“But unfaithful to what, Rango? She was not your wife, she was your sick child, long before I came. It was understood between you that your relationship was fraternal, that sooner or later you would need a woman’s love…”
“Zora didn’t mind when I had just a desire for a woman, a passing desire… But I gave you more than that. That’s what Zora cannot accept.”
“But Rango, she told me that she was happy and secure with our relationship, because she felt protected by both of us, she knew I would not take you away from her, she said she had gained two loves and lost nothing…”
“One can say such things, and yet feel betrayed, feel hurt…”
Rango convinced Djuna that their love must be atoned for. Even if Zora had always been ill, even as a child, even though their love protected her, yet they must atone…atone…atone. Never enough devotion could make up for what pain they caused her… Not enough to rise early in the morning to market for tempting foods for Zora, never enough to dress her, to answer her every whim, to surrender Rango over and over again.
Djuna fell into an overwhelming, blind, stupefying devotion to Zora. She became the sleeping dreamer seeking nothing but one brief moment of fiery joy with Rango, and then atoning for it the rest of the time.
Rango would ring her bell and call her out during the night to watch Zora while he went for medicines.
The sleeping dreamer Djuna walked up a muddy hill on a rainy afternoon to the hospital bringing Zora her winter coat, so divested and stripped of her possessions that her father was beginning to notice it and demanded explanations: “Where is your coat? Why aren’t you wearing stockings? You’re beginning to dress like a tramp recently. Is this the influence of your new friends? Who are you associating with?”
Rango’s grateful kisses over her eyelids were the blinding, drugging hypnosis, and she let her father believe that she was “fancying herself a bohemian now,” that she was playing at being poor.
That afternoon at the hospital Rango left her alone with Zora. The moment he left the room Zora said: “Reach for that bottle on the shelf. It’s a disinfectant. Pour some here in the bassinet. The nurse is stingy with it. She measures only a few drops. She doesn’t want me to get well. She’s saving the stuff. And I know more of it would cure me.”
“But Zora, this stuff is strong. It will burn your skin. You can’t use a lot of it. The nurse isn’t trying to economize.”
An expression of utter maliciousness came into Zora’s eyes: “You want me to die, don’t you? So you can live with Rango. That’s why you won’t give me the medicine.”
Djuna gave her the bottle and watched Zora pouring the strong liquid in the bassinet. She would burn her skin, but she would at least believe that Djuna was on her side.
Rango’s long oriental eyes which opened and closed like a cat’s, his oblique dark eyes, would soon close hers upon reality, upon all reasoning.
He did not observe the coincidences as Djuna did unconsciously. Whenever Djuna went away for a few days Zora would be moderately ill. Whenever Djuna returned there would be an aggravation, and thus Djuna and Rango could not meet that evening.
Djuna instinctively knew this to be so accurate and inevitable that she would prepare herself for it. On her way back from a trip she would say to herself: “Don’t get exalted at the idea of seeing Rango, for surely Zora will get very ill when you come back and Rango will not be free…”
And then because Rango could not explode or revolt against an illness (which he thought genuine and inevitable), could not see how its developments obeyed Zora’s destructive will, he revolted at other situations, unjustly, inaccurately. Djuna learned to detect the origin of the revolt, to know it was an aborted revolt at home which he diverted and brought to other scenes or circumstances. He exploded wildly over politics, he attacked the illnesses of other womn, he incited other husbands to revolt and would seek them out and take them to the cafe almost by force, just as Djuna indulged now and then in a tirade against helpless or childish women in general because she did not dare to speak openly against Zora’s childishness.
From so many scenes at home Rango escaped to Djuna as a refuge. He would place the whole weight of his head and arms on her knees, and if it happened that Djuna was tired, she did not reveal it for fear of overburdening a man too heavily burdened already. She disguised her own needs, her weaknesses, her handicaps, her own fears or troubles. She concealed them all from him. Thus grew in his mind an image of her infinite energy, infinite power to overcome obstacles. Any flaw in this irritated him like a failed promise. He needed her strength.
Because he seemed to love Zora for her weakness, to be so indulgent toward her inadequacies, her fumbling inability to open a door, incapacity to buy a stamp and mail a letter, to visit a friend alone, Djuna felt a deep unbalance, a deep injustice taking place. For the extreme childishness of Zora robbed her relation to Rango of all its naturalness. It set the two women at opposite poles, not as rivals, but as opposites, destruction against construction, weakness against strength, taking against giving.
To break the hypnosis came certain shocks, which Djuna was losing her power to interpret.
When she had gradually passed to Zora most of her belongings, all of her jewelry—to such an extreme that she had to surrender going to certain places and seeing certain friends where she could not appear dressed as carelessly as she was—she arrived unexpectedly at Zora’s and found her sitting among six opened trunks.
“I’m working on a costume for a new dance,” said Zora. The trunks overflowed with clothes. Not theatre costumes only, but coats, dresses, stockings, underwear, shoes.
Djuna looked bewildered and Zora began to show her all that the trunks contained, explaining: “I bought all this when things were going well for me in New York.”
“But you could wear them now!”
“Yes, I could, but they look too nice. I just like to keep them and look at them now and then.”
And all the time she had been wearing torn shoes, mended stockings, dresses too light for winter, when not wearing all that she had extracted from Djuna.
This discovery stunned Djuna. It proved what she had felt all the time obscurely, that Zora’s dramatization of the poor, the cold, the scantily dressed, the pathetic woman, was a voluntary role which suited her deepest convenience. That this drabness, which constantly aroused Rango’s pity, was deliberate, that, at any moment, she could have been better dressed than Djuna.
That night Djuna could not refrain from asking Rango: “Did you know when I gave up my fur coat for Zora to wear this winter that she had one in her trunk all the time?”
“Yes,” said Rango. “Zora has a lot of the gypsy you could say. Gypsies always keep their finery for certain occasions, and like to look at it now and then, but seldom wear it.”
“Am I going mad?” asked Djuna of herself. “Or is Rango as mad as Zora? He is not aware of the absurdity, the cruelty of this. He thinks it’s natural that I should dispossess myself for a woman obsessed with the desire to arouse pity.”
But as this incident threatened her faith in Rango, she soon closed her eyes again.
The actor does not suffer any cramps because he knows the role he plays he will be able to discard at some stated time, and walk free again to be himself.
But Djuna’s role in life seemed inescapable. She was doomed to be devoted to a cause she did not believe in. Zora would never get well; Rango would never be free. She suffered from pains which were like cramps, because in all these unnatural positions she took, these contortions of giving, of surrender, there was a strain from the knowledge that she could never, as long as she loved Rango, ever be free and herself again.
Out of physical exhaustion she would occasionally run away.