Seduction of the Minotaur Read Free Page A

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,