“Oh, no, Zora.”
“Yes, for no reason at all. She invited me to lunch with her every day and gave me tomatoes and eggs. They made me terribly ill. They were poisoned.”
“Perhaps they weren’t poisoned; perhaps eggs and tomatoes don’t agree with you.”
“She did it on purpose, I tell you. I was too much of a success.”
(That’s madness, thought Djuna. If only Rango would realize this, we could live in peace. If he would detach himself and admit: she is very ill, she is unbalanced. We could take care of her but not let her destroy our life together. But Rango sees everything as distortedly as she does. If only he would see. It would save us all.)
“Zora, what I can’t understand was why, if you were so successful as a dancer, if you reached the heights there, and could travel, and do all you wanted…what happened? What caused the downfall in your life? Was it your health?”
Zora hesitated. Djuna was painfully tense, awaiting an answer to this question, feeling that if Zora answered it their three lives would be altered.
But Zora never answered direct questions.
Djuna regretted having used the word downfall. Downfall was the wrong word for Zora and Rango, since all their troubles were caused by an evil world, came from a hostile aggression from the world.
Zora sank into apathy. Would she deviate as Rango did, elude, answer so elliptically that the question would be lost in a maze of useless vagaries.
She reopened her eyes and began her recitation where she had left off: “In New York I stopped the show. The agent came to see me with a long contract. I could make as much money as I wanted to. I had fur coats and beautiful evening dresses, I could travel…”
“And then?”
“Then I left everything and went home to Guatemala.”
“Home to Guatemala?”
Zora laughed, irrepressibly, hysterically, for such a long time that Djuna was frightened. A spasm of cough stopped her. “You should have seen the face of the agent, when I didn’t sign the contract. Everybody’s face. I enjoyed that. I enjoyed their faces more than I enjoyed the money. I left them all just like that and went home. I wanted to see Guatemala again. I laughed all the way, thinking of their faces when I quit.”
“Were you sick then?”
“I was always sick, from childhood. But it wasn’t that. I’m independent. “
Djuna remembered Rango telling her the story of a friend who had worked to obtain an engagement for Zora in Paris, a contract to dance at a private house. He had promised to meet this friend at the cafe. “I came five hours late, and she was in a state.” Whenever he told this story he laughed. The idea of this friend waiting, foaming and furious, sitting at the cafe, aroused his humor.
“I stayed six months in Guatemala. When the money was gone I returned to New York. But nobody would sign me up. They told each other about the broken contract…”
Rango arrived with the medicine. Zora refused to take it. Bismuth would calm her pain and the burn, but she refused to take it. She turned her face to the wall and fell asleep, holding Djuna and Rango’s hand, both enchained to her caprices.
Djuna’s head was bowed. Rango said: “You must be exhausted. You’d better go home. Sometimes I think…” Djuna raised imploring eyes to his face, wildly hoping that they would be united by the common knowledge that Zora was a sick, unstable child who needed care but who could not be allowed to direct, to infect their lives with her destructiveness.
Rango looked at her, his eyes not seeing what she saw. “Sometimes I think you’re right about Zora. She does foolish things…” And that was all.
He walked to the door with her… She looked into the bleak and empty street. It was just before dawn. She needed warmth, sleep. She needed to be as blind as Rango was, to continue living this way. The knowledge she had was useless. It only added to her burden, the knowing that so much effort, care, devotion were being utterly wasted, that Zora would never be well, that it was wrong to devote two lives to one twisted human being… This knowledge estranged her from Rango, whose blind faith she could not share. It burdened her, isolated her. Tonight, through fatigue, she wanted so much to lay her head on Rango’s shoulder, to fall asleep in his arms, but there was already another head on his shoulder, a heavy burden.
As if in fear that Djuna should ask him to come with her, he said: “She cannot be left alone.”
Djuna was silent. She could not divulge what she knew.
When she did protest against the excessive demands and whims of Zora, even gently, Rango would say: “I am between two fires, so you must help me.”
To help him meant to yield to Zora, knowing that she would in the end destroy their relationship.
Every day Djuna suppressed her knowledge, her lucidity; Rango would have considered them an attack upon a defenseless Zora.
Noblesse oblige enforced silence, and all her awareness of the destruction being wreaked upon their relationship—when Zora was the greatest beneficiary of this relationship—only served to increase her suffering.
Zora had mysteriously won all the battles; Rango and Djuna could never spend a whole night together.
What corrodes a love are the secrets.
This doubt of Zora’s sanity which she dared not word to Rango, which made every sacrifice futile, created a fissure in the closeness to Rango. A simple, detached understanding of this would have made Rango less enslaved, less anxious, and would have brought Djuna and Rango closer together, whereas his loyalty to all the irrational demands of Zora, her distorted interpretation of his acts as well as Djuna’s, was a constant irritant to Djuna’s intelligence and awareness.
The silence with which she accomplished her lies now became a gradual isolation in her emotions.
It was strange to be cooking, to be running errands, to be searching for new doctors, to be buying clothes, to be furnishing a new room for Zora, while knowing that Zora was working against them all and would never get well because her illness was her best treasure, was her weapon of power over them.
But Rango needed desperately to believe. He believed that every new medicine, every new doctor would restore her health.
Djuna felt now as she had as a child, when she had repudiated her religious dogmas but must continue to attend mass, rituals, kneel in prayer, to please her mother.
Any departure from what she believed he considered a betrayal of her love.
At every turn Zora defeated this battle for health. When she got a new room in the sun, she kept the blinds down and shut out air and light. When they went to the beach together up the river, her bathing suit, given to her by Djuna, was not ready. She had ripped it apart to improve its shape. When they went to the park she wore too light a dress and caught cold. When they went to a restaurant she ate the food she knew would harm her, and predicted that the next day she would be in bed all day.
She made pale attempts to take up her dancing again, but never when alone, only when Djuna and Rango were there to witness her pathetic attempts, and when the exertion would cause her heart to beat faster she would say to Rango: “Put your hand here. See how badly my heart goes when I try to work again.”
At times Djuna’s detachment, her self-protective numbness would be annihilated by Rango, as when he said once: “We are killing her.”
“We are killing her?” echoed Djuna, bewildered and shocked.
“Yes, she said once that it was my unfaithfulness which made her ill.”