The Four-Chambered Heart coti-3

by Anais Nin

  So that she had learned the only reconciliation she could find: she learned to preserve the balance between crime and punishment. She took her place against the wall, face to the wall, and then muttered, “Damn damn damn damn,” as many times as she pleased, since she was simultaneously punishing herself and felt absolved, with no time wasted on contrition.

  And now this good self could no longer be discarded. It had a compulsive life, its legend, its devotees! Every time she yielded to its sway she increased her responsibilities, for new devotees appeared, demanding perpetual attendance.

  If Rango asked her today to take care of Zora, it was because he had heard, and he knew, of many past instances when she had taken care of others.

  This indestructible good self, this false and wearying good self who answered prayers: Djuna, I need you; Djuna, console me; Djuna, you carry palliatives (why had she studied the art of healing, all the philters against pain?); Djuna, bring your wand; Djuna, we’ll take you to Rango, not the Rango of the joyous guitar and the warm songs, but Rango, the husband of a woman who is always ilt will break your heart, Djuna of the fracturable heart, your heart will fracture with a sound of wind chimes and the pieces will be iridescent. Where they fall new plants will grow instantly, and it is to the advantage of a new crop of breakable hearts that yours should fracture often, for the artist is like the religious man, he believes that denial of worldly possessions and acceptance of pain and trouble will give birth to the marvelous—sainthood or art.

  (This goodness is a role, too tight around me; it is a costume I can no longer wear. There are other selves trying to be born, demanding at least a hearing!)

  Your past history influenced your choice, Djuna; you have shown capabilities to lessen pain and so you are not invited to the fiestas.

  Irrevocable extension of past roles, and no reversal possible. Too many witnesses to past compassions, past abdications, and they will look scandalized by any alteration of your character and will reawaken your old guilts. Face to the wall! This time so that Rango may not see your rebellion in your face. Rango’s wife is mortally ill and you are to bring your philters.

  But she had made an important discovery.

  This bond with Rango, this patience with his violent temper, this tacit fraternity of her gentleness and his roughness, this collaboration of light and shadow, this responsibility for Rango which she felt, her compulsion to rescue him from the consequences of his blind rages, were because Rango lived out for her this self she had buried in her childhood. All that she had denied and repressed: chaos, disorder, caprice, destruction.

  The reason for her indulgence; everyone marveled (how could you bear his jealousy, his angers?) at the way he destroyed what she created so that each day she must begin anew: to understand, to order, to reconstruct, to mend; the reason for her acceptance of the troubles caused by his blindness was that Rango was nature, uncontrolled, and that the day she had buried her own laziness, her own jealousy, her own chaos, these atrophied selves awaited liberation and began to breathe through Rango’s acts. For this complicity in the dark she must share the consequences with him.

  The realm she had tried to skip: darkness, confusion, violence, destruction, erupted secretly through relationship with Rango. The burden was placed on his shoulders. She must therefore share the torments, too. She had not annihilated her natural self; it reasserted itself in Rango. And she was his accomplice.

  The dark-faced Rango who opened the door of his studio below street level was not the joyous carefree guitarist Djuna had first seen at the party, nor was it the fervent Rango of the nights at the barge, nor was it the oscillating Rango of the cafe, the ironic raconteur, the reckless adventurer. It was another Rango she did not know.

  In the dark hallway his body appeared silhouetted, his high forehead, the fall of his hair, his bow, full of nobility, grandeur. He bowed gravely in the narrow hallway as if this cavernous dwelling were his castle, he the seigneur and she a visitor of distinction. He emerged prouder, taller, more silent, too, out of poverty and barrenness, since they were of his own choice. If he had not been a rebel, he would be greeting her at the vast entrance of his ranch.

  Down the stairs into darkness. Her hand touched the walls hesitantly to guide herself, but the walls had such a rough surface and seemed to be sticky to the touch so that she withdrew it and Rango explained: “We had a fire here once. I set fire to the apartment when I fell asleep while smoking. The landlord never repaired the damage as we haven’t paid rent for six months.”

