The rooms he showed them gave on a peaceful patio fun of flowers and fountains. Lillian was tempted to go out with the Doctor, at least to dance a while. But traditional protectiveness toward women made him obstinately refuse to take the risk. At ten o'clock the fireworks, the music, and the shouts and quarrels began. They went to their rooms. Lillian's room was like a white nun's cell. Whitewashed walls, a cot buried in white mosquito netting, no sheets or blankets. The walls did not reach to the ceiling, to let the air through, and her shutter door let in all the sounds of the village. After the fireworks, the shooting began. The café owner had been wise.

It was in such rooms that Lillian always made the devastating discovery that she was not free. Out in the sun, with others, swimming or dancing, she was free. But alone, she was still in that underground city of her childhood. Even though she knew the magic formula: life is dreamed, life is a nightmare, you can awaken, and when you awaken you know the monsters were self-created.

If she could have danced with Doctor Palas, maintained the speed of elation, sat at a table and let him rest his hand lightly on her bare arm, participated in a carnival of affection.

All of them with navigation troubles. The American couple fearful of unfamiliarity. Doctor Palas lonely.

I can see, I can see that it is in this distorted vision of the world's proper proportions that lies the secret of our fears. We make the animals bigger with our fears. We make our creations and our loves smaller, we shrink by our vision, and enlarge and shrink according to the whims of our interchangeable vision, not according to an immutable law of growth. The size of each world we live in is individual and relative, and the objects and people vary in each EYE.

Lillian remembered when she had believed that her mother was the tallest woman on earth, and her father the heaviest man. She remembered that her mother never had a wrinkle on her dress, or a lock of hair out of place, and was always putting on her gloves as if she were a noted surgeon about to operate. Her presence was antiseptic, particularly in Mexico, where she was unsuited to the humanity of the life, the acceptance of flaws, spots, stains, wrinkles. Children changed the size of all they saw, but so did the parents, and they continued to see one small.

She was too cold to fall asleep. The wind from the mountain had descended upon San Luis as soon as the sun had set.

I see my parents smaller, they have assumed a natural size. My father must have been like Hatcher, terribly afraid of a strange country on which he was dependent for a living. But how could my mother's whistle have penetrated through all those underground passages? There must have been an echo!