Suddenly Djuna looked down at her coffee and her eyes filled with stinging tears; the tears of irony burn the skin more fiercely. She wept because she had aroused in Rango the desire to serve a purpose which was not hers, to live now for others when already he lived for Zora, and had so little to give her of himself. She wept because they were so close in that earthy darkness, close in the magnetic pull between their skins, their hair, their bodies, and yet their dreams never touched at any point, their vision of life, their attitudes. She wept over the many dislocations of life, forbidding the absolute unity.
Rango did not understand.
In the realm of ideas he was always restless, impatient, and like some wild animal who feared to be corralled. He often described how the horses, the bulls, were corralled in his ranch. He delighted in the fierceness of the battle. For him to examine, to understand, to interpret was exactly like some corralling activity, of which he was suspicious.
But for the moment, she was breathing the odor of his hair. For the moment there was this current between their skin and flesh, these harmonizations of contrasting colors, weight, quality, odors. Everything about him was pungent and violent. They were as his friends said, like Othello and Desdemona.
Manana he would be a party member.
When you lose your wings, thought Djuna, this is the way you live. You buy candles for the meeting of Rango’s friends, but these candles do not give a light that will delight you, because you do not believe in what you are doing.
Sadness never added to her weight; it caught her in flight as she danced in spirals misplacing air pools like an arrow shot at a bird which did not bring it down but merely increased its flutterings.
She had every day a greater reluctance to descend into familiar daily life, because the hurt, the huntsman’s bow, came from the earth, and therefore flight at a safe distance became more and more imperative.
Her mobility was now her only defense against new dangers. While you’re in movement it is harder to be shot at, to be wounded even. She had adopted the basic structure of the nomads.
Rango had said: “Prepare the barge for a meeting tonight. It will be an ideal place. No superintendents to tell tales to the police. No neighbors.”
He had signed all the papers. They must be more careful. The barge was being put to a greater usefulness.
There are two realms to live in now. (Do I hold the secret drug which permits me to hold on to the ecstasies while entering the life of the world, activities in the world, contingencies? I feel it coming to me while I am walking. It is a strange sensation, like drunkenness. It catches me in the middle of the street like a tremendous wave, and a numbness passes through my veins which is the numbness of the marvelous. I know it by its power, by the way it lifts my body, the air which passes under my feet. The cold room I left in the morning, the drab bed covers, the stove full of ashes, the sour wine at the bottom of the glass were all illuminated by the force of love for Rango. It was as if I had learned to fly over the street and were permitted to do so for an instant…making every color more intense, every caress more penetrating, every moment more magnificent… But I knew by the anxiety that it might not last. It is a state of grace of love, which some achieve by wine and others by prayer and fasting. It is a state of grace but I cannot discover what makes one fall out of it. The danger lies in flying low, in awakening. She knew she was flying lower now that Rango was to act in the world. The air of politics was charged with dust. People aspired to reach the planets, but it was a superfluous voyage; there was a certain way of breathing, of walking, of seeing, which transported human beings into space, into transparency. The extraordinary brilliancy of the games people played beyond themselves, the games of their starry selves…)
She bought wood for the fire. She swept the barge. She concealed the bed and the barrel of wine.
Rango would guide the newcomers to the barge, and remain on the bridge to direct them.
The Guatemalans arrived gradually. The darker Indian-blooded ones in Indian silence, the paler Spanish-blooded ones with Spanish volubility. But both were intimidated by the place, the creaking wood, the large room resembling the early meeting places of the revolutionaries, the extended shadows, the river noises, chains, oars, the disquieting lights from the bridge, the swaying when other barges passed. Too much the place for conspirators. At times life surpasses the novel, the drama. This was one of them. The setting was more dramatic than they wished. They stood awkwardly around.
Rango had not yet come. He was waiting for those who were late.
Djuna did not know what to do. This was a role for which she had no precedent. Politeness or marginal talk seemed out of place. She kept the stove filled with wood and watched the flames as if her guardianship would make them active.
When you lose your wings, and wear a dark suit bought in the cheapest store of Paris, to become anonymous, when you discard your earrings, and the polish on your nails, hoping to express an abdication of the self, a devotion to impersonal service, and still you do not feel sincere, you feel like an actress, because you expect conversion to come like miracle, by the grace of love for one party member…
They know I am pretending.
That is how she interpreted the silence.
In her own eyes, she stood judged and condemned. She was the only woman there, and they knew she was there only because she was a woman, tangled in her love, not in the revolution.
Then Rango came, breathless, and anxious: “There will be no meeting. You are ordered to disperse. No explanations.”
They were relieved to go. They left in silence. They did not look at her.
Rango and Djuna were left alone.
Rango said: “Your friend the policeman was on guard at the top of the stairs. A hobo had been found murdered. So when the Guatemalans began to arrive, he asked for papers. It was dangerous.” He had made his first error, in thinking the barge a good place. The head of the group had been severe. Had called him a romantic… “He also knows about you. Asked if you were a member. I had to tell the truth.”
“Should I sign the papers?” she asked, with a docility which was so much like a child’s that Rango was moved.
“If you do it for me, that’s bad. You have to do it for yourself.”
“Oh, for myself. You know what I believe. The world today is rootless; it’s like a forest with all the trees with their heads in the ground and their roots gesticulating wildly in the air, withering. The only remedy is to begin a world of two; in two there is hope of perfection, and that in turn may spread to all… But it must begin at the base, in relationship of man and woman.”
“I’m going to give you books to read, to study.”
Would his new philosophy change his overindulgence and slavishness to Zora, would he see her with new eyes, see the waste, the criminality of her self-absorption? Would he say to her, too: there are more important things in the world than your little pains. One must forget one’s personal life. Would his personal life be altered as she had not been able to alter it? Would his confusions and errors be clarified?
Djuna began to hope. She began to study. She noted analogies between the new philosophy and what she had been expounding uselessly to Rango.
For instance, to die romantically, recklessly, unintelligently, was not approved by the party. Waste. Confusion. Indiscipline. The party developed a kind of stoicism, an armature, a form of behavior and thinking.
Djuna gradually allied herself to the essence of the philosophy, to its results rather, and overlooked the rigid dogmas.
The essence was construcion. In a large way she could adopt this because it harmonized with her obsessional battle against destruction and negativism.