The Four-Chambered Heart coti-3

by Anais Nin

  Sabina sat astride a chair, flinging her hair back with her hands and laughing.

  She always gave at this moment the illusion that she was going to confess. She excelled in this preparation for unveiling, this setting of a mood for intimate revelations. She excelled equally in evasion. When she wished it, her life was like a blackboard on which she wrote swiftly and then erased almost before anyone could read what she had written. Her words then did not seem like words but like smoke issuing from her mouth and nostrils, a heavy smoke screen against detection. But at other times, if she felt secure from judgment, then she opened a story of an incident with direct, stabbing thoroughness…

  “Our affair lasted…lasted for the duration of an elevator ride! And I don’t mean that symbolically either! We took such a violent fancy to each other, the kind that will not last, but will not wait either. It was cannibalistic, and of no importance, but it had to be fulfilled once. Circumstances were against us. We had no place to go. We wandered through the streets, we were ravenous for each other. We got into an elevator, and he began to kiss me… First floor, second floor, and he still kissing me, third floor, fourth floor, and when the elevator came to a standstill, it was too late…we could not stop, his hands were everywhere, his mouth… I pressed the button wildly and went on kissing as the elevator came down… When we got to the bottom it was worse… He pressed the button and we went up and down, up and down, madly, while people kept ringing for the elevator…”

  She laughed again, with her entire body, even her feet, marking the rhythm of her gaiety, stamping the ground like a delighted spectator, while her strong thighs rocked the chair like an Amazon’s wooden horse.

  One evening while Djuna was waiting for Rango at the barge, she heard a footstep which was not the watchman’s and not Rango’s.

  The shadows of the candles on the tarpapered walls played a scene from a Balinese theatre as she moved toward the door and called: “Who’s there?”

  There was a complete silence, as if the river, the barge, and the visitor had connived to be silent at the same moment, put a tension in the air which she felt like a vibration through her body.

  She did not know what to do, whether to stay in the room and lock the door, awaiting Rango, or to explore the barge. If she stayed in the room quietly and watched for his coming, she could shout a warning to him out of the window, and then together they might corner the intruder.

  She waited.

  The shadows on the walls were still, but the reflections of the lights on the river played on the surface like a ghost’s carnival. The candles flickered more than usual, or was it her anxiety?

  When the wood beams ceased to creak, she heard the footsteps again, moving toward the room, cautiously but not light enough to prevent the boards from creaking.

  Djuna took her revolver from under her pillow, a small one which had been given to her and which she did not know how to use.

  She called out: “Who is there? If you come any nearer, I’ll shoot.”

  She knew there was a safety clasp to open. She wished Rango would arrive. He had no physical fear. He feared truth, he feared to confront his motives, feared to face, to understand, to examine in the realm of feelings and thought, but he did not fear to act, he did not fear physical danger. Djuna was intrepid in awareness, in painful exposures of the self, and dared more than most in matter of emotional surgery, but she had a fear of violence.

  She waited another long moment, put again the silence was complete, suspended.

  Rango did not come.

  Out of exhaustion, she lay down with her revolver in hand.

  The doors and windows were locked. She waited, listening for Rango’s uneven footsteps on the deck.

  The candles burnt down one by one, gasping out their last flame, throwing one last long, agonized skeleton on the wall.

  The river rocked the barge.

  Hours passed and Djuna fell into a half sleep.

  The catch of the door was gradually lifted off the hinge by some instrument or other and Zora stood at the opened door.

  Djuna saw her when she was bending over her, and screamed.

  Zora held a long old-fashioned hatpin in her hand and tried to stab Djuna with it. Djuna at first grasped her hands at the wrists, but Zora’s anger gave her greater strength. Her face was distorted with hatred. She pulled her hands free and stabbed at Djuna several times blindly, striking her at the shoulder, and then once more, with her eyes wide open, she aimed at the breast and missed. Then Djuna pushed her off, held her.

  “What harm have I done you, Zora?”

  “You forced Rango to join the party. He’s trying to become someone now, in politics, and it’s for you. He wants you to be proud of him. With me he never cared; he wasn’t ashamed of his laziness… It’s your fault that he is never home… Your fault that he’s in danger every day.”

  Djuna looked at Zora’s face and felt again as she did with Rango, the desperate hopelessness of talking, explaining, clarifying. Zora and Rango were fanatics.

