The Four-Chambered Heart

THE TRAP WAS INVISIBLE BY DAY

The trap was a web of senseless duties. No sooner were Djuna’s eyes open than she saw Zora vividly, lying down, pale, with soft flabby hands touching everything with infantile awkwardness. Zora missing her aim, dropping what she held, fumbling with a door, and moving so abnormally slow and with such hazy, uncertain gestures that it took her two hours to get dressed.

Compassion was the cover with which Djuna disguised to her own eyes her revulsion for Zora’s whining voice, unkempt body, and shrewd glance, for her beggar’s clothes which were a costume to attract pity, for the listless hair she was too lazy to brush, for the dead skin through which the blood stagnated.

If one knew what lay in Zora’s mind, one would turn away with revulsion. Djuna had heard her sometimes, half asleep, monotonously accusing doctors, the world, Rango, herself, friends, for all that befell her.

Revulsion. There is a guilt not only for acts committed but for one’s thoughts. Now that the trap had grown so grotesque, futile, stifling, Djuna wished every day that Zora might die. A useless life, grasping food, devotion, service, and giving absolutely nothing, less than nothing. A useless life, exuding poison, envy, a strangling tyranny.

If she died, Rango’s life might soar again, a fire, his body strong and exuberant, his imagination propelling him to all comers of the world. At his worst moments, there was always a fire in him. In Zora there was coldness. Only the mind at work, deforming, denigrating, accusing.

Only a showman left in her. “See my wound, see what I suffer. Love me.”

But love is not given for such reasons.

The trap is inescapable. Djuna has nightmares of Zora’s yellow face and lack of courage. She awakens early, to market for a special bread, a special meat, a special vegetable. There is an appointment for x-rays of the chest, for this week Zora believes she has tuberculosis. Hours wasted on this, only to hear the doctor say: “There’s nothing wrong. Hysterical symptoms. She should be taken to a psychiatrist.”

There is a visit to the pawnbroker, because one must pay the other doctor, the one who made the futile, the dramatic, test for cancer. Djuna’s allowance for the month is finished.

There is no escape. The day crumbles soon after it is born. The only tree she will see will be the anemic tree of the hospital garden.

A useless, abortive sacrifice gives sadness.

The day is the trap, but she does not dare revolt. If she wants her half-night with Rango, this is the only path to reach it. At the end of the day there will be his fervent kisses, his emotion, his desire, the bites of hunger on the shoulder, vibrations of pleasure shaking the body, the guttural moans of men and women returning to their primitive origin…

Sometimes there is no time for undressing. At others, the climax is postponed teasingly, arousing frenzy. The dross of the day is burned away.

When Djuna thinks during the day, “I must run away. I must leave Rango to his chosen torment,” it is the remembrance of this point of fire which binds her.

How can Rango admire Zora’s rotting away—not even a noble suicide, but a fixed obsession to die slowly, dragging others along with her? A life ugly and monstrous. If she washes a dish, she complains. If she sews a button, she laments.

These are Djuna’s thoughts, and she must atone for them too. Zora, take this bread I traveled an hour to find, it won’t nourish you, you are too full of poison within your body. Your first words to me were hypocritical, your talk about praying to be helped, and being glad I was the one, yes, because I was one who could be easily caught through compassion. You knew I would act toward you as you would never have acted toward me. I have tried to imagine you in my place, and I couldn’t. I know you would be utterly cruel.

On her way back to the barge she bought new candles, and a fur rug to lie on, because Rango believed it was too bourgeois to sleep on a bed like everybody else. They slept on the floor. Perhaps a fur, the bed of Eskimos, would be appropriate.

When Rango came, he looked at the candles and the fur like a lion looking at a lettuce leaf. But lying on it, his bronze desire is aroused and the primitive bed is baptized in memory of cavernous dwellings.

At this hour children are reading fairy tales from which Rango and Djuna were led to expect such marvels, the impossible. Rango had imagined a life without work, without responsibilities. Djuna had wanted a life of desire and freedom, not comfort but the smoothness of magical happenings, not luxury but beauty, not security but fulfillment, not perfection but a perfect moment like this one…but without Zora waiting to lie between them like an incubus…

Djuna was unprepared for Rango’s making the first leap out of the trap. It came unexpectedly at midnight as they were about to separate. Out of the fog of enswathing caresses came his voice: “We’re leading a selfish life. There are many things happening in the world; we should be working for them. You are like all the artists, with your big floodlights fixed on the sky, and never on earth, where things are happening. There is a revolution going on, and I want to help.”

Djuna did not think of the world or the revolution needing Rango, Rango and his bohemian indiscipline, his love of red wine, his laziness. She felt that Zora’s persecutions were driving him away. He was caught between a woman who wanted to die, and one who wanted to live! He had hoped to amalgamate the women, so he would not feel the tension between his two selves. He had thought only of his own emotional comfort. He had overlooked Zora’s egoistic ferocity, and Djuna’s clairvoyance. The alliance was a failure.

Now he was driven to risk his life for some impersonal task.

She was silent. She looked at ace and saw that his mouth looked unhappy, wounded, and revealed his desperateness. He kept it tightly shut, as women do when they don’t want to weep. His mouth which was not in keeping with his lion’s head, which was the mouth of a child, small and vulnerable; the mouth which aroused her indulgence.

Parting at the corner of the street, they kissed desperately as if for a long voyage. A beggar started to play on his violin, then stopped, thinking they were lovers who would never see each other again.

The blood beat in her ears as she walked away, her body parting from Rango in anticipation, hair parting from hair, hands unlocking, lips closing against the last kiss, surrendering him to a more demanding mistress: the revolution.

