Children of the Albatross (10 page)

Matilda was known for her obstinacy in sitting
there through winter and summer, her indifference to climate, her vague answers
to those who sought her reasons for being there, her tireless watchfulness, as
if she were keeping a rendezvous with eternity.

Only at sundown did she leave, sometimes gently
incited by the policeman.

Since there was not total deterioration in her
clothes, or in her health, everyone surmised she must have a home and no one
was ever concerned about her.

Djuna had once sat beside her and Matilda at
first would not speak, but addressed herself to the pigeons and to the falling
autumn leaves, murmuring, whispering, muttering by turns. Then suddenly she
said to Djuna very simply and clearly: “My lover left me sitting here and said
he would come back.”

(The policeman had said: I have seen her
sitting there for twenty years.)

“How long have you been sitting here and
waiting?” Djuna asked.

“I don’t know.”

She ate of the same bread she was feeding the
pigeons. Her face was wrinkled but not aged, through the wrinkles shone an
expression which was not of age, which was the expression of alert waiting,
watchfulness, expectation of the young.

“He will come back,” she said, for the first
time a look of defiance washing her face of its spectator’s pallor, the pallor
of the recluse who lives without intimate relationship to stir the rhythms of
the blood, this glazed expression of those who watch the crowd passing by and
never recognize a face.

“Of course he will,” said Djuna, unable to bear
even the shadow of anxiety on the woman’s face.

Matilda’s face recovered its placidity, its
patience. “He told me to sit here and wait.”

A mortal blow had stopped the current of her
life, but had not shattered her. It had merely paralyzed her sense oftime, she
would sit and wait for the lost lover and the years were obliterated by the
anesthesia of the deadened cell of time: five minutes stretched to infinity and
kept her alive, alive and ghostly, with the cell of time, the little clock of
reality inside the brain forever damaged. A faceless clock pointing to anguish.
And with time was linked pain, lodged in the same cell (neighbors and twins),
time and pain in more or less intimate relationship.

And what was left was this shell of a woman
immune to cold and heat, anesthetized by a great loss into immobility and
timelessness.

Sitting there beside Matilda Djuna heard the
echoes of the broken cell within the little psychic stage of her own heart, so
well enacted, so neat, so clear, and wondered whether when her father left the
house for good in one of his moods of violence as much damage had been done to
her, and whether some part of her being had not been atrophied, preventing
complete openness and complete development in living.

By his act of desertion he had destroyed a cell
in Djuna’s being, an act of treachery from a cruel world setting her against
all fathers, while retaining the perilous hope of a father returning under the
guise of t men who resembled him, to re-enact again the act of violence.

It was enough for a man to possess certain
attributes of the father—any man possessed of power—and then her being came
alive with fear as if the entire situation would be reenacted inevitably:
possession, love and desertion, replacing her on a bench like Matilda, awaiting
a denouement.

Looking back, there had been a momentous break
in the flow, a change of activity.

Every authoritarian step announced the return
of the father and danger. For the father’s last words had been: “I will come
back.”

Matilda had been more seriously injured: the
life flow had stopped. She had retained the first image, the consciousness that
she must wait, and the last words spoken by the lover had been a command for
eternity: wait until I come back.

As if these words had been uttered by a
proficient hypnotist who had then cut off all her communications with the
living, so that she was not permitted even this consolation allowed to other
deserted human beings: the capacity to transfer this love to another, to cheat
the order given, to resume life with others, to forget the first one.

Matilda had been mercifully arrested and
suspended in time, and rendered unconscious of pain.

But not Djuna.

In Djuna the wound had remained alive, and
whenever life touched upon this wound she mistook the pain she felt for being
alive, and her pain warning her and guiding her to deflect from man the father
to man the son.

She could see clearly all the cells of her
being, like the rooms of her house which had blossomed, enriched, developed and
stretched far and beyond all experiences, but she could see also the cell of
her being like the walled-in room of her house in which was lodged violence as
having been shut and condemned within her out of fear of disaster.

There was a little cell of her being in which
she still existed as a child, which only activated with a subtle anger in the
presence of the father, for in relation to him she lost her acquired power, her
assurance, she was rendered small again and returned to her former state of
helplessness and dependence.

And knowing the tragic outcome of this
dependence she felt hostility and her route towards the man of power bristled
with this hostility—an immediate need to shut out violence.

Paul and Djuna sat listening to Cesar Franck’s
Symphony in D Minor, in this little room of gentleness and trust, barring
violence from the world of love, seeking an opiate against destruction and
treachery.

So she had allied herself with the son against
the father. He had been there to forbid and thus to strengthen the desire. He
had been there, large and severe, to threaten the delicate, precarious bond,
and thus to render it desperate and make each encounter a reprieve from death
and loss.

The movements of the symphony and her movements
had been always like Paul’s, a ballet of oscillations, peripheral entrances and
exits, figures designed to become invisible in moments of danger, pirouetting
with all the winged knowledge of birds to avoid collision with violence and
severity.

Together they had taken leaps into the air to
avoid obstacles.

THE
CAFE

THE CAFES WERE THE WELLS of treasures,
the caves of Ali Baba.

