The Four-Chambered Heart (13 page)

Djuna was unprepared for Rango’s making the
first leap out of the trap. It came unexpectedly at midnight as they were about
to separate. Out of the fog of enswathing caresses came his voice: “We’re
leading a selfish life. There are many things happening in the world; we should
be working for them. You are like all the artists, with your big floodlights
fixed on the sky, and never on earth, where things are happening. There is a
revolution going on, and I want to help.”

Djuna did not think of the world or the
revolution needing Rango, Rango and his bohemian indiscipline, his love of red
wine, his laziness. She felt that Zora’s persecutions were driving him away. He
was caught between a woman who wanted to die, and one who wanted to live! He
had hoped to amalgamate the women, so he would not feel the tension between his
two selves. He had thought only of his own emotional comfort. He had overlooked
Zora’s egoistic ferocity, and Djuna’s clairvoyance. The alliance was a failure.

Now he was driven to risk his life for some
impersonal task.

She was silent. She looked at ace and saw that
his mouth looked unhappy, wounded, and revealed his desperateness. He kept it
tightly shut, as women do when they don’t want to weep. His mouth which was not
in keeping with his lion’s head, which was the mouth of a child, small and
vulnerable; the mouth which aroused her indulgence.

Parting at the corner of the street, they
kissed desperately as if for a long voyage. A beggar started to play on his
violin, then stopped, thinking they were lovers who would never see each other
again.

The blood beat in her ears as she walked away,
her body parting from Rango in anticipation, hair parting from hair, hands
unlocking, lips closing against the last kiss, surrendering him to a more
demanding mistress: the revolution.

The earth was turning fast. Women cannot walk
out of the traps of love, but men can; they have wars and revolutions to attend
to. What would happen now? She knew. One signed five sheets of paper and
answered minute, excruciatingly exact questions. She had seen the
questionnaire. One had to say whether one’s wife or husband believed in the
revolution; one had to tell everything. Rango would be filling these pages
slowly, with his nervous, rolling, and swaying handwriting. Everything. He
would probably say that his wife was a cripple, but the party would not condone
a mistress.

Then suddenly the earth ceased turning and the
blood no longer rang in her ear. Everything stood deathly still because she
remembered the dangers. She remembered Rango’s friend who had been found with a
bullet hole in his temple, near the cafe where they met. She remembered Rango’s
story about one of the men who worked for the revolution in Guatemala: the one
who had been placed in a jail half full of water until his legs rotted away in
strips of moldy flesh, until his eyes turned absolutely white.

The next evening Rango was late. Djuna forgot
that he was always late. She thought: he has signed all the papers, and been
told that a member of the party cannot have a mistress.

It was nine o’clock. She had not eaten. It was
raining. Friends came into the cafe, talked a little, and left. The time seemed
long because of the anxiety. This is the way it would be, the waiting, and
never knowing, if Rango were still alive. He would be so easily detected. A
foreigner, dark skin, wild hair, his very appearance was the one policemen
expected from a man working for the revolution.

What had happened to Rango? She picked up a
newspaper. Once he had said: “I picked up a newspaper and saw on the front page
the photograph of my best friend, murdered the night before.”

That is the way it would happen. Rango would
kiss her as he had kissed her the night before at the street corner, with the
violin playing, then the violin would stop, and that very night…

She questioned her instinct. No, Rango was not
dead. She would like to go to church, but that was forbidden, too. Despair was
forbidden. This was the time for stoicism.

She was jealous of Rango’s admiration for
Gauguin’s mother, a South American heroine, who had fought in revolutions and shot
her own husband when he betrayed the party.

Djuna walked past the church and entered. She
could not pray because she was seeking to transform herself into the proper
mate for a revolutionist. But she always felt a humorous, a private, connivance
with god. She felt he would always smile with irony upon her most wayward acts.
He would see the contradictions, and be indulgent. There was a pact between
them, even if she were considered guilty before most tribunals. It was like her
friendliness with the policemen of Paris.

And now Rango walked toward her! (See what a
pact she had with god that he granted her wishes no one else would have dared
to expect him to grant!)

Rango had been ill. No, he had not signed the
papers. He had overslept. Tomorrow.
Manana.

Djuna had forgotten this Latin deity:
Manana.

At the Cafe Martiniquaise, near the barge,
Rango and Djuna sat drinking coffee.

The place was dense with smoke, voices, faces,
heaving and swaying like a compact sonorous wave, washing over them at times
and enswathing them, at others retreating as if subdued, only to return again
louder and more suffocating to engulf their voices.

Djuna could never identify such a tide of faces
dissolved by lights and shadows, slightly blurred in outlines from drink. But
Rango could say immediately: “There’s a pimp, there’s a prizefighter. There’s a
drug addict.”

Two friends of Rango’s walked in, with their
hands in their pockets, greeted them obliquely, with heavy lids half dropped
over glazed eyes. They had deep purple shadows under the eyes and Rango said:
“It startles me to see my friends disintegrating so fast, even dying, from
drugs. I’m no longer drawn to this kind of life.”

“You were drawn toward destruction before,
weren’t you?”

“Yes,” said Rango, “but not really. When I was
a young man, at home, what I liked most was health, physical energy and
well-being. It was only later, here in Paris the poets taught me not to value
life, that it was more romantic to be desperate, more noble to rebel, and to
die, than to accept what ordinary life had to offer. I’m not drawn to that any
more. I want to live. That was not the real me. Zora says you changed me, yet I
can’t think of anything you said or did to accomplish it. But every time we are
together I want to accomplish something, something big. I don’t want any more
of this literary credo, about the romantic beauty of living desperately,
dangerously, destructively.”

