Seduction of the Minotaur (2 page)

“And then at home, if you want to fall apart,
there are so many people to stop you. Relatives and friends foil your attempts!
You get sermons, lectures, threats, and you are even rescued.”

The Austrian laughed: “I can’t help thinking
how much encouragement you would get here.”

“You, Mr. Hatcher, didn’t disintegrate in the
tropics!”

Hatcher answered solemnly: “But I am a happy
man. I have succeeded in living and feeling like a native.”

“Is that the secret, then? It’s those who don’t
succeed in going native, in belonging, who get desperately lonely and
self-destructive?”

“Perhaps,” said the Doctor pensively. “It may
also be that you Americans are work-cultists, and work is the structure that
holds you up, not the joy of pure living.”

His words were accompanied by a guitar. As soon
as one guitar moved away, the sound of another took its place, to continue this
net of music that would catch and maintain you in flight
froms
adness
, suspended in a realm of festivities.

Just as every tree carried giant brilliant
flowers playing chromatic scales, runs and trills of reds and blues, so the
people vied with them in wearing more intense indigoes, more flaming oranges,
more
platinous
whites, or else colors which resembled
the purple insides of mangoes, the flesh tones of pomegranates.

The houses were covered with vines bearing
bell-shaped flowers playing coloraturas. The guitars inside of the houses or on
the doorsteps took up the color chromatics and emitted
sounddth
=h
evoked the flavor of guava, papaya, cactus figs, anise, saffron, and red
pepper.

Big terra-cotta jars, heavily loaded donkeys,
lean and hungry dogs, all recalled images from the Bible. The houses were all
open; Lillian could see babies asleep in hammocks, holy pictures on the white
stucco walls, old people on rocking chairs, and photographs of relatives pinned
on the walls together with old palm leaves from the Palm Sunday feast
.

The sun was setting ostentatiously, with all
the pomp of embroidered silks and orange tapestries of Oriental spectacles. The
palms had a naked elegance and wore their giant plumes like languid feather
dusters sweeping the tropical sky of all clouds, keeping it as transparent as a
sea shell.

Restaurants served dinner out in the open. On
one long communal table was a bowl of fish soup and fried fish. Inside the
houses people had begun to light the oil lamps which had a more vivacious
flicker than candles.

The Doctor had been talking about illness.
“Fifteen years ago this place was actually dangerous. We had malaria,
dysentery, elephantiasis, and other illnesses you would not even know about.
They had no hospital and no doctor until I came. I had to fight dysentery
alone, and teach them not to sleep in the same bed with their farm animals.”

“How did you happen to come here?”

“We have a system in Mexico. Before obtaining
their degrees, young medical students have to have a year of practice in
whatever small town needs them. When I first came here I was only eighteen. I
was irresponsible and a bit sullen at having to take care of fishermen who
could neither read nor write nor follow instructions of any kind. When I was
not needed, I read French novels and dreamed of the life in large cities which
I was missing. But gradually I came to love my fishermen, and when the year was
over I chose to stay.”

The eyes of the people were full of burning
life. They squatted like Orientals next to their wide flat baskets filled with
fruits and vegetables. The fruit was not piled negligently but arranged in a
careful Persian design of decorative harmonies. Strings of chili hung from the
rafters, chili to wake them from their dreams, dreams born of scents and
rhythms, and the warmth that fell from the sky like the fleeciest blanket. Even
the twilight came without a change of temperature or alteration in the softness
of the air.

It was not only the music from the guitars but
the music of the body that Lillian heard—a continuous rhythm of life. There was
a rhythm in the way the women lifted the water jugs onto their heads, and
walked balancing them. There was a rhythm in the way the shepherds walked after
their lambs and their cows. It was not just the climate, but the people
themselves who exuded a more ardent life.

