Norman Manea - The Lair

Fatality hidden in profane numbers: temperature, speed, kilometers, cholesterol, blood pressure, glycemia? You don’t need symbols to kill. Transcendent advertisements and trivial instincts, Maestro? Is that the secret of the proselytizers?

Mynheer raises his bored gaze to his notebook. In the window to the right, the river is keeping vigil. The winter fog. The majestic, imperturbable river. A single line. Single, straight line, everlasting.

He closes his eyes. He opens his eyes: the postcard. He reads the text on the back. A biomathematics professor at Cornell University is protesting against the State Department’s harassment of the Mexican senator Castillo Martinez, blocked from entering the U.S., where he’d been invited for a public debate. Under this passage, the letter from the reader in Long Island about the State Hermitage Museum in Russia. The middle of the seventies, trip to Saint Petersburg, then Leningrad, the tour guide, the French Impressionist paintings brought back from Germany at the end of the war.

The postcard sits, aged, in Gaspar’s hand.

“What’s that got to do with me? What connection do I have with this nonsense? I’m neither Russian nor German, nor a museum specialist nor a tourist. I’m not even an amateur painter. And I don’t see the tie between the Hermitage, the State Department, and the labyrinth. Nor between the USSR, Ariadne, and the life of the Alchemist.”

Saturday evening, Tara comes without bringing the mail. A bored gesture, a trifle; it doesn’t merit attention.

On the table, two glasses and a bottle of red wine. The professor was prepared! Not just the bottle of wine and glasses, but even an apple pie. And a little delicate jar, and another delicate jar. A festive or ill-fated evening, or both?

He’d slept deeply and woke up revitalized. A clear mind, precise intentions: the Labyrinth! He will talk to Tara about the Labyrinth, he will show her his notes from the New York Public Library and the college library. “The Old Man, as we will call him, wrote a lot about the subject, including a chapter in the Encyclopedia Britannica.”

Tara had also come prepared: white shirt, low cut, long black skirt, elegant, tall boots. Her hair up in a small, black bun. Black eyes and mascara, intense brows. The professor is freshly shaven.

“The conspirators force us to talk about the labyrinth! The Old Man, that’s what we’ll call Dima, wrote much on the subject. Minos, the king of Crete, was punished with sterility because he didn’t sacrifice the bull he’d gotten as a gift from Poseidon, the god of the sea. The king’s wife will conceive a son with the bull. The monster Minotaur. Half man, half beast. Shut into a labyrinth by Minos.”

“Starts out well. . what more could an American student on the threshold of her education wish for other than a lecture on mythology?”

“It’s not a lecture. It’s a preamble. For conversation. The American student might be of use. Through her acuity and freshness. She’s neither uneducated, nor uncultivated, nor innocent.”

“I’ve learned not to turn down compliments anymore.”

“The labyrinth was designed by Daedalus, the king’s architect. Every eight years Athens, the vassal fortress of Crete, would send as sacrifice seven maidens and seven young men to be devoured by the Minotaur. One of them, Theseus, will kill the monster. He will come out of the labyrinth, with the aid of a ball of string, unwound behind him. The famous red thread, a gift from Ariadne. Theseus abandons her, however, in favor of Phaedra.”

“Sex, then. The red thread is sex. In antiquity, too.”

“Minos punishes Daedalus, the ineffective architect of the labyrinth. The labyrinth was imperfect! Daedalus is imprisoned in the labyrinth, together with his son, Icarus. The architect can’t escape his own creation. Icarus, who is obsessed with flight, fabricates a couple of wings, making himself into an artificial bird. And he flies. . ignoring the advice of his father not to fly too close to the sun. The wax in the wings melts. The flyer crashes into the sea. Then, the father Daedalus lands gently in Sicily.”

“An animated movie.”

“Let’s drink the first glass. To the innocence of the audience.”

The professor rises from the armchair, opens the bottle, pours the wine into the glasses, they clink, he sits back down into his seat.

Tara is docile and amused; the professor is in his new role.

“The Old Man wrote about such animated movies. Or the Alchemist. Should we call him that?”

“For the animated movies, the Alchemist is better.”

“All right, I’ll stay with the Old Man. The Old Man refers to modern interpretations, naturally. The urban reader. The solitaries of the city-labyrinth. The mythical Minotaur is the uninhibited part of man. The vital, prerational part.”

“The beast. The beast of joy inside us.”

“The modern city dweller wants to squelch this part of himself, says the passé-ist. Cosmin Dima is all for the inherent organic structure, he rejects modern artifice, the city labyrinth of modernity. Daedalus’ artifices, and those that follow, hide the monster in the subconscious. A fatal mistake, the nostalgic says. The Old Man is skeptical of reason, disgusted by progress. The Old Man gets stuck on … “

“The Alchemist.”

“For the Alchemist and for his friends, traditions, like pagan barbarism, are sources of energy and power. Civilization is forgetting. A lack of scope and center. The decline of the individual.”

“Referring to us! The city dwellers! The solitaries from the city labyrinth. But what about those who live in the country, at the college hidden in the woods? Does that revitalize the beast?”

“I don’t know what goes on in your dorms. Drugs, orgies? I wouldn’t be shocked. Youth. The test of limits. I never participated. Regretfully.”

“You can make it up. America offers you ways. You modify your look, body, mind, personality, anything. You can find the magic pill or the elixir invented only last week. You go to Arizona or Nevada or Antarctica under a different name. You’re someone else. The New World encourages the new. Newness. A new start, we say.”

“I was talking about the decline of the individual, not about impostures.”

Ga par looks at his knees, but he’s speaking clearly and audibly.

“It’s not an imposture, but a new start.”

“Substitution. A person who is a substitute for another person, that’s how the dictionary defines impostor. I know what I’m talking about, I’m an exile.”

“It’s not a new beginning?”

“A lot of mimetics. The first step toward change is mimetic.”

“So, then, you’re with the Old Man.”

“I don’t believe in the idealization of the past. Or in any idealization.”

“Skeptic.”

“The only decency. The modern decline of the individual means the decline of the Nation, the retronauts say. The decline of the individual, the disaster of the Nation.”

“Logical.”

“Logical and true, if the past were a golden reference. But it can’t be. It would defy human imperfection. Should we go back to the animated movies? The Minotaur can’t be stopped, the Old Man and his apprentices maintain. The nostalgia of myth, the pastoral, idealization. The Minotaur avenges the modern labyrinth. The happy and prosperous hell of modernity, or the totalitarian, mytho-maniacal colony. Should we drink to the modern inferno? It’s no worse than the infernos of the past.”

“I prefer to drink for no reason. Just because I like the wine. The student is a hedonist.”

“Not enough. I don’t like the Minotaur. I prefer the labyrinth. As a game. As artifice. Antidote to boredom. We drink for Saturday night. Rest. Relaxation.”