“You don’t know what you have given me!” I could not continue. My eyes blurred.
Johanna, Hans and I. His manuscripts spread on the table. Hans was saying very gently:
“I can’t work here. I’d like to go to Djuna’s place a few days. You understand, Johanna, this is the most important period of my life as a writer.”
“You don’t have to leave,” exclaimed Johanna hastily, “I’ll leave, I’ll go away as soon as I can get the money. I’ll go away to-night—I’ll always find some one to stay with.”
“I’m not asking you to leave,” said Hans, “only to leave me alone. I can’t work when you’re around. I can’t work! And the way I feel now I’d commit a crime in order to finish this book!”
I understood this strange, abstract mood, his brassiness. His eyes were black and hard. He was again the supreme egoist, the artist. But Johanna was weeping hysterically, her whole body shaking, raving wildly about him not being a human being, that she must fight him to protect herself against him, that if she stayed with him she would kill herself or do something mad. His work offended her, as a woman. She could only allow it if it glorified her.
At this moment I was not a woman. I was a writer too. I wanted Johanna to go and leave Hans to his work. I felt inhuman myself. Everything was blurred and distorted and magnified by the demon in both of us, the demon of literature.
Johanna’s grief left me unmoved. What stirred was Hans’ cry: “Let me work!”
Johanna got up, trembling.
“You’re better,” she said to Hans, “you’re better in some way that I can’t understand, and you’re worse in a way which crushes me. There’s something in you I can’t seize. I won’t be a slave to your ideas! You’re too spiritual a man. I’m the wrong woman for you.”
I wanted to say: “You love only the man, and the man is only half of Hans.”
Johanna stood ready to leave us, with her hair falling about her shoulders. At this moment her beauty seemed to have reached its climax. I was awed by the ripeness, the opulence of her body under her black cape, by the savage, almost phosphorescent glint of her eyes, by the dewiness and petal transparency of her skin. Johanna at this moment did not seem like a woman, but like some mythological figure of woman. Never did the aureole of this beauty shine so like a legend. I was awed. And awed too that this beauty could be submerged and swept away by a greater power—the great unswerving flow of creation. And it was to this force of creation that I responded as to a greater passion—the great inhuman passion.
Johanna left the room. Hans and I looked at each other with a profound understanding. Then I rose to follow Johanna. In the dark hall I took her in my arms. I caressed her hair, I lulled her with sweet words. I whispered her name caressingly. “My little Johanna, my poor little Johanna.” I caressed her like a child until her sobs subsided.
Johanna and I in a taxi. My arms becoming strong. It is I who am throwing back Johanna’s head. It is I who am kissing Johanna’s throat. And Johanna melting. An orgy of soft flesh. Johanna in my arms taking refuge from her fears of me, so that I might not judge her, not measure her. I would not see her while she lay in my arms. I could see only the forked lightning of her fear.
When I left the taxi I saw the blurred face of Johanna staring through the window. I saw this face behind the window, pleading like the face of a woman drowning. The face of the child frightened and unsure of love, frightened and struggling to wield power through mystery and mystification. A child caught in the great dark strain of lies and fantasies. Every gesture one of frenzied singularity to compel love and admiration. Johanna, little Johanna, beautiful Johanna, sometimes wise and sometimes empty! Johanna with her life all exterior and without core. Believing only in drama, in gestures, in appearance, in war, in outward and visible movement. Believing that a kiss can silence all judgment, believing like a whore that the soul can be traded, the body offered in exchange. Johanna, the born whore, who would triumph as a whore. But Johanna, the soul will not be traded!
This face behind the window, pleading, I saw in it the face of a woman drowning. I saw Johanna struggling to the bottom of the sea, with terror written on her face, the terror of monsters invisible to men. I could see in her face the submerged continents over which the ghost of Johanna borne on a manticore, had wandered. Johanna had seen the mantic religiosa which waits for its prey in a devotional attitude, and the giant crabs that cling to the marabou hair of shell flowers and choke them; she had seen the slimy coil of the octopus strangling the slippery necks of eels; she had seen the wrecks of ships gathered in glutinous cradles of moss, the rotted wood crawling with worms and the bodies of the dead, swollen and burst, staining the water with twisted entrails. She had been terrorized by the gold clarity of the sea on which the giant black birds threw purple shadows, and by the monstrous, phosphorescent eyes of the night which guided her course. She had experienced every terror and they trembled now in her face as she gazed at me through the watery taxi window.
A smile of immeasurable distress…
But in another instant, like a cloud passing over the face of the moon, it was effaced by another smile, the smile of the whore. It was this old, impenetrable smile which brought back to my mind the full impact of that moment when Johanna’s head, like a heavy flower broken from its stem, had fallen on my shoulder. It was this whore’s smile of Johanna which set the world rocking again as I stood there watching the taxi carrying Johanna off. Pity, protection, solace—they fell away from me like gifts of trivial import. I walked away unsteadi, like a man returning from a heavy debauch. I forgot about Johanna’s terror, forgot the child-face peering hungrily through the taxi window.
The taxi had taken care of my impulse, had thwarted it, with that banal fatality with which the petty and the trivial often arrests the most stupendous gestures. The taxi, the ordinary reality in which it moved, the rhythm it obeyed—allowing just that fatal, ordinary moment it required for two persons to part—it was this which had ordained the evolution of my emotion and the duration of it. It was this which allowed me to let Johanna depart with her deep distress, like a whore one has finished kissing, instead of withholding her and making her the gift of my love.
The trifling incident that had arrested the expression of my impulse, the passivity I had displayed, my inertia when confronted with the need of vital action which ought to follow every flash of understanding, the way I submitted to the taxi driver’s automatism, all this was no more amazing than the feeling I had that this was the moment when I understood Johanna’s potentialities or desires as I would never again be able to. Or rather, that this was the moment when I might have conveyed to her how deeply I understood her aspirations, but that I could only express this if Johanna were dead or removed from me by some contrast in our moods, some effective enmity between us. Thus fulfilling the inner fatality which makes of fusion the most evanescent of human attainments.
UNLESS SOME DAY JOHANNA SHOULD READ THIS BOOK.
We were walking together over dead leaves crackling like paper. Johanna was weeping, and I was weeping with her and for her. We were walking through the city as it sank into twilight and it was as if we were both going blind together, with the bitterness of our tears. Through this blurred city we walked, hazily and half lost, the light of a street lamp striking us now and then like a spotlight, throwing into relief Johanna’s distorted mouth and the broken line of her neck where the head fell forward heavily, as if she had been guillotined. The buses came upon us out of the dark, violently, with a deafening clatter and we had to leap out of their way, only to continue stumbling through dark streets, crossing bridges, passing under heavy arcades, our feet trembling on the uneven cobblestones, as if we had both lost our sense of gravity, as if we were treading already some other substance.