Seduction of the Minotaur (14 page)

Diana was certain that he had subtly sought out
his death. And now to this image Lillian could add others which until now had
not fitted in. The image of his distress magnetized a series of impressions
caught at various times but abandoned like impressionistic fragments which did
not coagulate. The shutters of the eyes opening to reveal anxiety,
discouragement, solitude, all the more somber by contrast with the landscape of
orange, turquoise, and gold. He seemed to flow with all the life currents of
Golconda. She had accepted only the surface evidence. But the selves of Doctor
Hernandez which had lived in the periphery, backstage, now emerged
unexpectedly. And with them all the invisible areas of life, his and hers, and
others’, which the eyes of the psyche sees but which the total self refuses to
acknowledge, when at times these “ghosts” contain the living self and it is the
personage on the stage who is empty and somnambulistic. It was as if having
begun to see the true Doctor Hernandez, solitary, estranged from his wife and
his children by her jealousy and hatred of Golconda immersed only in the
troubled, tragic life of a pleasure city, she could also see for the first
time, around the one-dimensional profile of her husband, a husband leaving for
work, a father bending over his children, an immense new personality. It was
Larry, the prisoner of his own silences which she had liberated the day she
visited the fraudulent one in jail. It was Larry’s silent messages she had been
able to read through the bars of the Mexican jail. Once the vision becomes
dual, or triple, like those lenses which fracture the designs one turns them on
but also repeats them to infinity in varied arrangements, she could see at
least two
Larrys
, one bearing an expression of hunger
and longing which had penetrated her the day of her birthday party more deeply
than the gaiety of her dancing partners, the other as the kind father and
husband who dispensed care and gifts and tenderness perhaps as Doctor Hernandez
had done, while desiring some unattainable pleasure.

Another image of Larry which appeared through
the thick glass window of the plane, was of him standing behind the glass
partition of a television studio. Lillian had been playing with an orchestra
for a recording and Larry had sat in the recording room. He had forgotten that
she could not hear him, and when the music had ended had stood up and talked,
smiling and gesturing, in an effort to convey his enthusiasm for the music. The
perplexed expression of her face urged him to magnify his gestures, to
exaggerate the expression of his face, to dramatize beyond his usual manner,
hoping that by a mime of his entire body and face he could transmit a message
without the help of words.

At the time the scene had been baffling to
Lillian, but only today did she understand it. She had failed to hear Larry,
because he did not employ the most obvious means of communication. These two
images seemed like a condensation of the drama of their marriage. First her
response to his mute needs, his mute calling to her, and then her failure to
discern his message. He had been a prisoner of his own silences, and these
silences she had interpreted as absences.

He had answered her needs! What she had
required of love was something that should never be expected of a human being,
a love so strong that it might neutralize her self-disparagement, a love that
would be occupied day and night with the reconstruction of a lovable Lillian,
an image she would tear down as quickly as he created it. A love of such
mathematical precision, occupied in keeping an inward balance between her
self-caricature and a Lillian she might accept. A love tirelessly repeating:
Lillian you are beautiful, Lillian you are wonderful, Lillian you are generous,
and kind, and inspiring, while she, on the other side of the ledger made her
own entries: Lillian, you were unjustly angry, you were thoughtless, you hurt
someone’s feelings, you were not patient with your child.

Endless accounting, endless revising of
accounts.

But what had Larry wanted? It was true that
Larry had accepted this abdication from life and seemed fulfilled when she
lived for him in the musicians’ world (because he had first wanted to be a
musician, and had not fulfilled this wish). It was true that he seemed content
in his silences, content to let her and her jazz musicians play and talk. This
peripheral life seemed natural to him. But this division of labor had become a
charade. When they grew tired of it (Lillian tired of Larry’s indirect
spectatorships, and Larry tired of Lillian’s predominant role) they had not
known how to exchange roles! Larry began to crystallize, not having any direct
flow into life, not having his own aqualungs, his own oxygen. They were like
twins with one set of lungs. And all Lillian knew was to sustain the flow by
escaping into other lives, a movement which gave her the illusion of a
completed circle. No other relationship could complete her, for it was Larry
she had wanted to share life with, and ultimately she was seeking Larry in the
other personages.

