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

the
night and feel: Now the evening is beginning and I will discover a human being
to court or to be courted by, an adventure with caprice and desire, and while
gambling I might find love.
    At this hour, when she took one last glance at
the mirror, the screen door of her room seemed the locked door of a prison, the
room an enclosure, only because she was a prisoner of anxiety: the moment
before the unknown gamble with a relationship to other human beings paralyzed
her with fear. Who would take her dancing? Would no one come, no one remember
her existence? Would all the groups that formed in the evening forget to
include her in their plans? Would she arrive at the terrace to find only the
head of the Chicago stockyards for a dancing partner? Would she come downstairs
and watch Christmas a bemused spectator of Diana’s provocations, and couples
climbing into cars going to fiestas, and couples climbing the hill to attend
the Sunday night dance on the rocks, and Doctor Hernandez appropriated by a
movie star who was sure she had malaria?
    This was the moment which proved she was a
prisoner of timidities and not a genuine adventurer, not a gambler who could
smile when he lost, who could be invulnerable before an empty evening, or
untouched by an evening spent with a drunken man who insisted on describing to
her how the stockyards functioned, how the animals were killed.
    This fantasy of disaster never actually took
place. Several people always gathered around the piano when she played and
waited for her to stop to offer her a drink and join them. But actual
happenings never freed her of her inner imprisonment by fear, in anticipation
of aloneness.
    She would like to have seen the prisoner again
but imagined he was already on his way to Mexico City. She had time to walk
down to the Spanish restaurant on the square, which she preferred to the hotel.
In the hotel she ate her own dinner in privacy. On the square she felt she had
dinner with the entire city of Golconda, and shared a multitude of lives.
    The square was the heart of the town. The
church opened its doors to it on one side. The other sides were lined with
cafes, restaurants with their tables on the sidewalk, a movie house; in the
center was a bandstand surrounded by a small park with benches.
    On the benches sat enraptured young lovers,
tired hobos, men reading their newspapers while little boys shined their shoes.
There was also a circle of vendors sitting on the sidewalk with their baskets
full of candied fruit, colored fruit drinks, red and yellow cigarettes, and
magazines. Old ladies with black shawls walked quietly in and out of the
church, children begged, marimba players settled in front of each cafe and
played as long as the pennies flowed. Singers stopped to sing. Little girls
sold sea-shell necklaces and earrings. The prostitutes paraded in taffeta
dresses with flowers in their black hair.
    The flow of beggars was endlessly varied. They
changed their handicaps. When they tired of portraying blindness they suddenly
appeared with wooden legs. The genuine ones were terrifying, like nightmare
figures: a child, shriveled and shrunken, lying on a little table with wheels
which he pushed with withered hands; an old woman so twisted she resembled the
roots of a very ancient tree; many of them sightless, with festering sores in
place of eyes. But they resisted all professional help, as Doctor Hernandez had
told her. They refused to bppeared win out of the
streets, from the spectacles of religious processions, Indian fireworks, band
concerts, or the flow of visitors in their eccentric costumes.
    And among them now, sitting at a nearby table,
was the American prisoner with the guide.
    From the heightened tones of their voices, the
numerous empty bottles of tequila on the table Lillian knew to what cause her
donation for freedom had been diverted. They were beyond recognizing her.
Unfocused eyes, vague gestures, revealed a Coney Island of the mind, with the whirlings , the