Djuna thought with irony that she had not meant
to give birth to a rebel. She had changed, too, because of Rango. She had
acquired some of his gypsy ways, some of his nonchalance, his bohemian
indiscipline. She had swung with him into the disorders of strewn clothes,
spilled cigarette ashes, slipping into bed all dressed, falling asleep thus,
indolence, timelessness… A region of chaos and moonlight. She liked it there.
It was the atmosphere of earth’s womb, where awareness could not reach and
illumine all the tragic aspects of unfulfilled desires. In the darkness, chaos,
warmt one forgot… And the silence. She liked the silence most of all. The
silence in which the body, the senses, the instincts, are more alert, more
powerful, more sensitized, live a more richly perfumed and intoxicating life,
instead of transmuting into thoughts, words, into exquisite abstractions,
mathematics of emotion in place of the violent impact, the volcanic eruptions
of fever, lust, and delight.

Irony. Now Rango was projecting himself out of
this realm, and wanted action. No more time for the guitar which had
ensorcelled her, no more time to visit the gypsies as he had once promised, no
more time to sleep in the morning as she had been learning, or to acquire by
osmosis his art of throwing off responsibilities, his self-indulgence, his
recklessness…

As they sat in the cafe, he condemned his past
life. He was full of contrition for the wasted hours, the wasted energy, the
wasted years. He wanted a more austere life, action and fulfillment.

Suddenly Djuna looked down at her coffee and
her eyes filled with stinging tears; the tears of irony burn the skin more
fiercely. She wept because she had aroused in Rango the desire to serve a
purpose which was not hers, to live now for others when already he lived for
Zora, and had so little to give her of himself. She wept because they were so
close in that earthy darkness, close in the magnetic pull between their skins,
their hair, their bodies, and yet their dreams never touched at any point,
their vision of life, their attitudes. She wept over the many dislocations of
life, forbidding the absolute unity.

Rango did not understand.

In the realm of ideas he was always restless,
impatient, and like some wild animal who feared to be corralled. He often
described how the horses, the bulls, were corralled in his ranch. He delighted
in the fierceness of the battle. For him to examine, to understand, to
interpret was exactly like some corralling activity, of which he was
suspicious.

But for the moment, she was breathing the odor
of his hair. For the moment there was this current between their skin and flesh,
these harmonizations of contrasting colors, weight, quality, odors. Everything
about him was pungent and violent. They were as his friends said, like Othello
and Desdemona.

Manana
he would be a party member.

When you lose your wings, thought Djuna, this
is the way you live. You buy candles for the meeting of Rango’s friends, but
these candles do not give a light that will delight you, because you do not
believe in what you are doing.

Sadness never added to her weight; it caught
her in flight as she danced in spirals misplacing air pools like an arrow shot
at a bird which did not bring it down but merely increased its flutterings.

She had every day a greater reluctance to
descend into familiar daily life, because the hurt, the huntsman’s bow, came from
the earth, and therefore flight at a safe distance became more and more
imperative.

Her mobility was now her only defense against
new dangers. While you’re in movement it is harder to be shot at, to be wounded
even. She had adopted the basic structure of the nomads.

Rango had said: “Prepare the barge for a
meeting tonight. It will be an ideal place. No superintendents to tell tales to
the police. No neighbors.”

He had signed all the papers. They must be more
careful. The barge was being put to a greater usefulness.

There are two realms to live in now. (Do I hold
the secret drug which permits me to hold on to the ecstasies while entering the
life of the world, activities in the world, contingencies? I feel it coming to
me while I am walking. It is a strange sensation, like drunkenness. It catches
me in the middle of the street like a tremendous wave, and a numbness passes
through my veins which is the numbness of the marvelous. I know it by its
power, by the way it lifts my body, the air which passes under my feet. The
cold room I left in the morning, the drab bed covers, the stove full of ashes,
the sour wine at the bottom of the glass were all illuminated by the force of
love for Rango. It was as if I had learned to fly over the street and were
permitted to do so for an instant…making every color more intense, every caress
more penetrating, every moment more magnificent… But I knew by the anxiety that
it might not last. It is a state of grace of love, which some achieve by wine
and others by prayer and fasting. It is a state of grace but I cannot discover
what makes one fall out of it. The danger lies in flying low, in awakening. She
knew she was flying lower now that Rango was to act in the world. The air of
politics was charged with dust. People aspired to reach the planets, but it was
a superfluous voyage; there was a certain way of breathing, of walking, of
seeing, which transported human beings into space, into transparency. The
extraordinary brilliancy of the games people played beyond themselves, the
games of their starry selves…)

She bought wood for the fire. She swept the
barge. She concealed the bed and the barrel of wine.

Rango would guide the newcomers to the barge,
and remain on the bridge to direct them.

The Guatemalans arrived gradually. The darker
Indian-blooded ones in Indian silence, the paler Spanish-blooded ones with
Spanish volubility. But both were intimidated by the place, the creaking wood,
the large room resembling the early meeting places of the revolutionaries, the
extended shadows, the river noises, chains, oars, the disquieting lights from
the bridge, the swaying when other barges passed. Too much the place for
conspirators. At times life surpasses the novel, the drama. This was one of
them. The setting was more dramatic than they wished. They stood awkwardly
around.

Rango had not yet come. He was waiting for
those who were late.

Djuna did not know what to do. This was a role
for which she had no precedent. Politeness or marginal talk seemed out of
place. She kept the stove filled with wood and watched the flames as if her
guardianship would make them active.

When you lose your wings, and wear a dark suit
bought in the cheapest store of Paris, to become anonymous, when you discard
your earrings, and the polish on your nails, hoping to express an abdication of
the self, a devotion to impersonal service, and still you do not feel sincere,
you feel like an actress, because you expect conversion to come like miracle,
by the grace of love for one party member…