“Today I have not been to the cemetery, Rango!”
“When you are here I know you are mine. But when you go up those little stairs, out of the barge, walking in your quick quick way, you enter another world, and you are no longer mine.”
“But you, too, Rango, when you climb those stairs, you enter another world, and you are no longer mine. You belong to Zora then, to your friends, to the cafe, to politics.”
(Why is he so quick to cry treachery? No two caresses ever resemble each other. Every lover holds a new body until he fills it with his essence, and no two essences are the same, and no flavor is ever repeated…)
“I love your ears, Djuna. They are small and delicate. All my life I dreamed of ears like yours.”
“And looking for ears you found me!”
He laughed with all of himself, his eyes closing like a cat’s, both lids meeting. His laughter made his high cheekbone even fuller, and he looked at times like a very noble lion.
“I want to become someone in the world. We’re living on top of a volcano. You may need my strength. I want to be able to take care of you.”
“Rango, I understand your life. You have a great force in you, but there is something impeding you, blocking you. What is it? This great explosive force in you, it is all wasted. You pretend to be indifferent, nonchalant, reckless, but I feel you care deep down. Sometimes you look like Peter the Great, when he was building a city on a swamp, rescuing the weak, charging in battle. Why do you drown the dynamite in you in wine? Why are you so afraid to create? Why do you put so many obstacles in your own way? You drown your strength, you waste it. You should be constructing…”
She kissed him, seeking and searching to understand him, to kiss the secret Rango so that it would rise to the surface, become visible and accessible.
And then he revealed the secret of his behavior to her in words which made her heart contract: “It’s useless, Djuna. Zora and I are victims of fatality. Everything I’ve tried has failed. I have bad luck. Everyone has harmed me, from my family on, friends, everyone. Everything has become twisted, and useless.”
“But Rango, I don’t believe in fatality. There is an inner pattern of character which you cascover and you can alter. It’s only the romantic who believes we are victims of a destiny. And you always talk against the romantic.”
Rango shook his head vehemently, impatiently. “You can’t tamper with nature. One just is. Nature cannot be controlled. One is born with a certain character and if that is one’s fate, as you say, well, there is nothing to be done. Character cannot be changed.”
He had those instinctive illuminations, flashes of intuition, but they were intermittent, like lightning in a stormy sky, and then in between he would go blind again.
The goodness which at times shone so brilliantly in him was a goodness without insight, too; he was not even aware of the changes from goodness to anger, and could not conjure any understanding against his violent outbursts.
Djuna feared those changes. His face at times beautiful, human, and near, at others twisted, cruel, and bitter. She wanted to know what caused the changes, to avert the havoc they caused, but he eluded all efforts at understanding.
She wished she had never told him anything about her past.
She remembered what incited her to talk. It was during the early part of the relationship, when one night he had leaned over and whispered: “You are an angel. I can’t believe you can be taken like a woman.” And he had hesitated for an instant to embrace her.
She had rushed to disprove it, eagerly denying it. She had as great a fear of being told that she was an angel as other women had of their demon being exposed. She felt it was not true, that she had a demon in her as everyone had, but that she controlled it rigidly, never allowing it to cause harm.
She also had a fear that this image of the angel would eclipse the woman in her who wanted an earthy bond. An angel to her was the least desirable of bedfellows!
To talk about her past had been her way to say: “I am a woman, not an angel.”
“A sensual angel,” then he conceded. But what he registered was her obedience to her impulses, her capacity for love, her gift of herself, on which to base henceforth his doubts of her fidelity.
“And you’re Vesuvius,” she said laughing. “Whenever I talk about understanding, mastering, changing, you get as angry as an earthquake. You have no faith that destiny can be changed.”
“The Mayan Indian is not a mystic, he is a pantheist. The earth is his mother. He has only one word for both mother and earth. When an Indian died they put real food in his tomb, and they kept feeding him.”
“A symbolical food does not taste as good as real food!”
(It is because he is of the earth that he is jealous and possessive. His angers are of the earth. His massive body is of the earth. His knees are of iron, so strong from pressing against the flanks of wild horses. His body has he flavors of the earth: spices, ginger, chutney, musk, pimiento, wine, opium. He has the smooth neck of a statue, a Spanish arrogance of the head, an Indian submission, too. He has the awkward grace of an animal. His hands and feet are more like paws. When he catches a fleeing cat he is swifter than the cat. He squats like an Indian and then leaps on powerful legs. I love the way his high cheekbones swell with laughter. Asleep he shows the luxuriant charcoal eyelashes of a woman. The nose so round and jovial; everything powerful and sensual except his mouth. His mouth is small and timid.)
What Djuna believed was that like a volcano his fire and strength would erupt and bring freedom, to him and to her. She believed the fire in him would burn all the chains which bound him. But fire too must have direction. His fire was blind. But she was not blind. She would help him.
In spite of his physical vitality, he was helpless, he was bound and tangled. He could set fire to a room and destroy, but he could not build as yet. He was bound and blind as nature is. His hands could break what he held out of strength, a strength he could not measure, but he could not build. His inner chaos was the chain around his body, his conviction that one was born a slave of one’s nature, to be led inevitably to destruction by one’s blind impulses.
“What do you want your life to be?”
“A revolution every day.”
“Why, Rango?”
“I love violence. I want to serve ideas with my body.”
“Men die every day for ideas which betray them, for leaders who betray them, for false ideals.”
“But love betrays, too,” said Rango. “I have no faith.”
(Oh, god, thought Djuna, will I have the strength to win this battle against destruction, this private battle for a human love?)
“I need independence,” said Rango, “as a wild horse needs it. I can’t harness myself to anything. I can’t accept any discipline. Discipline discourages me.”
Even asleep his body was restless, heavy, feverish. He threw off all the blankets, lay naked, and by morning the bed seemed like a battlefield. So many combats he had waged within his dreams; so tumultuous a life even in sleep.
Chaos all around him, his clothes always torn, his books soiled, his papers lost. His personal belongings, of which he remembered an object now and then which he missed, wanted to show Djuna, were scattered all over the world, in rooming-house cellars where they were kept as hostages for unpaid rent.
All the little flames burning in him at once, except the wise one of the holy ghost.
It saddened Djuna that Rango was so eager to go to war, to fight for his ideas, to die for them. It seemed to her that he was ready to live and die for emotional errors as women did, but that like most men he did not call them emotional errors; he called them history, philosophy, metaphysics, science. Her feminine self was sad and smiled, too, at this game of endowing personal and emotional beliefs with the dignity of impersonal names. She smiled at this as men smile at women’s enlargement of personal tragedies to a status men do not believe applicable to personal lives.