  A faint odor of dampness rose from the studio below, which was the familiar odor of poor studios in Paris. It was compounded of fog, of the ancient city breathing its fetid breath through cellar floors; it was the odor of stagnation, of clothes not often washed, of curtains gathering mildew.

  She hesitated again until she saw the skylight windows above her head; but they were covered with soot and let in a dim northern light.

  Rango then stood aside, and Djuna saw Zora lying in bed.

  Her black hair was uncombed and straggled around her parchment-colored skin. She had no Indian blood, and her face was almost a direct contrast to Rango’s. She had heavy, pronounced features, a wide full mouth, all cast in length, in sadness, a defeated pull downward which only changed when she raised her eyelids; then the eyes had in them an unexpected shrewdness which Rango did not have.

  She was wearing one of Rango’s shirts, and over that a kimono which had been dyed black. The red and black squares of the shirt’s colors showed at the neck and wrists. The stripes once yellow still showed through the black dye of the kimono.

  On her feet she wore a pair of Rango’s big socks filled with cotton wool at the toes, which seemed like disproportionate clown’s feet on her small body.

  Her shoulders were slightly hunched, and she smiled the smile of the hunchback, of a cripple. The arching of her shoulders gave her an air of having shrunk herself together to occupy a small space. It was the arch of fear.

  Even before her illness, Djuna felt, she could never have been handsome but had a strength of character which must have been arresting. Yet her hands were childish and clasped things without firmness. And in the mouth there was the same lack of control. Her voice, too, was childish.

  The studio was now half in darkness, and the oil lamp which Rango brought cast long shadows.

  The mist of dampness in the room seemed like the breath of the buried, making the walls weep, detaching the wallpaper in long wilted strips. The sweat of centuries of melancholic living, the dampness of roots and cemeteries, the moisture of agony and death seeping through the walls seemed appropriate to Zora’s skin from which all glow and life had withdrawn.

  Djuna was moved by Zora’s smile and plaintive voice. Zora was saying: “The other day I went to church and prayed desperately that someone should save us, and now you are here. Rango is always bewildered, and does nothing.” Then she turned tango: “Bring me my sewing box.”

  Rango brought her a tin cracker box which contained needles, threads, and buttons in boxes labeled with medicine names: injections, drops, pills.

  The material Zora took up to sew looked like a rag. Her small hands smoothed it down mechanically, yet the more she smoothed it down the more it wilted in her hands, as if her touch were too anxious, too compressing, as if she transmitted to objects some obnoxious withering breath from her sick flesh.

  And when she began to sew she sewed with small stitches, closely overlapping, so closely that it was as if she were strangling the last breath of color and life in the rag, as if she were sewing it to the point of suffocation.

  As they talked she completed the square she had already begun, and then Djuna watched her rip apart her labor and quietly begin again.

  “Djuna, I don’t know if Rango told you, but Rango and I are like brother and sister. Our physical life…was over years ago. It was never very important. I knew that sooner or later he would love another woman, and I am glad it’s you because you’re kind, and you w
ill not take him away from me. I need him.”

  “I hope we can be…kind to each other, Zora. It’s a difficult situation.”

  “Rango told me that you never tried, or even mentioned, his leaving me. How could I not like you? You saved my life. When you came I was about to die for lack of care and food. I don’t love Rango as a man. To me he is a child. He has done me so much harm. He just likes to drink, and talk, and be with friends. If you love him, I am glad, because of the kind of woman you are, because you are full of quality.”

  “You’re very generous, Zora.”

  Zora leaned over to whisper now: “Rango is mad, you know. He may not seem so to you because he is leaning on you. But if it were not for you I would be out in the street, homeless. We’ve often been homeless, and I’d be sitting on my valises, out on the sidewalk, and Rango just waving his arms and helpless, never knowing what to do. He lets everything terrible happen, and then he says: ‘It’s destiny.’ With his cigarette he set fire to our apartment. He was nearly burnt to death.”

