Seduction of the Minotaur coti-5 Read online

  The skins matched all the tones of chocolate, coffee, and wood. There were many white suits and dresses, and many of those flowered dresses which in the realm of printed dresses stand in the same relation as the old paintings of flowers and fruit done by maiden aunts to a Matisse, or a Braque. They had been unwilling to separate themselves from their daily fare in food, the daily appearance of a dining table.

  All the people she had seen in Golconda were there: taxi drivers, policemen, shopkeepers, truck drivers, life savers, beach photographers, lemon vendors, and the owner of the glass bottom boat. The men danced with the prostitutes of Golconda, and these were the girls Lillian had seen sewing quietly at windows, selling fruit at the market, and they brought to their evening profession the same lowered eyes, gentle voices, and passive quietude. They were dressed more enticingly, showed more shoulders and arms, but not provocatively. It was the men who drank and raised their voices. The policemen had tied their gun halters to their chairs.

  The natives danced in bare feet, and Lillian kicked off her sandals. The dirt floor was warm and dry, and just as the night she had danced on the beach with the sea licking her toes, she felt no interruption between the earth and her body as if the same sap and rhythm ran through both simultaneously: gold, green, watery, or fiery when you touched the core.

  Everyone spoke to Doctor Hernandez. Even tottering drunk, they bowed with respect.

  A singer was chanting the Mexican plainsong, a lamentation on the woes of passion. Tequila ran freely, sharpened by lemon and salt on the tongue. The voices grew husky and the figures blurred. The naked feet trampled the dirt, and the bodies lost their identities and flowed into a single dance, moved by one beat. The heat from the bowels of the earth warmed their feet.

  Doctor Hernandez frowned and said: “Lillian, put your sandals on!” His tone was protective; she knew he could justify this as a grave medical counsel. But she felt fiercely rebellious at anyone who might put an end to this magnetic connection with others, with the earth, and with the dance, and with the messages of sensuality passing between them.

  With Fred, too, whom she had once baptized “Christmas,” she was unaccountably angry. Because he looked pale and withdrawn, and because he was watching, not entering. He kept his shoes on, and not even the melodic jubilance of the singer could dissolve this peregrine, this foreign visitor. And then it was no longer Fred who sat there, spectator and fire extinguisher, but all those who had been an obstacle to her efforts to touch the fiery core.

  The plants which overflowed into the dance hall and brud the shoulders, uninvited guests from the jungle, the sharp stinging scent of tequila, the milk of cactus, the cries of the street like the cries of animals in the forest, bird, monkey, the burning eyes of the urchins watching through the leaves almost as phosphorescent as the eyes of wildcats; the water of the sewers running through the trench hissing like a fountain, the taxis throwing their headlights upon the dancers, beacons of a tumultuous sea of the senses, the perspiration on the shirt backs, the touch of toes more intimate than the touch of hands, the round tables seeming to turn like Ouija boards of censurable messages, every message a caress, all this orchestration of the effulgence of the tropics served to measure by contrast these moments of existence which did not bloom completely, moments lived dimly, conjunctions and fusions which did not take place.

  Larry and she had touched at one point, caught a glimpse of their undisguised self, but had not fused completely. Poor receptivity, poor connections, and at times no contact at all. Lillian knew now that it was an illusion that one lived in full possession of one’s body. It could slip away from one. She could see Fred achieving this by impermeability to the sensuality of the place and people.

  “Put your sandals on!” repeated Doctor Hernandez, and Lillian translated it: he wanted to protect her from promiscuity. That had been his role. She must defy him from causing more short circuits, more disconnections. And she must defy Fred, who, as in those dreams in which the identity is not clear, became all the ones who had not answered her love and particularly the first one, Gerard. When Fred danced with her, clumsily, soberly, she looked down at his boots as a sign of deliberate insulation, and she pushed him away and said: “Your shoes hurt me.”

