Seduction of the Minotaur (12 page)

She would plunge back with these people into
silence, into meditation and contemplation. When she washed her clothes in the
river she would feel only the flow of the water, the sun on her back. The light
of the sun would fill every corner of her mind and create refractions of light
and color and send messages to her senses which would dissolve into humid
shining fields, purple mountains, and the rhythms of the sea and the Mexican
songs.

No thoughts like the fingers of a surgeon,
feeling here and there, where is the pain, where did destruction spring from,
what cell has broken, where is the broken mirror that distorts the images of
human life?

Chaos was rich, destructive, and protective,
like the dense jungle they had traveled through. Could she return to the
twilight marshes of a purely natural, inarticulate, impulsive world, feel safe
there from inquiry and exposure?

But in this jungle, a pair of eyes, not her
own, had followed and found her. Her mother’s eyes. She had first seen the
world through her mother’s eyes, and seen herself through her mother’s eyes.
Children were like kites, at first they did not have vision, they did not see themselves
except reflected in the eyes of the parents. Lillian seen through her mother’s
eyes.

Her mother was a great lady. She wore
immaculate dresses, was always pulling on her gloves. She had tidy hair which
the wind could not disarrange, she wore veils, perfume. Lillian’s outbursts of
affection were always curtailed because they threatened this organization.
“Don’t wrinkle my dress. You will tear my veil. Don’t
muss
my hair.” And once when Lillian had buried her face in the folds of her dress
and cried: “Oh, Mother, you smell so good,” she had even said: “Don’t behave
like a savage.” If this is a woman, thought Lillian, I do not want to be one.
Lillian was impetuous, but this barrier had driven her into an excess, into
exaggerations of her tumultuousness.

She threw her clothes about, she soiled and
crumpled up her dresses. Her hair was never tidy. At the same time, she felt
that this was the cause of her mother’s coolness. She did not want this
coldness. She thought she would rather be chaotic, and stutter and be rough but
warm. When she disobeyed, when she ran amok, she felt she was rescuing her
warmth and naturalness from her mother’s formal hands. And at the same time she
felt despair, that because she was as she was, and unable to be like HER, she would
never be loved. She took to music passionately, and there too her wildness, her
lack of discipline, hampered her playing. In music too there was a higher
organization of experience. Yes, she knew that, she was undisciplined and
wayward. Only today, traveling through Mexico, a country of warmth, of
naturalness, and looking into eyes that did not criticize, did she realize she
had never yet used her own eyes to look at herself.

Her mother, a very tall woman with critical
eyes. She had eyes like Lillian’s, a vivid electric blue. Lillian looked into
them for everything. They were her mirror. She thought she could read them
clearly, and what she saw made her uneasy. There were never any words. Only her
eyes. Was this dissatisfaction due to other causes? She used her eyes to stop
Lillian when Lillian wanted to draw physically close to her. It was a kind of
signal. Her mother had told her only much later that she did think her an
awkward and ardent child, chaotic, impulsive, did think how emotional she was, how
she could not civilize her. Those were her mother’s words.

Lillian had never seen herself with her own
eyes. Children do not possess eyes of their own. You retained as upon a
delicate retina, your mother’s image of you, as the first and the only authentic
one, her judgment of your acts.

They had reached a place of shade by the river.
They had to wait for the barge to take them across. They got out of the car and
sat on the grass. A woman was hanging her laundry on the branches of a low
tree, and the blues, oranges, pinks looked like giant flowers wilted by
tropical rains.

Another woman approached them with a basket on
her head. She took it down with calm, deliberate gestures and put before them a
neatly arranged pile of small fried fish.

“Do you have any beer?” asked Doctor
Palas
.

The houses by the river did not have any walls.
They were palm leaves on four palm trunks. A woman was pushing a small hammock
monotonously to keep a baby asleep. Children were playing
aked
in the dust and by the edge of the river.

It was Doctor
Palas
‘
friends who noticed that the radiator was leaking profusely. They would never
reach Golconda. They would be lucky if they reached San Luis, on the other side
of the river.

Lillian was thinking that at this time Diana,
Christmas, and her other friends were starting on a colorful safari to the
beach.

The barge drifted in slowly, languidly. The men
who had pushed it wiped the perspiration from their shoulders. In their dark
red-brown eyes, fawn eyes, there were always specks of gold. From the sun, or
from some deep Indian irony. Catastrophe always made them laugh. Was it a
religion unknown to Lillian? A dog half drowned once, at the beach, made them
laugh. The leaking radiator, the stranded tourists. And this was New Year’s
Eve. They would not reach Golconda for the fireworks and street dances.

San Luis was a village of dirt streets, shacks,
in which bands of pigs were left to find their nourishment in the garbage, and
bands of children followed the foreigners asking for pennies. There was only a
square, with a church of gold and blue mosaics, a cafe, a grocery, a garage.
They took the car there and Doctor
Palas
translated
for them. Lillian understood the palaver. It consisted, on the Indian side, in
avoiding a direct answer to a simple question: “When will the car be ready?” As
if a direct answer would bring down on them some fatal wrath, some
superstitious punishment. It was impossible to say. Would they care to sit at
the cafe while they waited? It was four o’clock. They sat there until six.
Doctor
Palas
went back to the garage several times.
In between he sought to continue with Lillian an intimate conversation in
Spanish which his American friends would not understand. Without knowing the
trend of meditation that Lillian had embarked on, on the theme of eyes, the
eyes of her mother with which she had looked at herself, it was her eyes he
praised, and her hair. Her eyes which were not her own when she looked at
herself. But when she looked at others, she saw them with love, with compassion.
She truly saw them. She saw the American couple, uncomfortable, not
understanding this mixture of dirt and gaiety. The children took delight in
chasing away the pigs and imitating their cries.