  There was a book lying at the foot of her bed, and Djuna opened it while Zora was carefully unstitching all she had sewed before.

  “It’s a book about illness,” said Zora. “I love to read about illness. I go to the library and look up descriptions of the symptoms I have. I’ve marked all the pages which apply to me. Just look at all these markings. Sometimes I think I have all the sicknesses one can have!” She laughed. Then looking at Djuna plaintively, almost pleadingly, she said: “All my hair is falling out.”

  When Djuna left that evening, Rango and she were no longer man and woman in a chamber of isolated love for each other. They were suddenly a trinity, with Zora’s inexorable needs conducting all their movements, directing their time together, dictating the hours of separation.

  Rango had placed Zora under Djuna’s protection and her love for Rango had to extend in magnitude to include Zora.

  Zora talked to Djuna. If it was Djuna who had planned to come to Zora and show the most exemplary devotion, she found herself merely passive before the friendliness of Zora.

  It was Zora who talked, with her eyes upon her sewing and unsewing. “Rango is a changed man, and I’m so happy, Djuna. He is kinder to me. He was very unhappy before and he took it out on me. A man cannot live without love and Rango was not easy to satisfy. All the women wanted him, but he would see them once perhaps and come back dejected, and refuse to see them again. He always found something wrong with them. With you he is content. And I am happy because I knew this had to happen sometime, but I’m happy it’s you because I trust you. I used to fear some woman coming and taking him where I would never see him again. And I know you wouldn’t do that.”

  Djuna thought: “I love Rango so much that I want to share his burdens, love and serve what he loves and serves, share his conviction that Zora is an innocent victim of life, worthy of all sacrifices.”

  This was for both Rango and Djuna the atonement for the marvelous hours in the barge. All great flights away from life land one in such places of atonement as this room, with Zora sewing rags and talking about dandruff, about ovarian insufficiency, about gastritis, about thyroid and neuritis.

  Djuna had brought her a colorful Indian-print dress and Zora had dyed it black. And now she was reshaping it and it looked worn and dismal already. She wore a shawl pinned with a brooch which had once held stones in its clasps and was now empty, thrusting bare silver branches out like the very symbol of denudation. She wore two overcoats sewn together, the inner one showing at the edges.

  While they sat sewing together, Zora lamented over Rango: “Why must he always live with so many people around him?”

  Knowing that Rango liked to spend hours and hours alone with her, Djuna feared to say: “Perhaps he is just seeking warmth and forgetfulness, running away from illness and darkness.”

  When Rango was with her he seemed dominating, full of dignity and pride. When he entered Zora’s room he seemed to shrink. When he first entered there was a copper glow in his face; after a moment the glow vanished.

  “Why do men live in shoals?” persisted Zora.

  Djuna looked at Rango lighting the fire, warming water, starting to cook. There was something so discouraged in the pose of his body, expressing agreement with Zora’s enumeration of his faults, so diminished, which Djuna could not bear to witness.

  Zora was in the hospital.

  Djuna was cooking for Rango now, edges.

  As Djuna passed through the various rooms to find Zora she saw a woman sitting up in bed combing her hair and tying a blue ribbon around it. Her face was utterly wasted, and yet she had powdered it, and rouged her lips, and there was on it not only the smile of a woman dying but also the smile of a woman who wanted to die with grace, deploying her last flare of feminine coquetry for her interview with death.

  Djuna was moved by this courage, the courage to meet death with one’s hair combed, and this gentle smile issuing from centuries of conviction that a woman must be pleasing to all eyes, even to the eyes of death.

  When she reached Zora’s bed she was faced with the very opposite, an utter absence of courage, although Zora was less ill than the other woman.

