by Anais Nin
But for the moment, she was breathing the odor of his hair. For the moment there was this current between their skin and flesh, these harmonizations of contrasting colors, weight, quality, odors. Everything about him was pungent and violent. They were as his friends said, like Othello and Desdemona.
Manana he would be a party member.
When you lose your wings, thought Djuna, this is the way you live. You buy candles for the meeting of Rango’s friends, but these candles do not give a light that will delight you, because you do not believe in what you are doing.
Sadness never added to her weight; it caught her in flight as she danced in spirals misplacing air pools like an arrow shot at a bird which did not bring it down but merely increased its flutterings.
She had every day a greater reluctance to descend into familiar daily life, because the hurt, the huntsman’s bow, came from the earth, and therefore flight at a safe distance became more and more imperative.
Her mobility was now her only defense against new dangers. While you’re in movement it is harder to be shot at, to be wounded even. She had adopted the basic structure of the nomads.
Rango had said: “Prepare the barge for a meeting tonight. It will be an ideal place. No superintendents to tell tales to the police. No neighbors.”
He had signed all the papers. They must be more careful. The barge was being put to a greater usefulness.
There are two realms to live in now. (Do I hold the secret drug which permits me to hold on to the ecstasies while entering the life of the world, activities in the world, contingencies? I feel it coming to me while I am walking. It is a strange sensation, like drunkenness. It catches me in the middle of the street like a tremendous wave, and a numbness passes through my veins which is the numbness of the marvelous. I know it by its power, by the way it lifts my body, the air which passes under my feet. The cold room I left in the morning, the drab bed covers, the stove full of ashes, the sour wine at the bottom of the glass were all illuminated by the force of love for Rango. It was as if I had learned to fly over the street and were permitted to do so for an instant…making every color more intense, every caress more penetrating, every moment more magnificent… But I knew by the anxiety that it might not last. It is a state of grace of love, which some achieve by wine and others by prayer and fasting. It is a state of grace but I cannot discover what makes one fall out of it. The danger lies in flying low, in awakening. She knew she was flying lower now that Rango was to act in the world. The air of politics was charged with dust. People aspired to reach the planets, but it was a superfluous voyage; there was a certain way of breathing, of walking, of seeing, which transported human beings into space, into transparency. The extraordinary brilliancy of the games people played beyond themselves, the games of their starry selves…)
She bought wood for the fire. She swept the barge. She concealed the bed and the barrel of wine.
Rango would guide the newcomers to the barge, and remain on the bridge to direct them.
The Guatemalans arrived gradually. The darker Indian-blooded ones in Indian silence, the paler Spanish-blooded ones with Spanish volubility. But both were intimidated by the place, the creaking wood, the large room resembling the early meeting places of the revolutionaries, the extended shadows, the river noises, chains, oars, the disquieting lights from the bridge, the swaying when other barges passed. Too much the place for conspirators. At times life surpasses the novel, the drama. This was one of them. The setting was more dramatic than they wished. They stood awkwardly around.
Rango had not yet come. He was waiting for those who were late.
Djuna did not know what to do. This was a role for which she had no precedent. Politeness or marginal talk seemed out of place. She kept the stove filled with wood and watched the flames as if her guardianship would make them active.
When you lose your wings, and wear a dark suit bought in the cheapest store of Paris, to become anonymous, when you discard your earrings, and the polish on your nails, hoping to express an abdication of the self, a devotion to impersonal service, and still you do not feel sincere, you feel like an actress, because you expect conversion to come like miracle, by the grace of love for one party member…
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, befor
e 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.
She found herself defending Sabina against Rango’s ruthless mockery. She defended Sabina’s philosophy of the many loves against the One.
(Rango, your anger should not be directed against Sabina. Sabina is only behaving as all women do in their dreams, at night. I feel responsible for her acts, because when we walk together and I listen to her telling me about her adventures, a part of me is not listening to her telling me a story but recognizing scenes familiar to a secret part of myself. I recognize scenes I have dreamed and which therefore I have committed. What is dreamed is committed. In my dreams I have been Sabina. I have escaped from your tormenting love, caressed all the interchangeable lovers of the world. Sabina cannot be made alone responsible for acting the dreams of many women, just because the others sit back and participate with a secret part of their selves. Through secret and small vibrations of the flesh they admit being silent accomplices to Sabina’s acts. At night we have all tossed with fever and desire for strangers. During the day we deride Sabina, and revile her. You’re angry at Sabina because she lives out all her wishes overtly as you have done. To love Sabina’s fever, Sabina’s impatience, Sabina’s evasion of traps in the games of love, was being Sabina. To be only at night what Sabina dared to be during the day, to bear the responsibility for one’s secret dream of escape from the torments of one love into many loves.)
