If only Doctor Hernandez had not postponed that deeper, wilder talk which ran underground through the myths of dreams, shouted through architectural crevices, screamed eloquently through the eyes of statues, from the depths of all the ancient cities within ourselves, if he had not merely signaled distress like a deaf-mute...if only awareness had not appeared through the interstices of memory, between bars of lights and bars of shadows...if only human beings did not draw the blinds, don disguises, and live in isolation cells marked: not yet time for revelations...if only they had gone down together, down the caverns of the soul with picks, lanterns, cords, oxygen, X-rays, food, following the blueprints of all the messages from the geological depths where lay hidden the imprisoned self...

According to the definition, tropic meant a turning and changing, and with the tropics Lillian turned and changed, and she swung between the drug of forgetfulness and the drug of awareness, as the natives swung in their hammocks, as the jazz players swung into their rhythms, as the sea swung in its bed

turned

changed

Lillian was journeying homeward.

The other travelers were burdened with Mexican baskets, serapes, shawls, silver jewelry, painted clay figurines and Mexican hats.

Lillian carried no objects, because none of them would have incarnated what she was bringing back, the softness of the atmosphere, the tenderness of the voices, the caressing colors and the whispering presence of an underworld of memory which had serpentined under her every footstep and which was the past she had not been able to forget. Her husband and her children had traveled with her. Had she not loved Larry in the prisoner she had liberated? Her first image of Larry had been of him standing behind a garden iron grille, watching her dance. He was the only one of her fellow students she had forgotten to invite to her eighteenth birthday party. He had stood with his hands on the railing as the prisoner had stood in the Mexican jail, and she had seen him as a prisoner of his own silence and self-effacement. It was Larry and not the fraudulent prisoner she had wanted to liberate. Had she not loved her own children in Edward's children, kissed Lietta's freckles because they were Adele's freckles, sat up with them evenings because their loneliness was her children's loneliness?

She was bringing back new images of her husband Larry, as if while she were away, some photographer with a new chemical had made new prints of the old films in which new aspects appeared she had never noticed before. As if a softer Lillian who had absorbed some of the softness of the climate, some of the relaxed grace of the Mexicans, some of their genius for happiness had felt her senses sharpened, her vision more focused, her hearing more sensitive. As the inner turmoil quieted, she saw others more clearly. A less rebellious Lillian had become aware that when Larry was not there she had either become him or had looked for him in others.