by Djuna Barnes
Nora turned away—'What am I to do?'
'Ah, mighty uncertainty!' said the doctor. 'Have you thought of all the doors that have shut at night and opened again? Of women who have looked about with lamps, like you, and who have scurried on fast feet? Like a thousand mice they go this way and that, now fast, now slow, some halting behind doors, some trying to find the stairs, all approaching or leaving their misplaced mouse meat, that lies in some cranny, on some couch, down on some floor, behind some cupboard; and all the windows, great and small, from which love and fear have peered, shining and in tears? Put those windows end to end and it would be a casement that would reach around the world; and put those thousand eyes into one eye and you would have the night combed with the great blind searchlight of the heart.'
Tears began to run down Nora's face.
'And do I know my Sodomites?' the doctor said unhappily, 'and what the heart goes bang up against if it loves one of them, especially if it's a woman loving one of them. What do they find then, that this lover has committed the unpardonable error of not being able to exist—and they come down with a dummy in their arms. God's last round, shadow-boxing, that the heart may be murdered and swept into that still quiet place where it can sit and say: "Once I was, now I can rest."
'Well, that's only part of it,' he said, trying to stop her crying, 'and though your normal fellow will say all are alike in the dark, negro or white, I say you can tell them, and where they came from, and what quarter they frequent, by the size and excellence—and at the Bastille (and may I be believed) they come as handsome as mortadellas slung on a table.
'Your gourmet knows for instance from what water his fish was snatched, he knows from what district and to what year he blesses his wine, he knows one truffle from another and whether it be Brittany root or if it came down from the North, but you gentlemen sit here and tell me that the district makes no difference—is there no one who knows anything but myself? And, must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?
'Have I not shut my eyes with the added shutter of the night and put my hand out? And it's the same with girls,' he said, 'those who turn the day into night, the young, the drug addict, the profligate, the drunken and that most miserable, the lover who watches all night long in fear and anguish. These can never again live the life of the day. When one meets them at high noon they give off, as if it were a protective emanation, something dark and muted. The light does not become them any longer. They begin to have an unrecorded look. It is as if they were being tried by the continual blows of an unseen adversary. They acquire an "unwilling" set of features: they become old without reward, the widower bird sitting sighing at the turnstile of heaven, "Hallelujah! I am sticked! Skoll! Skoll! I am dying!"
'Or walks the floor, holding her hands; or lies upon the floor, face down, with that terrible longing of the body that would, in misery, be flat with the floor; lost lower than burial, utterly blotted out and erased so that no stain of her could ache upon the wood, or snatched back to nothing without aim—going backward through the target, taking with her the spot where she made one—'
'Yes!' Nora said.
'Look for the girls also in the toilets at night, and you will find them kneeling in that great secret confessional crying between tongues, the terrible excommunication:
'"May you be damned to hell! May you die standing upright! May you be damned upward! May this be damned, terrible and damned spot! May it wither into the grin of the dead, may this draw back, low riding mouth in an empty snarl of the groin! May this be your torment, may this be your damnation! God damned me before you, and after me you shall be damned, kneeling and standing away till we vanish! For what do you know of me, man's meat? I'm an angel on all fours, with a child's feet behind me, seeking my people that have never been made, going down face foremost, drinking the waters of night at the water hole of the damned, and I go into the waters, up to my heart, the terrible waters! What do you know of me? May you pass from me, damned girl! Damned and betraying!"
'There's a curse for you,' he said, 'and I have heard it.'
'Oh!' Nora said, 'Don't—don't!'
