Nightwood

by Djuna Barnes

  'For a whole minute I couldn't move. When I turned around I saw that Guido was ill. I took him in my arms and spoke to him in German. He had often put questions to me about his mother and I had managed always to direct his mind to expect her.'

  The doctor turned to the Baron with one of his sudden illuminations. 'Exactly right. With Guido, you are in the presence of the "maladjusted". Wait! I am not using that word in the derogatory sense at all, in fact my great virtue is that I never use the derogatory in the usual sense. Pity is an intrusion when in the presence of a person who is a new position in an old account—which is your son. You can only pity those limited to their generation. Pity is timely, and dies with the person; a pitiable man is his own last tie. You have treated Guido well.'

  The Baron paused, his knife bent down. He looked up. 'Do you know, doctor, I find the thought of my son's possible death at an early age a sort of dire happiness, because his death is the most awful, the most fearful thing that could befall me. The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy. I have become entangled in the shadow of a vast apprehension which is my son; he is the central point toward which life and death are spinning, the meeting of which my final design will be composed.'

  'And Robin?' the doctor asked.

  'She is with me in Guido, they are inseparable and this time', the Baron said, catching his monocle, 'with her full consent.' He leaned down and picked up his napkin. 'The Baronin', he continued, 'always seemed to be looking for someone to tell her that she was innocent. Guido is very like her, except that he has his innocence. The Baronin was always searching in the wrong direction, until she met Nora Flood, who seemed, from what little I knew of her, to be a very honest woman, at least by intention.'

  'There are some people', he went on, 'who must get permission to live, and if the Baronin finds no one to give her that permission, she will make an innocence for herself; a fearful sort of primitive innocence. It may be considered "depraved" by our generation, but our generation does not know everything.' He smiled. 'For instance Guido, how many will realize his value? One's life is peculiarly one's own when one has invented it.'

  The doctor wiped his mouth. 'In the acceptance of depravity the sense of the past is most fully captured. What is a ruin but Time easing itself of endurance? Corruption is the Age of Time. It is the body and the blood of ecstasy, religion and love. Ah, yes,' the doctor added, 'we do not "climb" to heights, we are eaten away to them, and then conformity, neatness, ceases to entertain us. Man is born as he dies, rebuking cleanliness; and there is its middle condition, the slovenliness that is usually an accompaniment of the "attractive" body, a sort of earth on which love feeds.'

  'That is true,' Felix said with eagerness. 'The Baronin had an undefinable disorder, a sort of odour of memory", like a person who has come from some place that we have forgotten and would give our life to recall.'

  The doctor reached out for the bread. 'So the reason for our cleanliness becomes apparent; cleanliness is a form of apprehension; our faulty racial memory is fathered by fear. Destiny and history are untidy; we fear memory of that disorder. Robin did not.'

  'No,' Felix said in a low voice. 'She did not.'

  'The almost fossilized state of our recollection is attested to by our murderers and those who read every detail of crime with a passionate and hot interest,' the doctor continued. 'It is only by such extreme measures that the average man can remember something long ago; truly, not that he remembers, but that crime itself is the door to an accumulation, a way to lay hands on the shudder of a past that is still vibrating.'

  The Baron was silent a moment. Then he said: 'Yes, something of this rigour was in the Baronin, in its first faint degree; it was in her walk, in the way she wore her clothes, in her silence, as if speech were heavy and unclarified. There was in her every movement a slight drag, as if the past were a web about her, as there is a web of time about a very old building. There is a sensible weight in the air around a thirteenth-century edifice', he said with a touch of pomposity, 'that is unlike the light air about a new structure; the new building seems to repulse it, the old to gather it. So about the Baronin there was a density, not of age, but of youth. It perhaps accounts for my attraction to her.'.

  'Animals find their way about largely by the keenness of their nose,' said the doctor. 'We have lost ours in order not to be one of them, and what have we in its place? A tension in the spirit which is the contraction of freedom. But,' he ended, 'all dreadful events are of profit.'

  Felix ate in silence for a moment, then point-blank he turned to the doctor with a question. 'You know my preoccupation; is my son's better?'

