Seduction of the Minotaur (19 page)

Larry ran to the Negro huts for warmth of
voices, warmth of gestures, and warmth of food. He liked the half-nakedness,
the soft laughter. Home here seemed like a nest, with joyous flesh proximity.
Caresses were lavish. There was a hum of content, a hiss of doves. Violence
came and went like tropical storms, leaving no traces. (At home a quarrel led
to weeks of silence and resentment.) It was Larry’s first closeness to human
beings. He threw off his too tight clothes. The Negro mother was his nurse. She
smiled upon his fairness. Her flowered cotton dress smelled of spices, and she
moved as easily as cotton tree seeds. When she was happy her body undulated
with laughter. Their laundry, swollen like sail boats, was more vivid than a
rainbow.

Yet she betrayed him.

He had played with the naked dark children.
After swimming in all the forbidden lagoons and rivers, they had openly admired
each other, half mocking, half tender. In his own home Larry had wanted to
repeat these games with his younger brother. But it was not a swimming
adventure as it was out in the country, among plants and grass and reeds. It
was in the bathroom. Larry thought all discoveries of bodies could be made as
merrily as by the riverside. His younger brother was so delicate, his hair so
fragile, his skin like a girl’s. With delight they contrasted skin tones,
breadth of chest, length of legs, strength of legs. But this scientific erotic
exploration was watched by the nurse through the transom window, and the same
thing she laughed at in nature, she now reported like a policeman on the
frontier of some forbidden land.

A shocking treachery from the world he loved
with a trusting passion, a treachery which came not from where he might have
expected it, the shaggy-browed father with his eyes too deeply set in tired
flesh, or from the cool eyes of the pale mother, but from the spice-scented,
barefooted, tender handed black mother he loved. Such treacheries throw human
beings into outer space, at a safe distance from human beings. They are propelled
into space by attacks from the human species. Could not the nurse have laughed
at the children exploring the wonders of the body? Could she not have laughed
at their games as she laughed at their games while swimming? Did she not
herself keep her warm dry hand on his coltish shoulder blades and comb his hair
with her fingers “To feel the silk of it”? He had almost reached the earth with
her, with her he had almost been born fully to his molten life.

The child has set his planet’s course, has
chosen his place in outer space, according to the waves of hostility or fear he
has encountered. Pain was the instrument which set him afloat and determined
his course. The sun, whether gold, white, or black, having failed him, he will
exist henceforward in a more temperate zone, twilit ones, less exposed to
danger.

Lillian had at first misinterpreted his
silences. He communicated only with children, and with animals. His absences
(if only I knew where he was when he was gone) distressed her. Never knowing
until later that, as a measure of safety he had sought periphery, the region of
no-pain, where human beings could not reach him.

The first betrayal had thrust him into space to
rotate at a certain distance from the source and origin of the first collision.

Lillian calculated the effect of his not having
been wanted. The effect of adopting a family and then being betrayed. The
atmosphere of gaiety and freedom was altered. When the Negro shack was
accidentally destroyed by fire he had no regrets. When he was made to sail away
from the Brazilian planet to England, he was sullen. The parents had decided he
could not grow up into a native “savage.” He needed discipline. Larry already
preferred drumming to sixteenth-century English songs. He liked the stamping of
bare feet more than the waltzing of high heels and patent leather shoes. He
liked vivid pinks, not his mother’s colorless dresses. He liked time for
dreaming, not his father’s tightly filled days.

He entered a cold atmosphere of discipline and
puritanism. His mother’s sister held the watch now, and also a whip. Every
infraction was severely punished. The long walk to school was timed. The
purchase of a water pistol was a crime. Pulling a little girl’s hair or pushing
her down on the grass was a crime. And as for the mystery of where her legs
started and asking if inside the bouffant dress there was a corolla as in the
heart of a poppy… Whatever food she served had no taste, because she imposed
it. She measured and enforced time and appetite, just as she commanded the
flowers to bloom at a certain date.

Larry disappeared behind a facade of obedience.
There was a Sea of Tranquility on the moon. Larry lived there. There were no
ruffles on the surface. Outwardly he conformed until his marriage to Lillian.
Lillian having spent her childhood in Mexico, seemed to be a messenger from the
happier days of Brazil.

“The relative smoothness of the lunar surface
poses a question.”

Much of men’s energies were being spent on such
questions, Lillian’s on the formation of Larry’s character. Their minds were
fixed on space; hers on the convolutions of Larry’s feelings.

Her vehement presence became the magnet. She
summoned him back from solitude. She was curious about his feelings, about his
silences, about his retractions. His mother’s first wish that he should not
exist at all was pitted against Lillian’s wish that he exist in a more vivid
and heightened way. She made a game of his retreats, pretended to discover his
“caves.” He was truly born in her warmth and her conviction of his existence.

How slender was the form he offered to the
world’s vision, how slender a slice of his self, a thin sliver of an eighth of
the moon on certain nights. She was not deceived as to the dangers of another
eclipse. She could hear, as you hear in
musique
concrete
,
the echo in vast space which
corresponds to new dimensions in science, the echo which was never heard in
classical music.

Lillian felt that in the husband playing the
role of husband, in the scientist playing his role of scientist, in the father
playing his role of father, there was always the danger of detachment. He had
to be maintained on the ground, given a body. She breathed, laughed, stirred,
and was tumultuous him. Together they moved as one living body and Larry was
passionately willed into being born, this time permanently. Larry, Larry, what
can I bring you? Intimacy with the world? She was on intimate terms with the
world. While he maintained a world in which Lillian was the only inhabitant, or
at least the reigning one.

Such obsession with reaching the moon, because
they had failed to reach each other, each a solitary planet! In silence, in
mystery, a human being was formed, was exploded, was struck by other passing
bodies, was burned, was deserted. And then it was born in the molten love of
the one who cared.