'But,' he continued, 'if you think that is all of the night, you're crazy! Groom, bring the shovel! Am I the golden-mouthed St. John Chrysostom, the Greek who said it with the other cheek? No, I'm a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet, under a cow pad. But,' he said with sorrow, 'even the evil in us comes to an end, errors may make you immortal—one woman went down the ages for sitting through Parsifal up to the point where the swan got his death, whereupon she screamed out "Godamercy, they have shot the Holy Grail!" —but not every one is as good as that; you lay up for yourself in your old age, Nora, my child, feebleness enough to forget the passions of your youth, which you spent your years in strengthening. Think of that also. As for me, I tuck myself in at night, well content because I am my own charlatan. Yes, I, the Lily of Killarney, am composing me a new song, with tears and with jealousy, because I have read that John was his favourite, and it should have been me, Prester Matthew! The song is entitled, "Mother, put the wheel away, I cannot spin tonight." Its other name, "According to me, everyone is a kind-of-a-son-of-a bitch," to be sung to two ocarinas and one concertina, and, if none of the world is about, to a Jew's-harp, so help me God! I am but a little child with my eyes wide open!'
'Matthew,' Nora said, 'what will become of her? That's what I want to know.'
'To our friends,' he answered, 'we die everyday, but to ourselves we die only at the end. We do not know death, or how often it has essayed our most vital spirit. While we are in the parlour it is visiting in the pantry. Montaigne says: "To kill a man there is required a bright shining and clear light," but that was spoken of the conscience toward another man. But what of our own death—permit us to reproach the night, wherein we die manifold alone. Donne says: "We are all conceived in close prison, in our mothers' wombs we are close prisoners all. When we are born, we are but born to the liberty of the house—all our life is but a going out to the place of execution and death. Now was there ever any man seen to sleep in the Cart, between Newgate and Tyburn? Between the prison and the place of execution, does any man sleep?" Yet he says, "men sleep all the way". How much more, therefore, is there upon him a close sleep when he is mounted on darkness."'
'Yes,' she said, 'but—'
'Now, wait a minute! It's all of a certain night that I'm coming to, that I take so long coming to it,' he said, 'a night in the branchy pitch of fall —the particular night you want to know about—for I'm a fisher of men and my gimp is doing a saltarello over every body of water to fetch up what it may. I have a narrative, but you will be put to it to find it.
'Sorrow fiddles the ribs and no man should put his hand on anything; there is no direct way. The foetus of symmetry nourishes itself on cross purposes, this is its wonderful unhappiness—and now I am come to Jenny—oh Lord, why do women have partridge blood and set out to beat up trouble? The places Jenny moults in are her only distinction, a Christian with a wanderer's rump. She smiles, and it is the wide smile of the self-abused, radiating to the face from some localized centre disturbance, the personification of the "thief". She has a longing for other people's property, but the moment she possesses it the property loses some of its value, for the owner's estimate is its worth. Therefore it was she took your Robin.'
'What is she like?' Nora asked.
'Well,' said the doctor, 'I have always thought I, myself, the funniest looking creature on the face of the earth; then I laid my eyes on Jenny—a little, hurried decaying comedy jester, the face on the fool's stick, and with a smell about her of mouse-nests. She is a "looter", and eternally nervous. Even in her sleep I'll pronounce that her feet twitch and her orifices expand and contract like the iris of a suspicious eye. She speaks of people taking away her "faith" in them, as if faith were a transportable object—all her life she has been subject to the feeling of "removal". Were she a soldier she would define defeat with the sente
nce: "The enemy took the war away." Having a conviction that she is somehow reduced, she sets about collecting a destiny—and for her, the sole destiny is love, anyone's love and so her own. So only someone's love is her love. The cock crew and she was laid—her present is always someone else's past, jerked out and dangling.
'Yet what she steals she keeps, through the incomparable fascination of maturation and rot. She has the strength of an incomplete accident—one is always waiting for the rest of it, for the last impurity that will make the whole; she was born at the point of death, but, unfortunately, she will not age into youth—which is a grave mistake of nature. How more tidy had it been to have been born old and have aged into a child, brought finally to the brink, not of the grave, but of the womb; in our age bred up into infants searching for a womb to crawl into, not be made to walk loth the gingerly dust of death, but to find a moist, gillflirted way. And a funny sight it would be to see us going to our separate lairs at the end of day, women wincing with terror, not daring to set foot to the street for fear of it.
