Seduction of the Minotaur (11 page)

Once one of them signaled Hatcher to stop.
Lillian saw him grow tense. Then they pushed before them a frightened child.
“Will you take him? He’s too small to walk all the way.”

“Climb over the bottles,” said Hatcher.

But the child was too frightened. He clung to
the extra tire in the back, and when the jeep slowed down before a deep ravine,
he leaped off and disappeared into the forest.

“Here is my place,” said Hatcher, and turned
left up a hill until he reached a plateau. On this open space he had built a
roof on posts, with only one wall in the back. The cooking was done out of
doors. A Mexican woman was bending over her washing. She only came when Hatcher
called her. She was small and heavy, and sad-faced, but she gave Hatcher a
caressing look and a brilliant warm smile. Toward the visitors she showed only
a conscious effort at politeness.

“You must excuse us, the place is not finished
yet. My husband works alone, and has a lot to do.”

“Bring the coffee, Maria,” said Hatcher. She
left them sitting around a table on the terrace, staring at an unbelievable
stretch of white sand, dazzling white foam spraying a gigantic, sprawling
vegetation which grew to the very edge of the sand. Birds sang deliriously, and
monkeys gave humorous clown cries in the trees. The colors all seemed purer,
and the whole place as if uninhabited by man.

Maria came with coffee in a thermos. Hatcher
patted her shoulder and looked gratefully at her.

“She is the most marvelous wife,” he said.

“And he is a wonderful husband,” said Maria.
“Mexican husbands never go around telling everyone they are married. Whenever
Harry goes to Golconda, he keeps telling everyone about his wife.”

And then, turning to Lillian, she added in a
lower tone, while Hatcher talked with the young doctor: “I don’t know why he
loves me. I am so short and squatty. He was once married to someone like you.
She was tall, and she had long, pointed, painted nails. He never talks about her.
I worked for him, at first. I was his secretary. We are going to build a
beautiful place here. This is only the beginning.”

Against the wall at the back they had their
bedroom. Lillian could imagine them together. She was sure that he lay with his
head on his wife’s breast. She was compliant, passive, devoted.

Lillian wondered if he were truly happy. He
seemed so intent on affirming his happiness. He was not tranquil, nor capable
of contemplation. He named all the beauties of his place, summoned them. When
he mentioned America, his mouth grew bitter. He missed nothing. American women…
He stopped himself, as if aware for the first
timthat
Lillian was one of them. His eyes alighted on Lillian’s nails. “I hate painted
nails,” he said. Until now he had been friendly. Something, a shadow of a
resemblance, a recall, had sent him for a moment into the city beneath the
city, the subterranean chambers of memory. But he leaped back into the present
to describe all the work that had yet to be done.

“As you can see, it is still very primitive.”

On the terrace, several camp beds were set side
by side, as in an army barracks, with screens between them.

“I hope you won’t mind sleeping out of doors.”

The Mexican doctor was leaving. “Tomorrow I
will be driving back with friends who are spending a few days in Golconda. If
you want us to, we will pick you up.”

Lillian wanted to walk to the beach. She left
the Hatchers discussing dinner, and followed a trail down the hill. The flowers
which opened their violet red velvety faces toward her were so eloquent, they
seemed about to speak. The sand did not seem like sand, but like vaporized
glass, which reflected lights. The spray and the foam from the waves was of a
whiteness impossible to match. The sea folded its layers around her, touched
her legs, her hips, her breasts—a liquid sculptor, the warm hands of the sea
all over her body.

She closed her eyes.

When she came out and put on her clothes she
felt reborn, born anew. She had closed the eyes of memory. She felt as though
she were one of the red flowers, that she would speak only with the texture of
her skin, the tendrils of hair at the core, remain open, feel no contractions
ever again.

She thought of the simplified life. Of cooking
over a wood fire, of swimming every day, of sleeping out of doors in a cot
without sheets with only a Mexican wool blanket. Of sandals, and freedom of the
body in light dresses, hair washed by the sea and curled by the air. Unpainted
nails.

