Seduction of the Minotaur (15 page)

The skins matched all the tones of chocolate,
coffee, and wood. There were many white suits and dresses, and many of those
flowered dresses which in the realm of printed dresses stand in the same
relation as the old paintings of flowers and fruit done by maiden aunts to a
Matisse, or a Braque. They had been unwilling to separate themselves from their
daily fare in food, the daily appearance of a dining table.

All the people she had seen in Golconda were
there: taxi drivers, policemen, shopkeepers, truck drivers, life savers, beach
photographers, lemon vendors, and the owner of the glass bottom boat. The men
danced with the prostitutes of Golconda, and these were the girls Lillian had
seen sewing quietly at windows, selling fruit at the market, and they brought
to their evening profession the same lowered eyes, gentle voices, and passive
quietude. They were dressed more enticingly, showed more shoulders and arms,
but not provocatively. It was the men who drank and raised their voices. The
policemen had tied their gun halters to their chairs.

The natives danced in bare feet, and Lillian
kicked off her sandals. The dirt floor was warm and dry, and just as the night
she had danced on the beach with the sea licking her toes, she felt no
interruption between the earth and her body as if the same sap and rhythm ran
through both simultaneously: gold, green, watery, or fiery when you touched the
core.

Everyone spoke to Doctor Hernandez. Even
tottering drunk, they bowed with respect.

A singer was chanting the Mexican plainsong, a
lamentation on the woes of passion. Tequila ran freely, sharpened by lemon and
salt on the tongue. The voices grew husky and the figures blurred. The naked
feet trampled the dirt, and the bodies lost their identities and flowed into a
single dance, moved by one beat. The heat from the bowels of the earth warmed
their feet.

Doctor Hernandez frowned and said: “Lillian,
put your sandals on!” His tone was protective; she knew he could justify this
as a grave medical counsel. But she felt fiercely rebellious at anyone who
might put an end to this magnetic connection with others, with the earth, and
with the dance, and with the messages of sensuality passing between them.

With Fred, too, whom she had once baptized
“Christmas,” she was unaccountably angry. Because he looked pale and withdrawn,
and because he was watching, not entering. He kept his shoes on, and not even
the melodic jubilance of the singer could dissolve this peregrine, this foreign
visitor. And then it was no longer Fred who sat there, spectator and fire
extinguisher, but all those who had been an obstacle to her efforts to touch
the fiery core.

The plants which overflowed into the dance hall
and
brud
the shoulders, uninvited guests from the
jungle, the sharp stinging scent of tequila, the milk of cactus, the cries of the
street like the cries of animals in the forest, bird, monkey, the burning eyes
of the urchins watching through the leaves almost as phosphorescent as the eyes
of wildcats; the water of the sewers running through the trench hissing like a
fountain, the taxis throwing their headlights upon the dancers, beacons of a
tumultuous sea of the senses, the perspiration on the shirt backs, the touch of
toes more intimate than the touch of hands, the round tables seeming to turn
like Ouija boards of censurable messages, every message a caress, all this
orchestration of the effulgence of the tropics served to measure by contrast
these moments of existence which did not bloom completely, moments lived dimly,
conjunctions and fusions which did not take place.

Larry and she had touched at one point, caught
a glimpse of their undisguised self, but had not fused completely. Poor
receptivity, poor connections, and at times no contact at all. Lillian knew now
that it was an illusion that one lived in full possession of one’s body. It
could slip away from one. She could see Fred achieving this by impermeability
to the sensuality of the place and people.

“Put your sandals on!” repeated Doctor
Hernandez, and Lillian translated it: he wanted to protect her from
promiscuity. That had been his role. She must defy him from causing more short
circuits, more disconnections. And she must defy Fred, who, as in those dreams
in which the identity is not clear, became all the ones who had not answered
her love and particularly the first one, Gerard. When Fred danced with her,
clumsily, soberly, she looked down at his boots as a sign of deliberate
insulation, and she pushed him away and said: “Your shoes hurt me.”