  The doctor, as he grew older, in answering a question seemed, as old people do, to be speaking more and more to himself, and, when troubled, he seemed to grow smaller. He said: 'Seek no further for calamity; you have it in your son. After all, calamity is what we are all seeking. You have found it. A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow as well as himself—and what is a man's shadow but his upright astonishment? Guido is the shadow of your anxiety, and Guido's shadow is God's.'

  Felix said: 'Guido also loves women of history.'

  'Mary's shadow!' said the doctor.

  Felix turned. His monocle shone sharp and bright along its edge. 'People say that he is not sound of mind. What do you say?'

  'I say that a mind like his may be more apt than yours and mine—he is not made secure by habit—in that there is always hope.'

  Felix said under his breath: 'He does not grow up.'

  Matthew answered: 'The excess of his sensibilities may preclude his mind. His sanity is an unknown room: a known room is always smaller than an unknown. If I were you,' the doctor continued, 'I would carry that boy's mind like a bowl picked up in the dark; you do not know what's in it. He feeds on odd remnants that we have not priced; he eats a sleep that is not our sleep. There is more in sickness than the name of that sickness. In the average person is the peculiar that has been scuttled, and in the peculiar the ordinary that has been sunk; people always fear what requires watching.'

  Felix ordered a fine. The doctor smiled. 'I said you would come to it,' he said, and emptied his own glass at a gulp.

  'I know,' Felix answered, 'but I did not understand. I thought you meant something else.'

  'What?'

  Felix paused, turning the small glass around in his trembling hand. 'I thought', he said, 'that you meant that I would give up.'

  The doctor lowered his eyes. 'Perhaps that is what I meant—but sometimes I am mistaken.' He looked at Felix from under his heavy brows. 'Man was born damned and innocent from the start, and wretchedly—as he must—on those two themes—whistles his tune.'

  The Baron leaned forward. He said, in a low voice, 'Was the Baronin damned?'

  The doctor deliberated for a second, knowing what Felix had hidden in his question. 'Guido is not damned,' he said, and the Baron turned away quickly. 'Guido', the doctor went on, 'is blessed—he is peace of mind—he is what you have always been looking for—Aristocracy', he said smiling, 'is a condition in the mind of the people when they try to think of something else and better—funny,' he added sharply, 'that a man never knows when he has found what he has always been looking for.'

  'And the Baronin,' Felix said, 'do you ever hear from her?'

  'She is in America now, but of course you know that. Yes, she writes, now and again, not to me—God forbid—to others.'

  'What does she say?' the Baron said, trying not to show his emotion.

  'She says,' the doctor answered, "Remember me." Probably because she has difficulty in remembering herself.'

  The Baron caught his monocle. 'Altamonte, who has been in America, tells me that she seemed "estranged". Once', he said, pinching his monocle into place, 'I wanted, as you, who are aware of everything, know, to go behind the scenes, back-stage as it were, to our present condition, to find, if I could, the secret of time; good, perhaps that that is an impossible ambition for the sane mind. One has, I am
now certain, to be a little mad to see into the past or the future, to be a little abridged of life to know life, the obscure life—darkly seen, the condition my son lives in; it may also be the errand on which the Baronin is going.'

  Taking out his handkerchief, the Baron removed his monocle, wiping it carefully.

  Carrying a pocket full of medicines, and a little flask of oil for the chapping hands of his son, Felix rode into Vienna, the child beside him; Frau Mann, opulent and gay, opposite, holding a rug for the boy's feet. Felix drank heavily now, and to hide the red that flushed his cheeks he had grown a beard ending in two forked points on his chin. In the matter of drink, Frau Mann was now no bad second. Many cafés saw this odd trio, the child in the midst wearing heavy lenses that made his eyes drift forward, sitting erect, his neck holding his head at attention, watching his father's coins roll, as the night drew out, farther and farther across the floor and under the feet of the musicians as Felix called for military music, for Wacht am Rhein, for Morgenrot, for Wagner; his monocle dimmed by the heat of the room, perfectly correct and drunk, trying not to look for what he had always sought, the son of a once great house; his eyes either gazing at the ceiling or lowered where his hand, on the table, struck thumb and little finger against the wood in rhythm with the music, as if he were playing only the two important notes of an octave, the low and the high; or nodding his head and smiling at his child, as mechanical toys nod to the touch of an infant's hand, Guido pressing his own hand against his stomach where, beneath his shirt, he could feel the medallion against his flesh, Frau Mann gripping her beer mug firmly, laughing and talking loudly.