  The time was past when her body could be ravished from her by visitations from the world of guilt. Such pleasurable sensations as a kiss on the inside of her arm, in the nook within the elbow, given by a stranger at a dance had been enough at one time to cause sudden departures. But no one could break now her feeling of oneness with Golconda. She had betrayed Larry with all the voluptuous textures, pungent smells, and with pleasure.

  The girls had noticed that Lillian would not dance with Fred, and they came to sit at his side. One of them wore a black satin dress with an edge of white lace which seemed like a petticoat making an indiscreet appearance. The other a shawl which was slipped off her shoulders constantly as by an invisible hand. One had the expression of a schoolgirl intent upon her work. Her hair was still damp from the beach, and hung straight down like a Tahitian’s. The other smiled and rested a fine-boned, delicate, small hand upon Fred’s knees. Then she leaned over and, still smiling, whispered in his ear a request which made the blood rush to Fred’s face, and his body stiffen with panic. The girl on his left, her small earrings trembling, and her medal of the Virgin engraved in blue lacquer which she held between her fingers like a cigarette, added: “The two of us? More exciting?”

  Fred threw a distressed glance at Lillian, who was laughing. One girl was kissing the lobe of his ear, and the other slipping her hand inside his shirt.

  “Lillian, help me.”

  He could not extricate himself. He had seen them at the beach selling shells, fish, lace. He had sen them entering the church, with black veils over their hair.

  Seeing the depth of his distress, Lillian said: “Let’s go swimming. It’s too hot to dance anymore.” It was true: their clothes were glued to their bodies, and their hair looked as if they had been swimming.

  The girls clung to Fred: “You stay,” they said.

  Lillian leaned over to them and said in Spanish: “Some other night. Tonight he feels he must stay with me.”

  Their hands fell off his shoulders.

  Now they were in a taxi, joggling over dirt roads.

  Fred did not know that during the evening he had lost his identity in Lillian’s eyes and become Gerard, her first defeat at the hands of passivity. A Gerard whose paralysis she now recognized and no longer desired. One could not lust for a wall, an obstacle, an inert mass, yet she had once been seduced by just such gentleness and passivity. It had calmed her fears. She did not know then what she knew now: it had been an encounter with a fear greater than her own. She could desire him violently (Gerard) because she had an instinctive knowledge that he would not respond. She could desire him without restraint (and even admire her own spontaneity) because the restraint was safely prearranged within him. She was free to desire, knowing that she would not be swept away into any fusion. It seemed absurd to say that one would refuse a glass of water when one was thirsty, but if this glass of water also represented all the dangers of love? When Lillian was sixteen or seventeen, fulfillment itself was the danger, love itself was the danger, a shared passion was slavery. She would be at the mercy of another human being. (Just as Fred now feared to be at the mercy of a woman.) Whereas by desiring someone who would not desire her, she could allow this fire to burn and feel: how alive I am! I am capable of desire. Poor Gerard, what a coward he is. He is afraid of life. It was not, as she thought, the pain of being alive she felt, but the pain of frustration.

  How elated she was now not to have been seduced by Fred’s mute pleadings and his retractions. How grateful to have discovered not a failed love affair, but the secret of that failure to lie in the choice of partner, a choice which came out of fear. So it was fear which had designed her life, and not desire or love.

  If they did not arrive too soon at the secret cove known only
to Doctor Hernandez, she would have time to make inevitable deductions. She and Larry had selected each other and each had played the role which kept their fears from overwhelming them. How could they pass judgment on each other for playing the role they had assigned to each other? You, Larry, must not change, or move, must represent fixed, unalterable love. You, Lillian, must change and move for both to sustain the myth of freedom.

  Fred was afraid of the night, afraid of Diana who was cooling her body by pulling her dress out away from her breasts, waving it before her like a fan. He was afraid of Lillian who was fanning her face with the edge of her cotton dress, exposing the lacy petticoat.

  The taxi left them at the top of the hill, and >

  Fred was afraid of the night, afraid his body would slip away from him, dissolve in that purple velvet with diamond eyes, the tropical night. The tropical night did not lie inert like a painted movie backdrop, but was filled with whisperings, and seemed to have arms like the foliage.