This last voyage without him had confronted her
with her own incompleteness. She had deluded herself that the lungs, the
capacity to live, were hers alone. How much of Larry she had carried within
herself and enacted as soon as he was not there to act it for her. It was she
who did not talk then, who let the Mexicans talk nimbly and flowingly, as she
let Doctor Hernandez monologue. It was she who had remained at a distance from
the life of Golconda except for the moment of abandon to the lulling drugs of
nature. She had behaved as Larry would have behaved. Her courage, her flow in
life had only existed in relation to Larry, by comparison with his withdrawals.
What had he done while deprived of her presence? Probably had lived out the
Lillian he carried within himself, her traits. Toward what Larry was she
voyaging now?

Was it not an act of love to impersonate the
loved one? Was it not like the strange “possessions” which take place at the
loss of a parent by death? When her mother died, Lillian
became
her
mother for at least a long year of mourning. It had been an imperceptible
possession, for Lillian did not belong to the race who had rituals at which
these truths were dramatized, rituals at which the spirit of the “departed”
entered the body of the living, at which the spirit of the dead parent was acknowledged
to be capable of entering the body of the son or daughter and inhabit until
driven, or prayed, or chased away. To all appearances these primitive beliefs
and what happened to Lillian were not related. Yet the spirit of her mother had
passed into her. When she died, leaving Lillian a thimble and a sewing machine
(when Lillian could not sew), Lillian did not know that she took some of her
moods, characteristics, attitudes. She once thought it was that as one grew
older one had less resistance to the influences of the family and one
surrendered to family resemblances.

Lillian laughed at the primitive rituals of
“possession” she had seen in Haiti. But there was a primitive Lillian who had
combated the total loss of her mother by a willingness to take into herself
some of her mannerisms and traits (the very ones she had rebelled against while
her mother was alive, the very ones which had injured her own growth). It was
not only that she began to sew, to use the thimble and the sewing machine, but
that she began to whistle when her children strayed from the house, she scolded
her children for the very traits her mother had censured in her: neglect in
dress, impulsive, chaotic behavior. A strange way to erect a monument to the
memory of her mother, a monument to her continuity.

Thus she had also been “possessed” by Larry,
and it was his selectivity in people which spoke against Diana’s lack of
discrimination. For the first time, in Golconda, she had practiced Larry’s
choice of withdrawing if the people were not of quality. Of preferring solitude
to the effort of pretending he was interested in them.

Nearing home, she wondered if both of them had
not accepted roles handed to them by others’ needs as conditions of the
marriage. It was the need which had dictated the role. And roles dictated by a
need and not the whole self caused a withering in time. They had been married
to parts of themselves only. Just as Dr. Hernandez had married a woman who
loved only the Doctor, and who never knew the man who had tried to shed the
role by entering the violent world of the smugglers, to feel himself in the
heart of life, even at the cost of death.

Lillian had felt responsible for the Doctor’s
death, but now she knew it was not a personal responsibility; it was because
she too had lived with only a part of Larry, and when you live with only a part
of a person, you symbolically condemn the rest of it to indifference, to
oblivion.

She knew it was not a bullet which had killed
Dr. Hernandez. He had placed himself in the bullet’s path. Certainly at times
his intelligence and knowledge of human nature must have warned him that he was
courting sudden death when he refused to surrender his supply of drugs or to
underwrite fake permits to obtain more.

