Seduction of the Minotaur Read Free Page B

laughing: “No, I’m not, but if
being unhappy would arouse your interest, I’m willing to be. It was tactless of
me to speak of illness in this place created for pleasure. I nearly spoiled your pleasure. And I can see you are one who has not had too much of it, one of
the underprivileged of pleasure! Those who have too much nauseate me. I don’t
know why. I’m glad when they get dysentery or serious sunburns. It is as if I
believed in an even distribution of pleasure. Now you, for instance, have a right
to some…not having had very much.”
    “I didn’t realize it was so apparent.”
    “It is not so apparent. Permit me to say I am
unusually astute. Diagnostic habit. You appear free and undamaged, vital
and without wounds.”
    “Diagnostic clairvoyance, then?”
    “Yes. But here comes our professional purveyor
of pleasure. He may be more beneficent for you.”
    Hansen sat down beside them and began to draw
on the tablecloth. “I’m going to add another terrace, then I will floodlight
the trees and the divers. I will also have a light around the statue of the
Virgin so that everyone can see the boys praying before they dive.” His glance
was cold, managerial. The sea, the night, the divers were all, in his eyes,
properties of the night club. The ancient custom of praying before diving one
hundred feet into a narrow rocky gorge was going to become a part of the
entertainment.
    Lillian turned her face away from him, and
listened to the jazz.
    Jazz was the music of the body. The breath came
through aluminum and copper tubes, it was the body’s breath, and the strings’
wails and moans were echoes of the body’s music. It was the body’s vibrations
which rippled from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme known to
the musicians alone was like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others
only peripheral improvisations. The plots, and themes of the music, like the
plots and themes of our life, never alchemized into words, existed only in a
state of music, stirring or numbing, exalting or despairing, but never named.
    When she turned her face unwillingly towards
Hansen, he was gone, and then she looked at the Doctor and said: “This is a
drugging place…”
    “There are so many kinds of drugs. One for
remembering and one for forgetting. Golconda is for forgetting. But it is not a
permanent forgetting. We may seem to forget a person, a place, a state of
being, a past life, but meanwhile what we are doing is selecting a new cast for
the reproduction of the same drama, seeking the closest reproduction to the
friend, the lover, or the husband we are striving to forget. And one day we
open our eyes, and there we are caught in the same pattern, repeating the same
story. How could it be otherwise? The design comes from within us. It is
internal.”
    There were tears in Lillian’s eyes, for having
made friends immediately not with a new, a beautiful, a drugging place, but
with a man intent on penetrating the mysteries of the human labyrinth from
which she was a fugitive. She was almost angered by his persistence. A man
should respect one’s desire to have no past. But even more damaging was his
conviction that we live by a series of repetitions until the experience is
solved, understood, liquidated…
    “You will never rest until you have discovered
the familiar within the unfamiliar. You will go around as these tourists do,
searching for flavors which remind you of home, begging for Coca-Cola instead
of tequila, cereal foods instead of papaya. Then the drug will wear off. You
will discover that barring a few divergences in skin tone, or mores, or language,
you are still related to the same kind of person because it all comes from
within you, you are the one fabricating the web.”
    Other people were dancing around them, so
obedient to the rhythms that they seemed like algae in the water, welded to each
other, and swaying, the coloredskirts billowing, the
white suits like frames to support the flower