  Beauty was a drug. The small beach shone like mercury at their feet. They undressed in the rocks which formed a cavern. The waves absorbed the words; one only heard the laughter, or a name. Diana, painted by the moonlight, walked like a phosphorescent Venus into the waves. The oil lamps on the fishermen’s small boats trembled like candlelight. The neon lights softened by the haze threw beams on the bay like miniature searchlights.

  Fred was as troubled as if he had encountered the singing mermaids. He did not undress. Doctor Hernandez swam far out; he was familiar with every rock. Lillian and Edward stayed near the shore. The fatigue and the heat of the dance were washed away. The sea swung like a hammock. One could grow a new skin over the body. The undulations of the sea were like their breathing, as if the sea and the swimmers had but one lung.

  Out of the full beauty of the tropical night, the full moon, the full bloom of the stars, the full velvet of the night, a full woman might be born. No more scattered fragments of herself living separate cellular lives, living at times in the temporary homes of others’ lives.

  Fred stood further away, clinging to his locks and his clocks, to peripheries, islands, bridges. The taxi driver smoked a cigarette and was singing the melopee of love.

  Fred’s immobility, sitting by the rock, not sharing in the baptismal immersion, gave birth to an image of Larry’s absence of mobility. But as the psyche changes, it recreates semantics, and the word “fixity” had once been considered a virtue. It was this fixity she had summoned, needed, loved, because in her chaos and confusions, fixity was the symbol of immutability, eternity. An unchanging love. How unjust to change its meaning when this unchanging love had been the hot house in which she had been born as a woman. Was it possible to begin one’s life anew with a knowledge of what lay behind the charades one had created? Would she circumvent the masks they had donned, those she had pinned upon the face of Larry? She now knew her responsibility in the symbolic drama of their marriage.

  Lillian was journeying homeward. The detours of the labyrinth did not expose disillusion, but unexplored dimensions. Archeologists of the soul never returned empty-handed. Lillian had felt the existence of the labyrinth beneath her feet like the excavated passageways under Mexico City, but she had feared entering it and meeting the Minotaur who would devour her.

  Yet now that she had come face to face with it, the Minotaur resembled someone she knew. It was not a monster. It was a reflection upon a mirror, a masked woman, Lillian herself, the hidden masked part of herself unknown to her, who had ruled her acts. She extended her hand toward this tyrant who could no longer harm her. It lay upon the mirror of the plane’s round portholes, traveling through the clouds, a fleeting face, her own, clear and definable only when darkness came on.

  Even though the airplane was taking her back to White Plains after an engagement of three months in Golconda, a little girl of six running up and down the aisle of the plane carried her by a detour into the past, to a certain day in her childhood in Mexico, where her father, frustrated by enigmatic natives and elemental cataclysms, would come home to the one kingdom, at least, where his will was unquestioned. He would receive from the mother a report on the day. And no matter how mild she made this, how much she attenuated the children’s infractions, the father always found the cause enough to march them up to the top floor, an attic filled with dusty objects. And there, one by one, he spanked them.

  As the rest of the time he did not talk to them, nor play with them nor cuddle them, nor sing to them, nor read to them, as he acted in fact as if they were not there, this moment in the attic produced in Lillian two distinct emotions: one of humiliation, the other the pleasure of intimacy. As there were no other moments of intimacy with her father, Lillian began to regard the attic as a place which was both the scene of spankings but also of the only rite shared with her father. For years, in telling of it, she only stressed the injustice, the ignominy of it. She stressed how there came a day when she openly rebelled and frightened her father into giving up this punishment.

  But once in Paris, she strayed into an arcade and saw people watching penny movies with such delight and interest that she waited her turn and slipped a penny in a slot. A little movie scene appeared, awkward and jerky like the movies of the 1920s. A family sat at dinner, father (with a mustache), mother in a ruffled dress, and three children. The young and pretty maid was serving the soup. She was dressed in black. Her dress was very short. It revealed a white lace-edged petticoat, and she wore a butterfly of white lace on her hair. She spilled the soup on the father’s lap. The father rose in a fury and left the table to go and change his clothes. The maid had not only to help him change his clothes, but to atone for the accident.

