Djuna did not think of the world or the revolution needing Rango, Rango and his bohemian indiscipline, his love of red wine, his laziness. She felt that Zora’s persecutions were driving him away. He was caught between a woman who wanted to die, and one who wanted to live! He had hoped to amalgamate the women, so he would not feel the tension between his two selves. He had thought only of his own emotional comfort. He had overlooked Zora’s egoistic ferocity, and Djuna’s clairvoyance. The alliance was a failure.
Now he was driven to risk his life for some impersonal task.
She was silent. She looked at ace and saw that his mouth looked unhappy, wounded, and revealed his desperateness. He kept it tightly shut, as women do when they don’t want to weep. His mouth which was not in keeping with his lion’s head, which was the mouth of a child, small and vulnerable; the mouth which aroused her indulgence.
Parting at the corner of the street, they kissed desperately as if for a long voyage. A beggar started to play on his violin, then stopped, thinking they were lovers who would never see each other again.
The blood beat in her ears as she walked away, her body parting from Rango in anticipation, hair parting from hair, hands unlocking, lips closing against the last kiss, surrendering him to a more demanding mistress: the revolution.
The earth was turning fast. Women cannot walk out of the traps of love, but men can; they have wars and revolutions to attend to. What would happen now? She knew. One signed five sheets of paper and answered minute, excruciatingly exact questions. She had seen the questionnaire. One had to say whether one’s wife or husband believed in the revolution; one had to tell everything. Rango would be filling these pages slowly, with his nervous, rolling, and swaying handwriting. Everything. He would probably say that his wife was a cripple, but the party would not condone a mistress.
Then suddenly the earth ceased turning and the blood no longer rang in her ear. Everything stood deathly still because she remembered the dangers. She remembered Rango’s friend who had been found with a bullet hole in his temple, near the cafe where they met. She remembered Rango’s story about one of the men who worked for the revolution in Guatemala: the one who had been placed in a jail half full of water until his legs rotted away in strips of moldy flesh, until his eyes turned absolutely white.
The next evening Rango was late. Djuna forgot that he was always late. She thought: he has signed all the papers, and been told that a member of the party cannot have a mistress.
It was nine o’clock. She had not eaten. It was raining. Friends came into the cafe, talked a little, and left. The time seemed long because of the anxiety. This is the way it would be, the waiting, and never knowing, if Rango were still alive. He would be so easily detected. A foreigner, dark skin, wild hair, his very appearance was the one policemen expected from a man working for the revolution.
What had happened to Rango? She picked up a newspaper. Once he had said: “I picked up a newspaper and saw on the front page the photograph of my best friend, murdered the night before.”
That is the way it would happen. Rango would kiss her as he had kissed her the night before at the street corner, with the violin playing, then the violin would stop, and that very night…
She questioned her instinct. No, Rango was not dead. She would like to go to church, but that was forbidden, too. Despair was forbidden. This was the time for stoicism.
She was jealous of Rango’s admiration for Gauguin’s mother, a South American heroine, who had fought in revolutions and shot her own husband when he betrayed the party.
Djuna walked past the church and entered. She could not pray because she was seeking to transform herself into the proper mate for a revolutionist. But she always felt a humorous, a private, connivance with god. She felt he would always smile with irony upon her most wayward acts. He would see the contradictions, and be indulgent. There was a pact between them, even if she were considered guilty before most tribunals. It was like her friendliness with the policemen of Paris.
And now Rango walked toward her! (See what a pact she had with god that he granted her wishes no one else would have dared to expect him to grant!)
Rango had been ill. No, he had not signed the papers. He had overslept. Tomorrow. Manana.
Djuna had forgotten this Latin deity: Manana.
At the Cafe Martiniquaise, near the barge, Rango and Djuna sat drinking coffee.
The place was dense with smoke, voices, faces, heaving and swaying like a compact sonorous wave, washing over them at times and enswathing them, at others retreating as if subdued, only to return again louder and more suffocating to engulf their voices.
Djuna could never identify such a tide of faces dissolved by lights and shadows, slightly blurred in outlines from drink. But Rango could say immediately: “There’s a pimp, there’s a prizefighter. There’s a drug addict.”
Two friends of Rango’s walked in, with their hands in their pockets, greeted them obliquely, with heavy lids half dropped over glazed eyes. They had deep purple shadows under the eyes and Rango said: “It startles me to see my friends disintegrating so fast, even dying, from drugs. I’m no longer drawn to this kind of life.”
“You were drawn toward destruction before, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” said Rango, “but not really. When I was a young man, at home, what I liked most was health, physical energy and well-being. It was only later, here in Paris the poets taught me not to value life, that it was more romantic to be desperate, more noble to rebel, and to die, than to accept what ordinary life had to offer. I’m not drawn to that any more. I want to live. That was not the real me. Zora says you changed me, yet I can’t think of anything you said or did to accomplish it. But every time we are together I want to accomplish something, something big. I don’t want any more of this literary credo, about the romantic beauty of living desperately, dangerously, destructively.”
Djuna thought with irony that she had not meant to give birth to a rebel. She had changed, too, because of Rango. She had acquired some of his gypsy ways, some of his nonchalance, his bohemian indiscipline. She had swung with him into the disorders of strewn clothes, spilled cigarette ashes, slipping into bed all dressed, falling asleep thus, indolence, timelessness… A region of chaos and moonlight. She liked it there. It was the atmosphere of earth’s womb, where awareness could not reach and illumine all the tragic aspects of unfulfilled desires. In the darkness, chaos, warmt one forgot… And the silence. She liked the silence most of all. The silence in which the body, the senses, the instincts, are more alert, more powerful, more sensitized, live a more richly perfumed and intoxicating life, instead of transmuting into thoughts, words, into exquisite abstractions, mathematics of emotion in place of the violent impact, the volcanic eruptions of fever, lust, and delight.
Irony. Now Rango was projecting himself out of this realm, and wanted action. No more time for the guitar which had ensorcelled her, no more time to visit the gypsies as he had once promised, no more time to sleep in the morning as she had been learning, or to acquire by osmosis his art of throwing off responsibilities, his self-indulgence, his recklessness…
As they sat in the cafe, he condemned his past life. He was full of contrition for the wasted hours, the wasted energy, the wasted years. He wanted a more austere life, action and fulfillment.