  She shook Zora by the shoulders, as if to force her to listen and said: “Killing me won’t change anything, can’t you understand that? We’re the two faces of Rango’s character. If you kill me, that side of him remains unmated and another woman will take my place. He’s divided within himself, between destruction and construction. While he’s divided there will be two women, always. I wished you would die, too, once, until I understood this. I once thought Rango could be saved if you died. And here you are, thinking that I would drive him into danger. He’s driving himself into danger. He is ashamed of his futility. He can’t bear the conflict of his split being enacted in us before his eyes. He is trying a third attempt at wholeness. For his peace of mind, if you and I could have been friends it would have been easier. He didn’t consider us, whether or not we could sincerely like each other. We tried and failed. You were too selfish. You and I stand at opposite poles. I don’t like you, and you don’t like me either; even if Rango did not exist you and I could never like each other. Zora, if you harm me you’ll be punished for it and sent to a place without Rango… And Rango will be angry with you. And if you died, it would be the same. He would not be mine either, because I can’t fulfill his love of destruction…”

  Words, words, words…all the words Djuna had turned in her mind at night when alone, she spoke them wildly, blindly, not hoping for Zora to understand, but they were said with such anxiety and vehemence that aside from their meaning Zora caught the pleading, the accents of truth, dissolving her hatred, her violence.

  At the sight of each other their antagonism always dissolved. Zora, faced with the sadness of Djuna’s face, her voice, her slender body, could never sustain her anger. And Djuna faced with Zora’s haggard face, limp hair, uncontrolled lips, lost her rebellion.

  Whatever scenes took place between them, there was a sincerity in each one’s sadness which bound them too.

  It was at this moment that Rango arrived, and stared at the two women with dismay.

  “What happened? Djuna, you’re bleeding!”

  “Zora tried to kill me. The wounds aren’t bad.”

  Djuna hoped once more that Rango would say, “Zora is mad,” and that the nightmare would cease.

  “You wanted us to be friends, because that would have made it easier for you. We tried. But it was impossible. I feel that Zora destroys all my efforts to create with you, and she thinks I sent you into a dangerous political life… We can never understand each other.”

  Rango found nothing to say. He stared at the blood showing through Djuna’s clothes. She showed him that the stabs were not deep and had struck fleshy places without causing harm.

  “I’ll take Zora home. I’ll come back.”

  When he returned he was still silent, crushed, bowed. “Zora has moments of madness,” he said. “She’s been threatening people in the street lately. I’m so afraid the police may catch her and put her in an institution.”

  “You don’t care about the peop
le she might kill, do you?”

  “I do care, Djuna. If she had killed you I don’t think I could ever have forgiven herBut you aren’t angry, when you have a right to be. You’re generous and good…”

  “No, Rango. I can’t let you believe that. It isn’t true. I have often wished Zora’s death, but I only had the courage to wish it… I had a dream one night in which I saw myself killing her with a long old-fashioned hatpin. Do you realize where she got the idea of the hatpin? From my own dream, which I told her. She was being more courageous, more honest, when she attacked me.”

  Rango took his head in his hands and swayed back and forth as if in pain. A dry sob came out of his chest.

  “Oh, Rango, I can’t bear this anymore. I will go away. Then you’ll have peace with Zora.”

  “Something else happened today, Djuna, something which reminded me of some of the things you said. Something so terrible that I did not want to see you tonight. I don’t know what instinct of danger made me come, after all. But what happened tonight is worse than Zora’s fit of madness. You know that once a month the workers of the party belonging to a certain group meet for what they call auto-criticism. It’s part of the discipline. It’s done with kindness, great objectivity, and very justly. I have been at such meetings. A man’s way of working, his character traits, are analyzed. Last night it was my turn. The men who sat in a circle, they were the ones I see every day, the butcher, the postman, the grocer, the shoemaker on my own street. The head of our particular section is the bus driver. At first, you know, they had been doubtful about signing me in. They knew I was an artist, a bohemian, an intellectual. But they liked me…and they took me in. I’ve worked for them two months now. Then last night…”

  He stopped as if he would not have the courage to relive the scene. Djuna’s hand in his calmed him. But he kept his head bowed. “Last night they talked, very quietly and moderately as the French do… They analyzed me, how I work. They told me some of the things you used to tell me. They made an analysis of my character. They observed everything, the good and the bad. Not only the laziness, the disorder, the lack of discipline, the placing of personal life before the needs of the party, the nights at the cafe, the immoderate talking, irresponsibility, but they also mentioned my capabilities, which made it worse, as they showed how I sabotage myself… They analyzed my power to influence others, my eloquence, my fervor and enthusiasm, my contagious enthusiasm and energy, my gift for making an impression on a crowd, the fact that people are inclined to trust me, to elect me as their leader. Everything. They knew about my fatalism, too. They talked about character changing, as you do. They even intimated that Zora should be placed in an institution, because they knew about her behavior.”

  All the time he kept his head bowed.

  “When you said these things gently, it didn’t hurt me. It was our secret and I could get angry with you, or contradict you. But when they said them before all the other men I knew it was true, and worse still, I knew that if I had not been able to change with all that you gave me, years of love and devotion, I wouldn’t change for the party either… Any other man, taking what you gave, would have accomplished the greatest changes…any other man but me.”

  The barge was sailing nowhere, a moored port of despair.

  Rango stretched himself and said: “I’m tired out…so tired, so tired…” And fell asleep almost instantly in the pose of a big child, with his fists tightly closed, his arms over his head.

