by Anais Nin
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.
If she had not talked to Doctor Hernandez it was because he had been seeking to bring to the surface what he knew to be her incompletely drowned marriage.
Doctor Hernandez. As she sat in the airplane, she saw him bending over his doctor’s bag unrolling bandages. She could not reconstruct his face. He turned away from her because she had not given him the confidence he asked for. This fleeting glimpse of him appeared as if on glass, and vanished, dissolved in the sun.
Diana had told Lillian just before she left: I believe I know the real cause of his death. He felt alone, divided from his wife, dealing only in the casual, intermittent friendships with people who changed every day. It was not a bullet which killed him. He was too deeply trained to combat death, to consider death as a private enemy, to accept suicide. But he brought it about in such a roundabout way, in so subtle a way that he could delude himself that he had no hand in his own death. HE COULD HAVE AVOIDED THE CONFLICT WITH THE DRUG SMUGGLERS. It was not his responsibility. He could have left this task to the police, better equipped to handle them. Something impelled him to seek danger, to challenge these violent men. ALMOST TO INVITE THEM TO KILL HIM. I often warned him, and he would smile. I knew what was truly killing him: an accumulation of defeats, the knowledge that even his wife loved in him the doctor and not the man. Did you know that she had been near death when they met, that he had cured her, and that even after their marriage it was his care of others that she was jealous of? To you he may have seemed beloved, but in his own eyes all the love went to the Doctor with the miraculous valise. Golconda was a place for fluctuating friendships, so many strangers passing through for a few days. Once he reproached me bitterly for my mobility and flexibility.
“You never hang on,” he said. “This constant flow suits your fickle temperament. But I would like something deeper and more permanent. The more gaiety there is around me, the more alone I feel.”
And Lillian must have added to his feeling. She had failed to give him that revelation of herself which he had wanted, a gift which might have enabled him to confide too. He was suffering from denials she had not divined. And how tired he must have been of people’s disappearances. They came to Golconda, they sat at the beach with him, they had dinner with him, they talked with him for the length of a consultation, and then left for other countries. What a relief it may have been to have become at last the one who left!
Diana was certain that he had subtly sought out his death. And now to this image Lillian could add others which until now had not fitted in. The image of his distress magnetized a series of impressions caught at various times but abandoned like impressionistic fragments which did not coagulate. The shutters of the eyes opening to reveal anxiety, discouragement, solitude, all the more somber by contrast with the landscape of orange, turquoise, and gold. He seemed to flow with all the life currents of Golconda. She had accepted only the surface evidence. But the selves of Doctor Hernandez which had lived in the periphery, backstage, now emerged unexpectedly. And with them all the invisible areas of life, his and hers, and others’, which the eyes of the psyche sees but which the total self refuses to acknowledge, when at times these “ghosts” contain the living self and it is the personage on the stage who is empty and somnambulistic. It was as if having begun to see the true Doctor Hernandez, solitary, estranged from his wife and his children by her jealousy and hatred of Golconda immersed only in the troubled, tragic life of a pleasure city, she could also see for the first time, around the one-dimensional profile of her husband, a husband leaving for work, a father bending over his children, an immense new personality. It was Larry, the prisoner of his own silences which she had liberated the day she visited the fraudulent one in jail. It was Larry’s silent messages she had been able to read through the bars of the Mexican jail. Once the vision becomes dual, or triple, like those lenses which fracture the designs one turns them on but also repeats them to infinity in varied arrangements, she could see at least two Larrys, one bearing an expression of hunger and longing which had penetrated her the day of her birthday party more deeply than the gaiety of her dancing partners, the other as the kind father and husband who dispensed care and gifts and tenderness perhaps as Doctor Hernandez had done, while desiring some unattainable pleasure.
Another image of Larry which appeared through the thick glass window of the plane, was of him standing behind the glass partition of a television studio. Lillian had been playing with an orchestra for a recording and Larry had sat in the recording room. He had forgotten that she could not hear him, and when the music had ended had stood up and talked, smiling and gesturing, in an effort to convey his enthusiasm for the music. The perplexed expression of her face urged him to magnify his gestures, to exaggerate the expression of his face, to dramatize beyond his usual manner, hoping that by a mime of his entire body and face he could transmit a message without the help of words.
At the time the scene had been baffling to Lillian, but only today did she understand it. She had failed to hear Larry, because he did not employ the most obvious means of communication. These two images seemed like a condensation of the drama of their marriage. First her response to his mute needs, his mute calling to her, and then her failure to discern his message. He had been a prisoner of his own silences, and these silences she had interpreted as absences.