'But I'm coming by degrees to the narrative of the one particular night that makes all other nights seem like something quite decent enough —and that was the night when, dressed in open-work mittens, showing the edge of a pantaloon (and certainly they had been out of style three mothers behind her), Jenny Petherbridge—for that is her name in case you'd care to know it,' he said with a grin, 'wrapped in a shawl of Spanish insight and Madrid fancy (as a matter of fact, the costume came later, but what do I care?), stepped out in the early fall of the year to the Opera—I think, and I am not mistaken, it was nothing better than Rigoletto—walking in the galleries and whisking her eyes about for trouble—that she swore, even after, she had really never wanted to know anything about—and there laid her eyes on Robin who was leaning forward in a box, and me pacing up and down, talking to myself in the best Comédie-Française French, trying to keep off what I knew was going to be trouble for a generation, and wishing I was hearing the Schumann cycle—when in swishes the old sow of a Danish count. My heart aches for all poor creatures putting on dog and not a pot to piss in or a window to throw it from. And I began to think, and I don't know why, of the closed gardens of the world where all people can make their thoughts go up high because of the narrowness and beauty, or of the wide fields where the heart can spread out and thin its vulgarity (it's why I eat salad), and I thought, we should all have a place to throw our flowers in, like me who, once in my youth, rated a corbeille of moth-orchids—and did I keep them? Don't get restless—I'm coming back to the point. No, I sat beside them a little while having my tea, and saying to myself; "You're a pretty lot, and you do my cupboard honour, but there's a better place awaiting you—" and with that I took them by the hand around to the Catholic church, and I said, "God is what we make Him, and life doesn't seem to be getting any better," and tiptoed out.
'So, I went around the gallery a third time, and I knew that Hindu or no Hindu, I was in on what was wrong with the world—and I said the world's like that poor distressed moll of a Jenny, never knowing which end to put its mittens on, and pecking about like a mystified rook, until this particular night gave her a hoist and set her up at the banquet (where she has been sitting dumbfounded ever since), and Robin the sleeping and troubled, looking amazed. It was more than a boy like me (who am the last woman left in this world, though I am the bearded lady) could bear, and I went into a lather of misery watching them, and thinking of you, and how in the end you'll all be locked together, like the poor beasts that get their antlers mixed and are found dead that way, their heads fattened with a knowledge of each other they never wanted, having had to contemplate each other, head-on and eye to eye, until death; well, that will be you and Jenny and Robin. You, who should have had a thousand children and Robin, who should have been all of them; and Jenny the bird, snatching the oats out of love's droppings—and I went mad, I'm like that. What an autopsy I'll make, with everything all which ways in my bowels! A kidney and a shoe cast of the Roman races; a liver and a long-spent whisper, a gall and a wrack of scolds from Milano, and my heart that will be weeping still when they find my eyes cold, not to mention a thought of Cellini in my crib of bones, thinking how he must have suffered when he knew he could not tell it for ever—(beauty's name spreads too thick). And the lining of my belly, flocked with the locks cut off love in odd places that I've come on, a bird's nest to lay my lost eggs in, and my people as good as they come, as long as they have been coming, down the grim path of "We know not" to "We can't guess why".
'Well, I was thinking of you, a woman at best, and you know what that means? Not much in the morning—all trussed up with pain's bridle. Then I turned my eyes on Jenny, who was turning her eyes looking for trouble, for she was then at that pitch of life that she knew to be her last moment. And do you need the doctor to tell you that that is a bad strange hour for a woman? If all women could have it all at once, you could beat them in flocks like a school of scorpions; but they come eternally, one after the other, and go head foremost into it alone. For men of my kind it isn't so bad, I've never asked better than to see the two ends of my man no matter how I might be dwindling. But for one like Jenny, the poor ruffled bitch, why, God knows, I bled for her, because I knew in an instant the kind of a woman she was, one who had spent all her life rummaging through photographs of the past, searching for the one who would be found leaning sideways with a look as if angels were sliding down her hip—a great love who had been spared a face but who'd been saddled with loins, leaning against a drape of Scotch velvet with a pedestal at the left twined with ivy, a knife in her boot and her groin pouting as if she kept her heart in it. Or searching among old books for the passion that was all renunciation and lung trouble, with flowers at the bosom—that was Jenny—so you can imagine how she trembled when she saw herself going toward fifty without a thing done to make her a tomb-piece, or anything in her past that would get a flower named for her. So I saw her coming forward, stepping lightly and trembling and looking at Robin, saying to me (I'd met her, if you call it meeting a woman when you pound her kidney), "Won't you introduce me?" and my knees knocking together; and my heart as heavy as Adam's off ox, because you are a friend of mine and a good poor thing, God knows, who will never put a stop to anything; you may be knocked down, but you'll crawl on for ever, while there's any use to it, so I said, "Certainly, damn it!" and brought them together. As if Robin hadn't met enough people without me making it worse.'