The earth was turning fast. Women cannot walk out of the traps of love, but men can; they have wars and revolutions to attend to. What would happen now? She knew. One signed five sheets of paper and answered minute, excruciatingly exact questions. She had seen the questionnaire. One had to say whether one’s wife or husband believed in the revolution; one had to tell everything. Rango would be filling these pages slowly, with his nervous, rolling, and swaying handwriting. Everything. He would probably say that his wife was a cripple, but the party would not condone a mistress.

Then suddenly the earth ceased turning and the blood no longer rang in her ear. Everything stood deathly still because she remembered the dangers. She remembered Rango’s friend who had been found with a bullet hole in his temple, near the cafe where they met. She remembered Rango’s story about one of the men who worked for the revolution in Guatemala: the one who had been placed in a jail half full of water until his legs rotted away in strips of moldy flesh, until his eyes turned absolutely white.

The next evening Rango was late. Djuna forgot that he was always late. She thought: he has signed all the papers, and been told that a member of the party cannot have a mistress.

It was nine o’clock. She had not eaten. It was raining. Friends came into the cafe, talked a little, and left. The time seemed long because of the anxiety. This is the way it would be, the waiting, and never knowing, if Rango were still alive. He would be so easily detected. A foreigner, dark skin, wild hair, his very appearance was the one policemen expected from a man working for the revolution.

What had happened to Rango? She picked up a newspaper. Once he had said: “I picked up a newspaper and saw on the front page the photograph of my best friend, murdered the night before.”

That is the way it would happen. Rango would kiss her as he had kissed her the night before at the street corner, with the violin playing, then the violin would stop, and that very night…

She questioned her instinct. No, Rango was not dead. She would like to go to church, but that was forbidden, too. Despair was forbidden. This was the time for stoicism.

She was jealous of Rango’s admiration for Gauguin’s mother, a South American heroine, who had fought in revolutions and shot her own husband when he betrayed the party.

Djuna walked past the church and entered. She could not pray because she was seeking to transform herself into the proper mate for a revolutionist. But she always felt a humorous, a private, connivance with god. She felt he would always smile with irony upon her most wayward acts. He would see the contradictions, and be indulgent. There was a pact between them, even if she were considered guilty before most tribunals. It was like her friendliness with the policemen of Paris.

And now Rango walked toward her! (See what a pact she had with god that he granted her wishes no one else would have dared to expect him to grant!)

Rango had been ill. No, he had not signed the papers. He had overslept. Tomorrow. Manana.

Djuna had forgotten this Latin deity: Manana.

At the Cafe Martiniquaise, near the barge, Rango and Djuna sat drinking coffee.

The place was dense with smoke, voices, faces, heaving and swaying like a compact sonorous wave, washing over them at times and enswathing them, at others retreating as if subdued, only to return again louder and more suffocating to engulf their voices.

Djuna could never identify such a tide of faces dissolved by lights and shadows, slightly blurred in outlines from drink. But Rango could say immediately: “There’s a pimp, there’s a prizefighter. There’s a drug addict.”

Two friends of Rango’s walked in, with their hands in their pockets, greeted them obliquely, with heavy lids half dropped over glazed eyes. They had deep purple shadows under the eyes and Rango said: “It startles me to see my friends disintegrating so fast, even dying, from drugs. I’m no longer drawn to this kind of life.”

“You were drawn toward destruction before, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” said Rango, “but not really. When I was a young man, at home, what I liked most was health, physical energy and well-being. It was only later, here in Paris the poets taught me not to value life, that it was more romantic to be desperate, more noble to rebel, and to die, than to accept what ordinary life had to offer. I’m not drawn to that any more. I want to live. That was not the real me. Zora says you changed me, yet I can’t think of anything you said or did to accomplish it. But every time we are together I want to accomplish something, something big. I don’t want any more of this literary credo, about the romantic beauty of living desperately, dangerously, destructively.”

Djuna thought with irony that she had not meant to give birth to a rebel. She had changed, too, because of Rango. She had acquired some of his gypsy ways, some of his nonchalance, his bohemian indiscipline. She had swung with him into the disorders of strewn clothes, spilled cigarette ashes, slipping into bed all dressed, falling asleep thus, indolence, timelessness… A region of chaos and moonlight. She liked it there. It was the atmosphere of earth’s womb, where awareness could not reach and illumine all the tragic aspects of unfulfilled desires. In the darkness, chaos, warmt one forgot… And the silence. She liked the silence most of all. The silence in which the body, the senses, the instincts, are more alert, more powerful, more sensitized, live a more richly perfumed and intoxicating life, instead of transmuting into thoughts, words, into exquisite abstractions, mathematics of emotion in place of the violent impact, the volcanic eruptions of fever, lust, and delight.

Irony. Now Rango was projecting himself out of this realm, and wanted action. No more time for the guitar which had ensorcelled her, no more time to visit the gypsies as he had once promised, no more time to sleep in the morning as she had been learning, or to acquire by osmosis his art of throwing off responsibilities, his self-indulgence, his recklessness…

As they sat in the cafe, he condemned his past life. He was full of contrition for the wasted hours, the wasted energy, the wasted years. He wanted a more austere life, action and fulfillment.

Suddenly Djuna looked down at her coffee and her eyes filled with stinging tears; the tears of irony burn the skin more fiercely. She wept because she had aroused in Rango the desire to serve a purpose which was not hers, to live now for others when already he lived for Zora, and had so little to give her of himself. She wept because they were so close in that earthy darkness, close in the magnetic pull between their skins, their hair, their bodies, and yet their dreams never touched at any point, their vision of life, their attitudes. She wept over the many dislocations of life, forbidding the absolute unity.

Rango did not understand.

In the realm of ideas he was always restless, impatient, and like some wild animal who feared to be corralled. He often described how the horses, the bulls, were corralled in his ranch. He delighted in the fierceness of the battle. For him to examine, to understand, to interpret was exactly like some corralling activity, of which he was suspicious.

