Relations are resumed with Helen Doyle, who’s going on alone at the Hacienda, though since Mr. Doyle’s heart has failed, Helen’s own heart is not quite in her yarns and stained glass and copper enameling. After a year or two of stumbling through her grief, she has returned to her consuming plan, the building of her new Arabian quarters on the other side of town. Now her gallery holds unfurled blueprints and a cardboard model of the villa-in-the-works, which seems half hacienda, half Alhambra. Art lessons resume. My mother joins a group which paints the still lifes Helen constructs: peaches, a black Oaxacan pottery bowl, a mandolin. I am brought along for lessons, too, but what is it I want to do? Ceramics, glass, jewelry? I can’t quite settle on anything, and don’t seem to have the patience for craft.

I decide on glasswork, assembling pieces of cut and broken glass, melting them in a small kiln, just hot enough to fuse the pieces together into ornaments one might hang in a window. I make a strange, spiky-looking bowl by hollowing a form out of soft firebrick, then firing found bits of broken glass inside it till they sag together into something rounded albeit slightly threatening. I enjoy this tinkering until one day a visitor to the Hacienda, a European professor whose wife is also taking painting lessons, examines my work and says, “So there is no intention to what you do, no craft? You merely put things together and see what happens, by chance.” There is nothing I can say to that. I feel bored, restless; there are great things inside me, surely, but who has the concentration or skill to bring them out, and how to choose where to begin, when any gesture eliminates other possibilities?

My mother seems bored, too, a little rebellious. One day she’s had enough of the limes and the mandolin, and whips out a long scrap of watercolor paper and a bamboo-handled Japanese brush and paints, quickly, in thick spontaneous strokes of ink, five Chinese horses running across the field of the page—something like what she used to draw on her precious pads of paper when she was a girl? But Eastern now in their simplicity, each animal made of the fewest possible strokes of the brush, each line alive with energy: rebel horses, free, a little angry. It’s the best thing she’ll ever paint. Then it’s back to the lesson.