The Four-Chambered Heart (10 page)

Zora was now talking about her career as a
dancer: “I was the first to present Guatemalan dances to Paris audiences. I was
very successful, so much so that an agent came from New York and arranged a
tour for me. I made money, I made many friends. But there was a woman in the
show traveling with me who wanted to kill me.”

“Oh, no, Zora.”

“Yes, for no reason at all. She invited me to
lunch with her every day and gave me tomatoes and eggs. They made me terribly
ill. They were poisoned.”

“Perhaps they weren’t poisoned; perhaps eggs
and tomatoes don’t agree with you.”

“She did it on purpose, I tell you. I was too
much of a success.”

(That’s madness, thought Djuna. If only Rango
would realize this, we could live in peace. If he would detach himself and
admit: she is very ill, she is unbalanced. We could take care of her but not
let her destroy our life together. But Rango sees everything as distortedly as
she does. If only he would
see.
It would save us all.)

“Zora, what I can’t understand was why, if you
were so successful as a dancer, if you reached the heights there, and could
travel, and do all you wanted…what happened? What caused the downfall in your
life? Was it your health?”

Zora hesitated. Djuna was painfully tense,
awaiting an answer to this question, feeling that if Zora answered it their
three lives would be altered.

But Zora never answered direct questions.

Djuna regretted having used the word downfall.
Downfall was the wrong word for Zora and Rango, since all their troubles were
caused by an evil world, came from a hostile aggression from the world.

Zora sank into apathy. Would she deviate as
Rango did, elude, answer so elliptically that the question would be lost in a
maze of useless vagaries.

She reopened her eyes and began her recitation
where she had left off: “In New York I stopped the show. The agent came to see
me with a long contract. I could make as much money as I wanted to. I had fur
coats and beautiful evening dresses, I could travel…”

“And then?”

“Then I left everything and went home to
Guatemala.”

“Home to Guatemala?”

Zora laughed, irrepressibly, hysterically, for
such a long time that Djuna was frightened. A spasm of cough stopped her. “You
should have seen the face of the agent, when I didn’t sign the contract.
Everybody’s face. I enjoyed that. I enjoyed their faces more than I enjoyed the
money. I left them all just like that and went home. I wanted to see Guatemala
again. I laughed all the way, thinking of their faces when I quit.”

“Were you sick then?”

“I was always sick, from childhood. But it
wasn’t that. I’m independent. “

Djuna remembered Rango telling her the story of
a friend who had worked to obtain an engagement for Zora in Paris, a contract
to dance at a private house. He had promised to meet this friend at the cafe.
“I came five hours late, and she was in a state.” Whenever he told this story
he laughed. The idea of this friend waiting, foaming and furious, sitting at
the cafe, aroused his humor.

“I stayed six months in Guatemala. When the
money was gone I returned to New York. But nobody would sign me up. They told
each other about the broken contract…”

Rango arrived with the medicine. Zora refused
to take it. Bismuth would calm her pain and the burn, but she refused to take
it. She turned her face to the wall and fell asleep, holding Djuna and Rango’s
hand, both enchained to her caprices.

Djuna’s head was bowed. Rango said: “You must
be exhausted. You’d better go home. Sometimes I think…” Djuna raised imploring
eyes to his face, wildly hoping that they would be united by the common knowledge
that Zora was a sick, unstable child who needed care but who could not be
allowed to direct, to infect their lives with her destructiveness.

Rango looked at her, his eyes not seeing what
she saw. “Sometimes I think you’re right about Zora. She does foolish things…”
And that was all.

He walked to the door with her… She looked into
the bleak and empty street. It was just before dawn. She needed warmth, sleep.
She needed to be as blind as Rango was, to continue living this way. The
knowledge she had was useless. It only added to her burden, the knowing that so
much effort, care, devotion were being utterly wasted, that Zora would never be
well, that it was wrong to devote two lives to one twisted human being… This
knowledge estranged her from Rango, whose blind faith she could not share. It
burdened her, isolated her. Tonight, through fatigue, she wanted so much to lay
her head on Rango’s shoulder, to fall asleep in his arms, but there was already
another head on his shoulder, a heavy burden.

As if in fear that Djuna should ask him to come
with her, he said: “She cannot be left alone.”

Djuna was silent. She could not divulge what
she knew.

When she did protest against the excessive
demands and whims of Zora, even gently, Rango would say: “I am between two
fires, so you must help me.”

To help him meant to yield to Zora, knowing
that she would in the end destroy their relationship.

Every day Djuna suppressed her knowledge, her
lucidity; Rango would have considered them an attack upon a defenseless Zora.

Noblesse oblige enforced silence, and all her
awareness of the destruction being wreaked upon their relationship—when Zora
was the greatest beneficiary of this relationship—only served to increase her
suffering.

Zora had mysteriously won all the battles; Rango
and Djuna could never spend a whole night together.

What corrodes a love are the secrets.

This doubt of Zora’s sanity which she dared not
word to Rango, which made every sacrifice futile, created a fissure in the
closeness to Rango. A simple, detached understanding of this would have made
Rango less enslaved, less anxious, and would have brought Djuna and Rango
closer together, whereas his loyalty to all the irrational demands of Zora, her
distorted interpretation of his acts as well as Djuna’s, was a constant
irritant to Djuna’s intelligence and awareness.

The silence with which she accomplished her lies
now became a gradual isolation in her emotions.

It was strange to be cooking, to be running
errands, to be searching for new doctors, to be buying clothes, to be
furnishing a new room for Zora, while knowing that Zora was working against
them all and would never get well because her illness was her best treasure,
was her weapon of power over them.

But Rango needed desperately to believe. He believed
that every new medicine, every new doctor would restore her health.

