Seduction of the Minotaur (10 page)

In another seat sat an English woman with a
young Mexican girl. The woman was a school teacher. Her English clothes were
wearing out; they were mended, patched, but she would not change to Mexican
clothes. She wore a colonial hat on her sparse yellow hair. The books she
carried were completely yellow and brittle, the corners all chewed, the covers
disintegrating.

At each station the bus stopped for the bus
driver to deliver letters and messages. In exchange for this he was given a
glass of beer. “Tell
Josefa
her daughter had a son
yesterday. She’ll write later. She wants you to comet>

A man climbed in. His pants were held up with a
string. His straw hat looked as if the cows had chewed on the edges until they
had reached the unappetizing stains of sweat. His shirt had never been washed.
He was selling cactus figs.

At the next stop a priest arrived on his
bicycle. He had tied his robe with strings so it would not get caught in the wheels.
When he jumped off he forgot to liberate himself, and as he began to run toward
the bus he fell on the white dusty road. But nobody laughed. They helped him
get his chairs and candelabras out of the bus and placed them on the side of
the road. The women then picked them up and balancing them on their heads,
followed the priest on his bicycle, in the wave of the dust he raised.

The bus seats were of plain hardwood. The bus
jumped like a bronco on the rocky, uneven, half-gutted road. Lillian had difficulty
staying in her seat. The bullfighter was gently sleeping, and did not seem like
the same young man who had suffered a symbolic rape before thousands of people.

Talking to the conductor in a stream of
tinkly
words like a marimba was a little girl of seven who
resembled
Lietta
, Edward’s oldest daughter. Lillian
felt all through her body a dissolution of tenderness for
Lietta
,
who, even though she was so deeply tanned, as dark as a Mexican child, had a
transparency and openness Lillian loved. As if children were made of
phosphorous, and one saw the light shining in them. The transparent child. Her
own little girl at home had had this. And then one day they lose it. How? Why?
One day for no perceptible reason, they close their thoughts, veil their feelings,
and one can no longer read their faces openly as before. The transparent child.
Such a delight to look into open naked feelings and thoughts.

The little girl who talked to the bus driver
did not mind that he was not listening. Her eyes were so large that it seemed
she must see more than anyone, and reveal more of herself than any child. But
her eyes were heavily fringed with eyelashes, and she was watching the road.

Lillian herself must have been transparent
once, and how did this heavy wall build up, these prison walls, these silences?
Unaware of this great loss, the loss of the transparent child, one becomes an
actor whose profession it is to manipulate his face so that others may have the
illusion they are reading his soul. Illusion. How she had loved the
bullfighter’s fury at the bull, this gentle and tender young man sleeping now,
so angry he had almost hurled himself upon its horns.

When did opaqueness set in? Mistrust, fear of
judgment. The bus was passing through a tunnel.

Lietta
. Lillian could
not tell if she was trying to understand
Lietta
, or
her own children, or the
Lietta
she had once been.
She remembered watching
Lietta’s
diminutive nose
twitching almost imperceptibly when she was afraid, when one of the dazzling
women approached her father, for instance. Dream of the transparent child.

The bus was like a bronco. Would they be able
to stay on it? In the darkness of the tunnel she lost the image of
Lietta
in her blue bathing suit and found herself at the
same age, herself and other children she had played with, in Mexico, at the
time her father was building bridges and roads. The beginning the whistling by
which her mother called her in from playing. She had a powerful whistle. The
children could hear it, no matter how far they went. Their playground was a
city beneath the city, which had been partly excavated to build a subway like
the American subway, and then abandoned. Cities in other centuries, once buried
in lava, which ran underneath the houses, gardens, streets. Where it ran under
streets there were grilles to catch the rainwater, but most of the time these
grilles only served to bring in a diffuse light. People walked over them
without knowing they were walking over another city. The neighborhood children
had brought mats, candles, toys, shawls, and lived there a life which because
of its secrecy seemed more intense than any above the ground. They had all been
forbidden to go there, had been warned of wells, sewers, underground rivers.

The children all stayed together and never
ventured farther than the lighted passageways. They were fearful of getting
lost.

From all the corners of the underground city
Lillian could hear her mother calling when it was time to come home. She had
never imagined she might disregard her mother’s whistle. But one day she was
learning from a Mexican playmate how to cut animals and flowers out of paper
for a fiesta, and was so surprised by the shapes that appeared that when the
whistle came, she decided not to hear it. Her brothers and sisters left. She
went on cutting out ships, stars, lanterns, suns, and moons. Then suddenly her
candle gave out.

Trailing all her streams of paper with her, she
walked toward the opening that gave onto their garden wall, trusting in her
memory. But the place was dark. Under her feet the clay was dry and soft. She
walked confidently, until she felt the clay growing wet. She did not remember
any wet clay in the places where they played. She became frightened. She
remembered the stories about wells, rivers, sewers. The knowledge that people
were walking about free right above her head, without knowing that she was
there, augmented her fear. She had never known the exact meaning of death. But
at this moment, she felt that this was death. Right above her
her
family was sitting down to dinner. She could faintly
hear voices. But they could not hear her. Her brothers and sisters were sworn
to secrecy and would not tell where she was.

She shouted through one of the grilled
openings, but the street was deserted at that moment and no one answered. She
took a few more steps into the wet clay and felt that her feet were sinking
deeper. She stumbled on a piece of wood. With it she struck at the roof, and
continued to call. Some of the dirt was loosened and fell on her. And at this
she sat down and wept.

