Seduction of the Minotaur coti-5 Read online

  The square was the heart of the town. The church opened its doors to it on one side. The other sides were lined with cafes, restaurants with their tables on the sidewalk, a movie house; in the center was a bandstand surrounded by a small park with benches.

  On the benches sat enraptured young lovers, tired hobos, men reading their newspapers while little boys shined their shoes. There was also a circle of vendors sitting on the sidewalk with their baskets full of candied fruit, colored fruit drinks, red and yellow cigarettes, and magazines. Old ladies with black shawls walked quietly in and out of the church, children begged, marimba players settled in front of each cafe and played as long as the pennies flowed. Singers stopped to sing. Little girls sold sea-shell necklaces and earrings. The prostitutes paraded in taffeta dresses with flowers in their black hair.

  The flow of beggars was endlessly varied. They changed their handicaps. When they tired of portraying blindness they suddenly appeared with wooden legs. The genuine ones were terrifying, like nightmare figures: a child, shriveled and shrunken, lying on a little table with wheels which he pushed with withered hands; an old woman so twisted she resembled the roots of a very ancient tree; many of them sightless, with festering sores in place of eyes. But they resisted all professional help, as Doctor Hernandez had told her. They refused to bppeared win out of the streets, from the spectacles of religious processions, Indian fireworks, band concerts, or the flow of visitors in their eccentric costumes.

  And among them now, sitting at a nearby table, was the American prisoner with the guide.

  From the heightened tones of their voices, the numerous empty bottles of tequila on the table Lillian knew to what cause her donation for freedom had been diverted. They were beyond recognizing her. Unfocused eyes, vague gestures, revealed a Coney Island of the mind, with the whirlings, the crack-the-whips, the dark chambers of surprises, the deforming mirrors, the jet-plane trips, the death-defying motorcycles of drunkenness. Tongues rubberized, their words came out on oiled rollers, their laughter like sudden geysers.

  Just as Lillian sat down there came to her table a short Irishman with an ageless face and round, absolutely fixed round eyes. Their roundness and fixity gave his face an expression of extreme innocence. He greeted her and asked her permission to sit down.

  He wore white pants as the Mexicans did, a blue shirt open at the neck, and Spanish rope shoes, and talked briefly in such a monotone that it was difficult to hear what he said.

  But his pockets were filled with small fragments from excavations: heads, arms, legs, snakes, flutes, pottery of various Indian origins. He would pull one of these objects out of his pocket and hold it for inspection in the palm of his hand. And quietly he would tell the history of the piece.

  He never asked anyone to buy them, but if a tourist asked: “Will you sell it?” he assented sadly, as if it belonged to a private collection and he was only a courteous host.

  Every time he saw Lillian he showed her one of the pieces and taught her how to distinguish between the periods, by whether the piece was clay or stone, by the slant of the eye, the headgear, the design of the jewels, so that she began to know the history of Mexico.

  O’Connor never talked of anything but the new excavations he had attended, the history of the little fragments. And after that he would fall into a tropical trance.

  The theatrical scenes on the square sufficed for his happiness—two sailors quarreling, lovers meeting, a Mexican family celebrating their daughter’s winning of the Carnival beauty-queen contest, men alone playing chess after dinner. He lived the life of others. Lillian could see him watching these people until he became them. He sat in his chair like a body empty of its spirit, and Lillian could sense him living the life of the lovers, the life of the sailors.

  She felt he would understand the story of the prisoner and laugh with her at her gullibility. But he did not laugh. His eyes for the first time lost their glassy fixity. They moistened with emotion.

  “I wish I had been able to warn you… I never imagined… To think you rescued the one prisoner who did not deserve it! I never told you… When I’m not working with excavators and anthropologists I spend all my time rescuing foreigners in trouble—a sailor who gets nto a brawl with a Mexican; a tourist whose car kills a donkey on the road. If they are poor, or if they strike a native, the Mexicans are apt to forget them in jail. This place is filled with people who don’t care what happens to others. They have come here for pleasure. They are running away from burdens. There’s something in the climate too. And now you… You went and rescued the one prisoner who makes a profession of this, who shares with the guide what the tourists give him, who lives on that, and then quickly returns to jail, to wait for more.”

