Nightwood

by Djuna Barnes

  The doctor was embarrassed by Nora's rigid silence; he went on. 'I was leaning forward on my cane as we went down under the trees, holding it with both hands, and the black wagon I was in was being followed by a black wagon, and that by another, and the wheels were turning, and I began saying to myself: The trees are better, and grass is better, and animals are all right and the birds in the air are fine. And everything we do is decent when the mind begins to forget—the design of life; and good when we are forgotten—the design of death. I began to mourn for my spirit, and the spirits of all people who cast a shadow a long way beyond what they are; and for the beasts that walk out of the darkness alone, I began to wail for all the little beasts in their mothers, who would have to step down and begin going decent in the one fur that would last them their time. And I said to myself: For these I would go bang on my knees, but not for her—I wouldn't piss on her if she were on fire! I said, Jenny is so greedy that she wouldn't give her shit to the crows. And then I thought: Oh, the poor bitch, if she were dying, face down in a long pair of black gloves, would I forgive her? And I knew I would forgive her, or anyone making a picture. And then I began looking at the people in that carriage, very carefully raising my eyes so they would not notice anything unusual, and I saw the English girl sitting up there pleased and frightened.

  'And then at the child—there was terror in it and it was running away from something grown up; I saw that she was sitting still and she was running, it was in her eyes, and in her chin, drawn down, and her eyes wide open. And then I saw Jenny sitting there shaking, and I said: God, you are no picture! And then, Robin was going forward, and the blood running red, where Jenny had scratched her, and I screamed and thought: "Nora will leave that girl some day: but though these two are buried at opposite ends of the earth, one dog will find them both."'

  CHAPTER SIX

  Where the Tree Falls

  Baron Felix, who had given up his place in the bank, though not his connections with it, had been seen in many countries standing before that country's palace gate, holding his gloved hands before him in the first unconcluded motion of submission; contemplating relics and parts, with a tension in his leg that took the step forward or back a little quicker than his fellow sightseer.

  As at one time he had written to the press about this noble or that (and had never seen it in print), as he had sent letters to declining houses and never received an answer, he was now amassing a set of religious speculations that he eventually intended sending to the Pope. The reason for this was, that as time passed it became increasingly evident that his child, if born to anything, had been born to holy decay. Mentally deficient, and emotionally excessive, an addict to death; at ten, barely as tall as a child of six, wearing spectacles, stumbling when he tried to run, with cold hands and anxious face, he followed his father, trembling with an excitement that was a precocious ecstasy. Holding his father's hand he climbed palace and church steps with the tearing swing of the leg necessitated by a measure that had not taken a child into account; staring at paintings and wax reproductions of saints, watching the priests with the quickening of the breath of those in whom concentration must take the place of participation, as in the scar of a wounded animal will be seen the shudder of its recovery.

  When Guido had first spoken of wishing to enter the church, Felix had been startled out of himself. He knew that Guido was not like other children, that he would always be too estranged to be argued with; in accepting his son the Baron saw that he must accept a demolition of his own life. The child would obviously never be able to cope with it. The Baron bought his boy a virgin in metal, hanging from a red ribbon, and placed it about his neck, and in doing so, the slight neck, bent to take the ribbon, recalled to him Robin's, as she stood back to him in the antique shop on the Seine.

  So Felix began to look into the matter of the church. He searched the face of every priest he saw in the streets; he read litanies and examined chasubles and read the Credo; he inquired into the state of monasteries. He wrote, after much thought, to the Pope, a long disquisition on the state of the cloth. He touched on Franciscan monks and French priests, pointing out that any faith that could, in its profoundest unity, compose two such dissimilar types—one the Roman, shaved and expectant of what seemed, when one looked into his vacantly absorbed face, nothing more glorious than a muscular resurrection; and the other, the French priest, who seemed to be composite of husband and wife in conjunction with original sin, carrying with them good and evil in constantly quantitative ascent and descent, the unhappy spectacle of a single ego come to a several public dissolution,—must be profoundly elastic.

  He inquired if this might not be the outcome of the very different confessional states of the two countries. Was it not, he asked, to be taken for granted that the Italian ear must be less confounded because, possibly, it was harking the echo of its past, and the French that of the future? Was it conceivable that the 'confessions' of the two nations could, in the one case, produce that living and expectant coma and, in the other, that worldly, incredible, indecent gluttony? He said that he himself had come to the conclusion that the French, the more secular, were a very porous people. Assuming this, it was then only natural that from listening to a thousand and one lay sins, the priest, upon reaching no riper age than two score, should find it difficult to absolve, the penitent having laid himself open to a peculiar kind of forgiveness; not so much absolution as exigency, for the priest was himself a vessel already filled to overflowing, and gave pardon because he could no longer hold—he signed with the cross, hastily and in stress, being, like a full bladder, embarrassed and in need of an immediate privacy. The Franciscan, on the other hand, had still a moment to wait. There was no tangent in his iris, as one who, in blessing is looking for relief.