But for the moment, she was breathing the odor of his hair. For the moment there was this current between their skin and flesh, these harmonizations of contrasting colors, weight, quality, odors. Everything about him was pungent and violent. They were as his friends said, like Othello and Desdemona.

Manana he would be a party member.

When you lose your wings, thought Djuna, this is the way you live. You buy candles for the meeting of Rango’s friends, but these candles do not give a light that will delight you, because you do not believe in what you are doing.

Sadness never added to her weight; it caught her in flight as she danced in spirals misplacing air pools like an arrow shot at a bird which did not bring it down but merely increased its flutterings.

She had every day a greater reluctance to descend into familiar daily life, because the hurt, the huntsman’s bow, came from the earth, and therefore flight at a safe distance became more and more imperative.

Her mobility was now her only defense against new dangers. While you’re in movement it is harder to be shot at, to be wounded even. She had adopted the basic structure of the nomads.

Rango had said: “Prepare the barge for a meeting tonight. It will be an ideal place. No superintendents to tell tales to the police. No neighbors.”

He had signed all the papers. They must be more careful. The barge was being put to a greater usefulness.

There are two realms to live in now. (Do I hold the secret drug which permits me to hold on to the ecstasies while entering the life of the world, activities in the world, contingencies? I feel it coming to me while I am walking. It is a strange sensation, like drunkenness. It catches me in the middle of the street like a tremendous wave, and a numbness passes through my veins which is the numbness of the marvelous. I know it by its power, by the way it lifts my body, the air which passes under my feet. The cold room I left in the morning, the drab bed covers, the stove full of ashes, the sour wine at the bottom of the glass were all illuminated by the force of love for Rango. It was as if I had learned to fly over the street and were permitted to do so for an instant…making every color more intense, every caress more penetrating, every moment more magnificent… But I knew by the anxiety that it might not last. It is a state of grace of love, which some achieve by wine and others by prayer and fasting. It is a state of grace but I cannot discover what makes one fall out of it. The danger lies in flying low, in awakening. She knew she was flying lower now that Rango was to act in the world. The air of politics was charged with dust. People aspired to reach the planets, but it was a superfluous voyage; there was a certain way of breathing, of walking, of seeing, which transported human beings into space, into transparency. The extraordinary brilliancy of the games people played beyond themselves, the games of their starry selves…)

She bought wood for the fire. She swept the barge. She concealed the bed and the barrel of wine.

Rango would guide the newcomers to the barge, and remain on the bridge to direct them.

The Guatemalans arrived gradually. The darker Indian-blooded ones in Indian silence, the paler Spanish-blooded ones with Spanish volubility. But both were intimidated by the place, the creaking wood, the large room resembling the early meeting places of the revolutionaries, the extended shadows, the river noises, chains, oars, the disquieting lights from the bridge, the swaying when other barges passed. Too much the place for conspirators. At times life surpasses the novel, the drama. This was one of them. The setting was more dramatic than they wished. They stood awkwardly around.

Rango had not yet come. He was waiting for those who were late.

Djuna did not know what to do. This was a role for which she had no precedent. Politeness or marginal talk seemed out of place. She kept the stove filled with wood and watched the flames as if her guardianship would make them active.

When you lose your wings, and wear a dark suit bought in the cheapest store of Paris, to become anonymous, when you discard your earrings, and the polish on your nails, hoping to express an abdication of the self, a devotion to impersonal service, and still you do not feel sincere, you feel like an actress, because you expect conversion to come like miracle, by the grace of love for one party member…

They know I am pretending.

That is how she interpreted the silence.

In her own eyes, she stood judged and condemned. She was the only woman there, and they knew she was there only because she was a woman, tangled in her love, not in the revolution.

Then Rango came, breathless, and anxious: “There will be no meeting. You are ordered to disperse. No explanations.”

They were relieved to go. They left in silence. They did not look at her.

Rango and Djuna were left alone.

Rango said: “Your friend the policeman was on guard at the top of the stairs. A hobo had been found murdered. So when the Guatemalans began to arrive, he asked for papers. It was dangerous.” He had made his first error, in thinking the barge a good place. The head of the group had been severe. Had called him a romantic… “He also knows about you. Asked if you were a member. I had to tell the truth.”

“Should I sign the papers?” she asked, with a docility which was so much like a child’s that Rango was moved.

“If you do it for me, that’s bad. You have to do it for yourself.”

“Oh, for myself. You know what I believe. The world today is rootless; it’s like a forest with all the trees with their heads in the ground and their roots gesticulating wildly in the air, withering. The only remedy is to begin a world of two; in two there is hope of perfection, and that in turn may spread to all… But it must begin at the base, in relationship of man and woman.”

“I’m going to give you books to read, to study.”

Would his new philosophy change his overindulgence and slavishness to Zora, would he see her with new eyes, see the waste, the criminality of her self-absorption? Would he say to her, too: there are more important things in the world than your little pains. One must forget one’s personal life. Would his personal life be altered as she had not been able to alter it? Would his confusions and errors be clarified?

Djuna began to hope. She began to study. She noted analogies between the new philosophy and what she had been expounding uselessly to Rango.

For instance, to die romantically, recklessly, unintelligently, was not approved by the party. Waste. Confusion. Indiscipline. The party developed a kind of stoicism, an armature, a form of behavior and thinking.

Djuna gradually allied herself to the essence of the philosophy, to its results rather, and overlooked the rigid dogmas.

The essence was construcion. In a large way she could adopt this because it harmonized with her obsessional battle against destruction and negativism.

She was not alone against the demoralizing, dissolving influence of Zora.

Perhaps the trap was opening a little, in an unforeseen direction.