  Lillian laughed again, irrepressibly.

  “I’m glad you’re laughing. I guess I have taken all this too seriously. It has seemed to me almost a matter of life and death, to get all the prisoners out. I never quite understood it. Sometimes I forget them for a few days, go on my expeditions, swim, travel. But always I return to the jail, to the jailed.”

  “When you’re so intent on freeing others, you must be trying to free some part of yourself too.”

  “I never gave it much thought…but the desperation with which I work, the amount of time I spent on this, as if it were a vice I had no control over… Opening jail doors, and searching for fragments of vanished civilizations. Never thought what it might mean… You see, I came here to forget myself. I had the illusion that if I engaged in impersonal activities, I would get rid of myself somewhere. I felt that an interest in the history of Mexico and salvaging prisoners meant I had abdicated my personal life. “

  “Does it disturb you so much to think that perhaps your apparently impersonal activities actually represent a personal drama in which you yourself are involved? That you are merely re-enacting your intimate drama through others, expressing it through others?”

  “Yes, it does disturb me. It makes me feel I have failed to escape from myself. Yet I have known all along that I failed in some way. Because I should have been content, alive, as people are when they give of themselves. Instead I have often felt like a depersonalized ghost, a man without a self, a zombie. It is not a good feeling. It’s like the old stories about the man who lost his shadow.”

  “You never abdicate the self, you merely find new ways of manifesting its activities.”

  “If you know what they mean, my two obsessions, then tell me, I would rather know. I know I have been deceiving myself. Before we began to talk tonight, when I first sat down with you, I thought to myself, ‘Now I will act like a dead man again, talk like a guide about my new pieces… ‘”

  “We never cast off the self. It persists in living through our impersonal activities. When it is in distress it seeks to give messages through our activities.”

  “Are you trying to say that I was one of the prisoners myself?”

  “Yes, I would say that at some time or other you were in bondage, figuratively speaking, at least kept from doing what you wanted to do; your freedom was tampered with.”

  “Yes, it’s true.”

  “And every time you can get one of those jail doors open, you feel you are settling an account with some past jailer…or at least trying to, as I tried today…”

  “Very true. At fifteen I had such a passion for archaeology that I ran away from home. I tried to get to Yucatan. The family sent police after me, who caught me and brought me back. From then on they kept me under watch.”

  Then his look turned once more toward the square, and he relinquished this expedition into his personal life. His eyes became round again and fixed. He had no more to say.

  Watching him, Lillian was reminded of the way animals took on the immobility and the color of a tree’s bark or a bush so as not to be detected. She smiled at him, but already he was far removed from the present, the personal, as if he had never talked to her, or known her.

  She felt that imprisonment had deprived him of communicatio
n with his family, that it was his tongue he had lost then, a vital fragment of himself, and that no matter how many statues he unearthed and reconstructed, no matter how many fragments of history he reassembled, one part of him was missing and might never be found.

  The marimba players interrupted their playing as if their instruments were a juke box that could not function without the proper amount of nickels, and began to ask for contributions.

  In the morning it was the intense radium shafts of the sun on the seas that awakened her, penetrating the native hut. The dawns were like court scenes of Arabian magnificence. The tent of the sky took fire, a laminated coral, dispelling all the seashell delicacies which had preceded the birth of the sun, and it was a duel between fire and platinum. The whole sea would seem to have caught fire, until the incendiary dawn stopped burning. After the fire came a rearrangement of more subtle brocades, the turquoise and the coral separated, and transparencies appeared like curtains of the sheerest sari textiles. The rest of the day might have seemed shabby after such an opening, but not in Golconda. The dawn was merely the rain of colors from the sky which the earth and the sea would orchestrate all day, with fruits, flowers, and the dress of the natives. These were not merely spots of color, but always vividly shining and humid, as shining as human eyes, colors as alive as flesh tones.

