The Four-Chambered Heart (3 page)

BOOK: The Four-Chambered Heart
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At night the ceremony was perilous, and rowing
back and forth from the barges was not without difficulties. As the river
swelled, the currents became violent. The smiling Seine showed a more ominous
aspect of its character.

The rope ladder was ancient, and some of its
solidity undermined by time.

Rango’s chivalrous behavior was suited to the
circumstances; he helped Djuna climb over the wall without showing too much of
the scalloped sea-shell edge of her petticoat to the curious bystanders; he
then carried her into the rowboat, and rowed with vigor. He stood up at first
and with a pole pushed the boat away from the shore, as it had a tendency to be
pushed by the current against the stairway, then another current would absorb
it in the opposite direction, and he had to fight to avoid sailing down the
Seine.

His pants rolled up, his strong dark legs bare,
his hair wild in the wind, his muscular arms taut, he smiled with enjoyment of
his power, and Djuna lay back and allowed herself to be rescued each time anew,
or to be rowed like a great lady of Venice.

Rango would not let the watchman row them
across. He wanted to be the one to row his lady to the barge. He wanted to
master the tumultuous current for her, to land her safely in their home, to
feel that he abducted her from the land, from the city of Paris, to shelter and
conceal her in his own tower of love.

At the hour of midnight, when others are
dreaming of firesides and bedroom slippers, of finding a taxi to reach home
from the theatre, or pursuing false gaieties in the bars, Rango and Djuna lived
an epic rescue, a battle with an angry river, a journey into difficulties, wet
feet, wet clothes, an adventure in which the love, the test of the love, and
the reward telescoped into one moment of wholeness. For Djuna felt that if
Rango fell and were drowned she would die also, and Rango felt that if Djuna
fell into the icy river he would die to save her. In this instant of danger
they realized they were each other’s reason for living, and into this instant
they threw their whole beings.

Rango rowed as if they were lost at sea,ot in
the heart of a city; and Djuna sat and watched him with admiration, as if this
were a medieval tournament and his mastering of the Seine a supreme votive
offering to her feminine power.

Out of worship and out of love he would let no
one light the stove for her either, as if he would be the warmth and the fire
to dry and warm her feet. He carried her down the trap door into the freezing
room damp with winter fog. She stood shivering while he made the fire with an
intensity into which he poured his desire to warm her, so that it no longer
seemed like an ordinary stove smoking and balking, or Rango an ordinary man
lighting wood with damp newspapers, but like some Valkyrian hero lighting a
fire in a Black Forest.

Thus love and desire restored to small actions
their large dimensions, and renewed in one winter night in Paris the full
stature of the myth.

She laughed as he won his first leaping flame
and said: “You are the God of Fire.”

He took her so deeply into his warmth, shutting
the door of their love so intimately that no corroding external air might
enter.

And now they were content, having attained all
lovers’ dream of a desert island, a cell, a cocoon, in which to create a world
together from the beginning.

In the dark they gave each other their many
selves, avoiding only the more recent ones, the story of the years before they
met as a dangerous realm from which might spring dissensions, doubts, and
jealousies. In the dark they sought rather to give each other their earlier,
their innocent, unpossessed selves.

This was the paradise to which every lover
liked to return with his beloved, recapturing a virgin self to give one
another.

Washed of the past by their caresses, they
returned to their adolescence together.

Djuna felt herself at this moment a very young
girl, she felt again the physical imprint of the crucifix she had worn at her
throat, the incense of mass in her nostrils. She remembered the little altar at
her bedside, the smell of candles, the faded artificial flowers, the face of
the virgin, and the sense of death and sin so inextricably entangled in her
child’s head. She felt her breasts small again in her modest dress, and her
legs tightly pressed together. She was now the first girl he had loved, the one
he had gone to visit on his horse, having traveled all night across the
mountains to catch a glimpse of her. Her face was the face of this girl with
whom he had talked only through an iron gate. Her face was the face of his dreams,
a face with the wide space between the eyes of the madonnas of the sixteenth
century. He would marry this girl and keep her jealously to himself like an
Arab husband, and she would never be seen or known to the world.

