Seduction of the Minotaur (6 page)

“
Buenos
dias
.
”

“
Muy
buenos
dias
.
”

“The lady is here to visit the American
prisoner.”

One of the guards who had been asleep now
pulled out his keys with vague hesitancies. He considered giving the keys to
the guide and returning to his siesta, but suddenly his pride awakened and he
decided to play his allotted role with exaggerated arrogance.

Inside, the walls of the prison were painted in
sky blue. The ceilings retained their murals of nude angels, clouds, and
vaporous young women playing harps. The cots were all occupied by sleeping
prisoners. The American stood by the iron door of his cell watching the arrival
of the visitor.

His thin, long-fingered hands held onto the
bars of the cell door as if he would tear them down. But in his lean, unshaved
face there was a glint of irony which Lillian interpreted as a show of courage.
He was smiling.

“It was good of you to come,” he said.

“What can I do for you? Should I telephone the
American consulate?”

“Other people have tried that but he will not
bother. There are too many of us.”

“Too many of you?”

“Well, yes, Americans without papers, runaways
from home, runaways from the draft, escaped criminals, displaced persons who
claim to be Americans, ex-politicos, ex-gangsters, runaways from wives and
alimony…”

“What happened to your papers?”

“I went for a swim one day. I left all my
clothes on the beach. When I came back, all my clothes were gone, and with them
my papers. So here I am.”

He kept his eyes on her face. They were red,
probably from not sleeping. The amusement in them might have been a form a
courage.

“But what can I do for you? How can I get you
out? I’m not rich. I get a small salary for playing the piano at the Black
Pearl. “

His eyes pleaded softly in contradiction to the
clipped words. “The best way to help me is to give the guide fifty dollars. Can
you spare that? He will fix things up and get me out. He knows the ropes. Can
you manage that?”

“I can do that. But once you’re out, how will
you get back home, and won’t you get caught again without papers?”

“Once I’m out I can hitchhike to Mexico City,
and there go to the consulate. I can manage the rest, if you can get me out.”

Later on, having delivered the money, she felt
immensely light, as if she had freed a part of herself. The prisoner would have
haunted her. She knew by the exaggeration of her feelings that there must be
some relationship between the condition of the prisoner and herself. What she
had felt was more than sympathy for a fellow American. It may have been
sympathy for a fellow prisoner.

To all appearances she was free. But free of
what? Had she not lost her identity papers? Was not her voyage like that of the
South American bird that walked over the sands rubbing out his tracks with a
special feather that grew longer than the others, like a feather duster?

The past had been dissolved by the intensity of
Golconda, by its light which dazzled the thoughts, closed the eyes of memory.
Freedom from the past came with unfamiliar objects; none of them possessed any
evocative power. From the moment she opened her eyes she was in a new world.
The colors were all hot and brilliant, not the pearly greys and attenuated
pastels of her homeland. Breakfast was a tray of fruit of a humid, fleshy
quality never tasted before, and even the bread did not have the same flavor.
There was an herb which they burned in the oven before inserting the bread
which gave it a slight flavor of anise.

All day long there was not a single familiar
object to carry her back into her past life. The first human being she saw in
the morning was the gardener. She could see him through the half-shut bamboo
blinds, raking the pebbles and the sand, not as if he was eager to terminate
the task but as if raking pebbles and sand was the most pleasurable occupation
and he wanted to prolong his enjoyment. Now and then he would stop to talk with
a lonely little girl in a white dress who skipped rope all around him asking
questions which he answered gently.

“What makes some butterflies have such
beautiful colors on their wings, and others not?”

“The plain ones were born of parents who didn’t
know how to paint.”

And even when familiar objects turned up, they
did not turn up in their accustomed places. Like the giant Coca-Cola bottle
made of wood placed in the middle of the bull ring before the bullfight began—a
grotesque surrealist dream. Lillian had expected the bulls to charge it, but
just before the bull was let out the attendants (who usually took care of
carrying away the dead bull and sweeping over the bloody tracks) had come and
toppled the bottle, and the six of them had carried it away on their
shoulders—publicity’s defeated trophy.

So all was freedom: her hours, her time, and
even the music she improvised at night, the jazz which allowed her to embroider
on all her moods.

But there was one moment that was different,
and it was the knowledge of this moment that perhaps created her feeling of
kinship with the prisoner. That was the hour just before dinner, when she was
freshly bathed and dressed, the hour when a genuine adventurer would reach the
high point of his gambling
wth
the beauty of the
night and feel: Now the evening is beginning and I will discover a human being
to court or to be courted by, an adventure with caprice and desire, and while
gambling I might find love.

At this hour, when she took one last glance at
the mirror, the screen door of her room seemed the locked door of a prison, the
room an enclosure, only because she was a prisoner of anxiety: the moment
before the unknown gamble with a relationship to other human beings paralyzed
her with fear. Who would take her dancing? Would no one come, no one remember
her existence? Would all the groups that formed in the evening forget to
include her in their plans? Would she arrive at the terrace to find only the
head of the Chicago stockyards for a dancing partner? Would she come downstairs
and watch Christmas a bemused spectator of Diana’s provocations, and couples
climbing into cars going to fiestas, and couples climbing the hill to attend
the Sunday night dance on the rocks, and Doctor Hernandez appropriated by a
movie star who was sure she had malaria?

This was the moment which proved she was a
prisoner of timidities and not a genuine adventurer, not a gambler who could
smile when he lost, who could be invulnerable before an empty evening, or
untouched by an evening spent with a drunken man who insisted on describing to
her how the stockyards functioned, how the animals were killed.