Hansen was looking out the taxi window with a
detached and bored expression. He did not see the people. He did not notice the
children who, because of their black hair cut in square bangs and their slanted
eyes, sometimes looked like Japanese. He questioned Lillian on entertainers.
What entertainers from New York or Paris or London should he bring to the Black
Pearl?

The hotel was at the top of the hill, one main
building and a cluster of small cottages hidden by olive trees and cactus. It
faced the sea at a place where huge boiling waves were trapped by crevices in
the rocks and struck at their prison with cannon reverberations. Two narrow
gorges were each time assaulted, the waves sending foam high in the air and
leaping up as if in a fury at being restrained.

The receptionist at the desk was dressed in
rose silk, as if registering guests and handing out keys were part of the
festivities. The manager came out, holding out his hand paternally, as though
his immense bulk conferred on him a patriarchy, and said: “You are free to
enjoy yourself tonight. You won’t have to start playing until tomorrow night.
Did you see the posters?”

He led her to the entrance where her
photograph, enlarged, faced her like the image of a total stranger. She never
recognized herself in publicity photographs. “I look pickled,” she thought.

A dance was going on, on the leveled portion of
the rock beside the hotel. The music was intermittent, for the wind carried
some of the notes away, and the sound of the sea absorbed others, so that these
fragments of mambos had an abstract distinction like the music of Erik Satie.
It also made the couples seem to be dancing sometimes in obedience to it, and
sometimes in obedience to the gravitations of their secret attractions.

A barefoot boy carried Lillian’s bags along
winding paths. Flowers brushed her face as she passed. Both music and sea
sounds grew fainter as they climbed. Cottages were set capriciously on rock
ledges, hidden by reeds, or camouflaged in bougainvillea. The boy stopped
before a cottage with a palm-leaf roof.

In front of it was a long tile terrace with a
hemp hammock strung across it. The room inside had whitewashed walls and
contained only a bed, a table, and a chair.
Parasoling
over the cottage was a giant tree which bore leaves shaped like fans. The
encounter of the setting sun and rising moon had combined to paint everything
in the changing colors of mercury.

As Lillian opened a bureau drawer, a mouse that
had been making a nest of magnolia petals suddenly fled.

She showered and dressed hastily, feeling that
perhaps the beauty and velvety softness of the night might not last, that if
she delayed it would change to coldness and harshness. She put on the only
dress she had that matched the bright flowers, an orange cotton. Then she
opened the screen door. The night lay unchanged, serene, filled with tropical
whisperings, as if leaves, birds, and sea breezes possessed
musicalities
unknown to northern countries, as if the richness of the scents kept them all
intently alive.

The tiles under her bare feet were warm. The
perfume she had sprayed on herself evaporated before the stronger perfumes of
carnation and honeysuckle.

She walked back to the wide terrace where
people sat on deck chairs waiting for each other and for dinner.

The expanse of sky was like an infinite canvas
on which human beings were incapable of projecting images from their human life
because they would seem out of scale and absurd.

Lillian felt that nature was so powerful it
absorbed her into itself. It was a drug for forgetting. People seemed warmer
and nearer, as the stars seemed nearer and the moon warmer.

The sea’s orchestration carried away half the
spoken words and made talking and laughing seem a mere casual accompaniment,
like the sound of birds. Words had no weight. The intensity of the colors made
them float in space like balloons, and the velvet texture of the climate gave
them a purely decorative quality like no other flowers. They had no abstract
meaning, being received by the senses which only recognized touch, smell, and
vision, so that these people sitting in their chairs became a part of a vivid
animated mural. A brown shoulder emerging from a white dress, the limpidity of
a smile in a tanned face, the muscular tension of a brown leg, seemed more
eloquent than the voices.

This is an exaggerated spectacle, thought
Lillian, and it makes me comfortable. I was always an exaggerated character
because I was trying to create all by myself a climate which suited me, bigger
flowers, warmer words, more fervent relationships, but here nature does it for
me, creates the climate I need within myself, and I can be languid and at rest.
It is a drug…a drug…

Why were so many people fearful of the tropics?
“All adventurers came to grief.” Perhaps they had not been able to make the
transition, to alchemize the life of the mind into the life of the senses. They
died when their minds were overpowered by nature, yet they did not hesitate to
dilute it in alcohol.

