Nightwood

by Djuna Barnes

  'The army, the celibate's family!' grinned the doctor. 'His one safety.'

  The young woman, who was in her late twenties, turned from the group, coming closer to Felix and the doctor. She rested her hands behind her against the table. She seemed embarrassed. 'Are you both really saying what you mean, or are you just talking?' Having spoken, her face flushed, she added hurriedly, 'I am doing advance publicity for the circus, I'm Nora Flood.'

  The doctor swung around, looking pleased. 'Ah!' he said, 'Nora suspects the cold incautious melody of time crawling, but,' he added, 'I've only just started.' Suddenly he struck his thigh with his open hand. 'Flood, Nora, why sweet God, my girl, I helped to bring you into the world!'

  Felix, as disquieted as if he were expected to 'do something' to avert a catastrophe (as one is expected to do something about an overturned tumbler, the contents of which is about to drip over the edge of the table and into a lady's lap), on the phrase 'time crawling' broke into uncontrollable laughter, and though this occurrence troubled him the rest of his life he was never able to explain it to himself. The company, instead of being silenced, went on as if nothing had happened, two or three of the younger men were talking about something scandalous, and the 'Duchess' in her loud empty voice was telling a very stout man something about the living statues. This only added to the Baron's torment. He began waving his hands, saying, 'Oh, please! please!' and suddenly he had a notion that he was doing something that wasn't laughing at all, but something much worse, though he kept saying to himself, 'I am laughing, really laughing, nothing else whatsoever! ' He kept waving his arms in distress and saying, 'Please, please!' staring at the floor, deeply embarrassed to find himself doing so.

  As abruptly he sat straight up, his hands on the arms of the chair, staring fixedly at the doctor who was leaning forward as he drew a chair up exactly facing him. 'Yes,' said the doctor, and he was smiling, 'you will be disappointed! In questa tomba oscura—oh, unfaithful one! I am no herbalist, I am no Rutebeuf, I have no panacea, I am not a mountebank—that is, I cannot or will not stand on my head. I'm no tumbler, neither a friar, nor yet a thirteenth-century Salome dancing arse up on a pair of Toledo blades—try to get any lovesick girl, male or female, to do that to-day! If you don't believe such things happened in the long back of yesterday look up the manuscripts in the British Museum or go to the Cathedral of Clermont-Ferrand, it's all one to me; become as the rich Mussulmans of Tunis who hire silly women to reduce the hour to its minimum of sense, still it will not be a cure, for there is none that takes place all at once in any man. You know what man really desires?' inquired the doctor, grinning into the immobile face of the Baron. 'One of two things: to find someone who is so stupid that he can lie to her, or to love someone so much that she can lie to him.'

  'I was not thinking of women at all,' the Baron said, and he tried to stand up.

  'Neither was I,' said the doctor, 'sit down.' He refilled his glass. 'The fine is very good,' he said.

  Felix answered, 'No, thank you, I never drink.'

  'You will,' the doctor said. 'Let us put it the other way, the Lutheran or Protestant church versus the Catholic. The Catholic is the girl that you love so much that she can lie to you, and the Protestant is the girl that loves you so much that you can lie to her, and pretend a lot that you do not feel. Luther, and I hope you don't mind my saying so, was as bawdy an old ram as ever trampled his own straw, because the custody of the people's 'remissions' of sins and indulgences had been snatched out of his hands, which was in that day in the shape of half of all they had and which the old monk of Wittenberg had intended to get off with in his own way. So, of course, after that, he went wild and chattered like a monkey in a tree and started something he never thought to start (or so the writing on his side of the breakfast table would seem to confirm), an obscene megalomania—and wild and wanton stranger that that is, it must come clear and cool and long or not at all. What do you listen to in the Protestant church? To the words of a man who has been chosen for his eloquence—and not too eloquent either, mark you, or he gets the bum's rush from the pulpit, for fear that in the end he will use his golden tongue for political ends. For a golden tongue is never satisfied until it has wagged itself over the destiny of a nation, and this the church is wise enough to know.

