Djuna walked lightly to the front cabin, looked once through the small barred portholes like the windows of a prison, leaned over the mildewed floor, and tore up one of the bottom boards, inviting the deluge to sink this Noah’s Ark sailing nowhere.
The wood being old and half rotted had made it easy for Djuna to pull on the plank where it had once been patched, but the influx of the water had been partly blocked by the outer layer of barnacles and corrugated seaweeds which she could not reach.
She returned to the bed on the floor and lay beside Rango, to wait patiently for death.
She saw the river sinuating toward the sea and wondered if they would float unhampered toward the ocean.
Below the level of identity lay an ocean, an ocean of which human beings carry only a drop in their veins; but some sink below cognizance and the drop becomes a huge wave, the tide of memory, the undertows of sensation…
Beneath the cities of the interior flowed many rivers carrying a multitude of images… All the women she had been spread their hair in a halo on the surface of the river, extended multiple arms like the idols of India, their essence seeping in and out of the meandering dreams of men…
Djuna, lying face upward like a water lily of amniotic lakes; Djuna floating down to the organ grinder’s tune of a pavana for a defunct infanta of Spain, the infanta who never acceded to the throne of maturity, the one who remained a pretender…
As for Rango, the drums would burst and all the painted horses of the carnival would turn a polka…
She saw their lives over and over again until she caught a truth which was not simple and divisible but fluctuating and elusive; but she saw it clearly from the places under the surface where she had been accustomed to exist: all the women she had been like many rivers running out of her and with her into the ocean…
She saw, through this curtain of water, all of them as personages larger than nature, more visible to sluggish hearts being in the focus of death, a stage on which there are no blurred passages, no missed cues…
She saw, now that she was out of the fog of imprecise relationships, with the more intense light of death upon these faces which had caused her despair, she saw these same faces as pertaining to gentle clowns. Zora dressed in comical trappings, in Rango’s outsized socks, in dyed kimonos, in strangled rags and empty-armed brooches, a comedy to awaken guilt in others…
…on this stage, floating down the Seine toward death, the actors drifted along and love no longer seemed a trap…the trap was the static pause growth, the arrested self caught in its own web of obstinacy and obsession…
…you grow, as in the water the algae grow taller and heavier and are carried by their own weight into different currents…
…I was afraid to grow or move away, Rango, I was ashamed to desert you in your torment, but now I know your choice is your own, as mine was my own…
…fixation is death… death is fixation…
…on this precarious ship, devoid of upholstery and self-deception, the voyage can continue into tomorrow…
…what I see now is the vastness, and the places where I have not been and the duties I have not fulfilled, and the uses for this unusual cargo of past sorrows all ripe for transmutations…
…the messenger of death, like all adventurers, will accelerate your heart toward change and mutation…
…if one sinks deep enough and then deeper, all these women she had been flowed into one at night and lost their separate identities; she would learn from Sabina how to make love laughing, and from Stella how to die only for a little while and be born again as children die and are reborn at the slightest encouragement…
…from the end in water to the beginning in water, she would complete the journey, from origin to birth and birth to flow…
…she would abandon her body to flow into a vaster body than her own, as it was at the beginning, and return with many other lives to be unfolded…
…with her would float the broken doll of her childhood, the Easter egg which had been smaller than the one she had asked for, debris of fictions…
…she would return to the life above the waters of the unconscious and see the magnifications of sorrow which had taken place and been the true cause of the deluge…
…there were countries she had not yet seen…
…this image created a pause in her floating…
…there must also be loves she had not yet encountered…
…as the barge ran swiftly down the current of despair, she saw the people on the shore flinging their arms in desolation, those who had counted on her Noah’s Ark to save themselves…
…she was making a selfish journey…
…she had intended the barge for other purposes than for a mortuary…
…war was coming…
…the greater the turmoil, the confusion, the greater had been her effort to maintain an individually perfect world, a cocoon of faith, which would be a symbol and a refont>
…the curtain of dawn would rise on a deserted river…
…on two deserters…
…in the imminence of death she seized this intermediary region of our being in which we rehearse our future sorrows and relive the past ones…
…in this heightened theatre their lives appeared in their true color because there was no witness to distort the private admissions, the most absurd pretensions…
…in the last role Djuna became immune from the passageway of pretense, from a suspended existence in reflection, from impostures…
…and she saw what had appeared immensely real to her as charades…
…in the theatre of death, exaggeration is the cause of despair…
…the red Easter egg I had wanted to be so enormous when I was a child, if it floats by today in its natural size, so much smaller than my invention, I will be able to laugh at its shrinking…
…I had chosen death because I was ashamed of this shrinking and fading, of what time would do to our fiction of magnificence, time like the river would wear away the pain of defeats and broken promises, time and the river would blur the face of Zora as a giant incubus, time and the river would mute the vibrations of Rango’s voice upon my heart…
…the organ grinder will play all the time but it will not always seem like a tragic accompaniment to separations…
…the organ grinder will play all the time but the images will change, as the feelings will change, Rango’s gestures will seem less violent, and sorrows will fall off like leaves to fecundate the heart for a new love…
…the organ grinder will accelerate his rhythm into arabesques of delight to match the vendor’s cries: “Mimosa! mimosa!” to the tune of Brahm’s “Lullaby.”… “Couteaux! couteaux a aiguiser!“to the tune from Madame Butterfly… “Pommes de terre! pommes de terre!“to the tune from Ravel’s Bolero.
…”Bouteilles! bouteilles!“to the tune from Tristan and Isolde.
She laughed.
…tomorrow the city would ferment with new disasters, the paper vendors would raise their voices to the pitch of hysteria, the crowds would gather to discuss the news, the trains would carry away the cowards…
..the cowards…
…floating down the river…
…with the barge that had been intended not only to house a single love but as a refuge for faith…
…she was sinking a faith…
…instead of solidifying the floating kingdom with its cargo of eternal values…
(“An individually perfect world,” said Rango, “is destroyed by reality, war, revolutions.”)