A Spy in the House of Love

As if to silence it, Djuna placed a record in her phonograph.

“Sabina…” But no words came as one of Beethoven’s Quartets began to tell Sabina, as Djuna could not, of what they both knew for absolute certainty: the continuity of existence and of the chain of summits, of elevations by which such continuity is reached. By elevation the consciousness reached a perpetual movement, transcending death, and in the same manner attained the continuity of love by seizing upon its impersonal essence, which was a summation of all the alchemies producing life and birth, a child, a work of art, a work of science, a heroic act, an act of love. The identity or the human couple was not eternal but interchangeable, to protect this exchange of spirits, transmissions of character, all the fecundations of new selves being born, and faithfulness only to the continuity, the extensions and expansions of love achieving their crystallizations into high moments and summits equal to the high moments and summits of art or religion.

Sabina slid to the floor and sat there with her head against the phonograph, with her wide skirt floating for one instant like an expiring parachute; and then deflating completely and dying in the dust.

The tears on Sabina’s face were not round and separate like ordinary tears, but seemed to have fallen like a water veil, as if she had sunk to the bottom of the sea by the weight and dissolutions of the music. There was a complete dissolution of the eyes, features, as if she were losing her essence.

The lie detector held out his hands as if to rescue her, in a light gesture, as if this were a graceful dance of sorrow rather than the sorrow itself, and said: “In homeopathy there is a remedy called pulsatile for those who weep at music.”