Rango made a gesture of impatience. “I don’t see why you should give that any importace. It doesn’t mean anything. I don’t understand you at all.”
If it were not for music, one could forget one’s life and be born anew, washed of memories. If it were not for music one could walk through the markets of Guatemala, through the snows of Tibet, up the steps of Hindu temples, one could change costumes, shed possessions, retain nothing of the past.
But music pursues one with some familiar air and no longer does the heart beat in an anonymous forest of heartbeats, no longer is it a temple, a market, a street like a stage set, but now it is the scene of a human crisis reenacted inexorably in all its details, as if the music had been the score of the drama itself and not its accompaniment.
The last scene between Rango and Djuna might have faded into sleep, and she might have forgotten his refusal to let her cut his hair once more, but now the organ grinder on the quay turned his handle mischievously, and aroused in her the evocation of another scene. She would not have been as disturbed by Rango’s evasiveness, or his defense of Zora’s rights to the cutting of his hair, if it had not added itself to other scenes which the organ grinder had attended with similar tunes, and which he was now recreating for her, other scenes where she had not obtained her desire, had not been answered.
The organ grinder playing Carmen took her back inexorably like an evil magician to the day of her childhood when she had asked for an Easter egg as large as herself, and her father had said impatiently: “What a silly wish!” Or to another time when she had asked him to let her kiss his eyelids, and he had mocked her, or still another time when she had wept at his leaving on a trip and he had said: “I don’t understand your giving this such importance.”
Now Rango was saying the same thing: “I don’t understand why you should be sad at not being able to cut my hair any longer.”
Why could he not have opened his big arms to her, sheltered her for an instant and said: “It cannot be, that right belongs to Zora, but I do understand how you feel, I do understand you are frustrated in your wish to care for me as a wife…”
She wanted to say: “Oh, Rango, beware. Love never dies of a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source, it dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illnesses and wounds, it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings, but never of natural death. Every lover could be brought to trial as the murderer of his own love. When something hurts you, saddens you, I rush to avoid it, to alter it, to feel as you do, but you turn away with a gesture of impatience and say: ‘I don’t understand.’”
It was never one scene which took place between human beings, but many scenes converging like great intersections of rivers. Rango believed this scene contained nothing but a whim of Djuna’s to be denied.
He failed to see that it contained at once all of Djuna’s wishes which had been denied, and these wishes had flown from all directions to meet at this intersection and to plead once more for understanding.
All the time that the organ grinder was unwinding the songs Carmen in the orchestra pit of this scene, what was conjured was not this room in a barge, and these two people, but a series of rooms and a procession of people, accumulating to reach immense proportions, accumulating analogies and repetitions of small defeats until it contained them all, and the continuity of the organ grinder’s accompaniment welded, compressed them all into a large injustice. Music expanding the compressed heart created a tidal wave of injustice for which no Noah’s Ark had ever been provided.
The fire sparkled high; their eyes reflected all its dances joyously.
Djuna looked at Rango with a premonition of difficulties, for it so often happened that their gaiety wakened in him a sudden impulse to destroy their pleasure together. Their joys together never a luminous island in the present but stimulating his remembrance that she had been alive before, that her knowledge of caresses had been taught to her by others, that on other nights, in other rooms, she had smiled. At every peak of contentment she would tremble slightly and wonder when they would begin to slide into torment.
This evening the danger came unsuspected as they talked of painters they liked, and Rango said suddenly: “And to think that you believed Jay a great painter!”
When she defended a friend from Rango’s irony and wit it always aroused his jealousy, but to defend an opinion of a painter, Djuna thought, could be achieved without danger.
“Of course, you’ll defend Jay,” said Rango, “he was a part of your former life, of your former values. I will never be able to alter that. I want you to think as I do.”
“But Rango, you couldn’t respect someone who surrendered an opinion merely to please you. It would be hypocrisy.”
“You admire Jay as a painter merely because Paul admired him. He was Paul’s great hero in painting.”
“What can I say, Rango? What can I do to prove to you that I belong to you? Paul is not only far away but you know we will never see each other again, that we were not good for each other. I have completely surrendered him, and I could forget him if you would let me. You are the one constantly reminding me of his existence.”
At these moments Rango was no longer the fervent, the adoring, the warm, the big, the generous one. His face would darken with anger, and he made violent gestures. His talk became vague and formless, and she could barely catch the revealing phrase which might be the key to the storm and enable her to abate or deflect it.
A slow anger at the injustice of the scene overtook her. Why must Rango use the past to destroy the present? Why did he deliberately seek torment?
She left the table swiftly, and climbed to the deck. She sat near the anchor chain, in the dark. The rain fell on her and she did not feel it; she felt lost and bewildered.
Then she felt him beside her. “Djuna! Djuna!”
He kissed her, and the rain and the tears and his breath mingled. There was such a desperation in his kiss that she melted. It was as if the quarrel had peeled away a layer and left a core like some exposed nerve, so that the kiss was magnified, intensified, as if the pain had made a fine incision for the greater penetration of pleasure.
“What can I do?” she murmured. “What can I do?”
“I’m jealous because I love you.”
“But Rango, you have no cause for jealousy.”
It was as if they shared his illness of doubt and were seeking a remedy, together.
It seemed to her that if she said, “Jay was a bad painter,” Rango could see the obviousness of such a recantation, its absurdity. Yet how could she restore his confidence? His entire body was pleading for reassurance, and if her whole love was not enough what else could she give him to cure his doubt?
When they returned to the room the fire was low.
Rango did not relax. He found some books piled next to the wastebasket which she had intended to throw away. He picked them up and studied them, one by one, like a detective.
Then he left the ones she had discarded and walked to those aligned on the book shelf.
He picked one up at random and read on the fly leaf: “From Paul.”
It was a book on Jay, with reproductions of his paintings.
Djuna said: “If it makes you happy, you can throw it away with the others.”
“We’ll burn them,” he said.
“Burn them all,” she said with bitterness.
To her this was not only an offering of peace to his tormenting jealousy, but a sudden anger at this pile of books whose contents had not prepared her for moments such as this one. All these novels so carefully concealing the truth about character, about the obscurities, the tangles, the mysteries. Words words words words and no revelation of the pitfalls, the abysms in which human beings found themselves.