When she arrived Maria had set the table. The lights were weak bulbs hanging from a string. The generator was working and could be heard. But the trees were full of fireflies, crickets, and pungent odors.

"If you want to wash the salt off, there is a creek just down toward the left, and a natural pool. Take a candle."

"No, I like the salt on my skin."

On the table were dishes of black beans, rice, and tamales.

And again coffee in the thermos bottle.

After dinner Hatcher wanted to show Lillian all of the half-built house. She saw their bedroom, with its white-washed walls and flowered curtains. And behind the wall a vast storage room.

"He is very proud of his storage room," said Maria.

It was enormous, as large as the entire front of the house. As large as a supermarket. With shelves reaching to the ceiling. Organized, alphabetized, catalogued.

Every brand of canned food, every brand of medicine, every brand of clothing, glasses, work gloves, tools, magazines, books, hunting guns, fishing equipment.

"Will you have cling peaches? Asparagus? Quinine?" He was swollen with pride. "Magazines? Newspapers?"

Lillian saw a pair of crutches on a hook at the side of the shelf. His eyes followed her glance, and he said without embarrassment: "That's in case I should break a leg."

Lillian did not know why the place depressed her. She suddenly felt deeply tired. Maria seemed grateful to be left alone with her husband. They went into their bedroom in the back, and Lillian sat on her cot at the front of the open terrace, and undressed behind a screen.

She had imagined Hatcher free. That was what had depressed her. She had been admiring him for several weeks as a figure who had attained independence, who could live like a native, a simplified existence with few needs. He was not even free of his past, of his other wife. The goodness of this one, her warmth, her servitude, only served to underline the contrast between her and the other. Lillian had felt him making comparisons between her and his Mexican wife. The other still existed in his thoughts. It may even have been why he invited Lillian the very first day in the taxi.

She couldn't sleep, having witnessed Hatcher's umbilical ties with his native land's protectiveness. (America alone could supply crutches if one broke one's leg, America alone could cure him of malaria, America-the-mother, America-the-father had been transported into the supplies shed, canned and bottled.) He had been unable to live here naked, without possessions, without provisions, with his Mexican mother and the fresh fruits and vegetables in abundance, the goat's milk, and hunting.

Close the eyes of memory...but was she free? Hatcher's umbilical cord had stirred her own roots. His fears had lighted up these intersections of memory which were like double exposures. Like the failed photograph of the Mayan temple, in which by an accident, a failure to turn a small key, Lillian had been photographed both standing up and lying down, and her head had seemed to lie inside the jaws of a giant king snake of stone, and the stairs of the pyramid to have been built across her body as if she had been her own ghostly figure transcending the stone.