The Four-Chambered Heart (8 page)

She had loved strong language like ginger upon
the lips. But her parents had said: “From you we don’t expect this, not from
you.” And appointed her as a guard upon her brothers, asking her to enforce
their laws, just as Rango had appointed her now a guard against his disintegrations.

So that she had learned the only reconciliation
she could find: she learned to preserve the balance between crime and
punishment. She took her place against the wall, face to the wall, and then
muttered, “Damn damn damn damn,” as many times as she pleased, since she was
simultaneously punishing herself and felt absolved, with no time wasted on
contrition.

And now this good self could no longer be
discarded. It had a compulsive life, its legend, its devotees! Every time she
yielded to its sway she increased her responsibilities, for new devotees
appeared, demanding perpetual attendance.

If Rango asked her today to take care of Zora,
it was because he had heard, and he knew, of many past instances when she had
taken care of others.

This indestructible good self, this false and
wearying good self who answered prayers: Djuna, I need you; Djuna, console me;
Djuna, you carry palliatives (why had she studied the art of healing, all the
philters against pain?); Djuna, bring your wand; Djuna, we’ll take you to
Rango, not the Rango of the joyous guitar and the warm songs, but Rango, the
husband of a woman who is always ilt will break your heart, Djuna of the
fracturable heart, your heart will fracture with a sound of wind chimes and the
pieces will be iridescent. Where they fall new plants will grow instantly, and
it is to the advantage of a new crop of breakable hearts that yours should
fracture often, for the artist is like the religious man, he believes that
denial of worldly possessions and acceptance of pain and trouble will give
birth to the marvelous—sainthood or art.

(This goodness is a role, too tight around me;
it is a costume I can no longer wear. There are other selves trying to be born,
demanding at least a hearing!)

Your past history influenced your choice,
Djuna; you have shown capabilities to lessen pain and so you are not invited to
the fiestas.

Irrevocable extension of past roles, and no
reversal possible. Too many witnesses to past compassions, past abdications,
and they will look scandalized by any alteration of your character and will
reawaken your old guilts. Face to the wall! This time so that Rango may not see
your rebellion in your face. Rango’s wife is mortally ill and you are to bring
your philters.

But she had made an important discovery.

This bond with Rango, this patience with his
violent temper, this tacit fraternity of her gentleness and his roughness, this
collaboration of light and shadow, this responsibility for Rango which she
felt, her compulsion to rescue him from the consequences of his blind rages,
were because Rango lived out for her this self she had buried in her childhood.
All that she had denied and repressed: chaos, disorder, caprice, destruction.

The reason for her indulgence; everyone
marveled (how could you bear his jealousy, his angers?) at the way he destroyed
what she created so that each day she must begin anew: to understand, to order,
to reconstruct, to mend; the reason for her acceptance of the troubles caused
by his blindness was that Rango
was
nature, uncontrolled, and that the
day she had buried her own laziness, her own jealousy, her own chaos, these
atrophied selves awaited liberation and began to breathe through Rango’s acts.
For this complicity in the dark she must share the consequences with him.

The realm she had tried to skip: darkness,
confusion, violence, destruction, erupted secretly through relationship with
Rango. The burden was placed on his shoulders. She must therefore share the
torments, too. She had not annihilated her natural self; it reasserted itself
in Rango. And she was his accomplice.

The dark-faced Rango who opened the door of his
studio below street level was not the joyous carefree guitarist Djuna had first
seen at the party, nor was it the fervent Rango of the nights at the barge, nor
was it the oscillating Rango of the cafe, the ironic raconteur, the reckless
adventurer. It was another Rango she did not know.

In the dark hallway his body appeared
silhouetted, his high forehead, the fall of his hair, his bow, full of
nobility, grandeur. He bowed gravely in the narrow hallway as if this cavernous
dwelling were his castle, he the seigneur and she a visitor of distinction. He
emerged prouder, taller, more silent, too, out of poverty and barrenness, since
they were of his own choice. If he had not been a rebel, he would be greeting
her at the vast entrance of his ranch.

Down the stairs into darkness. Her hand touched
the walls hesitantly to guide herself, but the walls had such a rough surface
and seemed to be sticky to the touch so that she withdrew it and Rango
explained: “We had a fire here once. I set fire to the apartment when I fell
asleep while smoking. The landlord never repaired the damage as we haven’t paid
rent for six months.”

A faint odor of dampness rose from the studio
below, which was the familiar odor of poor studios in Paris. It was compounded
of fog, of the ancient city breathing its fetid breath through cellar floors;
it was the odor of stagnation, of clothes not often washed, of curtains
gathering mildew.

She hesitated again until she saw the skylight
windows above her head; but they were covered with soot and let in a dim
northern light.

Rango then stood aside, and Djuna saw Zora
lying in bed.

Her black hair was uncombed and straggled
around her parchment-colored skin. She had no Indian blood, and her face was
almost a direct contrast to Rango’s. She had heavy, pronounced features, a wide
full mouth, all cast in length, in sadness, a defeated pull downward which only
changed when she raised her eyelids; then the eyes had in them an unexpected
shrewdness which Rango did not have.

She was wearing one of Rango’s shirts, and over
that a kimono which had been dyed black. The red and black squares of the
shirt’s colors showed at the neck and wrists. The stripes once yellow still
showed through the black dye of the kimono.

On her feet she wore a pair of Rango’s big
socks filled with cotton wool at the toes, which seemed like disproportionate
clown’s feet on her small body.

Her shoulders were slightly hunched, and she
smiled the smile of the hunchback, of a cripple. The arching of her shoulders
gave her an air of having shrunk herself together to occupy a small space. It
was the arch of fear.