  Djuna walked lightly to the front cabin, looked once through the small barred portholes like the windows of a prison, leaned over the mildewed floor, and tore up one of the bottom boards, inviting the deluge to sink this Noah’s Ark sailing nowhere.

  The wood being old and half rotted had made it easy for Djuna to pull on the plank where it had once been patched, but the influx of the water had been partly blocked by the outer layer of barnacles and corrugated seaweeds which she could not reach.

  She returned to the bed on the floor and lay beside Rango, to wait patiently for death.

  She saw the river sinuating toward the sea and wondered if they would float unhampered toward the ocean.

  Below the level of identity lay an ocean, an ocean of which human beings carry only a drop in their veins; but some sink below cognizance and the drop becomes a huge wave, the tide of memory, the undertows of sensation…

  Beneath the cities of the interior flowed many rivers carrying a multitude of images… All the women she had been spread their hair in a halo on the surface of the river, extended multiple arms like the idols of India, their essence seeping in and out of the meandering dreams of men…

  Djuna, lying face upward like a water lily of amniotic lakes; Djuna floating down to the organ grinder’s tune of a pavana for a defunct infanta of Spain, the infanta who never acceded to the throne of maturity, the one who remained a pretender…

  As for Rango, the drums would burst and all the painted horses of the carnival would turn a polka…

  She saw their lives over and over again until she caught a truth which was not simple and divisible but fluctuating and elusive; but she saw it clearly from the places under the surface where she had been accustomed to exist: all the women she had been like many rivers running out of her and with her into the ocean…

  She saw, through this curtain of water, all of them as personages larger than nature, more visible to sluggish hearts being in the focus of death, a stage on which there are no blurred passages, no missed cues…

  She saw, now that she was out of the fog of imprecise relationships, with the more intense light of death upon these faces which had caused her despair, she saw these same faces as pertaining to gentle clowns. Zora dressed in comical trappings, in Rango’s outsized socks, in dyed kimonos, in strangled rags and empty-armed brooches, a comedy to awaken guilt in others…

  …on this stage, floating down the Seine toward death, the actors drifted along and love no longer seemed a trap…the trap was the static pause growth, the arrested self caught in its own web of obstinacy and obsession…

  …you grow, as in the water the algae grow taller and heavier and are carried by their own weight into different currents…

  …I was afraid to grow or move away, Rango, I was ashamed to desert you in your torment, but now I know your choice is your own, as mine was my own…

  …fixation is death… death is fixation…

  …on this precarious ship, devoid of upholstery and self-deception, the voyage can continue into tomorrow…

  …what I see now is the vastness, and the places where I have not been and the duties I have not fulfilled, and the uses for this unusual cargo of past sorrows all ripe for transmutations…

  …the messenger of death, like all adventurers, will accelerate your heart toward change and mutation…

  …if one sinks deep enough and then deeper, all these women she had been flowed into one at night and lost their separate identities; she would learn from Sabina how to make love laughing, and from Stella how to die only for a little while and be born again as children die and are reborn at the slightest encouragement…

  …from the end in water to the beginning in water, she would complete the journey, from origin to birth and birth to flow…

  …she would abandon her body to flow into a vaster body than her own, as it was at the beginning, and return with many other lives to be unfolded…

  …with her would float the broken doll of her childhood, the Easter egg which had been smaller than the one she had asked for, debris of fictions…

  …she would return to the life above the waters of the unconscious and see the magnifications of sorrow which had taken place and been the true cause of the deluge…

  …there were countries she had not yet seen…

  …this image created a pause in her floating…

  …there must also be loves she had not yet encountered…

  …as the barge ran swiftly down the current of despair, she saw the people on the shore flinging their a
rms in desolation, those who had counted on her Noah’s Ark to save themselves…

  …she was making a selfish journey…

  …she had intended the barge for other purposes than for a mortuary…

  …war was coming…

  …the greater the turmoil, the confusion, the greater had been her effort to maintain an individually perfect world, a cocoon of faith, which would be a symbol and a refont>

  …the curtain of dawn would rise on a deserted river…

  …on two deserters…

  …in the imminence of death she seized this intermediary region of our being in which we rehearse our future sorrows and relive the past ones…

  …in this heightened theatre their lives appeared in their true color because there was no witness to distort the private admissions, the most absurd pretensions…

  …in the last role Djuna became immune from the passageway of pretense, from a suspended existence in reflection, from impostures…

  …and she saw what had appeared immensely real to her as charades…

  …in the theatre of death, exaggeration is the cause of despair…

  …the red Easter egg I had wanted to be so enormous when I was a child, if it floats by today in its natural size, so much smaller than my invention, I will be able to laugh at its shrinking…

  …I had chosen death because I was ashamed of this shrinking and fading, of what time would do to our fiction of magnificence, time like the river would wear away the pain of defeats and broken promises, time and the river would blur the face of Zora as a giant incubus, time and the river would mute the vibrations of Rango’s voice upon my heart…