What he could not do for her (because she was his pleasure, his self-indulgence, his sensually fulfilling mistress, and this gave him guilt), he might do for the party and for a large, anonymous mass of people.

The trap was the fixation on the impossible. A change in Zora, instead of an aggravation. A change in Rango, instead of a gradual strangulation.

Passion alone had not made him whole. But it had made him whole enough to be useful to the world.

When the barge failed to become the meeting place for Rango’s fellow workers, it was suddenly transformed into its opposite: a shelter for the dreamers looking for a haven. The more bitter the atmosphere of Paris, the more intense the dissensions, the rising tide of political antagonisms, dangers, fears, the more they came to the barge as if it were Noah’s Ark against a new deluge.

It was no longer the secret boat of a voyage of two. The unicellular nights had come to an end. Rango was but a visitor-lover in transit.

The divergence between them became sharply exteriorized: while Rango attended meetings, talked feverishly in cafes, sought to convert, to teach, to organize, worked among the poor he had known, among the artists, Djuna’s friends brought to the barge the values they believed in danger of being lost, a passionate clinging to aesthetic and human creation.

Rango brought stories of cruelty and personal sacrifice: Ramon had been four years without seeing his wife and child. He had been working in Guatemala. Now his wife in Paris was gravely ill, and he wanted to throw off his duties there and come, at any cost. “Think of a man forgetting his loyalty to his party, just because his wife and child need him. Willing to sacrifice the good of millions, perhaps, for just two.”

“Rango, that’s just what you would do, and you know it. That’s what you have done with Zora. You’ve given twenty years of your strength to one human being, when you could have done greater things, too…”

Another day he came and was sick in her arms, vomited all night, and only at dawn, weak, and feverish did he confess: they had had to arrest a traitor. He had been a friend of Rango’s. The group had been obliged to judge him. Rango had been forced to question him. The man was not really a traitor. He was weak. He had needed money for his family. He was tired of working for the party without pay. The party never worried about a man’s family, what they needed while he was away on duty. He had given his whole life, and now, at forty, he had weakened. He had been tempted by a good position in the embassy. At first he had intended to exploit his position for the benefit of the party. But after awhile he got tired of danger. He had ceased to be of help… Rango had had to force himself to turn him over to the party. It had made him sick. It was his first cruel, difficult, disciplined act. But he didn’t sleep for a week, and each time he remembered the man’s face as he told his story, and repeated: just tired, very tired, worn out, at forty, too many times in prison, too many hardships, couldn’t take any more. Had been in the party from the age of seventeen, had been useful, courageous, but now he was tired.

Every day he brought a story like this one. When the conflict grew too great he drank. Djuna did not have this escape. When the stories burnt into her and hurt her, she turned away and into the dream again, as she had done in childhood. There was another world visible to practiced eyes, easy to enter and inhabit, another chamber to which only the initiate could follow.

(Moods flowing like the river finding its way to the sea and vastness and depth. In this world the river was the flow; tap the secret of its flow, in the lulling rhythm of its waves, in the continuity of its current. Love is a madness shared by two, love is the crystal in which people find their unity. In this world Rango was capable of giving himself to a dream of love, which is a city of only two inhabitants. In this world, when Rango buys shoes so heavy and so strong, they seem like the hooves of the centaur, hooves of iron, whose head was in the heavens but whose hooves must pound the battlefields.)

There are drugs to escape reality, a Rango vomiting from the spectacle of cruelty, Rango’s harshness toward her feelings. He should, by laws of accuracy, be angry at his own emotionalism and human fallibility. But because of his blindness, he gets angry at Djuna’s face turned away and attacks her swift departures from horror. He drinks but does not consider thata trap door opening on the infinite, an inferior drug to dispel pain… But Djuna’s excursions into astronomy, her sheltering of the artists in the barge… He is merciless toward their kind of drug to transform reality into something bearable…

“To me, it is the world of history which appears mad, treacherous and full of contradictions,” said Djuna.

“In Guatemala,” said Rango, with an ironic twist of his lips which Djuna disliked, “they placed madmen by the side of the river, and that cured them. If your madmen don’t get cured, we’ll make a hole in the floor and sink them.”

“I may sink with them, you know.”

Walking along the quay, they saw a hobo sitting under a tree, a hobo with a Scotch cap, a plaid, and a crooked pipe.

Rango adopted his best imitation of a Scotch accent and said: “Weel, and where d’ya come from, ma good friend?”

But the hobo looked up bewildered and said in pure Montmartre French: “Mon Dieu, I’m no foreigner, sir. What makes you think I am?”

“The cap and the blanket,” said Rango.

“Oh, that, sir, it’s just that I’m always digging in the garbage can of the Opera Comique, and I found this rig. It was the only one I could wear, you understand, the others were a little too fancy, and most of them pretty indecent, I must say.”

Then he took a faded gray sporran out of his pocket: “Could you tell me what this is for?”

Rango laughed: “That’s a wig. The use of the skirt has caused premature baldness of an unusual kind in Scotland. Hold on to it, it might come useful one day…”

Sabina walked with her feet flat on the ground, which gave to her heavy body the poise of Biblical water carriers.

Djuna saw her and Rango as composed of the same elements, and felt that perhaps they would love each other. She imagined a parting scene with Rango, surrendering his black hair to hers heavy and straight, his burnt sienna skin to her incandescent gold one, his rough dry hands to her strong peasant ones, his laughter to hers, his Indian slyness to her Semitic labyrinthian mind. They will recognize each other’s climate of fever and chaos, and embrace each other.

Djuna was amazed to see her predictions unfulfilled. Rango fled from Sabina’s intensity and violence. They met like two armed warriors, and the part of Rango which longed to be yielded to, who longed for warmth, found in Sabina an unyielding armor. She yielded only at the last moment, merely to achieve a sensual embrace, and immediately after was poised for battle again. No aperture for tenderness to lodge itself, for his secret timidity to flow into, as it flew into Djuna’s breast. Not a woman one could nestle into.