Even before her illness, Djuna felt, she could
never have been handsome but had a strength of character which must have been
arresting. Yet her hands were childish and clasped things without firmness. And
in the mouth there was the same lack of control. Her voice, too, was childish.

The studio was now half in darkness, and the
oil lamp which Rango brought cast long shadows.

The mist of dampness in the room seemed like
the breath of the buried, making the walls weep, detaching the wallpaper in
long wilted strips. The sweat of centuries of melancholic living, the dampness
of roots and cemeteries, the moisture of agony and death seeping through the
walls seemed appropriate to Zora’s skin from which all glow and life had
withdrawn.

Djuna was moved by Zora’s smile and plaintive
voice. Zora was saying: “The other day I went to church and prayed desperately
that someone should save us, and now you are here. Rango is always bewildered,
and does nothing.” Then she turned tango: “Bring me my sewing box.”

Rango brought her a tin cracker box which
contained needles, threads, and buttons in boxes labeled with medicine names:
injections, drops, pills.

The material Zora took up to sew looked like a
rag. Her small hands smoothed it down mechanically, yet the more she smoothed
it down the more it wilted in her hands, as if her touch were too anxious, too
compressing, as if she transmitted to objects some obnoxious withering breath
from her sick flesh.

And when she began to sew she sewed with small
stitches, closely overlapping, so closely that it was as if she were strangling
the last breath of color and life in the rag, as if she were sewing it to the
point of suffocation.

As they talked she completed the square she had
already begun, and then Djuna watched her rip apart her labor and quietly begin
again.

“Djuna, I don’t know if Rango told you, but
Rango and I are like brother and sister. Our physical life…was over years ago.
It was never very important. I knew that sooner or later he would love another
woman, and I am glad it’s you because you’re kind, and you will not take him
away from me. I need him.”

“I hope we can be…kind to each other, Zora.
It’s a difficult situation.”

“Rango told me that you never tried, or even
mentioned, his leaving me. How could I not like you? You saved my life. When
you came I was about to die for lack of care and food. I don’t love Rango as a
man. To me he is a child. He has done me so much harm. He just likes to drink,
and talk, and be with friends. If you love him, I am glad, because of the kind
of woman you are, because you are full of quality.”

“You’re very generous, Zora.”

Zora leaned over to whisper now: “Rango is mad,
you know. He may not seem so to you because he is leaning on you. But if it
were not for you I would be out in the street, homeless. We’ve often been
homeless, and I’d be sitting on my valises, out on the sidewalk, and Rango just
waving his arms and helpless, never knowing what to do. He lets everything
terrible happen, and then he says: ‘It’s destiny.’ With his cigarette he set
fire to our apartment. He was nearly burnt to death.”

There was a book lying at the foot of her bed,
and Djuna opened it while Zora was carefully unstitching all she had sewed
before.

“It’s a book about illness,” said Zora. “I love
to read about illness. I go to the library and look up descriptions of the symptoms
I have. I’ve marked all the pages which apply to me. Just look at all these
markings. Sometimes I think I have all the sicknesses one can have!” She
laughed. Then looking at Djuna plaintively, almost pleadingly, she said: “All
my hair is falling out.”

When Djuna left that evening, Rango and she
were no longer man and woman in a chamber of isolated love for each other. They
were suddenly a trinity, with Zora’s inexorable needs conducting all their
movements, directing their time together, dictating the hours of separation.

Rango had placed Zora under Djuna’s protection
and her love for Rango had to extend in magnitude to include Zora.

Zora talked to Djuna. If it was Djuna who had
planned to come to Zora and show the most exemplary devotion, she found herself
merely passive before the friendliness of Zora.

It was Zora who talked, with her eyes upon her
sewing and unsewing. “Rango is a changed man, and I’m so happy, Djuna. He is
kinder to me. He was very unhappy before and he took it out on me. A man cannot
live without love and Rango was not easy to satisfy. All the women wanted him,
but he would see them once perhaps and come back dejected, and refuse to see
them again. He always found something wrong with them. With you he is content.
And I am happy because I knew this had to happen sometime, but I’m happy it’s
you because I trust you. I used to fear some woman coming and taking him where
I would never see him again. And I know you wouldn’t do that.”

Djuna thought: “I love Rango so much that I want
to share his burdens, love and serve what he loves and serves, share his
conviction that Zora is an innocent victim of life, worthy of all sacrifices.”

This was for both Rango and Djuna the atonement
for the marvelous hours in the barge. All great flights away from life land one
in such places of atonement as this room, with Zora sewing rags and talking
about dandruff, about ovarian insufficiency, about gastritis, about thyroid and
neuritis.

Djuna had brought her a colorful Indian-print
dress and Zora had dyed it black. And now she was reshaping it and it looked
worn and dismal already. She wore a shawl pinned with a brooch which had once
held stones in its clasps and was now empty, thrusting bare silver branches out
like the very symbol of denudation. She wore two overcoats sewn together, the
inner one showing at the edges.

While they sat sewing together, Zora lamented
over Rango: “Why must he always live with so many people around him?”

Knowing that Rango liked to spend hours and
hours alone with her, Djuna feared to say: “Perhaps he is just seeking warmth
and forgetfulness, running away from illness and darkness.”

When Rango was with her he seemed dominating,
full of dignity and pride. When he entered Zora’s room he seemed to shrink.
When he first entered there was a copper glow in his face; after a moment the
glow vanished.

“Why do men live in shoals?” persisted Zora.

Djuna looked at Rango lighting the fire,
warming water, starting to cook. There was something so discouraged in the pose
of his body, expressing agreement with Zora’s enumeration of his faults, so
diminished, which Djuna could not bear to witness.

Zora was in the hospital.