The natives saw only the present. This communion of eyes and smiles was elating. Where Lillian came from people seemed intent on not seeing each other. Only children looked at her with this unashamed curiosity. Poor white man, wandering and lost in his proud possession of a dimension in which bodies became invisible to the naked eye, as if staring were an immodest act. Already she felt incarnated, in full possession of her own body because the porter was in full possession of his, and this concentration upon the present allowed no interruption or short circuits of the physical contact. When she turned away from the porter it was to find a smiling taxi driver who seemed to be saying: "I am not keen on going anywhere. It is just as good right here, right now..."

He was scratching his luxuriant black hair, and he carried his wet bathing suit around his neck.

The guitars kept up their musical fire. The beggars squatted around the airport. Blind or crippled, they smiled. The festivities of nature bathed them in gold and anesthetized their suffering.

Clothes seemed ponderous and superfluous in the city of Golconda.

Golconda was Lillian's private name for this city which she wanted to rescue from the tourist-office posters and propaganda. Each one of us possesses in himself a separate and distinct city, a unique city, as we possess different aspects of the same person. She could not bear to love a city which thousands believed they knew intimately. Golconda was hers. True, it had been at first a pearl-fishing village. True, a Japanese ship had been wrecked here, slave ships had brought Africans, other ships delivered spices, and Spanish ships had brought the art of filigree, of lace making. A shipwrecked Spanish galley had scattered on the beach baptism dresses which the women of southern Mexico had adopted as headgear.

The legend was that when the Japanese pearl divers had been driven away they had destroyed the pearl caches, and Golconda became a simple fishing village. Then the artists had come on donkeys and discovered the beauty of the place. They had been followed by the real-estate men and hotelkeepers. But none could destroy Golconda. Golconda remained a city where the wind was like velvet, where the sun was made of radium, and the sea as warm as a mother's womb.

The porters were deserting before all the baggage was distributed. They had earned enough, just enough for the day for food, beer, a swim, and enough to take a girl dancing, and they did not want any more. So the little boys of ten and twelve, who had been waiting for this opening, were seeking to carry bags bigger than themselves.

The taxi driver, who was in no hurry to go anywhere in his dilapidated car, saw his car filling up, and decided it was time to put on his clean laundry-blue shirt.