They sought grounds for a duel. Rango hated her presence about Djuna, and would have liked to drive her away from the barge.

Once sitting in a restaurant together, with Djuna and two other friends, they decided to see which one could eat the most red chilies.

They ate the red chilies with ostentatious insolence, watching each other. At first mixed with rice and vegetables, then with the salad, and finally by themselves.

Both might have died of the contest, for neither one would yield. Each little red chili like a concentrate of fire which burned them both.

Now and then they opened their mouths wide and breathed quickly in and out, as if to cool their insides.

As in the old myths, they sat like fire eaters partaking of a fire banquet. Tears came to Sabina’s intense dark eyes. A sepia flush came to Rango’s laughing cheeks, but neither would yield, though they might scar their entrails.

Fortunately the restaurant was closing, and the waiters maliciously washed the floor under their feet with ammonia, piled chairs on the table, and finally put an end to the marathon by turning out the lights.

Not one but many Djunas descended the staircase of the barge, one layer formed by the parents, the childhood, another molded by her profession and her friends, still another born of history, geology, climate, race, economics, and all the backgrounds and backdrops, the sky and nature of the earth, the pure sources of birth, the influence of a tree, a word dropped carelessly, an image seen, and all the corrupted sources: books, art, dogmas, tainted friendships, and all the places where a human being is wounded, defeated, crippled, and which fester…

People add up their physical mishaps, the stubbed toes, the cut finger, the burn scar, the fever, the cancer, the microbe, the infection, the wounds and broken bones. They never add up the accumulated bruises and scars of the inner lining, forming a complete universe of reactions, a reflected world through which no event could take place without being subjected to a personal and private interpretation, through this kaleidoscope of memory, through the peculiar formation of the psyche’s sensitive photographic plates, to this assemblage of emotional chemicals through which every word, every event, every experience is filtered, digested, deformed, before it is projected again upon people and relationships.

The movement of the many layers of the self-described by Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” the multiple selves grown in various proportions, not singly, not evenly developed, not moving in one direction, but composed of multiple juxtapositions revealing endless spirals of character as the earth revealed its strata, an infinite constellation of feelings expanding as mysteriously as space and light in the realm of the planets.

Man turned his telescope outward and far, not seeing character emerging at the opposite end of the telescope by subtle accumulations, fragments, accretions, and encrustations.

Woman turned her telescope to the near, and the warm.

Djuna felt at this moment a crisis, a mutation, a need to leap from the self-born of her relationship to Rango and Zora, a need to resuscitate in another form. She was unable to follow Rango in his faith, unable either to live in the dream in peace, or to sail the barge accurately through a stormy Seine.

She found herself defending Sabina against Rango’s ruthless mockery. She defended Sabina’s philosophy of the many loves against the One.

(Rango, your anger should not be directed against Sabina. Sabina is only behaving as all women do in their dreams, at night. I feel responsible for her acts, because when we walk together and I listen to her telling me about her adventures, a part of me is not listening to her telling me a story but recognizing scenes familiar to a secret part of myself. I recognize scenes I have dreamed and which therefore I have committed. What is dreamed is committed. In my dreams I have been Sabina. I have escaped from your tormenting love, caressed all the interchangeable lovers of the world. Sabina cannot be made alone responsible for acting the dreams of many women, just because the others sit back and participate with a secret part of their selves. Through secret and small vibrations of the flesh they admit being silent accomplices to Sabina’s acts. At night we have all tossed with fever and desire for strangers. During the day we deride Sabina, and revile her. You’re angry at Sabina because she lives out all her wishes overtly as you have done. To love Sabina’s fever, Sabina’s impatience, Sabina’s evasion of traps in the games of love, was being Sabina. To be only at night what Sabina dared to be during the day, to bear the responsibility for one’s secret dream of escape from the torments of one love into many loves.)

Sabina sat astride a chair, flinging her hair back with her hands and laughing.

She always gave at this moment the illusion that she was going to confess. She excelled in this preparation for unveiling, this setting of a mood for intimate revelations. She excelled equally in evasion. When she wished it, her life was like a blackboard on which she wrote swiftly and then erased almost before anyone could read what she had written. Her words then did not seem like words but like smoke issuing from her mouth and nostrils, a heavy smoke screen against detection. But at other times, if she felt secure from judgment, then she opened a story of an incident with direct, stabbing thoroughness…

“Our affair lasted…lasted for the duration of an elevator ride! And I don’t mean that symbolically either! We took such a violent fancy to each other, the kind that will not last, but will not wait either. It was cannibalistic, and of no importance, but it had to be fulfilled once. Circumstances were against us. We had no place to go. We wandered through the streets, we were ravenous for each other. We got into an elevator, and he began to kiss me… First floor, second floor, and he still kissing me, third floor, fourth floor, and when the elevator came to a standstill, it was too late…we could not stop, his hands were everywhere, his mouth… I pressed the button wildly and went on kissing as the elevator came down… When we got to the bottom it was worse… He pressed the button and we went up and down, up and down, madly, while people kept ringing for the elevator…”

She laughed again, with her entire body, even her feet, marking the rhythm of her gaiety, stamping the ground like a delighted spectator, while her strong thighs rocked the chair like an Amazon’s wooden horse.

One evening while Djuna was waiting for Rango at the barge, she heard a footstep which was not the watchman’s and not Rango’s.

The shadows of the candles on the tarpapered walls played a scene from a Balinese theatre as she moved toward the door and called: “Who’s there?”

There was a complete silence, as if the river, the barge, and the visitor had connived to be silent at the same moment, put a tension in the air which she felt like a vibration through her body.

