The Four-Chambered Heart (4 page)

Rango’s protest was to set out to deny and
destroy the enemy. He set out to deny clock time and he would miss, first of
all, all that he reached for. He would make such detours to obey his own rhythm
and not the city’s that the simplest act of shaving and buying a steak would
take hours, and the vitally important letter would never be written. If he
passed a cigar store, his habit of counter-discipline would be stronger than
his own needs and he would forget to buy the cigarettes he craved, but later
when about to reach the house of a friend for lunch he would make a long detour
for cigarettes and arrive too late for lunch, to find his angry friend gone,
and thus once more the rhythm and pattern of the city were destroyed, the order
broken, and Rango with it, Rango left without lunch.

He might try to reach the friend by going to the
cafe, would find someone else and fall into talk about bookbinding and
meanwhile another friend was waiting for Rango at the Guatemalan Embassy,
waiting for his help, his introduction, and Rango never appeared, while Zora
waited for him at the hospital, and Djuna waited for him in the barge, while
the dinner she had made spoiled on the fire.

At this moment Rango was standing looking at a
print on the bookstalls, or throwing dice over a cafe counter to gamble for a
drink, and now that the city’s pattern had been destroyed, lay in shambles, he
returned and said to Djuna: “I am tired.” And laid a despondent, a heavy head
on her breasts, his heavy body on her bed, and all his unfulfilled desires, his
aborted moments, lay downwith him like stones in his pockets, weighing him
down, so that the bed creaked with the inertia of his words: “I wanted to do
this, I wanted to do that, I want to change the world, I want to go and fight,
I want…”

But it is night already, the day has fallen
apart, disintegrated in his hands. Rango is tired, he will take another drink
from the little barrel, eat a banana, and start to talk about his childhood,
about the bread tree, the tree of the meadows that kill, the death of the
little Negro boy his father had given him for his birthday, a little Negro boy
who had been born the same day as Rango, but in the jungle, and who would be
his companion on hunting trips, but who died almost immediately from the cold
up in the mountains.

Thus at twilight when Rango had destroyed all
order of the city because the city destroyed his body, and the day lay like a
cemetery of negations, of rebellions and abortions, lay like a giant network in
which he had tangled himself as a child tangles himself in an order he cannot
understand, and is in danger of strangling himself…then Djuna, fearing he might
suffocate, or be crushed, would tenderly seek to unwind him, just as she picked
up the pieces of his broken glasses to have them made again…

They had reached a perfect moment of human
love. They had created a moment of perfect understanding and accord. This
highest moment would now remain as a point of comparison to torment them later
on when all natural imperfections would disintegrate it.

The dislocations were at first subtle and held
no warning of future destruction. At first the vision was clear, like a perfect
crystal. Each act, each word would be imprinted on it to shed light and warmth
on the growing roots of love, or to distort it slowly and corrode its
expansion.

Rango lighting the lantern for her arrival, for
her to see the red light from afar, to be reassured, incited to walk faster,
elated by this symbol of his presence and his fervor. His preparing the fire to
warm her… These rituals Rango could not sustain, for he could not maintain the
effort to arrive on time since his lifelong habit had created the opposite
habit: to elude, to avoid, to disappoint every expectation of others, every
commitment, every promise, every crystallization.

The magic beauty of simultaneity, to see the
loved one rushing toward you at the same moment you are rushing toward him, the
magic power of meeting exactly at midnight to achieve union, the illusion of
one common rhythm achieved by overcoming obstacles, deserting friends, breaking
other bonds—all this was soon dissolved by his laziness, by his habit of
missing every moment, of never keeping his word, of living perversely in a
state of chaos, of swimming more naturally in a sea of failed intentions,
broken promises, and aborted wishes.

The importance of rhythm in Djuna was so strong
that no matter where she was, even without a watch, she sensed the approach of
midnight and would climb on a bus, so instinctively accurate that very often as
she stepped off the bus the twelve loud gongs of midnight would be striking at
the large station clock.

This obedience to timing was her awareness of
the rarity of unity between human beings. She was fully, painfully aware that
very rarely did midnight strike in two hearts at once, very rarely did midnight
arouse two equal desires, and that any dislocation in this, any indifference,
was an indication of disunity, of the difficulties, the impossibilities of
fusion between human beings.

Her own lightness, her freedom of movement, her
habit of sudden vanishings made her escapes more possible, whereas Rango, on
the contrary, had never been known to leave except when the bottles, the
people, the night, the cafe, the streets were utterly empty.

But for her, his inability to overcome the
obstacles which delayed him lessened the power of his love.

Little by little, she became aware that he had
two fires to light, one at home for Zora, and one on the barge. When he arrived
late and wet, she was moved by his tiredness and her awareness of his burdens
at home, and she began to light the fire for him.

He loved to sleep late, while she would be
awakened by the passing of coal barges, by foghorns, and by the heavy traffic
over the bridge. So she would dress quietly and she would run to the cafe at
the corner and return with coffee and buns to surprise him on awakening.

“How human you are, Djuna, how warm and human…”

“But what did you expect me to be?”

“Oh, you look as if the very day you were born
you took one look at the world and decided to live in some region between
heaven and earth which the Chinese called the Wise Place.”

The immense clock on the Quai d’Orsay station
which sent people traveling, showed such an enormous, reproachful face in the
morning: it is time to take care of Zora, it is time to take care of your
father, it is time to return to the world, time time time…

As she knew how much she had loved to see the
red lantern gleaming behind the window of the barge as she walked toward it,
when Rango fell back into his habit of lateness, it was she who lit the lantern
for him, mastering her fear of the dark barge, the drunken watchman, the hobos
asleep, the moving figures behind the trees.

