Seduction of the Minotaur (7 page)

“Does it disturb you so much to think that
perhaps your apparently impersonal activities actually represent a personal
drama in which you yourself are involved? That you are merely re-enacting your
intimate drama through others, expressing it through others?”

“Yes, it does disturb me. It makes me feel I
have failed to escape from myself. Yet I have known all along that I failed in
some way. Because I should have been content, alive, as people are when they
give of themselves. Instead I have often felt like a depersonalized ghost, a
man without a self, a zombie. It is not a good feeling. It’s like the old
stories about the man who lost his shadow.”

“You never abdicate the self, you merely find
new ways of manifesting its activities.”

“If you know what they mean, my two obsessions,
then tell me, I would rather know. I know I have been deceiving myself. Before
we began to talk tonight, when I first sat down with you, I thought to myself,
‘Now I will act like a dead man again, talk like a guide about my new pieces…
‘”

“We never cast off the self. It persists in
living through our impersonal activities. When it is in distress it seeks to
give messages through our activities.”

“Are you trying to say that I was one of the
prisoners myself?”

“Yes, I would say that at some time or other
you were in bondage, figuratively speaking, at least kept from doing what you
wanted to do; your freedom was tampered with.”

“Yes, it’s true.”

“And every time you can get one of those jail
doors open, you feel you are settling an account with some past jailer…or at
least trying to, as I tried today…”

“Very true. At fifteen I had such a passion for
archaeology that I ran away from home. I tried to get to Yucatan. The family
sent police after me, who caught me and brought me back. From then on they kept
me under watch.”

Then his look turned once more toward the
square, and he relinquished this expedition into his personal life. His eyes
became round again and fixed. He had no more to say.

Watching him, Lillian was reminded of the way
animals took on the immobility and the color of a tree’s bark or a bush so as
not to be detected. She smiled at him, but already he was far removed from the
present, the personal, as if he had never talked to her, or known her.

She felt that imprisonment had deprived him of
communication with his family, that it was his tongue he had lost then, a vital
fragment of himself, and that no matter how many statues he unearthed and
reconstructed, no matter how many fragments of history he reassembled, one part
of him was missing and might never be found.

The marimba players interrupted their playing
as if their instruments were a juke box that could not function without the
proper amount of nickels, and began to ask for contributions.

In the morning it was the intense radium shafts
of the sun on the seas that awakened her, penetrating the native hut. The dawns
were like court scenes of Arabian magnificence. The tent of the sky took fire,
a laminated coral, dispelling all the seashell delicacies which had preceded
the birth of the sun, and it was a duel between fire and platinum. The whole
sea would seem to have caught fire, until the incendiary dawn stopped burning.
After the fire came a rearrangement of more subtle brocades, the turquoise and
the coral separated, and transparencies appeared like curtains of the sheerest
sari textiles. The rest of the day might have seemed shabby after such an
opening, but not in Golconda. The dawn was merely the rain of colors from the
sky which the earth and the sea would orchestrate all day, with fruits,
flowers, and the dress of the natives. These were not merely spots of color,
but always vividly shining and humid, as shining as human eyes, colors as alive
as flesh tones.

Just as music was an unbroken chain in
Golconda, so were the synchronizations of color. Where the flowers ended their
jeweled displays, their pagan illuminated manuscripts, fruits took up the
gradations. Once or twice, her mouth full of fruit, she stopped. She had the
feeling that she was eating the dawn.

Lying in her hammock she could see both sea and
the sunlight, and the rocks below between the stellated, swaying palms. From there
too she could see the gardener at work with the tenderness which was the
highest quality of the Mexican, a quality which made him work not just for a
living, with indifference, but with a tenderness for the plants, a
caressingness
toward the buds, a swinging rhythm with the
rake which made work seem like an act of devotion.

Her day
wa
free until
it was time to play with the orchestra for the evening cocktails and dancing.

Before, she had had the feeling that
festivities began only with the evening, with the jazz musicians, but now she
saw that they began with the sun’s extravagance, and ended with a night which
never closed up the flowers, or put the gardens to sleep, or made the birds
hide their heads in their wings. The night came with such a softness that a new
kind of life blossomed. If one touched the sea at night, sparks of phosphorous
illuminated it, and sparkled under one’s step on the wet sand.

Sometimes, at the beach, the sea seemed not
like water but a pool of mercury, so iridescent, so clinging. Swimming on her
back, she could see the native musicians arrive, and she would swim ashore.

A guitarist, a violinist, a cellist, and a
singer would cluster around an umbrella. The singer sang with such sweetness
and tenderness that the hammocks stopped swaying. He enchanted not only the
bathers, but the other musicians as well, and the cellist would close his
heavy-lidded eyes and play with such a relaxed hand that his brown arm seemed
to be held up not by the weight of the hand on the bow, but by some miraculous
yogi means of suspension. The South Sea Island shirt seemed to contain no
nerves or muscles. The violinist played with one string missing, but as the sea
occasionally carried away a few of the notes anyway no one detected the
missingones
.

The waves, attracted by the music, would unroll
like a bolt of silk, each time a little closer to the musicians, and aim at
surrounding the peg of the cello dug deep into the sand. The cellist did not
seem to be looking at the waves, yet each
timethey
moved to encircle his cello, he had already lifted
itup
in midair and continued to play uninterruptedly while the waves washed his
feet, then retreated.

After the musicians came children carrying
baskets on their heads, selling fruit and fried fish. Then came the old
photographer with his old-fashioned accordion box camera, and a big black box
cover for his head. He was so neatly dressed, his mustache so smoothly combed
that he himself looked like an old photograph. Someone had touched up the old
photographer until he had become a black and white abstraction of old age.