  Felix received no answer. He had expected none. He wrote to clear some doubt in his mind. He knew that in all probability the child would never be 'chosen'. If he were the Baron hoped that it would be in Austria, among his own people, and to that end he finally decided to make his home in Vienna.

  Before leaving, however, he sought out the doctor. He was not in his lodging. The Baron aimlessly set off toward the square. He saw the small black clad figure moving toward him. The doctor had been to a funeral and was on his way to the Café de la Mairie du VIe to lift his spirits. The Baron was shocked to observe, in the few seconds before the doctor saw him, that he seemed old, older than his fifty odd years would account for. He moved slowly as if he were dragging water; his knees, which one seldom noticed, because he was usually seated, sagged. His dark shaved chin was lowered as if in a melancholy that had no beginning or end. The Baron hailed him, and instantly the doctor threw off his unobserved self, as one hides, hastily, a secret life. He smiled, drew himself up, raised his hand in greeting, though, as is usual with people when taken unaware, with a touch of defence.

  'Where have you been?' he said as he came to a standstill in the middle of the block. 'I haven't seen you for months, and', he added, 'it's a pity.'

  The Baron smiled in return. 'I've been in mental trouble,' he said, walking beside the doctor. 'Are you', he added, 'engaged for dinner?'

  'No,' said the doctor, 'I've just buried an excellent fellow. Don't think you ever met him, a Kabyle, better sort of Arab. They have Roman blood, and can turn pale at a great pinch, which is more than can be said for most, you know,' he added, walking a little sideways, as one does when not knowing where a companion is going. 'Do a bit for a Kabyle, back or front, and they back up on you with a camel or a bag of dates.' He sighed and passed his hand over his chin. 'He was the only one I ever knew who offered me five francs before I could reach for my own. I had it framed in orange blossoms and hung it over the whatnot.'

  The Baron was abstracted, but he smiled out of politeness. He suggested dining in the Bois. The doctor was only too willing, and at the sudden good news, he made that series of half-gestures of a person taken pleasantly unaware; he half held up his hands—no gloves—he almost touched his
breast pocket—a handkerchief; he glanced at his boots, and was grateful for the funeral; he was shined, fairly neat; he touched his tie, stretching his throat muscles.

  As they drove through the Bois the doctor went over in his mind what he would order—duck with oranges, no—having eaten on a poor man's purse for so many years, habit had brought him to simple things with garlic. He shivered. He must think of something different. All he could think of was coffee and Grand Marnier, the big tumbler warmed with the hands, like his people warming at the peat fire. 'Yes?' he said, and realized that the Baron had been speaking. The doctor lifted his chin to the night air and listened now with an intensity with which he hoped to reconstruct the sentence.

  'Strange, I had never seen the Baronin in this light before,' the Baron was saying, and he crossed his knees. 'If I should try to put it into words, I mean how I did see her, it would be incomprehensible, for the simple reason that I find that I never did have a really clear idea of her at any time. I had an image of her, but that is not the same thing. An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties. I had gathered, of course, a good deal from you, and later, after she went away, from others, but this only strengthened my confusion. The more we learn of a person, the less we know. It does not, for instance, help me to know anything of Chartres above the fact that it possesses a cathedral, unless I have lived in Chartres and so keep the relative heights of the cathedral and the lives of its population in proportion. Otherwise it would only confuse me to learn that Jean of that city stood his wife upright in a well; the moment I visualize this, the deed will measure as high as the building; just as children who have a little knowledge of life will draw a man and a barn on the same scale.'

  'Your devotion to the past', observed the doctor, looking at the cab metre with apprehension, 'is perhaps like a child's drawing.'

  The Baron nodded. He was troubled. 'My family is preserved because I have it only from the memory of one single woman, my aunt; therefore it is single, clear and unalterable. In this I am fortunate, through this I have a sense of immortality. Our basic idea of eternity is a condition that cannot vary. It is the motivation of marriage. No man really wants his freedom. He gets a habit as quickly as possible—it is a form of immortality.'

  'And what's more,' said the doctor, 'we heap reproaches on the person who breaks it, saying that in so doing he has broken the image—of our safety.'

  The Baron acquiesced. 'This quality of one sole condition, which was so much a part of the Baronin, was what drew me to her; a condition of being that she had not, at that time, even chosen, but a fluid sort of possession which gave me a feeling that I would not only be able to achieve immortality, but be free to choose my own kind.'

  'She was always holding God's bag of tricks upside down,' murmured the doctor.

