The Four-Chambered Heart (6 page)

There was this difference between them: that
when these thoughts floated up to the surface of Djuna’s consciousness, she
could not communicate them to Rango. He laughed at her. “Mystic nonsense,” he
said.

As Rango chopped wood, lighted the fire,
fetched water from the fountain one day with energy and ebullience, smiling a
smile of absolute faith and pleasure, then Djuna felt: wonderful things will be
born.

But the next day he sat in the cafe and laughed
like a rogue, and when Djuna passed she was confronted with another Rango, a
Rango who stood at the bar with the bravado of the drunk, laughing with his
head thrown back and his eyes closed, forgetting her, forgetting Zora, forgetting
politics and history, forgetting rent, marketing, obligations, appointments,
friends, doctors, medicines, pleasures, the city, his past, his future, his
present self, in a temporary amnesia, which left him the next day depressed,
inert, poisoned with his own angers at himself, angry with the world, angry
with the sky, the barge, the books, angry with everything.

And the third day another Rango, turbulent,
erratic, dark, like Heathcliff, said Djuna, destroying everything. That was the
day that followed the bouts of drinking: a quarrel with Zora, a fight with the
watchman. Sometimes he came back with his face hurt by a brawl at the cafe. His
hands shook. His eyes glazed, with a yellow tinge. Djuna would turn her face
away from his breath, but his warm, his deep voice would bring her face back
saying: “I’m in trouble, bad trouble…”

On windy nights the shutters beat against the
walls like the bony wings of a giant albatross.

The wall against which the bed lay was wildly
licked by the small river waves and they could hear the lap lap lap against the
mildewed flanks.

In the darkness of the barge, with the wood
beams groaning, the rain falling in the room through the unrepaired roof, the
steps sounded louder and more ominous. The river seemed reckless and angry.

Against the smoke and brume of their caresses,
these brusque changes of mood, when the barge ceased to be the cell of a
mysterious new life, an enchanted refuge; when it became the site of compressed
angers, like a load of dynamite boxes awaiting explosion.

For Rango’s angers and battles with the world
turned to poison. The world was to blame for everything. The world was to blame
for Zora having been born very poor, of an insane mother, of a father who ran
away. The world was to blame for her undernourishment, her ill health, her
precocious marriage, her troubles. The doctors were to blame for her not
getting well. The public was to blame for not understanding her dances. The
house owner should have let them off without paying rent. The grocer had no
right to claim his due. They were poor and had a right to mercy.

The noise of the chain tying and untying the
rowboat, the fury of the winter Seine, the suicides from the bridge, the old
watchman banging his pails together as he leaped over the gangplank and down
the stairs, the water seeping too fast into the hold of the barge not pumped,
the dampness gathering and painting shoes and clothes with mildew. Holes in the
floor, unrepaired, through which the water gleamed like the eyes of the river,
and through which the legs of the chairs kept falling like an animal’s leg
caught in a trap.

Rango said: “My mother told me once: how can
you hope to play the piano, you have the hands of a savage.”

“No,” said Djuna, “your hands are just like
you. Three of the fingers are strong and savage, but these last two, the
smallest, are sensitive and delicate. Your hand is just like you; the core is
tender within a dark and violent nature. When you trust, you are tender and
delicate, but when you doubt, you are dangerous and destructive.”

“I always took the side of the rebel. Once I
was appointed chief of police in my home town, and sent with a posse to capture
a bandit who had been terrorizing the Indian villages. When I got there I made
friends with the bandit and we played cards and drank all night.”

“What killed your faith in love, Rango? You
were never betrayed.”

“I don’t accept your having loved anyone before
you knew me.”

Djuna was silent, thinking that jealousy of the
past was unfounded, thinking that the deepest possessions and caresses were
stored away in the attics of the heart but had no power to revive and enter the
present lighted rooms. They lay wrapped in twilight and dust, and if an old
association caused an old sensation to revive it was but for an instant, like
an echo, intermittent and transitory. Life carries away, dims, and mutes the
most indelible experiences down the River Styx of vanished worlds. The body has
its cores and its peripheries and such a mysterious way of maintaining
intruders on the outer rim. A million cells protect the coreof a deep love from
ghostly invasions, from any recurrences of past loves.

An intense, a vivid present was the best
exorcist of the past.

So that whenever Rango began his inquisitorial
searchings into her memory, hoping to find an intruder, to battle Paul, Djuna
laughed: “But your jealousy is necrophilic! You’re opening tombs!”

“But what a love you have for the dead! I’m
sure you visit them every day with flowers.”

“Today I have not been to the cemetery, Rango!”

“When you are here I know you are mine. But
when you go up those little stairs, out of the barge, walking in your quick
quick way, you enter another world, and you are no longer mine.”

“But you, too, Rango, when you climb those
stairs, you enter another world, and you are no longer mine. You belong to Zora
then, to your friends, to the cafe, to politics.”

(Why is he so quick to cry treachery? No two
caresses ever resemble each other. Every lover holds a new body until he fills
it with his essence, and no two essences are the same, and no flavor is ever
repeated…)

“I love your ears, Djuna. They are small and
delicate. All my life I dreamed of ears like yours.”

“And looking for ears you found me!”

He laughed with all of himself, his eyes
closing like a cat’s, both lids meeting. His laughter made his high cheekbone
even fuller, and he looked at times like a very noble lion.

“I want to become someone in the world. We’re
living on top of a volcano. You may need my strength. I want to be able to take
care of you.”