When she arrived Maria had set the table. The
lights were weak bulbs hanging from a string. The generator was working and
could be heard. But the trees were full of fireflies, crickets, and pungent
odors.

“If you want to wash the salt off, there is a
creek just down toward the left, and a natural pool. Take a candle.”

“No, I like the salt on my skin.”

On the table were dishes of black beans, rice,
and tamales.

And again coffee in the thermos bottle.

After dinner Hatcher wanted to show Lillian all
of the half-built house. She saw their bedroom, with its white-washed walls and
flowered curtains. And behind the wall a vast storage room.

“He is very proud of his storage room,” said
Maria.

It was enormous, as large as the entire front
of the house. As large as a supermarket. With shelves reaching to the ceiling.
Organized, alphabetized, catalogued.

Every brand of canned food, every brand of
medicine, every brand of clothing, glasses, work gloves, tools, magazines,
books, hunting guns, fishing equipment.

“Will you have cling peaches? Asparagus?
Quinine?” He was swollen with pride. “Magazines? Newspapers?”

Lillian saw a pair of crutches on a hook at the
side of the shelf. His eyes followed her glance, and he said without
embarrassment: “That’s in case I should break a leg.”

Lillian did not know why the place depressed
her. She suddenly felt deeply tired. Maria seemed grateful to be left alone
with her husband. They went into their bedroom in the back, and Lillian sat on
her cot at the front of the open terrace, and undressed behind a screen.

She had imagined Hatcher free. That was what
had depressed her. She had been admiring him for several weeks as a figure who
had attained independence, who could live like a native, a simplified existence
with few needs. He was not even free of his past, of his other wife. The
goodness of this one, her warmth, her servitude, only served to underline the
contrast between her and the
other.
Lillian had felt him making
comparisons between her and his Mexican wife. The
other
still existed in
his thoughts. It may even have been why he invited Lillian the very first day
in the taxi.

She couldn’t sleep, having witnessed Hatcher’s
umbilical ties with his native land’s protectiveness. (America alone could
supply crutches if one broke one’s leg, America alone could cure him of malaria,
America-the-mother, America-the-father had been transported into the supplies
shed, canned and bottled.) He had been unable to live here naked, without
possessions, without provisions, with his Mexican mother and the fresh fruits
and vegetables in abundance, the goat’s milk, and hunting.

Close the eyes of memory…but was she free?
Hatcher’s umbilical cord had stirred her own roots. His fears had lighted up
these intersections of memory which were like double exposures. Like the failed
photograph of the Mayan temple, in which by an accident, a failure to turn a
small key, Lillian had been photographed both standing up and lying down, and
her head had seemed to lie inside the jaws of a giant king snake of stone, and
the stairs of the pyramid to have been built across her body as if she had been
her own ghostly figure transcending the stone.

The farther she traveled into unknown places,
unfamiliar places, the more precisely she could find within herself a map
showing only the cities of the interior.

This place resembled none other, with its
colonnade of palm-tree trunks, its walled back set against the rocks, its
corrugated roof on which monkeys clowned. The cactus at night took shapes of
arthritic old men, bearded scarecrows of the tropics, and the palms were always
swaying with a rhythm of fans in the heat, of hammocks in the shade.

Was there no open road, simple, clear, unique?
Would all her roads traverse several
worlnd
herimultaneously
, bordered by the fleeting shadows of other
roads, other mountains? She could not pass by a little village in the present
without passing as well by some other little village in some other country,
even the village of a country she had wished to visit once and had not reached!

Lillian could see the double exposure created
by memory. A lake once seen in Italy flowed into the lagoon which encircled
Golconda, a hotel on a snowy mountain in Switzerland was tied to Hatcher’s
unfinished mountain home by a long continuous cable, and this folding cot
behind a Mexican screen
lay
alongside a hundred other
beds in a hundred other rooms, New York, Paris, Florence, San Francisco, New
Orleans, Bombay, Tangiers, San Luis.