She knew that by similar detours of the
labyrinth, it was not the absence of love or the death of it which had
estranged her from Larry, but the absence of communication between all the
parts of themselves, the sides of their character which each one feared to
uncover in the other. The channels of emotions were just like the passageways
running through our physical body which some illness congests, and renders
narrower and narrower until the supply of oxygen and blood is diminished and
brings on death. The passageways of their communication with each other had
shrunk. They had singled out their first image of each other as if they had
selected the first photograph of each other to live with forever, regardless of
change or growth. They had set it upon their desks, and within their hearts, a
photograph of Larry as he had first appeared behind the garden gate, mute and
hungry, and a photograph of Lillian in distress because her faith in herself
had been killed by her parents.

If they had been flowing together in life, they
would not
reated
these areas of vacuum into which
other relationships had penetrated, just as if Doctor Hernandez had been loved
and happy in Golconda, he would have found a way to escape his enemies. (Diana
had proofs that he had been warned, offered help, and recklessly disregarded
both.)

The manner in which Lillian had finally immured
herself against the life in Golconda betrayed how she, as well as Larry, often
closed doors against experience, and lived by patterns.

Diana had said: “People only called him when they
were in distress. When they gave parties they never thought of him. I knew that
what he gave to others was what he deeply wanted for himself. This sympathy…for
those in trouble. I do believe he was in greater trouble than any of us.”

His death set in motion a chain of
disappearances, an awareness of the dangers of disappearances. And this fear
fecundated Lillian, stirred all life and feeling into bloom again. Sudden death
had exposed the preciousness of human love and human life. All the negations, withdrawals,
indifferences seemed like the precursors of absolute death, and were to be
condemned. She had a vision of a world without Larry and without her children,
and then she knew that her love of Golconda had only been possible because of
the knowledge that her absence was temporary.

And now the words spoken by Doctor Hernandez
were clear to her, their meaning reached her. “We may seem to forget a person,
a place, a state of being, a past life, but meanwhile what we are doing is
selecting new actors, seeking the closest reproduction to the friend, the
lover, the husband we are trying to forget, in order to re-enact the drama with
understudies. And one day we open our eyes and there we are, repeating the same
story. How could it be otherwise? The design comes from within us. It is
internal. It is what the old mystics described as karma, repeated until the
spiritual or emotional experience was understood, liquidated, achieved.”

All the personages had been there, not to be
described in words but by a series of images. The prisoner had touched her only
because he vaguely echoed the first image of Larry as he appeared behind the
iron gate. Even if this prisoner had been fraudulent, his acting had been good
enough to reawaken in Lillian her feelings towards the first Larry she had
known, a Larry in trouble, a trouble which she deeply shared, was married to,
not only by empathy but by affinity. She had disguised it by throwing herself
into life and relationships, by appearing fearless and passionate, and it had taken
the true freedom of Golconda, its fluid, soft, flowing life, to expose her own
imprisonment, her own awkwardness. She had been more mated to Larry than she
had known. She had been as much afraid, only fear had made her active, leaping
and courting and loving and giving and seeking, but driven by the same fear
which made Larry recoil into his home and solitude. In losing this first
intuitive knowledge she had of the bond between them, she had also lost a truth
about herself. She had been taken in by the myth of her courage, the myth of
her warmth and flow. And it was the belief in this myth which had caused her to
pass judgment on the static quality of Larry, concealing the static elements in
herself.

One night Doctor Hernandez, Fred, Diana, and
Edward had decided to visit the native dance halls of Golconda which opened on
small, unpaved streets behind the market. They leaped across an open trench of
sewer water, onto a dirt floor, and sat at a table with a red oilcloth.
Tropical plants growing out of gasoline cans partly veiled them from the
street. Red bulbs strung on wires cast charcoal shadows and painted the skins
in the changing tones of leaping flames. A piano out of tune gave out a sound
of broken glass. The drums always dominated the melodies, whether songs or juke
boxes, insistent like the drums of Africa. The houses being like gardens with
roofs, the various
musics
mingled: guitars, a Cuban
dance orchestra, a woman’s voice. But the dancers obeyed the drums.