Seduction of the Minotaur (8 page)

Neither one had seemed to make any movement
toward the other, but as if they had both been moving in the same sphere, at
the same altitude, with the same spectator’s detachment, they encountered each
other and continued to walk together. They did not keep their eyes fastened on
each other as the Mexican lovers did.

They both carried cameras, and they
methodically photographed everything. But as for themselves, it was as if they
agreed to reveal nothing of themselves by word or gesture.

Edward treated them casually, like walking
posters, like one-dimensional cut-outs. But Lillian believed their facade to be
a disguise like any other. “They’re just not acquainted with their own selves,”
she said.

“Will you introduce them?” asked Edward
ironically.

“But you know that’s a dangerous thing to do.
They wouldn’t recognize each other; they would treat me like a trespasser, and
their unrecognized selves like house breakers.”

“It is dangerous to confront people with an
image of themselves they do not wish to acknowledge.”

These words reawakened in her the sense of
danger and mystery she felt each time she saw Doctor Hernandez. She remembered
his saying: “I get bored with physical illness, which I have fought for fifteen
years. As an amateur detective of secret lives, I entertain myself.”

Another time he had said: “I’m fully aware, of
course, that you’ve thrown me off the scent by involving me in the secret lives
of all your friends in place of your own. But I will tell you one shocking
truth. It’s not the sun you’re basking in, it’s my people’s passivity and
fatalism. They believe the character of man cannot be altered or tampered with,
that man is nature, unpredictable, uncontrollable. They believe whatever he is
should be accepted along with poverty, illness, death. The concept of effort
and change is unknown. You are born poor, good or bad, or a genius, and you
live with that just as you live with your relatives.”

“Do people ever run amok in Golconda? As they
do in Bali or Africa, or the South Sea Islands?”

“Yes, they do. Because having based all their
lives on resignation, acceptance, humility, passivity, when they find
them selves
in a trap, they do not know how to defeat it;
they only know how to grab a revolver or a knife and kill.”

“No one searches for reasons, no one prods?”

“Except me. And I will be punished for it.
Whoever tampers with this empathy with animals, this osmosis with light, this
absence of thought, is always made the victim of people’s hatred of awareness.”

“You have anesthetics for physical pain. Why
not for anxiety, then?”

“Because they do not care.”

There was a masquerade dance on the Mexican
general’s yacht.

From its decks fireworks exploded into the bay,
and the rowboats which took the guests up to the ladder had to sail
courageously through a shower of comet tails.

The Mexican general was the only one who was
not disguised. He awaited his guests at the top of the ladder, greeted them
with an embrace; his circumference was so wide that all Lillian was able to
kiss in response to his embrace was one of the medals on his chest.

From behind masks, feathers, paint, spangles,
all Lillian could see at first were eyes, sea-eyes, animal-eyes, earth-eyes,
eyes of precious stones. Fixed, mobile, fluid, some were easily caught by a
stare, others escaped all but a fleeting spark.

Lillian recognized the Doctor only when he
spoke. He was costumed as an Aztec warrior, face and body painted, and he was
carrying a sharp-pointed lance, with sharp arrows slung across his ck. It was
his turn to inflict deep wounds, like those he was weary of healing. That night
his appearance forbade all women to rest their heads upon his shoulder and
confess their difficulties. Before they crumpled into wailing children, he
would challenge the potential mistress.

When Diana arrived with Christmas walking in
her shadow, the Doctor said: “When patients suffer from malnutrition of the
senses, I send them to Diana.”

Diana, her head emerging from the empty picture
frame, wearing a violet face mask and her hair covered with sea weed, was
dancing with Christmas.

Christmas was dressed quite fittingly, as a man
from another planet, but such affirmation of distance did not discourage Diana.
She kissed him, and the frame fell around both their shoulders like a life belt
to keep them afloat on the unfamiliar sea of the senses, its swell heightened
by the jazz and the fireworks.

A couple was leaning over the railing, and
Lillian could hear the woman say: “Even if you don’t mean it, just for tonight,
say you love me. I won’t ever remind you of it; I will not see you again, but
just for tonight say you love me, say you love me.”

Would such a guarantee of freedom from
responsibility make of any man a lover and a poet? Bring about a lyrical
confession? In the green flare of a fireworks fountain, Lillian saw that the
man hesitated to create illusion even for one night, and she thought, “He
should have been disguised as the greatest of all misers!”

The woman in quest of illusion disappeared
among the dancers.

Everyone was already dancing the intricate
patterns of the mambo, which not only set bodies in motion but generated words
which would not have been said without such propulsions.

The Doctor was transformed by his disguise;
Lillian was astonished to watch him in the role of ruthless lover who would
deal only in wounds in the war of love, none of the consolations. He had
separated Diana from Christmas with some ironic remarks, and caused another
woman to sit alone among the cordage piled in circles on the deck like sleeping
anacondas.

It was not only the champagne Lillian drank, it
was the softness of the night so palpable that when she opened her mouth she
felt as if she had swallowed some of it: it descended into her arteries like a
new drug not yet discovered by the alchemists. She swallowed the softness, and
then swallowed the showers of light from the fireworks too, and felt illumined
by them. It was not only the champagne, but the merry cries of the native boys
diving for silver pieces around the yacht, and then climbing on the anchor
chain to watch the festivities.

There were many
Golcondas
—one
above the horizon, dark hills wearing necklaces of shivering lights, one
reflected on the satin-surfaced bay, one of oil lamps from the native huts, one
of
candlelights
, one of cold neon lights, the neon
cross on the church, the neon eyes of the future, without warmth at all—but all
of them looked equally beautiful when their reflections fell into the water.

