Children of the Albatross (9 page)

Above all she was his “ocean,” as he wrote her.
“When a man takes a woman to himself he possesses the sea.”

The waves, the enormous waves of a woman’s
love!

She was a sea whose passions could rise
sometimes into larger waves than he felt capable of facing!

Much as he loved danger, the unknown, the vast,
he felt too the need of taking flight, to put distance and space between
himself and the ocean for fear of being submerged!

Flight: into silence, into a kind of
invisibility by which he could be sitting there on the floor while yet creating
an impression of absence, able to disappear into a book, a drawing, into the
music he listened to.

She was gazing at his little finger and the
extreme fragility and sensitiveness of it astonished her.

(He is the transparent child.)

Before this transparent finger so artfully
carved, sensitively wrought, boned, which alighted on objects with a touch of
air and magic, at the marvel of it, the ephemeral quality of it, a wave of
passion would mount within her and exactly like the wave of the ocean intending
merely to roll over, cover the swimmer with an explosion of foam, in a rhythm
of encompassing, and withdrawing, without intent to drag him to the bottom.

But Paul, with the instinct of the new swimmer,
felt that there were times when he could securely hurl himself into the concave
heart of the wave and be lifted into ecstasy and be delivered back again on the
shore safe and whole; but that there were other times when this great inward
curve disguised an undertow, times when he measured his strength and found it
insufficient to return to shore.

Then he took up again the lighter games of his
recently surrendered childhood.

Djuna found him gravely bending over a drawing
and it was not what he did which conveyed his remoteness, but his way of
sitting hermetically closed like some secret Chinese box whose surface showed
no possibility of opening.

He sat then as children do, immured in his
particular lonely world then, having built a magnetic wall of detachment.

It was then that he practiced as deftly as
older men the great objectivity, the long-range view by which men eluded all
personal difficulties: he removed himself from the present and the personal by
entering into the most abstruse intricacies of a chess game, by explaining to
her what Darwin had written when comparing the eye to a microscope, by dissertating
on the pleuronectidae or flat fish, so remarkable for their asymmetrical
bodies.

And Djuna followed this safari into the worlds
of science, chemistry, geology with an awkwardness which was not due to any
laziness of mind, but to the fact that the large wave of passion which had been
roused in her at the prolonged sight of Paul’s little finger was so difficult
to dam, because the feeling of wonder before this spectacle was to her as great
as that of the explorers before a new mountain peak, of the scientists before a
new discovery.

She knew what excitement enfevered men at such
moments of their lives, but she did not see any difference between the beauty
of a high flight above the clouds and the subtly colored and changing landscape
of adolescence she traversed through the contemplation of Paul’s little finger.

A study of anthropological excavations made in
Peru was no more wonderful to her than the half-formed dreams unearthed with
patience from Paul’s vague words, dreams of which they were only catching the
prologue; and no forest of precious woods could be more varied than the
oscillations of his extreme vulnerability which forced him to take cover, to
disguise his feelings, to swing so movingly between great courage and a secret
fear of pain.

The birth of his awareness was to her no lesser
miracle than the discoveries of chemistry, the variations in his temperature,
the mysterious angers, the sudden serenities, no less valuable than the studies
of remote climates.

But when in the face of too large a wave, whose
dome seemed more than a mere ecstasy of foam raining over the marvelous shape
of his hands, a wave whose concaveness seemed more than a temporary womb in
which he could lie for the fraction of an instant, the duration of an orgasm,
he sat like a Chinese secret box with a surface revealing no possible opening
to the infiltrations of tenderness or the flood of passion, then her larger
impulse fractured with a strange pain into a multitude of little waves capped
with frivolous sunspangles, secretly ashamed of its wild disproportion to the
young man who sat there offering whatever he possessed—his intermittent
manliness, his vastest dreams and his fear of his own expansions, his maturity
as well as his fear of this maturity which was leading him out of the gardens
of childhood.

And when the larger wave had dispersed into
smaller ones, and when Paul felt free of any danger of being dragged to the
bottom, free of that fear of possession which is the secret of all adolescence,
when he had gained strength within his retreat, then he returned to tease and
stir her warmth into activity again, when he felt equal to plunging into it, to
lose himself in it, feeling the intoxication of the man who had conquered the
sea…

Then he would write to her exultantly: you are
the sea…

But she could see the little waves in himself
gathering power for the future, preparing for the moment when he would be the
engulfing onee inf>

Then he seemed no longer the slender adolescent
with dreamy gestures but a passionate young man rehearsing his future scenes of
domination.

He wore a white scarf through the gray streets
of the city, a white scarf of immunity. His head resting on the folds was the
head of the dreamer walking through the city selecting by a white magic to see
and hear and gather only according to his inner needs, slowly and gradually
building as each one does ultimately, his own world out of the material at hand
from which he was allowed at least a freedom of selection.

The white scarf asserted the innumerable things
which did not touch him: choked trees, broken windows, cripples, obscenities
penciled on the walls, the lascivious speeches of the drunks, the miasmas and
corrosions of the city.

He did not see or hear them.

After traversing deserted streets, immured in
his inner dream, he would suddenly open his eyes upon an organ grinder and his
monkey.

What he brought home again was always some
object by which men sought to overcome mediocrity: a book, a painting, a piece
of music to transform his vision of the world, to expand and deepen it.

The white scarf did not lie.

It was the appropriate flag of his voyages.

