Seduction of the Minotaur by Anaïs Nin Read Free Book Online Page A

runaways from wives and
alimony…”
    “What happened to your papers?”
    “I went for a swim one day. I left all my
clothes on the beach. When I came back, all my clothes were gone, and with them
my papers. So here I am.”
    He kept his eyes on her face. They were red,
probably from not sleeping. The amusement in them might have been a form a
courage.
    “But what can I do for you? How can I get you
out? I’m not rich. I get a small salary for playing the piano at the Black
Pearl. “
    His eyes pleaded softly in contradiction to the
clipped words. “The best way to help me is to give the guide fifty dollars. Can
you spare that? He will fix things up and get me out. He knows the ropes. Can
you manage that?”
    “I can do that. But once you’re out, how will
you get back home, and won’t you get caught again without papers?”
    “Once I’m out I can hitchhike to Mexico City,
and there go to the consulate. I can manage the rest, if you can get me out.”
    Later on, having delivered the money, she felt
immensely light, as if she had freed a part of herself. The prisoner would have
haunted her. She knew by the exaggeration of her feelings that there must be
some relationship between the condition of the prisoner and herself. What she
had felt was more than sympathy for a fellow American. It may have been
sympathy for a fellow prisoner.
    To all appearances she was free. But free of
what? Had she not lost her identity papers? Was not her voyage like that of the
South American bird that walked over the sands rubbing out his tracks with a
special feather that grew longer than the others, like a feather duster?
    The past had been dissolved by the intensity of
Golconda, by its light which dazzled the thoughts, closed the eyes of memory.
Freedom from the past came with unfamiliar objects; none of them possessed any
evocative power. From the moment she opened her eyes she was in a new world.
The colors were all hot and brilliant, not the pearly greys and attenuated
pastels of her homeland. Breakfast was a tray of fruit of a humid, fleshy
quality never tasted before, and even the bread did not have the same flavor.
There was an herb which they burned in the oven before inserting the bread
which gave it a slight flavor of anise.
    All day long there was not a single familiar
object to carry her back into her past life. The first human being she saw in
the morning was the gardener. She could see him through the half-shut bamboo
blinds, raking the pebbles and the sand, not as if he was eager to terminate
the task but as if raking pebbles and sand was the most pleasurable occupation
and he wanted to prolong his enjoyment. Now and then he would stop to talk with
a lonely little girl in a white dress who skipped rope all around him asking
questions which he answered gently.
    “What makes some butterflies have such
beautiful colors on their wings, and others not?”
    “The plain ones were born of parents who didn’t
know how to paint.”
    And even when familiar objects turned up, they
did not turn up in their accustomed places. Like the giant Coca-Cola bottle
made of wood placed in the middle of the bull ring before the bullfight began—a
grotesque surrealist dream. Lillian had expected the bulls to charge it, but
just before the bull was let out the attendants (who usually took care of
carrying away the dead bull and sweeping over the bloody tracks) had come and
toppled the bottle, and the six of them had carried it away on their
shoulders—publicity’s defeated trophy.
    So all was freedom: her hours, her time, and
even the music she improvised at night, the jazz which allowed her to embroider
on all her moods.
    But there was one moment that was different,
and it was the knowledge of this moment that perhaps created her feeling of
kinship with the prisoner. That was the hour just before dinner, when she was
freshly bathed and dressed, the hour when a genuine adventurer would reach the
high point of his gambling wth the beauty of