The Four-Chambered Heart (11 page)

To break the hypnosis came certain shocks,
which Djuna was losing her power to interpret.

When she had gradually passed to Zora most of
her belongings, all of her jewelry—to such an extreme that she had to surrender
going to certain places and seeing certain friends where she could not appear
dressed as carelessly as she was—she arrived unexpectedly at Zora’s and found
her sitting among six opened trunks.

“I’m working on a costume for a new dance,”
said Zora. The trunks overflowed with clothes. Not theatre costumes only, but
coats, dresses, stockings, underwear, shoes.

Djuna looked bewildered and Zora began to show
her all that the trunks contained, explaining: “I bought all this when things
were going well for me in New York.”

“But you could wear them now!”

“Yes, I could, but they look too nice. I just
like to keep them and look at them now and then.”

And all the time she had been wearing torn
shoes, mended stockings, dresses too light for winter, when not wearing all
that she had extracted from Djuna.

This discovery stunned Djuna. It proved what
she had felt all the time obscurely, that Zora’s dramatization of the poor, the
cold, the scantily dressed, the pathetic woman, was a voluntary role which
suited her deepest convenience. That this drabness, which constantly aroused
Rango’s pity, was deliberate, that, at any moment, she could have been better
dressed than Djuna.

That night Djuna could not refrain from asking
Rango: “Did you know when I gave up my fur coat for Zora to wear this winter
that she had one in her trunk all the time?”

“Yes,” said Rango. “Zora has a lot of the gypsy
you could say. Gypsies always keep their finery for certain occasions, and like
to look at it now and then, but seldom wear it.”

“Am I going mad?” asked Djuna of herself. “Or
is Rango as mad as Zora? He is not aware of the absurdity, the cruelty of this.
He thinks it’s natural that I should dispossess myself for a woman obsessed
with the desire to arouse pity.”

But as this incident threatened her faith in
Rango, she soon closed her eyes again.

The actor does not suffer any cramps because he
knows the role he plays he will be able to discard at some stated time, and
walk free again to be himself.

But Djuna’s role in life seemed inescapable.
She was doomed to be devoted to a cause she did not believe in. Zora would
never get well; Rango would never be free. She suffered from pains which were
like cramps, because in all these unnatural positions she took, these
contortions of giving, of surrender, there was a strain from the knowledge that
she could never, as long as she loved Rango, ever be free and herself again.

Out of physical exhaustion she would
occasionally run away.

This time to conceal her exhaustion from Rango
she took the Dover-Calais boat intending to hide in London for a few days at
the house of a friend.

Sitting on deck, on a foggy afternoon, she felt
so utterly tired and discouraged that she fell asleep. Tired tired tired, her
body sank into deep sleep on the deck chair. Sleep. A deep deep sleep…until she
felt a hand on her shoulder as if calling. She would not open her eyes; she
would not respond. She dreaded to awaken. She feigned a complete sleep and
turned her head away from the hand that was beckoning…

But the voice persisted: “Mademoiselle,
mademoiselle…” A voice pleading.

She felt the spray on her face, the swaying of
the ship, and began to hear the voices around her.

She opened her eyes.

A man was leaning over her, his hand still on
her shoulder. “Mademoiselle, forgive me. I know I should have let you sleep. Forgive
me.”

“Why did you wake me? I was so tired, so
tired.” She was not fully awake yet, not awake enough to be angry, or even
reproachful.

“Forgive me. I can explain, if you will let me.
I am not trying to flirt, believe me. I’m a
grand blesse de guerre.
I
can’t tell you how seriously wounded, but it’s left me so I can’t bear fog,
damp, rain, or the sea. Pains. Such pains all over the body. I have to make
this trip often, for my work. It’s torture, you know. Going back to England
now… When the pains start there is nothing I can do but to talk to someone. I
had to talk to someone. I looked all around me. I looked into every face. I saw
you asleep. I know it was inconsiderate, but I felt: that’s the woman I can
talk to. It will help me—do you mind?”

“I don’t mind,” said Djuna.

And they talked, all the way, on the train too,
all the way to London. When she reached London she was near collapse. She took
the first hotel room she could find and slept for twelve hours. Then she
returned to Paris.

No more questioning, no more interpretations,
no more examinations of her life. She was resigned to her destiny. It was her
destiny. The
grand blesse de guerre
on the ship had made her feel it,
had convinced her.

So she made a pirouette charged with sadness,
on the revolving stages of awareness, and returned to this role she had been
fashioned for, even down to the face, even when asleep.

But when people play a role motivated by false
impulses, moved by compulsions formed by fear, by distortions, rather than by a
deep need, the only symptom which reveals that it is a role and that acts do
not correspond to the true nature, is the sense of unbearable tension.

The ways to measure one’s insincerities are
few, but Djuna knew that the most infallible one was joylessness. Any task
accomplished without joy was a falsity to one’s true nature. When Djuna
indulged in an extravagant giving to Zora she felt no joy because it was
misinterpreted by both Rango and Zora. If there was a natural goodness in Djuna
it was not this magnified, this self-destructive annihilation of all of
herself.

But this role could last a lifetime, since
Rango denied the possibility of change by clairvoyance, the possibility of a
lucid change of direction. They were rudderless and at the mercy of Zora’s madness.

She did not even gain the prestige granted to
the professional actor, for there is this about roles played in life, and that
is that no one is deceived. The most obtuse, the most insensitive people feel a
dissonance, sense an imposture, and, whereas the actor is respected for
creating an illusion on the stage, no one is respected for seeking to create an
illusion in life.

She planned another escape, this time with
Rango and Zora. She felt that taking them to the sea, into nature, might heal
them all, might strengthen Zora and bring them peace.

