messages in various secretions? Ugh. On the other hand, though, the very accessibility of invisible ink was a welcome discovery. I had everything I needed at hand. For starters, I decided to forgo urine, I went down to the cellar, grabbed a jar of canned peaches, opened it and with the end of a matchstick slowly wrote out the two most secret pages in my diary.
Here I will show part of what was written with invisible fruit ink:
What, so you don’t see anything? That means it really is invisible. If only I could write a whole novel in such ink.
SIDE CORRIDOR
After all the evidence that the history of the past four billion years is written in the DNA of living creatures, the saying that “the universe is a library” has long since ceased to be a metaphor. But now we will need a new literacy. We’ve got a lot of reading ahead of us. When Mr. Jorge said that he imagined heaven as a library without beginning or end, he most likely, without suspecting it, was thinking about the endless shelves of deoxyribonucleic acid.
I am books.
DAD, WHAT’S A MINOTAUR?
We bang around like Minotaurs in these basements, to heck with their . . . friggin’ housing fund and lists. My father made heroic attempts not to curse in front of my mother and me, not unlike his attempts to quit smoking. I was sure that he secretly made up for it, smoking up all those skipped cigarettes and cursing out all those unsaid curses. My father’s line following his stumble over the nozzle of our Rocket vacuum cleaner would have important consequences for me. I knew what “friggin” and “housing fund” were, just as I knew about “extremely indigent,” “Pershing,” and so on, but I didn’t know what a Minotaur was. Nor whether it was one of the good guys (our guys) or the bad guys. At that time, I divided everything into those two categories. I discovered with surprise that adults did, too. The world was divided in two—good vs. bad, ours vs. yours. We, as luck would have it, had ended up our side, hence that of “the good guys.” However, I had heard my father say in the evenings after the news: “Come on now, how is that idiot Jimmy Carter to blame for the fact that I live in a basement and that there’s no lids for the canning jars?!” My mother, who was always more sensible, would shush him. Did they think I would let something slip in front of the local cop who lived two doors down? And they really did draw Jimmy Carter like an idiot in caricatures, with huge teeth, a star-spangled top hat clapped over his eyes, chomping on a winged rocket rather than a cigar.
I’ve gone down other corridors again, I keep getting mixed up when I turn back. Past time is distinguishable from the present due to one essential feature—it never runs in one direction. Where did I start? Good thing I’m writing this down, otherwise I’d never find the thread again . . .
We bang around like Minotaurs in these basements . . . That was the line . . . and it immediately entered my as-of-yet unassembled catalogue of epiphanies, of all those revelations, which as a rule appeared in the most unexpected and even inconvenient of moments. My father tripped over the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner because he didn’t see it, because it was cramped, we lived underground, the afternoon was overcast, the window was low, and the sun failed to reach down there.
Dad, what’s a Minotaur? I asked. My father pretended not to hear me. Dad, is the Minotaur on our side? I think this question irked him all the more. The next day he brought me that old complete edition of Ancient Greek myths from somewhere. I never set the book down again. I entered into the Minotaur then and don’t recall ever coming out. He was me. A boy who spent long days and nights in the basement of the palace, while his parents worked as kings or slept with bulls.
Never mind that the book makes him out to be a monster. I was inside him and I know the whole story. A huge mistake and calumny lie hidden there, exceptional injustice. I am the Minotaur and I am not bloodthirsty, I don’t want to eat seven youths and seven maidens, I don’t know why I’ve been locked up, it’s not my fault . . . And I am terribly afraid of the dark.
AGAINST AN ABANDONMENT: THE CASE OF M.
In the basement of the palace in Crete, Daedalus built a labyrinth of such confounding galleries that once you went inside it you could never find the exit again. Minos locked up his family’s shame, his wife Pasiphaë’s son, in this underground labyrinth. She conceived this son by a bull sent by the god Poseidon. The Minotaur—a monster with a human body and a bull’s head. Every nine years the Athenians were forced to send seven maidens and seven youths to be devoured by him. Then the hero Theseus appeared, who decided to kill the Minotaur. Without her father’s knowledge, Ariadne gave Theseus a sharp sword and a ball of string. He tied the string to the entrance and set off down the endless corridors to hunt the Minotaur. He walked and walked until he suddenly heard a terrible roar—the monster was rushing toward him with its enormous horns. A frightful battle ensued. Finally, Theseus grabbed the Minotaur by the horns and plunged his sharp sword into his chest. The monster slumped to the ground and Theseus dragged him all the way back to the entrance.
—Ancient Greek Myths and Legends
DOSSIER
Most honorable members of the jury, living and dead, from all times and geographies, ladies and gentlemen collectors and tellers of myths, and you, most honorable Mr. Minos, the present judge from the underworld.
Over the course of 37 years I have been preparing this case, “The Case of M.,” and writing arguments in his defense. I began at nine, with my grandfather’s indelible pencil in his old soldier’s notebook, which he had long since ceased using. (This does not, however, justify my unauthorized appropriation of the notebook. As we see, in the beginning there is always a crime.)
The first version reads as follows:
The Minotaur is not guilty. He is a boy locked up in a basement. He is frightened. They have abandoned him.
I, the Minotaur.
That was the whole text. Written in large capital letters on two pages from the notebook. I include it with the other materials related to the case. In broad terms, that is the basic thesis. Over the years I have merely added further evidence. And I have collected the signs which have come to me on their own.
It is striking that I have not found any compassion for the Minotaur in the whole of the classics. No departure from the established facts, from the monstrous mask once placed on him. Monster is the tamest word bandied about when it comes to the Minotaur in ancient writings. Doesn’t Ovid in Metamorphoses call him a “double-natured shame” and “disgrace from his abode” . . . Nothing but a disgrace and a freak. Didn’t he suspect that only a few months later he himself would be sent to the Pontus—the depths of the subcelestial Roman labyrinth, from which he would never find his way back. Not all roads lead to Rome when you are in the labyrinth of the provinces, my dear Ovid.
The funny thing is that he is much kindlier toward the Minotaur in one of his earlier books, Heroides or Epistulae Heroidum. I prefer the translated title “Heroines,” as it best captures the heroin of despair. There, the abandoned Ariadne writes to Theseus, who is already sailing for Athens. And there, for the first time, this accessory to the Minotaur’s murder, motivated by love, seems to regret what she has done: you would have died in the winding labyrinth unless guided by the thread I gave you, Theseus. You said that as long as we both shall live, you’ll be mine. Well, look, we’re alive, and if you’re alive, too, that means you’re nothing more than a lowdown despicable liar. I never should’ve given you that damn thread, and so on. But
