He was waiting for her at the door, neat and trim.
He said: “Why don’t you come and sit at the cafe with me?” She followed him. Not far from there was the Place Clichy, always animated but more so now as the site of the Fair.
The merry-go-rounds were turning swiftly. The gypsies were reading fortunes in little booths hung with Arabian rugs.
Workmen were shooting clay pigeons and winning cut-glass dishes for their wives.
The prostitutes were enjoying their watchful promenades, and the men their loitering.
The ballet master was talking to her: “Djuna (and suddenly as he said her name, she felt again where he had deposited his tribute), I am a simple man. My parents were shoemakers in a little village down south. I was put to work as a boy in an iron factory where I handled heavy things and was on the way to becoming deformed by big muscles. But during my lunch hour I danced. I wanted to be a ballet dancer, and I practiced at one of the iron bars in front of a big furnace. And today—look!” He handed her a cigarette case all engraved with names of famous ballet dancers. “Today,” he said proudly, “I have been the partner of all these women. If you would come with me, we could be happy. I am a simple man, but we could dance in all the cities of Europe. I am no longer young but I have a lot of dancing in me still. We could be happy…”
The merry-go-round turned and her feelings with it, riding again the wooden horses of her childhood in the park, which was so much like flying, riding around from city to city reaching eagerly for the prizes, for bouquets, for clippings, for fame, flinging all of one’s secret desires for pleasure on the outside like a red shawl, with this joyous music at the center always, the body recovered, the body dancing. (Hadn’t she been the woman in quest of her body once lost by a shattering blow—submerged, and now floating again on the surface where uncrippled human beings lived in a world of pleasure like the Fair?)
How to explain to this simple man, how to explain? There is something broken inside of me. I cannot dance, live, love as easily as others. Surely enough, if we traveled around the world, I would break my leg somewhere. Because this inner break is invisible and unconvincing to others, I would not rest until I had broken something for everyone to see, to understand. How to explain to this simple man, I could dance continuously with success, without breaking. I am the dancer who falls,t>always, into traps of depression, breaking my heart and my body almost at every turn, losing my tempo and my lightness, falling out of groups, out of grace, out of perfection. There is too often something wrong. Something you cannot help me with… Supposing we found ourselves in a strange country, in a strange hotel. You are alone in a hotel room. Well, what of that? You can talk to the bar man, or you can sit before your glass of beer and read the papers. Everything is simple. But when I am alone in a hotel room something happens to me at times which must be what happens to children when the lights are turned out. Animals and children. But the animals howl their solitude, and children can call for their parents and for lights. But I…
“What a long time it takes you to answer me,” said the ballet master.
“I’m not strong enough,” said Djuna.
“That’s what I thought when I first saw you. I thought you couldn’t take the discipline of a dancer’s life. But it isn’t so. You look fragile and all that, but you’re healthy. I can tell healthy women by their skin. Yours is shining and clear. No, I don’t think you have the strength of a horse, you’re what we call ‘une petite nature.‘But you have energy and guts. And we’ll take it easy on the road.”
In the middle of a piece of music the merry-go-round suddenly stopped. Something had gone wrong with the motor! The horses slowed down their pace. The children lost their hilarity. The boss looked troubled, and the mechanic was called and like a doctor came with his bag.
The Fair lost its spinning frenzy.
When the music stopped, one could hear the dry shots of the amateur hunters and the clay pigeons falling behind the cardboard walls.
The dreams which Djuna had started to weave in the asylum as if they were the one net in which she could exist, leaping thus always out of reach of unbearable happenings and creating her own events parallel to the ones her feelings could not accept, the dreams which gave birth to worlds within worlds, which, begun at night when she was asleep, continued during the day as an accompaniment to acts which she now discovered were rendered ineffectual by this defensive activity, with time became more and more violent.
For at first the personages of the dream, the cities which sprang up, were distinct and bore no resemblance to reality. They were images which filled her head with the vapors of fever, a drug-like panorama of incidents which rendered her insensible to cold, hunger and fatigue.
The day her mother was taken to the hospital to die, the day her brother was injured while playing in the street and developed a gentle insanity, the day at the asylum when she fell under the tyranny of the only man in the place, were days when she noted an intensification of her other world.
She could still weep at these happenings, but as people might lament just before they go under an anesthetic. “It still hurts,” says the voice as the anesthetic begins to take effect and the pain growing duller, thebody complaining more out of a mere remembrance of pain, automatically, just before sinking into a void.
She even found a way to master her weeping.
No mirrors were allowed in the orphan asylum, but girls had made one by placing black paper behind one of the small windows. Once a week they set it up and took turns looking at their faces.
Djuna’s first glimpse of her adolescent face was in this black mirror, where the clear coloring of her skin was as if touched with mourning, as if reflected at the bottom of a well.
Even long afterwards it was difficult for her to overcome this first impression of her face painted upon black still waters.
But she discovered that if she was weeping, and she looked at the weeping in a mirror, the weeping stopped. It ceased to be her own. It belonged to another.
Henceforth she possessed this power: whatever emotion would ravish or torment her, she could bring it before a mirror, look at it, and separate herself from it. And she thought she had found a way to master sorrow.
There was a boy of her age who passed under her window and who had the power to move her. He had a lean, eager face, eyes which seemed liquid with tenderness, and his gestures were full of gentleness.
His passage had the power to make her happy or unhappy, warm or cold, rich or poor. Whether he walked abstractedly on the other side of the street or on her side, whether he looked up at her window or forgot to look up, determined the mood of her day.
Because of his manner, she felt she trusted him entirely, that if he should come to the door and ask her to follow him she would do so without hesitation.
In her dreams at night she dissolved in his presence, lost herself in him. Her feelings for him were the opposite of an almost continuous and painful tension whose origin she did not know.
In contrast to this total submission to the unknown boy’s gentleness, her first encounter with man was marked with defiance, fear, hostility.
The man, called the Watchman by the girls, was about forty years old when Djuna was sixteen. He was possessed of unlimited power because he was the lover of the Directress. His main attribute was power. He was the only man in the asylum, and he could deal privileges, gifts, and give permissions to go out at night.
This unique role gave him a high prestige. He was polite, carried himself with confidence, and was handsome in a neutral way which adapted him easily to any kind of image the orphans wished to fashion of him.