Seduction of the Minotaur Read online

  In front of it was a long tile terrace with a hemp hammock strung across it. The room inside had whitewashed walls and contained only a bed, a table, and a chair. Parasoling over the cottage was a giant tree which bore leaves shaped like fans. The encounter of the setting sun and rising moon had combined to paint everything in the changing colors of mercury.

  As Lillian opened a bureau drawer, a mouse that had been making a nest of magnolia petals suddenly fled.

  She showered and dressed hastily, feeling that perhaps the beauty and velvety softness of the night might not last, that if she delayed it would change to coldness and harshness. She put on the only dress she had that matched the bright flowers, an orange cotton. Then she opened the screen door. The night lay unchanged, serene, filled with tropical whisperings, as if leaves, birds, and sea breezes possessed musicalities unknown to northern countries, as if the richness of the scents kept them all intently alive.

  The tiles under her bare feet were warm. The perfume she had sprayed on herself evaporated before the stronger perfumes of carnation and honeysuckle.

  She walked back to the wide terrace where people sat on deck chairs waiting for each other and for dinner.

  The expanse of sky was like an infinite canvas on which human beings were incapable of projecting images from their human life because they would seem out of scale and absurd.

  Lillian felt that nature was so powerful it absorbed her into itself. It was a drug for forgetting. People seemed warmer and nearer, as the stars seemed nearer and the moon warmer.

  The sea’s orchestration carried away half the spoken words and made talking and laughing seem a mere casual accompaniment, like the sound of birds. Words had no weight. The intensity of the colors made them float in space like balloons, and the velvet texture of the climate gave them a purely decorative quality like no other flowers. They had no abstract meaning, being received by the senses which only recognized touch, smell, and vision, so that these people sitting in their chairs became a part of a vivid animated mural. A brown shoulder emerging from a white dress, the limpidity of a smile in a tanned face, the muscular tension of a brown leg, seemed more eloquent than the voices.

  This is an exaggerated spectacle, thought Lillian, and it makes me comfortable. I was always an exaggerated character because I was trying to create all by myself a climate which suited me, bigger flowers, warmer words, more fervent relationships, but here nature does it for me, creates the climate I need within myself, and I can be languid and at rest. It is a drug…a drug…

  Why were so many people fearful of the tropics? “All adventurers came to grief.” Perhaps they had not been able to make the transition, to alchemize the life of the mind into the life of the senses. They died when their minds were overpowered by nature, yet they did not hesitate to dilute it in alcohol.

  Even while Golconda lulled her, she was aware of several mysteries entering her reverie. One she called the sorrows of Doctor Hernandez. The other was why do exiles come to a bad end (if they did, of which she was not sure). From where she sat, she saw the Doctor arrive with his professional valise. But this burden he deposited at the hotel desk, and then he walked toward Lillian as if he had been seeking her.

  “You haven’t had dinner yet? Come and have it with me. We’ll have it in the Black Pearl, so you will become familiar with the place where you are going to play every night.”

  The Black Pearl had been built of driftwood. It was a series of terraces overhanging the sea. Red ship lanterns illumined a jazz band playing for a few dancers.

  Because the hiss of the sea carried away some of the overtones, the main drum beat seemed more emphatic, like a giant heart pulsing. The more volatile cadences, the ironic notes, the lyrical half-sobs of the trombone rose like sea spray and were lost. As if the instrumentalists knew this, they repeated their climbs up invisible antennae into vast spaces of volatile joys and shrank the sorrows by speed and flight, decanting all the essences, and leaving always at the bottom the blood beat of the drums.

  The Doctor was watching her face. “Did I frighten you with all my talk about sickness?”

  “No, Doctor Hernandez, illness does not frighten me. Not physical illness. The one that does is unknown in Golconda. And I’m a convalescent. And in any case, it’s one which does not inspire sympathy.” Her words had been spoken lightly, but they caused the Doctor’s smooth face to wrinkle with anxiety. Anxiety? Fear? She could not read his face. It had the Indian sculptural immobility. Even when the skin wrinkled with some spasm of pain, the eyes revealed nothing, and the mouth was not altered.