He had answered her needs! What she had required of love was something that should never be expected of a human being, a love so strong that it might neutralize her self-disparagement, a love that would be occupied day and night with the reconstruction of a lovable Lillian, an image she would tear down as quickly as he created it. A love of such mathematical precision, occupied in keeping an inward balance between her self-caricature and a Lillian she might accept. A love tirelessly repeating: Lillian you are beautiful, Lillian you are wonderful, Lillian you are generous, and kind, and inspiring, while she, on the other side of the
ledger made her own entries: Lillian, you were unjustly angry, you were thoughtless, you hurt someone’s feelings, you were not patient with your child.
Endless accounting, endless revising of accounts.
But what had Larry wanted? It was true that Larry had accepted this abdication from life and seemed fulfilled when she lived for him in the musicians’ world (because he had first wanted to be a musician, and had not fulfilled this wish). It was true that he seemed content in his silences, content to let her and her jazz musicians play and talk. This peripheral life seemed natural to him. But this division of labor had become a charade. When they grew tired of it (Lillian tired of Larry’s indirect spectatorships, and Larry tired of Lillian’s predominant role) they had not known how to exchange roles! Larry began to crystallize, not having any direct flow into life, not having his own aqualungs, his own oxygen. They were like twins with one set of lungs. And all Lillian knew was to sustain the flow by escaping into other lives, a movement which gave her the illusion of a completed circle. No other relationship could complete her, for it was Larry she had wanted to share life with, and ultimately she was seeking Larry in the other personages.
This last voyage without him had confronted her with her own incompleteness. She had deluded herself that the lungs, the capacity to live, were hers alone. How much of Larry she had carried within herself and enacted as soon as he was not there to act it for her. It was she who did not talk then, who let the Mexicans talk nimbly and flowingly, as she let Doctor Hernandez monologue. It was she who had remained at a distance from the life of Golconda except for the moment of abandon to the lulling drugs of nature. She had behaved as Larry would have behaved. Her courage, her flow in life had only existed in relation to Larry, by comparison with his withdrawals. What had he done while deprived of her presence? Probably had lived out the Lillian he carried within himself, her traits. Toward what Larry was she voyaging now?
Was it not an act of love to impersonate the loved one? Was it not like the strange “possessions” which take place at the loss of a parent by death? When her mother died, Lillian became her mother for at least a long year of mourning. It had been an imperceptible possession, for Lillian did not belong to the race who had rituals at which these truths were dramatized, rituals at which the spirit of the “departed” entered the body of the living, at which the spirit of the dead parent was acknowledged to be capable of entering the body of the son or daughter and inhabit until driven, or prayed, or chased away. To all appearances these primitive beliefs and what happened to Lillian were not related. Yet the spirit of her mother had passed into her. When she died, leaving Lillian a thimble and a sewing machine (when Lillian could not sew), Lillian did not know that she took some of her moods, characteristics, attitudes. She once thought it was that as one grew older one had less resistance to the influences of the family and one surrendered to family resemblances.
Lillian laughed at the primitive rituals of “possession” she had seen in Haiti. But there was a primitive Lillian who had combated the total loss of her mother by a willingness to take into herself some of her mannerisms and traits (the very ones she had rebelled against while her mother was alive, the very ones which had injured her own growth). It was not only that she began to sew, to use the thimble and the sewing machine, but that she began to whistle when her children strayed from the house, she scolded her children for the very traits her mother had censured in her: neglect in dress, impulsive, chaotic behavior. A strange way to erect a monument to the memory of her mother, a monument to her continuity.
Thus she had also been “possessed” by Larry, and it was his selectivity in people which spoke against Diana’s lack of discrimination. For the first time, in Golconda, she had practiced Larry’s choice of withdrawing if the people were not of quality. Of preferring solitude to the effort of pretending he was interested in them.
Nearing home, she wondered if both of them had not accepted roles handed to them by others’ needs as conditions of the marriage. It was the need which had dictated the role. And roles dictated by a need and not the whole self caused a withering in time. They had been married to parts of themselves only. Just as Dr. Hernandez had married a woman who loved only the Doctor, and who never knew the man who had tried to shed the role by entering the violent world of the smugglers, to feel himself in the heart of life, even at the cost of death.
