He could pass for the tall man, the brown-haired man, the blond man; given a little leeway, he answered all the descriptions of gypsy card readers.
An added piquancy was attained by the common knowledge that he was the favorite of the Directress, who was verue role gah hated. In winning his favor, one struck indirect blows at her authority, and achieved a subtle revenge for her severity.
The girls thought of him as possessing an even greater power than hers, for she who submitted to no one, had often been seen bowing her head before his reproaches.
The one he chose felt endowed immediately with greater beauty, greater charm and power than the other girls. He was appointed the arbiter, the connoisseur, the bestower of decorations.
To be chosen by the Watchman was to enter the realm of protection. No girl could resist this.
Djuna could distinguish his steps at a great distance. It seemed to her that he walked more evenly than anyone she knew, evenly and without stops or change of rhythm. He advanced through the hallways inexorably. Other people could be stopped, or eluded. But his steps were those of absolute authority.
He knew at what time Djuna would be passing through this particular hallway alone. He always came up to her, not a yard away, but exactly beside her.
His glance was always leveled at her breasts, and two things would happen simultaneously: he would offer her a present without looking at her face, as if he were offering it to her breasts, and then he would whisper: “Tonight I will let you out if you are good to me.”
And Djuna would think of the boy who passed by under her window, and feel a wild beating of her heart at the possibility of meeting him outside, of talking to him, and her longing for the boy, for the warm liquid tenderness of his eyes was so violent that no sacrifice seemed too great—her longing and her feeling that if he knew of this scene, he would rescue her, but that there was no other way to reach him, no other way to defeat authority to reach him than by this concession to authority.
In this barter there was no question of rebellion. The way the Watchman stood, demanded, gestured, was all part of a will she did not even question, a continuation of the will of the father. There was the man who demanded, and outside was the gentle boy who demanded nothing, and to whom she wanted to give everything, whose silence even, she trusted, whose way of walking she trusted with her entire heart, while this man she did not trust.
It was the droit du seigneur.
She slipped the Watchman’s bracelet around the lusterless cotton of her dress, while he said: “The poorer the dress the more wonderful your skin looks, Djuna.”
Years later when Djuna thought the figure of the Watchman was long since lost she would hear echoes of his heavy step and she would find herself in the same mood she had experienced so many times in his presence.
No longer a child, and yet many times she still had the feeling that she might be overpowered by a will stronger than her own, might be trapped, might be somehow unable to free herself, unable to escape the demands of man upon her.
Her first defet at the hands of man the father had caused her such a conviction of helplessness before tyranny that although she realized that she was now in reality no longer helpless, the echo of this helplessness was so strong that she still dreaded the possessiveness and willfulness of older men. They benefited from this regression into her past, and could override her strength merely because of this conviction of unequal power.
It was as if maturity did not develop altogether and completely, but by little compartments like the airtight sections of a ship. A part of her being would mature, such as her insight, or interpretative faculties, but another could retain a childhood conviction that events, man and authority together were stronger than one’s capacity for mastering them, and that one was doomed to become a victim of one’s pattern.
It was only much later that Djuna discovered that this belief in the great power of others became the fate itself and caused the defeats.
But for years, she felt harmed and defeated at the hands of men of power, and she expected the boy, the gentle one, the trusted one, to come and deliver her from tyranny.
Ever since the day of Lillian’s concert when she had seen the garden out of the window, Djuna had wanted a garden like it.
And now she possessed a garden and a very old house on the very edge of Paris, between the city and the Park.
But it was not enough to possess it, to walk through it, sit in it. One still had to be able to live in it.
And she found she could not live in it.
The inner fever, the restlessness within her corroded her life in the garden.
When she was sitting in a long easy chair she was not at ease.
The grass seemed too much like a rug awaiting footsteps, to be trampled with hasty incidents. The rhythm of growth too slow, the falling of the leaves too tranquil.
Happiness was an absence of fever. The garden was feverless and without tension to match her tensions. She could not unite or commune with the plants, the languor, the peace. It was all contrary to her inward pulse. Not one pulsation of the garden corresponded to her inner pulsation which was more like a drum beating feverish time.
Within her the leaves did not wait for autumn, but were torn off prematurely by unexpected sorrows. Within her, leaves did not wait for spring to sprout but bloomed in sudden hothouse exaggerations. Within her there were storms contrary to the lazy moods of the garden, devastations for which nature had no equivalent.
Peace, said the garden, peace.
The day began always with the sound of gravel crushed by automobiles.
The shutters werepushed open by the French servant, and the day admitted.
With the first crushing of the gravel under wheels came the barking of the police dog and the carillon of the church bells.
Cars entered through an enormous green iron gate, which had to be opened ceremoniously by the servant.
Everyone else walked through the small green gate that seemed like the child of the other, half covered with ivy. The ivy did not climb over the father gate.
When Djuna looked at the large gate through her window it took on the air of a prison gate. An unjust feeling, since she knew she could leave the place whenever she wanted, and since she knew morethan anyone that human beings placed upon an object, or a person this responsibility of being the obstacle, when the obstacle lay within one’s self.
In spite of this knowledge, she would often stand at the window staring at the large closed iron gate as if hoping to obtain from this contemplation a reflection of herinner obstacles to a full open life.
She mocked its importance; the big gate had a presumptuous creak! Its rusty voice was full of dissonant affectations. No amount of oil could subdue its rheumatism, forit took a historical pride in its own rust: it was a hundred years old.
But the little gate, with its overhanging ivy like disordered hair over a running child’s forehead, had a sleepy and sly air, an air of always being half open, never entirely locked.
Djuna had chosen the house for many reasons, because it seemed to have sprouted out of the earth like a tree, so deeply grooved it was within the old garden. It had no cellar and the rooms rested right on the ground. Below the rugs, she felt, was the earth. One could take root here, feel as one with the house and garden, take nourishment from them like the plants.
She had chosen it too because its symmetrical facade covered by a trellis overrun by ivy showed twelve window faces. But one shutter was closed and corresponded to no room. During some transformation of the house it had been walled up.