to pare and change his features: the man in the mirror was not Randolph, but whatever personality
imagination desired him to resemble, and he, as if corroborating such a theory, said: «They can
romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the
mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurance of our identities? I tell you, my dear,
Narcissus was no egotist. . . he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized,
on seeing his reflection, the one beautiful comrade, the only inseparable love. . . poor Narcissus, possibly
the only human who was ever honest on this point.»
A shy rap at the door interrupted. «Randolph,» said Amy, «is that boy in there with you?»
«We’re busy. Go away, go away. . .»
«But Randolph,» she whined, «don’t you think he ought to come and read to his father?»
«I said: go away.»
Joel let his face reveal neither relief nor gratitude: to obscure emotion was becoming for him a
natural reflex; it helped him sometimes not to feel at all. Still there was one thing he could not do, for there
is no known way of making the mind clear-blank, and whatever he obliterated in daytime rose up at night
in dreams to sleep beside him with an iron embrace. As for reading to his father, he’d made an odd
discovery: Mr Sansom never really listened: a list of prices recited from a Sears Roebuck interested him,
Joel had found by experiment, as much as any wild-west story.
«Before it happened,» said Randolph, resuming his seat, «before then, Ed was very different. . .
very sporting, and, if your standards are not too distinguished, handsome (there, in that photograph you
can see for yourself), but, to be truthful, I never much liked him, quite the contrary; for one thing, his
owning Pepe, or being, that is, his manager, complicated our relations. Pepe Alvarez, he is the one with
the straw hat, and the girl, well, that is Dolores. It is not of course a very accurate picture: so innocent:
who could imagine that only two days after it was taken one of us fell down a flight of stairs with a bullet
in his back?» Pausing to adjust the drawing board, he stared at Joel, one eye squinting like a
watchmaker’s. «Careful now, don’t speak, I’m doing your lips.» Rustling the ribbon-dressed dolls, a
breeze came through the windows bringing here in the velvet shade sunshine smells of outside, and Joel
wanted to be out there where right now Idabel might be splashing through a field of grass, running with
Henry at her heels. The circular composition of Randolph’s face lengthened in concentration; he worked
silently a great while until at last, and it was as if all that had gone before had indescribably led up to this,
he said:
«Let me begin by telling you that I was in love. An ordinary statement, to be sure, but not an
ordinary fact, for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion
suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in
another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the
true beloveds of this world are in their lover’s eyes lilac opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape,
remembered conversations, friends, a child’s Sunday, lost voices, one’s favorite suit, autumn and all
seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory. A nostalgic list, but then, of
course, where could one find a more nostalgic subject? When one is your age most subtleties go
unobserved; even so, I imagine you think it incredible, looking at me as I am now, that I should’ve had
ever the innocence to feel such love; nevertheless, when I was twenty-three. . .
«It is the girl in the picture, Dolores. And we met in Madrid. But she was not Spanish; at least I
do not believe so, though actually I never knew precisely where she came from: her English was quite
perfect. As for me, I had been in Europe then two years, living, as it were, and for the most part, in
museums: I wonder really whether anyone ever copied so many Masters? There was almost no painting
of which I could not do a most engaging facsimile. . . still, when it came to something of my own, I went
quite dead, and it was as though I had no personal perception, no interior life whatever: I was like the
wind-flower whose pollen will not mate at all.
«Dolores, on the other hand, was one of those from whom such as I manage occasionally to
borrow energy: always with her I knew very much that I was alive, and came finally to believe in my own
validity: for the first time I saw things without distortion and complete. That fall we went to Paris, and then
to Cuba, where we lived high above the bay of Matanzas in a house. . . how should I describe it?. . . it
was cloud-pink stone with rooms strewn like gold and white flowers on a vine of high corridors and
crumbling blue steps; with the windows wide and the wind moving through, it was like an island, cool and
most silent. She was like a child there, and sweet as an orange is sweet, and lazy, deliciously lazy; she
liked to sit naked in the sun, and draw tiny little animals, toads and bees and chipmunks, and read
astrology magazines, and chart the stars, and wash her hair (this she did no less than three times a day);
she was a gambler, too, and every afternoon we went down to the village and bought lottery tickets, or a
new guitar: she had over thirty guitars, and played all of them, I must admit, quite horridly.
«And there was this other thing: we seldom talked; I can never remember having with Dolores a
sustained conversation; there was always between us something muted, hushed; still our silence was not
of a secret kind, for in itself it communicated that wonderful peace those who understand each other very
well sometimes achieve. . . yet neither knew the other truly, for at that time we did not really know
ourselves.
«However. . . toward the end of winter I discovered the dream book. Every morning Dolores
wrote out her night’s dreams in a big scrapbook she kept concealed under a mattress; she wrote them
sometimes in French, more often in German or English, but whatever the language, the content was
always shockingly malevolent and I could make no sense of them, for it seemed impossible to identify
Dolores with her ruthless dreams. And I was always in them, always fleeing before her, or hiding in the
shadow, and each day while she lay naked in the sun I would find the newest page and read how much
closer her pursuit had come, for in early dreams she’d murdered in Madrid a lover she called L., and I
knew. . . that when, she found R. . . . she would kill him, too.
«We slept in a bed with a canopy veil that kept out mosquitoes and sifted the moonlight, and I
would lie there awake in the dark watching her sleep, afraid of being trapped in that dream-choked head;
and when morning came she would laugh and tease and pull my hair, and presently, after I’d gone, write.
. . well, there is this I remember: ‘R. is hiding behind a giant clock. Its tick is like thunderstrokes, like the
pulsebeat of God, and the hands, shaped like pointing fingers, stand at seventeen past three; come six I
will find him, for he does not know it is from me he hides, but imagines it is himself. I do not wish him
harm, and I would run away if I could, but the clock demands a sacrifice, or it will never stop, and life
must cease somewhere, for who among us can long endure its boom?’
«Aside from all else, there is some truth in that; clocks indeed must have their sacrifice: what is
death but an offering to time and eternity?
«Now, oddly enough, our lives were more than ever interlocked: there were any number of times
I could have left, gone away, never seen her again; however, to desert would’ve been to deny love, and if
I did not love Dolores, then no emotion of mine has been anything but spurious. I think now she was not
altogether human (a trance-child, if such there be, or a dream herself), nor was I. . . though for reasons of
youth, and youth is hardly human: it can’t be, for the young never believe they will die. . . especially would
they never believe that death comes, and often, in forms other than the natural one.
«In the spring we sailed for Florida; Dolores had never been before to the States, and we went to
New York, which she did not like, and Philadelphia, which she thought equally tiresome. At last, in New
Orleans, where we took a charming patio apartment, she was happy, as indeed was I. And during our
peregrinations the dream book disappeared: where she could have hidden it I do not know, for I
searched every possible place: it was in a way a relief really not to find it. Then one afternoon, walking
home from the market and carrying, if you please, a fine live hen, I saw her talking with a man there in the
shade by the cathedral; there was an intimacy in their attitude which made me still inside: this I knew was
no simple tourist asking direction, and later, when I told her what I’d seen, she said, oh, very casually,
yes, it was a friend, someone she’d met in a café,
