That’s the situation, he says. That’s exactly what happened.
What exactly happened?
Nothing. A week passed, and.…
You fought?
No.
You didn’t get tired of her in a week.
No.
For that you need a little longer.
Right.
Did she make a scene?
No, not at all.
Because you don’t like scenes.
Right.
If she made a scene, I’d understand.
I wouldn’t have stayed with her for a single minute.
I know. I know you.
When you’re right you’re right.
So what happened? In a week you hardly have time to begin to admire one another. It’s still the time when the food tastes more and more delicious, the wine has more of a kick, the fucking is only beginning to get better …
There wasn’t any fucking, he hurries to slip one true fact into the fantasy he’s weaving, but this poor truth is rejected with contempt:
Don’t give me that bullshit! What happened to make you get up and leave after a week?
If I’d stayed there I would have murdered someone, he confesses.
Mona stands up in the boat. With great care she folds the sail, takes off her life-jacket, throws off her shirt, and unfastens the hooks of her bra, freeing her breasts which burst joyfully into the night air, shaking themselves like two wet puppies; she wriggles out of her trousers, drops her panties, jumps onto the prow and sets her strong feet on either side of it, and before he has time to admire the beauty of her muscular buttocks she dives into the water of the bay and distances herself from the boat with a few strong crawl
strokes, smooth and supple and elegant as a dolphin, and is swallowed up in the darkness.
Mona? he calls hesitantly. Mona?!
No answer. For a moment he wonders whether to strip and jump into the sea after her, but the water is too wet, and the night is too cold, and even if he jumps into the water, how will he find her in the darkness? And anyway, Mona is a professional swimmer, who had swum for the national youth team in her time, she was a master of all the styles of swimming, whereas he was an amateur with no style at all. If it was a question of running, he consoles himself, you would overtake her even if she had a start of two kilometers, but when it comes to swimming you haven’t got a chance to come close to her. He strains his eyes and scans the sea around him, but the darkness of the water merges with the darkness of the air very near to the boat, and beyond the point where the two darknesses merge it’s impossible to see anything. There’s nothing for it but to wait in the hope that she’ll return.
There’s no danger that she’ll drown herself like Jack London, who she admires so much, the thought crosses his mind, she isn’t the suicidal type. But suddenly the possibility occurs to him that she might simply swim ashore and leave him alone in the boat in the middle of the sea. She’s capable of it. But on the other hand, she wouldn’t go ashore naked, even though she is capable of that too. But the keys of the Land Rover are still on the boat, in her trouser pocket, he reassures himself
And he lies down on his back again, on the soft sand of the shore of the Atlantic Ocean, opposite the Breakers Hotel in
Palm Beach, with Melissa lounging next to him, sliding her slender foot over his legs covered with frizzy black hair, and saying to him:
You ask why you went into that dangerous mine?
Yes, he says, I hoped that you would solve the riddle for me, but up to now you haven’t solved anything for me.
All the way to Florida I thought about it, she says, and it seems to me that I’ve found the answer.
Let’s hear it, he says.
You’re a leg-man, she says.
What’s a ‘leg-man’? he asks.
There are four human types who are permitted to enter the labyrinths of Venus, which are carved into the bowels of the copper mountains. Let’s start with the brainy type, she suggests. The brain-man seeks to solve every problem by means of logical thought. He will never give way to spontaneous impulses. He’ll always try to obtain all the information on any given subject before he makes a decision. He’ll also try to predict the probable consequences of the next step before he takes it. This type is the ideal chess player. Before he sets out he always draws himself as accurate as possible a map of the surest route to his goal, and calculates the precise length of every part of the road, and the time needed to cross it.
What’s all this got to do with the labyrinth of Venus? he asks, even though he hasn’t got the faintest idea of what this labyrinth may be—he allows himself to flow with the words.