  'But turn to the Catholic church, go into mass at any moment—what do you walk in upon? Something that's already in your blood. You know the story that the priest is telling as he moves from one side of the altar to the other, be he a cardinal, Leo X, or just some poor bastard from Sicily who has discovered that pecca fortiter among his goats no longer masses his soul, and has, God knows, been God's child from the start—it makes no difference. Why? Because you are sitting there with your own meditations and a legend (which is nipping the fruit as the wren bites), and mingling them both with the Holy Spoon, which is that story; or you can get yourself into the confessional, where, in sonorous prose, lacking contrition (if you must) you can speak of the condition of the knotty, tangled soul and be answered in Gothic echoes, mutual and instantaneous—one saying hail to your farewell. Mischief unravels and the fine high hand of heaven proffers the skein again, combed and forgiven!'

  'The one House', he went on, 'is hard, as hard as the gift of gab, and the other is as soft as a goat's hip, and you can blame no man for anything, and you can't like them at all.'

  'Wait!' said Felix.

  'Yes?' said the doctor.

  Felix bending forward, deprecatory and annoyed, went on: 'I like the prince who was reading a book, when the executioner touched him on the shoulder telling him that it was time, and he, arising, laid a paper-cutter between the pages to keep his place and closed the book.'

  'Ah,' said the doctor, 'that is not man living in his moment, it is man living in his miracle.' He refilled his glass. 'Gesundheit,' he said; 'Freude sei Euch von Gott beschieden, wie heut' so immerdar!''

  'You argue about sorrow and confusion too easily,' Nora said.

  'Wait!' the doctor answered. 'A man's sorrow runs uphill; true it is difficult for him to bear, but it is also difficult for him to keep. I, as a medical man, know in what pocket a man keeps his heart and soul, and in what jostle of the liver, kidneys and genitalia these pockets are pilfered. There is no pure sorrow. Why? It is bedfellow to lungs, lights, bones, guts and gall! There are only confusions, about that you are quite right, Nora my child, confusions and defeated anxieties—there you have us, one and all. If you are a gymnosophist you can do without clothes, and if you are gimp-legged you will know more wind between the knees than another, still it is confusion; God's chosen walk close to the wall.'

  'I was in the war once myself,' the doctor went on, 'in a little town where the bombs began tearing the heart out of you, so that you began to think of all the majesty in the world that you would not be able to think of in a minute, if the noise came down and struck in the right place; I was scrambling for the cellar—and in it was an old Breton woman and a cow she had dragged with her, and behind that someone from Dublin, saying "Glory be to God!" in a whisper at the far end of the animal. Thanks be to my Maker I had her head on, and the poor beast trembling on her four legs so I knew all at once that the tragedy of the beast can be two legs more awful than a man's. She was softly dropping her dung at the far end where the thin Celtic voice kept coming up saying, "Glory be to Jesus!" and I said to myself, "Can't the morning come now, so I can see what my face is mixed up with?" At that a flash of lightning went by and I saw the cow turning her head straight back so her horns made two moons against her shoulders, the tears soused all over her great black eyes.

  'I began talking to her, cursing myself and the mick, and the old woman looking as if she were looking down her life, sighting it the way a man looks down the barrel of a gun for an aim. I put my hand on the poor bitch of a cow and her hide was running water under my hand, like water tumbling down from Lahore, jerking against my hand as if she wanted to go, standing still in one spot; and I thought, there are directions and spee
ds that no one has calculated, for believe it or not that cow had gone somewhere very fast that we didn't know of, and yet was still standing there.'

  The doctor lifted the bottle. 'Thank you,' said Felix, 'I never drink spirits.'

  'You will,' said the doctor.

  'There's one thing that has always troubled me,' the doctor continued, 'this matter of the guillotine. They say that the headsman has to supply his own knife, as a husband is supposed to supply his own razor. That's enough to rot his heart out before he has whittled one head. Wandering about the Boul 'Mich' one night, flittering my eyes, I saw one with a red carnation in his buttonhole. I asked him what he was wearing it for, just to start up a friendly conversation, he said, "It's the headsman's prerogative,"—and I went as limp as a blotter snatched from the Senate. "At one time", he said, "the executioner gripped it between his teeth," at that my bowels turned turtle, seeing him in my mind's eye stropping the cleaver with a bloom in his mouth, like Carmen, and he the one man who is supposed to keep his gloves on in church! They often end by slicing themselves up, it's a rhythm that finally meets their own neck. He leaned forward and drew a finger across mine and said, "As much hair as thick as that makes it a little difficult," and at that moment I got heart failure for the rest of my life. I put down a franc and flew like the wind, the hair on my back standing as high as Queen Anne's ruff! And I didn't stop until I found myself spang in the middle of the Musée de Cluny, clutching the rack.'