His head resting fittingly on its white folds
was immune to stains. He could traverse sewers, hospitals, prisons, and none
left their odor upon him. His coat, his breath, his hair, when he returned,
still exhaled the odor of his dream.

This was the only virgin forest known to man:
this purity of selection.

When Paul returned with his white scarf
gleaming it was all that he rejected which shone in its folds.

He was always a little surprised at older
people’s interest in him.

He did not know himself to be the possessor of
anything they might want, not knowing that in his presence they were violently
carried back to their first dream.

Because he stood at the beginning of the
labyrinth and not in the heart of it, he made everyone aware of the turn where
they had lost themselves. With Paul standing at the entrance of the maze, they
recaptured the beginning of their voyage, they remembered their first intent,
their first image, their first desires.

They would don his white scarf and begin anew.

And yet today she felt there was another
purity, a greater purity which lay in the giving of one’s self. She felt pure
when she gave herself, and Paul felt pure when he withdrew himself.

The tears of his mother, the more restrained
severity of his father, brought him home again.

His eighteenth birthday came and this was the
one they could not spend together, this being his birthday in reality, the one
visible to his parents. Whereas with Djuna he had spent so many birthdays which
his parents could not have observed, with their limited knowledge of him.

They had not attended the birthday of his
manhood, the birthday of his roguish humorous self, of his first drunkenness,
his first success at a party; or the birthday of his eloquent self on the theme
of poetry, painting or music. Or the birthday of his imagination, his fantasy,
of his new knowledge of people, of his new assertions and his discoveries of
unknown powers in himself.

This succession of birthdays that had taken
place since he left home was the highest fiesta ever attended by Djuna, the
spectacle of unpredictable blooms, of the shells breaking around his
personality, the emergence of the man.

But his real birthday they could not spend
together.

His mother made dinner for him, and he played
chess with his father—they who loved him less and who had bound and stifled him
with prohibitions, who had delayed his manhood.

His mother made a birthday cake iced and
sprinkled with warnings against expansion, cautions against new friends,
designed a border like those of formal gardens as if to outline all the
proprieties with which to defeat adventure.

His father played chess with him silently,
indicating in the carefully measured moves a judgment upon all the wayward
dances of the heart, the caprices of the body, above all a judgment upon such
impulses as had contributed to Paul’s very presence there, the act of
conjunction from which had been formed the luminous boy eating at their table.

The cake they fed him was the cake of caution:
to fear all human beings and doubt the motivations of all men and women not
listed in the Social Directory.

The candles were not lit to celebrate his
future freedom, but to say: only within the radius lighted by these birthday
candles, only within the radius of father and mother are you truly safe.

A small circle. And outside of this circle,
evil.

And so he ate of this birthday cake baked by
his mother, containing all the philters against love, expansion and freedom
known to white voodoo.

A cake to prevent and preserve the child from
becoming man!

No more nights together, when to meet the dawn
together was the only marriage ceremony accorded to lovers.

But he returned to her one day carrying the
valise with his laundry. On his return home he had packed his laundry to have
it washed at home. And his mother had said: “Take it back. I won’t take care of
laundry you soiled while living with strangers.”

So quietly he brought it back to Djuna, to the
greater love that would gladly take care of his belongings as long as they were
the clothes he soiled in his experience with freedom.

The smallness of his shirts hurt her, like a
sign of dangers for him which she could not avert. He was still slender enough,
young enough to be subjected to tyranny.

They were both listening to Cesar Franck’s
Symphony in D Minor.

And then the conflicting selves in Djuna fused
into one mood as they do at such musical crossroads.

The theme of the symphony was gentleness.

She had first heard it at the age of sixteen
one rainy afternoon and associated it with her first experience of love, of a
love without climax which she had known with Michael. She had interwoven this
music with her first concept of the nature of love as one of ultimate, infinite
gentleness.

In Cesar Franck’s symphony there was immediate
exaltation, dissolution in feeling and the evasion of violence. Over and over
again in this musical ascension of emotion, the stairway of fever was climbed
and deserted before one reached explosion.

An obsessional return to minor themes, creating
an endless tranquility, and at sixteen she had believed that the experience of
love was utterly contained in this gently flowing drug, in the delicate spirals,
cadences, and undulations of this music.

Cesar Franck came bringing messages of softness
and trust, accompanying Paul’s gestures and attitudes, and for this she trusted
him, a passion without the storms of destruction.

She had wanted such nebulous landscapes, such
vertiginous spirals without explosions: the drug.

Listening to the symphony flowing and yet not
flowing (for there was a static groove in which it remained imprisoned, so
similar to the walled-in room of her house, containing a mystery of stillness),
Djuna saw the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, the arrow of stone placed at
the center of a gracefully turbulent square, summating gardens, fountains and
rivers of automobiles. One pointed dart of stone to pierce the night, the fog,
the rain, the sun, aiming faultlessly into the clouds.

And there was the small, crazy woman Matilda,
whom everyone knew, who came every morning and sat on one of the benches near
the river, and stayed there all day, watching the passers-by, eating sparingly
and lightly of some mysterious food in crumbs out of a paper bag, like the
pigeons. So familiar to the policeman, to the tourists, and to the permanent
inhabitants of the Place de la Concorde, that not to see her there would have
been as noticeable, as disturbing, as to find the Obelisk gone, and the square
left without its searchlight into the sky.