Children of the Albatross (3 page)

She saw the whole house on fire in the summer
night and it was like those moments of great passion and deep experience when
every cell of the self lighted simultaneously, a dream of fullness, and she
hungered for this that would set aflame every room of the house and of herself
at once!

In herself there was one shuttered window.

She did not sleep soundly in the old and
beautiful house.

She was disturbed.

She could hear voices in the dark, for it is
true that on days of clear audibility there are voices which come from within
and speak in multiple tongues contradicting each other. They speak out of the
past, out of the present, the voices of awareness—in dialogues with the self
which mark each step of living.

There was the voice of the child in herself,
unburied, who had long ago insisted: I want only the marvelous.

There was the low-toned and simple voice of the
human being Djuna saying: I want love.

There was the voice of the artist in Djuna
saying: I will create the marvelous.

Why should such wishes conflict with each
other, or annihilate each other?

In the morning the human being Djuna sat on the
carpet before the fireplace and mended and folded her stockings into little
partitioned boxes, keeping the one perfect unmended pair for a day of high
living, partitioning at the same time events into little separate boxes in her
head, dividing (that was one of the great secrets against shattering sorrows),
allotting and rearranging under the heading of one word a constantly fluid,
mobile and protean universe whose multiple aspects were like quicksands.

This exaggerated sense, for instance, of a
preparation for the love to come, like the extension of canopies, the unrolling
of ceremonial carpets, the belief in the state of grace, of a perfection
necessary to the advent of love.

As if she must first of all create a marvelous
world in which to house it, thinking it befell her adequately to recee this
guest of honor.

Wasn’t it too oriental, said a voice protesting
with mockery—such elaborate receptions, such costuming, as if love were such an
exigent guest?

She was like a perpetual bride preparing a
trousseau. As other women sew and embroider, or curl their hair, she
embellished her cities of the interior, painted, decorated, prepared a great
mise
en scene
for a great love.

It was in this mood of preparation that she
passed through her kingdom the house, painting here a wall through which the
stains of dampness showed, hanging a lamp where it would throw Balinese theater
shadows, draping a bed, placing logs in the fireplaces, wiping the dull-surfaced
furniture that it might shine. Every room in a different tone like the varied
pipes of an organ, to emit a wide range of moods—lacquer red for vehemence,
gray for confidences, a whole house of moods with many doors, passageways, and
changes of level.

She was not satisfied until it emitted a glow
which was not only that of the Dutch interiors in Dutch paintings, a glow of
immaculateness, but an effulgence which had caused Jay to discourse on the gold
dust of Florentine paintings.

Djuna would stand very still and mute and feel:
my house will speak for me. My house will tell them I am warm and rich. The
house will tell them inside of me there are these rooms of flesh and Chinese
lacquer, sea greens to walk through, inside of me there are lighted candles, live
fires, shadows, spaces, open doors, shelters and air currents. Inside of me
there is color and warmth.

The house will speak for me.

People came and submitted to her spell, but
like all spells it was wonderful and remote. Not warm and near. No human being,
they thought, made this house, no human being lived here. It was too fragile
and too unfamiliar. There was no dust on her hands, no broken nails, no sign of
wear and tear.

It was the house of the myth.

It was the ritual they sensed, tasted, smelled.
Too different from the taste and smell of their own houses. It took them out of
the present. They took on an air of temporary guests. No familiar landscape, no
signpost to say: this is your home as well.

All of them felt they were passing, could not
remain. They were tourists visiting foreign lands. It was a voyage and not a
port.

Even in the bathroom there were no medicine
bottles on the shelves proclaiming: soda, castor oil, cold cream. She had
transferred all of them to alchemist bottles, and the homeliest drug assumed an
air of philter.

This was a dream and she was merely a guide.

None came near enough.

There were houses, dresses, which created one’s
isolation as surely as those tunnels created by ferrets to elude pursuit by the
male.

There were rooms and costumes which appeared to
be made to lure but which were actually effective means to create distance.

Djuna had not yet decided what her true wishes
were, or how near she wanted them to come. She was apparently calling to them
but at the same time, by a great ambivalence and fear of their coming too near,
of invading her, of dominating or possessing her, she was charming them in such
a manner that the human being in her, the warm and simple human being, remained
secure from invasion. She constructed a subtle obstacle to invasion at the same
time as she constructed an appealing scene.

None came near enough. After they left she sat
alone, and deserted, as lonely as if they had not come.

She was alone as everyone is every morning
after a dream.

What was this that was weeping inside of her
costume and house, something smaller and simpler than the edifice of spells?

She did not know why she was left hungry.

The dream took place. Everything had
contributed to its perfection, even her silence, for she would not speak when
she had nothing meaningful to say (like the silence in dreams between fateful
events and fateful phrases, never a trivial word spoken in dreams!).

The next day, unknowing, she began anew.

She poured medicines from ugly bottles into
alchemist bottles, creating minor mysteries, minor transmutations. Insomnia.
The nights were long.

Who would come and say: that is
my
dream,
and take up the thread and make all the answers?

Or are all dreams made alone?

Lying in the fevered sheets of insomnia, there
was a human being cheated by the dream.

Insomnia came when one must be on the watch,
when one awaited an important visitor.

