The Four-Chambered Heart (7 page)

While Rango took the side of wars and
revolutions, she took the side of Rango, she took the side of love.

Parties changed every day, philosophies and
science changed, but for Djuna human love alone continued. Great changes in the
maps of the world, but none in this need of human love, this tragedy of human
love swinging between illusion and human life, sometimes breaking at the dangerous
passageway between illusion and human life, sometimes breaking altogether. But
love itself as continuous as life.

She smiled at man’s great need to build cities
when it was so much harder to build relationships, his need to conquer
countries when it was so much harder to conquer one heart, to satisfy a child,
to create a perfect human life. Man’s need to invent, to circumnavigate space
when it is so much harder to overcome space between human beings, man’s need to
organize systems of philosophy when it was so much harder to understand one
human being, and when the greatest depths of human character lay but half
explored.

“I must go to war,” he said. “I must act. I
must serve a cause.”

Rango gave her the feeling of one who
reproduced in life gestures and scenes and atmosphere already imprinted on her
memory. Where had she already seen Rango on horseback, wearing white fur boots,
furs and corduroys, Rango with his burning eyes, somber face, and wild black
hair?

Where had she already seen Rango’s face in
passion worshipful like a man receiving communion, the profane wafer on the
tongue?

Seeing him lying at her side was like one of
those memories which assail one while traveling through foreign lands to which
one was not bound in any conscious way, and yet at each step recognizing its
familiarity, with an exact prescience of the scene awaiting one around the
corner of the street.

Memory, or race memories, or the influence of
tales, fairy tales, legends, and ballads heard in childhood?

Rango came from sixteenth-century Spain, the
Spain of the troubadours, with its severity, its rigid form, the domination of
the church, the claustration of women, the splendor of Catholic ceremonies, and
a vast, secret tumultuous river of sensuality running below the surface,
uncontrollable, and detectable only through those persistent displays of guilt
and atonement common to all races.

Rango recreated for Djuna a natural
blood-and-flesh paradise so different from the artificial paradises created in
art by city children. In her childhood spent in cities, and not in forests, she
had created paradises of her own inventions, with a language of her own,
outside and beyond life, as certain birds create a nest in some inaccessible
branch of a tree, inaccessible to disaster but also difficult to preserve.

But Rango’s paradise was an artless paradise of
life in a forest, in mountains, lakes, mirages, with strange animals and
strange flowers and trees, all of it warm and accessible.

Because she had been a child of the cities, the
paradise of her childhood had been born of fairy tales, legends, and mythology,
obscuring ugliness, cramped rooms, miserly backyards.

Rango had had no need to invent. He had
possessed mountains of legendary magnificence, lakes of fantastic proportions,
extraordinary animals, a house of great beauty. He had known fiestas which
lasted for a week, carnivals, orgies. He had taken his ecstasies from the
rarefied air of heights, his drugs from religious ceremonies, his physical
pleasures from battles, his poetry from solitude, his music from Indian dances,
and been nourished on tales told by his Indian nurse.

To visit the first girl he had loved he had had
to travel all night on horseback, he had leaped walls, and risked her mother’s
fury and possible death at the hands of her father. It was all written in the
Romancero
!

The paradise of her childhood was under a
library table covered to the ground by a red cloth with fringes, which was her
house, in which she read forbidden books from her father’s vast library. She
had been given a little piece of oilcloth on which she wiped her feet
ostentatiously before entering this tent, this Eskimo hut, this African mud
house, this realm of the myth.

The paradise of her childhood had been in
books.

The house in which she had lived as a child was
the house of the spirit which does not live blindly but is ever, out of
passionate experience, building and adorning its four-chambered heart—an
extension and expansion of the body, with many delicate affinities establishing
themselves between her and the doors and passageways, the lights and shadows of
her outward abode, until she was incorporated into it in the entire
expressiveness of what is outward as related to the inner significance, until
there was no more distinction between outward and inward at all.

(I’m fighting a dark force in Rango, loving
nature in him, through him, and yet fighting the destructions of nature. When
my life culminates in a heaven of passion, it is most dangerously balanced over
a precipice. The further I seek to soar into the dream, the essence, touching
the vaults of the sky, the tighter does the cord of reality press my neck. Will
I break seeking to rescue Rango? Fatigue of the heart and body…

Intermittently I see and feel the dampness,
poverty, a sick Zora, food on the table with wine stains, cigarette ashes, and
bread crumbs of past meals. Only now and then do I notice the rust in the
stove, the leak in the roof, the rain on the rug, the fire that has gone out,
the sour wine in a cup. And thus I descend through trap doors without falling
into a trap but knowing there is another Rango I cannot see, the one who lives
with Zora, who awaits to appear in the proper lighting. And I am afraid, afraid
of pain… Now I understand why I loved Paul…because he was afraid. When we lay
down and caressed each other we caressed this self-same fear and understood it,
under the blanket, fear of violence. We recognized it in the dark, with our
hands and our mouths. We touched it and were moved by it, because it was our secret
which we shared through the body. Everyone says: you must take sides, choose a
political party, choose a philosophy, choose a dogma… I chose the dream of
human love. Whatever I ally myself to is to be close to my love. With it I hope
to defeat tragedy, to defeat violence. I dance, I sew, I mend, I cook for the
sake of this dream. In this dream nobody dies, nobody is sick, nobody
separates. I love and dance with my dream unfurled, trusting darkness, trusting
the labyrinth, into the furnaces of love. Some say: the dream is escape. Some
say: the dream is madness. Some say: the dream is sickness. It will betray you.
The Rango I see is not the one Zora sees, or the world sees. This is the
witchcraft of love. You can take sides in religion, you can take sides in
history, and there are others with you, you are not alone. But when you take
the side of love, the opium of love, you are alone. For the doctors call the
dream a symptom, the historians escape, the philosophers a drug, and even your
lover will not make the perilous journey with you… Hang your dream of love on
the mast of this barge of caresses…a flag of fire…)

The enemy was not outside as Rango believed.