  She felt compelled to ask: “Are you unhappy? Are you in trouble?”

  She knew it was dangerous to question those who were accustomed to doing the questioning, to being depended on (and well did Lillian know that those who were in the position of consolers, guides, healers, felt uncomfortable in any reversal), but she took the risk.

  He answered, laughing: “No, I’m not, but if being unhappy would arouse your interest, I’m willing to be. It was tactless of me to speak of illness in this place created for pleasure. I nearly spoiled your pleasure. And I can see you are one who has not had too much of it, one of the underprivileged of pleasure! Those who have too much nauseate me. I don’t know why. I’m glad when they get dysentery or serious sunburns. It is as if I believed in an even distribution of pleasure. Now you, for instance, have a right to some…not having had very much.”

  “I didn’t realize it was so apparent.”

  “It is not so apparent. Permit me to say I am unusually astute. Diagnostic habit. You appear free and undamaged, vital and without wounds.”

  “Diagnostic clairvoyance, then?”

  “Yes. But here comes our professional purveyor of pleasure. He may be more beneficent for you.”

  Hansen sat down beside them and began to draw on the tablecloth. “I’m going to add another terrace, then I will floodlight the trees and the divers. I will also have a light around the statue of the Virgin so that everyone can see the boys praying before they dive.” His glance was cold, managerial. The sea, the night, the divers were all, in his eyes, properties of the night club. The ancient custom of praying before diving one hundred feet into a narrow rocky gorge was going to become a part of the entertainment.

  Lillian turned her face away from him, and listened to the jazz.

  Jazz was the music of the body. The breath came through aluminum and copper tubes, it was the body’s breath, and the strings’ wails and moans were echoes of the body’s music. It was the body’s vibrations which rippled from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme known to the musicians alone was like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others only peripheral improvisations. The plots, and themes of the music, like the plots and themes of our life, never alchemized into words, existed only in a state of music, stirring or numbing, exalting or despairing, but never named.

  When she turned her face unwillingly towards Hansen, he was gone, and then she looked at the Doctor and said: “This is a drugging place…”

  “There are so many kinds of drugs. One for remembering and one for forgetting. Golconda is for forgetting. But it is not a permanent forgetting. We may seem to forget a person, a place, a state of being, a past life, but meanwhile what we are doing is selecting a new cast for the reproduction of the same drama, seeking the closest reproduction to the friend, the lover, or the husband we are striving to forget. And one day we open our eyes, and there we are caught in the same pattern, repeating the same story. How could it be otherwise? The design comes from within us. It is internal.”

  There were tears in Lillian’s eyes, for having made friends immediately not with a new, a beautiful, a drugging place, but with a man intent on penetrating the mysteries of the human labyrinth from which she was a fugitive. She was almost angered by his persistence. A man should respect one’s desire to have no past. But even more damaging was his conviction that we live by a series of repetitions until the experience is solved, unde
rstood, liquidated…

  “You will never rest until you have discovered the familiar within the unfamiliar. You will go around as these tourists do, searching for flavors which remind you of home, begging for Coca-Cola instead of tequila, cereal foods instead of papaya. Then the drug will wear off. You will discover that barring a few divergences in skin tone, or mores, or language, you are still related to the same kind of person because it all comes from within you, you are the one fabricating the web.”

  Other people were dancing around them, so obedient to the rhythms that they seemed like algae in the water, welded to each other, and swaying, the coloredskirts billowing, the white suits like frames to support the flower arrangements made by the women’s dresses, their hair, their jewels, their lacquered nails. The wind sought to carry them away from the orchestra, but they remained in its encirclement of sound like Japanese kites moved by strings from the instruments.

