Free Seduction of the Minotaur by Anaïs Nin

the native boys
diving for silver pieces around the yacht, and then climbing on the anchor
chain to watch the festivities.
    There were many Golcondas —one
above the horizon, dark hills wearing necklaces of shivering lights, one
reflected on the satin-surfaced bay, one of oil lamps from the native huts, one
of candlelights , one of cold neon lights, the neon
cross on the church, the neon eyes of the future, without warmth at all—but all
of them looked equally beautiful when their reflections fell into the water.
    Doctor Hernandez was dancing with a woman who
reminded n of Man Ray’s painting of a mouth: a giant mouth that took up all of
the canvas. The young man the woman had discarded in order to dance with the
Doctor seemed disoriented. Lillian noticed his pallor. Drunkenness? Sorrow?
Jealousy? Loneliness?
    She said to him: “Do you remember in all the
Coney Islands of the world a slippery turntable on which we all tried to sit?
As it turned more swiftly people could no longer hold onto the highly waxed
surface and they slid off.”
    “The secret is to spit on your hands.”
    “Then let’s both spit on our hands right now,”
she said, and the manner in which he compressed his mouth made her fear he
would be angry. “We both slipped off at the same moment.”
    His smile was so forced that it came as a
grimace. The cries of the diving boys, the narcotic lights, the carnival of
fireworks and dancing feet, no longer reached them, and they recognized the
similarity of their mood.
    “Every now and then, at a party, in the middle
of living, I get this feeling that I have slipped off,” she said, “that I am
becalmed, that I have struck a snag… I don’t know how to put it.”
    “I have that feeling all the time, not now and
then. How would you like to escape altogether? I have a beautiful house in an
ancient city, only four hours from here. My name is Michael Lomax. I know your
name, I have heard you play.”
    In the jeep she fell asleep. She dreamed of a
native guide with a brown naked torso, who stood at the entrance to an Aztec
tomb. Holding a machete, he said: “Would you like to visit the tomb?”
    She was about to refuse his invitation when she
awakened because the jeep was acting like a camel on the rough road. She heard
the hissing of the sea.
    “How old are you, Michael?”
    He laughed at this: “I’m twenty-nine and you’re
about thirty, so you need not use such a protective tone.”
    “Adolescence is like cactus,” she said, and
fell asleep again.
    And she began dreaming of a Chirico painting:
endless vistas of ruined columns and ghostly figures either too large, like
ancient Greek statues, or too small as they sometimes appeared in dreams.
    But she was not dreaming. She was awake and
driving at dawn through the cobblestones of an ancient city.
    Not a single house complete. The ruins of a
once sumptuous baroque architecture, still buried in the silence it had been in
since the volcano had erupted and half buried it in ashes and lava.
    The immobility of the people, the absence of
wind, gave it a static quality.
    The Indians lived behind the scarred walls
quietly, like mourners of an ancient splendor. The lie of each family took
place in an inner patio, and, as they kept the shutters closed on the street
side, the city had the deserted aspect of a ghost town.
    Rows of columns no longer supporting roofs,
churches open to a vaulted sky, a coliseum’s empty seats watching in the arena
the spectacle of mutilated statues toppled by the victorious lava. A convent
without doors, the nun’s cells, prisons, secret stairways exposed.
    “Here is my house,” said Michael. “It was once
a convent attached to the church. The church, by the way, is an historic
monument, what’s left of it.”
    They crossed the inner patio with its music of
fountains and entered a high-ceilinged white stucco room. Dark wood beams,
blood-red curtains, and wrought-iron grilles on the windows gave the dramatic
contrasts which are