In the depth of this love, under the vast tent
of this love, as he talked of his childhood, he recovered his innocence too, an
innocence much greater than the first, because it did not stem from ignorance,
from fear, or from neutrality in experience. It was born like an ultimate pure
gold out of many tests, selections, from voluntary rejection of dross. It was
born of courage, after desecrations, from much deeper layers of the being
inaccessible to youth.

Rango talked in the night. “The mountain I was
born on was an extinct volcano. It was nearer to the moon. The moon there was
so immense it frightened man. It appeared at times with a red halo, occupying
half of the sky, and everything was stained red… There was a bird we hunted,
whose life was so tough that after we shot him the Indians had to tear out two
of his feathers and plunge them into the back of the bird’s neck, otherwise it
would not die… We killed ducks in the marshes, and once I was caught in
quicksands and saved myself by getting quickly out of my boots and leaping to
safe ground… There was a tame eagle who nestled on our roof… At dawn my mother
would gather the entire household together and recite the rosary… On Sundays we
gave formal dinners which lasted all afternoon. I still remember the taste of
the chocolate, which was thick and sweet, Spanish fashion… Prelates and
cardinals came in their purple and gold finery. We led the life of
sixteenth-century Spain. The immensity of nature around us caused a kind of
trance. So immense it gave sadness and loneliness. Europe seemed so small, so
shabby at first, after Guatemala. A toy moon, I said, a toy sea, such small
houses and gardens. At home it took six hours by train and three weeks on
horseback to reach the top of the mountain where we went hunting. We would stay
there for months, sleeping on the ground. It had to be done slowly because of
the strain on the heart. Beyond a certain height the horses and mules could not
stand it; they would bleed through mouth and ears. When we reached the snow
caps, the air was almost black with intensity. We would look down sharp cliffs,
thousands of miles down, and we would see below, the small, intensely green,
luxuriant tropical jungle. Sometimes for hours and hours my horse would travel
alongside a waterfall, until the sound of the falling water would hypnotize me.
And all this time, in snow and wildness, I dreamed of a pale slender woman…
When I was seventeen, I was in love with a small statue of a Spanish virgin,
who had the wide space between the eyes which you have. I dreamed of this woman,
who was you, and I dreamed of cities, of living in cities… Up in the mountain
where I was born one never walked on level ground, one walked always on
stairways, an eternal stairway toward the sky, made of gigantic square stones.
No one knows how the Indians were able to pile these stones one upon another;
it seems humanly impossible. It seemed more like a stairway made by gods,
because the steps were higher than a man’s step could encompass. They were
built for giant gods, for the Mayan giants carved in granite, those who drank
the blood of sacrifices, those who laughed at the puny efforts of men who tired
of taking such big steps up the flanks of mountains. Volcanoes often erupted
and covered the Indians with fire and lava and ashes. Some were caught descending
the rocks, shoulders bowed, and frozen in the lava, as if cursed by the earth,
by maledictions from the bowels of the earth. We sometimes found traces of
footsteps bigger than our own. Could they have been the white boots of the
Mayans? Where I was born the world began. Where I was born lay cities buried
under lava, children not yet born destroyed by volcanoes. There was no sea up
there, but a lake capable of equally violent storms. The wind was so sharp at
times it seemed as if it would behead one. The clouds were pierced by
sandstorms, the lava froze in the shape of stars, the trees died of fevers and
shed ashen leaves, the dew steamed where it fell, and clouds rose from the
earth’s parched cracked lips… And there I was born. And the first memory I have
is not like other children’s; my first memory is of a python devouring a cow…
The poor Indians did not have the money to buy coffins for their dead. When
bodies are not placed in coffins a combustion takes place, little explosions
andue flames, as the sulphur burns. These little blue flames seen at night are
weird and frightening… To reach our house we had to cross a river. Then came
the front patio which was as large as the Place Vendome… Then came the chapel
which belonged to our ranch. A priest was sent for from town every Sunday to
say mass… The house was large and rambling, with many inner patios. It was
built of pale coral stucco. There was one room entirely filled with firearms,
all hanging on the walls. Another room filled with books. I still remember the
cedar-wood smell of my father’s room. I loved his elegance, manliness, courage…
One of my aunts was a musician; she married a very brutal man who made her
unhappy. She let herself die of hunger, playing the piano all through the
night. It was hearing her play night after night, until she died, and finding
her music afterward, which drew me to the piano. Bach, Beethoven, the best,
which at that time were very little known in such far-off ranches. The schools
of music were only frequented by girls. It was thought to be an effeminate art.
I had to give up going there and study alone, because the girls laughed at me.
Although I was so big, and so rough in many ways, loved hunting, fighting,
horseback riding, I loved the piano above everything else… The mountain man’s
obsession is to get a glimpse of the sea. I never forgot my first sight of the
ocean. The train arrived at four in the morning. I was dazzled, deeply moved.
Even today when I read the
Odyssey
it is with the fascination of the
mountain man for the sea, of the snow man for warm climates, of the dark,
intense Indian for the Greek light and mellowness. And it is that which draws
me to you, too, for you are the tropics, you have the sun in you, and the
softness, and the clarity…”