  Lillian asked for another drink. But as she drank it, she knew that one of the drops of the Doctor’s clairvoyance had fallen into her glass, that a part of what he had said was already proved true. The first friend she had made in Golconda, choosing him in preference to the engineer and the nightclub manager, resembled, at least in his role, a personage she had known who was nicknamed “The Lie Detector”; for many months this man had lived among a group of artists extracting complete confessions from them without effort and subtly changing the course of their lives.

  Not to yield to the Doctor’s challenge, she brusquely turned the spotlight on him: “Are you engaged in such a repetition now, with me? Have you left anyone behind?”

  “My wife hates this place,” said the Doctor simply. “She comes here rarely. She stays in Mexico City most of the time, on the excuse that the children must go to good schools. She is jealous of my patients, and says they are not really ill, that they pretend to be. And in this she is right. Tourists in strange countries are easily frightened. More frightened of strangeness. They call me to reassure themselves that they will not succumb to the poison of strangeness, to unfamiliar foods, exotic flavors, or the bite of an unfamiliar insect. They do call me for trivial reasons, often out of fear. But is fear trivial? And my native patients do need me desperately… I bui beautiful house for my wife. But I cannot keep her here. And I love this place, the people. Everything I have created is here. The hospital is my work. And if I leave, the drug traffic will run wild. I have been able to control it.”

  Lillian no longer resented the Doctor’s probings. He was suffering, and it was this which made him so aware of others’ difficulties.

  “That’s a very painful conflict, and not easily solved,” she said. She wanted to say more, but she was stopped by a messenger boy with bare feet, who had come to fetch the Doctor on an emergency case.

  Lillian and the Doctor sat in a hand-carved canoe. The pressure of the human hand on the knife had made uneven indentations in the scooped-out tree trunk which caught the light like the scallops of the sea shell. The sun on the high rims of these declivities and the shadows within their valleys gave the canoe a stippled surface like that of an impressionist painting, made it seem a multitude of spots moving forward on the water in ripples of changeable colors and textures.

  The fisherman was paddling it quietly through the varied colors of the lagoon water, colors that ranged from the dark sepia of the red earth bottom to silver grey when the colors of the bushes triumphed over the earth, to gold when the sun conquered them both, to purple in the shadows.

  He paddled with one arm. His other had been blown off when he was a young fisherman of seventeen first learning the use of dynamite sticks for fishing.

  The canoe had once been painted in laundry blue. This blue had faded and become like the smoky blue of old Mayan murals, a blue which man could not create, only time.

  The lagoon trees showed their naked roots, as though on stilts, an intricate maze of silver roots as fluent below as they were interlaced above, and overhung, casting shadows before the bow of the canoe so dense that Lillian could scarcely believe they would open and divide to let them through.

  Emerald sprays and fronds projected from a mass of wasp nests, of pendant vines and lianas. Above her head the branches formed metallic green parabolas and enameled pennants, while the canoe and her body accomplished the magical feat of cutting smoothly through the roots and dense tangles.

  The boat undulated the aquatic plants and the grasses that bore long plumes, and traveled through reflections of the clouds. The absence of visible earth made Lillian feel as if the forest were afloat, an archipelago of green vapors.

  The snowy herons, the shell-pink flamingos meditated upon one leg like yogis of the animal world.

  Now and then she saw a single habitation by the waterside, an ephemeral hut of palm leaves wading on frail stilts and a canoe tied to a toy-sized jetty. Before each hut, watching Lillian and the Doctor float by would be a smiling woman and several naked children. They stood against a backdrop of impenetrable foliage, as if the jungle allowed them, along with the butterflies, dragonflies, praying mantises, beetles, and parrots, to occupy only its fringe. The exposed giant roots of the trees made the children seem to be standing between the toes of Gulliver’s feet.

