But she had made an important discovery.
This bond with Rango, this patience with his violent temper, this tacit fraternity of her gentleness and his roughness, this collaboration of light and shadow, this responsibility for Rango which she felt, her compulsion to rescue him from the consequences of his blind rages, were because Rango lived out for her this self she had buried in her childhood. All that she had denied and repressed: chaos, disorder, caprice, destruction.
The reason for her indulgence; everyone marveled (how could you bear his jealousy, his angers?) at the way he destroyed what she created so that each day she must begin anew: to understand, to order, to reconstruct, to mend; the reason for her acceptance of the troubles caused by his blindness was that Rango was nature, uncontrolled, and that the day she had buried her own laziness, her own jealousy, her own chaos, these atrophied selves awaited liberation and began to breathe through Rango’s acts. For this complicity in the dark she must share the consequences with him.
The realm she had tried to skip: darkness, confusion, violence, destruction, erupted secretly through relationship with Rango. The burden was placed on his shoulders. She must therefore share the torments, too. She had not annihilated her natural self; it reasserted itself in Rango. And she was his accomplice.
The dark-faced Rango who opened the door of his studio below street level was not the joyous carefree guitarist Djuna had first seen at the party, nor was it the fervent Rango of the nights at the barge, nor was it the oscillating Rango of the cafe, the ironic raconteur, the reckless adventurer. It was another Rango she did not know.
In the dark hallway his body appeared silhouetted, his high forehead, the fall of his hair, his bow, full of nobility, grandeur. He bowed gravely in the narrow hallway as if this cavernous dwelling were his castle, he the seigneur and she a visitor of distinction. He emerged prouder, taller, more silent, too, out of poverty and barrenness, since they were of his own choice. If he had not been a rebel, he would be greeting her at the vast entrance of his ranch.
Down the stairs into darkness. Her hand touched the walls hesitantly to guide herself, but the walls had such a rough surface and seemed to be sticky to the touch so that she withdrew it and Rango explained: “We had a fire here once. I set fire to the apartment when I fell asleep while smoking. The landlord never repaired the damage as we haven’t paid rent for six months.”
A faint odor of dampness rose from the studio below, which was the familiar odor of poor studios in Paris. It was compounded of fog, of the ancient city breathing its fetid breath through cellar floors; it was the odor of stagnation, of clothes not often washed, of curtains gathering mildew.
She hesitated again until she saw the skylight windows above her head; but they were covered with soot and let in a dim northern light.
Rango then stood aside, and Djuna saw Zora lying in bed.
Her black hair was uncombed and straggled around her parchment-colored skin. She had no Indian blood, and her face was almost a direct contrast to Rango’s. She had heavy, pronounced features, a wide full mouth, all cast in length, in sadness, a defeated pull downward which only changed when she raised her eyelids; then the eyes had in them an unexpected shrewdness which Rango did not have.
She was wearing one of Rango’s shirts, and over that a kimono which had been dyed black. The red and black squares of the shirt’s colors showed at the neck and wrists. The stripes once yellow still showed through the black dye of the kimono.
On her feet she wore a pair of Rango’s big socks filled with cotton wool at the toes, which seemed like disproportionate clown’s feet on her small body.
Her shoulders were slightly hunched, and she smiled the smile of the hunchback, of a cripple. The arching of her shoulders gave her an air of having shrunk herself together to occupy a small space. It was the arch of fear.
Even before her illness, Djuna felt, she could never have been handsome but had a strength of character which must have been arresting. Yet her hands were childish and clasped things without firmness. And in the mouth there was the same lack of control. Her voice, too, was childish.
The studio was now half in darkness, and the oil lamp which Rango brought cast long shadows.
The mist of dampness in the room seemed like the breath of the buried, making the walls weep, detaching the wallpaper in long wilted strips. The sweat of centuries of melancholic living, the dampness of roots and cemeteries, the moisture of agony and death seeping through the walls seemed appropriate to Zora’s skin from which all glow and life had withdrawn.
Djuna was moved by Zora’s smile and plaintive voice. Zora was saying: “The other day I went to church and prayed desperately that someone should save us, and now you are here. Rango is always bewildered, and does nothing.” Then she turned tango: “Bring me my sewing box.”
Rango brought her a tin cracker box which contained needles, threads, and buttons in boxes labeled with medicine names: injections, drops, pills.
The material Zora took up to sew looked like a rag. Her small hands smoothed it down mechanically, yet the more she smoothed it down the more it wilted in her hands, as if her touch were too anxious, too compressing, as if she transmitted to objects some obnoxious withering breath from her sick flesh.
And when she began to sew she sewed with small stitches, closely overlapping, so closely that it was as if she were strangling the last breath of color and life in the rag, as if she were sewing it to the point of suffocation.
As they talked she completed the square she had already begun, and then Djuna watched her rip apart her labor and quietly begin again.
“Djuna, I don’t know if Rango told you, but Rango and I are like brother and sister. Our physical life…was over years ago. It was never very important. I knew that sooner or later he would love another woman, and I am glad it’s you because you’re kind, and you will not take him away from me. I need him.”
“I hope we can be…kind to each other, Zora. It’s a difficult situation.”
“Rango told me that you never tried, or even mentioned, his leaving me. How could I not like you? You saved my life. When you came I was about to die for lack of care and food. I don’t love Rango as a man. To me he is a child. He has done me so much harm. He just likes to drink, and talk, and be with friends. If you love him, I am glad, because of the kind of woman you are, because you are full of quality.”
“You’re very generous, Zora.”
Zora leaned over to whisper now: “Rango is mad, you know. He may not seem so to you because he is leaning on you. But if it were not for you I would be out in the street, homeless. We’ve often been homeless, and I’d be sitting on my valises, out on the sidewalk, and Rango just waving his arms and helpless, never knowing what to do. He lets everything terrible happen, and then he says: ‘It’s destiny.’ With his cigarette he set fire to our apartment. He was nearly burnt to death.”
There was a book lying at the foot of her bed, and Djuna opened it while Zora was carefully unstitching all she had sewed before.
“It’s a book about illness,” said Zora. “I love to read about illness. I go to the library and look up descriptions of the symptoms I have. I’ve marked all the pages which apply to me. Just look at all these markings. Sometimes I think I have all the sicknesses one can have!” She laughed. Then looking at Djuna plaintively, almost pleadingly, she said: “All my hair is falling out.”
When Djuna left that evening, Rango and she were no longer man and woman in a chamber of isolated love for each other. They were suddenly a trinity, with Zora’s inexorable needs conducting all their movements, directing their time together, dictating the hours of separation.