When she discovered how strong was his need of
wine, she never said: don’t drink. She bought a small barrel at the flea
market, had it filled with red wine, and placed it at the head of the bed
within reach of his hand, having faith that their life together, their
adventures together, and the stories they told each other to pass the time,
would soon take the place of the wine. Having faith that their warmth together
would take the place of the warmth of the wine, believing that all the natural
intoxications of caresses would flow from her and not the barrel…

Then one day he arrived with a pair of scissors
in his pocket. Zora was in the hospital for a few days. It was she who always
cut his hair. He hated barbers. Would Djuna like to cut his hair?

His heavy, his brilliant, his curling black
hair, which neither water nor oil could tame. She cut it as he wished, and
felt, for a moment, like his true wife.

Then Zora returned home, and resumed her care
of Rango’s hair.

And Djuna wept for the first time, and Rango
did not understand why she wept.

“I would like to be the one to cut your hair.”

Rango made a gesture of impatience. “I don’t
see why you should give that any importace. It doesn’t mean anything. I don’t
understand you at all.”

If it were not for music, one could forget
one’s life and be born anew, washed of memories. If it were not for music one
could walk through the markets of Guatemala, through the snows of Tibet, up the
steps of Hindu temples, one could change costumes, shed possessions, retain
nothing of the past.

But music pursues one with some familiar air
and no longer does the heart beat in an anonymous forest of heartbeats, no longer
is it a temple, a market, a street like a stage set, but now it is the scene of
a human crisis reenacted inexorably in all its details, as if the music had
been the score of the drama itself and not its accompaniment.

The last scene between Rango and Djuna might
have faded into sleep, and she might have forgotten his refusal to let her cut
his hair once more, but now the organ grinder on the quay turned his handle
mischievously, and aroused in her the evocation of another scene. She would not
have been as disturbed by Rango’s evasiveness, or his defense of Zora’s rights
to the cutting of his hair, if it had not added itself to other scenes which
the organ grinder had attended with similar tunes, and which he was now
recreating for her, other scenes where she had not obtained her desire, had not
been answered.

The organ grinder playing Carmen took her back
inexorably like an evil magician to the day of her childhood when she had asked
for an Easter egg as large as herself, and her father had said impatiently:
“What a silly wish!” Or to another time when she had asked him to let her kiss
his eyelids, and he had mocked her, or still another time when she had wept at
his leaving on a trip and he had said: “I don’t understand your giving this
such importance.”

Now Rango was saying the same thing: “I don’t
understand why you should be sad at not being able to cut my hair any longer.”

Why could he not have opened his big arms to
her, sheltered her for an instant and said: “It cannot be, that right belongs
to Zora, but I do understand how you feel, I do understand you are frustrated
in your wish to care for me as a wife…”

She wanted to say: “Oh, Rango, beware. Love
never dies of a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish
its source, it dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illnesses
and wounds, it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings, but never of
natural death. Every lover could be brought to trial as the murderer of his own
love. When something hurts you, saddens you, I rush to avoid it, to alter it,
to feel as you do, but you turn away with a gesture of impatience and say: ‘I
don’t understand.’”

It was never one scene which took place between
human beings, but many scenes converging like great intersections of rivers.
Rango believed this scene contained nothing but a whim of Djuna’s to be denied.

He failed to see that it contained at once all
of Djuna’s wishes which had been denied, and these wishes had flown from all
directions to meet at this intersection and to plead once more for
understanding.

All the time that the organ grinder was
unwinding the songs
Carmen
in the orchestra pit of this scene, what was
conjured was not this room in a barge, and these two people, but a series of
rooms and a procession of people, accumulating to reach immense proportions,
accumulating analogies and repetitions of small defeats until it contained them
all, and the continuity of the organ grinder’s accompaniment welded, compressed
them all into a large injustice. Music expanding the compressed heart created a
tidal wave of injustice for which no Noah’s Ark had ever been provided.

The fire sparkled high; their eyes reflected
all its dances joyously.

Djuna looked at Rango with a premonition of
difficulties, for it so often happened that their gaiety wakened in him a
sudden impulse to destroy their pleasure together. Their joys together never a
luminous island in the present but stimulating his remembrance that she had
been alive before, that her knowledge of caresses had been taught to her by
others, that on other nights, in other rooms, she had smiled. At every peak of
contentment she would tremble slightly and wonder when they would begin to
slide into torment.

This evening the danger came unsuspected as
they talked of painters they liked, and Rango said suddenly: “And to think that
you believed Jay a great painter!”

When she defended a friend from Rango’s irony
and wit it always aroused his jealousy, but to defend an opinion of a painter,
Djuna thought, could be achieved without danger.

“Of course, you’ll defend Jay,” said Rango, “he
was a part of your former life, of your former values. I will never be able to
alter that. I want you to think as I do.”

“But Rango, you couldn’t respect someone who
surrendered an opinion merely to please you. It would be hypocrisy.”

“You admire Jay as a painter merely because
Paul admired him. He was Paul’s great hero in painting.”

“What can I say, Rango? What can I do to prove
to you that I belong to you? Paul is not only far away but you know we will
never see each other again, that we were not good for each other. I have
completely surrendered him, and I could forget him if you would let me. You are
the one constantly reminding me of his existence.”