by Djuna Barnes
'The scalpel and the Scriptures have taught me that little I did not already know. And I was doing well enough', he snapped, 'until you came along and kicked my stone over, and out I came, all moss and eyes; and here I sit, as naked as only those things can be, whose houses have been torn away from them to make a holiday, and it my only skin—labouring to comfort you. Am I supposed to render up my paradise—that splendid acclimatation—for the comfort of weeping women and howling boys? Look at Felix now, what kind of a Jew is that? Screaming up against tradition like a bat against a window-pane, high-up over the town, his child a boy weeping "o'er graves of hope and pleasure gone".
'Ah, yes—I love my neighbour. Like a rotten apple to a rotten apple's breast affixed we go down together, nor is there a hesitation in that decay, for when I sense such, there I apply the breast the firmer, that he may rot as quickly as I, in which he stands in dire need or I miscalculate the cry. I, who am done sooner than any fruit! The heat of his suppuration has mingled his core with mine, and wrought my own to the zenith before its time. The encumbrance of myself I threw away long ago, that breast to breast I might go with my failing friends. And do they love me for it? They do not. So have I divorced myself, not only because I was born as ugly as God dared premeditate, but because with propinquity and knowledge of trouble I have damaged my own value. And death—have you thought of death? What risk do you take? Do you know which dies first, you or she? And which is the sorrier part, head or feet? I say, with that good Sir Don, the feet. Any man can look upon the head in death, but no man can look upon the feet. They are most awfully tipped up from the earth. I've thought of that also. Do you think, for Christ's sweet sake,' he shouted suddenly, 'that I am so happy that you should cry down my neck? Do you think there is no lament in this world, but your own? Is there not a forbearing saint somewhere? Is there no bread that does not come proffered with bitter butter? I, as good a Catholic as they make, have embraced every confection of hope, and yet I know well, for all our outcry and struggle, we shall be for the next generation not the massive dung fallen from the dinosaur, but the little speck left of a humming-bird; so as well sing our Chi vuol la Zingarella (how women love it!) while I warble my Sonate au Crépuscule, throwing in der Erlkönig for good measure, not to mention Who is Sylvia? Who is anybody!
'Oh,' he cried. 'A broken heart have you! I have falling arches, flying dandruff, a floating kidney, shattered nerves and a broken heart! But do I scream that an eagle has me by the balls or has dropped his oyster on my heart? Am I going forward screaming that it hurts, that my mind goes back, or holding my guts as if they were a coil of knives? Yet you are screaming, and drawing your lip and putting your hand out and turning round and round! Do I wail to the mountains of the trouble I have had in the valley, or to every stone of the way it broke my bones, or of every lie, how it went down into my belly and built a nest to hatch me to my death there? Isn't everyone in the world peculiarly swung and me the craziest of the lot?—so that I come dragging and squealing, like a heifer on the way to slaughter, knowing his cries have only half a rod to go, protesting his death—as his death has only a rod to go to protest his screaming? Do you walk high Heaven without shoes? Are you the only person with a bare foot pressed down on a rake? Oh, you poor blind cow! Keep out of my feathers; you ruffle me the wrong way and flit about, stirring my misery! What end is sweet? Are the ends of the hair sweet when you come to number them?'
'Listen,' Nora said. 'You've got to listen! She would come back to me after a night all over the city and lie down beside me and she would say, "I want to make everyone happy," and her mouth was drawn down. "I want everyone to be gay, gay. Only you," she said, holding me, "only you, you mustn't be gay or happy, not like that, it's not for you, only for everyone else in the world." She knew she was driving me insane with misery and fright; only', she went on, 'she couldn't do anything because she was a long way off and waiting to begin. It's for that reason she hates everyone near her. It's why she falls into everything, like someone in a dream. It's why she wants to be loved and left alone, all at the same time. She would kill the world to get at herself if the world were in the way, and it is in the way. A shadow was falling on her—mine—and it was driving her out of her wits.'