“Rango, I understand your life. You have a
great force in you, but there is something impeding you, blocking you. What is
it? This great explosive force in you, it is all wasted. You pretend to be
indifferent, nonchalant, reckless, but I feel you care deep down. Sometimes you
look like Peter the Great, when he was building a city on a swamp, rescuing the
weak, charging in battle. Why do you drown the dynamite in you in wine? Why are
you so afraid to create? Why do you put so many obstacles in your own way? You
drown your strength, you waste it. You should be constructing…”

She kissed him, seeking and searching to
understand him, to kiss the secret Rango so that it would rise to the surface,
become visible and accessible.

And then he revealed the secret of his behavior
to her in words which made her heart contract: “It’s useless, Djuna. Zora and I
are victims of fatality. Everything I’ve tried has failed. I have bad luck.
Everyone has harmed me, from my family on, friends, everyone. Everything has
become twisted, and useless.”

“But Rango, I don’t believe in fatality. There
is an inner pattern of character which you cascover and you can alter. It’s
only the romantic who believes we are victims of a destiny. And you always talk
against the romantic.”

Rango shook his head vehemently, impatiently.
“You can’t tamper with nature. One just is. Nature cannot be controlled. One is
born with a certain character and if that is one’s fate, as you say, well,
there is nothing to be done. Character cannot be changed.”

He had those instinctive illuminations, flashes
of intuition, but they were intermittent, like lightning in a stormy sky, and
then in between he would go blind again.

The goodness which at times shone so
brilliantly in him was a goodness without insight, too; he was not even aware
of the changes from goodness to anger, and could not conjure any understanding
against his violent outbursts.

Djuna feared those changes. His face at times
beautiful, human, and near, at others twisted, cruel, and bitter. She wanted to
know what caused the changes, to avert the havoc they caused, but he eluded all
efforts at understanding.

She wished she had never told him anything
about her past.

She remembered what incited her to talk. It was
during the early part of the relationship, when one night he had leaned over
and whispered: “You are an angel. I can’t believe you can be taken like a
woman.” And he had hesitated for an instant to embrace her.

She had rushed to disprove it, eagerly denying
it. She had as great a fear of being told that she was an angel as other women
had of their demon being exposed. She felt it was not true, that she had a
demon in her as everyone had, but that she controlled it rigidly, never
allowing it to cause harm.

She also had a fear that this image of the
angel would eclipse the woman in her who wanted an earthy bond. An angel to her
was the least desirable of bedfellows!

To talk about her past had been her way to say:
“I am a woman, not an angel.”

“A sensual angel,” then he conceded. But what
he registered was her obedience to her impulses, her capacity for love, her
gift of herself, on which to base henceforth his doubts of her fidelity.

“And you’re Vesuvius,” she said laughing.
“Whenever I talk about understanding, mastering, changing, you get as angry as
an earthquake. You have no faith that destiny can be changed.”

“The Mayan Indian is not a mystic, he is a
pantheist. The earth is his mother. He has only one word for both mother and
earth. When an Indian died they put real food in his tomb, and they kept
feeding him.”

“A symbolical food does not taste as good as
real food!”

(It is because he is of the earth that he is
jealous and possessive. His angers are of the earth. His massive body is of the
earth. His knees are of iron, so strong from pressing against the flanks of
wild horses. His body has he flavors of the earth: spices, ginger, chutney,
musk, pimiento, wine, opium. He has the smooth neck of a statue, a Spanish
arrogance of the head, an Indian submission, too. He has the awkward grace of
an animal. His hands and feet are more like paws. When he catches a fleeing cat
he is swifter than the cat. He squats like an Indian and then leaps on powerful
legs. I love the way his high cheekbones swell with laughter. Asleep he shows the
luxuriant charcoal eyelashes of a woman. The nose so round and jovial;
everything powerful and sensual except his mouth. His mouth is small and
timid.)

What Djuna believed was that like a volcano his
fire and strength would erupt and bring freedom, to him and to her. She
believed the fire in him would burn all the chains which bound him. But fire
too must have direction. His fire was blind. But she was not blind. She would
help him.

In spite of his physical vitality, he was
helpless, he was bound and tangled. He could set fire to a room and destroy,
but he could not build as yet. He was bound and blind as nature is. His hands
could break what he held out of strength, a strength he could not measure, but
he could not build. His inner chaos was the chain around his body, his
conviction that one was born a slave of one’s nature, to be led inevitably to
destruction by one’s blind impulses.

“What do you want your life to be?”

“A revolution every day.”

“Why, Rango?”

“I love violence. I want to serve ideas with my
body.”

“Men die every day for ideas which betray them,
for leaders who betray them, for false ideals.”

“But love betrays, too,” said Rango. “I have no
faith.”

(Oh, god, thought Djuna, will I have the
strength to win this battle against destruction, this private battle for a
human love?)

“I need independence,” said Rango, “as a wild
horse needs it. I can’t harness myself to anything. I can’t accept any
discipline. Discipline discourages me.”

Even asleep his body was restless, heavy,
feverish. He threw off all the blankets, lay naked, and by morning the bed
seemed like a battlefield. So many combats he had waged within his dreams; so
tumultuous a life even in sleep.

Chaos all around him, his clothes always torn,
his books soiled, his papers lost. His personal belongings, of which he
remembered an object now and then which he missed, wanted to show Djuna, were
scattered all over the world, in rooming-house cellars where they were kept as
hostages for unpaid rent.

All the little flames burning in him at once,
except the wise one of the holy ghost.

It saddened Djuna that Rango was so eager to go
to war, to fight for his ideas, to die for them. It seemed to her that he was
ready to live and die for emotional errors as women did, but that like most men
he did not call them emotional errors; he called them history, philosophy,
metaphysics, science. Her feminine self was sad and smiled, too, at this game
of endowing personal and emotional beliefs with the dignity of impersonal
names. She smiled at this as men smile at women’s enlargement of personal
tragedies to a status men do not believe applicable to personal lives.