She did not know what to do, whether to stay in the room and lock the door, awaiting Rango, or to explore the barge. If she stayed in the room quietly and watched for his coming, she could shout a warning to him out of the window, and then together they might corner the intruder.

She waited.

The shadows on the walls were still, but the reflections of the lights on the river played on the surface like a ghost’s carnival. The candles flickered more than usual, or was it her anxiety?

When the wood beams ceased to creak, she heard the footsteps again, moving toward the room, cautiously but not light enough to prevent the boards from creaking.

Djuna took her revolver from under her pillow, a small one which had been given to her and which she did not know how to use.

She called out: “Who is there? If you come any nearer, I’ll shoot.”

She knew there was a safety clasp to open. She wished Rango would arrive. He had no physical fear. He feared truth, he feared to confront his motives, feared to face, to understand, to examine in the realm of feelings and thought, but he did not fear to act, he did not fear physical danger. Djuna was intrepid in awareness, in painful exposures of the self, and dared more than most in matter of emotional surgery, but she had a fear of violence.

She waited another long moment, put again the silence was complete, suspended.

Rango did not come.

Out of exhaustion, she lay down with her revolver in hand.

The doors and windows were locked. She waited, listening for Rango’s uneven footsteps on the deck.

The candles burnt down one by one, gasping out their last flame, throwing one last long, agonized skeleton on the wall.

The river rocked the barge.

Hours passed and Djuna fell into a half sleep.

The catch of the door was gradually lifted off the hinge by some instrument or other and Zora stood at the opened door.

Djuna saw her when she was bending over her, and screamed.

Zora held a long old-fashioned hatpin in her hand and tried to stab Djuna with it. Djuna at first grasped her hands at the wrists, but Zora’s anger gave her greater strength. Her face was distorted with hatred. She pulled her hands free and stabbed at Djuna several times blindly, striking her at the shoulder, and then once more, with her eyes wide open, she aimed at the breast and missed. Then Djuna pushed her off, held her.

“What harm have I done you, Zora?”

“You forced Rango to join the party. He’s trying to become someone now, in politics, and it’s for you. He wants you to be proud of him. With me he never cared; he wasn’t ashamed of his laziness… It’s your fault that he is never home… Your fault that he’s in danger every day.”

Djuna looked at Zora’s face and felt again as she did with Rango, the desperate hopelessness of talking, explaining, clarifying. Zora and Rango were fanatics.

She shook Zora by the shoulders, as if to force her to listen and said: “Killing me won’t change anything, can’t you understand that? We’re the two faces of Rango’s character. If you kill me, that side of him remains unmated and another woman will take my place. He’s divided within himself, between destruction and construction. While he’s divided there will be two women, always. I wished you would die, too, once, until I understood this. I once thought Rango could be saved if you died. And here you are, thinking that I would drive him into danger. He’s driving himself into danger. He is ashamed of his futility. He can’t bear the conflict of his split being enacted in us before his eyes. He is trying a third attempt at wholeness. For his peace of mind, if you and I could have been friends it would have been easier. He didn’t consider us, whether or not we could sincerely like each other. We tried and failed. You were too selfish. You and I stand at opposite poles. I don’t like you, and you don’t like me either; even if Rango did not exist you and I could never like each other. Zora, if you harm me you’ll be punished for it and sent to a place without Rango… And Rango will be angry with you. And if you died, it would be the same. He would not be mine either, because I can’t fulfill his love of destruction…”

Words, words, words…all the words Djuna had turned in her mind at night when alone, she spoke them wildly, blindly, not hoping for Zora to understand, but they were said with such anxiety and vehemence that aside from their meaning Zora caught the pleading, the accents of truth, dissolving her hatred, her violence.

At the sight of each other their antagonism always dissolved. Zora, faced with the sadness of Djuna’s face, her voice, her slender body, could never sustain her anger. And Djuna faced with Zora’s haggard face, limp hair, uncontrolled lips, lost her rebellion.

Whatever scenes took place between them, there was a sincerity in each one’s sadness which bound them too.

It was at this moment that Rango arrived, and stared at the two women with dismay.

“What happened? Djuna, you’re bleeding!”

“Zora tried to kill me. The wounds aren’t bad.”

Djuna hoped once more that Rango would say, “Zora is mad,” and that the nightmare would cease.

“You wanted us to be friends, because that would have made it easier for you. We tried. But it was impossible. I feel that Zora destroys all my efforts to create with you, and she thinks I sent you into a dangerous political life… We can never understand each other.”

Rango found nothing to say. He stared at the blood showing through Djuna’s clothes. She showed him that the stabs were not deep and had struck fleshy places without causing harm.

“I’ll take Zora home. I’ll come back.”

When he returned he was still silent, crushed, bowed. “Zora has moments of madness,” he said. “She’s been threatening people in the street lately. I’m so afraid the police may catch her and put her in an institution.”

“You don’t care about the people she might kill, do you?”

“I do care, Djuna. If she had killed you I don’t think I could ever have forgiven herBut you aren’t angry, when you have a right to be. You’re generous and good…”

“No, Rango. I can’t let you believe that. It isn’t true. I have often wished Zora’s death, but I only had the courage to wish it… I had a dream one night in which I saw myself killing her with a long old-fashioned hatpin. Do you realize where she got the idea of the hatpin? From my own dream, which I told her. She was being more courageous, more honest, when she attacked me.”

Rango took his head in his hands and swayed back and forth as if in pain. A dry sob came out of his chest.

“Oh, Rango, I can’t bear this anymore. I will go away. Then you’ll have peace with Zora.”

