The Four-Chambered Heart (5 page)

At these moments Rango was no longer the
fervent, the adoring, the warm, the big, the generous one. His face would
darken with anger, and he made violent gestures. His talk became vague and
formless, and she could barely catch the revealing phrase which might be the
key to the storm and enable her to abate or deflect it.

A slow anger at the injustice of the scene
overtook her. Why must Rango use the past to destroy the present? Why did he
deliberately seek torment?

She left the table swiftly, and climbed to the
deck. She sat near the anchor chain, in the dark. The rain fell on her and she
did not feel it; she felt lost and bewildered.

Then she felt him beside her. “Djuna! Djuna!”

He kissed her, and the rain and the tears and
his breath mingled. There was such a desperation in his kiss that she melted.
It was as if the quarrel had peeled away a layer and left a core like some
exposed nerve, so that the kiss was magnified, intensified, as if the pain had
made a fine incision for the greater penetration of pleasure.

“What can I do?” she murmured. “What can I do?”

“I’m jealous because I love you.”

“But Rango, you have no cause for jealousy.”

It was as if they shared his illness of doubt
and were seeking a remedy, together.

It seemed to her that if she said, “Jay was a
bad painter,” Rango could see the obviousness of such a recantation, its
absurdity. Yet how could she restore his confidence? His entire body was
pleading for reassurance, and if her whole love was not enough what else could
she give him to cure his doubt?

When they returned to the room the fire was
low.

Rango did not relax. He found some books piled
next to the wastebasket which she had intended to throw away. He picked them up
and studied them, one by one, like a detective.

Then he left the ones she had discarded and
walked to those aligned on the book shelf.

He picked one up at random and read on the fly
leaf: “From Paul.”

It was a book on Jay, with reproductions of his
paintings.

Djuna said: “If it makes you happy, you can
throw it away with the others.”

“We’ll burn them,” he said.

“Burn them all,” she said with bitterness.

To her this was not only an offering of peace
to his tormenting jealousy, but a sudden anger at this pile of books whose
contents had not prepared her for moments such as this one. All these novels so
carefully concealing the truth about character, about the obscurities, the
tangles, the mysteries. Words words words words and no revelation of the
pitfalls, the abysms in which human beings found themselves.

Let him burn them all; they deserved their
fate.

(Rango thinks he is burning moments of my life
with Paul. He is only burning words, words which eluded all truths, eluded
essentials, eluded the bare demon in human beings, and added to the blindness,
added to the errors. Novels promising experience, and then remaining on the
periphery, reporting only the semblance, the illusions, the costumes, and the
falsities, opening no wells, preparing no one for the crises, the pitfalls, the
wars, and the traps of human life. Teaching nothing, revealing nhing, cheating
us of truth, of immediacy, of reality. Let him burn them, all the books of the
world which have avoided the naked knowledge of the cruelties that take place
between men and women in the pit of solitary nights. Their abstractions and
evasions were no armor against moments of despair.)

She sat beside him by the fire, partaking of
this primitive bonfire. A ritual to usher in a new life.

If he continued to destroy malevolently, they
might reach a kind of desert island, a final possession of each other. And at
times this absolute which Rango demanded, this peeling away of all externals to
carve a single figure of man and woman joined together, appeared to her as a
desirable thing, perhaps as a final, irrevocable end to all the fevers and
restlessness of love, as a finite union. Perhaps a perfect union existed for
lovers willing to destroy the world around them. Rango believed the seed of
destruction lay in the world around them, as for example in these books which
revealed to Rango too blatantly the difference between their two minds.

To fuse then, it was, at least for Rango,
necessary to destroy the differences.

Let them burn the past then, which he
considered a threat to their union.

He was driving the image of Paul into another
chamber of her heart, an isolated chamber without communicating passage into
the one inhabited by Rango. A place in some obscure recess, where flows eternal
love, in a realm so different from the one inhabited by Rango that they would
never meet or collide, in these vast cities of the interior.

“The heart…is an organ…consisting of four
chambers… A wall separates the chambers on the left from those on the right and
no direct communication is possible between them…”

Paul’s image was pursued and hid in the chamber
of gentleness, as Rango drove it away, with his holocaust of the books they had
read together.

(Paul, Paul, this is the claim you never made,
the fervor you never showed. You were so cool and light, so elusive, and I
never felt you encircling me and claiming possession. Rango is saying all the
words I had wanted to hear you say. You never came close to me, even while
taking me. You took me as men take foreign women in distant countries whose
language they cannot speak. You took me in silence and strangeness…)

When Rango fell asleep, when the aphrodisiac
lantern had burnt out its oil, Djuna still lay awake, shaken by the echoes of
his violence, and by the discovery that Rango’s confidence would have to be
reconstructed each day anew, that none of these maladies of the soul were
curable by love or devotion, that the evil lay at the roots, and that those who
threw themselves into palliating the obvious symptoms assumed an endless task,
a task without hope of cure.

The word most often on his lips was
trouble.

He broke the glass, he spilled the wine, he
burnt the table with cigarettes, he drank the wine which dissolved his will, he
talked away his plans, he tore his pockets, he lost s buttons, he broke his
combs.

He would say: “I’ll paint the door. I will
bring oil for the lantern. I will repair the leak on the roof.” And months
passed: the door remained unpainted, the leak unrepaired, the lantern without
oil.

He would say: “I would give my life for a few
months of fulfillment, of achievement, of something I could be proud of.”

And then he would drink a little more red wine,
light another cigarette. His arms would fall at his side; he would lie down
beside her and make love to her.