The map of Mexico lay open on her knees, but
she could not find the thick jungle line which indicated her journeys. They
divided into two, four, six, eight skeins.

She was speeding at the same rhythm along
several dusty roads, as a child with parents, as a wife driving her husband, as
a mother taking her children to school, as a pianist touring the world, and all
these roads intersected noiselessly and without damage.

Swinging between the drug of forgetfulness and
the drug of awareness, she closed her eyes, she closed the eyes of memory.

When she awakened she saw first of all a
casuarina
tree with orange flowers that seemed like tongues
of flames. Between its branches rose a thin wisp of smoke from Maria’s
brasero
.
Maria was patting tortillas between
her hands with an even rhythm and at the same time watching over genuine
American pancakes saying: “Senorita, I have tortillas
a La Americana
for
you.”

The table was set in the sun, with Woolworth
dishes and oilcloth and paper napkins.

The young doctor had arrived with his friends.
They would take her back to Golconda.

Maria was gazing at Lillian pensively. She was
trying to imagine that a woman just like this one had hurt Hatcher so deeply
that he never talked about it. She was trying to imagine the nature of the
hurt. She knew that Hatcher no longer loved that woman. But she knew also that
he still hated her, and that she was still present in his thoughts.

Lillian wanted to talk to her, help her
exorcise the American woman with the painted nails. But Hatcher would be lonely
without his memories, lonely without his canned asparagus, and his
American-made crutches. Did he truly love Maria, with her oily black hair, her
maternal body, her compassionate eyes, or did he love her for not being his
first wife?

He looked at Lillian with hardness. Because she
did not want to stay? Could she explain that she had spent the night in the
subterranean cities of memory, instead of outside in the spicy, lulling
tropical night?

Doctor
Palas
had been
called during the night, and was in a bad humor. His friends had found the new
beach hotel lacking in comfort. “The cot had a large stain, as if a crime had
been
ommitted
there. The mosquito netting had a hole,
and we were bitten by mosquitoes. And in the morning we had to wash our faces
from a pail of water. We gave some pennies to the children. They were so eager
that they scratched our hands. And only fish and black beans to eat, even for
breakfast. “

“
Some day
,” said
Hatcher, “when my place is built, it will attract everyone. I am sure the movie
colony will come.”

“But I thought you came here to be isolated, to
enjoy a primitive life, a simple life.”

“It isn’t the first time a human being has had
two wishes, diametrically opposed,” said Doctor
Palas
.

In the car, driving back in the violent sun, no
one talked. The light filled the eyes, the mind, the nerves, the bones, and it
was only when they drove through shade that they came out of this anesthesia of
sunlight. In the shade they would find women washing clothes in the river,
children swimming naked, old men sitting on fences, and the younger men behind
the plough, or driving huge wheeled carts pulled by white Brahma bulls. In the
eyes of the Mexicans there were no questions, no
probings
;
only resignation, passivity, endurance, patience. Except when one of them ran
amok.

Lillian could feel as they did at times. There
were states of being which resembled the time before the beginning of the
world, unformed,
undesigned
,
unseparated
.
Chaos. Mountains, sea and earth undifferentiated, nebulous, intertwined. States
of mind and feeling which would never appear under any spiritual X-ray. Dense,
invisible, inaccessible to articulate people. She would live here, would be
lost. At every moment of anxiety, of probing, she would slip into the sea for
rebirth. Her body would be restored to her. She would feel her face as a face,
fleshy, sunburned, warm, and not as a mask concealing a flow of thoughts. She
would be given back her neck as a firm, living, palpitating, warm neck, not as
a support for a head heavy with fever and questions. Her whole body would be
restored to her, breasts relaxed, no longer compressed by the emotions of the
chest, legs restored, smooth and gleaming. All of it cool, smooth, washed of
thought.