Rango had placed Zora under Djuna’s protection and her love for Rango had to extend in magnitude to include Zora.
Zora talked to Djuna. If it was Djuna who had planned to come to Zora and show the most exemplary devotion, she found herself merely passive before the friendliness of Zora.
It was Zora who talked, with her eyes upon her sewing and unsewing. “Rango is a changed man, and I’m so happy, Djuna. He is kinder to me. He was very unhappy before and he took it out on me. A man cannot live without love and Rango was not easy to satisfy. All the women wanted him, but he would see them once perhaps and come back dejected, and refuse to see them again. He always found something wrong with them. With you he is content. And I am happy because I knew this had to happen sometime, but I’m happy it’s you because I trust you. I used to fear some woman coming and taking him where I would never see him again. And I know you wouldn’t do that.”
Djuna thought: “I love Rango so much that I want to share his burdens, love and serve what he loves and serves, share his conviction that Zora is an innocent victim of life, worthy of all sacrifices.”
This was for both Rango and Djuna the atonement for the marvelous hours in the barge. All great flights away from life land one in such places of atonement as this room, with Zora sewing rags and talking about dandruff, about ovarian insufficiency, about gastritis, about thyroid and neuritis.
Djuna had brought her a colorful Indian-print dress and Zora had dyed it black. And now she was reshaping it and it looked worn and dismal already. She wore a shawl pinned with a brooch which had once held stones in its clasps and was now empty, thrusting bare silver branches out like the very symbol of denudation. She wore two overcoats sewn together, the inner one showing at the edges.
While they sat sewing together, Zora lamented over Rango: “Why must he always live with so many people around him?”
Knowing that Rango liked to spend hours and hours alone with her, Djuna feared to say: “Perhaps he is just seeking warmth and forgetfulness, running away from illness and darkness.”
When Rango was with her he seemed dominating, full of dignity and pride. When he entered Zora’s room he seemed to shrink. When he first entered there was a copper glow in his face; after a moment the glow vanished.
“Why do men live in shoals?” persisted Zora.
Djuna looked at Rango lighting the fire, warming water, starting to cook. There was something so discouraged in the pose of his body, expressing agreement with Zora’s enumeration of his faults, so diminished, which Djuna could not bear to witness.
Zora was in the hospital.
Djuna was cooking for Rango now, edges.
As Djuna passed through the various rooms to find Zora she saw a woman sitting up in bed combing her hair and tying a blue ribbon around it. Her face was utterly wasted, and yet she had powdered it, and rouged her lips, and there was on it not only the smile of a woman dying but also the smile of a woman who wanted to die with grace, deploying her last flare of feminine coquetry for her interview with death.
Djuna was moved by this courage, the courage to meet death with one’s hair combed, and this gentle smile issuing from centuries of conviction that a woman must be pleasing to all eyes, even to the eyes of death.
When she reached Zora’s bed she was faced with the very opposite, an utter absence of courage, although Zora was less ill than the other woman.
“The soup is not thin enough,” said Zora. “It should have been strained longer.” And she laid it aside and shook her head while Djuna and Rango pleaded that she should eat it anyway for the sake of gaining strength.
Her refusal to eat caused Rango anxiety, and Zora watched this anxiety on his face and savored it.
He had brought her a special bread, but it was not the one she wanted.
Djuna had brought her some liver concentrate in glass containers. Zora looked at them and said: “They are not good. They’re too dark. I’m sure they’re not fresh and they will poison me.”
“But Zora, the date is printed on the box, the drugstore can’t sell them when they’re old.”
“They’re very old, I can see it. Rango, I want you to get me some others at La Muette drugstore.”
La Muette was one hour away. Rango left on his errand and Djuna took the medicine away.
When they met in the evening Rango said: “Give me the liver medicine. I’ll take it back to the drugstore.”
They walked to the drugstore together. The druggist was incensed and pointed to the recent date on the box.
What amazed Djuna was not that Zora should give way to a sick woman’s whims, but that Rango should be so utterly convinced of their rationality.
The druggist would not take it back.
Rango was angry and tumultuous, but Djuna was rebelling against Rango’s blindness and when they returned to the houseboat she opened one of the containers and before Rango’s eyes she swallowed it.
“What are you doing?” asked Rango with amazement. “Showing you that the medicine is fresh.”
“You believe the druggist and not Zora?” he said angrily.
“And you believe in a sick person’s whim,” she said.
Zora was always talking about her future death. She began all her conversations with: “When I die…” Rango was maintained in a state of panic, fearing her death, and lived each day accordingly: “Zora is in grave danger of death,” he would say, to excuse her demands upon his time.
At first Djuna was alarmed by Zora’s behavior, and shared Rango’s anxieties. Her gestures were so vehement, so magnified, that Djuna believed they might be those of a dying woman. But as these gestures repeated themselves day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, Djuna lost her fear of Zora’s death.
When Zora said: “I have a burning sensation in my stomach,” she made the gestures of a person writhing in a brasier of flames.
At the hospital, where Djuna sometimes accompanied her, the nurses and doctors no longer listened to her. Djuna caught glances of irony in the doctor’s eyes.
Zora’s gestures to describe her troubles became for Djuna a special theatre of exaggeration, which at first caused terror, and then numbed the senses.
It was like the Grand Guignol, where knowing every scene was overacted to create horror finally created detachment and laughter.
But what helped Djuna to overcome her terror was something else which happened that winter: there was an epidemic of throat infection which swept Paris and which Djuna caught.
It was painful but came without fever, and there was no need to stay in bed.
That same day Rango rushed to the barge, distressed and vehement. He could not stay with Djuna because Zora was terribly ill. “You might come back with me, if you wish. Zora has a heart attack, an inflamed throat, and she’s suffocating.”
When they arrived, the doctor was there examining Zora’s throat. Zora lay back pale and rigid, as if her last hour had come. Her gestures, her hands upon her throat, her strained face were a representation of strangulation.
The doctor straightened up and said: “Just the same throat infection everybody has just now. You don’t have to stay in bed. Just keep warm, and eat soups only.”
And Djuna, with the same throat trouble, was out with Rango.
The first year Djuna had suffered from Rango’s panic. The second year from pity; the third year detachment and wisdom came. But Rango’s anxiety never diminished.
Djuna awakened one morning and asked herself: “Do I love this woman who magnifies her illness a thousand times, unconcerned with curing it, but savoring its effect on others? Why does Zora contort herself in a more than life-size pain for all the world to see and hear?”