Seduction of the Minotaur Read Online Free PDF Page A

not, as it may have seemed during the day, cold and cruel.
This reassurance was never granted to the mature, so that Lillian told no one
of the role the pool played in her life today. It was the same role played by
another watchman whom she had heard when she was ten years old and living in
Mexico while her father built bridges and roads. The town watchman, a figure
out of the Middle Ages, walked the streets at night chanting: “All is well, all
is calm and peaceful. All is well.”
    Lillian had always waited for this watchman to
pass before going to sleep. No matter how tense she had been during the day, no
matter what catastrophes had taken place in school, or in the street, or at
home, she knew that this moment would come when the watchman would walk all
alone in the darkened streets swinging his lantern and his keys, crying
monotonously, “All is well, all is well and calm and peaceful.” No sooner had
he said this and no sooner had she heard the jangling keys and seen the flash
of his lantern on the wall of her room, than she would fall instantly asleep.
    Others who came to the pool were of the
fraternity who liked to break laws, who liked to steal their pleasures, who
liked the feeling that at any time the hotel watchman might appear at the top
of the long stairs; they knew his voice would not carry above the hissing sea,
and that as he was too lazy to walk downstairs he would merely turn off the
lights as if this were enough to disperse the transgressors. To be forced to
swim in the darkness and slip away from the pool in darkness was not, as the
watchman believed, a punishment, but an additional pleasure.
    In the darkness one became even more aware of
the softness of the night, of pulsating life in the muscles, of the pleasure of
motion. The silence that ensued was the silence of conspiracy and at this hour
everyone dropped his disguises and spoke from some realm of innocence preserved
from the corrosion of convention.
    The Doctor would come to the pool, leaving his
valise at the hotel desk. He talked as if he wanted to forget that everyone needed
him, and that he had little time for pleasure or leies ,
who li But Lillian felt that he never rested from diagnosis. It was as if he
did not believe anyone free of pain, and could not rest until he had placed his
finger on the core of it.
    Lillian now sat in one of the white string
chairs that looked like flattened harps, and played abstractedly with the white
cords as if she were composing a song.
    The Doctor watched her and said: “I can’t
decide which of the two drugs you need: the one for forgetting or the one for
remembering.”
    Lillian abandoned the harp chair and slipped
into the pool, floating on her back and seeking immobility.
    “Golconda is for forgetting, and that’s what I
need,” she said, laughing.
    “Some memories are imbedded in the flesh like
splinters,” said the Doctor, “and you have to operate to get them out.”
    She swam underwater, not wanting to hear him,
and then came up nearer to where he sat on the steps and said: “Do I really
seem to you like someone with a splinter in her flesh?”
    “You act like a fugitive.”
    She did not want to be touched by the word. She
plunged into the deep water again as if to wash her body of all memories, to
wash herself of the past. She returned gleaming, smooth, but not free. The word
had penetrated and caused an uneasiness in her breast like that caused by
diminished oxygen. The search for truth was like an explorer’s deep-sea diving,
or his climb into impossible altitudes. In either case it was a problem of
oxygen, whether you went too high or too low. Any world but the familiar
neutral one caused such difficulty in breathing. It may have been for this
reason that the mystics believed in a different kind of training in breathing
for each different realm of experience.
    The pressure in her chest compelled her to
leave the pool and sit beside the Doctor, who was looking out to sea.
    In the