Djuna felt now as she had as a child, when she
had repudiated her religious dogmas but must continue to attend mass, rituals,
kneel in prayer, to please her mother.

Any departure from what she believed he
considered a betrayal of her love.

At every turn Zora defeated this battle for
health. When she got a new room in the sun, she kept the blinds down and shut
out air and light. When they went to the beach together up the river, her
bathing suit, given to her by Djuna, was not ready. She had ripped it apart to
improve its shape. When they went to the park she wore too light a dress and
caught cold. When they went to a restaurant she ate the food she knew would
harm her, and predicted that the next day she would be in bed all day.

She made pale attempts to take up her dancing
again, but never when alone, only when Djuna and Rango were there to witness
her pathetic attempts, and when the exertion would cause her heart to beat
faster she would say to Rango: “Put your hand here. See how badly my heart goes
when I try to work again.”

At times Djuna’s detachment, her
self-protective numbness would be annihilated by Rango, as when he said once:
“We are killing her.”

“We are killing her?” echoed Djuna, bewildered
and shocked.

“Yes, she said once that it was my
unfaithfulness which made her ill.”

“But unfaithful to what, Rango? She was not
your wife, she was your sick child, long before I came. It was understood
between you that your relationship was fraternal, that sooner or later you
would need a woman’s love…”

“Zora didn’t mind when I had just a desire for
a woman, a passing desire… But I gave you more than that. That’s what Zora
cannot accept.”

“But Rango, she told me that she was happy and
secure with our relationship, because she felt protected by both of us, she
knew I would not take you away from her, she said she had gained two loves and
lost nothing…”

“One can say such things, and yet feel
betrayed, feel hurt…”

Rango convinced Djuna that their love must be
atoned for. Even if Zora had always been ill, even as a child, even though
their love protected her, yet they must atone…atone…atone. Never enough
devotion could make up for what pain they caused her… Not enough to rise early
in the morning to market for tempting foods for Zora, never enough to dress
her, to answer her every whim, to surrender Rango over and over again.

Djuna fell into an overwhelming, blind,
stupefying devotion to Zora. She became the sleeping dreamer seeking nothing
but one brief moment of fiery joy with Rango, and then atoning for it the rest
of the time.

Rango would ring her bell and call her out
during the night to watch Zora while he went for medicines.

The sleeping dreamer Djuna walked up a muddy
hill on a rainy afternoon to the hospital bringing Zora her winter coat, so
divested and stripped of her possessions that her father was beginning to
notice it and demanded explanations: “Where is your coat? Why aren’t you
wearing stockings? You’re beginning to dress like a tramp recently. Is this the
influence of your new friends? Who are you associating with?”

Rango’s grateful kisses over her eyelids were
the blinding, drugging hypnosis, and she let her father believe that she was
“fancying herself a bohemian now,” that she was playing at being poor.

That afternoon at the hospital Rango left her
alone with Zora. The moment he left the room Zora said: “Reach for that bottle
on the shelf. It’s a disinfectant. Pour some here in the bassinet. The nurse is
stingy with it. She measures only a few drops. She doesn’t want me to get well.
She’s saving the stuff. And I know more of it would cure me.”

“But Zora, this stuff is strong. It will burn
your skin. You can’t use a lot of it. The nurse isn’t trying to economize.”

An expression of utter maliciousness came into
Zora’s eyes: “You want me to die, don’t you? So you can live with Rango. That’s
why you won’t give me the medicine.”

Djuna gave her the bottle and watched Zora
pouring the strong liquid in the bassinet. She would burn her skin, but she
would at least believe that Djuna was on her side.

Rango’s long oriental eyes which opened and
closed like a cat’s, his oblique dark eyes, would soon close hers upon reality,
upon all reasoning.

He did not observe the coincidences as Djuna
did unconsciously. Whenever Djuna went away for a few days Zora would be
moderately ill. Whenever Djuna returned there would be an aggravation, and thus
Djuna and Rango could not meet that evening.

Djuna instinctively knew this to be so accurate
and inevitable that she would prepare herself for it. On her way back from a
trip she would say to herself: “Don’t get exalted at the idea of seeing Rango,
for surely Zora will get very ill when you come back and Rango will not be
free…”

And then because Rango could not explode or
revolt against an illness (which he thought genuine and inevitable), could not
see how its developments obeyed Zora’s destructive will, he revolted at other
situations, unjustly, inaccurately. Djuna learned to detect the origin of the
revolt, to know it was an aborted revolt at home which he diverted and brought
to other scenes or circumstances. He exploded wildly over politics, he attacked
the illnesses of other womn, he incited other husbands to revolt and would seek
them out and take them to the cafe almost by force, just as Djuna indulged now
and then in a tirade against helpless or childish women in general because she
did not dare to speak openly against Zora’s childishness.

From so many scenes at home Rango escaped to
Djuna as a refuge. He would place the whole weight of his head and arms on her
knees, and if it happened that Djuna was tired, she did not reveal it for fear
of overburdening a man too heavily burdened already. She disguised her own
needs, her weaknesses, her handicaps, her own fears or troubles. She concealed
them all from him. Thus grew in his mind an image of her infinite energy,
infinite power to overcome obstacles. Any flaw in this irritated him like a
failed promise. He needed her strength.

Because he seemed to love Zora for her
weakness, to be so indulgent toward her inadequacies, her fumbling inability to
open a door, incapacity to buy a stamp and mail a letter, to visit a friend
alone, Djuna felt a deep unbalance, a deep injustice taking place. For the
extreme childishness of Zora robbed her relation to Rango of all its
naturalness. It set the two women at opposite poles, not as rivals, but as
opposites, destruction against construction, weakness against strength, taking
against giving.