  Lillian was about to leave, unmoved, amused, when the machine clicked and a new film began. The scene this time took place in a classroom. The students were little girls of six or seven (Lillian’s age when she was receiving the spankings). They were dressed in old-fashioned frilly and bouffant dresses. The teacher was angered by their mockeries and laughter, and asked them to come up, one by one, to be spanked (just as Lillian and her sisters and brothers were lined up and made to march up the stairs). At this scene Lillian’s heart began to beat wildly. She thought she was about to relive the pain and humiliation caused by their father.

  But when the teacher lifted up the little girl, stretched her across his knees, turned up her skirt, pulled down her panties, and began to spank her, what Lillian experienced after twenty years was not pain, but a flooding joy of sensual excitement. As if the spankings, while hurting her, had been at the same time the only caress she had known from her father. Pain had become inextricably mixed with joy at his presence, the distorted closeness had alchemized into pleasure. The rite, intended as a punishment, had become the only intimacy she had known, the only contact, a substitution of anger and tears in place of tenderness.

  She wanted to be in the little girl’s place!

  She hurried away from the arcade, trembling with joy, as if she were returning from an erotic adventure.

  Thus the real dictator, the organizer and director of her life, had been this quest for a chemical compound—so many ounces of pain mixed with so many ounces of pleasure in a formula known only to the unconscious. The failure lay in the enormous difference between the relationship she had needed, and the one she had, on a deeper level, more deeply wanted. The need was created out of an aggregate of negativities and deformations. When Lillian thought that in her relationship to Jay she was only in bondage to a passion, she was also in bondage to a need. When she thought her stays in Paris were directed entirely by a desire for Jay, they were in fact predetermined on those days in Mexico when she was six or seven years old.

  Not enough of that measure of pain had existed in her marriage to Larry.

  In the laboratories the scientists were trying to isolate the virus which might be the cause of cancer. Djuna believed one could isolate the virus which destroys love. But then there were outcries: that this would be the end of illusion, wh
en it was only the beginning! Lillian had learned from Djuna that each cell, once separated from the diseased one, was capable of new life.

  Erasing the grooves. It was not that Lillian had remained attached to the father, and incapable of other attachments. It was that the form of the relationship, the mold, had become a groove, the groove itself was familiar, her footsteps followed it habitually, unquestioningly, the familiar groove of pain and pleasure, of closeness at the cost of pain.

  Lillian remembered Djuna’s words: Man is not falling apart. He is undergoing a kind of fission, but I believe in those who are trying quietly to isolate the destructive cells, so that after fission each part is illumined and alive, waiting for a new fusion.

  Was this why Lillian had always wept at weddings? Had she known obscurely that each human being might lie wrapped in his self-created myth, in the first plaster cast made by his emotions. Static and unchangeable, each could move only in the grooves etched by the past.

  Jay had appeared at first as the bearer of joy. She had loved his complete union with the earth, his acceptance of the hungry, the greedy animal within himself. He lived with blinders on, seeking only pleasure, avoiding responsibilities and duties, swimming skillfully on the surface, enjoying, suspicious of depths, out in the world, preferring the many to the few, intoxication with life only, wherever it carried him, not faithful to individuals, or to ideas. Seeking the flow, the living moment only. Never looking back or looking into the future.

  His talk of violence suited her tumultuous nature. But then he had made love without violence, and then asked her: “Did you expect more brutality?” She did not know this man. The first room he had taken her to was shabby. He had said: “Look how worn the carpet is.” But all she could see was the golden glow, the sun behind the curtain. All she could hear were his words: “Lillian, your eyes are full of wonder. You expect a miracle every day.” His brown shirt hung behind the door, there was only one glass to drink from and a mountain of sketches and notebooks she was to song iut later, silk screen, and arrange into the famous Portfolio. He had no time to stop. There was too much to see in the streets. He had just discovered the Algerian street, with its smell of saffron, and the Algerian melopee issuing from dark medieval doorways.