She saw young Doctor
Palas
not yet humanly connected with the poor as Doctor Hernandez was.

“Will you go dancing with me tonight?”

“If we get to Golconda,” said Lillian,
laughing. “I hope the Hungarian violinist will sweep them off their feet, so
they will, not notice my absence.”

At seven o’clock the streets were silent and it
began to grow dark. The owner of the cafe was a fair-faced Spaniard with the
manners of a courtier. He was helping them to pass the time. He had sent for a
guitar player and a singer. He had fixed them a dinner.

When all of them realized they would not be
leaving that night, that the car seemed to be losing vigor rather than
regaining it, he came and talked to them with vehemence.

“San Luis looks quiet now, but it is only
because they are dressing for New Year’s Eve. Pretty soon they will all be out
in the streets. There l be dancing. But the men will drink heavily. I advise
you not to mix with them. The women know when to leave. Gradually they
disappear with the children. The men continue drinking, and soon they begin to
shoot at mirrors, at glasses, at bottles, at anything. Sometimes they shoot at
each other. I entreat you,
Senores
y
Senoras
to stay right here. I have clean rooms I can
let you have for the night. Stay in our rooms. I strongly advise you…”

The rooms he showed them gave on a peaceful
patio fun of flowers and fountains. Lillian was tempted to go out with the
Doctor, at least to dance a while. But traditional protectiveness toward women
made him obstinately refuse to take the risk. At ten o’clock the fireworks, the
music, and the shouts and quarrels began. They went to their rooms. Lillian’s
room was like a white nun’s cell. Whitewashed walls, a cot buried in white
mosquito netting, no sheets or blankets. The walls did not reach to the
ceiling, to let the air through, and her shutter door let in all the sounds of
the village. After the fireworks, the shooting began. The cafe owner had been
wise.

It was in such rooms that Lillian always made
the devastating discovery that she was not free. Out in the sun, with others, swimming
or dancing, she was free. But alone, she was still in that underground city of
her childhood. Even though she knew the magic formula: life is dreamed, life is
a nightmare, you can awaken, and when you awaken you know the monsters were
self-created.

If she could have danced with Doctor
Palas
, maintained the speed of elation, sat at a table and
let him rest his hand lightly on her bare arm, participated in a carnival of
affection.

All of them with navigation troubles. The
American couple fearful of unfamiliarity. Doctor
Palas
lonely.

I can see, I can see that it is in this
distorted vision of the world’s proper proportions that lies the secret of our
fears. We make the animals bigger with our fears. We make our creations and our
loves smaller, we shrink by our vision, and enlarge and shrink according to the
whims of our interchangeable vision, not according to an immutable law of
growth. The size of each world we live in is individual and relative, and the
objects and people vary in each EYE.

Lillian remembered when she had believed that
her mother was the tallest woman on earth, and her father the heaviest man. She
remembered that her mother never had a wrinkle on her dress, or a lock of hair
out of place, and was always putting on her gloves as if she were a noted
surgeon about to operate. Her presence was antiseptic, particularly in Mexico,
where she was unsuited to the humanity of the life, the acceptance of flaws,
spots, stains, wrinkles. Children changed the size of all they saw, but so did
the parents, and they continued to see one
small.

She was too cold to fall asleep. The wind from
the mountain had descended upon San Luis as soon as the sun had set.

I see my parents smaller, they have assumed a
natural size. My father must have been like Hatcher, terribly afraid of a
strange country on which he was dependent for a living. But how could my
mother’s whistle have penetrated through all those underground passages? There
must have been an echo!

If she still could hear this whistle, there
must be echoes in the soul. But she was regaining her own eyes, and with these
eyes, with her own vision, she would return home.

The patio was full of birds in cages. The
noises of the fiesta kept them awake too. Why should it be among these shadows,
these furtive illuminations, these descending passageways that her true self
would hide? Driven so far below the surface! She was now like those French
speleologists who had descended thousands of feet into the earth and found
ancient caves covered with paintings and carvings. But Lillian carried no
searchlight and no nourishment. Nothing but the wafer granted to those who
believe in symbolism, a wafer in place of bread. And all she had to follow were
the inscriptions of her dreams, half-effaced hieroglyphs on half-broken
statues. And no guide in the darkness but a scream through the eyes of a
statue.

In the morning she returned to life above the
ground. Outside in the patio there was a washstand, and the water in the
pitcher was cool spring water. The mirror was broken, and the towel had been
used by many people. But after the loneliness of the night’s journey Lillian
was happy to use a collective towel and to see her face in two pieces which
could be made to fit together again. She had made a long journey, the journey
of the smile and the eyes. There were no decorations for such discoveries. The
journey had in reality taken only three months. According to the calendar her
trip had taken only the time of an engagement in a night club. The voyage
underground had taken longer, and had taken her farther. She would return to
Golconda to drink her last cup of flowing gold, iridescent water, sun and air,
to pack her treasures, her geological discoveries, the statues which, once
unearthed, had become so eloquent.

When they arrived at Golconda it was the end of
the New Year celebrations. The streets were still littered with confetti. The
street vendor’s baskets were empty, and they were sleeping beside them rolled
in their ponchos. The scent of
malabar
was in the
air, and that of burnt fireworks.

Lillian walked down the hill to the center of
town, past the old woman in black who sold colored fruit juices and white
coconut candy, past the church with its wide doors open so that she could see
the bouquets of candle lights and the women praying while they fanned their
faces. Cats and dogs were allowed to stray in and out, the workmen continued to
work on their scaffolds while Mass was being said, the children were allowed to
cry, or were fed right there while lying in the black shawls slung from their
mother’s necks like hammocks.