and moons. Then suddenly her candle gave out.
Trailing all her streams of paper with her, she walked toward the opening that gave onto their garden wall, trusting in her memory. But the place was dark. Under her feet the clay was dry and soft. She walked confidently, until she felt the clay growing wet. She did not remember any wet clay in the places where they played. She became frightened. She remembered the stories about wells, rivers, sewers. The knowledge that people were walking about free right above her head, without knowing that she was there, augmented her fear. She had never known the exact meaning of death. But at this moment, she felt that this was death. Right above her her family was sitting down to dinner. She could faintly hear voices. But they could not hear her. Her brothers and sisters were sworn to secrecy and would not tell where she was.
She shouted through one of the grilled openings, but the street was deserted at that moment and no one answered. She took a few more steps into the wet clay and felt that her feet were sinking deeper. She stumbled on a piece of wood. With it she struck at the roof, and continued to call. Some of the dirt was loosened and fell on her. And at this she sat down and wept.
And just as she had begun to feel that she was dying, her mother arrived carrying a candle and followed by her brothers and sisters.
(When you do not answer the whistle of duty and obedience, you risk death all alone in the forgotten cities of the past. When you engage in the delights of creating pink, blue, white animals and towers, ships and starry stems, you court solitude and catastrophe.
When you choose to play in a realm far away from the eyes of parents, you court death.)
For some Golconda was the city of pleasure which one should be punished for visiting or for loving. Was this the beginning of the adventurers’ superstitions, the secret of their doomed exiles from home?
Her father never smiled. He had so much dark hair, even along his fingers. He drank and was easily angered, particularly at the natives. The tropics and the love of pleasure were his personal enemies. They interfered with the building of roads and bridges. Roads and bridges were the most important personages in his life.
Lillian’s mother did not smile either. Hers was the house of no-smile, from her father because the building of bridges and roads was such a grave matter which the natives would not take seriously, and from her mother because the children were growing up as “savages.” All they were learning was to sing, dance, paint their faces, make their own toys as the Mexican children did, adopt stray donkeys and goats, and to smile. The Mexican children smiled in such a way that Lillian felt they were giving all they had, all of themselves, in that one smile. So much was said about “economy” in her house that there was perhaps also an economy of smiles! Did one have to be sparing of them, give half-smiles, small sidelong smiles, crumbs of smiles? Were the Mexican children living in the present recklessly, without thought of the future, and would these dazzling smiles wear out?
A cyclone carried away one of Lillian’s father’s bridges. He felt personally offended, as if nature had flaunted his dedication to his work. A flood undermined a road. Another personal affront from the realm of nature. Was it because of this that they returned home? Or because there was shooting in the streets, minor revolutions every now and then?
>
Once during a school concert at which Lillian was playing the piano, there was a shot in the audience. It was intended for the President but merely put out the lights. While people screamed to get out, Lillian had calmly finished her piece. It she had stayed in Mexico, would she have been so different?
Did everyone live thus in two cities at once, one above the ground, in the sun of Golconda, and one underground? And was everyone now and then metamorphosed into a child again?
There must be someone with whom one can hold a dialogue absolutely faithful to the thoughts that go on in one’s head?
At a certain point human beings began to veil themselves. The key word was “transparent.” Lietta was transparent. The child talking to the bus driver was transparent. The driver was not listening, but the child was willing to be transparent, exposed.
The bus stopped by a wide river, beyond the village of San Luis. It was waiting for the ferry. The ferry was a flat raft made of logs tied together. Two men pushed it along with long bamboo poles. The ferry was halfway back.
An old woman in black had set up a stand of fruit juices and Coca-Cola. The bullfighter was the first one to leap out. “Are you going to visit your folks, Miguelito?”
“Yes,” he answered sullenly. He did not want to talk.
“What’s the matter, Miguelito? Usually you’re as quick with your tongue as you are with your sword!”
He too, was traveling through two cities at once. Was he still in the arena, still angry at the bull? Was he concerned about the cost of a new suit?
The raft was approaching. And on the raft was Hatcher’s jeep.
When he saw Lillian he smiled. “Were you coming to visit me? I would have come to get you.”
“I wanted a ride in the bus.”
“I’m going to pick up some bottles of water here and going right back. Where is your bag?”