She began to walk again. 'I have been loved', she said, 'by something strange, and it has forgotten me.' Her eyes were fixed and she seemed to be talking to herself. 'It was me made her hair stand on end, because I loved her. She turned bitter because I made her fate colossal. She wanted darkness in her mind—to throw a shadow over what she was powerless to alter—her dissolute life, her life at night; and I, I dashed it down. We will never have it out now,' Nora said. 'It's too late. There is no last reckoning for those who have loved too long, so for me there is no end. Only I can't, I can't wait for ever!' she said frantically. 'I can't live without my heart!
'In the beginning, after Robin went away with Jenny to America, I searched for her in the ports. Not literally, in another way. Suffering is the decay of the heart; all that we have loved becomes the "forbidden", when we have not understood it all, as the pauper is the rudiment of a city, knowing something of the city, which the city, for its own destiny, wants to forget. So the lover must go against nature to find love. I sought Robin in Marseilles, in Tangier, in Naples, to understand her, to do away with my terror. I said to myself, I will do what she has done, I will love what she has loved, then I will find her again. At first it seemed that all I should have to do would be to become "debauched", to find the girls that she had loved; but I found that they were only little girls that she had forgotten. I haunted the cafés where Robin had lived her night-life; I drank with the men, I danced with the women, but all I knew was that others had slept with my lover and my child. For Robin is incest too, that is one of her powers. In her, past-time records, and past time is relative to us all. Yet not being the family she is more present than the family. A relative is in the foreground only when it is born, when it suffers and when it dies, unless it becomes one's lover, then it must be everything, as Robin was; yet not as much as she, for she was like a relative found in another generation. I thought, "I will do something that she will never be able to forgive, then we can begin again as strangers." But the sailor got no further than the hall. He said: "Mon dieu, il y a deux chevaux de bois dans la chambre à coucher.''''
'Christ!' muttered the doctor.
'So', Nora continued, 'I left Paris. I went through the streets of Marseilles, the waterfront of Tangier, the basso porto of Naples. In the narrow streets of Naples, ivies and flowers were growing over the broken-down walls. Under enormous staircases, rising open to the streets, beggars lay sleeping beside images of St. Gennaro; girls going into the churches to pray were calling out to boys in the squares. In open door-ways night-lights were burning all day before gaudy prints of the Virgin. In one room that lay open to the alley, before a bed covered with a cheap heavy satin comforter, in the semi-darkness, a young girl sat on a chair, leaning over its back, one arm across it, the other hanging at her side, as if half of her slept; and half of her suffered. When she saw me she laughed, as children do, in embarrassment. Looking from her to the Madonna behind the candles, I knew that the image, to her, was what I had been to Robin, not a saint at all, but a fixed dismay, the space between the human and the holy head, the arena of the "indecent" eternal. At that moment I stood in the centre of eroticism and death, death that makes the dead smaller, as a lover we are beginning to forget dwindles and wastes; for love and life are a bulk of which the body and heart can be drained, and I knew in that bed Robin should have put me down. In that bed we would have forgotten our lives in the extremity of memory, moulted our parts, as figures in the wax works are moulted down to their story, so we would have broken-down to our love.'
The doctor stood up. He staggered as he reached for his hat and coat. He stood in confused and unhappy silence—he moved toward the door. Holding the knob in his hand he turned toward her. Then he went out.
The doctor, walking
with his coat-collar up, entered the Café de la Mairie du VIe. He stood at the bar and ordered a drink, looking at the people in the close, smoke-blue room, he said to himself, 'Listen!' Nora troubled him, the life of Nora and the lives of the people in his life. 'The way of a man in a fog!' he said. He hung his umbrella on the bar ledge. 'To think is to be sick,' he said to the barman. The barman nodded.
The people in the café waited for what the doctor would say, knowing that he was drunk and that he would talk; in great defaming sentences his betrayals came up; no one ever knew what was truth and what was not. 'If you really want to know how hard a prize-fighter hits,' he said, look-around, 'you have got to walk into the circle of his fury and be carried out by the heels, not by the count.'
