The Four-Chambered Heart (16 page)

Djuna walked lightly to the front cabin, looked
once through the small barred portholes like the windows of a prison, leaned
over the mildewed floor, and tore up one of the bottom boards, inviting the
deluge to sink this Noah’s Ark sailing nowhere.

The wood being old and half rotted had
made it easy for Djuna to pull on the plank where it had once been patched, but
the influx of the water had been partly blocked by the outer layer of barnacles
and corrugated seaweeds which she could not reach.

She returned to the bed on the floor and lay
beside Rango, to wait patiently for death.

She saw the river sinuating toward the sea and
wondered if they would float unhampered toward the ocean.

Below the level of identity lay an ocean, an
ocean of which human beings carry only a drop in their veins; but some sink
below cognizance and the drop becomes a huge wave, the tide of memory, the
undertows of sensation…

Beneath the cities of the interior flowed many
rivers carrying a multitude of images… All the women she had been spread their
hair in a halo on the surface of the river, extended multiple arms like the
idols of India, their essence seeping in and out of the meandering dreams of
men…

Djuna, lying face upward like a water lily of
amniotic lakes; Djuna floating down to the organ grinder’s tune of a pavana for
a defunct infanta of Spain, the infanta who never acceded to the throne of
maturity, the one who remained a pretender…

As for Rango, the drums would burst and all the
painted horses of the carnival would turn a polka…

She saw their lives over and over again until
she caught a truth which was not simple and divisible but fluctuating and
elusive; but she saw it clearly from the places under the surface where she had
been accustomed to exist: all the women she had been like many rivers running
out of her and with her into the ocean…

She saw, through this curtain of water, all of
them as personages larger than nature, more visible to sluggish hearts being in
the focus of death, a stage on which there are no blurred passages, no missed
cues…

She saw, now that she was out of the fog of
imprecise relationships, with the more intense light of death upon these faces
which had caused her despair, she saw these same faces as pertaining to gentle
clowns. Zora dressed in comical trappings, in Rango’s outsized socks, in dyed
kimonos, in strangled rags and empty-armed brooches, a comedy to awaken guilt
in others…

…on this stage, floating down the Seine toward
death, the actors drifted along and love no longer seemed a trap…
the trap
was the static pause growth, the arrested self caught in its own web of
obstinacy and obsession…

…you grow, as in the water the algae grow
taller and heavier and are carried by their own weight into different currents…

…I was afraid to grow or move away, Rango, I
was ashamed to desert you in your torment, but now I know your choice is your
own, as mine was my own…

…fixation is death…death is fixation…

…on this precarious ship, devoid of upholstery
and self-deception, the voyage can continue into tomorrow…

…what I see now is the vastness, and the places
where I have not been and the duties I have not fulfilled, and the uses for
this unusual cargo of past sorrows all ripe for transmutations…

…the messenger of death, like all adventurers,
will accelerate your heart toward change and mutation…

…if one sinks deep enough and then deeper, all
these women she had been flowed into one at night and lost their separate
identities; she would learn from Sabina how to make love laughing, and from
Stella how to die only for a little while and be born again as children die and
are reborn at the slightest encouragement…

…from the end in water to the beginning in
water, she would complete the journey, from origin to birth and birth to flow…

…she would abandon her body to flow into a
vaster body than her own, as it was at the beginning, and return with many
other lives to be unfolded…

…with her would float the broken doll of her
childhood, the Easter egg which had been smaller than the one she had asked
for, debris of fictions…

…she would return to the life above the waters
of the unconscious and see the magnifications of sorrow which had taken place
and been the true cause of the deluge…

…there were countries she had not yet seen…

…this image created a pause in her floating…

…there must also be loves she had not yet
encountered…

…as the barge ran swiftly down the current of
despair, she saw the people on the shore flinging their arms in desolation,
those who had counted on her Noah’s Ark to save themselves…

…she was making a selfish journey…

…she had intended the barge for other purposes
than for a mortuary…

…war was coming…

…the greater the turmoil, the confusion, the
greater had been her effort to maintain an individually perfect world, a cocoon
of faith, which would be a symbol and a refont>

…the curtain of dawn would rise on a deserted
river…

…on two deserters…

…in the imminence of death she seized this
intermediary region of our being in which we rehearse our future sorrows and
relive the past ones…

…in this heightened theatre their lives
appeared in their true color because there was no witness to distort the
private admissions, the most absurd pretensions…

…in the last role Djuna became immune from the
passageway of pretense, from a suspended existence in reflection, from
impostures…

…and she saw what had appeared immensely real
to her as charades…

…
in the theatre of death, exaggeration is
the cause of despair…

…the red Easter egg I had wanted to be so
enormous when I was a child, if it floats by today in its natural size, so much
smaller than my invention, I will be able to laugh at its shrinking…

…I had chosen death because I was ashamed of
this shrinking and fading, of what time would do to our fiction of
magnificence, time like the river would wear away the pain of defeats and
broken promises, time and the river would blur the face of Zora as a giant
incubus, time and the river would mute the vibrations of Rango’s voice upon my
heart…

…the organ grinder will play all the time but
it will not always seem like a tragic accompaniment to separations…

…the organ grinder will play all the time but
the images will change, as the feelings will change, Rango’s gestures will seem
less violent, and sorrows will fall off like leaves to fecundate the heart for
a new love…

…the organ grinder will accelerate his rhythm
into arabesques of delight to match the vendor’s cries: “Mimosa! mimosa!” to
the tune of Brahm’s “Lullaby.”… “
Couteaux! couteaux a aiguiser!
“to the
tune from
Madame Butterfly…
“
Pommes de terre! pommes de terre!
“to
the tune from Ravel’s
Bolero.