  Once when the earth showed itself on the right bank, Lillian saw on the mud the tracks of a crocodile that had come to quench his thirst. The scaly carapaces of the iguanas were colored so exactly like the ashen roots and tree trunks that she could not spot them until they moved. When they did not move they lay as still as stones in the sun, as if petrified.

  The canoe pushed languid water lettuce out of the way, and water orchids, magnolias, and giant clover leaves.

  A flowing journey, a contradiction to the persistent dream from which Lillian sought to liberate herself. The dream of a boat, sometimes large and sometimes small, but invariably caught in a waterless place, in a street, in the jungle, in the desert. When it was large it was in city streets, and the deck reached to the upper windows of the houses. She was in this boat and aware that it could not float unless it were pushed, so she would get down from it and seek to push it along so that it might move and finally reach water. The effort of pushing the boat along the street was immense, and she never accomplished her aim. Whether she pushed it along cobblestones or over asphalt, it moved very little, and no matter how much she strained she always felt she would never reach the sea. When the boat was small the pushing was less difficult; nevertheless she never reached the lake or river or the sea in which it could sail. Once the boat was stuck between rocks, another time on a mud bank.

  Today she was fully aware that the dream of pushing the boat through waterless streets was ended. In Golconda she had attained a flowing life, a flowing journey. It was not only the presence of water, but the natives’ flowing rhythm: they never became caught in the past, or stagnated while awaiting the future. Like children, they lived completely in the present.

  She had read that certain Egyptian rulers had believed that after death they would join a celestial caravan in an eternal journey toward the sun. Scientists had found two solar barques, which they recognized from ancient texts and mortuary paintings, in a subterranean chamber of limestone. The chamber was so well sealed that no air, dust, or cobwebs had been found in it. There were always two such barques—one for the night’s journey toward the moon, one for the day’s journey toward the sun.

  In dreams one perpetuated these journeys in solar barques. And in dreams, too, there were always two: one buried in limestone and unable to float on the waterless routes of anxiety, the other flowing continuously with life. The static one made the voyage of memories, and the floating one proceeded into endless discoveries.

  This canoe, thought Lillian, as she dipped her hand into the lagoon water, was to be her solar barque, magnetized by sun and water, gyrating and flowing, without strain or effort.

  The Doctor’s thoughts had also been wandering through other places. Mexico City, where his wife was? His three small children?
His past? His medical studies in Paris and in New York? His first book of poems, published when he was twenty years old?

  Lillian smiled at him as if saying, you too have taken a secret into the past.

  Simultaneously they returned to the present.

  Lillian said: “There is a quality in this place which does not come altogether from its beauty. What is it? Is it the softness which annihilates all thought and lulls the body for enjoyment? Is it the continuity of music which prevents thoughts from arresting the flow of life? I have seen other trees, other rivers; they did not have the power to intoxicate the senses. Do you feel this? Does everyone feel this? Is this what kept South Seas travelers from ever returning home?”

  “It does not affect everyone in the same way,” said the Doctor with bitterness in his voice, and Lillian realized he was thinking of his wife.

  Was this the mystery in Doctor Hernandez’s life? A wife he could not win over to the city he liked, the life he loved?

  She waited for him to say more. But he was silent, and his face had become placid again.

  Her hand, which she had left in the waters of the lagoon to feel the gliding, the uninterrupted gentleness of the flowing, to assure herself of this union with a living current, she now felt she must lift, to prove to the Doctor that she shared his anxiety, and that his sadness affected her. She must surrender the pleasure of touching the flow of water, as if she were touching the flow of life within her, out of sympathy for his anguish.

  As she lifted her hand and waited for the drops of water to finish dripping from it, a shot was heard, and water spattered over her. They all three sat still, stunned.

  “Hunters?” she asked. She wanted to stand up and shout and wave so the hunters would know they were there.

  The Doctor answered quietly: “They were not hunters. It was not a mistake. They intended to shoot me, but they missed.”

  “But why? Why? You’re the most needed, the most loved man here!”