When they entered a shop, she saw a padlock
which they needed for the trap door and said: “Let’s buy it.”

“No,” said Rango, “I have seen one cheaper
elsewhere.”

She desisted. And the next day she said: “I’m
going near the place, where you said they sold cheap padlocks. Tell me where it
is and I’ll get it.”

“No,” said Rango. “I’m going there today. I’ll
get it.” Weeks passed, months passed, and their belongings kept disappearing
because there was no padlock on the trap door.

No child was being created in the womb of their
love, no child, but so many broken promises, each day an aborted wish, a lost
object, a misplaced unread book, cluttering the room like an attic with
discarded possessions.

Rango only wanted to kiss her wildly, to talk
vehemently, to drink abundantly, and to sleep late in the mornings.

His body was in a fever always, his eyes
ablaze, as if at dawn he were going to don a heavy steel armor and go on a
crusade like the lover of the myths.

The crusade was the cafe.

Djuna wanted to laugh, and forget his words,
but he did not allow her to laugh or to forget. He insisted that she retain
this image of himself created in his talks at night, the image of his
intentions and aspirations. Every day he handed her anew a spider web of
fantasies, and he wanted her to make a sail of it and sail their barge to a
port of greatness.

She was not allowed to laugh. When at times she
was tempted to surrender this fantasy, to accept the Rango who created nothing,
and said playfully: “When I first met you, you wanted to be a hobo. Let me be a
hobo’s wife,” then Rango would frown severely and remind her of a more austere
destiny, reproaching her for surrendering and diminishing his aims. He was
unyielding in his desire that she should remind him of his promises to himself
and to her.

This insistence on his dream of another Rango
touched her compassion. She was deceived by his words and his ideal of himself.
He had appointed her not only guardian angel, but a reminder of his ideals.

She would have liked at times to descend with
him into more humanly accessible regions, into a carefree world. She envied him
his reckl hours at the cafe, his joyous friendships, his former life with the
gypsies, his careless adventures. The night he and his bar companions stole a
rowboat and rowed up the Seine singing, looking for suicides to rescue. His
awakenings sometimes in far-off benches in unknown quarters of the city. His
long conversations with strangers at dawn far from Paris, in some truck which
had given him a ride. But she was not allowed into this world with him.

Her presence had awakened in him a man suddenly
whipped by his earlier ideals, whose lost manhood wanted to assert itself in
action. With his conquest of Djuna he felt he had recaptured his early self
before his disintegration, since he had recaptured his first ideal of woman,
the one he had not attained the first time, the one he had completely
relinquished in his marriage to Zora—Zora, the very opposite of what he had
first dreamed.

What a long detour he had taken by his choice
of Zora, who had led him into nomadism, into chaos and destruction.

But in this new love lay the possibility of a
new world, the world he had first intended to reach and had missed, had failed
to reach with Zora.

Sometimes he would say: “Is it possible that a
year ago I was just a bohemian?”

She had unwittingly touched the springs of his
true nature: his pride, his need of leadership, his early ambition to play an
important role in history.

There were times when Djuna felt, not that his
past life had corrupted him—because in spite of his anarchy, his
destructiveness, the core of him had remained human and pure—but that perhaps
the springs in him had been broken by the tumultuous course of his life, the
springs of his will.

How much could love accomplish: it might
extract from his body the poisons of failure and bitterness, of betrayals and
humiliations, but could it repair a broken spring, broken by years and years of
dissolution and surrenders?

Love for the uncorrupted, the intact, the basic
goodness of another, could give a softness to the air, a caressing sway to the
trees, a joyousness to the fountains, could banish sadness, could produce all
the symptoms of rebirth…

He was like nature, good, wild, and sometimes
cruel. He had all the moods of nature: beauty, timidity, violence, and
tenderness.

Nature was chaos.

“Way up into the mountains,” Rango would begin
again, as if he were continuing to tell her stories of the past which he loved,
never of the past of which he was ashamed, “on a mountain twice as high as Mont
Blanc, there is a small lake inside of a bower of black volcanic rocks polished
like black marble, in the middle of eternal snow peaks. The Indians went up to
visit it, to see the mirages. What I saw in the lake was a tropical scene,
richly tropical, palms and fruits and flowers. You are that to me, an oasis.
You drug me and at the same time you give me strength.”

(The drug of love was no escape, for in its
coils lie latent dreams of greatness which awaken when men and women fecundate
each oter deeply. Something is always born of man and woman lying together and
exchanging the essences of their lives. Some seed is always carried and opened
in the soil of passion. The fumes of desire are the womb of man’s birth and
often in the drunkenness of caresses history is made, and science, and
philosophy. For a woman, as she sews, cooks, embraces, covers, warms, also
dreams that the man taking her will be more than a man, will be the
mythological figure of her dreams, the hero, the discoverer, the builder…
Unless she is the anonymous whore, no man enters woman with impunity, for where
the seed of man and woman mingle, within the drops of blood exchanged, the
changes that take place are the same as those of great flowing rivers of
inheritance, which carry traits of character from father to son to grandson,
traits of character as well as physical traits. Memories of experience are
transmitted by the same cells which repeated the design of a nose, a hand, the
tone of a voice, the color of an eye. These great flowing rivers of inheritance
transmitted traits and carried dreams from port to port until fulfillment, and
gave birth to selves never born before… No man or woman knows what will be born
in the darkness of their intermingling; so much besides children, so many
invisible births, exchanges of soul and character, blossoming of unknown
selves, liberation of hidden treasures, buried fantasies…)