  Just as music was an unbroken chain in Golconda, so were the synchronizations of color. Where the flowers ended their jeweled displays, their pagan illuminated manuscripts, fruits took up the gradations. Once or twice, her mouth full of fruit, she stopped. She had the feeling that she was eating the dawn.

  Lying in her hammock she could see both sea and the sunlight, and the rocks below between the stellated, swaying palms. From there too she could see the gardener at work with the tenderness which was the highest quality of the Mexican, a quality which made him work not just for a living, with indifference, but with a tenderness for the plants, a caressingness toward the buds, a swinging rhythm with the rake which made work seem like an act of devotion.

  Her day wa free until it was time to play with the orchestra for the evening cocktails and dancing.

  Before, she had had the feeling that festivities began only with the evening, with the jazz musicians, but now she saw that they began with the sun’s extravagance, and ended with a night which never closed up the flowers, or put the gardens to sleep, or made the birds hide their heads in their wings. The night came with such a softness that a new kind of life blossomed. If one touched the sea at night, sparks of phosphorous illuminated it, and sparkled under one’s step on the wet sand.

  Sometimes, at the beach, the sea seemed not like water but a pool of mercury, so iridescent, so clinging. Swimming on her back, she could see the native musicians arrive, and she would swim ashore.

  A guitarist, a violinist, a cellist, and a singer would cluster around an umbrella. The singer sang with such sweetness and tenderness that the hammocks stopped swaying. He enchanted not only the bathers, but the other musicians as well, and the cellist would close his heavy-lidded eyes and play with such a relaxed hand that his brown arm seemed to be held up not by the weight of the hand on the bow, but by some miraculous yogi means of suspension. The South Sea Island shirt seemed to contain no nerves or muscles. The violinist played with one string missing, but as the sea occasionally carried away a few of the notes anyway no one detected the missingones.

  The waves, attracted by the music, would unroll like a bolt of silk, each time a little closer to the musicians, and aim at surrounding the peg of the cello dug deep into the sand. The cellist did not seem to be looking at the waves, yet each timethey moved to encircle his cello, he had already lifted itup in midair and continued to play uninterruptedly while the waves washed his feet, then retreated.

  After the musicians came children carrying baskets on their heads, selling fruit and fried fish. Then came the old photographer with his old-fashioned accordion box camera, and a big black box cover for his head. He was so neatly dressed, his mustache so smoothly combed that he himself looked like an old photograph. Someone had touched up the old photographer until he had become a black and white abstraction of old age.

  Lillian did not enjoy being photographed, and she sought to escape him by going for a swim. But he was a figure of endless patience, and waited silently, compact, brittle, and straight. The wrinkles of his face all ran upward, controlled by an almost perpetual smile. He was like the old gardener, so ritualistic in his work, so stylized in his dignity, that Lillian felt she owed him an apology: “I’m sorry I kept you waiting.”

  “No harm done, no harm done,” he said gently, as he proceeded to balance his camera on the sand, and just before disappearing under the black cloth he said: “We all have much more time than we have life!”

  Watching Lillian being photographed was Edward, the ex-violinist with red hair and freckles who lived in a trailer on the beach. His calendar of events was determined by his multiple marriages. “Oh, the explosion of the yacht? That happened at the time of my second wife.” Or if someone tried to recall when the American swimming champion had dived into the rocks: “Oh that was four wives back!” The wives disappeared, but the children remained. They were so deeply tanned it was difficult to distinguish them from the native children. Edward worked at odd jobs: designing fabrics, tending silver shops, or building a house for someone. At the time Lillian met him he was distributing Coca-Cola calendars all over Mexico. To his own amazement, the people loved them and hung them up on their walls. The last one, which he now unrolled to create a stir among the bathers, was an interpretation of a Mayan human sacrifice. The Yucatan pyramid was smaller than the woman, and the woman who was about to be sacrificed looked like Gypsy Rose Lee. The shaved and lean priest looked unequal to the task of annihilating such splendor of the body. The active volcano on the right-hand side was the size of the sacrificial virgin’s breast.

