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commander. I wonder if we will leave here alive.
My mother's friends in East Hampton shop around for a doctor with the perfect bedside manner.
Don Giovanni ran through his thousand and three. As a child I was forever daydreaming about
Atlantis. According to Van, the kingdom of heaven is here and now, no place else. He quotes the
Gospel of Thomas. I on the other hand always want to be elsewhere, someplace like Mu.
Van is concerned about my drinking. It's a strange thing for him to be worrying about, considering
the company he kept in Saint Louis. My eyebrows shot up the other day on the mountain pass,
when I saw the serape-draped roadside vendor in a round-crowned Indian hat pouring mezcal into
empty Coca Cola bottles through a funnel and found out the price was about a dime for a pint. Van
noticed my reaction. I expected some kind of comment. Instead he got drunk with me.
July 7. We made friends with the prisoners in the Pochutla marketplace. We went in from here on
the dawn bus and found them in front of the jail, playing basketball. They get out twice a day,
morning and afternoon. We shot a few baskets with them. Soon it will be a habit. Yesterday
afternoon we swam out to a rock in the bay near our beach. Sitting on the rock, we saw a
barracuda swim past a couple of times. We raced each other ashore.
Whenever we order something to eat at the cafe on the beach, a little Indian girl waits on us. Van
says he would like to take her back to the States.
Van has a blazer from Saint Louis that shimmers like a rainbow. He wore it to Pochutla one day
and the commander, joking, called it his coat of many colors. Around here Van wears his torn
chinos and, when going to the port, puts on an old black teeshirt and tennis sneakers.
We got shaves and haircuts in Pochutla. In the barber shop I read a picture magazine article on
Willi, the yodeling parrot. His first owner was a Hitler Youth leader. They are shown skiing in the
Tyrol in the summer of 1938. They taught him to scream, "Sieg Heil!" In 1941 he was part of a
revue given for Hitler at Berchtesgaden. Today, Willi belongs to a flea circus on tour in the Middle
East.
Our general plan is to live here and write books. Puerto Angel's relation to Pochutla is that of
Piraeus relative to Athens. Every now and then, the government announces a plan to transform
Pochutla and Puerto Angel into something big, because a lot of coffee and other produce move out
of here, in spite of the fact that loading is all done by rafts, in the absence of any docks. This year
they resurrected the project. The only evidence of anything actually happening is the presence of a
German engineer, engaged to survey the possibilities for a real port. No one has any idea what
they may be.
Evenings, the cafe on the beach can have its charm. Watching the shadows of the hammocks
slung next to the door jump back and forth to the flickering of a kerosene lamp, I recreate the
scene as an engraving in a Harper's Monthly Magazine of the 1870s. In my mind's eye I picture a
title like "Tramping in the By-Ways of Oaxaca." In this light the engineer sitting alone at his table on
the other side of the cafe has a pre-Raphaelite bohemian look. Van grows ever more enthralled
with the little Indian girl. She is the owner's niece.
As I pause from writing, I can look straight up into the Milky Way. When I climb into the hammock,
my feet will point west, toward the Pacific. Van says poetic license is freedom to do exactly what
you feel like doing from one minute to the next.
Some things repeat themselves and have to be turned off. Lost continents. A belle epoque. I'm
twenty-five. This is my belle 6poque. I am losing out on it. The idea of loss keeps bobbing up to the
surface. I don't like putting it in words, even mentally, much less on paper, because saying it
makes it come true. I concentrate on the idea of finding, or invention. I draw a blank on that, too. I
asked Van if invention wasn't an illusion.
In reply, he said something about alchemy and the concept of the philosopher's stone as a
scorned, or unnoticed, beautiful thing that is there in the dust by the roadside, free for the taking.
"Just something like a dime you find on the sidewalk, when a dime is what you need."
He said he liked the idea of metamorphosis because change is the law of life and permanence
suggests spiritual if not physical death, both of which are also strongly suggested by the idea of
closeness with another person: "No one can ever come close to touching another person. Heaven
help them if they try."
We saw what looked like a bright star moving across the twilit sky. Van informed me it was Sputnik.
July 8. Van gets skinnier and skinnier, yet it's impossible to think of him as being sick with a fatal
illness. I doubt that any of the locals suspect. As we stepped out of the commander's doorway
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