Now and then they opened their mouths wide and breathed quickly in and out, as if to cool their insides.
As in the old myths, they sat like fire eaters partaking of a fire banquet. Tears came to Sabina’s intense dark eyes. A sepia flush came to Rango’s laughing cheeks, but neither would yield, though they might scar their entrails.
Fortunately the restaurant was closing, and the waiters maliciously washed the floor under their feet with ammonia, piled chairs on the table, and finally put an end to the marathon by turning out the lights.
Not one but many Djunas descended the staircase of the barge, one layer formed by the parents, the childhood, another molded by her profession and her friends, still another born of history, geology, climate, race, economics, and all the backgrounds and backdrops, the sky and nature of the earth, the pure sources of birth, the influence of a tree, a word dropped carelessly, an image seen, and all the corrupted sources: books, art, dogmas, tainted friendships, and all the places where a human being is wounded, defeated, crippled, and which fester…
People add up their physical mishaps, the stubbed toes, the cut finger, the burn scar, the fever, the cancer, the microbe, the infection, the wounds and broken bones. They never add up the accumulated bruises and scars of the inner lining, forming a complete universe of reactions, a reflected world through which no event could take place without being subjected to a personal and private interpretation, through this kaleidoscope of memory, through the peculiar formation of the psyche’s sensitive photographic plates, to this assemblage of emotional chemicals through which every word, every event, every experience is filtered, digested, deformed, before it is projected again upon people and relationships.
The movement of the many layers of the self-described by Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” the multiple selves grown in various proportions, not singly, not evenly developed, not moving in one direction, but composed of multiple juxtapositions revealing endless spirals of character as the earth revealed its strata, an infinite constellation of feelings expanding as mysteriously as space and light in the realm of the planets.
Man turned his telescope outward and far, not seeing character emerging at the opposite end of the telescope by subtle accumulations, fragments, accretions, and encrustations.
Woman turned her telescope to the near, and the warm.
Djuna felt at this moment a crisis, a mutation, a need to leap from the self-born of her relationship to Rango and Zora, a need to resuscitate in another form. She was unable to follow Rango in his faith, unable either to live in the dream in peace, or to sail the barge accurately through a stormy Seine.
She found herself defending Sabina against Rango’s ruthless mockery. She defended Sabina’s philosophy of the many loves against the One.
(Rango, your anger should not be directed against Sabina. Sabina is only behaving as all women do in their dreams, at night. I feel responsible for her acts, because when we walk together and I listen to her telling me about her adventures, a part of me is not listening to her telling me a story but recognizing scenes familiar to a secret part of myself. I recognize scenes I have dreamed and which therefore I have committed. What is dreamed is committed. In my dreams I have been Sabina. I have escaped from your tormenting love, caressed all the interchangeable lovers of the world. Sabina cannot be made alone responsible for acting the dreams of many women, just because the others sit back and participate with a secret part of their selves. Through secret and small vibrations of the flesh they admit being silent accomplices to Sabina’s acts. At night we have all tossed with fever and desire for strangers. During the day we deride Sabina, and revile her. You’re angry at Sabina because she lives out all her wishes overtly as you have done. To love Sabina’s fever, Sabina’s impatience, Sabina’s evasion of traps in the games of love, was being Sabina. To be only at night what Sabina dared to be during the day, to bear the responsibility for one’s secret dream of escape from the torments of one love into many loves.)
Sabina sat astride a chair, flinging her hair back with her hands and laughing.
She always gave at this moment the illusion that she was going to confess. She excelled in this preparation for unveiling, this setting of a mood for intimate revelations. She excelled equally in evasion. When she wished it, her life was like a blackboard on which she wrote swiftly and then erased almost before anyone could read what she had written. Her words then did not seem like words but like smoke issuing from her mouth and nostrils, a heavy smoke screen against detection. But at other times, if she felt secure from judgment, then she opened a story of an incident with direct, stabbing thoroughness…
“Our affair lasted…lasted for the duration of an elevator ride! And I don’t mean that symbolically either! We took such a violent fancy to each other, the kind that will not last, but will not wait either. It was cannibalistic, and of no importance, but it had to be fulfilled once. Circumstances were against us. We had no place to go. We wandered through the streets, we were ravenous for each other. We got into an elevator, and he began to kiss me… First floor, second floor, and he still kissing me, third floor, fourth floor, and when the elevator came to a standstill, it was too late…we could not stop, his hands were everywhere, his mouth… I pressed the button wildly and went on kissing as the elevator came down… When we got to the bottom it was worse… He pressed the button and we went up and down, up and down, madly, while people kept ringing for the elevator…”
She laughed again, with her entire body, even her feet, marking the rhythm of her gaiety, stamping the ground like a delighted spectator, while her strong thighs rocked the chair like an Amazon’s wooden horse.
One evening while Djuna was waiting for Rango at the barge, she heard a footstep which was not the watchman’s and not Rango’s.
The shadows of the candles on the tarpapered walls played a scene from a Balinese theatre as she moved toward the door and called: “Who’s there?”
There was a complete silence, as if the river, the barge, and the visitor had connived to be silent at the same moment, put a tension in the air which she felt like a vibration through her body.
She did not know what to do, whether to stay in the room and lock the door, awaiting Rango, or to explore the barge. If she stayed in the room quietly and watched for his coming, she could shout a warning to him out of the window, and then together they might corner the intruder.
She waited.
The shadows on the walls were still, but the reflections of the lights on the river played on the surface like a ghost’s carnival. The candles flickered more than usual, or was it her anxiety?
When the wood beams ceased to creak, she heard the footsteps again, moving toward the room, cautiously but not light enough to prevent the boards from creaking.
Djuna took her revolver from under her pillow, a small one which had been given to her and which she did not know how to use.
She called out: “Who is there? If you come any nearer, I’ll shoot.”
She knew there was a safety clasp to open. She wished Rango would arrive. He had no physical fear. He feared truth, he feared to confront his motives, feared to face, to understand, to examine in the realm of feelings and thought, but he did not fear to act, he did not fear physical danger. Djuna was intrepid in awareness, in painful exposures of the self, and dared more than most in matter of emotional surgery, but she had a fear of violence.
She waited another long moment, put again the silence was complete, suspended.
Rango did not come.
Out of exhaustion, she lay down with her revolver in hand.
The doors and windows were locked. She waited, listening for Rango’s uneven footsteps on the deck.