the second hand. Perhaps it was moving too slowly to tell, though nothing would have changed even if time hadn’t stopped. His notebooks and journals—and the empty bottle—certainly still lay scattered across the floor. His half-unpacked suitcase still sat in the corner. The traveler drew on his cigarette, which was burning itself to the quick. And now the lighter was out of flints. Stretching back in bed, like an iguana under a midnight sun, he stared at a wall, another wall, a third wall, and the ceiling. Far off, he could hear the familiar muttering of palm fronds, and farther off still, the murmur of the ocean, its waves sighing in and out, slow and weak as a dying man’s breath. So, he was reminded, the unseen world still existed.
(He had known something of this world before, he knew—in his earliest childhood, his own ancient history, but he did not know how he knew. When he had descended through the cloud-forest in the crowded bus from Veracruz, he had sensed the memory knocking at the back door of his mind. Yes, it was much like opening a door. This world would not let him forget that he was an outsider, though he felt he shared something with these people he couldn’t begin to explain. He had felt it when he’d entered that ruined cathedral, and he had felt it again in that airless room in the slums. The door had swung open and part of him had fallen away into the dream of history. In the evenings when he sat at the cafes going over his notes and sketches, he could look down upon himself like someone gazing at an old painting, one you think you’ve seen before but can’t quite remember where or when. And the people he talked to never looked him directly in the eyes, but always seemed to be staring off into the distance—not at the mountains or jungle or blistering sky, but into the forgotten past.)
When the fly touched his eyelid and he woke (again?), he was curled at the end of the bed, more like a caged panther now than a lizard. Somewhere down in the street a radio was playing antique foxtrots, waltzes, foxtrots nothing else. It seemed to have been playing since time began—or stopped. All was still dark, but hours must have passed; his chin now felt bristly.
The sheet was wound around his ankles, tight as leg-irons.
Did he sleep at all? He must have slept. He recalled one last dream: doors opening onto other doors, the hundredth door opening into this hotel room, where he lay awake. Before that dream, only the memory of a close citric breath, the memory of damp, caressing hands. And a naked light-bulb swinging like a pendulum before his eyes, though his eyes were shut tight.
The traveler washed his face in the chipped porcelain water basin, dressed, and descended the hotel stairs into the street. The air was cool and moist, the sky black, though a few amber rectangles glowed in the adobe houses down the narrow and winding streets—lamps burning behind shades. The houses were painted in pastel blues, pinks, greens: the faded colors of a garden after first frost (though this place had never known cold). As the traveler continued down the hard dirt road, more radios came on in the houses along the way. They were all playing the same dance melodies, but there was no dancing or any sign of waking among the people other than the music and the lights. Flying cockroaches and moths beat their wings against the shades; a large white moth struck his face, and with a gasp he brushed it away.
In the east, a strip of phosphorous green rimmed the horizon—the first hint of another dawn. A tang pervaded the air; the wind had shifted in from the ocean, which he could hear better now but still could not see. The air smelled not of fish, but of lemons and sourness, yellow and acrid. The ocean began to hiss. It was raining.
He took shelter on a bench under a pink-and-blue-striped awning. Turning and facing the shop window above the bench, he saw a reflection of the buildings and sky behind him, but his own visage was just a shadow; it told him nothing; it was a phrase in a language he did not know. He was solid, he absorbed the light, he was a silhouette, that was all. The bright festival candies within the window seemed much more comprehensible, more real: rows of glazed wafers in the same pastels as the town’s houses; straw baskets overflowing with salt-water taffies wrapped in wax paper; gaudy lozenges and heart-shaped nuggets that might have been carved out of glass; black, brown, white, and pink chocolates; as well as taffy and wax novelties in the shape of crucifixes and mummies. Under the weak sulfurous glow of the display light, a gleaming pile of white sugar skulls was heaped like the bones of a monks in catacombs. The smell here was not sweet, however, but defiled, like spoiled meat, as if this were a butcher’s and not a confectionery.