  One evening, seated in his favourite café on the King, Felix on entering had seen instantly, but refused to admit it to himself, a tall man in the corner who, he was sure, was the Grand Duke Alexander of Russia, cousin and brother-in-law of the late Czar Nicholas—and toward whom in the early part of the evening he steadfastly refused to look. But as the clock hands pointed twelve, Felix, (with the abandon of what a mad man knows to be his one hope of escape, disproof of his own madness) could not keep his eyes away, and as they arose to go, his cheeks now drained of colour, the points of his beard bent sharply down with the stiffening back of his chin, he turned and made a slight bow, his head in his confusion making a complete half-swing, as an animal will turn its head away from a human, as if in mortal shame.

  He stumbled as he got into his carriage. 'Come,' he said, taking the child's fingers in his own. 'You are cold.' He poured a few drops of oil, and began rubbing Guido's hands.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Go Down, Matthew

  Can't you be quiet now?' the doctor said. He had come in late one afternoon to find Nora writing a letter. 'Can't you be done now, can't you give up? Now be still, now that you know what the world is about, knowing it's about nothing?' He took his hat and coat off without being asked, placing his umbrella in a corner. He came forward into the room. 'And me who seem curious because no one has seen me for a million years, and now I'm seen! Is there such extraordinary need of misery to make beauty? Let go Hell; and your fall will be broken by the roof of Heaven.' He eyed the tea-tray and, seeing that the tea-pot had long since become cold, poured himself a generous port. He threw himself into a chair and added more softly, as Nora turned away from her letter, 'In the far reaches of India there is a man being still beneath a tree. Why not rest? Why not put the pen away? Isn't it bitter enough for Robin that she is lost somewhere without receiving mail? And Jenny, what of her now? Taken to drink and appropriating Robin's mind with vulgar inaccuracy, like those eighty-two plaster virgins she bought because Robin had one good one; when you laugh at the eight-two standing in a row, Jenny runs to the wall, back to the picture of her mother, and stands there between two tortures—the past that she can't share, and the present that she can't copy. What of her now? Looking at her quarters with harrowing, indelicate cries; burying her middle at both ends, searching the world for the path back to what she wanted once and long ago! The memory past, and only by a coincidence, a wind, the flutter of a leaf, a surge of tremendous recollection goes through her, and swooning she knows it gone. Cannot a beastly thing be analogous to a fine thing, if both are apprehensions? Love of two things often makes one thing right. Think of the fish racing the sea, their love of air and water turning them like wheels, their tails and teeth biting the water, their spines curved round the air. Is that not Jenny? She who could not encompass anything whole, but only with her teeth and tail, and the spine on her sprung up. Oh, for God's sake! Can't you rest now?'

  'If I don't write to her, what am I to do? I can't sit here for ever—thinking!'

  'Terra damnata et maledicta!' exclaimed the doctor, banging his fist down. 'My uncle Octavius, the trout-tickler of Itchen, was better, he ate his fish when he caught it! But you, you must unspin fate, go back to find Robin! That's what you are going to do. In your chair should have been set the Holy Stone, to say yes to your yes, no to your no; instead it's lost in Westminster Abbey, and if I could have stopped Brech on his way with it into Ireland and have whispered in his ear I would have said, "Wait" (though it was seven hundred years B.C.); it might have been passed around. It might have stopped you, but no, you are always writing to Robin. Nothing will curb it. You've made her a legend and set before her head the Eternal Light, and you'll keep to it even if it does cost her the tearing open of a million envelopes to her end. How do you know what sleep you raise her from? What words she must say to annul the postman's whistle to another girl rising up on a wild elbow? Can't you let any of us loose? Don't you know your holding on is her only happiness and so her sole misery. You write and weep and think and plot, and all the time what is Robin doing? Chucking Jack Straws, or sitting on the floor playing soldiers; so don't cry to me, who have no one to write to, and only taking in a little light laundry known as the Wash of the World. Dig a hole, drop me in! Not at all. St. Matthew's Passion by Bach I'll be. Everything can be used in a lifetime, I've discovered that.'

