He answered, laughing: "No, I'm not, but if being unhappy would arouse your interest, I'm willing to be. It was tactless of me to speak of illness in this place created for pleasure. I nearly spoiled your pleasure. And I can see you are one who has not had too much of it, one of the underprivileged of pleasure! Those who have too much nauseate me. I don't know why. I'm glad when they get dysentery or serious sunburns. It is as if I believed in an even distribution of pleasure. Now you, for instance, have a right to some...not having had very much."

"I didn't realize it was so apparent."

"It is not so apparent. Permit me to say I am unusually astute. Diagnostic habit. You appear free and undamaged, vital and without wounds."

"Diagnostic clairvoyance, then?"

"Yes. But here comes our professional purveyor of pleasure. He may be more beneficent for you."

Hansen sat down beside them and began to draw on the tablecloth. "I'm going to add another terrace, then I will floodlight the trees and the divers. I will also have a light around the statue of the Virgin so that everyone can see the boys praying before they dive." His glance was cold, managerial. The sea, the night, the divers were all, in his eyes, properties of the night club. The ancient custom of praying before diving one hundred feet into a narrow rocky gorge was going to become a part of the entertainment.

Lillian turned her face away from him, and listened to the jazz.

Jazz was the music of the body. The breath came through aluminum and copper tubes, it was the body's breath, and the strings' wails and moans were echoes of the body's music. It was the body's vibrations which rippled from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme known to the musicians alone was like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others only peripheral improvisations. The plots, and themes of the music, like the plots and themes of our life, never alchemized into words, existed only in a state of music, stirring or numbing, exalting or despairing, but never named.

When she turned her face unwillingly towards Hansen, he was gone, and then she looked at the Doctor and said: "This is a drugging place..."

"There are so many kinds of drugs. One for remembering and one for forgetting. Golconda is for forgetting. But it is not a permanent forgetting. We may seem to forget a person, a place, a state of being, a past life, but meanwhile what we are doing is selecting a new cast for the reproduction of the same drama, seeking the closest reproduction to the friend, the lover, or the husband we are striving to forget. And one day we open our eyes, and there we are caught in the same pattern, repeating the same story. How could it be otherwise? The design comes from within us. It is internal."