(The traveler felt the last of the bad wine in his head and tried not to think, but thought anyhow of the town to the northwest and its infamous museum. High on a hill, underground, in a narrow white-washed chamber, lined up within glass cabinets, were the bodies of the unfortunate whose families could no longer afford to pay rent for them in the local cemeteries— or so he had been told. The dry climate and lime in the soil, he guessed, had preserved them. The place smelled of soap and stale urine. The tenants’ parchment flesh had shriveled on their bones, and their mouths hung open, still screaming the screams begun in other decades. Screams you can’t hear, the traveler thought then, are easily the worst. Outside the museum, little barefoot children offered tourists mummy-shaped candy, along with postcards and sugar skulls. He hurried away from them. None of it should upset him, he knew. Such things bespeak the history of a time and a place. Perhaps it was shame he felt, as much for himself as for the children. It occurred to him then that the historian must forever remain only a traveler, nothing more and nothing less.)
How long the storm lasted, he did not know, for he had fallen asleep beneath the awning without realizing it. His clothes were wet from blowing rain. When he opened his eyes onto the town, the world was once more in quietude. The ocean was calm, the wind had changed again, and the odor was gone. Though this place had never known anything but the heat, it was as if a thick muffling snow had fallen instead of rain, as if everything were silenced under ice—a town encased in glass like a scorpion in a paperweight. The sky was clear, a violet color, though the sun had yet to rise. Toward the west, indigo clouds huddled over the jungle (could he hear the distant drumming of rain on leaves?) and a pale morning moon was suspended over the trees. The moon was a bleached shell, a petal, a thumbnail, a pearl button, a watch-face, a skull, anything he wanted it to be. The moon was losing itself to the sky; it was translucent, shining faintly, and soon transparent, all but invisible. Overhead the palms rustled, that hoarse silken shuffling. The traveler stood, shook himself, and began to walk around the pools of water shining in the street; he had dreamt of mirrors—he was sure he must have dreamt of mirrors.
He searched out the poorest part of town and entered the crowded barrio, where the fishermen who rose earliest were hauling their long hemp nets over their shoulders. The men did not notice the traveler, as if he were unnoticeable as a cloud, but looked directly into the sun. When he mounted the crest of a hill, he saw them glimmering in their white cotton pajamas a mile away on the jade-green tropical sea; they stood upright in their tiny rowboats, and, like white spiders unraveling webs, cast their nets into the shining water.
No one who passed him spoke. No one looked at him or disturbed his transparency. The young people skipped past with transistor radios perched on their shoulders. No more music now, though—only talk and static, and a thin quivering flute-like signal that rose higher and higher.
Within the barrio, the cerulean faces of the television sets flickered as if passing secret codes from tenement window to tenement window—flickered and rolled, ominous and whispering. Women and men stood before the sets, open-mouthed, silent; children spun aimlessly about, snatching at gems buzzing in the air. Adolescent girls—young whores in brassieres and slacks—combed their hair before cracked hand mirrors, leaning out of second-story windows and singing down into the street. Even they did not call or whistle to him. One girl, lustrous blue-black hair veiling her face, stood before a window, hand in front of parted lips, looking as if she were about to yawn or brea
k into an aria. She did neither.
(The tall eggplant-black Creole he had met in a rhumba bar in the slums of San Morisco had led him upstairs to a tiny room. There was a mattress on the floor and a bare bulb hanging above it. When he pulled the string, she jumped up from the mattress and declared she would do nothing in the dark. There was no window, no other light. They seemed to be using up all the air. Once she slapped him and once she kissed him. She bit at his neck with sharp little teeth. The Creole burned from within like a coal; he wound a braid of her corn-rowed hair around her neck and thought, and was shocked by his thought, of taking his pocket-knife and splitting her from belly to throat like a ripe melon.)
He did not know the time: his watch still held yesterday’s hour. It was important to know the time; even travelers must know the time. Sometimes that is all that matters. Ask people in the street, though, and they ignore you. At last, he knocked on the door of some kind of shop; the words on the windows made no sense, not even in Spanish. The shop was painted a forlorn shade of yellow that was