The farther she traveled into unknown places, unfamiliar places, the more precisely she could find within herself a map showing only the cities of the interior.

This place resembled none other, with its colonnade of palm-tree trunks, its walled back set against the rocks, its corrugated roof on which monkeys clowned. The cactus at night took shapes of arthritic old men, bearded scarecrows of the tropics, and the palms were always swaying with a rhythm of fans in the heat, of hammocks in the shade.

Was there no open road, simple, clear, unique? Would all her roads traverse several worlds simultaneously, bordered by the fleeting shadows of other roads, other mountains? She could not pass by a little village in the present without passing as well by some other little village in some other country, even the village of a country she had wished to visit once and had not reached!

Lillian could see the double exposure created by memory. A lake once seen in Italy flowed into the lagoon which encircled Golconda, a hotel on a snowy mountain in Switzerland was tied to Hatcher's unfinished mountain home by a long continuous cable, and this folding cot behind a Mexican screen lay alongside a hundred other beds in a hundred other rooms, New York, Paris, Florence, San Francisco, New Orleans, Bombay, Tangiers, San Luis.

The map of Mexico lay open on her knees, but she could not find the thick jungle line which indicated her journeys. They divided into two, four, six, eight skeins.

She was speeding at the same rhythm along several dusty roads, as a child with parents, as a wife driving her husband, as a mother taking her children to school, as a pianist touring the world, and all these roads intersected noiselessly and without damage.

Swinging between the drug of forgetfulness and the drug of awareness, she closed her eyes, she closed the eyes of memory.

When she awakened she saw first of all a casuarina tree with orange flowers that seemed like tongues of flames. Between its branches rose a thin wisp of smoke from Maria's brasero. Maria was patting tortillas between her hands with an even rhythm and at the same time watching over genuine American pancakes saying: "Senorita, I have tortillas a La Americana for you."

The table was set in the sun, with Woolworth dishes and oilcloth and paper napkins.

The young doctor had arrived with his friends. They would take her back to Golconda.

Maria was gazing at Lillian pensively. She was trying to imagine that a woman just like this one had hurt Hatcher so deeply that he never talked about it. She was trying to imagine the nature of the hurt. She knew that Hatcher no longer loved that woman. But she knew also that he still hated her, and that she was still present in his thoughts.