…”
Bouteilles! bouteilles!
“to the tune
from
Tristan and Isolde.

She laughed.

…tomorrow the city would ferment with new
disasters, the paper vendors would raise their voices to the pitch of hysteria,
the crowds would gather to discuss the news, the trains would carry away the
cowards…

..the cowards…

…floating down the river…

…with the barge that had been intended not only
to house a single love but as a refuge for faith…

…she was sinking a faith…

…instead of solidifying the floating kingdom
with its cargo of eternal values…

(“An individually perfect world,” said Rango,
“is destroyed by reality, war, revolutions.”)

“Rango, wake up wake up wake up, there’s a
leak!”

He was slow in awakening, his dreams of
greatness and magnificence were heavy on his body like royal garments, but the
face he opened to the dawn was the face of innocence, as every man presents
innocence to the new day. Djuna read on it what she had refused to see, the
other face of Rango the child lodged in a big man’s body by a merry freak.

It had been a game: “Djuna, you stand there and
watch while I am the king and savior. You will admire me when I give the cue.”
She will now laugh and say: “But actually, you know, I prefer a hobo who plays
the guitar.”

She will laugh when he refuses to see Zora’s
madness, because it was like her refusal to see his madness, his
impersonations, his fictions, his illusions…

In the face of death the barge was smaller,
Rango did not loom so immense, Zora had shrunk…

In the face of death they were playing games,
Zora absurdly overdressed in the trappings of tragedy, muddying, aborting,
confusing, delighted with the purple colors of catastrophe as children delight
in fire engines. When their absence of wisdom and courage tormented her, she
would avenge herself by descending into their realm and adding to the
difficulties. She had once told Rango that her father would have to live in the
south of France for his health and that they would have to separate. Being
helpless, they had believed she would let this happen, since they were
accustomed to bowing to the inevitable. Rango had jumped and leaped with pain.
Zora had said to him, not without mixing it with a delicate shading of poison:
“This must happen sooner or later… Djuna will leave you.”

Then she had gone to see Zora, Zora awkwardly,
laboriously moving her small and flabby hands, Zora appearing helpless while
Djuna knew she was the strongest of the three because she had learned to
exploit her weakness. She told Djuna that Rango had not eaten that day. He was
just pacing around, and he had been so cruel to Zora. He had said to her: “If
Djuna goes to the south of France, I’ll send you home to your relatives.”

“Alone? And what about you?”

“Oh, me,” he said with a shrug. Zora added: “He
will kill himself.”

By this time her game had given her enough
pleasure. She felt mature again. But after a week of torment the stage was set
for a great love scene; she knew now that if she left Rango he would not
console himself with Zora. That was all she needed to know. Perhaps she was not
so much wiser than they were…perhaps she did not have herself too great a faith
in love… Perhaps there was in her a Zora in need of protection and a wildly
anxious Rango in need of reassurances. And perhaps that was why she loved them,
and perhaps Zora was right to believe in her love as she did in her moments of
lucidity…

In the face of death Rango seemed less violent,
Zora less tyrannical, and Djuna less wise. And when Zora looked at Djuna above
the rim of her glasses which she had picked up in a scrap basket at somebody’s
door and which were not suited to her eyes—she looked as children do when they
stare and frown over the rim of their parents’ glasses, these pretenders to the
throne of maturity…

“Rango, wake up wake up wake up wake up wake
up, there’s a leak.”

Rango opened his eyes and then jumped: “Oh, I
forgot to pump the water yesterday.”

The second face of Rango, after awakening, following
the bewildered and innocent one, contained this expression of total, of
absolute, distress common to children and adolescents betraying an exaggeration
in the vision of reality, a sense of the menacing, disproportionate stature of
this reality. Only children and adolescents know this total despair, as if
every wound were fatal and irremediable, every moment the last, death and
dangers looming immense as they had loomed in Djuna’s mind during the night…

Rango repaired the leak vigorously, and they
walked out on the quay. It was a moment before dawn, and some fishermen were
already installed because the river was smooth for fishing. One of them had
caught something unusual and was holding it out for Djuna to see, and laughing.

It was a doll.

It was a doll who had committed suicide during
the night.

The water had washed off its features. Her hair
aureoled her face with crystalline glow.

Noah’s Ark had survived the flood.