She was not alone against the demoralizing, dissolving influence of Zora.
Perhaps the trap was opening a little, in an unforeseen direction.
What he could not do for her (because she was his pleasure, his self-indulgence, his sensually fulfilling mistress, and this gave him guilt), he might do for the party and for a large, anonymous mass of people.
The trap was the fixation on the impossible. A change in Zora, instead of an aggravation. A change in Rango, instead of a gradual strangulation.
Passion alone had not made him whole. But it had made him whole enough to be useful to the world.
When the barge failed to become the meeting place for Rango’s fellow workers, it was suddenly transformed into its opposite: a shelter for the dreamers looking for a haven. The more bitter the atmosphere of Paris, the more intense the dissensions, the rising tide of political antagonisms, dangers, fears, the more they came to the barge as if it were Noah’s Ark against a new deluge.
It was no longer the secret boat of a voyage of two. The unicellular nights had come to an end. Rango was but a visitor-lover in transit.
The divergence between them became sharply exteriorized: while Rango attended meetings, talked feverishly in cafes, sought to convert, to teach, to organize, worked among the poor he had known, among the artists, Djuna’s friends brought to the barge the values they believed in danger of being lost, a passionate clinging to aesthetic and human creation.
Rango brought stories of cruelty and personal sacrifice: Ramon had been four years without seeing his wife and child. He had been working in Guatemala. Now his wife in Paris was gravely ill, and he wanted to throw off his duties there and come, at any cost. “Think of a man forgetting his loyalty to his party, just because his wife and child need him. Willing to sacrifice the good of millions, perhaps, for just two.”
“Rango, that’s just what you would do, and you know it. That’s what you have done with Zora. You’ve given twenty years of your strength to one human being, when you could have done greater things, too…”
Another day he came and was sick in her arms, vomited all night, and only at dawn, weak, and feverish did he confess: they had had to arrest a traitor. He had been a friend of Rango’s. The group had been obliged to judge him. Rango had been forced to question him. The man was not really a traitor. He was weak. He had needed money for his family. He was tired of working for the party without pay. The party never worried about a man’s family, what they needed while he was away on duty. He had given his whole life, and now, at forty, he had weakened. He had been tempted by a good position in the embassy. At first he had intended to exploit his position for the benefit of the party. But after awhile he got tired of danger. He had ceased to be of help… Rango had had to force himself to turn him over to the party. It had made him sick. It was his first cruel, difficult, disciplined act. But he didn’t sleep for a week, and each time he remembered the man’s face as he told his story, and repeated: just tired, very tired, worn out, at forty, too many times in prison, too many hardships, couldn’t take any more. Had been in the party from the age of seventeen, had been useful, courageous, but now he was tired.
Every day he brought a story like this one. When the conflict grew too great he drank. Djuna did not have this escape. When the stories burnt into her and hurt her, she turned away and into the dream again, as she had done in childhood. There was another world visible to practiced eyes, easy to enter and inhabit, another chamber to which only the initiate could follow.
(Moods flowing like the river finding its way to the sea and vastness and depth. In this world the river was the flow; tap the secret of its flow, in the lulling rhythm of its waves, in the continuity of its current. Love is a madness shared by two, love is the crystal in which people find their unity. In this world Rango was capable of giving himself to a dream of love, which is a city of only two inhabitants. In this world, when Rango buys shoes so heavy and so strong, they seem like the hooves of the centaur, hooves of iron, whose head was in the heavens but whose hooves must pound the battlefields.)
There are drugs to escape reality, a Rango vomiting from the spectacle of cruelty, Rango’s harshness toward her feelings. He should, by laws of accuracy, be angry at his own emotionalism and human fallibility. But because of his blindness, he gets angry at Djuna’s face turned away and attacks her swift departures from horror. He drinks but does not consider thata trap door opening on the infinite, an inferior drug to dispel pain… But Djuna’s excursions into astronomy, her sheltering of the artists in the barge… He is merciless toward their kind of drug to transform reality into something bearable…
“To me, it is the world of history which appears mad, treacherous and full of contradictions,” said Djuna.
“In Guatemala,” said Rango, with an ironic twist of his lips which Djuna disliked, “they placed madmen by the side of the river, and that cured them. If your madmen don’t get cured, we’ll make a hole in the floor and sink them.”
“I may sink with them, you know.”
Walking along the quay, they saw a hobo sitting under a tree, a hobo with a Scotch cap, a plaid, and a crooked pipe.
Rango adopted his best imitation of a Scotch accent and said: “Weel, and where d’ya come from, ma good friend?”
But the hobo looked up bewildered and said in pure Montmartre French: “Mon Dieu, I’m no foreigner, sir. What makes you think I am?”
“The cap and the blanket,” said Rango.
“Oh, that, sir, it’s just that I’m always digging in the garbage can of the Opera Comique, and I found this rig. It was the only one I could wear, you understand, the others were a little too fancy, and most of them pretty indecent, I must say.”
Then he took a faded gray sporran out of his pocket: “Could you tell me what this is for?”
Rango laughed: “That’s a wig. The use of the skirt has caused premature baldness of an unusual kind in Scotland. Hold on to it, it might come useful one day…”
Sabina walked with her feet flat on the ground, which gave to her heavy body the poise of Biblical water carriers.
Djuna saw her and Rango as composed of the same elements, and felt that perhaps they would love each other. She imagined a parting scene with Rango, surrendering his black hair to hers heavy and straight, his burnt sienna skin to her incandescent gold one, his rough dry hands to her strong peasant ones, his laughter to hers, his Indian slyness to her Semitic labyrinthian mind. They will recognize each other’s climate of fever and chaos, and embrace each other.
Djuna was amazed to see her predictions unfulfilled. Rango fled from Sabina’s intensity and violence. They met like two armed warriors, and the part of Rango which longed to be yielded to, who longed for warmth, found in Sabina an unyielding armor. She yielded only at the last moment, merely to achieve a sensual embrace, and immediately after was poised for battle again. No aperture for tenderness to lodge itself, for his secret timidity to flow into, as it flew into Djuna’s breast. Not a woman one could nestle into.
They sought grounds for a duel. Rango hated her presence about Djuna, and would have liked to drive her away from the barge.
Once sitting in a restaurant together, with Djuna and two other friends, they decided to see which one could eat the most red chilies.
They ate the red chilies with ostentatious insolence, watching each other. At first mixed with rice and vegetables, then with the salad, and finally by themselves.
Both might have died of the contest, for neither one would yield. Each little red chili like a concentrate of fire which burned them both.