Seduction of the Minotaur (13 page)

She walked in a glittering sunlight that
annihilated all thought, that left only the eyes awake, and a procession of
images marching through the retina, no thoughts around them, no thoughts
interpreting them.

She walked more heavily on her heels, on flat
sandals, as the natives walked, and although she weighed exactly the same as
when she had first arrived, a medium weight, she felt heavier, and more aware
of her body. The swimming, the sun, the air, all contributed to sculpture a
firm, elastic, balanced body, free in its movements.

She was preparing herself to talk to the
Doctor, as he had wanted her to talk. She had awakened with a clear image of
the Doctor’s character.

ernandez
in the taxi,
the first day, concerned over his village’s state of health, aware of others’
moods and needs, unable to forget the secret sorrow of his own life. Doctor
Hernandez probing into her life with a doctor’s conviction of his right to
probe, and evading her questions.

She had seen him in his home, in a Spanish
setting, and met his wife, who had come for one of her brief visits. Under a
semblance of Latin submission, under her thoughtfulness in serving him his
drink, saving him from telephone calls, there was a mockery in his wife’s
attitude toward his patients. This had been instilled in the children who
played the game of “being a doctor” differently from other children; they
expressed distaste for his profession. The sick were not really sick, and the
sick who came from the poor, with the desperate illnesses that attacked the
undernourished natives, both children and wife totally ignored.

Lillian had seen in the Doctor’s eyes a sadness
which seemed out of proportion to the children’s irony. He watched them perform
their doctor act. The patient was a beautiful movie star. She was covered with
bandages. Doctor Hernandez’s daughter took this role. As soon as the “doctor”
came near to her, she herself unwound all the bandages, threw herself upon him,
embraced him and said: “Now that you have come I am not sick anymore.”

This morning as she walked, all these fragments
had coalesced into the figure of a man in trouble, and Lillian understood that
his persistence in making her confess was a defense against all that he himself
wanted to confess.

At first she had not understood the game, nor
his need. But she did now. And even if it meant that first of all (to play it
as he wished it) she must confide in him, she was now willing, because it would
liberate him of his secret. It was a habitual role for him to take: that of
confessor. In any other role he would be uncomfortable.

The street climbed halfway up the hill, and
there was the Doctor’s office. The waiting room was a patio, with wicker chairs
placed between potted palms and rubber plants. Pink and purple bougainvillea
trailed down the walls. A servant in bedroom slippers was mopping the mosaic
floor. The nurse was not dressed like a nurse but, like all the native girls
who worked in Golconda, she wore a party dress, a rose pastel taffeta which
made her seem much more like a nurse to pleasure than to illness. There were
ribbons in her hair, and sea-shell earrings on her ears.

“The Doctor has not yet arrived,” she said.

This was no unusual occurrence in the Doctor’s
life. Added to the demands of his profession and their uncertain timing, was
the natives’ own religion of timelessness. They absolutely refused to live in
obedience to clocks, and it was always their mood that dictated their
movements.

But Lillian felt an uneasiness which compelled
her to walk instead of waiting patiently in the office.

She walked along the docks, watching the
fishermen returning from their day’s work. Each boat that had made a large
catch had a pennant waving on its mast. The wind caught the banners and
imprinted on them the same ripples and billows as it did on the skirts of the
women, and the ribbons on their hair.
/div>

She sat down at a little cafe and had a dark
coffee, watching the boats heaving up and down, and the families taking a walk
with all their children. How they installed themselves in the present! They
looked at everything that was happening as if nothing else existed, as if there
were no work to be done, no home to return to
.
They abandoned themselves
to the rhythm, let the wind animate scarves and hair, as if every undulation
and ripple of color and motion hypnotized them into contentment.

By the time she returned to the Doctor’s office
it was growing dark.

None of the patients showed uneasiness. But the
nurse said: “I don’t understand. I called the Doctor’s home. He left there an
hour ago saying he was coming straight to his office.”

Just as she turned on the electric lights, they
went out again. This often happened in Golconda. The power was weak. But it
increased Lillian’s anxiety, and to relieve it she decided to walk toward the
Doctor’s home, hoping to meet him on the way.

The long walk uphill oppressed her. The
electric lights were on again, but the houses grew farther apart from each
other, the gardens darker and denser as she walked.

Then in an isolated field she noticed a car
which had run into an electric pole. A group of people were gathered around it.

In the dark she could not see the color of the
car. But she heard the screams of the Doctor’s wife.

Lillian began to tremble.
He had tried to
prepare her for this.

She continued to walk. She was not aware that
she was weeping. The Doctor’s wife broke away from the group and ran toward
Lillian, blindly. Lillian took her in her arms and held her, but the woman
fought against her. Her mouth was contorted but no sounds came from it, as if
her cries had been strangled. The wife fell on her knees and hid her face in
Lillian’s dress.

Lillian could not believe in the Doctor’s
death. She consoled the wife as if she were a child with an exaggerated sorrow.
She heard the ambulance come, the one he had raised the funds to buy. She saw
the doctors and the people around the car. She realized that it was his car’s
hitting the pole that had cut off the electric current for a moment. The wife
now talked incoherently: “They shot him, they finally shot him… They shot him
and the car went against the pole. I wanted to get him away from here. Who
would be capable of killing such a man? Who? Tell me. Tell me.”

Who would be capable of killing such a man?
Who, thinking of the sick people who would need him and not find him, thinking
how gently he took his short moments of pleasure without rebelling when they
were interrupted. Thinking how deep his pleasure was in curing illness.
Thinking how he had tried to control the drug traffic and refused to dispense
dangerous forgetfulness. Thinking of his nights spent in studying drugs for
remembrance, which were known to the Indians. As a port doctor, what underworld
had he known which neither Lillian nor his wife could ever have known, but
which his wife had sensed as dangerous.