What he most wanted to avoid, which was that
Djuna should remember her days with Paul, or desire Paul’s return, or yearn for
his presence, was the very feeling he caused by his violence.

Because his violence drove her away from him.
The sense of devastation left by his angry words, or his distorted
interpretations of her acts, his doubts, caused such an anxious climate that at
times to escape from the tension, like a child seeking peace and gentleness,
she did remember Paul…

Then Rango committed a second error: he wanted
Djuna and Zora to be friends.

Djuna never knew whether he believed this would
achieve a unity in his torn and divided life, whether he was thinking only of
himself, or of sharing his burden with Djuna, or whether he had such faith in
Djuna’s creation of human beings that he hoped she could heal Zora and perhaps
win Zora’s affection and put an end tothe tension he felt whenever he returned
home.

The obscurities and labyrinths of Rango’s mind
remained always mysterious to her. There were twists and deformities in his
nature which she could not clarify. Not only because he never knew himself what
took place within him, not only because he was full of contradictions and
confusions, but because he resented and rebelled against any examination,
probing, or questioning of his motives.

Socame the day when he said: “I wish you would
visit Zora. She is very ill and you might help her,”

Until now there had been very little mention of
Zora. Certain words ofRango’s had accumulated in Djuna’s mind: Rango had
married Zora when he was seventeen. Six years before he met Djuna they had
begun to live together without a physical bond, “as brother and sister.” She
was constantly ill and Rango had a great compassion for her helplessness. Djuna
did not know whether more than compassion bound them together, more than the
past.

She knew that this appeal was made to her
goodself, and that she must, to answer it, subdue her own wishes not to be
entangled in Rango’s life with Zora, and to avoid a relationship which could
only cause her pain. She was being asked to bring a certain aspect of herself
among her other aspects as others are asked to wear a certain costume out of
their multiple wardrobe.

She was invited to bring her good self only, in
which Rango believed utterly, and yet she felt a rebellion against this good
self which was too often called upon, was too often invited, to the detriment
of other selves who were now like numerous wallflowers! The Djuna who wanted to
laugh, to be carefree, to have a love all of her own, an integrated life, a
rest from troubles.

Secretly she had often dreamed of her other selves,
the wild, the free, the natural, the capricious, the whimsical, the mischievous
ones. But the constant demand upon the good one was atrophying the others.

But there are invitations which are like
commands.

There are heraldic worlds of spiritual and
emotional aristocracy which have nothing to do with conventional morality,
which give to certain acts a quality of noblesse oblige, a faithfulness to the
highest capacities of a personality, a sort of life on the altitudes, a
devotion to the idealized self. The artists who had overthrown conventions
submitted to this code and knew the sadness and guilt which came from any
failing in this voluntary standard. All of them suffered at times from a guilt
resembling the guilt of the religious, the moralists, the bourgeois, while
apparently living in opposition to them. It was the incurable guilt of the
idealist seeking to reach an image of one’s self one could be proud of.

They had merely created fraternities, duties,
communal taboos of another sort, but to which they adhered at the cost of great
personal sacrifices.

Djuna did not know how this good self had
attained such prominence. She did not know how it had come to be born at all,
for she considered it thrust upon her, not adopted by her. She felt much less good
than she was expected to be. It gave her a feeling of treachery, of deception.

She did not have the courage to say: I would
rather not see Zora, not know your other life. I would rather retain my
illusion of a single love.

In childhood she remembered she played
dangerous games. She sought adventures and difficulties. She fabricated paper
wings and threw herself out of a second-story window, escaping injury by a
miracle. She did not want to be the sweet and gentle heroine in charades and
games, but the dark queen of intrigue. She preferred Catherine de’ Medici to
the flavorless and innocent princesses.

She was often tangled in her own high
rebellions, in her devastating bad tempers, and in lies.

But her parents repeated obsessionally: You
must be good. You must keep your dress clean. You must be kind, thank the lady,
hide your pain if you fall, do not reach for anything you want, do not attract
attention to yourself, do not be vain about the ribbon in your hair, efface
yourself, be silent and modest, give up to your brothers the games they want,
curb your temper, do not talk too much, do not invent stories about things
which never happened,
be good or else you will not be loved.
And when
she was accused of any of these offenses, both parents turned away from her and
she was denied the good-night or good-morning kiss which was essential to her
happiness. Her mother carried out her threats of loss into games which seemed
like tragedies to Djuna the child: once swimming in a lake before Djuna’s
anxious eyes, she had pretended to disappear and be drowned. When she
reappeared on the surface Djuna was already hysterical. Another time, in a vast
railroad station, when Djuna was six years old, the mother hid behind a column
and Djuna found herself alone in the crowd, lost, and again she wept
hysterically.

The good self was formed by these threats: an
artificial bloom. In this incubator of fear, her goodness bloomed merely as the
only known way to hold and attract love.

There were other selves which interested her
more but which she learned to conceal or to stifle: her inventive,
fantasy-weaving self who loved tales, her high-tempered self who flared like
heat lightning, her stormy self, the lies which were not lies but an
improvement on reality.