Seduction of the Minotaur coti-5 Page 14
Lillian had at first misinterpreted his silences. He communicated only with children, and with animals. His absences (if only I knew where he was when he was gone) distressed her. Never knowing until later that, as a measure of safety he had sought periphery, the region of no-pain, where human beings could not reach him.
The first betrayal had thrust him into space to rotate at a certain distance from the source and origin of the first collision.
Lillian calculated the effect of his not having been wanted. The effect of adopting a family and then being betrayed. The atmosphere of gaiety and freedom was altered. When the Negro shack was accidentally destroyed by fire he had no regrets. When he was made to sail away from the Brazilian planet to England, he was sullen. The parents had decided he could not grow up into a native “savage.” He needed discipline. Larry already preferred drumming to sixteenth-century English songs. He liked the stamping of bare feet more than the waltzing of high heels and patent leather shoes. He liked vivid pinks, not his mother’s colorless dresses. He liked time for dreaming, not his father’s tightly filled days.
He entered a cold atmosphere of discipline and puritanism. His mother’s sister held the watch now, and also a whip. Every infraction was severely punished. The long walk to school was timed. The purchase of a water pistol was a crime. Pulling a little girl’s hair or pushing her down on the grass was a crime. And as for the mystery of where her legs started and asking if inside the bouffant dress there was a corolla as in the heart of a poppy… Whatever food she served had no taste, because she imposed it. She measured and enforced time and appetite, just as she commanded the flowers to bloom at a certain date.
Larry disappeared behind a facade of obedience. There was a Sea of Tranquility on the moon. Larry lived there. There were no ruffles on the surface. Outwardly he conformed until his marriage to Lillian. Lillian having spent her childhood in Mexico, seemed to be a messenger from the happier days of Brazil.
“The relative smoothness of the lunar surface poses a question.”
Much of men’s energies were being spent on such questions, Lillian’s on the formation of Larry’s character. Their minds were fixed on space; hers on the convolutions of Larry’s feelings.
Her vehement presence became the magnet. She summoned him back from solitude. She was curious about his feelings, about his silences, about his retractions. His mother’s first wish that he should not exist at all was pitted against Lillian’s wish that he exist in a more vivid and heightened way. She made a game of his retreats, pretended to discover his “caves.” He was truly born in her warmth and her conviction of his existence.
How slender was the form he offered to the world’s vision, how slender a slice of his self, a thin sliver of an eighth of the moon on certain nights. She was not deceived as to the dangers of another eclipse. She could hear, as you hear in musique concrete, the echo in vast space which corresponds to new dimensions in science, the echo which was never heard in classical music.
Lillian felt that in the husband playing the role of husband, in the scientist playing his role of scientist, in the father playing his role of father, there was always the danger of detachment. He had to be maintained on the ground, given a body. She breathed, laughed, stirred, and was tumultuous him. Together they moved as one living body and Larry was passionately willed into being born, this time permanently. Larry, Larry, what can I bring you? Intimacy with the world? She was on intimate terms with the world. While he maintained a world in which Lillian was the only inhabitant, or at least the reigning one.
Such obsession with reaching the moon, because they had failed to reach each other, each a solitary planet! In silence, in mystery, a human being was formed, was exploded, was struck by other passing bodies, was burned, was deserted. And then it was born in the molten love of the one who cared.
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