The cafes were richer even than the oriental
cities where all living was plied openly under your eyes so that you were
offered all the activities of the world to touch and smell. You saw your shoes
being made from the skinning of the animal to the polishing of the leather. You
saw the weaving of cloth and the dyeing in pails of multicolored liquids. You
saw the scribes writing letters for the illiterate, the philosopher meditating,
the religious man chanting as he squatted and the lepers disintegrating under
your eyes, within the touch of your hand.

And so in the cafe, with one franc for a glass
of wine and even less for coffee, you could hear stories from the Pampas, share
in African voodoo secrets, read the pages of a book being written, listen to a
poem, to the death rattles of an aristocrat, the life story of a revolutionary.
You could hear the hummed theme of a symphony, watch the fingers of a jazz
drummer drumming on the table, accept an invitation from a painter who would
take you to the zoo to watch the serpents eat their daily ration of white mice,
consult a secretive Hindu on his explorations of occult streets, or meet an
explorer who would take you on his sailboat around the world.

The chill of autumn was tempered by little coal
stoves and glass partitions.

A soft rain covered the city with a muted lid,
making it intimate like a room, shutting out sky and sun as if drawing
curtains, lighting lamps early, kindling fires in the fireplaces, pushing human
beings gently to live under the surface, inciting them to sprout words,
sparkling colors out of their own flesh, to become light, fire, flowers and
tropical fiestas.

The cafe was the hothouse, densely perfumed
with all the banned oils, the censured musks, the richest blooms accelerated by
enclosure, warmth, and crossgraftings from all races.

No sunsets, no dawns, but exhibits of paintings
rivaling all in luxuriance. Rivers of words, forests of sculptures, huge
pyramids of personalities. No need of gardens.

City and cafes became intimate like a room that
was carpeted, quilted for the easy intermingling of man’s inner landscapes, his
multiple secret wishes vibrating from table to table as elbows and the
garcon
not only carried brimming glasses but endless messages and signals as the
servants did in the old Arabian tales.

Day and night were colliding gently at twilight,
throwing off erotic sparks.

Day and night met on the
boulevards.eight=”0”>

Sabina was always breaking the molds which life
formed around her.

She was always trespassing boundaries, erasing
identifications.

She could not bear to have a permanent address
or to give her telephone number.

Her greatest pleasure consisted in being where
no one knew she was, in an out-of-the-way cafe, a little-known hotel, if
possible a room from which the number had been scratched off.

She changed her name as criminals efface their
tracks. She herself did not know what she was preserving from detection, what
mystery she was defending.

She hated factual questions as to her
activities. Above all she hated to be registered in any of the official books.
She hated to give her birth hour, her genealogy, and all her dealings with
passport authorities were blurred and complicated.

She lived entirely by a kind of opportunism,
all her acts dictated by the demands of the present situation. She eluded
tabulations only to place herself more completely at the disposal of anyone’s
fantasy about her.

She kept herself free of all identifications
the better to obey some stranger’s invention about her.

As soon as a man appeared the game began.

She must keep silent. She must let him look at
her face and let his dream take form. She must allow time and silence for his
invention to develop.

She let him build an image. She saw the image
take form in his eyes. If she said what she wanted to say he might think her an
ordinary woman!

This image of herself as a
not
ordinary
woman, an image which was trembling now in his eyes, might suddenly disappear.
Nothing more difficult to live up to than men’s dreams. Nothing more tenuous,
elusive to fulfill than men’s dreams.

She might say the wrong phrase, make the wrong
gesture, smile the wrong smile, and then see his eyes waver vulnerably for one
instant before turning to the glassy brilliance of disillusion.

She wanted desperately to answer man’s most
impossible wishes. If the man said: you seem perverse to me, then she would set
about gathering together all her knowledge of perversity to become what he had
called her.

It made life difficult. She lived the tense,
strained life of an international spy. She moved among enemies set on exposing
her pretenses. People felt the falseness at times and sought to uncover her.

She had such a fear of being discovered!

She could not bear the light of common,
everyday simplicities! As other women blink at the sunlight, she blinked at the
light of common everyday simplicities.

And so this race which must never stop. To run
from the slanting eyes of one to the caressing hands of another to the sadness
of the third.

As she collided with people they lost their
identities also: they became objects of desire, objects to be consumed, fuel
for the bonfire. Their quality was summarized as either inflammable or
noninflammable. That was all that counted. She never distinguished age,
nationality, class, fortune, status, occupation or vocation.

Her desire rushed instantaneously, without past
or future. A point of fire in the present to which she attached no contracts,
no continuity.

Her breasts were always heavy and full. She was
like a messenger carrying off all she received from one to carry it to the
other, carrying in her breasts the words said to her, the book given her, the
land visited, the experience acquired, in the form of stories to be spun
continuously.

Everything lived one hour before was a story to
tell the following hour to the second companion. From room to room what was
perpetuated was her pollen-carrying body.

When someone asked her: where are you going
now? whom are you going to meet? she lied. She lied because this current
sweeping her onward seemed to cause others pain.

Crossing the street she nourished herself upon
the gallant smile of the policeman who stopped the traffic for her. She culled
the desire of the man who pushed the revolving door for her. She gathered the
flash of adoration from the drugstore clerk: are you an actress? She picked the
bouquet of the shoe salesman trying on her shoes: are you a dancer? As she sat
in the bus she received the shafts of the sun as a personal intimate visit. She
felt a humorous connivance with the truck driver who had to pull the brakes
violently before her impulsive passages and who did so smiling.