The Four-Chambered Heart (14 page)

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.