“Something else happened today, Djuna, something which reminded me of some of the things you said. Something so terrible that I did not want to see you tonight. I don’t know what instinct of danger made me come, after all. But what happened tonight is worse than Zora’s fit of madness. You know that once a month the workers of the party belonging to a certain group meet for what they call auto-criticism. It’s part of the discipline. It’s done with kindness, great objectivity, and very justly. I have been at such meetings. A man’s way of working, his character traits, are analyzed. Last night it was my turn. The men who sat in a circle, they were the ones I see every day, the butcher, the postman, the grocer, the shoemaker on my own street. The head of our particular section is the bus driver. At first, you know, they had been doubtful about signing me in. They knew I was an artist, a bohemian, an intellectual. But they liked me…and they took me in. I’ve worked for them two months now. Then last night…”

He stopped as if he would not have the courage to relive the scene. Djuna’s hand in his calmed him. But he kept his head bowed. “Last night they talked, very quietly and moderately as the French do… They analyzed me, how I work. They told me some of the things you used to tell me. They made an analysis of my character. They observed everything, the good and the bad. Not only the laziness, the disorder, the lack of discipline, the placing of personal life before the needs of the party, the nights at the cafe, the immoderate talking, irresponsibility, but they also mentioned my capabilities, which made it worse, as they showed how I sabotage myself… They analyzed my power to influence others, my eloquence, my fervor and enthusiasm, my contagious enthusiasm and energy, my gift for making an impression on a crowd, the fact that people are inclined to trust me, to elect me as their leader. Everything. They knew about my fatalism, too. They talked about character changing, as you do. They even intimated that Zora should be placed in an institution, because they knew about her behavior.”

All the time he kept his head bowed.

“When you said these things gently, it didn’t hurt me. It was our secret and I could get angry with you, or contradict you. But when they said them before all the other men I knew it was true, and worse still, I knew that if I had not been able to change with all that you gave me, years of love and devotion, I wouldn’t change for the party either… Any other man, taking what you gave, would have accomplished the greatest changes…any other man but me.”

The barge was sailing nowhere, a moored port of despair.

Rango stretched himself and said: “I’m tired out…so tired, so tired…” And fell asleep almost instantly in the pose of a big child, with his fists tightly closed, his arms over his head.

Djuna walked lightly to the front cabin, looked once through the small barred portholes like the windows of a prison, leaned over the mildewed floor, and tore up one of the bottom boards, inviting the deluge to sink this Noah’s Ark sailing nowhere.

The wood being old and half rotted had made it easy for Djuna to pull on the plank where it had once been patched, but the influx of the water had been partly blocked by the outer layer of barnacles and corrugated seaweeds which she could not reach.

She returned to the bed on the floor and lay beside Rango, to wait patiently for death.

She saw the river sinuating toward the sea and wondered if they would float unhampered toward the ocean.

Below the level of identity lay an ocean, an ocean of which human beings carry only a drop in their veins; but some sink below cognizance and the drop becomes a huge wave, the tide of memory, the undertows of sensation…

Beneath the cities of the interior flowed many rivers carrying a multitude of images… All the women she had been spread their hair in a halo on the surface of the river, extended multiple arms like the idols of India, their essence seeping in and out of the meandering dreams of men…

Djuna, lying face upward like a water lily of amniotic lakes; Djuna floating down to the organ grinder’s tune of a pavana for a defunct infanta of Spain, the infanta who never acceded to the throne of maturity, the one who remained a pretender…

As for Rango, the drums would burst and all the painted horses of the carnival would turn a polka…

She saw their lives over and over again until she caught a truth which was not simple and divisible but fluctuating and elusive; but she saw it clearly from the places under the surface where she had been accustomed to exist: all the women she had been like many rivers running out of her and with her into the ocean…

She saw, through this curtain of water, all of them as personages larger than nature, more visible to sluggish hearts being in the focus of death, a stage on which there are no blurred passages, no missed cues…

She saw, now that she was out of the fog of imprecise relationships, with the more intense light of death upon these faces which had caused her despair, she saw these same faces as pertaining to gentle clowns. Zora dressed in comical trappings, in Rango’s outsized socks, in dyed kimonos, in strangled rags and empty-armed brooches, a comedy to awaken guilt in others…

…on this stage, floating down the Seine toward death, the actors drifted along and love no longer seemed a trap…the trap was the static pause growth, the arrested self caught in its own web of obstinacy and obsession…

…you grow, as in the water the algae grow taller and heavier and are carried by their own weight into different currents…

…I was afraid to grow or move away, Rango, I was ashamed to desert you in your torment, but now I know your choice is your own, as mine was my own…

…fixation is death… death is fixation…

…on this precarious ship, devoid of upholstery and self-deception, the voyage can continue into tomorrow…

…what I see now is the vastness, and the places where I have not been and the duties I have not fulfilled, and the uses for this unusual cargo of past sorrows all ripe for transmutations…

…the messenger of death, like all adventurers, will accelerate your heart toward change and mutation…

…if one sinks deep enough and then deeper, all these women she had been flowed into one at night and lost their separate identities; she would learn from Sabina how to make love laughing, and from Stella how to die only for a little while and be born again as children die and are reborn at the slightest encouragement…

…from the end in water to the beginning in water, she would complete the journey, from origin to birth and birth to flow…

…she would abandon her body to flow into a vaster body than her own, as it was at the beginning, and return with many other lives to be unfolded…

…with her would float the broken doll of her childhood, the Easter egg which had been smaller than the one she had asked for, debris of fictions…

…she would return to the life above the waters of the unconscious and see the magnifications of sorrow which had taken place and been the true cause of the deluge…

…there were countries she had not yet seen…

…this image created a pause in her floating…

…there must also be loves she had not yet encountered…

…as the barge ran swiftly down the current of despair, she saw the people on the shore flinging their arms in desolation, those who had counted on her Noah’s Ark to save themselves…