Doctor Hernandez was dancing with a woman who
reminded n of Man Ray’s painting of a mouth: a giant mouth that took up all of
the canvas. The young man the woman had discarded in order to dance with the
Doctor seemed disoriented. Lillian noticed his pallor. Drunkenness? Sorrow?
Jealousy? Loneliness?

She said to him: “Do you remember in all the
Coney Islands of the world a slippery turntable on which we all tried to sit?
As it turned more swiftly people could no longer hold onto the highly waxed
surface and they slid off.”

“The secret is to spit on your hands.”

“Then let’s both spit on our hands right now,”
she said, and the manner in which he compressed his mouth made her fear he
would be angry. “We both slipped off at the same moment.”

His smile was so forced that it came as a
grimace. The cries of the diving boys, the narcotic lights, the carnival of
fireworks and dancing feet, no longer reached them, and they recognized the
similarity of their mood.

“Every now and then, at a party, in the middle
of living, I get this feeling that I have slipped off,” she said, “that I am
becalmed, that I have struck a snag… I don’t know how to put it.”

“I have that feeling all the time, not now and
then. How would you like to escape altogether? I have a beautiful house in an
ancient city, only four hours from here. My name is Michael Lomax. I know your
name, I have heard you play.”

In the jeep she fell asleep. She dreamed of a
native guide with a brown naked torso, who stood at the entrance to an Aztec
tomb. Holding a machete, he said: “Would you like to visit the tomb?”

She was about to refuse his invitation when she
awakened because the jeep was acting like a camel on the rough road. She heard
the hissing of the sea.

“How old are you, Michael?”

He laughed at this: “I’m twenty-nine and you’re
about thirty, so you need not use such a protective tone.”

“Adolescence is like cactus,” she said, and
fell asleep again.

And she began dreaming of a Chirico painting:
endless vistas of ruined columns and ghostly figures either too large, like
ancient Greek statues, or too small as they sometimes appeared in dreams.

But she was not dreaming. She was awake and
driving at dawn through the cobblestones of an ancient city.

Not a single house complete. The ruins of a
once sumptuous baroque architecture, still buried in the silence it had been in
since the volcano had erupted and half buried it in ashes and lava.

The immobility of the people, the absence of
wind, gave it a static quality.

The Indians lived behind the scarred walls
quietly, like mourners of an ancient splendor. The lie of each family took
place in an inner patio, and, as they kept the shutters closed on the street
side, the city had the deserted aspect of a ghost town.

Rows of columns no longer supporting roofs,
churches open to a vaulted sky, a coliseum’s empty seats watching in the arena
the spectacle of mutilated statues toppled by the victorious lava. A convent
without doors, the nun’s cells, prisons, secret stairways exposed.

“Here is my house,” said Michael. “It was once
a convent attached to the church. The church, by the way, is an historic
monument, what’s left of it.”

They crossed the inner patio with its music of
fountains and entered a high-ceilinged white stucco room. Dark wood beams,
blood-red curtains, and wrought-iron grilles on the windows gave the dramatic
contrasts which are the essence of Spanish life, a conflict between austerity
and passion, poetry and discipline. The high walls gave purity and elevation,
the rich, voluptuous, red primitive ardor; dark wood gave the somber
nobilities; the iron grilles symbolized the separation from the world which
made individuality grow intensely as it did not grow when all barriers of
quality and evaluations were removed.

The church bells tolled persistently although
there was no ritual to be attended, as if calling day and night to the natives
buried by the volcano’s eruption years before.

Walking through the muted streets of the place
with Michael, Lillian wondered how the Spaniards and the Mayans now lived
quietly welded, with no sign of their past warring visible to the outsider.
Whatever opposition remained was so subtle and indirect that neither Spaniards
nor visitors were aware of it. Michael repeated many times: “The Indians are
the most stubborn people.”

In the dark, slumbering eyes, white people
could never find a flicker of approbation. The Indians expressed no open
hostility, merely silence whenever white people approached them, and their
glazed obsidian eyes had the power of reflecting without revelation of
feelings, as if they had themselves become their black lacquered pottery. White
people would explain how they wanted a meal cooked, a house built, a dress made.
In the Indian eyes there was a complete lack of adhesion, in their smiles a
subtle mockery of the freakish ways of all visitors, ancient or modern. The
Indians would work for these visitors, but disregard their eccentricity and
disobey them with what appeared to be ignorance or lack of understanding, but
which was in reality an enormous passive resistance to change, which enabled
them to preserve their way of life against all outside influences.

The Catholic church bells continued to toll,
but in the eyes of the Indians this was merely another external form to be
adopted and mysteriously, indefinably mocked. On feast days they mixed totem
poles and saint’s statues, Catholic incense and Indian perfumes, the Catholic
wafer and Mayan magic foods. They enjoyed the chanting, the organ and
candlelight, the lace and brocades; they played with pictures of the saints and
at the same time with Indian bone necklaces.

The silence of the ancient city was so
noticeable and palpable that it disturbed Lillian. She did not know at first
what caused it. It hung over her head like suspense itself, as menacing as the
unfamiliar noises in the jungle she had crossed on the way.

She wondered what attracted Michael to living
here among ruins. It was a city rendered into poetry by its recession into the
past, as cities are rendered into poetry by the painters because of the
elements left out, allowing each spectator to fill in the spaces for himself.
The missing elements of the half-empty canvas were important because they were
the only spaces in which human imagination could draw its own inferences, its
own architecture from its private myths, its streets and personages from a
private world.