The time was past when her body could be
ravished from her by visitations from the world of guilt. Such pleasurable
sensations as a kiss on the inside of her arm, in the nook within the elbow,
given by a stranger at a dance had been enough at one time to cause sudden
departures. But no one could break now her feeling of oneness with Golconda.
She had betrayed Larry with all the voluptuous textures, pungent smells, and
with pleasure.

The girls had noticed that Lillian would not
dance with Fred, and they came to sit at his side. One of them wore a black
satin dress with an edge of white lace which seemed like a petticoat making an
indiscreet appearance. The other a shawl which was slipped off her shoulders
constantly as by an invisible hand. One had the expression of a schoolgirl
intent upon her work. Her hair was still damp from the beach, and hung straight
down like a Tahitian’s. The other smiled and rested a fine-boned, delicate,
small hand upon Fred’s knees. Then she leaned over and, still smiling,
whispered in his ear a request which made the blood rush to Fred’s face, and
his body stiffen with panic. The girl on his left, her small earrings
trembling, and her medal of the Virgin engraved in blue lacquer which she held
between her fingers like a cigarette, added: “The two of us? More exciting?”

Fred threw a distressed glance at Lillian, who
was laughing. One girl was kissing the lobe of his ear, and the other slipping
her hand inside his shirt.

“Lillian, help me.”

He could not extricate himself. He had seen
them at the beach selling shells, fish, lace. He had
sen
them entering the church, with black veils over their hair.

Seeing the depth of his distress, Lillian said:
“Let’s go swimming. It’s too hot to dance anymore.” It was true: their clothes
were glued to their bodies, and their hair looked as if they had been swimming.

The girls clung to Fred: “You stay,” they said.

Lillian leaned over to them and said in
Spanish: “Some other night. Tonight he feels he must stay with me.”

Their hands fell off his shoulders.

Now they were in a taxi, joggling over dirt
roads.

Fred did not know that during the evening he
had lost his identity in Lillian’s eyes and become Gerard, her first defeat at
the hands of passivity. A Gerard whose paralysis she now recognized and no
longer desired. One could not lust for a wall, an obstacle, an inert mass, yet
she had once been seduced by just such gentleness and passivity. It had calmed
her fears. She did not know then what she knew now: it had been an encounter
with a fear greater than her own. She could desire him violently (Gerard)
because she had an instinctive knowledge that he would not respond. She could
desire him without restraint (and even admire her own spontaneity) because the
restraint was safely prearranged within him. She was free to desire, knowing
that she would not be swept away into any fusion. It seemed absurd to say that
one would refuse a glass of water when one was thirsty,
but if this glass of
water also represented all the dangers of love?
When Lillian was sixteen or
seventeen, fulfillment itself was the danger, love itself was the danger, a
shared passion was slavery. She would be at the mercy of another human being.
(Just as Fred now feared to be at the mercy of a woman.) Whereas by desiring
someone who would not desire her, she could allow this fire to burn and feel:
how alive I am! I am capable of desire. Poor Gerard, what a coward he is. He is
afraid of life. It was not, as she thought, the pain of being alive she felt,
but the pain of frustration.

How elated she was now not to have been seduced
by Fred’s mute pleadings and his retractions. How grateful to have discovered
not a failed love affair, but the secret of that failure to lie in the choice
of partner, a choice which came out of fear. So it was fear which had designed
her life, and not desire or love.

If they did not arrive too soon at the secret
cove known only to Doctor Hernandez, she would have time to make inevitable
deductions. She and Larry had selected each other and each had played the role
which kept their fears from overwhelming them. How could they pass judgment on
each other for playing the role they had assigned to each other? You, Larry,
must not change, or move, must represent fixed, unalterable love. You, Lillian,
must change and move for both to sustain the myth of freedom.

Fred was afraid of the night, afraid of Diana
who was cooling her body by pulling her dress out away from her breasts, waving
it before her like a fan. He was afraid of Lillian who was fanning her face
with the edge of her cotton dress, exposing the lacy petticoat.