The connection is simple, she explains. The minute the brainy type enters the labyrinth—the spirit of the labyrinth gets who he is and programs the labyrinth to react to his brainy characteristics.
The spirit of the labyrinth? he stops the stream of her words, what’s that?
Have you ever driven a car with a smart gearbox, that in the first seconds of the journey gets the driving style of the driver and behaves accordingly?
Yes, he says, holding the wheel of the dark green Citroen MX, making its way through a dense oak wood on a mountain road winding along the ancient Limes Germanicus, somewhere in the state of Hessen—
How did it behave?
Like a woman in love, he answers. She loved every crazy thing I did.
You asshole, she scolds him and jolts him out of that distant summer evening, I asked you how the car behaved, and not some woman you’re dreaming about now.
I was talking about the car, he laughs, why did you think I was talking about a woman?
So how did the car respond to you?
Like a sport, he says.
So why are you surprised that a labyrinth of tunnels in an abandoned copper mine is able to recognize the type of person who enters the belly of the mountain?
Go on, says Shakespeare and notes to himself that this conversation is so silly that it has to lead somewhere. He learnt long ago from personal experience that clever, logical conversations put the imagination to sleep and fail to produce interesting ideas, whereas idle talk, ostensibly banal and pointless, in the end awakens the imagination from its slumbers. Therefore he relinquishes responsibility and abandons himself to the vicissitudes of the strange conversation, ready to flow in whatever direction it takes him. And as if she reads his thoughts she says:
The brainy type will stop at every junction in the tunnels and seek information that will help him to decide which way to go.
Who can he get such information from? asks Shakespeare.
He will appeal to the brainy types who preceded him on the journey.
And how will the spirit of the labyrinth respond to him?
It will give him a very strict timetable, every deviation from which will lead immediately to the closing of the gates, and then the savior will turn into another captive in the belly of the mountain, and he himself will be in need of a savior to come and rescue him.
The second type is the man of feeling? he guesses, and thinks of Jonas, and a wave of painful longing for his dead friend suddenly overcomes him.
Yes, she confirms, this type is the heart-man. He is very open and sensitive to others. He feels the other, he is moved by him, he feels with him, and he operates according to the commands of his heart. He inflames the feelings of his mate too and leads her to behave according to her feelings, and the two of them release a lot of energy, and he expresses himself poetically.
Like Shaninas de los Rugashivas, he suggests.
Who’s that? she asks.
A Brazilian poet, he hears Shakespeare beginning to develop a character. During the day he worked as a gray clerk in the electric corporation, and at night he would put on a green suit and a fedora hat, and go out to enjoy himself in the bars of Copa-Roja, he invents the name of a quarter. He wrote amazing erotic poetry. I saw fat women melting like butter in the sun when they longingly recited his poems.
What do you say, she says, I’ll look for his poems.
Now go on, he requests.
What were we talking about? she asks.
The heart-man.
The heart-man, yes, she remembers, the heart-man activates the soul of the labyrinth, but the labyrinths of Venus have two souls, one good one, creative and friendly, and
one evil, destructive and dangerous. While the good soul will love the heart-man and try to help him with singing and music to accompany him on his way through the abandoned mine, the evil soul will try to seduce him with its sweetness and lead him astray in the tunnels, so that he will never reach the prisoner sitting and waiting to be saved. He will be lost in one of the dark chasms.
We’ve spoken of the brain-man and the heart-man, he sums up. Who’s the third type?
The guts-man, she pronounces confidently. He is activated by dark drives, animal instincts and gut-feelings.
I have a friend like that, he says to her and thinks of Yadanuga. Tell me about him. Maybe I’ll understand at last why he did what he did to me.