This fantasy of disaster never actually took
place. Several people always gathered around the piano when she played and
waited for her to stop to offer her a drink and join them. But actual
happenings never freed her of her inner imprisonment by fear, in anticipation
of aloneness.

She would like to have seen the prisoner again
but imagined he was already on his way to Mexico City. She had time to walk
down to the Spanish restaurant on the square, which she preferred to the hotel.
In the hotel she ate her own dinner in privacy. On the square she felt she had
dinner with the entire city of Golconda, and shared a multitude of lives.

The square was the heart of the town. The
church opened its doors to it on one side. The other sides were lined with
cafes, restaurants with their tables on the sidewalk, a movie house; in the
center was a bandstand surrounded by a small park with benches.

On the benches sat enraptured young lovers,
tired hobos, men reading their newspapers while little boys shined their shoes.
There was also a circle of vendors sitting on the sidewalk with their baskets
full of candied fruit, colored fruit drinks, red and yellow cigarettes, and
magazines. Old ladies with black shawls walked quietly in and out of the
church, children begged, marimba players settled in front of each cafe and
played as long as the pennies flowed. Singers stopped to sing. Little girls
sold sea-shell necklaces and earrings. The prostitutes paraded in taffeta
dresses with flowers in their black hair.

The flow of beggars was endlessly varied. They
changed their handicaps. When they tired of portraying blindness they suddenly
appeared with wooden legs. The genuine ones were terrifying, like nightmare
figures: a child, shriveled and shrunken, lying on a little table with wheels
which he pushed with withered hands; an old woman so twisted she resembled the
roots of a very ancient tree; many of them sightless, with festering sores in
place of eyes. But they resisted all professional help, as Doctor Hernandez had
told her. They refused to
bppeared
win out of the
streets, from the spectacles of religious processions, Indian fireworks, band
concerts, or the flow of visitors in their eccentric costumes.

And among them now, sitting at a nearby table,
was the American prisoner with the guide.

From the heightened tones of their voices, the
numerous empty bottles of tequila on the table Lillian knew to what cause her
donation for freedom had been diverted. They were beyond recognizing her.
Unfocused eyes, vague gestures, revealed a Coney Island of the mind, with the
whirlings
, the crack-the-whips, the dark chambers of
surprises, the deforming mirrors, the jet-plane trips, the death-defying
motorcycles of drunkenness. Tongues rubberized, their words came out on oiled
rollers, their laughter like sudden geysers.

Just as Lillian sat down there came to her
table a short Irishman with an ageless face and round, absolutely fixed round
eyes. Their roundness and fixity gave his face an expression of extreme
innocence. He greeted her and asked her permission to sit down.

He wore white pants as the Mexicans did, a blue
shirt open at the neck, and Spanish rope shoes, and talked briefly in such a
monotone that it was difficult to hear what he said.

But his pockets were filled with small
fragments from excavations: heads, arms, legs, snakes, flutes, pottery of
various Indian origins. He would pull one of these objects out of his pocket
and hold it for inspection in the palm of his hand. And quietly he would tell
the history of the piece.

He never asked anyone to buy them, but if a
tourist asked: “Will you sell it?” he assented sadly, as if it belonged to a
private collection and he was only a courteous host.

Every time he saw Lillian he showed her one of
the pieces and taught her how to distinguish between the periods, by whether
the piece was clay or stone, by the slant of the eye, the headgear, the design
of the jewels, so that she began to know the history of Mexico.

O’Connor never talked of anything but the new
excavations he had attended, the history of the little fragments. And after
that he would fall into a tropical trance.

The theatrical scenes on the square sufficed
for his happiness—two sailors quarreling, lovers meeting, a Mexican family
celebrating their daughter’s winning of the Carnival beauty-queen contest, men
alone playing chess after dinner. He lived the life of others. Lillian could
see him watching these people until he
became
them. He sat in his chair
like a body empty of its spirit, and Lillian could sense him living the life of
the lovers, the life of the sailors.

She felt he would understand the story of the
prisoner and laugh with her at her gullibility. But he did not laugh. His eyes
for the first time lost their glassy fixity. They moistened with emotion.

“I wish I had been able to warn you… I never
imagined… To think you rescued the one prisoner who did not deserve it! I never
told you… When I’m not working with excavators and anthropologists I spend all
my time rescuing foreigners in trouble—a sailor who gets
nto
a brawl with a Mexican; a tourist whose car kills a donkey on the road. If they
are poor, or if they strike a native, the Mexicans are apt to forget them in
jail. This place is filled with people who don’t care what happens to others.
They have come here for pleasure. They are running away from burdens. There’s
something in the climate too. And now you… You went and rescued the one
prisoner who makes a profession of this, who shares with the guide what the
tourists give him, who lives on that, and then quickly returns to jail, to wait
for more.”

Lillian laughed again, irrepressibly.

“I’m glad you’re laughing. I guess I have taken
all this too seriously. It has seemed to me almost a matter of life and death,
to get all the prisoners out. I never quite understood it. Sometimes I forget
them for a few days, go on my expeditions, swim, travel. But always I return to
the jail, to the jailed.”

“When you’re so intent on freeing others, you
must be trying to free some part of yourself too.”

“I never gave it much thought…but the
desperation with which I work, the amount of time I spent on this, as if it
were a vice I had no control over… Opening jail doors, and searching for
fragments of vanished civilizations. Never thought what it might mean… You see,
I came here to forget myself. I had the illusion that if I engaged in
impersonal activities, I would get rid of myself somewhere. I felt that an
interest in the history of Mexico and salvaging prisoners meant I had abdicated
my personal life. “