…she was making a selfish journey…

…she had intended the barge for other purposes than for a mortuary…

…war was coming…

…the greater the turmoil, the confusion, the greater had been her effort to maintain an individually perfect world, a cocoon of faith, which would be a symbol and a refont>

…the curtain of dawn would rise on a deserted river…

…on two deserters…

…in the imminence of death she seized this intermediary region of our being in which we rehearse our future sorrows and relive the past ones…

…in this heightened theatre their lives appeared in their true color because there was no witness to distort the private admissions, the most absurd pretensions…

…in the last role Djuna became immune from the passageway of pretense, from a suspended existence in reflection, from impostures…

…and she saw what had appeared immensely real to her as charades…

…in the theatre of death, exaggeration is the cause of despair…

…the red Easter egg I had wanted to be so enormous when I was a child, if it floats by today in its natural size, so much smaller than my invention, I will be able to laugh at its shrinking…

…I had chosen death because I was ashamed of this shrinking and fading, of what time would do to our fiction of magnificence, time like the river would wear away the pain of defeats and broken promises, time and the river would blur the face of Zora as a giant incubus, time and the river would mute the vibrations of Rango’s voice upon my heart…

…the organ grinder will play all the time but it will not always seem like a tragic accompaniment to separations…

…the organ grinder will play all the time but the images will change, as the feelings will change, Rango’s gestures will seem less violent, and sorrows will fall off like leaves to fecundate the heart for a new love…

…the organ grinder will accelerate his rhythm into arabesques of delight to match the vendor’s cries: “Mimosa! mimosa!” to the tune of Brahm’s “Lullaby.”… “Couteaux! couteaux a aiguiser!“to the tune from Madame Butterfly… “Pommes de terre! pommes de terre!“to the tune from Ravel’s Bolero.

…”Bouteilles! bouteilles!“to the tune from Tristan and Isolde.

She laughed.

…tomorrow the city would ferment with new disasters, the paper vendors would raise their voices to the pitch of hysteria, the crowds would gather to discuss the news, the trains would carry away the cowards…

..the cowards…

…floating down the river…

…with the barge that had been intended not only to house a single love but as a refuge for faith…

…she was sinking a faith…

…instead of solidifying the floating kingdom with its cargo of eternal values…

(“An individually perfect world,” said Rango, “is destroyed by reality, war, revolutions.”)

“Rango, wake up wake up wake up, there’s a leak!”

He was slow in awakening, his dreams of greatness and magnificence were heavy on his body like royal garments, but the face he opened to the dawn was the face of innocence, as every man presents innocence to the new day. Djuna read on it what she had refused to see, the other face of Rango the child lodged in a big man’s body by a merry freak.

It had been a game: “Djuna, you stand there and watch while I am the king and savior. You will admire me when I give the cue.” She will now laugh and say: “But actually, you know, I prefer a hobo who plays the guitar.”

She will laugh when he refuses to see Zora’s madness, because it was like her refusal to see his madness, his impersonations, his fictions, his illusions…

In the face of death the barge was smaller, Rango did not loom so immense, Zora had shrunk…

In the face of death they were playing games, Zora absurdly overdressed in the trappings of tragedy, muddying, aborting, confusing, delighted with the purple colors of catastrophe as children delight in fire engines. When their absence of wisdom and courage tormented her, she would avenge herself by descending into their realm and adding to the difficulties. She had once told Rango that her father would have to live in the south of France for his health and that they would have to separate. Being helpless, they had believed she would let this happen, since they were accustomed to bowing to the inevitable. Rango had jumped and leaped with pain. Zora had said to him, not without mixing it with a delicate shading of poison: “This must happen sooner or later… Djuna will leave you.”

Then she had gone to see Zora, Zora awkwardly, laboriously moving her small and flabby hands, Zora appearing helpless while Djuna knew she was the strongest of the three because she had learned to exploit her weakness. She told Djuna that Rango had not eaten that day. He was just pacing around, and he had been so cruel to Zora. He had said to her: “If Djuna goes to the south of France, I’ll send you home to your relatives.”

“Alone? And what about you?”

“Oh, me,” he said with a shrug. Zora added: “He will kill himself.”

By this time her game had given her enough pleasure. She felt mature again. But after a week of torment the stage was set for a great love scene; she knew now that if she left Rango he would not console himself with Zora. That was all she needed to know. Perhaps she was not so much wiser than they were…perhaps she did not have herself too great a faith in love… Perhaps there was in her a Zora in need of protection and a wildly anxious Rango in need of reassurances. And perhaps that was why she loved them, and perhaps Zora was right to believe in her love as she did in her moments of lucidity…

In the face of death Rango seemed less violent, Zora less tyrannical, and Djuna less wise. And when Zora looked at Djuna above the rim of her glasses which she had picked up in a scrap basket at somebody’s door and which were not suited to her eyes—she looked as children do when they stare and frown over the rim of their parents’ glasses, these pretenders to the throne of maturity…

“Rango, wake up wake up wake up wake up wake up, there’s a leak.”

Rango opened his eyes and then jumped: “Oh, I forgot to pump the water yesterday.”

The second face of Rango, after awakening, following the bewildered and innocent one, contained this expression of total, of absolute, distress common to children and adolescents betraying an exaggeration in the vision of reality, a sense of the menacing, disproportionate stature of this reality. Only children and adolescents know this total despair, as if every wound were fatal and irremediable, every moment the last, death and dangers looming immense as they had loomed in Djuna’s mind during the night…

Rango repaired the leak vigorously, and they walked out on the quay. It was a moment before dawn, and some fishermen were already installed because the river was smooth for fishing. One of them had caught something unusual and was holding it out for Djuna to see, and laughing.

It was a doll.

It was a doll who had committed suicide during the night.

The water had washed off its features. Her hair aureoled her face with crystalline glow.

Noah’s Ark had survived the flood.