Here goes, she says. The guts-man doesn’t believe in words, he is almost deaf to verbal messages. Nor does he believe in poetic outbursts or emotional outpourings. On the other hand he responds to signs, omens, smells and colors. He believes only in his gut feelings, and he is alert to every tiny movement to which the brainy and emotional types are oblivious. When he enters the labyrinth, the labyrinth immediately adapts itself to him and speaks to him in the language of smells, shapes, murmurs and whispers. This man is sure that he is closer to the true reality than the men of brains and emotions, but this confidence often leads him to make bad decisions and to enter places where the brain-man and the heart-man would not risk setting foot.
Interesting, he says, all this is very interesting. But let’s hear now about the characteristics of the leg-man, he urges her.
The leg-man, or the homopod, she informs him, is a man who has lost his faith in what the brain, heart and guts can tell him.
So what remains for him?
Only legs remain for him, she says. Long and thin like mine, or short and sturdy like yours. He doesn’t trust anything except for his legs.
And his shoes, he says.
Shoes? she repeats in surprise
Have you ever heard of a language called Yiddish? he replies with a question.
The language of the Hasids in Queens, she says.
That’s what’s left of it, he corrects her.
What’s it got to do with the legs-man? she asks.
It was his language, he says, and sees his father. Some people think that Yiddish was the language of the heart and the guts, but this is a superficial view of this language, he pronounces. The people who lived in this language believed only in their legs, and their shoes. His motto was:
Ich un meine shich
, which means—
Me and my shoes, she guesses.
You understand what it means?
Sure, she says. As long as my shoes are okay, everything’s okay.
Not everything, he says, but the main thing. The ability to move wherever your legs can take you, when the earth begins to burn. But what did you want to tell me about the leg-man, or what did you call him?
The homopod proceeds only along the difficult path of trial and error, she says. Even if somebody tells him that a certain tunnel leads to a dead end, he won’t believe it until he discovers it for himself. He has to do the wrong thing in order to discover that it’s wrong. Only by making mistakes and erasing them will he arrive at the right results, but then he will know the truth in a way that cannot be denied.
If I understand you correctly, the leg-man doesn’t believe in signs, words, or the experience of others, he is astonished
to discover and formulate for the first time with complete clarity his own attitude towards the world.
Right, she confirms, he has to walk on his own legs to the places that he wants to know.
And that means taking risks, he reflects out loud.
Risks and great difficulties, she agrees, and he is also ready to suffer the difficult or unpleasant consequences of his mistakes.
He isn’t afraid or deterred by failure, he suggests.
On the contrary, she reinforces him, failure for him is a necessary condition of success.
And how does this affect the spirit of the labyrinth? he asks.
The labyrinth won’t volunteer any information about what awaits him, not in signs, not in words and not in clues of any other kind, but at the same time the labyrinth will allow him to retrace his steps whenever he realizes his mistake, on condition that he doesn’t make the same mistake twice.
A road you learn with your feet you don’t forget easily, he says.
And therefore repeating a mistake is something the homopod cannot forgive, she says.
The leg-man isn’t too clever before the event, he smiles sadly.
No, she agrees, but on the other hand, the leg-man, who perhaps we should call the ‘journey-man’, crosses greater distances than all the other types together, and nobody knows all the wrong roads like he does. Those feet have crossed countries and continents, and I’d like to hear the story they told the earth, she says and strokes his legs cast in steel. But it’s beginning to get cold outside. Why don’t we go up to the room?
They get up, shake the sand from the big towels they took from the hotel room. She drapes her skinny body in the white towel, and he drapes her shoulders in his towel too.
What about you, she asks him, aren’t you cold?
I’m never cold, he laughs at himself, I have the coat of a seal.
Of a walrus, she laughs and strokes his hairy back, let me get the sand off your fur.
Should we play a game? he suggests as they stand under the hot water in the shower.
What game?
I’ll ask questions and you answer quickly, without thinking.
Go ahead, she says, fire away.
Why do I enter the belly of the mountain?
To rescue a friend.
Which friend?
You’re a team.
What kind of a team?
An action team, she answers.
How many of us are there in the team?
Four? She throws out a guess.