Free Seduction of the Minotaur by Anaïs Nin Page A

the essence of Spanish life, a conflict between austerity
and passion, poetry and discipline. The high walls gave purity and elevation,
the rich, voluptuous, red primitive ardor; dark wood gave the somber
nobilities; the iron grilles symbolized the separation from the world which
made individuality grow intensely as it did not grow when all barriers of
quality and evaluations were removed.
    The church bells tolled persistently although
there was no ritual to be attended, as if calling day and night to the natives
buried by the volcano’s eruption years before.
    Walking through the muted streets of the place
with Michael, Lillian wondered how the Spaniards and the Mayans now lived
quietly welded, with no sign of their past warring visible to the outsider.
Whatever opposition remained was so subtle and indirect that neither Spaniards
nor visitors were aware of it. Michael repeated many times: “The Indians are
the most stubborn people.”
    In the dark, slumbering eyes, white people
could never find a flicker of approbation. The Indians expressed no open
hostility, merely silence whenever white people approached them, and their
glazed obsidian eyes had the power of reflecting without revelation of
feelings, as if they had themselves become their black lacquered pottery. White
people would explain how they wanted a meal cooked, a house built, a dress made.
In the Indian eyes there was a complete lack of adhesion, in their smiles a
subtle mockery of the freakish ways of all visitors, ancient or modern. The
Indians would work for these visitors, but disregard their eccentricity and
disobey them with what appeared to be ignorance or lack of understanding, but
which was in reality an enormous passive resistance to change, which enabled
them to preserve their way of life against all outside influences.
    The Catholic church bells continued to toll,
but in the eyes of the Indians this was merely another external form to be
adopted and mysteriously, indefinably mocked. On feast days they mixed totem
poles and saint’s statues, Catholic incense and Indian perfumes, the Catholic
wafer and Mayan magic foods. They enjoyed the chanting, the organ and
candlelight, the lace and brocades; they played with pictures of the saints and
at the same time with Indian bone necklaces.
    The silence of the ancient city was so
noticeable and palpable that it disturbed Lillian. She did not know at first
what caused it. It hung over her head like suspense itself, as menacing as the
unfamiliar noises in the jungle she had crossed on the way.
    She wondered what attracted Michael to living
here among ruins. It was a city rendered into poetry by its recession into the
past, as cities are rendered into poetry by the painters because of the
elements left out, allowing each spectator to fill in the spaces for himself.
The missing elements of the half-empty canvas were important because they were
the only spaces in which human imagination could draw its own inferences, its
own architecture from its private myths, its streets and personages from a
private world.
    A city in ruins, as this ancient city was, was
more powerful and evocative because it had to be constructed anew by each
person, therefore enhanced into illimitable beauty, never destroyed or obscured
by the realism of the present, never rendered familiar and forced to expose its
flaws.
    To gain such altitude it was necessary to learn
from the artist how to overlook, leave out, the details which weighed down the
imagination and caused crash landings.
    Even the prisons, where one knew that scenes of
horror had taken place, acquired in the sun, under streams of ivy gently
bleached by time, a serenity, a passivity, a transmutation into resignation
which included forgiveness of man’s crimes against man. In time man will
forgive even the utmost cruelty merely because the sacred personal value of
each man is lost when the father, the mother, son or daughter, brother or
sister, wife of this man have ceased to