Many times Djuna had been baffled by the fact that when someone said to Zora, “You look better, so much better,” Zora was not pleased. A frown would come between her eyes, an expression of distress.
At the hospital one day, the doctor did not linger very long at Zora’s bedside, and when he walked away Djuna laid her hand on his arm: “Please tell me what’s the matter with my friend?”
“She’s a pathological case,” he said.
Djuna saw the second face of Zora.
It was an expression she had seen before and could not place. And then she remembered.
It was the expression upon the face of professional beggars.
Her enumeration of the troubles she had endured that day was like the plaintive incantation too perfectly molded by time and repetition.
Under the tone of sorrow there was a practice in the tone of sorrow.
Yet Djuna felt ashamed to doubt the sincerity of Zora’s complaints, as one is ashamed to doubt a beggar’s poverty. Yet she felt, as one does occasionally before a beggar, that a pain too often studied for public exposure had become a pain necessary to the beggar, his means of livelihood, his claim to existence, to protection. If he were deprived of it, he would be deprived of his right to compassion.
It was as if true compassion should be reserved for troubles not exploited, but of recent occurrence and deeply felt. The poverty of the professional lamenter was an asset rather than a tragedy.
Djuna wanted to forget her intuition, in favor of the tradition which dictated that a beggar’s needs cannot be judged, because there is a noblesse oblige which dictates: his cup is empty and yours is full, therefore there is only one action possible; and even if an investigation revealed the beggar not to be blind and to have amassed a fortune under his pallet, even then, such hesitations before an empty cup are so distressing that the role of the believer is easier, easier to be deceived than to doubt…
Djuna was sometimes disconcerted by the shrewd look in Zora’s eyes while she detailed her day’s hardships; as startled to catch this expression as to see a blind man who was crossing the street alone and walking into danger—causing you a sharp compassion—to see him suddenly turn upon you eyes fully aware of the impending danger.
But Djuna wanted to believe, because Rango believed. She discarded this first glimpse of Zora’s second face as people often discard first intuitions until they reach the end of a friendship, the end of a love, and then this long-buried first impression reappears only to prove that the animal senses in human beings warning them clearly of dangers, of traps, may be accurate but are often discarded in favor of a blind compulsion in the opposite direction to that of self-preservation. Proving that huma beings have a sense of danger but that some other desire, some other compulsion, lures and draws them precisely toward these traps, toward self-destruction.
Djuna felt now like a puppet. She felt the need to give Rango a perpetually healthy, perpetually spirited woman because at home he had a perpetually sick, depressed wife. Rango’s needs set the tone, mood, and activities of her days. She obeyed the strings blindly. She allowed Rango’s anxieties to infect her, merely so he would not be alone with his burden. The strings were in Zora’s hands. The hierarchy was firmly established: if Zora had a cold, a headache, Rango must stay at home (even if this cold were caused by Zora washing her hair in the middle of a winter day and going out with her hair still wet). It was forbidden to rebel or question the origin of the trouble, or to suggest that Zora might consider others, consider preventing these troubles.
Zora could not cook, could not shop, could not clean, she could not be alone at night. If friends came to see her, Rango must be at home to save her pride.
When Djuna had first known Rango he spent most of his nights out at the cafe. Often he did not come home till dawn, and oftener still he did not come home at all when he was spending a night with one of his mistresses.
At first Zora had said: “I’m so glad to know Rango is not drinking, that he is with you instead of at the cafe.”
But after awhile she developed new fears. Rango said: “Poor Zora, she is so afraid at night. The other evening someone knocked at her door for a long time and just stood there waiting. She was so frightened that the man would come in and rape her that she piled all the furniture in front of the door and did not sleep all night.”
Rango spent every other night at the barge, and then only twice a week as Zora’s complaints increased, and then one night a week.
And on that one night Zora came and knocked on the door.
She was in pain, she said. Rango rushed out and took her home. She was convulsed with pains. The doctor was called, and could not find the cause. Only at dawn did she confess: she had heard that cleaning fluid was good for the stomach, so she had drunk a glass of it.
Rango left Djuna to watch over Zora for a while he went to buy the medicines which the doctor advised.
Djuna tended Zora, and Zora smiled at her innocently. Could Zora be so unaware of the consequences of her acts?
Whenever they were alone together they fell naturally into a sincere relationship. Djuna’s compassion would once more be aroused and Zora would nestle into it securely. At these moments Djuna believed a relationship was being constructed to which Zora would be loyal, one of mutual giving. It was only later that Djuna would discover what Zora had achieved with her behavior, and that would always be, in the end, something to harm and stifle the relationship between Rango and Djuna.
But it was all so subtly done that Djuna could never detect it. When Zora talked about Rango, it seemed at first a natural harmless sick woman’s complaining; it seemed not as if she wanted to harm Rango in Djuna’s eyes, but as if she wanted Djuna’s sympathy for her difficult life with Rango. It was only later when alone that Djuna became aware of how much dissension and doubt Zora had managed to insert in her monotonous lamentations against Rango.
Djuna would prepare herself for these talks which hurt her by thinking: “She is talking about another Rango, not the one I know. The Rango I love is different. This is the Rango that was born of his life with Zora. She is responsible for what he was with her.”
This night, calmed by Djuna’s ministrations, Zora began to talk: “You love Rango in such a different way than I do. I never loved Rango physically. I never loved any man physically. I don’t know what it is to respond to a man… You know, sometimes when I get these crying spells, I think to myself: maybe it’s because I can’t melt physically. I don’t feel anything, and so crying is a relief, I cry instead…”
Djuna was moved by this, and then appalled. Rango did not know about Zora’s coldness. Was this the secret of her destructiveness toward him?
She wished she did not have to become an intimate part of their lives together. She wished she could escape the clutch of Zora’s dependence.
She was silent. Zora was beginning her usual long, monotonous recital of Rango’s faults: It was Rango who had made her ill. It was Rango who had ruined her career. Rango was to blame for everything.
Zora blamed Rango, and Rango blamed the world. Both of them were equally blind in the knowledge of their own character and responsibilities. Djuna did not know yet, but sensed the cause of their downfall.
Djuna rebelled against Rango’s blind subservience to Zora’s helplessness, and yet she found herself in the same position: unable to avoid the slavery.
Zora never asked a favor. She demanded, and then proceeded to criticize how the orders were carried out, with a sense of her right to be served and no acknowledgment or lightest form of thankfulness.
Zora was now talking about her career as a dancer: “I was the first to present Guatemalan dances to Paris audiences. I was very successful, so much so that an agent came from New York and arranged a tour for me. I made money, I made many friends. But there was a woman in the show traveling with me who wanted to kill me.”