Children of the Albatross (15 page)

in the new pan old tin

in the new shoe old leather

in the new silk old hair

in the new hat old straw…

“Anyhow,” said Donald, “what I like best in the
zoo is not the weasel, it’s the rhinoceros with his wonderful tough hide.”

Michael felt inexplicably angry that Donald
should like the rhinoceros and not the weasel. That he should admire the
toughness of the rhinoceros skin, as if he were betraying him, expressing the
wish that Michael should be less vulnerable.

How how how could Michael achieve
invulnerability when every gesture Donald made was in a different rhythm from
his own, when he remained uncapturable even at the moments when he gave
himself.

Donald was singing:

in the new man the child

and the new not new

im, exprot new

the new not new

Then he sat down to write a letter, and the way
he wrote his letter was so much in the manner of a schoolboy, with the
attentiveness born of awkwardness, an unfamiliarity with concentration, an
impatience to have the task over and done with that the little phrase in his
song which Michael had not allowed to become audible to his heart now became
louder and more ominous: in the new man the child.

As Donald sat biting the tip of his pen,
Michael could see him preparing to trip, skip, prance, laugh, but always within
a circle in which he admitted no partner.

To avoid the assertion of a difference which
would be emphasized in a visit to the zoo, Michael tempted Donald with a visit
to the Flea Market, knowing this to be one of Donald’s favorite rambles.

There, exposed in the street, on the sidewalk,
lay all the objects the imagination could produce and summon.

All the objects of the world with the added
patina of having been possessed already, loved and hated, worn and discarded.

But there, as Michael moved and searched
deliberately he discovered a rare book on astronomy, and Donald found the
mechanism of a music box without the box, just a skeleton of fine wires that
played delicately in the palm of his hand. Donald placed it to his ear to
listen and then said: “Michael, buy me this music box. I love it.”

In the open air it was scarcely audible, but
Donald did not offer it to Michael’s ear, as if he were listening to a music
not made for him.

Michael bought it for him as one buys a toy for
a child, a toy one is not expected to share. And for himself he bought the book
on astronomy which Donald did not even glance at.

Donald walked with the music box playing inside
of his pocket, and then he wanted reindeer horns, and he wanted a Louis
Fifteenth costume, and he wanted an opium pipe.

Michael studied old prints, and all his
gestures were slow and lagging with a kind of sadness which Donald refused to
see, which was meant to say: “Take me by the hand and let me share your games.”

Could he not see, in Michael’s bearing, a child
imprisoned wishing to keep pace with Donald, wishing to keep pace with his
prancing, wishing to hear the music of the music box?

Finally they came upon the balloon woman,
holding a floating bouquet of emerald-green balloons, and Donald wanted them
all.

“All?” said Michael in dismay.

“Maybe they will carry me up in the air. I’m so
much lighter than the old woman,” said Donald.

But when he had taken the entire bunch from the
woman, and held them and was not lifted off the ground as he expected, he let
them fly off and watched their ascension with delight, as if part of himself
wereattached to them and werenow swinging in space.

Now it seemed to Michael that this divorce
which happened every day would stretch intolerably during the rest of their
time together, and he was wishing for the night, for darkness.

A blind couple passed them, leaning on each
other. Michael envied them. (How I envy the blind who can love in the dark.
Never to see the eye of the lover without reflection or remembrance. Black
moment of desire knowing nothing of the being one is holding but the fiery
point in darkness at which they could touch and spark. Blind lovers throwing
themselves in the void of desire lying together for a night without dawn. Never
to see the day upon the body that was taken. Could love go further in the
darkness? Further and deeper without awakening to the sorrows of lucidity?
Touch only warm flesh and listen only to the warmth of a voice!)

There was no darkness dark enough to prevent
Michael from seeing the eyes of the lover turning away, empty of remembrance,
never dark enough not to see the death of a love, the defectof a love, the end
of the night of desire.

No love blind enough for him to escape the
sorrows of lucidity.

“And now,” said Donald, his arms full of
presents, “let’s go to the cafe.”

Elbows touching, toes overlapping, breaths
mingling, they sat in circles in the cafe while the passers-by flowed down the
boulevard, the flower vendors plied their bouquets, the newsboys sang their
street songs, and the evening achieved the marriage of day and night called
twilight.

An organ grinder was playing at the corner like
a fountain of mechanical birds singing wildly Carmen’s provocations in this
artificial paradise of etiolated trees, while the monkey rattled his chains and
the pennies fell in the tin cup.

They sat rotating around each other like
nearsighted planets, they sat mutating, exchanging personalities.

Jay seemed the one nearest to the earth, for
there was the dew of pleasure upon his lips, there was this roseate bloom of
content on his cheeks because he was nearest to the earth. He could possess the
world physically whenever he wished, he could bite into it, eat it, digest it
without difficulty. He had an ample appetite, he was not discriminating, he had
a good digestion. So his face shone with the solid colors of Dutch paintings,
with the blood tones of a well-nourished man, in a world never far from his
teeth, never made invisible or insubstantial, for he carried no inner chamber
in which the present scene must repeat itself for the commentator.

He carried no inner chamber in which this scene
must be stored in order to be possessed. He carried no echo and no retentions.
No snail roof around his body, no veils, no insulators.

Because of his confidence in the natural
movements of the planets, a pattern all arranged beforehand by some humorous
astrologer, he always showed a smiling face in this lantern slide of life in
Paris, and felt no strings of bondage, of restraint, and no tightrope walking
as the others did.