Lillian was helping the wife up the hill,
helping the woman who had hated the city he loved, and whose hatred was now
justified by events.

“I have to prepare the children, but they are
so young. What can I say to such young children about death?”

Lillian did not want to know whether he had
bled, been cut by glass. It seemed to her that he alone knew how to bandage,
how to stop bleeding, how to heal.

The siren of the ambulance grew fainter. People
walked behind them in silence.

If it were true that what we practice on others
is secretly what we wish practiced upon ourselves, then he had wanted, needed
all the care he gave.

To the wife with her too-high heels, her coiled
black hair, her dark and jealous eyes, her small hands and feet, what could he
have confided when from the beginning she turned against the city and the sick
people he loved?

Lillian did not believe in the death of Doctor
Hernandez, and yet she heard the shot, she felt in her body the sound of the
car hitting the pole, she knew the moment of death, as if all of them had
happened to her.

He had something to say, which he had not said,
and he had gone, taking with him his secrets.

If only Doctor Hernandez had not postponed that
deeper, wilder talk which ran underground through the myths of dreams, shouted
through architectural crevices, screamed eloquently through the eyes of
statues, from the depths of all the ancient cities within ourselves, if he had
not merely signaled distress like a deaf-mute…if only awareness had not
appeared through the interstices of memory, between bars of lights and bars of
shadows…if only human beings did not draw the blinds, don disguises, and live
in isolation cells marked: not yet time for revelations…if only they had gone
down together, down the caverns of the soul with picks, lanterns, cords,
oxygen, X-rays, food, following the blueprints of all the messages from the
geological depths where lay hidden the imprisoned self…

According to the definition, tropic meant a
turning and changing, and with the tropics Lillian turned and changed, and she
swung between the drug of forgetfulness and the drug of awareness, as the
natives swung in their hammocks, as the jazz players swung into their rhythms,
as the sea swung in its bed

turned

changed

Lillian was journeying homeward.

The other travelers were burdened with Mexican
baskets, serapes, shawls, silver jewelry, painted clay figurines and Mexican
hats.

Lillian carried no objects, because none of
them would have incarnated what she was bringing back, the softness of the
atmosphere, the tenderness of the voices, the caressing colors and the
whispering presence of an underworld of memory which had
serpentined
under her every footstep and which was the past she had not been able to
forget. Her husband and her children had traveled with her. Had she not loved
Larry in the prisoner she had liberated? Her first image of Larry had been of
him standing behind a garden iron grille, watching her dance. He was the only
one of her fellow students she had forgotten to invite to her eighteenth
birthday party. He had stood with his hands on the railing as the prisoner had
stood in the Mexican jail, and she had seen him as a prisoner of his own silence
and self-effacement. It was Larry and not the fraudulent prisoner she had
wanted to liberate. Had she not loved her own children in Edward’s children,
kissed
Lietta’s
freckles because they were Adele’s
freckles, sat up with them evenings because their loneliness was her children’s
loneliness?

She was bringing back new images of her husband
Larry, as if while she were away, some photographer with a new chemical had
made new prints of the old films in which new aspects appeared she had never
noticed before. As if a softer Lillian who had absorbed some of the softness of
the climate, some of the relaxed grace of the Mexicans, some of their genius
for happiness had felt her senses sharpened, her vision more focused, her
hearing more sensitive. As the inner turmoil quieted, she saw others more
clearly. A less rebellious Lillian had become aware that when Larry was not
there she had either become him or had looked for him in others.

If she had not talked to Doctor Hernandez it
was because he had been seeking to bring to the surface what he knew to be her
incompletely drowned marriage.

Doctor Hernandez. As she sat in the airplane,
she saw him bending over his doctor’s bag unrolling bandages. She could not
reconstruct his face. He turned away from her because she had not given him the
confidence he asked for. This fleeting glimpse of him appeared as if on glass,
and vanished, dissolved in the sun.

Diana had told Lillian just before she left: I
believe I know the real cause of his death. He felt alone, divided from his
wife, dealing only in the casual, intermittent friendships with people who
changed every day. It was not a bullet which killed him. He was too deeply
trained to combat death, to consider death as a private enemy, to accept
suicide. But he brought it about in such a roundabout way, in so subtle a way
that he could delude himself that he had no hand in his own death. HE COULD
HAVE AVOIDED THE CONFLICT WITH THE DRUG SMUGGLERS. It was not his
responsibility. He could have left this task to the police, better equipped to
handle them. Something impelled him to seek danger, to challenge these violent
men. ALMOST TO INVITE THEM TO KILL HIM. I often warned him, and he would smile.
I knew what was truly killing him: an accumulation of defeats, the knowledge that
even his wife loved in him the doctor and not the man. Did you know that she
had been near death when they met, that he had cured her, and that even after
their marriage it was his care of others that she was jealous of? To you he may
have seemed beloved, but in his own eyes all the love went to the Doctor with
the miraculous valise. Golconda was a place for fluctuating friendships, so
many strangers passing through for a few days. Once he reproached me bitterly
for my mobility and flexibility.

“You never hang on,” he said. “This constant
flow suits your fickle temperament. But I would like something deeper and more
permanent. The more gaiety there is around me, the more alone I feel.”

And Lillian must have added to his feeling. She
had failed to give him that revelation of herself which he had wanted, a gift
which might have enabled him to confide too. He was suffering from denials she
had not divined. And how tired he must have been of people’s disappearances.
They came to Golconda, they sat at the beach with him, they had dinner with
him, they talked with him for the length of a consultation, and then left for
other countries. What a relief it may have been to have become at last the one
who left!