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that intensity. That was not difficult to find in a Mexican sea
town. All their dresses took their colors from flowers. She bought the coral
tree dress. The orange cotton had almost invisible blood-red threads running
through it as if the Mexicans had concocted their dyes from the coral tree
flower itself.
    The coral tree would kill the memory of a black
gnarled tree and of two figures sheltered under its grotesque branches.
    The coral tree would carry her into a world of
festivities. An orange world.
    In Haiti the trees were said to walk at night.
Many Haitians swore they had actually seen them move, or had found them in
different places in the morning. So at first she felt as if the coral tree had
moved from its birthplace and was walking through the spicy streets or the
zling festive beach. Her own starched, flouncing skirt made her think of the
coral tree flower that never wilted on the tree, but at death fell with a
sudden stab to earth.
    The coral tree dress did not fray or fade in
the tropical humidity. But Renate did not, as she had expected, become suffused
with its colors. She had hoped to be penetrated by the orange flames and that
it would dye her mood to match the joyous life of the sea town. She had thought
that steeped in its fire she would be able to laugh with the orange gaiety of
the natives. She had expected to absorb its liveliness intravenously. But to
the self that had sought to disguise her regrets the coral tree dress remained
a costume.
    Every day the dress became more brilliant,
drenched in sunlight and matching its dazzling hypnosis. But Renate’s inner
landscape was not illumined by it. Inside her grew a gigantic, tortured black
tree and two young men who had made a bed of it.
    People stopped her as she passed, women to
envy, children to touch, men to receive the magnetic rays. On the beach, people
turned towards her as if the coral tree itself had come walking down the hill.
    But inside the dress lay a black tree, the
night. How people were taken in by symbolism! She felt like a fraud, drawing
everyone into her circle of orange fire.
    She attracted the attention of a man from Los
Angeles who wore white sailor pants, a white T-shirt, and who was suntanned and
smiling at her.
    Is he truly happy, she wondered, or is he
wearing a disguise too?
    At the beach he had merely smiled. But here in
the market, the one behind the bullring, he was lost, and he appealed to her.
He did not know where he was. His arms were full of straw hats, straw donkeys,
pottery, baskets and sandals.
    He had strayed among the parrots, the sliced
and odorous melons, the women’s petticoats and ribbons. The petticoats swollen
by the breeze caressed his hair and damp cheeks. The palm-leafed roofs were too
low for him and the tips of the leaves tickled his ears.
    “I must get back soon,” he said. “I left my car
alone for two hours now.”
    “They’re not strict with tourists,” she
answered. “Don’t worry.”
    “Oh, it’s not in the street. I wouldn’t leave
it in the street. I tried every hotel in town, until I found one where I could
park my car near my bedroom. Do you want to come and see it?”
    He said this in the tone of a man offering a
glimpse of an original Picasso.
    They walked slowly in the sun. “It’s such a
beautiful car,” he said, “the best they ever made. I raced it in Los Angeles.
It’s as sensitive as a human being. You don’t know what an ordeal it was, the
trip from Mexico City. They are repairing the road—it was full of detours.”
    “What happened to you?”
    “Nothing happened to me, but my poor car! I
could feel every bump on the road; every hole, the dust, the stones. It hurt me
to see it struggle along that road, scraped by pebbles, stained with tar,
covered with red dust, my beautiful car that I took such care of. It was as if
my own body were walking on that road. I had to drive through a river. A little
boy sat astride the hood, and guided me with a propeller-like gesture of