The taxi left them at the top of the hill, and
>

Fred was afraid of the night, afraid his body
would slip away from him, dissolve in that purple velvet with diamond eyes, the
tropical night. The tropical night did not lie inert like a painted movie
backdrop, but was filled with whisperings, and seemed to have arms like the
foliage.

Beauty was a drug. The small beach shone like
mercury at their feet. They undressed in the rocks which formed a cavern. The
waves absorbed the words; one only heard the laughter, or a name. Diana,
painted by the moonlight, walked like a phosphorescent Venus into the waves.
The oil lamps on the fishermen’s small boats trembled like candlelight. The
neon lights softened by the haze threw beams on the bay like miniature
searchlights.

Fred was as troubled as if he had encountered
the singing mermaids. He did not undress. Doctor Hernandez swam far out; he was
familiar with every rock. Lillian and Edward stayed near the shore. The fatigue
and the heat of the dance were washed away. The sea swung like a hammock. One
could grow a new skin over the body. The undulations of the sea were like their
breathing, as if the sea and the swimmers had but one lung.

Out of the full beauty of the tropical night,
the full moon, the full bloom of the stars, the full velvet of the night, a
full woman might be born. No more scattered fragments of herself living
separate cellular lives, living at times in the temporary homes of others’
lives.

Fred stood further away, clinging to his locks
and his clocks, to peripheries, islands, bridges. The taxi driver smoked a
cigarette and was singing the
melopee
of
love.

Fred’s immobility, sitting by the rock, not
sharing in the baptismal immersion, gave birth to an image of Larry’s absence
of mobility. But as the psyche changes, it recreates semantics, and the word
“fixity” had once been considered a virtue. It was this fixity she had
summoned, needed, loved, because in her chaos and confusions, fixity was the
symbol of immutability, eternity. An unchanging love. How unjust to change its
meaning when this unchanging love had been the hot house in which she had been
born as a woman. Was it possible to begin one’s life anew with a knowledge of
what lay behind the charades one had created? Would she circumvent the masks
they had donned, those she had pinned upon the face of Larry? She now knew her
responsibility in the symbolic drama of their marriage.

Lillian was journeying homeward. The detours of
the labyrinth did not expose disillusion, but unexplored dimensions.
Archeologists of the soul never returned empty-handed. Lillian had felt the
existence of the labyrinth beneath her feet like the excavated passageways
under Mexico City, but she had feared entering it and meeting the Minotaur who
would devour her.

Yet now that she had come face to face with it,
the Minotaur resembled someone she knew. It was not a monster. It was a
reflection upon a mirror, a masked woman, Lillian herself, the hidden masked
part of herself unknown to her, who had ruled her acts. She extended her hand
toward this tyrant who could no longer harm her. It lay upon the mirror of the
plane’s round portholes, traveling through the clouds, a fleeting face, her
own, clear and definable only when darkness came on.

Even though the airplane was taking her back to
White Plains after an engagement of three months in Golconda, a little girl of
six running up and down the aisle of the plane carried her by a detour into the
past, to a certain day in her childhood in Mexico, where her father, frustrated
by enigmatic natives and elemental cataclysms, would come home to the one
kingdom, at least, where his will was unquestioned. He would receive from the
mother a report on the day. And no matter how mild she made this, how much she
attenuated the children’s infractions, the father always found the cause enough
to march them up to the top floor, an attic filled with dusty objects. And
there, one by one, he spanked them.

As the rest of the time he did not talk to
them, nor play with them nor cuddle them, nor sing to them, nor read to them,
as he acted in fact as if they were not there, this moment in the attic
produced in Lillian two distinct emotions: one of humiliation, the other the
pleasure of intimacy. As there were no other moments of intimacy with her
father, Lillian began to regard the attic as a place which was both the scene
of spankings but also of the only rite shared with her father. For years, in
telling of it, she only stressed the injustice, the ignominy of it. She
stressed how there came a day when she openly rebelled and frightened her
father into giving up this punishment.