  A sudden silence went over the room. The Count was standing in the doorway, rocking on his heels, either hand on the sides of the door, a torrent of Italian, which was merely the culmination of some theme he had begun in the entrance hall, was abruptly halved as he slapped his leg, standing tall and bent and peering. He moved forward into the room, holding with thumb and forefinger the centre of a round magnifying glass which hung from a broad black ribbon. With the other hand he moved from chair to table, from guest to guest. Behind him, in a riding habit, was a young girl. Having reached the sideboard he swung around with gruesome nimbleness.

  'Get out!' he said softly, laying his hand on the girl's shoulder. 'Get out, get out!' It was obvious he meant it; he bowed slightly.

  As they reached the street the 'Duchess' caught a swirling hem of lace about her chilling ankles. 'Well, my poor devil?' she said, turning to Felix.

  'Well!' said Felix. 'What was that about, and why?'

  The doctor hailed a cab with the waving end of a bulldog cane. 'That can be repaired at any bar,' he said.

  'The name of that', said the Duchess, pulling on her gloves, 'is a brief audience with the great, brief, but an audience!'

  As they went up the darkened street Felix felt himself turning scarlet. 'Is he really a Count?' he asked.

  'Herr Gott!' said the Duchess. Am I what I say? Are you? Is the doctor?' She put her hand on his knee. 'Yes or no?'

  The doctor was lighting a cigarette and in its flare the Baron saw that he was grinning. 'He put us out for one of those hopes that is about to be defeated.' He waved his gloves from the window to other guests who were standing along the curb, hailing vehicles.

  'What do you mean?' the Baron said in a whisper.

  'Count Onatorio Altamonte—may the name eventually roll over the Ponte Vecchio and into the Arno—suspected that he had come upon his last erection.'

  The doctor began to sing, 'Nur eine Nacht.'

  Frau Mann, with her face pressed against the cab window, said, 'It's snowing.' At her words Felix turned his coat collar up.

  'Where are we going?' he asked Frau Mann. She was quite gay again.

  'Let us go to Heinrich's, I always do when it's snowing. He mixes the drinks stronger then, and he's a good customer, he always takes in the show.'

  'Very well,' said the doctor, preparing to rap on the window. 'Where is thy Heinrich?'

  'Go down Unter den Linden,' Frau Mann said. 'I'll tell you when.'

  Felix said, 'If you don't mind, I'll get down here.' He got down, walking against the snow.

  Seated in the warmth of the favoured café, the doctor, unwinding his scarf said: 'There's something missing and whole about the Baron Felix—damned from the waist up, which reminds me of Mademoiselle Basquette who was damned from the waist down, a girl without legs, built like a medieval abuse. She used to wheel herself through the Pyrenees on a board. What there was of her was beautiful in a cheap traditional sort of way, the face that one sees on people who come to a racial, not a personal, amazement. I wanted to give her a present for what of her was missing, and she said, "Pearls—they go so well with everything!" Imagine, and the other half of her still in God's bag of tricks! Don't tell me that what was missing had not taught her the value of what was present. Well, in any case,' the doctor went on rolling down his gloves, 'a sailor saw her one day and fell in love with her. She was going uphill and the sun was shining all over her back, it made a saddle across her bent neck and flickered along the curls of her head, gorgeous and bereft as the figure head of a Norse vessel that the ship has abandoned. So he snatched her up, board and all, and took her away and had his will; when he got good and tired of her, just for gallantry, he put her down on her board about five miles out of town, so she had to roll herself back again, weeping something fearful to see, because one is accustomed to see tears falling down to the feet. Ah truly, a pineboard may come up to the chin of a woman and still she will find reason to weep. I tell you Madame, if one gave birth to a heart on a plate, it would say "Love" and twitch like the lopped leg of a frog.'

  'Wunderbar!' exclaimed Frau Mann. 'Wunderbar, my God!'

