Seduction of the Minotaur Read online

  1959

  Book V of CITIES OF THE INERIOR

  SOME VOYAGES HAVE THEIR INCEPTION in the blueprint of a dream, some in the urgency of contradicting a dream. Lillian’s recurrent dream of a ship that could not reach the water, that sailed laboriously, pushed by her with great effort, through city streets, had determined her course toward the sea, as if she would give this ship, once and for all, its proper sea bed.

  She had landed in the city of Golconda, where the sun painted everything with gold, the lining of her thoughts, the worn valises, the plain beetles, Golconda of the golden age, the golden aster, the golden eagle, the golden goose, the golden fleece, the golden robin, the goldenrod, the goldenseal, the golden warbler, the golden wattles, the golden wedding, and the gold fish, and the gold of pleasure, the goldstone, the gold thread, the fool’s gold.

  With her first swallow of air she inhaled a drug of forgetfulness well known to adventurers.

  Tropic, from the Greek, signified change and turning. So she changed and turned and was metamorphosed by the light and caressing heat into a spool of silk. Every movement she made from that moment on, even the carrying of her valise, was softened and pleasurable. Her nerves, of which she had always been sharply aware, had become instead strands from a spool of silk, spiraling through the muscles.

  “How long do you intend to stay?” asked the official. “How much money do you carry with you? In what currency? Do you have a return ticket?”

  You had to account for every move, arrival or exit. In the world there was a conspiracy against improvisation. It was only permitted in jazz.

  The guitars and the singing opened fire. Her skin blossomed and breathed. A heavy wave of perfume came down the jungle on the right, and a fine spray of waves came from the left. On the beach the natives swung in hammocks of reeds. The tender Mexican voices sang love songs which cradled and rocked the body as did the hammocks.

  Where she came from only jewels were placed in satin-lined, cushioned boxes, but here it was thoughts and memories which the air, the scents, and the music conspired to hypnotize by softness.

  But the airport official who asked cactus-pointed questions wore no shirt, nor did the porters, so that Lillian decided to be polite to the smoothest torso and show respect only to the strongest muscle.

  The absence of uniforms restored the dignity and importance of the body. They all looked untamed and free in their bare feet, as if they had assumed the duties of receiving the travelers only temporarily and would soon return to their hammocks, to swimming and singing. Work was one of the absurdities of existence. Don’t you think so, Senorita? said their laughing eyes while they appraised her from head to toe. They looked at her openly, intently, as children and animals do, with a physical vision, measuring only physical attributes, charm, aliveness, and not titles, possessions, or occupations. Their full, complete smile was not always answered by the foreigners, who blinked at such sudden warmth of smile as they did at the dazzling sun. Against the sun they wore dark glasses, but against these smiles and open naked glances they could only defend their privacy with a half-smile. Not Lillian. Her very full, rounded lips had always given such a smile. She could respond to this naked curiosity, naked interest, proximity. Thus animals and children stare, with their whole, concentrated attentiveness. The natives had not yet learned from the white man his inventions for traveling away from the present, his scientific capacity for analyzing warmth into a chemical substance, for abstracting human beings into symbols. The white man had invented glasses which made objects too near or too far, cameras, telescopes, spyglasses, objects which put glass between living and vision. It was the image he sought to possess, not the texture, the living warmth, the human closeness.

  The natives saw only the present. This communion of eyes and smiles was elating. Where Lillian came from people seemed intent on not seeing each other. Only children looked at her with this unashamed curiosity. Poor white man, wandering and lost in his proud possession of a dimension in which bodies became invisible to the naked eye, as if staring were an immodest act. Already she felt incarnated, in full possession of her own body because the porter was in full possession of his, and this concentration upon the present allowed no interruption or short circuits of the physical contact. When she turned away from the porter it was to find a smiling taxi driver who seemed to be saying: “I am not keen on going anywhere. It is just as good right here, right now…”

  He was scratching his luxuriant black hair, and he carried his wet bathing suit around his neck.

  The guitars kept up their musical fire. The beggars squatted around the airport. Blind or crippled, they smiled. The festivities of nature bathed them in gold and anesthetized their suffering.

  Clothes seemed ponderous and superfluous in the city of Golconda.

  Golconda was Lillian’s private name for this city which she wanted to rescue from the tourist-office posters and propaganda. Each one of us possesses in himself a separate and distinct city, a unique city, as we possess different aspects of the same person. She could not bear to love a city which thousands believed they knew intimately. Golconda was hers. True, it had been at first a pearl-fishing village. True, a Japanese ship had been wrecked here, slave ships had brought Africans, other ships delivered spices, and Spanish ships had brought the art of filigree, of lace making. A shipwrecked Spanish galley had scattered on the beach baptism dresses which the women of southern Mexico had adopted as headgear.

  The legend was that when the Japanese pearl divers had been driven away they had destroyed the pearl caches, and Golconda became a simple fishing village. Then the artists had come on donkeys and discovered the beauty of the place. They had been followed by the real-estate men and hotelkeepers. But none could destroy Golconda. Golconda remained a city where the wind was like velvet, where the sun was made of radium, and the sea as warm as a mother’s womb.

