The way he copes is by turning inward: “Geryon turned all attention to his inside world.” The only place where he feels safe is inside himself he doesn’t feel like he has control over his body or the world around him. As soon as his mother, his only hope of protection from his brother, leaves the house, he “felt the walls of the kitchen contract as most of the air in the room/swirled out after her.
The early abuse that Geryon suffers at his brother’s hands is a formative trauma that gradually drives him out of his family home. Herakles finds Geryon’s obsession with “captivity” to be “depressing,” because Herakles values freedom over intimacy, and this is a major source of Geryon’s loneliness he feels alone in valuing intimacy over freedom (55). We see this also in his silent exhortation towards Herakles: “Don’t want to be free want to be with you” (74). He wants to feel contained within the warmth of others. One of the happiest moments we see Geryon experience is at a dinner party in Buenos Aires, where he let “the talk flow over him warm as a bath,” and “for a moment the frailest leaves of life contained him in a widening happiness” (96-7). He wants to feel a part of things, embraced by the world, for he knows “There is no person without a world” (82). This solitude weighs on him because he is someone who longs for love, and puts great stock in relationships, not only between persons but between persons and their environment. Geryon is a fundamentally solitary person. In all of Geryon’s relationships, there are gaps in both partners' understanding of each other, and the consequence is loneliness, whether they’re together or apart.
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