“Rango, wake up wake up wake up, there’s a leak!”
He was slow in awakening, his dreams of greatness and magnificence were heavy on his body like royal garments, but the face he opened to the dawn was the face of innocence, as every man presents innocence to the new day. Djuna read on it what she had refused to see, the other face of Rango the child lodged in a big man’s body by a merry freak.
It had been a game: “Djuna, you stand there and watch while I am the king and savior. You will admire me when I give the cue.” She will now laugh and say: “But actually, you know, I prefer a hobo who plays the guitar.”
She will laugh when he refuses to see Zora’s madness, because it was like her refusal to see his madness, his impersonations, his fictions, his illusions…
In the face of death the barge was smaller, Rango did not loom so immense, Zora had shrunk…
In the face of death they were playing games, Zora absurdly overdressed in the trappings of tragedy, muddying, aborting, confusing, delighted with the purple colors of catastrophe as children delight in fire engines. When their absence of wisdom and courage tormented her, she would avenge herself by descending into their realm and adding to the difficulties. She had once told Rango that her father would have to live in the south of France for his health and that they would have to separate. Being helpless, they had believed she would let this happen, since they were accustomed to bowing to the inevitable. Rango had jumped and leaped with pain. Zora had said to him, not without mixing it with a delicate shading of poison: “This must happen sooner or later… Djuna will leave you.”
Then she had gone to see Zora, Zora awkwardly, laboriously moving her small and flabby hands, Zora appearing helpless while Djuna knew she was the strongest of the three because she had learned to exploit her weakness. She told Djuna that Rango had not eaten that day. He was just pacing around, and he had been so cruel to Zora. He had said to her: “If Djuna goes to the south of France, I’ll send you home to your relatives.”
“Alone? And what about you?”
“Oh, me,” he said with a shrug. Zora added: “He will kill himself.”
By this time her game had given her enough pleasure. She felt mature again. But after a week of torment the stage was set for a great love scene; she knew now that if she left Rango he would not console himself with Zora. That was all she needed to know. Perhaps she was not so much wiser than they were…perhaps she did not have herself too great a faith in love… Perhaps there was in her a Zora in need of protection and a wildly anxious Rango in need of reassurances. And perhaps that was why she loved them, and perhaps Zora was right to believe in her love as she did in her moments of lucidity…
In the face of death Rango seemed less violent, Zora less tyrannical, and Djuna less wise. And when Zora looked at Djuna above the rim of her glasses which she had picked up in a scrap basket at somebody’s door and which were not suited to her eyes—she looked as children do when they stare and frown over the rim of their parents’ glasses, these pretenders to the throne of maturity…
“Rango, wake up wake up wake up wake up wake up, there’s a leak.”
Rango opened his eyes and then jumped: “Oh, I forgot to pump the water yesterday.”
The second face of Rango, after awakening, following the bewildered and innocent one, contained this expression of total, of absolute, distress common to children and adolescents betraying an exaggeration in the vision of reality, a sense of the menacing, disproportionate stature of this reality. Only children and adolescents know this total despair, as if every wound were fatal and irremediable, every moment the last, death and dangers looming immense as they had loomed in Djuna’s mind during the night…
Rango repaired the leak vigorously, and they walked out on the quay. It was a moment before dawn, and some fishermen were already installed because the river was smooth for fishing. One of them had caught something unusual and was holding it out for Djuna to see, and laughing.
It was a doll.
It was a doll who had committed suicide during the night.
The water had washed off its features. Her hair aureoled her face with crystalline glow.
Noah’s Ark had survived the flood.