Free Seduction of the Minotaur by Anaïs Nin Page B

exist—the ones who gave his life its
importance, its irreplaceable quality. Time, powerless to love one man,
promptly effaces him. His sorrows, torments, and death recede into impersonal
history, or evaporate into these poetic moments which the tourists come to
seek, sitting on broken columns, or focusing their cameras on empty ransacked
tombs, none of them knowing they are learning among ruins and echoes to
devaluate the importance of one man, and to prepare themselves for their own
disappearance.
    The ancient city gave Lillian a constriction of
the heart. She was not given to such journeys into the past. To her it seemed
like a city mourning its dead, even though it could not remember those it mourned.
She saw it as the ruins of Chirico’s paintings and asked Michael: “But why the
heavy silence?”
    “There’s no wind here,” said Michael.
    It was true. The windlessness gave it the static beauty of a painting.
    But there was another reason for the silence,
which she discovered only in the afternoon. She was taking a sunbath on the
terrace, alone.
    The sun was so penetrating that it drugged her.
She fell asleep and had a dream. A large vulture was flying above the terrace,
circling over her, and then it swooped downward and she felt its beak on her
shoulder. She awakened screaming, sat up, and saw that she had not been
dreaming, for a vulture had marked her shoulder and was flying away slowly,
heavily.
    Wherever vultures settled they killed the
singing birds. The absence of singing birds, as well as of the wind, was the
cause of that petrified silence.
    She began to dislike the ancient city. The
volcano began its menacing upward sweep as neat as the edge of the city, and
rose so steeply and so high that its tip was hidden in the clouds. “I have been
up there,” said Michael. “I looked down into its gaping top and saw the earth’s
insides moldering.”
    Michael said on Sunday: “I wish you would spend
all your free days here, every week.”
    That evening he and Lillian, and other guests,
were sitting in the patio when suddenly there appeared in the sky what seemed
at first like a flying comet, which then burst high in the air into a shower of
sparks and detonations.
    Lillian thought: “It’s the volcano!”
    They ran to the outside windows. A crowd of
young men, carefully dressed in dark suits and gleaming white shirts, stood
talking and laughing. Fireworks illuminated their dark, smooth faces. The
marimbas played like a concert of children’s pianos, small light notes so gay
that they seemed the laughter of the instrument.
    The fireworks were built in the shape of tall
trees, and designed to go off in tiers, branch by branch. From the tips of the
gold and red branches hung planets, flowers, wheels gyrating and then igniting,
all propelled into space bursting, splintering, falling as if the sun and the
moon and the stars themselves had been pierced open and had spilled their
jewels of lights, particles of delight.
    Some of the flowers spilled their pollen of
gold, the planets flew into space, discarding ashes, the skeletons of their
bodies. But some of the chariot wheels, gyrating wildly, spurred by each
explosion of their gold spokes, wheeled themselves into space and never
returned in any form, whether gold showers or ashes.
    When the sparkles fell like a rain of gold, the
children rushed to place themselves under them, as if the bath of gold would
transform their ragged clothes and lives into light.
    Beside Lillian, Michael took no pleasure in the
spectacle. She saw him watching the students with an expression which had the
cold glitter of hunger, not emotion. Almost the cold glitter of the hunter
taking aim before killing.
    “This is a fiesta for men only, Lillian. The
men here love each other openly. See, there, they are holding hands.”
    Lillian translated this into: He wants it to be
thus, this is the way he wants it to be.
    “They like to be alone, among men. They enjoy
being without women.” He