Someone laughed. The doctor turned slowly. 'So safe as all that?' he asked sarcastically; 'so damned safe? Well, wait until you get in gaol and find yourself slapping the bottoms of your feet for misery.'
He put his hand out for his drink—muttering to himself: 'Matthew, you have never been in time with any man's life and you'll never be remembered at all, God save the vacancy! The finest instrument goes wrong in time—that's all, the instrument gets broken, and I must remember that when everyone is strange; it's the instrument gone flat. Lapidary, engrave that on my stone when Matthew is all over and lost in a field.' He looked around. 'It's the instrument, gentlemen, that has lost its G string, otherwise he'd be playing a fine tune; otherwise he'd still be passing his wind with the wind of the north—otherwise touching his billycock!'
'Only the scorned and the ridiculous make good stories,' he added angrily, seeing the habitues smiling, 'so you can imagine when you'll get told! Life is only long enough for one trade; try that one!'
An unfrocked priest, a stout pale man with woman's hands, on which were many rings, a friend of the doctor's, called him and asked him to have a drink. The doctor came, carefully bringing his umbrella and hat. The priest said: 'I've always wanted to know whether you were ever really married or not.'
'Should I know that?' inquired the doctor. 'I've said I was married and I gave the girl a name and had children by her, then, presto! I killed her off as lightly as the death of swans. And was I reproached for that story? I was. Because even your friends regret weeping for a myth, as if that were not practically the fate of all the tears in the world! What if the girl was the wife of my brother and the children my brother's children? When I laid her down her limbs were as handsome and still as two May boughs from the cutting—did he do as much for her? I imagined about her in my heart as pure as a French print, a girl all of a little bosom and a bird cage, lying back down comfortable with the sea for a background and a rope of roses to hold her. Has any man's wife been treated better than that? Who says she might not have been mine, and the children also? Who for that matter', he said with violence, 'says they are not mine? Is not a brother his brother also, the one blood cut up in lengths, one called Michael and the other Matthew? Except that people get befuddled seeing them walk in different directions? Who's to say that I'm not my brother's wife's husband and that his children were not fathered in my lap? Is it not to his honour that he strikes me as myself? And when she died, did my weeping make his weeping less?'
The ex-priest said, 'Well, there's something in that, still I like to know what is what.'
'You do, do you?' said the doctor. 'Well then, that's why you are where you are now, right down in the mud without a feather to fly with, like the ducks in Golden Gate park—the largest park in captivity—everybody with their damnable kindness having fed them all the year round to their ruin because when it comes time for their going south they are all a bitter consternation, being too fat and heavy to rise off the water, and, my God, how they flop and struggle all over the park in autumn, crying and tearing their hair out because their nature is weighed down with bread and their migration stopped, by crumbs. You wring your hands to see it, and that's another illustration of love; in the end you are too heavy to move with the greediness in your stomach. And', said the doctor, 'it would be the same with me if I'd let it, what with the wind at the one end and the cyclone at the other. Yet there are some that I have neglected for my spirit's sake—the old yeomen of the Guard and the beefeaters of the Tower because of their cold kidneys and gray hairs, and the kind of boy who only knows two existences—himself in a mirror—back and front.' He was very drunk now. He looked about the café. He caught someone nudging someone. He looked up at the ex-priest and cursed. 'What people! All queer in a terrible way. There were a couple of queer good people once in this world—but none of you,' he said, addressing the room, 'will ever know them. You think you are all studded with diamonds, don't you! Well, part the diamonds and you'll find slug's meat. My God,' he said, turning around, 'when I think!' He began to pound the table with his glass. 'May they all be damned! The people in my life who have made my life miserable, coming to me to learn of degradation and the night. Nora, beating her head against her heart, sprung over, her mind closing her life up like a heel on a fan, rotten to the bone for love of Robin. My God, how that woman can hold on to an idea! And that old sandpiper, Jenny! Oh, it's a grand bad story, and who says I'm a betrayer? I say, tell the story of the world to the world!'
