They had not attended the birthday of his manhood, the birthday of his roguish humorous self, of his first drunkenness, his first success at a party; or the birthday of his eloquent self on the theme of poetry, painting or music. Or the birthday of his imagination, his fantasy, of his new knowledge of people, of his new assertions and his discoveries of unknown powers in himself.
This succession of birthdays that had taken place since he left home was the highest fiesta ever attended by Djuna, the spectacle of unpredictable blooms, of the shells breaking around his personality, the emergence of the man.
But his real birthday they could not spend together.
His mother made dinner for him, and he played chess with his father—they who loved him less and who had bound and stifled him with prohibitions, who had delayed his manhood.
His mother made a birthday cake iced and sprinkled with warnings against expansion, cautions against new friends, designed a border like those of formal gardens as if to outline all the proprieties with which to defeat adventure.
His father played chess with him silently, indicating in the carefully measured moves a judgment upon all the wayward dances of the heart, the caprices of the body, above all a judgment upon such impulses as had contributed to Paul’s very presence there, the act of conjunction from which had been formed the luminous boy eating at their table.
The cake they fed him was the cake of caution: to fear all human beings and doubt the motivations of all men and women not listed in the Social Directory.
The candles were not lit to celebrate his future freedom, but to say: only within the radius lighted by these birthday candles, only within the radius of father and mother are you truly safe.
A small circle. And outside of this circle, evil.
And so he ate of this birthday cake baked by his mother, containing all the philters against love, expansion and freedom known to white voodoo.
A cake to prevent and preserve the child from becoming man!
No more nights together, when to meet the dawn together was the only marriage ceremony accorded to lovers.
But he returned to her one day carrying the valise with his laundry. On his return home he had packed his laundry to have it washed at home. And his mother had said: “Take it back. I won’t take care of laundry you soiled while living with strangers.”
So quietly he brought it back to Djuna, to the greater love that would gladly take care of his belongings as long as they were the clothes he soiled in his experience with freedom.
The smallness of his shirts hurt her, like a sign of dangers for him which she could not avert. He was still slender enough, young enough to be subjected to tyranny.
They were both listening to Cesar Franck’s Symphony in D Minor.
And then the conflicting selves in Djuna fused into one mood as they do at such musical crossroads.
The theme of the symphony was gentleness.
She had first heard it at the age of sixteen one rainy afternoon and associated it with her first experience of love, of a love without climax which she had known with Michael. She had interwoven this music with her first concept of the nature of love as one of ultimate, infinite gentleness.
In Cesar Franck’s symphony there was immediate exaltation, dissolution in feeling and the evasion of violence. Over and over again in this musical ascension of emotion, the stairway of fever was climbed and deserted before one reached explosion.
An obsessional return to minor themes, creating an endless tranquility, and at sixteen she had believed that the experience of love was utterly contained in this gently flowing drug, in the delicate spirals, cadences, and undulations of this music.
Cesar Franck came bringing messages of softness and trust, accompanying Paul’s gestures and attitudes, and for this she trusted him, a passion without the storms of destruction.
She had wanted such nebulous landscapes, such vertiginous spirals without explosions: the drug.
Listening to the symphony flowing and yet not flowing (for there was a static groove in which it remained imprisoned, so similar to the walled-in room of her house, containing a mystery of stillness), Djuna saw the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, the arrow of stone placed at the center of a gracefully turbulent square, summating gardens, fountains and rivers of automobiles. One pointed dart of stone to pierce the night, the fog, the rain, the sun, aiming faultlessly into the clouds.
And there was the small, crazy woman Matilda, whom everyone knew, who came every morning and sat on one of the benches near the river, and stayed there all day, watching the passers-by, eating sparingly and lightly of some mysterious food in crumbs out of a paper bag, like the pigeons. So familiar to the policeman, to the tourists, and to the permanent inhabitants of the Place de la Concorde, that not to see her there would have been as noticeable, as disturbing, as to find the Obelisk gone, and the square left without its searchlight into the sky.
Matilda was known for her obstinacy in sitting there through winter and summer, her indifference to climate, her vague answers to those who sought her reasons for being there, her tireless watchfulness, as if she were keeping a rendezvous with eternity.
Only at sundown did she leave, sometimes gently incited by the policeman.
Since there was not total deterioration in her clothes, or in her health, everyone surmised she must have a home and no one was ever concerned about her.
Djuna had once sat beside her and Matilda at first would not speak, but addressed herself to the pigeons and to the falling autumn leaves, murmuring, whispering, muttering by turns. Then suddenly she said to Djuna very simply and clearly: “My lover left me sitting here and said he would come back.”
(The policeman had said: I have seen her sitting there for twenty years.)
“How long have you been sitting here and waiting?” Djuna asked.
“I don’t know.”
She ate of the same bread she was feeding the pigeons. Her face was wrinkled but not aged, through the wrinkles shone an expression which was not of age, which was the expression of alert waiting, watchfulness, expectation of the young.
“He will come back,” she said, for the first time a look of defiance washing her face of its spectator’s pallor, the pallor of the recluse who lives without intimate relationship to stir the rhythms of the blood, this glazed expression of those who watch the crowd passing by and never recognize a face.
“Of course he will,” said Djuna, unable to bear even the shadow of anxiety on the woman’s face.
Matilda’s face recovered its placidity, its patience. “He told me to sit here and wait.”
A mortal blow had stopped the current of her life, but had not shattered her. It had merely paralyzed her sense oftime, she would sit and wait for the lost lover and the years were obliterated by the anesthesia of the deadened cell of time: five minutes stretched to infinity and kept her alive, alive and ghostly, with the cell of time, the little clock of reality inside the brain forever damaged. A faceless clock pointing to anguish. And with time was linked pain, lodged in the same cell (neighbors and twins), time and pain in more or less intimate relationship.
And what was left was this shell of a woman immune to cold and heat, anesthetized by a great loss into immobility and timelessness.
Sitting there beside Matilda Djuna heard the echoes of the broken cell within the little psychic stage of her own heart, so well enacted, so neat, so clear, and wondered whether when her father left the house for good in one of his moods of violence as much damage had been done to her, and whether some part of her being had not been atrophied, preventing complete openness and complete development in living.