Let him burn them all; they deserved their fate.
(Rango thinks he is burning moments of my life with Paul. He is only burning words, words which eluded all truths, eluded essentials, eluded the bare demon in human beings, and added to the blindness, added to the errors. Novels promising experience, and then remaining on the periphery, reporting only the semblance, the illusions, the costumes, and the falsities, opening no wells, preparing no one for the crises, the pitfalls, the wars, and the traps of human life. Teaching nothing, revealing nhing, cheating us of truth, of immediacy, of reality. Let him burn them, all the books of the world which have avoided the naked knowledge of the cruelties that take place between men and women in the pit of solitary nights. Their abstractions and evasions were no armor against moments of despair.)
She sat beside him by the fire, partaking of this primitive bonfire. A ritual to usher in a new life.
If he continued to destroy malevolently, they might reach a kind of desert island, a final possession of each other. And at times this absolute which Rango demanded, this peeling away of all externals to carve a single figure of man and woman joined together, appeared to her as a desirable thing, perhaps as a final, irrevocable end to all the fevers and restlessness of love, as a finite union. Perhaps a perfect union existed for lovers willing to destroy the world around them. Rango believed the seed of destruction lay in the world around them, as for example in these books which revealed to Rango too blatantly the difference between their two minds.
To fuse then, it was, at least for Rango, necessary to destroy the differences.
Let them burn the past then, which he considered a threat to their union.
He was driving the image of Paul into another chamber of her heart, an isolated chamber without communicating passage into the one inhabited by Rango. A place in some obscure recess, where flows eternal love, in a realm so different from the one inhabited by Rango that they would never meet or collide, in these vast cities of the interior.
“The heart… is an organ… consisting of four chambers… A wall separates the chambers on the left from those on the right and no direct communication is possible between them…”
Paul’s image was pursued and hid in the chamber of gentleness, as Rango drove it away, with his holocaust of the books they had read together.
(Paul, Paul, this is the claim you never made, the fervor you never showed. You were so cool and light, so elusive, and I never felt you encircling me and claiming possession. Rango is saying all the words I had wanted to hear you say. You never came close to me, even while taking me. You took me as men take foreign women in distant countries whose language they cannot speak. You took me in silence and strangeness…)
When Rango fell asleep, when the aphrodisiac lantern had burnt out its oil, Djuna still lay awake, shaken by the echoes of his violence, and by the discovery that Rango’s confidence would have to be reconstructed each day anew, that none of these maladies of the soul were curable by love or devotion, that the evil lay at the roots, and that those who threw themselves into palliating the obvious symptoms assumed an endless task, a task without hope of cure.
The word most often on his lips was trouble.
He broke the glass, he spilled the wine, he burnt the table with cigarettes, he drank the wine which dissolved his will, he talked away his plans, he tore his pockets, he lost s buttons, he broke his combs.
He would say: “I’ll paint the door. I will bring oil for the lantern. I will repair the leak on the roof.” And months passed: the door remained unpainted, the leak unrepaired, the lantern without oil.
He would say: “I would give my life for a few months of fulfillment, of achievement, of something I could be proud of.”
And then he would drink a little more red wine, light another cigarette. His arms would fall at his side; he would lie down beside her and make love to her.
When they entered a shop, she saw a padlock which they needed for the trap door and said: “Let’s buy it.”
“No,” said Rango, “I have seen one cheaper elsewhere.”
She desisted. And the next day she said: “I’m going near the place, where you said they sold cheap padlocks. Tell me where it is and I’ll get it.”
“No,” said Rango. “I’m going there today. I’ll get it.” Weeks passed, months passed, and their belongings kept disappearing because there was no padlock on the trap door.
No child was being created in the womb of their love, no child, but so many broken promises, each day an aborted wish, a lost object, a misplaced unread book, cluttering the room like an attic with discarded possessions.
Rango only wanted to kiss her wildly, to talk vehemently, to drink abundantly, and to sleep late in the mornings.
His body was in a fever always, his eyes ablaze, as if at dawn he were going to don a heavy steel armor and go on a crusade like the lover of the myths.
The crusade was the cafe.
Djuna wanted to laugh, and forget his words, but he did not allow her to laugh or to forget. He insisted that she retain this image of himself created in his talks at night, the image of his intentions and aspirations. Every day he handed her anew a spider web of fantasies, and he wanted her to make a sail of it and sail their barge to a port of greatness.
She was not allowed to laugh. When at times she was tempted to surrender this fantasy, to accept the Rango who created nothing, and said playfully: “When I first met you, you wanted to be a hobo. Let me be a hobo’s wife,” then Rango would frown severely and remind her of a more austere destiny, reproaching her for surrendering and diminishing his aims. He was unyielding in his desire that she should remind him of his promises to himself and to her.
This insistence on his dream of another Rango touched her compassion. She was deceived by his words and his ideal of himself. He had appointed her not only guardian angel, but a reminder of his ideals.
She would have liked at times to descend with him into more humanly accessible regions, into a carefree world. She envied him his reckl hours at the cafe, his joyous friendships, his former life with the gypsies, his careless adventures. The night he and his bar companions stole a rowboat and rowed up the Seine singing, looking for suicides to rescue. His awakenings sometimes in far-off benches in unknown quarters of the city. His long conversations with strangers at dawn far from Paris, in some truck which had given him a ride. But she was not allowed into this world with him.
Her presence had awakened in him a man suddenly whipped by his earlier ideals, whose lost manhood wanted to assert itself in action. With his conquest of Djuna he felt he had recaptured his early self before his disintegration, since he had recaptured his first ideal of woman, the one he had not attained the first time, the one he had completely relinquished in his marriage to Zora—Zora, the very opposite of what he had first dreamed.
What a long detour he had taken by his choice of Zora, who had led him into nomadism, into chaos and destruction.
But in this new love lay the possibility of a new world, the world he had first intended to reach and had missed, had failed to reach with Zora.
Sometimes he would say: “Is it possible that a year ago I was just a bohemian?”
She had unwittingly touched the springs of his true nature: his pride, his need of leadership, his early ambition to play an important role in history.
There were times when Djuna felt, not that his past life had corrupted him—because in spite of his anarchy, his destructiveness, the core of him had remained human and pure—but that perhaps the springs in him had been broken by the tumultuous course of his life, the springs of his will.