The Four-Chambered Heart (12 page)

She wore a dress of brilliant colors, indigo
and saffron; she brushed her hair until it glistened, and proclaimed in all her
gestures a joyousness which she hoped would infect Rango.

But as often happened, this very joyousness
alarmed him; he suspected the cause of it, and he set about to reclaim her from
a region she had not traversed with him, the region of peace, faith, and
gentleness he could never give her.

True that Paul the second had only appropriated
her little finger and laid no other claim on her, true that Rango’s weight upon
her body was like the earth, stronger and warmer, true that when his arms fell
at her side with discouragement they were so heavy that she could not have
lifted them, true that those made only of earth and fire were never
illuminated, never lifted or borne above it, never free of it, but hopelessly
entangled in its veins.

Her dream of freeing Rango disintegrated day by
day. When she gave them the sun and the sea, they slept. Zora had ripped her
bathing suit and was sewing it again. She would sew it for years.

It was clear to Djuna now that the
four-chambered heart was no act of betrayal, but that there were regions
necessary to life to which Rango had no access. It was not that Djuna wanted to
house the image of Paul in one chamber and Rango in another, nor that to love
Rango she must destroy the chamber inhabited by Paul—it was that in Djuna there
was a hunger for a haven which Rango was utterly incapable of giving to her, or
attaining with her.

If she sought in Paul’s brother a moment of
relief, a moment of forgetfulness, she also sought in the dark, at night,
someone without flaw, who would protect her and forgive all things.

Whoever was without flaw, whoever understood,
whoever contained an inexhaustible flow of love was god the father whom she had
lost in her childhood.

Alone at night, after the torments of her life
with Rango, after her revolts against this torment which she had vainly tried
to master with understanding of Rango, defeated by Rango’s own love of this
inferno, because he said it was real, it was life, it was heightened life, and
that happiness was a mediocre ideal, held in contempt by the poets, the
romantics, the artists—alone at night when she acknowledged to herself that
Rango was doomed and would never be whole again, that he was corrupted in his
love of pain, in his belief that war and troubles heightened the flavor of
life, that scenes were necessary to the climax of desire, like fire, suddenly
in touching the bottom of the abysmal loneliness in which both relationships
left her, she felt the presence of god again, as she had felt him as a child,
or still at another time when she had been close to death.

She felt this god again, whoever he was, taking
her tenderly, holding her, putting her to sleep. She felt protected, her nerves
unknotted, she felt peace. She fell asleep, all her anxieties dissolved. How
she needed him, whoever he was, how she needed sleep, she needed peace, she
needed god the father.

In the orange light of the fishing port, the
indigo spread of the sea, the high flavor of the morning rolls, the joyousness
of early mornings on the wharf, the scenes with Rango became more and more like
hallucinations.

Rango walking through the reeds seemed like a
Balinese, with his dark skin and blazing eyes.

When they sat at the beach late at night around
a fire and roasted meat, he seemed so in harmony with nature, crouching on his
strong legs, nimble with his hands. When they returned from long bicycle rides,
after hours of pedaling against a brisk wind, tired and thirsty but drugged
with physical euphoria and content, then the returns to his obsessions seemed
more like a sickness.

Djuna knew all the prefaces to trouble. If
during the ride she had sung in rhythm with others, or laughed, or acquiesced,
Rango would begin: “This morning I found your bicycle and the boy’s against the
wall of the cafe, so close together, as if you had spent the night together.”

“But Rango, he arrived after me, he merely
placed his bicycle next to mine. Everyone has breakfast at the same cafe. It
doesn’t mean anything.”

At times Djuna felt that Rango had caught
Zora’s madness. Then she felt compassion for him, and would answer with
patience, as you would a sick person.

She knew that we love in others some repressed
self. In consoling Rango, reassuring him, was she consoling some secret Djuna
who had once been jealous and not dared to reveal it?

(We love shadows of our hidden selves in
others. Once I must have been as jealous as Rango, but I did not reveal it,
even to myself. I must have experienced such jealousy in so hidden a realm of
my own nature that I was not even aware of it. Or else I would not be so
patient with Rango. I would not feel compassion. He is destroying us both by
this jealousy. I want to protect him from the consequences… He is driving me
away from him. I should run away now, yet I feel responsible. When we see
another daring to be what we did not dare, we feel responsible for him…)

But once she awakened so exhausted by Rango’s
demon that she decided to frighten him, to run away, hoping it might cure him.

She packed and went to the station. But there
was no train until evening. She sat disconsolately to wait.

And Rango arrived. He looked distracted.
“Djuna! Djuna, forgive me. I must have been mad. I didn’t tell you the truth. A
friend of mine has been making absinthe in his cellar and every day at noon we
have been sampling it. I must have taken a good deal of it all these days.”

She forgave him. She also thought, in an effort
always to absolve him: “His slavery to Zora’s needs is so tremendous and he
does not dare to rebel. She has a gift for making him feel that he never does
enough, and to burden him with guilt, and that may be why, when he comes to me,
he has to rebel and be angry about something, he has to explode. I ais
scapegoat.”

And she was tied to Rango through this breathing
tube, tied to his explosions. She might one day come to believe, as he did,
that violence was necessary to dive to the depths of experience.

On these revolving stages of the unconscious,
the last hidden jungles of our nature which we have controlled and harnessed
almost to extermination, sealing all the wells, it is no wonder when we seek to
open these sealed wells again to find a flow of life we find instead a flow of
anger.

Thus in anger Rango threw like a geyser this
nature’s poison, and then refused to admit responsibility for the storms. His
angers came like lightning, and each time Djuna was delivered of her own.

But the black sun of his jealousy eclipsed the
Mediterranean sun, churned the sea’s turquoise gentleness.

There were times when she lay alone on the sand
and sought to remember what she had tried to reach through the body of Rango,
what her first sight of him, playing on his guitar and evoking his gypsy life,
had awakened in her.

Through him, to extend into pure nature.

There were times when she remembered his first
smile, the ironic smile of the Indian which came from afar like the echo of an
ancient Indian smile at the beginning of Mayan worlds; the earthy walk issued
from bare footsteps treading paths into the highest mountains of the world,
into the most immune lakes and impenetrable forests.

In her dream of him she returned to the origins
of the world, hearing footsteps in Rango which were echoes of primeval
footsteps hunting.

She remembered, above all, stories, the one Rango
had told her about sitting on a rock on top of a glacier and asserting he had
felt the spinning of the earth!

She had kissed eyes filled with remembrance of
splendors, eyes which had seen the Mayans bury their gold treasures at the
bottom of the lakes out of reach of the plundering Spaniards.

She had kissed the Indian princes of her
childhood fairytales.

She had plunged with love and desire into the
depths of ancient races, and sought heights and depths and magnificence.

And found…found deserts where vultures
perpetuated their encirclement, no longer distinguishing between the living and
the dead.

Found a muted city resting on ruined columns,
cracked cupolas, tombs, with owls screaming like women in childbirth.

In the shadows of volcanoes there were fiestas,
orgies, dances, and guitars.

But Rango had not taken her there.

To love he brought only his fierce anxieties;
she had embraced, kissed, possessed a mirage. She had walked and walked, not
into the TIFY” nd the music, not into laughter, but into the heart of an Indian
volcano…

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…