Everyone, Djuna felt, saw the dancer on light
feet but no one seized the moment when she vacillated, fell. No one perceived
or shared her difficulties, the mere technical difficulties of loving, dancing,
believing.

When she fell, she fell alone, as she had in
adolescence.

She remembered feeling this mood as a girl,
that all her adolescence had proceeded by oscillations between weakness and
strength. She remembered, too, that whenever she became entangled in too great
a difficulty she had these swift regressions into her adolescent state. Almost
as if in the large world of maturity, when the obstacle loomed too large, she
shrank again into the body of a young girl for whom the world had first
appeared as a violent and dangerous place, forcing her to retreat, and when she
retreated she fell back into smallness.

She returned to the adolescent deserts of
mistrust of love.

Walking through snow, carrying her muff like an
obsolete wand no longer possessed of the power to create the personage she
needed, she felt herself walking through a desert of snow.

Her body muffled in furs, her heart muffled
like her steps, and the pain of living muffled as by the deepest rich carpets,
while the thread of Ariadne which led everywhere, right and left, like
scattered footsteps in the snow, tugged and pulled within her memory and she
began to pull upon this thread (silk for the days of marvel and cotton for the
bread of everyday living which was always a little stale) as one pulls upon a
spool, and she heard the empty wooden spool knock against the floor of
different houses.

Holding the silk or cotton began to cut her
fingers which bled from so much unwinding, or was it that the thread of Ariadne
had led into a wound?

The thread slipped through her fingers now,
with blood on it, and the snow was no longer white.

Too much snow on the spool she was unwinding
from the tightly wound memories. Unwinding snow as it lay thick and hard around
the edges of her adolescence because the desire of men did not find a magical
way to open her being.

The only words which opened her being were the
muffled words of poets so rarely uttered by human beings. They alone penetrated
her without awakening the bristling guards on watch at the gateways, costumed
like silver porcupines armed with mistrust, barring the way to the secret
recesses of her thoughts and feelings.

Before most people, most places, most situations,
most words, Djuna’s being, at sixteen, closed hermetically into muteness. The
sentinels bristled: someone is approaching! And all the passages to her inner
self would close.

Today as a mature woman she could see how these
sentinels had not been content with defending her, but they had constructed a
veritable fort under this mask of gentle shyness, forts with masked holes
concealing weapons built by fear.

The snow accumulated every night all around the
rim of her young body.

Blue and crackling snowbound adolescence.

The young men who sought to approach her then,
drawn by her warm eyes, were startled to meet with such harsh resistance.

This was no mere flight of coquetry inviting
pursuit. It was a fort of snow (for the snowbound, dream-swallower of the
frozen fairs). An unmeltable fort of timidity.

Yet each time she walked, muffled, protected,
she was aware of two young women walking: one intent on creating trap doors of
evasion, the other wishing someone might find the entrance that she might not
be so alone.

With Michael it was as if she had not heard him
coming, so gentle were his steps, his words. Not the walk or words of the
hunter, of the man of war, the determined entrance of older men, not the
dominant walk of the father, the familiak of the brother, not like any other
man she knew.

Only a year older than herself, he walked into
her blue and white climate with so light a tread that the guards did not hear
him!

He came into the room with a walk of
vulnerability, treading softly as upon a carpet of delicacies. He would not
crush the moss, no gravel would complain under his feet, no plant would bow its
head or break.

It was a walk like a dance in which the
gentleness of the steps carried him through air, space and silence in a
sentient minuet in accord with his partner’s mood, his leaf-green eyes obeying
every rhythm, attentive to harmony, fearful of discord, with an excessive care
for the other’s intent.

The path his steps took, his velvet words,
miraculously slipped between the bristles of her mistrust, and before she had
been fully aware of his coming, by his softness he had entered fully into the
blue and white climate.

The mists of adolescence were not torn open,
not even disturbed by his entrance.

He came with poems, with worship, with flowers
not ordered from the florist but picked in the forest near his school.

He came not to plunder, to possess, to
overpower. With great gentleness he moved towards the hospitable regions of her
being, towards the peaceful fields of her interior landscape, where white
flowers placed themselves against green backgrounds as in Botticelli paintings
of spring.

At his entrance her head remained slightly
inclined towards the right, as it was when she was alone, slightly weighed down
by pensiveness, whereas on other occasions, at the least approach of a
stranger, her head would raise itself tautly in preparation for danger.

And so he entered into the flowered regions,
behind the forts, having easily crossed all the moats of politeness.

His blond hair gave him the befitting golden
tones attributed to most legendary figures.

Djuna never knew whether this light of sun he
emitted came out of his own being or was thrown upon him by her dream of him,
as later she had observed the withdrawal of this light from those she had
ceased to love. She never knew whether two people woven together by feelings
answering each other as echoes threw off a phosphorescence, the chemical sparks
of marriage, or whether each one threw upon the other the spotlight of his
inner dream.

Transient or everlasting, inner or outer,
personal or magical, there was now this lighting falling upon both of them and
they could only see each other in its spanning circle which dazzled them and
separated them from the rest of the world.

Through the cocoon of her shyness her voice had
been hardly audible, but he heard every shading of it, could follow its nuances
even when it retreated into the furthest impasse of the ear’s labyrinth.