  'I've got to write to her,' Nora said. 'I've got to.'

  'No man knows it as I know it, I who am the god of darkness. Very well, but know the worst, then. What of Felix and his son Guido, that sick lamenting, fevered child? Death in the weather is a tonic to him. Like all the new young his sole provision for old age is hope of an early death. What spirits answer him who will never come to man's estate? The poor shattered eagerness. So, I say, was Robin purposely unspun? Was Jenny a sitting bitch for fun? Who knows what knives hash her apart? Can't you rest now, lay down the pen? Oh, papelero, have I not summed up my time! I shall rest myself some day by the brim of Saxon-les-Bains and drink it dry, or go to pieces in Hamburg at the gambling table, or end up like Madame de Staël—with an affinity for Germany. To all kinds of ends I'll come. Ah yes, with a crupper of maiden's hair to keep my soul in place, and in my vanguard a dove especially feathered to keep to my wind, as I ride that grim horse with ample glue in every hoof to post up my deeds when I'm dropped in and sealed with earth. In time everything is possible and in space everything forgivable; life is but the intermediary vice. There is eternity to blush in. Life laid end to end is what brings on flux in the clergy—can't you rest now, put down the pen? Oh, the poor worms that never arrive! Some strangely connived angel pray for us! We shall not encompass it—the defunctive murmur in the cardiac nerve has given us all our gait. And Robin? I know where your mind is! She, the eternal momentary—Robin who was always the second person singular. Well,' he said with violence, 'lie weeping with a sword in your hand! Haven't I eaten a book too? Like the angels and prophets? And wasn't it a bitter book to eat? The archives of my case against the law, snatched up and out of the tale-telling files by my high important friend. And didn't I eat a page and tear a page and stamp on others and flay some and toss some into the toilet for relief's sake—then think of Jenny without a comma to eat, and Robin with nothing but a pet name—your pet name to sustain her; for pet names are a guard against loss, like primitive music. But does that sum he
r up? Is even the end of us an account? No, don't answer, I know that even the memory has weight. Once in the war I saw a dead horse that had been lying long against the ground. Time and the birds, and its own last concentration had removed the body a great way from the head. As I looked upon that head, my memory weighed for the lost body; and because of that missing quantity even heavier hung that head along the ground. So love, when it has gone, taking time with it, leaves a memory of its weight.'

  She said: 'She is myself. What am I to do?'

  'Make birds' nests with your teeth, that would be better,' he said angrily, 'like my English girl friend. The birds liked them so well that they stopped making their own (does that sound like any nest you have made for any bird, and so broken it of its fate?). In the spring they form a queue by her bedroom window and stand waiting their turn, holding on to their eggs as hard as they can until she gets around to them, strutting up and down on the ledge, the eyes in their feathers a quick shine and sting, whipped with impatience, like a man waiting at a toilet door for someone inside who had decided to read the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And then think of Robin who never could provide for her life except in you. Oh, well,' he said under his breath, ' "happy are they whom privacy makes innocent."'

  Nora turned around, and speaking in a voice that she tried to make steady said: 'Once, when she was sleeping, I wanted her to die. Now, that would stop nothing.'

  The doctor, nodding, straightened his tie with two fingers. 'The number of our days is not check rein enough to look upon the death of our love. While living we knew her too well, and never understood, for then our next gesture permitted our next misunderstanding. But death is intimacy walking backward. We are crazed with grief when she, who once permitted us, leaves to us the only recollection. We shed tears of bankruptcy then. So it's well she didn't.' He sighed. 'You are still in trouble—I thought you had put yourself outside of it. I might have known better, nothing is what everybody wants, the world runs on that law. Personally, if I could, I would instigate Meat-Axe Day, and out of the goodness of my heart I would whack your head off along with a couple of others. Every man should be allowed one day and a hatchet just to ease his heart.'