Seduction of the Minotaur Read Online Free PDF

lightest voice she could find, and with
the hope of discouraging the Doctor’s seriousness, she said: “I was a woman who
was so ashamed of a run in my stocking that it would prevent me from dancing
all evening…”
    “It wasn’t the run in your stocking…”
    “You mean… other things… ashamed… just vaguely
ashamed…”
    “If you had not been ashamed of other things
you would not have cared about the run in your stocking…”
    “I’ve never been able to describe or understand
what I felt. I’ve lived so long in an impulsive world, desiring without knowing
why, destroying without knowing why, losing without knowing why, being
defeated, hurting myself and others… All this was painful, like a jungle in
which I was constantly lost. A chaos.”
    “Chaos is a convenient hiding place for
fugitives. You are a fugitive from truth.”
    “Why do you want to force me to remember? The
beauty of Golconda is that one does not remember…”
    “In Eastern religions there was a belief that
human beings gathered the sum total of their experiences on earth, to be
examined at the border. And according to the findings of the celestial customs
officer one would be directed either to a new realm of experience, or back to
re-experience the same drama over and over again. The condemnation to
repetition would only cease when one had understood and transcended the old
experience.”
    “So you think I am condemned to repetition? You
think that I have not liquidated the past?”
    “Yes, unless you know what it is you ran away
from…”
    “I don’t believe this, Doctor. I know I can
begin anew here.”
    “So you will plunge back into chaos, and this
chaos is like the jungle we saw from the boat. It is also your smoke screen.”
    “But I do feel new…”
    The Doctor’s expression at the moment was
perplexed, as if he were no longer certain of his diagnosis; or was it that
what he had discovered about Lillian was so grave he did not want to alarm her?
He very unexpectedly withdrew at the word “new,” smiled with indulgence, raised
his shoulders as if he had been persuaded by her eloquence, and finally said:
“Maybe only the backdrop has changed.”
    Lillian examined the pool, the sea, the plants,
but could not see them as backdrops. They were too charged with essences, with
penetrating essences like the newest drugs which altered the chemistry of the
body. The softness entered the nerves, the beauty surrounded and enveloped the
thoughts. It was impossible that in this place the design of her past life
should repeat itself, and the same characters reappear, as the Doctor had
implied. Did the self which lived below visibility really choose its characters
repetitiously and with only superficial variations, intent on reproducing the
same basic drama, like a well-trained actor with a limited repertory?
    And exactly at the moment when she felt
convinced of the deep power of the tropics to alter a character, certain
personages appeared who seemed to bear no resemblance to the ones she had left
in the other country, personages whom she received with delight because they
were gifts from Golconda itself, intended to heal her of other friendships,
other loves, and other places.
    The hitchhiker Fred was a student from the
University of Chicago who had been given a job in the hotel translating letters
from prospective guests. Lillian called him “Christmas,” because at everything
he saw which delighted him—a coppery sunrise or a flamingo bird, a Mexican girl
in her white starched dress or a bougainvillaea bush
in full bloom—he would exclaim: “It’s like Christmas!”
    He was tall and blond but undecided in his
movements, as if he were not sure yet that his arms and legs belonged to him.
He was at that adolescent age when his body hampered him, as though itY ” height=a shell he was seeking to outgrow. He was still
concerned with the mechanics of living, unable as yet to enjoy it. For him it
was still an initiation, an