She forgave him. She also thought, in an effort always to absolve him: “His slavery to Zora’s needs is so tremendous and he does not dare to rebel. She has a gift for making him feel that he never does enough, and to burden him with guilt, and that may be why, when he comes to me, he has to rebel and be angry about something, he has to explode. I ais scapegoat.”
And she was tied to Rango through this breathing tube, tied to his explosions. She might one day come to believe, as he did, that violence was necessary to dive to the depths of experience.
On these revolving stages of the unconscious, the last hidden jungles of our nature which we have controlled and harnessed almost to extermination, sealing all the wells, it is no wonder when we seek to open these sealed wells again to find a flow of life we find instead a flow of anger.
Thus in anger Rango threw like a geyser this nature’s poison, and then refused to admit responsibility for the storms. His angers came like lightning, and each time Djuna was delivered of her own.
But the black sun of his jealousy eclipsed the Mediterranean sun, churned the sea’s turquoise gentleness.
There were times when she lay alone on the sand and sought to remember what she had tried to reach through the body of Rango, what her first sight of him, playing on his guitar and evoking his gypsy life, had awakened in her.
Through him, to extend into pure nature.
There were times when she remembered his first smile, the ironic smile of the Indian which came from afar like the echo of an ancient Indian smile at the beginning of Mayan worlds; the earthy walk issued from bare footsteps treading paths into the highest mountains of the world, into the most immune lakes and impenetrable forests.
In her dream of him she returned to the origins of the world, hearing footsteps in Rango which were echoes of primeval footsteps hunting.
She remembered, above all, stories, the one Rango had told her about sitting on a rock on top of a glacier and asserting he had felt the spinning of the earth!
She had kissed eyes filled with remembrance of splendors, eyes which had seen the Mayans bury their gold treasures at the bottom of the lakes out of reach of the plundering Spaniards.
She had kissed the Indian princes of her childhood fairytales.
She had plunged with love and desire into the depths of ancient races, and sought heights and depths and magnificence.
And found…found deserts where vultures perpetuated their encirclement, no longer distinguishing between the living and the dead.
Found a muted city resting on ruined columns, cracked cupolas, tombs, with owls screaming like women in childbirth.
In the shadows of volcanoes there were fiestas, orgies, dances, and guitars.
But Rango had not taken her there.
To love he brought only his fierce anxieties; she had embraced, kissed, possessed a mirage. She had walked and walked, not into the TIFY” nd the music, not into laughter, but into the heart of an Indian volcano…
THE TRAP WAS INVISIBLE BY DAY
The trap was a web of senseless duties. No sooner were Djuna’s eyes open than she saw Zora vividly, lying down, pale, with soft flabby hands touching everything with infantile awkwardness. Zora missing her aim, dropping what she held, fumbling with a door, and moving so abnormally slow and with such hazy, uncertain gestures that it took her two hours to get dressed.
Compassion was the cover with which Djuna disguised to her own eyes her revulsion for Zora’s whining voice, unkempt body, and shrewd glance, for her beggar’s clothes which were a costume to attract pity, for the listless hair she was too lazy to brush, for the dead skin through which the blood stagnated.
If one knew what lay in Zora’s mind, one would turn away with revulsion. Djuna had heard her sometimes, half asleep, monotonously accusing doctors, the world, Rango, herself, friends, for all that befell her.
Revulsion. There is a guilt not only for acts committed but for one’s thoughts. Now that the trap had grown so grotesque, futile, stifling, Djuna wished every day that Zora might die. A useless life, grasping food, devotion, service, and giving absolutely nothing, less than nothing. A useless life, exuding poison, envy, a strangling tyranny.
If she died, Rango’s life might soar again, a fire, his body strong and exuberant, his imagination propelling him to all comers of the world. At his worst moments, there was always a fire in him. In Zora there was coldness. Only the mind at work, deforming, denigrating, accusing.
Only a showman left in her. “See my wound, see what I suffer. Love me.”
But love is not given for such reasons.
The trap is inescapable. Djuna has nightmares of Zora’s yellow face and lack of courage. She awakens early, to market for a special bread, a special meat, a special vegetable. There is an appointment for x-rays of the chest, for this week Zora believes she has tuberculosis. Hours wasted on this, only to hear the doctor say: “There’s nothing wrong. Hysterical symptoms. She should be taken to a psychiatrist.”
There is a visit to the pawnbroker, because one must pay the other doctor, the one who made the futile, the dramatic, test for cancer. Djuna’s allowance for the month is finished.
There is no escape. The day crumbles soon after it is born. The only tree she will see will be the anemic tree of the hospital garden.
A useless, abortive sacrifice gives sadness.
The day is the trap, but she does not dare revolt. If she wants her half-night with Rango, this is the only path to reach it. At the end of the day there will be his fervent kisses, his emotion, his desire, the bites of hunger on the shoulder, vibrations of pleasure shaking the body, the guttural moans of men and women returning to their primitive origin…
Sometimes there is no time for undressing. At others, the climax is postponed teasingly, arousing frenzy. The dross of the day is burned away.
When Djuna thinks during the day, “I must run away. I must leave Rango to his chosen torment,” it is the remembrance of this point of fire which binds her.
How can Rango admire Zora’s rotting away—not even a noble suicide, but a fixed obsession to die slowly, dragging others along with her? A life ugly and monstrous. If she washes a dish, she complains. If she sews a button, she laments.
These are Djuna’s thoughts, and she must atone for them too. Zora, take this bread I traveled an hour to find, it won’t nourish you, you are too full of poison within your body. Your first words to me were hypocritical, your talk about praying to be helped, and being glad I was the one, yes, because I was one who could be easily caught through compassion. You knew I would act toward you as you would never have acted toward me. I have tried to imagine you in my place, and I couldn’t. I know you would be utterly cruel.
On her way back to the barge she bought new candles, and a fur rug to lie on, because Rango believed it was too bourgeois to sleep on a bed like everybody else. They slept on the floor. Perhaps a fur, the bed of Eskimos, would be appropriate.
When Rango came, he looked at the candles and the fur like a lion looking at a lettuce leaf. But lying on it, his bronze desire is aroused and the primitive bed is baptized in memory of cavernous dwellings.
At this hour children are reading fairy tales from which Rango and Djuna were led to expect such marvels, the impossible. Rango had imagined a life without work, without responsibilities. Djuna had wanted a life of desire and freedom, not comfort but the smoothness of magical happenings, not luxury but beauty, not security but fulfillment, not perfection but a perfect moment like this one…but without Zora waiting to lie between them like an incubus…
Djuna was unprepared for Rango’s making the first leap out of the trap. It came unexpectedly at midnight as they were about to separate. Out of the fog of enswathing caresses came his voice: “We’re leading a selfish life. There are many things happening in the world; we should be working for them. You are like all the artists, with your big floodlights fixed on the sky, and never on earth, where things are happening. There is a revolution going on, and I want to help.”