  Tequila always brought out in Edward a total repudiation of art. He was emphatic about the fact that he had deserted the musical world of his own volition. “In this place music is not necessary. Golconda is full of natural music, dance music, singing music, music for living. The street vendors’ tunes are better than any modern composition. Life itself is full of rhythm, people sing while they work. I don’t miss concerts or my own violin at all!”

  The second glass of tequila unleashed reminiscences of concert halls, and the Museum of Modern Art, as if they had been his residence prior to Golconda. With the third glass came a lecture on the superfluity of art. “For example, here, with the lagoon, the jungle, you do not need the collages of Max Ernst, his artificial lagoons and swamps. With the deserts and sand dunes, the bleaching bones of cows and donkeys, there is no need of Tanguy’s desert scenes and bleaching bones. And with the ruins of San Miguel what need do we have of Chirico’s columns? I lack nothing here. Only a wife willing to live on bananas and coconut milk.”

  “When I felt cold,” said Lillian, “I used to go to the Tropical Birds and Plants Department at Sears Roebuck. It was warm, humid, and pungent. Or I would go to look at the tropical plants in the Botanical Gardens. I was looking for Golconda then. I remember a palm tree there which grew so tall, too tall for the glass dome, and I would watch it pushing against the glass, wishing to grow beyond it and be free. I think of this caged palm tree often while I watch the ones of Golconda sweeping the skies.”

  But at the third glass of tequila, Edward’s talk grew less metallic, and his glance would fall on his left hand where a finger was missing. Everyone knew, but he never mentioned it, that this was the cause of his broken career as a violinist.

  Everyone knew too that his children were loved, nourished, and protected by all in Golconda. They had mysteriously accepted an interchangeable mother, one with many faces and speaking many languages, but for the moment it was Lillian they had adopted, as if they had sensed that in her there was a groove for children, already formed, once used, familiar, and which they found comfortable. And Lillian wondered
at their insight, wondered how they knew that she had once possessed, and lost, children of the same age.

  How did they know she had already kissed such freckles on the nose, such thin elbows, braided such tangled hair, and known where to find missing shoes? It was not only that they allowed her toy the missing mother, but that they seemed intent on filling an empty niche in her, on playing the missing children.

  She and the children embraced each other with a knowledge of substitution which added to their friendship, a familiarity the children did not feel with their other temporary mothers.

  To her alone they confessed their concern with their father’s next choice of a wife. They examined each newcomer gravely, weighing her qualifications. They had observed one infallible sign: “If she loves us first,” they explained, “Father doesn’t like it. If she loves him first, then she doesn’t want us around.”

  An airline’s beauty queen arrived at the beach. She walked and carried herself as if she knew she were on display and should hold herself as still as possible, arranged for others’ eyes as if to allow them to photograph her. The way she held herself and did not look at others made her seem an image cut out of a poster which incited young men to go to war. A surface unblurred, unruffled, no frown of thought to mar the brow, she exposed herself to others’ eyes with no sign of recognition. She neither transmitted nor received messages to and from the nerves and senses. She walked toward others without emitting any vibrations of warmth or cold. She was a plastic perfection of hair, skin, teeth, body, and form which could not rust, or wrinkle, or cry. It was as if only synthetic elements had been used to create her.

  Edward’s children were uneasy with this girl because they imagined their father would be spellbound by the perfect image she presented, the clear blue eyes, the graceful hair, the flawless profile. But soon she made her own choice of companion and it was the ex-Marine who had been pensioned off for exposing himself voluntarily to an experiment with the atom bomb, and had been damaged inside. No one dared to ask, or even to imagine the nature of the injury. He himself was laconic: “I got damaged inside.” No injury was apparent. He was tall, strong, and blond, with so rich a coloring he could not take the sun. His blue eyes matched those of the American airline’s beauty queen; both were untroubled and designed to be admired. He was reluctant to tell his story, but when he drank he would admit: “I offered myself as a volunteer to be stationed as close as possible…and I got damaged, that’s all.”