Lillian did not enjoy being photographed, and
she sought to escape him by going for a swim. But he was a figure of endless
patience, and waited silently, compact, brittle, and straight. The wrinkles of
his face all ran upward, controlled by an almost perpetual smile. He was like
the old gardener, so ritualistic in his work, so stylized in his dignity, that
Lillian felt she owed him an apology: “I’m sorry I kept you waiting.”

“No harm done, no harm done,” he said gently,
as he proceeded to balance his camera on the sand, and just before disappearing
under the black cloth he said: “We all have much more time than we have life!”

Watching Lillian being photographed was Edward,
the ex-violinist with red hair and freckles who lived in a trailer on the
beach. His calendar of events was determined by his multiple marriages. “Oh,
the explosion of the yacht? That happened at the time of my second wife.” Or if
someone tried to recall when the American swimming champion had dived into the
rocks: “Oh that was four wives back!” The wives disappeared, but the children
remained. They were so deeply tanned it was difficult to distinguish them from
the native children. Edward worked at odd jobs: designing fabrics, tending
silver shops, or building a house for someone. At the time Lillian met him he
was distributing Coca-Cola calendars all over Mexico. To his own amazement, the
people loved them and hung them up on their walls. The last one, which he now
unrolled to create a stir among the bathers, was an interpretation of a Mayan
human sacrifice. The Yucatan pyramid was smaller than the woman, and the woman
who was about to be sacrificed looked like Gypsy Rose Lee. The shaved and lean
priest looked unequal to the task of annihilating such splendor of the body.
The active volcano on the right-hand side was the size of the sacrificial
virgin’s breast.

Tequila always brought out in Edward a total
repudiation of art. He was emphatic about the fact that he had deserted the
musical world of his own volition. “In this place music is not necessary.
Golconda is full of natural music, dance music, singing music, music for
living. The street vendors’ tunes are better than any modern composition. Life
itself is full of rhythm, people sing while they work. I don’t miss concerts or
my own violin at all!”

The second glass of tequila unleashed
reminiscences of concert halls, and the Museum of Modern Art, as if they had
been his residence prior to Golconda. With the third glass came a lecture on
the superfluity of art. “For example, here, with the lagoon, the jungle, you do
not need the collages of Max Ernst, his artificial lagoons and swamps. With the
deserts and sand dunes, the bleaching bones of cows and donkeys, there is no
need of Tanguy’s desert scenes and bleaching bones. And with the ruins of San
Miguel what need do we have of Chirico’s columns? I lack nothing here. Only a
wife willing to live on bananas and coconut milk.”

“When I felt cold,” said Lillian, “I used to go
to the Tropical Birds and Plants Department at Sears Roebuck. It was warm,
humid, and pungent. Or I would go to look at the tropical plants in the
Botanical Gardens. I was looking for Golconda then. I remember a palm tree
there which grew so tall, too tall for the glass dome, and I would watch it
pushing against the glass, wishing to grow beyond it and be free. I think of
this caged palm tree often while I watch the ones of Golconda sweeping the
skies.”

But at the third glass of tequila, Edward’s
talk grew less metallic, and his glance would fall on his left hand where a
finger was missing. Everyone knew, but he never mentioned it, that this was the
cause of his broken career as a violinist.

Everyone knew too that his children were loved,
nourished, and protected by all in Golconda. They had mysteriously accepted an
interchangeable mother, one with many faces and speaking many languages, but
for the moment it was Lillian they had adopted, as if they had sensed that in
her there was a groove for children, already formed, once used, familiar, and
which they found comfortable. And Lillian wondered at their insight, wondered
how they knew that she had once possessed, and lost, children of the same age.

How did they know she had already kissed such
freckles on the nose, such thin elbows, braided such tangled hair, and known
where to find missing shoes? It was not only that they allowed her
toy
the missing mother, but that they seemed intent on
filling an empty niche in her, on playing the missing children.

She and the children embraced each other with a
knowledge of substitution which added to their friendship, a familiarity the
children did not feel with their other temporary mothers.

To her alone they confessed their concern with
their father’s next choice of a wife. They examined each newcomer gravely,
weighing her qualifications. They had observed one infallible sign: “If she
loves us first,” they explained, “Father doesn’t like it. If she loves him
first, then she doesn’t want us around.”

An airline’s beauty queen arrived at the beach.
She walked and carried herself as if she knew she were on display and should
hold herself as still as possible, arranged for others’ eyes as if to allow
them to photograph her. The way she held herself and did not look at others made
her seem an image cut out of a poster which incited young men to go to war. A
surface
unblurred
, unruffled, no frown of thought to
mar the brow, she exposed herself to others’ eyes with no sign of recognition.
She neither transmitted nor received messages to and from the nerves and
senses. She walked toward others without emitting any vibrations of warmth or
cold. She was a plastic perfection of hair, skin, teeth, body, and form which
could not rust, or wrinkle, or cry. It was as if only synthetic elements had
been used to create her.

Edward’s children were uneasy with this girl
because they imagined their father would be spellbound by the perfect image she
presented, the clear blue eyes, the graceful hair, the flawless profile. But
soon she made her own choice of companion and it was the ex-Marine who had been
pensioned off for exposing himself voluntarily to an experiment with the atom
bomb, and had been damaged inside. No one dared to ask, or even to imagine the
nature of the injury. He himself was laconic: “I got damaged inside.” No injury
was apparent. He was tall, strong, and blond, with so rich a coloring he could
not take the sun. His blue eyes matched those of the American airline’s beauty
queen; both were untroubled and designed to be admired. He was reluctant to
tell his story, but when he drank he would admit: “I offered myself as a
volunteer to be stationed as close as possible…and I got damaged, that’s all.”