  The porters were deserting before all the baggage was distributed. They had earned enough, just enough for the day for food, beer, a swim, and enough to take a girl dancing, and they did not want any more. So the little boys of ten and twelve, who had been waiting for this opening, were seeking to carry bags bigger than themselves.

  The taxi driver, who was in no hurry to go anywhere in his dilapidated car, saw his car filling up, and decided it was time to put on his clean laundry-blue shirt.

  The three men who were to share the taxi with Lillian were already installed. Perhaps because they were in city clothes or perhaps because they were not smiling, they seemed to be the only subjects the sun could not illumine. The sea’s aluminum reflectors had even penetrated the old taxi and found among the cracked leather some stuffing which had come out of the seat and which the sun transformed into angel hair such as grows on Christmas trees.

  One of the men helped her into the car and introduced himself with Spanish colonial courtesy: “I am Doctor Hernandez.”

  He had the broad face she had seen in Mayan sculpture, the round high cheekbones, the aquiline nose, the full mouth slanting downward while the eyes slanted upward. His skin was a light olive which came from the mixture of Indian and Spanish blood. His smile was like the natives’, open and total, but it came less often and faded quickly, leaving a shadow over his face.

  She looked out the window to explore her new territory of pleasure. Everything was novel. The green of the foliage was not like any other greens: it was deeper, lacquered, and moist. The leaves were heavier, fuller, the flowers bigger. They seemed surcharged with sap, and more alive, as if they never had to close against the frost, or even a colder night. As if they had no need of sleep.

  The huts made of palm leaves recalled Africa. Some were pointed on top and on stilts. Others had slanting roofs, and t
he palm leaves extended far enough to create shadows all around the house.

  The lagoon on the left of the road showed a silver surface which sometimes turned to sepia. It was half filled with floating lagoon flowers. Trees and bushes seemed like new vegetation, also on stilts, dipping twistroots into the water as the reeds dipped their straight and flexible roots. Herons stood on one leg. Iguanas slithered away, and parrots became hysterically gay.

  Lillian’s eyes returned to the Doctor. His thoughts were elsewhere, so she looked at the American who had introduced himself as Hatcher. He was an engineer who had come to Mexico years before to build roads and bridges, and had remained and married a Mexican woman. He spoke perfect Spanish, and was a leathery-skinned man who had been baked by the sun as dark as the natives. The tropics had not relaxed his forward-juttingjaw and shoulders. He looked rigid, lean, hard-fleshed. His bare feet were in Mexican sandals, the soles made of discarded rubber tires. His shirt was open at the neck. But on him the negligent attire still seemed a uniform to conquer, rather than a way of submitting to, the tropics.

  “Golconda may seem beautiful to you, but it’s spoiled by tourism. I found a more beautiful place farther on. I had to hack my way to it. I have a beach where the sand isso white it hurts the eyes like a snow slope. I’m building a house. I come to Golconda once a week to shop. I have a jeep. If you like you can drive out with me for a visit. Unless, like most Americans, you have come here to drink and dance…”

  “I’m not free to drink and dance. I have to play every night with the jazz orchestra.”

  “Then you must be Lillian Beye,” said the passenger who had not yet spoken. He was a tall blond Austrian who spoke a harsh Spanish but with authority. “I’m the owner of the Black Pearl. I engaged you.”

  “Mr. Hansen?”

  He shook her hand without smiling. He was fair-skinned.

  The tropics had not been able to warm him or to melt the icicle-blue eyes.

  Lillian felt that these three men were somehow interfering with her own tasting of Golconda. They seemed intent on giving her an image of Golconda she did not want. The Doctor wanted her to notice only that the children were in need of care, the American wanted her to recoil from tourism, and the owner of the Black Pearl made the place seem like a night club.

  The taxi stopped for gasoline. An enormously fat American, unshaved for many days, rose from a hammock to wait on them.

  “Hello, Sam,” said Doctor Hernandez. “How is Maria? You didn’t bring her to me for her injection.”

  Sam shouted to a woman dimly visible inside the palm leaf shack. She came to the door. Her long black shawl was fastened to her shoulders and her baby was cradled in the folds of it as if inside a hammock.

  Sam repeated the Doctor’s question. She shrugged her shoulders: “No time,” she said and called: “Maria!”

  Maria came forward from a group of children, carrying a boat made out of a coconut shell. She was small for her age, delicately molded, like a miniature child, as Mexican children often are. In the eyes of most Mexican painters, these finely chiseled beings with small hands and feet and slender necks and waists become larger than nature, with the sinews and muscles of giants. Lillian saw them tender and fragile and neat. The Doctor saw them ill.

  The engineer said to Lillian: “Sam was sent here twenty years ago to build bridges and roads. He married a native. He does nothing but sleep and drink.”

  “It’s the tropics,” said Hansen.

  “You’ve never been to the Bowery,” said Lillian.

  “But in the tropics all white men fall apart.”

  “I’ve heard that but I never believed it. Any more than I believe all adventurers are doomed. I think such beliefs are merely an expression of fear, fear of expatriation, fear of adventure.”

  “I agree with you,” said the Doctor. “The white man who falls apart in the tropics is the same one who would fall apart anywhere. But in foreign lands they stand out more because they are few, and we notice them more.”

  “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 shephe
rds 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.