What had happened to this body made for the
mountain, for violence and war? A little blue flame of music, of art, from the
body of the aunt who had died playing Bach, a little blue flame of restless
sulphur had passed into this body made for hunting, for war and the tournaments
of love. It had lured him away from his birthplace, to the cities, to the
cafes, to the artists.

But it had not made of him an artist.

It had been like a mirage, stealing him from
other lives, depriving him of ranch, of luxury, of parents, of marriage and
children, to make of him a nomad, a wanderer, a restless, homeless one who
could never go home again: “Because I am ashamed, I have nothing to show, I
would be coming back as a beggar.”

The little blue flame of music and poetry shone
only at night, during the long nights of love, that was all. In the daytime it
was invisible. As soon as day came, his body rose with such strength that she
thought: he will conquer the world.

His body—which had not been chiseled like a
city man’s, not with the precision and finesse of some highly finished statue,
but modeled in a clay more massive, more formless too, cruder in outline,
closer to primitive sculpture, as if it had kept a little of the heavier
contours of the Indian, of animals, of rocks, earth, and plants.

His mother used to say: “You don’t kiss me like
a boy, but like a little animal.”

He began his day slowly, like a cub, rubbing
his eyes with closed fists, yawning with eyes closed, a humorous, a sly, upward
wrinkle from mouth to high cheekbone, all his strength, as in the lion, hiden
in a smooth form, no visible sign of effort.

He began his day slowly, as if man’s
consciousness were something he had thrown off during the night, and had to be
recovered like some artificial covering for his body.

In the city, this body made for violent
movements, to leap, to face a danger of some kind, to match the stride of a
horse, was useless. It had to be laid aside like a superfluous mantle. Firm
muscles, nerves, instincts, animal quickness were useless. It was the head
which must awaken, not the muscles and sinews. What must awaken was awareness
of a different kind of danger, a different kind of effort, all of it to be
considered, matched, mastered in the head, by some abstract wit and wisdom.

The physical euphoria was destroyed by the
city. The supply of air and space was small. The lungs shrank. The blood
thinned. The appetite was jaded and corrupt.

The vision, the splendor, the rhythm of the
body were instantly broken. Clock time, machines, auto horns, whistles,
congestion, caught man in their cogs, deafened, stupefied him. The city’s
rhythm dictated to man; the imperious order to remain alive actually meant to
become an abstraction.

BOOK: The Four-Chambered Heart
6.24Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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