Lillian wanted to talk to her, help her exorcise the American woman with the painted nails. But Hatcher would be lonely without his memories, lonely without his canned asparagus, and his American-made crutches. Did he truly love Maria, with her oily black hair, her maternal body, her compassionate eyes, or did he love her for not being his first wife?

He looked at Lillian with hardness. Because she did not want to stay? Could she explain that she had spent the night in the subterranean cities of memory, instead of outside in the spicy, lulling tropical night?

Doctor Palas had been called during the night, and was in a bad humor. His friends had found the new beach hotel lacking in comfort. "The cot had a large stain, as if a crime had been committed there. The mosquito netting had a hole, and we were bitten by mosquitoes. And in the morning we had to wash our faces from a pail of water. We gave some pennies to the children. They were so eager that they scratched our hands. And only fish and black beans to eat, even for breakfast. "

"Some day," said Hatcher, "when my place is built, it will attract everyone. I am sure the movie colony will come."

"But I thought you came here to be isolated, to enjoy a primitive life, a simple life."

"It isn't the first time a human being has had two wishes, diametrically opposed," said Doctor Palas.

In the car, driving back in the violent sun, no one talked. The light filled the eyes, the mind, the nerves, the bones, and it was only when they drove through shade that they came out of this anesthesia of sunlight. In the shade they would find women washing clothes in the river, children swimming naked, old men sitting on fences, and the younger men behind the plough, or driving huge wheeled carts pulled by white Brahma bulls. In the eyes of the Mexicans there were no questions, no probings; only resignation, passivity, endurance, patience. Except when one of them ran amok.

Lillian could feel as they did at times. There were states of being which resembled the time before the beginning of the world, unformed, undesigned, unseparated. Chaos. Mountains, sea and earth undifferentiated, nebulous, intertwined. States of mind and feeling which would never appear under any spiritual X-ray. Dense, invisible, inaccessible to articulate people. She would live here, would be lost. At every moment of anxiety, of probing, she would slip into the sea for rebirth. Her body would be restored to her. She would feel her face as a face, fleshy, sunburned, warm, and not as a mask concealing a flow of thoughts. She would be given back her neck as a firm, living, palpitating, warm neck, not as a support for a head heavy with fever and questions. Her whole body would be restored to her, breasts relaxed, no longer compressed by the emotions of the chest, legs restored, smooth and gleaming. All of it cool, smooth, washed of thought.