That is what happened now. And his timidity disarmed her anger.
She opened the door. And Rango stayed with her and they sought closeness again, as if to resolder all that his violence broke.
“You’re like Heathcliff, Rango, and one day everything will break.”
He had an incurable jealousy of her friends, because to him friends were the accomplices in the life she led outside of his precincts. They were the possible rivals, the witnesses, and perhaps the instigators to unfaithfulness. They were the ones secretly conniving to separate them.
But graver still was his jealousy of the friends who reflected an aspect of Djuna not included in her relationship to Rango, or which revealed aspects of Djuna not encompassed in the love, an unknown Djuna which she could not give to Rango. And this was a playful, a light, a peace-loving Djuna, the one who delighted in harmony, not in violence, the one who found outside of passion luminous moods and regions unknown to Rango. Or still the Djuna who believed understanding could be reached by effort, by an examination of one’s behavior, and that destiny could be reshaped, one’s twisted course redirected with lucidity.
She attracted those who knew how to escape the realm of sorrow by fantasy. Other extensions of Paul appeared, and one in particular of whom Rango was as jealous as if he had been a reincarnation of Paul. Though he knew it was an innocent friendship, still he stormed around it. He knew the boy could give Djuna a climate which his violence and intensity destroyed.
It was her old quest for a paradise again, a region outside of sorrow.
Lying on the sand with Paul the second (while Rango and Zora slept through half of the day) they built nine-pins out of driftwood, they dug labyrinths into the sand, they swam underwater looking for sea plants, and drugged themselves with tales.
Their only expression of a bond was his reaching for her little finger with his, as Paul had once done, and this was like an echo of her relation to Paul, a fragile bond, a bond like a game, but life-giving through its very airiness and delicacy.
Iridescent, ephemeral hours of relief from darkness.
When Rango came, blurred, soiled by his stagnant life with Zora, from quarrels, she felt stronger to meet this undertow of bitterness.
She wore a dress of brilliant colors, indigo and saffron; she brushed her hair until it glistened, and proclaimed in all her gestures a joyousness which she hoped would infect Rango.
But as often happened, this very joyousness alarmed him; he suspected the cause of it, and he set about to reclaim her from a region she had not traversed with him, the region of peace, faith, and gentleness he could never give her.
True that Paul the second had only appropriated her little finger and laid no other claim on her, true that Rango’s weight upon her body was like the earth, stronger and warmer, true that when his arms fell at her side with discouragement they were so heavy that she could not have lifted them, true that those made only of earth and fire were never illuminated, never lifted or borne above it, never free of it, but hopelessly entangled in its veins.
Her dream of freeing Rango disintegrated day by day. When she gave them the sun and the sea, they slept. Zora had ripped her bathing suit and was sewing it again. She would sew it for years.
It was clear to Djuna now that the four-chambered heart was no act of betrayal, but that there were regions necessary to life to which Rango had no access. It was not that Djuna wanted to house the image of Paul in one chamber and Rango in another, nor that to love Rango she must destroy the chamber inhabited by Paul—it was that in Djuna there was a hunger for a haven which Rango was utterly incapable of giving to her, or attaining with her.
If she sought in Paul’s brother a moment of relief, a moment of forgetfulness, she also sought in the dark, at night, someone without flaw, who would protect her and forgive all things.
Whoever was without flaw, whoever understood, whoever contained an inexhaustible flow of love was god the father whom she had lost in her childhood.
Alone at night, after the torments of her life with Rango, after her revolts against this torment which she had vainly tried to master with understanding of Rango, defeated by Rango’s own love of this inferno, because he said it was real, it was life, it was heightened life, and that happiness was a mediocre ideal, held in contempt by the poets, the romantics, the artists—alone at night when she acknowledged to herself that Rango was doomed and would never be whole again, that he was corrupted in his love of pain, in his belief that war and troubles heightened the flavor of life, that scenes were necessary to the climax of desire, like fire, suddenly in touching the bottom of the abysmal loneliness in which both relationships left her, she felt the presence of god again, as she had felt him as a child, or still at another time when she had been close to death.
She felt this god again, whoever he was, taking her tenderly, holding her, putting her to sleep. She felt protected, her nerves unknotted, she felt peace. She fell asleep, all her anxieties dissolved. How she needed him, whoever he was, how she needed sleep, she needed peace, she needed god the father.
In the orange light of the fishing port, the indigo spread of the sea, the high flavor of the morning rolls, the joyousness of early mornings on the wharf, the scenes with Rango became more and more like hallucinations.
Rango walking through the reeds seemed like a Balinese, with his dark skin and blazing eyes.
When they sat at the beach late at night around a fire and roasted meat, he seemed so in harmony with nature, crouching on his strong legs, nimble with his hands. When they returned from long bicycle rides, after hours of pedaling against a brisk wind, tired and thirsty but drugged with physical euphoria and content, then the returns to his obsessions seemed more like a sickness.
Djuna knew all the prefaces to trouble. If during the ride she had sung in rhythm with others, or laughed, or acquiesced, Rango would begin: “This morning I found your bicycle and the boy’s against the wall of the cafe, so close together, as if you had spent the night together.”
“But Rango, he arrived after me, he merely placed his bicycle next to mine. Everyone has breakfast at the same cafe. It doesn’t mean anything.”
At times Djuna felt that Rango had caught Zora’s madness. Then she felt compassion for him, and would answer with patience, as you would a sick person.
She knew that we love in others some repressed self. In consoling Rango, reassuring him, was she consoling some secret Djuna who had once been jealous and not dared to reveal it?
(We love shadows of our hidden selves in others. Once I must have been as jealous as Rango, but I did not reveal it, even to myself. I must have experienced such jealousy in so hidden a realm of my own nature that I was not even aware of it. Or else I would not be so patient with Rango. I would not feel compassion. He is destroying us both by this jealousy. I want to protect him from the consequences… He is driving me away from him. I should run away now, yet I feel responsible. When we see another daring to be what we did not dare, we feel responsible for him…)
But once she awakened so exhausted by Rango’s demon that she decided to frighten him, to run away, hoping it might cure him.
She packed and went to the station. But there was no train until evening. She sat disconsolately to wait.
And Rango arrived. He looked distracted. “Djuna! Djuna, forgive me. I must have been mad. I didn’t tell you the truth. A friend of mine has been making absinthe in his cellar and every day at noon we have been sampling it. I must have taken a good deal of it all these days.”