Seduction of the Minotaur by Anaïs Nin Page B

thoughts.
    Lillian wanted to talk to her, help her
exorcise the American woman with the painted nails. But Hatcher would be lonely
without his memories, lonely without his canned asparagus, and his
American-made crutches. Did he truly love Maria, with her oily black hair, her
maternal body, her compassionate eyes, or did he love her for not being his
first wife?
    He looked at Lillian with hardness. Because she
did not want to stay? Could she explain that she had spent the night in the
subterranean cities of memory, instead of outside in the spicy, lulling
tropical night?
    Doctor Palas had been
called during the night, and was in a bad humor. His friends had found the new
beach hotel lacking in comfort. “The cot had a large stain, as if a crime had
been ommitted there. The mosquito netting had a hole,
and we were bitten by mosquitoes. And in the morning we had to wash our faces
from a pail of water. We gave some pennies to the children. They were so eager
that they scratched our hands. And only fish and black beans to eat, even for
breakfast. “
    “ Some day ,” said
Hatcher, “when my place is built, it will attract everyone. I am sure the movie
colony will come.”
    “But I thought you came here to be isolated, to
enjoy a primitive life, a simple life.”
    “It isn’t the first time a human being has had
two wishes, diametrically opposed,” said Doctor Palas .
    In the car, driving back in the violent sun, no
one talked. The light filled the eyes, the mind, the nerves, the bones, and it
was only when they drove through shade that they came out of this anesthesia of
sunlight. In the shade they would find women washing clothes in the river,
children swimming naked, old men sitting on fences, and the younger men behind
the plough, or driving huge wheeled carts pulled by white Brahma bulls. In the
eyes of the Mexicans there were no questions, no probings ;
only resignation, passivity, endurance, patience. Except when one of them ran
amok.
    Lillian could feel as they did at times. There
were states of being which resembled the time before the beginning of the
world, unformed, undesigned , unseparated .
Chaos. Mountains, sea and earth undifferentiated, nebulous, intertwined. States
of mind and feeling which would never appear under any spiritual X-ray. Dense,
invisible, inaccessible to articulate people. She would live here, would be
lost. At every moment of anxiety, of probing, she would slip into the sea for
rebirth. Her body would be restored to her. She would feel her face as a face,
fleshy, sunburned, warm, and not as a mask concealing a flow of thoughts. She
would be given back her neck as a firm, living, palpitating, warm neck, not as
a support for a head heavy with fever and questions. Her whole body would be
restored to her, breasts relaxed, no longer compressed by the emotions of the
chest, legs restored, smooth and gleaming. All of it cool, smooth, washed of
thought.
    She would plunge back with these people into
silence, into meditation and contemplation. When she washed her clothes in the
river she would feel only the flow of the water, the sun on her back. The light
of the sun would fill every corner of her mind and create refractions of light
and color and send messages to her senses which would dissolve into humid
shining fields, purple mountains, and the rhythms of the sea and the Mexican
songs.
    No thoughts like the fingers of a surgeon,
feeling here and there, where is the pain, where did destruction spring from,
what cell has broken, where is the broken mirror that distorts the images of
human life?
    Chaos was rich, destructive, and protective,
like the dense jungle they had traveled through. Could she return to the
twilight marshes of a purely natural, inarticulate, impulsive world, feel safe
there from inquiry and exposure?
    But in this jungle, a pair of eyes, not her
own, had followed and found her. Her mother’s eyes. She had first seen the
world through her mother’s eyes, and seen herself through