It was a most arduous undertaking to get Zora
to pack and to free Rango from all his tangles. They missed not one but several
trains. Zora had two trunks of belongings. Rango had debts and his debtors were
reluctant to let him leave Paris. They overslept in the mornings.

Rango borrowed some money and bought Djuna a
present, a slender white leather belt from Morocco. It was his first present
and Djuna was overjoyed and wore it proudly. But when the three met at the
station she found Zora wearing an identical belt, so her own lost its charm for
her and she threw it away.

The fishing port they reached in the morning
lay in the sun. The crescent-shaped harbor sheltered yachts and fishing boats
from all over the world. The cafes were all gathered on the edge and as they
sat having coffee they saw the boats come to life, the sailors and voyagers
emerging from theircabins. They saw the small portholes open, the hatches
lifted, and sails spread. They saw the sailors starting to polish brass and
wash decks.

Behind them rose the hills planted with white
houses built during the Moors’ invasion of the Mediterranean coast.

The place was animated, like a perpetual
carnival. The fluttering, glitter, and mobility of the harbor and ships were
reflected in the cafes and visitors. Women’s scarves answered the coquetries of
the sails. The eyes, skins, and smiles were as polished as the brass. Women’s
sea-shell necklaces reflected the sky and the sea.

Rango found a place for Zora and himself at the
top of a hill within a forest. Djuna took a room in a hotel farther down the
hill and nearer to the harbor.

When Rango came down the hill on his bicycle
and met Djuna at one of the cafes on the port, the sun was setting.

The night and the sea were velvety and
caressing, unfolding a core of softness. As the plants exhaled a more
mysterious flowering, people, too, shed their brighter day selves and donned
colors and perfumes more appropriate to secret blooms. They dilated with the leaves,
the shadows, at the approach of night.

The automobiles which passed carried all the
flags of pleasure unfurled in audacious smiles, insolent scarves.

All the voices were pitched to a tone of
intimacy. Sea, earth, and bodies seeking alliances, wearing their plumage of
adventure, coral and turquoise, indigo and orange. Human corollas opening in
the night, inviting pursuit, seeking capture, in all the dilations which allow
the sap to rise and flow.

Then Rango said: “I must leave. Zora is afraid
of the dark.”

To make it easier for Rango she bicycled back
with him but when she returned alone to her room all the exhalations of the sea
tempted her out again, and she returned to the port and sat at the same table
where she had sat with Rango and watched the gaiety of the port as she had
watched that first party out of her window as a girl, feeling again that all
pleasure was unattainable for her.

People were dancing in the square to an
accordion played by the village postmaster. The letter carrier invited her to
dance, but all the time she felt Rango’s jealous and reproachful eyes on her.
Every porthole, every light, seemed to be watching her dance with reproach.

So at ten o’clock she left the port and its
festivities and bicycled back to her small hotel room.

As she climbed the last turn in the hill,
pushing her bicycle before her, she saw a flashlight darting over her window
which gave on the ground floor. She could not see who was wielding it, but she
felt it was Rango and she called out to him joyously, thinking that perhaps
Zora had fallen asleep and he was free and had come to be with her.

But Rango responded angrily to her greeting:
“Where have you been?”

h, Rango, you’re too unjust. I couldn’t stay in
my room at eight o’clock. It’s only ten now, and I’m back early, and alone. How
can you be angry?”

But he was.

“You’re too unjust,” she said, and passing by
him, almost running, she went into her room and locked the door.

The few times that she had held out against
him, such as the time he had arrived at midnight instead of for dinner as he
had promised, she had noticed that Rango’s anger abated, and that his knock on
the door had not been imperious, but gentle and timid.

That is what happened now. And his timidity
disarmed her anger.

She opened the door. And Rango stayed with her
and they sought closeness again, as if to resolder all that his violence broke.

“You’re like Heathcliff, Rango, and one day
everything will break.”

He had an incurable jealousy of her friends,
because to him friends were the accomplices in the life she led outside of his
precincts. They were the possible rivals, the witnesses, and perhaps the
instigators to unfaithfulness. They were the ones secretly conniving to
separate them.

But graver still was his jealousy of the friends
who reflected an aspect of Djuna not included in her relationship to Rango, or
which revealed aspects of Djuna not encompassed in the love, an unknown Djuna
which she could not give to Rango. And this was a playful, a light, a
peace-loving Djuna, the one who delighted in harmony, not in violence, the one
who found outside of passion luminous moods and regions unknown to Rango. Or
still the Djuna who believed understanding could be reached by effort, by an
examination of one’s behavior, and that destiny could be reshaped, one’s
twisted course redirected with lucidity.

She attracted those who knew how to escape the
realm of sorrow by fantasy. Other extensions of Paul appeared, and one in
particular of whom Rango was as jealous as if he had been a reincarnation of
Paul. Though he knew it was an innocent friendship, still he stormed around it
.
He knew the boy could give Djuna a climate which his violence and intensity
destroyed.

It was her old quest for a paradise again, a
region outside of sorrow.

Lying on the sand with Paul the second (while
Rango and Zora slept through half of the day) they built nine-pins out of
driftwood, they dug labyrinths into the sand, they swam underwater looking for
sea plants, and drugged themselves with tales.

Their only expression of a bond was his
reaching for her little finger with his, as Paul had once done, and this was
like an echo of her relation to Paul, a fragile bond, a bond like a game, but
life-giving through its very airiness and delicacy.

Iridescent, ephemeral hours of relief from
darkness.
When Rango came, blurred, soiled by his stagnant life with Zora, from quarrels,
she felt stronger to meet this undertow of bitterness.