And just as she had begun to feel that she was
dying, her mother arrived carrying a candle and followed by her brothers and
sisters.

(
When you do not answer the whistle of duty
and obedience, you risk death all alone in the forgotten cities of the past.
When you engage in the delights of creating pink, blue, white animals and
towers, ships and starry stems, you court solitude and catastrophe.

When you choose to play in a realm far away
from the eyes of parents, you court death.
)

For some Golconda was the city of pleasure
which one should be punished for visiting or for loving. Was this the beginning
of the adventurers’ superstitions, the secret of their doomed exiles from home?

Her father never smiled. He had so much dark
hair, even along his fingers. He drank and was easily angered, particularly at
the natives. The tropics and the love of pleasure were his personal enemies.
They interfered with the building of roads and bridges. Roads and bridges were
the most important personages in his life.

Lillian’s mother did not smile either. Hers was
the house of no-smile, from her father because the building of bridges and
roads was such a grave matter which the natives would not take seriously, and
from her mother because the children were growing up as “savages.” All they
were learning was to sing, dance, paint their faces, make their own toys as the
Mexican children did, adopt stray donkeys and goats, and to smile. The Mexican
children smiled in such a way that Lillian felt they were giving all they had,
all of themselves, in that one smile. So much was said about “economy” in her
house that there was perhaps also an economy of smiles! Did one have to be
sparing of them, give half-smiles, small sidelong smiles, crumbs of smiles?
Were the Mexican children living in the present recklessly, without thought of
the future, and would these dazzling smiles wear out?

A cyclone carried away one of Lillian’s
father’s bridges. He felt personally offended, as if nature had flaunted his
dedication to his work. A flood undermined a road. Another personal affront
from the realm of nature. Was it because of this that they returned home? Or
because there was shooting in the streets, minor revolutions every now and
then?

Once during a school concert at which Lillian
was playing the piano, there was a shot in the audience. It was intended for
the President but merely put out the lights. While people screamed to get out,
Lillian had calmly finished her piece. It she had stayed in Mexico, would she
have been so different?

Did everyone live thus in two cities at once,
one above the ground, in the sun of Golconda, and one underground? And was
everyone now and then metamorphosed into a child again?

There must be someone with whom one can hold a
dialogue absolutely faithful to the thoughts that go on in one’s head?

At a certain point human beings began to veil
themselves. The key word was “transparent.”
Lietta
was transparent. The child talking to the bus driver was transparent. The
driver was not listening, but the child was willing to be transparent, exposed.

The bus stopped by a wide river, beyond the
village of San Luis. It was waiting for the ferry. The ferry was a flat raft
made of logs tied together. Two men pushed it along with long bamboo poles. The
ferry was halfway back.

An old woman in black had set up a stand of
fruit juices and Coca-Cola. The bullfighter was the first one to leap out. “Are
you going to visit your folks,
Miguelito
?”

“Yes,” he answered sullenly. He did not want to
talk.

“What’s the matter,
Miguelito
?
Usually you’re as quick with your tongue as you are with your sword!”

He too, was traveling through two cities at
once. Was he still in the arena, still angry at the bull? Was he concerned
about the cost of a new suit?

The raft was approaching. And on the raft was
Hatcher’s jeep.

When he saw Lillian he smiled. “Were you coming
to visit me? I would have come to get you.”

“I wanted a ride in the bus.”

“I’m going to pick up some bottles of water
here and going right back. Where is your bag?”

“I don’t have any. I’m only free for the week
end. I followed an impulse.”

“My wife will be glad to see you. She gets
lonely up there.”

The bottles of water were loaded on the jeep.
Then both jeep and bus rolled onto the raft.

Hatcher had hair on his fingers, like her
father. Like her father he was always commanding. The raft became his raft, the
men his men, the journey his responsibility. He even wanted to change its
course, a course settled hundreds of years ago. His smile too was a
quarter-tone smile, as if he had no time to radiate, to expand.

Already she regretted having come. This was not
a journey in her solar
barque
. It was a night journey
into the past, and the thread that had pulled her was one of accidental
resemblances, familiarity, the past. She had been unable to live for three
months a new life, in a new city, without being caught by an umbilical cord and
brought back to the figure of her father. Hatcher was an echo from the past.

They were leaving the raft, starting their
journey through the jungle. A dust road, with just enough room for the car. The
cactus and the banana leaves touched their faces. When they were deep in the
forest and seemingly far from all villages, they found a young man waiting for
them on the road. He carried a heavy small bag, like a doctor’s bag. He wore
dark glasses.

“I’m Doctor
Palas
,”
he said. “Will you give me a ride?”

When he had settled himself beside Lillian he
explained: “I just delivered a child. I’m stationed at
Kulacan
.”

He was carrying a French novel like the one
Doctor Hernandez must have carried at his age. Was he bored and indifferent, or
was he already devoted to his poor patients? She wanted to ask. He seemed to
divine her question, for he said: “Last night I didn’t sleep a wink. A workman
came in the middle of the night. He had a wood splinter in his eye. I tried to
send him away, I hoped he would get tired of waiting, I just couldn’t wake up.
But he stayed on my porch, stayed until I had to get up. Even in my sleep I
heard the way he called me. They call me the way children call their mother.
And I have a year of this to endure!”

Between the trees, now and then there appeared
the figure of a workman with a machete. White pants, naked torso, sandals, and
a straw hat, bending over their cutting. When they heard the car they
straightened up and watched them with somber eyes.