  “The soup is not thin enough,” said Zora. “It should have been strained longer.” And she laid it aside and shook her head while Djuna and Rango pleaded that she should eat it anyway for the sake of gaining strength.

  Her refusal to eat caused Rango anxiety, and Zora watched this anxiety on his face and savored it.

  He had brought her a special bread, but it was not the one she wanted.

  Djuna had brought her some liver concentrate in glass containers. Zora looked at them and said: “They are not good. They’re too dark. I’m sure they’re not fresh and they will poison me.”

  “But Zora, the date is printed on the box, the drugstore can’t sell them when they’re old.”

  “They’re very old, I can see it. Rango, I want you to get me some others at La Muette drugstore.”

  La Muette was one hour away. Rango left on his errand and Djuna took the medicine away.

  When they met in the evening Rango said: “Give me the liver medicine. I’ll take it back to the drugstore.”

  They walked to the drugstore together. The druggist was incensed and pointed to the recent date on the box.

  What amazed Djuna was not that Zora should give way to a sick woman’s whims, but that Rango should be so utterly convinced of their rationality.

  The druggist would not take it back.

  Rango was angry and tumultuous, but Djuna was rebelling against Rango’s blindness and when they returned to the houseboat she opened one of the containers and before Rango’s eyes she swallowed it.

  “What are you doing?” asked Rango with amazement. “Showing you that the medicine is fresh.”

  “You believe the druggist and not Zora?” he said angrily.

  “And you believe in a sick person’s whim,” she said.

  Zora was always talking about her future death. She began all her conversations with: “When I die…” Rango was maintained in a state of panic, fearing her death, and lived each day accordingly: “Zora is in grave danger of death,” he would say, to excuse her demands upon his time.

  At first Djuna was alarmed by Zora’s behavior, and shared Rango’s anxieties. Her gestures were so vehement, so magnified, that Djuna believed they might be those of a dying woman. But as these gestures repeated themselves day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, Djuna lost her fear of Zora’s death.

  When Zora said: “I have a burning sensation in my stomach,” she made the gestures of a person writhing in a brasier of flames.

  At the hospital, where Djuna sometimes accompanied her, the nurses and doctors no longer listened to her. Djuna caught glances of irony in the doctor’s eyes.

  Zora’s gestures to describe her troubles became for Djuna a special theatre of exaggeration, which at first caused terror, and then numbed the senses.

/>   It was like the Grand Guignol, where knowing every scene was overacted to create horror finally created detachment and laughter.

  But what helped Djuna to overcome her terror was something else which happened that winter: there was an epidemic of throat infection which swept Paris and which Djuna caught.

  It was painful but came without fever, and there was no need to stay in bed.

  That same day Rango rushed to the barge, distressed and vehement. He could not stay with Djuna because Zora was terribly ill. “You might come back with me, if you wish. Zora has a heart attack, an inflamed throat, and she’s suffocating.”

  When they arrived, the doctor was there examining Zora’s throat. Zora lay back pale and rigid, as if her last hour had come. Her gestures, her hands upon her throat, her strained face were a representation of strangulation.

  The doctor straightened up and said: “Just the same throat infection everybody has just now. You don’t have to stay in bed. Just keep warm, and eat soups only.”

  And Djuna, with the same throat trouble, was out with Rango.

  The first year Djuna had suffered from Rango’s panic. The second year from pity; the third year detachment and wisdom came. But Rango’s anxiety never diminished.

  Djuna awakened one morning and asked herself: “Do I love this woman who magnifies her illness a thousand times, unconcerned with curing it, but savoring its effect on others? Why does Zora contort herself in a more than life-size pain for all the world to see and hear?”

  Many times Djuna had been baffled by the fact that when someone said to Zora, “You look better, so much better,” Zora was not pleased. A frown would come between her eyes, an expression of distress.

  At the hospital one day, the doctor did not linger very long at Zora’s bedside, and when he walked away Djuna laid her hand on his arm: “Please tell me what’s the matter with my friend?”