'A sad and a corrupt age,' the ex-priest said.
Matthew O'Connor called for another drink. 'What do they all come to me for? Why do they all tell me everything then expect it to lie hushed in me, like a rabbit gone home to die? And that Baron Felix, hardly muttered a word in his life, and yet his silence breeds like scum on a pond; and that boy of his, Guido, by Robin, trying to see across the Danube with the tears in his eyes, Felix holding on to his hand and the boy holding on to the image of the Virgin on a darkening red ribbon, feeling its holy lift out of the metal and calling it mother; and me not even knowing which direction my end is coming from. So, when Felix said to me, "Is the child infirm?" I said, "Was the Mad King of Bavaria infirm?" I'm not one to cut the knot by drowning myself in any body of water, not even the print of a horse's hoof, no matter how it has been raining.'
People had begun to whisper and the waiters moved closer, watching. The ex-priest was smiling to himself, but O'Connor did not seem to see or hear anything but his own heart. 'Some people', he said, 'take off head-first into any body of water and six glasses later someone in Haarlem gets typhoid from drinking their misery. God, take my hand and get me up out of this great argument—the more you go against your nature, the more you will know of it—hear me, heaven! I've done, and been everything that I didn't want to be or do—Lord, put the light out—so I stand here, beaten up and mauled and weeping, knowing I am not what I thought I was, a good man doing wrong, but the wrong man doing nothing much, and I wouldn't be telling you about it if I weren't talking to myself. I talk too much, because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed. I'm an old worn out lioness, a coward in my corner, for the sake of my bravery I've never been one thing that I am, to find out what I am! Here lies the body of Heaven. The mocking bird howls through the pillars of Paradise, oh, Lord! Death in Heaven lies couched on a mackerel sky, on her breast a helmet and at her feet a foal with a silent marble mane. Nocturnal sleep is heavy on her eyes.'
'Funny little man,' someone said, 'never stops talking—always getting everyone into trouble by excusing them, because he can't excuse himself—the Squatting Beast, coming out at night'—as he broke off, the voice of the doctor was heard: 'And what am I? I'm damned, and carefully public!'
He fumbled for a cigarette, found it and lit it.
'Once upon a time, I was standing listening to a quack hanky-panky of a medicine man saying: "Now, ladies and gentlemen, before I behead the small boy, I will endeavour to entertain you with a few parlour tricks." He had a turban cocked over his eye and a moaning in his left ventricle which was meant to be the whine of Tophet, and a loin-cloth as big as a tent and protecting about as much. Well, he began doing his tricks. He made a tree grow out of his left shoulder and dashed two rabbits out of his cu
ffs and balanced three eggs on his nose. A priest, standing in the crowd, began to laugh, and a priest laughing always makes me wring my hands with doubt. The other time was when Catherine the Great sent for me to bleed her. She took to the leech with rowdy Saxon abandon, saying: "Let him drink, I've always wanted to be in two places at once!"'
'For heaven's sake,' the ex-priest said. 'Remember your century at least!'
For a moment the doctor looked angry. 'See here,' he said, 'don't interrupt me. The reason I'm so remarkable is that I remember everyone even when they are not about. It's the boys that look as innocent as the bottom of a plate that get you into trouble, not a man with a prehistoric memory.'
'Women can cause trouble too,' the ex-priest said lamely.
'That's another story,' the doctor said. 'What else has Jenny ever done, and what else has Robin ever done? And Nora, what's she done but cause it, by taking it in at night like a bird-coop? And I myself wish I'd never had a button up my middle —for what I've done and what I've not done all goes back to that—to be recognized, a gem should lie in a wide open field; but I'm all aglitter in the underbrush! If you don't want to suffer you should tear yourself apart. Were not the several parts of Caroline of Hapsburg put in three utterly obvious piles?—her heart in the Augustiner church, her intestines in St. Stefan's and what was left of the body in the vault of the Capucines? Saved by separation. But I'm all in one piece! Oh, the new moon! ' he said. 'When will she come riding?'
