minotaur
It
was Dario who taught me that the labyrinth and the minotaur are one.
This
was a long time ago, of course, and he was past his prime even by then, but
still like a pool of quiet power, sitting in the dusty rooms of his huge, old
house with cups of sweet tea, wrapped in his shabby overcoat like a dressing
gown. He would call to me from
wherever he sat, in his study or at the table in his dining hall: “Novice!”
(Because he would never use my name, said that I was nameless until I earned
one.) And I would come in from
whatever task and find him poring over a book, or writing fitfully on parchment
with his huge, dark fountain pen, and without looking up he would pose me, in
his lilting, unplaceable European accent, one of his strange riddles without
solutions:
“Novice,
in the gardens are rows of flowers, courted by bees. And both the bees and the flowers have in them poison.
Which is the maze, and which is the monster?”
And
then he would wave me back to my task, and leave me to contemplate it, dropping
the question until days later. Sometimes
he would be pleased with my answers, and sometimes not, and I confess I never
really learned the secrets of which would be which.
And
he never touched me; that I must stress. He
was not the minotaur in his own labyrinthine house, though it would have been
easy for him. That I was a girl
seemed to matter not at all. Only the mind concerned him, its agility in
traversing mazes and unlocking ciphers, in answering and posing riddles.
That was the path he set me upon. It
was not until much later that I realized how deeply Dario (not his real name
either, as magicians are as zealous in the guarding of their names as those who
walk in the world are of their fortunes) was respected and revered by the others
in our order. That was not a concern inside the walls of his house; only
the mind mattered there.
And
then sometimes I would find him in the evenings, as the sun was failing outside
the window, with his Borges in his lap, tears coming down his face as he said,
“Ah, the Argentine, he knows, he knows.”
I
did not learn until later what it was he meant.
That
the labyrinth is the world.
And the world is a monster in its heart.