From the first moment when he had cut utterly
the umbilical cord between himself and his mother by running away from home at
the age of fourteen and never once returning, he had known this absence of
spools, lassos, webs, safety nets. He had eluded them all.

Thus in the sky of the cafe tables rotating,
the others circled around him to drink of his gaiety, hoping to catch his
secret formula.

Was it because he had accepted that such an
indifference to effort led men to the edge of the river, to sleep under
bridges, was it because he had decided that he did not mind sleeping under
bridges, drinking from the fountain, smoking cigarette butts, eating soup from
the soup line of the Hospital de la Sante?

Was this his secret? To relinquish, to
dispossess one’s self of all wishes, to renounce, to be attached to no one, to
hold no dream, to live in a state of anarchy?

Actually he never reached the last stage. He
always met someone who assumed the responsibility of his existence.

But he could sense whoever unwound from the
center of a spool and rewound himself back into it again at night, or the one
who sought to lasso the loved one into an indissoluble spiral, or the one who
flung himself from heights intent on catching the swing midway and fearful of a
fatal slip into abysms.

This always incited him to grasp giant scissors
and cut through all the patterns.

He began to open people before the cafe table
as he opened bottles, not delicately, not gradually, but uncorking them,
hurling direct questions at them like javelins, assaulting them with naked
curiosity.

A secret, an evasion, a shrinking, drove him to
repeat his thrusts like one hard of hearing: what did you say?

No secrets! No mystifications allowed! Spill
open! Give yourself publicly like those fanatics who confess to the community.

He hated withdrawals, shells, veils. They
aroused the barbarian in him, the violator of cities, the sacker and invader.

Dive from any place whatever!

But dive!

With large savage scissors he cut off all the
moorings. Cut off responsibilities, families, shelters. He sent every one of
them towards the open sea, into chaos, into poverty, into solitude, into storms.
t agv>

At first they bounced safely on the buoyant
mattress of his enthusiasms. Jay became gayer and gayer as his timid passengers
embarked on unfamiliar and tumultuous seas.

Some felt relieved to have been violated. There
was no other way to open their beings. They were glad to have been done
violence to as secrets have a way of corroding their containers. Others felt
ravaged like invaded countries, felt hopelessly exhibited and ashamed of this
lesser aspect of themselves.

As soon as Jay had emptied the person, and the
bottle, of all it contained, down to the sediments, he was satiated.

Come, said Jay, display the worst in yourself.
To laugh it is necessary to present a charade of our diminished states. To face
the natural man, and the charm of his defects. Come, said Jay, let us share our
flaws together. I do not believe in heroes. I believe in the natural man.

(I now know the secret of Jay’s well-being,
thought Lillian.
He does not care.
That is his secret. He does not care!
And I shall never learn this from him. I will never be able to feelas he does.
I must run away from him. I will return to New York.)

And at this thought, the cord she had imagined
tying her and Jay together for eternity, the cord of marriage, taut with
incertitude, worn with anxiety, snapped, and she felt unmoored.

While he unmoored others, by cutting through
the knots of responsibilities, he had inadvertently cut the binding, choking
cord between them. From the moment she decided to sail away from him she felt
elated.

All these tangled cords, from the first to the
last, from the mother to the husband, to the children, and to Jay, all
dissolved at once, and Jay was surprised to hear Lillian laugh in a different
tone, for most times her laughter had a rusty quality which brought it closer
to a sob, as if she had never determined which she intended to do.

At the same hour at the tip of the Observatory
astronomers were tabulating mileage between planets, and just as Djuna had
learned to measure such mileage by the oscillations of her heart (he is warm
and near, he is remote and cool) from her first experience with Michael, past
master in the art of creating distance between human beings, Michael himself
arrived with Donald and she could see instantly that he was suffering from his
full awareness of the impenetrable distance between himself and Donald, between
himself and the world of adolescence he wanted to remain in forever and from
which his lack of playfulness and recklessness barred him.

As soon as Michael saw Djuna’s eyes he had the
feeling of being restored to visibility, as if by gazing into the clear mirrors
of her compassion he were reincarnated, for the relentless work accomplished by
Donald’s exclusion of him from his boyish world deprived him of his very
existence.

Djuna needed only to say: Hello, Michael! for
him to feel he was no longer a kindly protective ghost necessary to Donald’s
existence. For Djuna saw him handsome, gifted in astronomy and mathematics,
rich with many knowledges, eloquent when roperly warmed.

Hello, Michael! Djuna said, and the
100000000000000000000000000 miles between himself and human beings became like
a small pencil addition on a note paper and not a state of being. They were
laid aside like a student’s abstractions, and now he was sitting in a cafe and
Donald at his right was merely a very beautiful boy of which there were so
many, cut out like a clay pigeon at the fair, with only a facade, and that is
what Djuna had called him from the very beginning (the first time she had said
it he had been angry and brooded on the insufferable jealousy of woman). Hello,
Michael! How is your clay pigeon today?

Such fine threads passed between Michael and
Djuna. He could always seize the intermediary color of her mood. That was his
charm, his quality, this fine incision from his knowledge of woman, this
capacity for dealing in essences.

This love without possibility of incarnation
which took place between Djuna and all the descendants of Michael, the lineage
of these carriers of subtleties known only to men of his race.

They had found a territory which existed beyond
sensual countries, and by a communion of swift words could charm each other
actively in spite of the knowledge that this enchantment would have no ordinary
culmination.