'Yes,' she said, 'she met every one.'
'Well,' he went on, 'The house was beginning to empty, all the common clay was pouring down the steps talking of the Diva (there's something wrong with any art that makes a woman all bust!) and how she had taken her high L, and all the people looking out of the corner of their eyes to see how their neighbours were dressed, and some of them dropping their cloaks rather low to see the beast in a man snarling up in his neck—and they never guessed that it was me, with both shoulders under cover, that brought the veins to their escorts' temples—and walking high and stately—the pit of my stomach gone black in the darkness that was eating it away for thinking of you, and Robin smiling sideways like a cat with canary feathers to account for, and Jenny tripping beside her so fast that she would get ahead and have to run back with small cries of ambition, saying wistfully, "You must come to my house for late supper."
'God help me, I went! For who will not betray a friend, or, for that matter, himself, for a whisky and soda, caviare and a warm fire—and that brings me to the ride that we took later. As Don Antonio said long ago, "Did'st thou make a night of it?" And was answered (by Claudio), "Yes. Egad! And morning too; for about eight o'clock the next day, slap! They all soused upon their knees, kissed around, burned their commodes, drank my health, broke their glasses and so parted." So Cibber put it, and I put it in Taylor's words: "Did not Periander think fit to lie with his wife Melissa after she had already gone hent to heaven?" Is this not night work of another order also, but night work still? And in anoth
er place, as Montaigne says: "Seems it not to be a lunatic humour of the moon that Endymion was by the lady moon lulled to sleep for many months together that she might have her joy of him who stirred not at all except in sleep."
'Well, having picked up a child in transit, a niece of someone Jenny knew, we all went riding down the Champs Elysées. We went straight as a die over the Pont Neuf, and whirled around into the rue du Cherche-Midi, God forgive us! Where you, weak vessel of love, were lying awake and wondering where, and all the time Jenny doing the deed that was as bad and out of place as that done by Catherine of Russia, and don't deny it, who took old Poniatovsky's throne for a water closet. And suddenly I was glad I was simple and didn't want a thing in the world but what could be had for five francs. And I envied Jenny nothing she had in her house, though I admit I had been sort of casting my eye over a couple of books, which I would have spirited away if they hadn't been bound in calf—for I might steal the mind of Petronius, as well I knew, but never the skin of a calf—for the rest, the place was as full of the wrong thing as you would care to spend your inheritance on—well, I furnished my closet with phenomenal luck at the fair, what with shooting a row of chamber pots and whirling a dozen wheels to the good, and every one about me getting nothing for a thousand francs but a couple of velvet dogs, or dolls that looked as if they had been up all night. And what did I walk home with for less than five francs? A fine frying pan that could coddle six eggs, and a raft of minor objects that one needs in the kitchen—so I looked at Jenny's possessions with scorn in my eye. It may have been all most "unusual", but who wants a toe-nail that is thicker than common? And that thought came to me out of the contemplation of the mad strip of the inappropriate that runs through creation, like my girl friend who married some sort of Adriatic bird who had such thick ones that he had to trim them with a horse file—my mind is so rich that it is always wandering! Now I am back to the time when that groom walked into my life wearing a priest's collar that he had no more right to than I have to a crupper. Well, then the carriages came up with their sweet wilted horses, and Robin went down the steps first, and Jenny tearing after her saying, "Wait! Wait!" as if she were talking to an express on its way into Boston, and dragging her shawl and running, and we all got in—she'd collected some guests who were waiting for her in the house.'