  'Yet, if I tell the whole truth,' the Baron continued, 'the very abundance of what then appeared to me to be security, and which was, in reality, the most formless loss, gave me at the same time pleasure and a sense of terrible anxiety, which proved only too legitimate.'

  The doctor lit a cigarette.

  'I took it', the Baron went on, 'for acquiescence, thus making my great mistake. She was really like those people who, coming unexpectedly into a room, silence the company because they are looking for someone who is not there.' He knocked on the cab window, got down and paid. As they walked up the gravel path he went on: 'What I particularly wanted to ask you was, why did she marry me? It has placed me in the dark, for the rest of my life.'

  'Take the case of the horse who knew too much,' said the doctor, 'looking between the branches in the morning, cypress or hemlock. She was in mourning for something taken away from her in a bombardment in the war—by the way she stood, that something lay between her hooves —she stirred no branch, though her hide was a river of sorrow; she was damned to her hocks, where the grass came waving up softly. Her eyelashes were gray-black, like the eyelashes of a nigger, and at her buttocks' soft centre a pulse throbbed like a fiddle.'

  The Baron, studying the menu, said, 'The Petherbridge woman called on me.'

  'Glittering God,' exclaimed the doctor putting the card down. 'Has it gone as far as that? I shouldn't have thought it.'

  'For the first moment', the Baron continued, 'I had no idea who she was. She had spared no pains to make her toilet rusty and grievous by an arrangement of veils and flat-toned dark material with flowers in it, cut plainly and extremely tight over a very small bust, and from the waist down gathered into bulky folds to conceal, no doubt, the widening parts of a woman well over forty. She seemed hurried. She spoke of you.'

  The doctor put the menu on his knee. He raised his dark eyes with the bushy brows erect. 'What did she say?'

  The Baron answered, evidently unaware of the tender spot which his words touched: 'Utter nonsense, to the effect that you are seen nearly every day in a certain nunnery, where you bow and pray and get free meals and attend cases which are, well, illegal.'

  The Baron looked up. To his surprise he saw that the doctor had 'deteriorated' into that condition in which he had seen him in the street, when he thought himself unobserved.

  In a loud voice the doctor said to the waiter, who was within an inch of his mouth: 'Yes, and with oranges, oranges!'

  The Baron continued hastily: 'She gave me uneasiness because Guido was in the room at the time. She said that she had come to buy a painting—indeed, she offered me a very good price, which I was tempted to take (I've been doing a little dealing in old masters lately) for my stay in Vienna—but, as it turned out, she wanted the portrait of my grandmother, which on no account could I bring myself to part with. She had not been in the room five minutes before I sensed that the picture was an excuse, and that what she really wanted was something else. She began talking about the Baronin almost at once, though she mentioned no name at first, and I did not connect the story with my wife until the end. She said, "She is really quite extraordinary. I don't understand her at all, though I must say I understand her better than other people." She added this with a sort of false eagerness. She went on: "She always lets her pets die. She is so fond of them, and then she neglects them, the way that animals neglect themselves."

  'I did not like her to talk about this subject, as Guido is very sensitive to animals, and I could fancy what was going on in his mind; he is not like other children, not cruel, or savage. For this very reason he is called "strange". A child who is mature, in the sense that the heart is mature, is always, I have observed, called deficient.' He gave his order and went on, 'She then changed the subject—'

  'Tacking into the wind like a barge.'

  'Well, yes, to a story about a little girl she had staying with her (she called her Sylvia); the Baronin was also staying with her at the time, though I did not know that the young woman in question was the Baronin until later—well anyway it appears that this little girl Sylvia had "fallen in love" with the Baronin, and that she, the Baronin, kept waking her up all through the night to ask her if she "loved her".

  'During the holidays, while the child was away, Petherbridge became "anxious"—that is the way she put it—as to whether or not the "young lady had a heart".'

  'And brought the child back to prove it?' interpolated the doctor, casting an eye over the fashionable crowd beginning to fill the room.

  'Exactly,' said the Baron, ordering wine. 'I made an exclamation, and she said quickly: "You can't blame me, you can't accuse me of using a child for my own ends!" Well, what else does it come to?'

  'That woman', the doctor said, settling himself more comfortably in his chair, 'would use the third-rising of a corpse for her ends. Though', he added, 'I must admit she is very generous with money.'

  The Baron winced. 'So I gathered from her over-large bid for the portrait. Well, she went on to say that, when they met, the Baronin had so obviously forgotten all about her, that the child was "ashamed." She said "shame went all over her". She was already at the door when she spoke the last sentence. In fact, she condu
cted the whole scene as though my room were a stage that had been marked out, and at this point she must read her final lines.

  '"Robin," she said, "Baronin Robin Volkbein, I wonder if she could be a relative."