She did not mind that by this expectation of a miracle, she exposed herself to immense disappointments. What she suffered as a human being when others betrayed themselves and her she counted as nothing—like the pains of childbirth.
She believed that the dream which human beings carry in themselves was man’s greatest hunger. If statistics were taken there would be found more deaths by aborted dreams than from physical calamities, more deaths by dream abortions than child abortions, more deaths by infection from despair than from physical illness.
Carrying this ultimate knowledge she was often the victim of strange revenges: people’s revenge against the image of their unfulfilled dream. If they could annihilate her they might annihilate this haunting image of their completed selves and be done with it!
She only knew one person who might rescue her from this world, from this city of the interior lying below the level of identity.
She might learn from Jay to walk into a well-peopled world and abandon the intense selectivity of the dream (this personage fits into my dream and this one does not).
The dreamer rejects the ordinary.
Jay invited the ordinary. He was content with unformed fragments of people, incomplete ones: a minor doctor, a feeble painter, a h unfoocre writer, an average of any kind.
For Djuna it must always be: an extraordinary doctor, a unique writer, a summation of some kind, which could become a symbol by its completeness, by its greatness in its own realm.
Jay was the living proof that it was in this acceptance of the ordinary that pleasure lay. She would learn from him. She would learn to like daily bread. He gave her everything in its untransformed state: food, houses, streets, cafes, people. A way back to the simplicities.
Somewhere, in the labyrinth of her life, bread had been transformed on her tongue into a wafer, with the imponderability of symbols. Communion had been the actual way she experienced life—as communion, not as bread and wine. In place of bread, the wafer, in place of blood, the wine.
Jay would give her back a crowded world untransmuted. He had mocked her once saying he had found her portrait in one page of the dictionary under Trans:transmutations, transformation, transmitting, etc.
In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.
What was she seeking to salvage from the daily current of living, what sudden revulsions drove her back into the solitary cell of the dream?
Let Jay lead her out of the cities of the interior.
She would work as usual, hours of dancing, then she would take her shoes to be repaired, then she would go to the cafe.
The shoemaker was working with his window open on the street. As often as Djuna passed there he would be sitting in his low chair, his head bowed over his work, a nail between his lips, a hammer in his hand.
She took all her shoes to him for repairing, because he had as great a love of unique shoes as she did. She brought him slippers from Montenegro whose tips were raised like the prows of galleys, slippers from Morocco embroidered in gold thread, sandals from Tibet.
His eyes traveled up from his work towards the package she carried as if she were bringing him a gift.
He took the fur boots from Lapland he had not seen before, and was moved by the simplicity of their sewing, the reindeer guts sewn by hand. He asked for their history.
Djuna did not have to explain to him that as she could not travel enough to satisfy the restlessness of her feet, she could at least wear shoes which came from the place she might never visit. She did not have to explain to him that when she looked at her feet in Lapland boots she felt herself walking through deserts of snow.
The shoes carried her everywhere, tireless shoes walking forever all over the world.
This shoemaker repaired them with all the curiosity of a great traveler. He respected the signs of wear and tear as if she were returning from all the voyages she had wanted to make. It was not alone the dust or mud of Paris he brushed off but of Egypt, Greece, India. Every shoe she brought him was his voyage too. He respected wear as a sign of distance, broken straps as an indication of discoveries, torn heels as an accident happening only to explorers.
He was always sitting down. From his cellar room he looked up at the window where he could see only the feet of the passers-by.
“I love a foot that has elegance,” he said. “Sometimes for days I see only ugly feet. And then perhaps one pair of beautiful feet. And that makes me happy.”
As Djuna was leaving, for the first time he left his low working chair and moved forward to open the door for her, limping.
He had a club foot.
Once she had been found in the corner of a room by her very angry parents, all covered by a shawl. Their anxiety in not finding her for a long time turned to great anger.
“What are you doing there hiding, covered by a shawl?”
She answered: “Traveling. I am traveling.”
The Rue de la Sante, the Rue Dolent, the Rue des Saint Peres became Bombay, Ladoma, Budapest, Lavinia.
The cities of the interior were like the city of Fez, intricate, endless, secret and unchartable.
Then she saw Jay sitting at the cafe table with Lillian, Donald, Michael, Sabina and Rango, and she joined them.
Faustin the Zombie, as everyone called him, awakened in a room he thought he had selected blindly but which gave the outward image of his inner self as accurately as if he had turned every element of himself into a carpet or a piece of furniture.
First of all it was not accessible to the door when it opened, but had to be reached by a dark and twisted corridor. Then he had contrived to cover the windows in such a manner with a glazed material that the objects, books and furniture appeared to be conserved in a storage room, to be at once dormant and veiled. The odor they emitted was the odor of hibernation.
One expected vast hoods to fall over the chairs and couch. Certain chairs were dismally isolated and had to be forcibly dragged to enter into relation with other chairs. There was an inertia in the pillows, an indifference in the wilted texture of the couch cover. The table in the center of the room blocked all passageways, the lamp shed a tired light. The walls absorbed the light without throwing it back.
His detachment affected the whole room. Objects need human warmth like human beings to bloom. A lamp sheds a meager or a prodigal light according to one’s interior lighting. Even specks of dust are inhabited by the spirit of the master. There are rooms in which the dust is brilliant. There are rooms in which even carelessness is alive, as the disorder of someone rushing to more important matters. But here in Faustin’s room there was not even the disorder caused by emotional draughts!
The walls of the rooming house were very thin, and he could hear all that took place in the other rooms.
This morning he awakened to a clear duet between a man and a woman.
Man: It’s unbelievable, we’ve been together six years now, and I still have an illusion about you! I’ve never had this as long with any woman.
Woman: Six years!
Man: I’d like to know how often you have been unfaithful.
Woman: Well, I don’t want to know how many times you were.
Man: Oh, me, only a few times. Whenever you went away and I’d get lonely and angry that you had left me. One summer at the beach…do you remember the model Colette?