  'I'm not through,' said the doctor, laying his gloves across his knees, 'someday I am going to see the Baron again, and when I do I shall tell him about the mad Wittelsbach. He'll look as distressed as an owl tied up in a muffler.'

  'Ah,' exclaimed Frau Mann, 'he will enjoy it. He is so fond of titles.'

  'Listen,' the doctor said, ordering a round, 'I don't want to talk of the Wittelsbach. Oh God, when I think back to my past, everyone in my family a beauty, my mother, with hair on her head as red as a fire kicked over in spring (and that was early in the eighties when a girl was the toast of the town, and going the limit meant lobster à la Newburg). She had a hat on her as big as the top of a table, and everything on it but running water; her bosom clinched into a corset of buckram, and my father sitting up beside her (snapped while they were riding on a roller-coaster). He had on one of those silly little yellow jackets and a tan bowler just up over his ears, and he must have been crazy, for he was sort of crosseyed—maybe it was the wind in his face or thoughts of my mother where he couldn't do anything about it.' Frau Mann took up her glass, looking at it with one eye closed—'I've an album of my own,' she said in a warm voice, 'and everyone in it looks like a soldier—even though they are dead.'

  The doctor grinned, biting his teeth. Frau Mann tried to light a cigarette, the match wavered from side to side in her unsteady hand.

  Frau Mann was slightly tipsy, and the insistent hum of the doctor's words was making her sleepy.

  Seeing that Frau Mann dozed, the doctor got up lightly and tip-toed noiselessly to the entrance. He said to the waiter in bad German: 'The lady will pay,' opened the door, and went quietly into the night.

  CHAPTER TWO

  La Somnambule

  Close to the church of St. Sulpice, around the corner in the rue Servandoni, lived the doctor. His small slouching figure was a feature of the Place. To the proprietor of the Café de la Mairie du VIe he was almost a son. This relatively small square, through which tram lines ran in several directions, bounded on the one side by the church and on the other by the court, was the doctor's 'city'. What he could not find here to answer to his needs, could be found in the narrow streets that ran into it. Here he had been seen ordering details for funerals in the parlour with its black broadcloth curtains and mounted pictures of hearses; buying holy pictures and petits Jésus in the boutique displaying vestments and flowering candles. He had shouted down at least
one judge in the Mairie du Luxembourg after a dozen cigars had failed to bring about his ends.

  He walked, pathetic and alone, among the pasteboard booths of the Foire St. Germain when for a time its imitation castles squatted in the square. He was seen coming at a smart pace down the left side of the church to go into Mass; bathing in the holy water stoup as if he were its single and beholden bird, pushing aside weary French maids and local tradespeople with the impatience of a soul in physical stress.

  Sometimes, late at night, before turning into the Café de la Mairie de VIe, he would be observed staring up at the huge towers of the church which rose into the sky, unlovely but reassuring, running a thick warm finger around his throat, where, in spite of its custom, his hair surprised him, lifting along his back and creeping up over his collar. Standing small and insubordinate, he would watch the basins of the fountain loosing their skirts of water in a ragged and flowing hem, sometimes crying to a man's departing shadow: 'Aren't you the beauty!'

  To the Café de la Mairie du VIe he brought Felix, who turned up in Paris some weeks after the encounter in Berlin. Felix thought to himself that undoubtedly the doctor was a great liar, but a valuable liar. His fabrications seemed to be the framework of a forgotten but imposing plan; some condition of life of which he was the sole surviving retainer. His manner was that of a servant of a defunct noble family, whose movements recall, though in a degraded form, those of a late master. Even the doctor's favourite gesture—plucking hairs out of his nostrils—seemed the 'vulgarization' of what was once a thoughtful plucking of the beard.

  As the altar of a church would present but a barren stylization but for the uncalculated offerings of the confused and humble; as the corsage of a woman is made suddenly martial and sorrowful by the rose thrust among the more decorous blooms by the hand of a lover suffering the violence of the overlapping of the permission to bestow a last embrace, and its withdrawal: making a vanishing and infinitesimal bull's eye of that which had a moment before been a buoyant and showy bosom, by dragging time out of his bowels (for a lover knows two times, that which he is given, and that which he must make)—so Felix was astonished to find that the most touching flowers laid on the altar he had raised to his imagination were placed there by the people of the underworld, and that the reddest was to be the rose of the doctor.