Even while Golconda lulled her, she was aware
of several mysteries entering her reverie. One she called the sorrows of Doctor
Hernandez. The other was why do exiles come to a bad end (if they did, of which
she was not sure). From where she sat, she saw the Doctor arrive with his
professional valise. But this burden he deposited at the hotel desk, and then
he walked toward Lillian as if he had been seeking her.

“You haven’t had dinner yet? Come and have it
with me. We’ll have it in the Black Pearl, so you will become familiar with the
place where you are going to play every night.”

The Black Pearl had been built of driftwood. It
was a series of terraces overhanging the sea. Red ship lanterns illumined a
jazz band playing for a few dancers.

Because the hiss of the sea carried away some
of the overtones, the main drum beat seemed more emphatic, like a giant heart
pulsing. The more volatile cadences, the ironic notes, the lyrical half-sobs of
the trombone rose like sea spray and were lost. As if the instrumentalists knew
this, they repeated their climbs up invisible antennae into vast spaces of
volatile joys and shrank the sorrows by speed and flight, decanting all the
essences, and leaving always at the bottom the blood beat of the drums.

The Doctor was watching her face. “Did I
frighten you with all my talk about sickness?”

“No, Doctor Hernandez, illness does not
frighten me. Not physical illness. The one that does is unknown in Golconda.
And I’m a convalescent. And in any case, it’s one which does not inspire
sympathy.” Her words had been spoken lightly, but they caused the Doctor’s
smooth face to wrinkle with anxiety. Anxiety? Fear? She could not read his
face. It had the Indian sculptural immobility. Even when the skin wrinkled with
some spasm of pain, the eyes revealed nothing, and the mouth was not altered.

She felt compelled to ask: “Are you unhappy?
Are you in trouble?”

She knew it was dangerous to question those who
were accustomed to doing the questioning, to being depended on (and well did
Lillian know that those who were in the position of consolers, guides, healers,
felt uncomfortable in any reversal), but she took the risk.

He answered, laughing: “No, I’m not, but if
being unhappy would arouse your interest, I’m willing to be. It was tactless of
me to speak of illness in this place created for pleasure. I nearly spoiled
your
pleasure. And I can see you are one who has not had too much of it, one of
the underprivileged of pleasure! Those who have too much nauseate me. I don’t
know why. I’m glad when they get dysentery or serious sunburns. It is as if I
believed in an even distribution of pleasure. Now you, for instance, have a right
to some…not having had very much.”

“I didn’t realize it was so apparent.”

“It is not so apparent. Permit me to say I am
unusually astute. Diagnostic habit. You
appear
free and undamaged, vital
and without wounds.”

“Diagnostic clairvoyance, then?”

“Yes. But here comes our professional purveyor
of pleasure. He may be more beneficent for you.”

Hansen sat down beside them and began to draw
on the tablecloth. “I’m going to add another terrace, then I will floodlight
the trees and the divers. I will also have a light around the statue of the
Virgin so that everyone can see the boys praying before they dive.” His glance
was cold, managerial. The sea, the night, the divers were all, in his eyes,
properties of the night club. The ancient custom of praying before diving one
hundred feet into a narrow rocky gorge was going to become a part of the
entertainment.

Lillian turned her face away from him, and
listened to the jazz.

Jazz was the music of the body. The breath came
through aluminum and copper tubes, it was the body’s breath, and the strings’
wails and moans were echoes of the body’s music. It was the body’s vibrations
which rippled from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme known to
the musicians alone was like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others
only peripheral improvisations. The plots, and themes of the music, like the
plots and themes of our life, never alchemized into words, existed only in a
state of music, stirring or numbing, exalting or despairing, but never named.