Lillian had felt responsible for the Doctor’s death, but now she knew it was not a personal responsibility; it was because she too had lived with only a part of Larry, and when you live with only a part of a person, you symbolically condemn the rest of it to indifference, to oblivion.
She knew it was not a bullet which had killed Dr. Hernandez. He had placed himself in the bullet’s path. Certainly at times his intelligence and knowledge of human nature must have warned him that he was courting sudden death when he refused to surrender his supply of drugs or to underwrite fake permits to obtain more.
She knew that by similar detours of the labyrinth, it was not the absence of love or the death of it which had estranged her from Larry, but the absence of communication between all the parts of themselves, the sides of their character which each one feared to uncover in the other. The channels of emotions were just like the passageways running through our physical body which some illness congests, and renders narrower and narrower until the supply of oxygen and blood is diminished and brings on death. The passageways of their communication with each other had shrunk. They had singled out their first image of each other as if they had selected the first photograph of each other to live with forever, regardless of change or growth. They had set it upon their desks, and within their hearts, a photograph of Larry as he had first appeared behind the garden gate, mute and hungry, and a photograph of Lillian in distress because her faith in herself had been killed by her parents.
If they had been flowing together in life, they would not reated these areas of vacuum into which other relationships had penetrated, just as if Doctor Hernandez had been loved and happy in Golconda, he would have found a way to escape his enemies. (Diana had proofs that he had been warned, offered help, and recklessly disregarded both.)
The manner in which Lillian had finally immured herself against the life in Golconda betrayed how she, as well as Larry, often closed doors against experience, and lived by patterns.
Diana had said: “People only called him when they were in distress. When they gave parties they never thought of him. I knew that what he gave to others was what he deeply wanted for himself. This sympathy…for those in trouble. I do believe he was in greater trouble than any of us.”
His death set in motion a chain of disappearances, an awareness of the dangers of disappearances. And this fear fecundated Lillian, stirred all life and feeling into bloom again. Sudden death had exposed the preciousness of human love and human life. All the negations, withdrawals, indifferences seemed like the precursors of absolute death, and were to be condemned. She had a vision of a world without Larry and without her children, and then she knew that her love of Golconda had only been possible because of the knowledge that her absence was temporary.
And now the words spoken by Doctor Hernandez were clear to her, their meaning reached her. “We may seem to forget a person, a place, a state of being, a past life, but meanwhile what we are doing is selecting new actors, seeking the closest reproduction to the friend, the lover, the husband we are trying to forget, in order to re-enact the drama with understudies. And one day we open our eyes and there we are, repeating the same story. How could it be otherwise? The design comes from within us. It is internal. It is what the old mystics described as karma, repeated until the spiritual or emotional experience was understood, liquidated, achieved.”
All the personages had been there, not to be described in words but by a series of images. The prisoner had touched her only because he vaguely echoed the first image of Larry as he appeared behind the iron gate. Even if this prisoner had been fraudulent, his acting had been
good enough to reawaken in Lillian her feelings towards the first Larry she had known, a Larry in trouble, a trouble which she deeply shared, was married to, not only by empathy but by affinity. She had disguised it by throwing herself into life and relationships, by appearing fearless and passionate, and it had taken the true freedom of Golconda, its fluid, soft, flowing life, to expose her own imprisonment, her own awkwardness. She had been more mated to Larry than she had known. She had been as much afraid, only fear had made her active, leaping and courting and loving and giving and seeking, but driven by the same fear which made Larry recoil into his home and solitude. In losing this first intuitive knowledge she had of the bond between them, she had also lost a truth about herself. She had been taken in by the myth of her courage, the myth of her warmth and flow. And it was the belief in this myth which had caused her to pass judgment on the static quality of Larry, concealing the static elements in herself.
One night Doctor Hernandez, Fred, Diana, and Edward had decided to visit the native dance halls of Golconda which opened on small, unpaved streets behind the market. They leaped across an open trench of sewer water, onto a dirt floor, and sat at a table with a red oilcloth. Tropical plants growing out of gasoline cans partly veiled them from the street. Red bulbs strung on wires cast charcoal shadows and painted the skins in the changing tones of leaping flames. A piano out of tune gave out a sound of broken glass. The drums always dominated the melodies, whether songs or juke boxes, insistent like the drums of Africa. The houses being like gardens with roofs, the various musics mingled: guitars, a Cuban dance orchestra, a woman’s voice. But the dancers obeyed the drums.
