She leaned over the table until our breaths mingled, and she fixed her snake-like eyes upon me.
“You don’t know what a relief it is. The smoke of opium like fog. It brings marvellous dreams, and gaiety. Such gaiety, Djuna! And you feel so powerful, so powerful! You don’t feel any more frustration, you feel that you are lording it over the whole world, with a marvellous strength. No one can hurt you, humiliate you, confuse you. You feel that you are soaring over the world. Everything becomes larger and deeper. Such joys, Djuna, as you’ve never known or imagined. The touch of a hand is enough… the touch of a hand is like going the whole way… the tip of the finger on the breast can give an orgasm. And the time, how it flies! The days pass like an hour… it is all like down, so soft and lulling. You would love the heaviness of the body, the laziness, and the smells, the smells which fill the room. No more straining and desiring, just dreaming and floating and enjoying…”
“I’ve known all this without drugs,” I murmured.
“No, never as strongly, as powerfully. Everything you’ve ever known, every joy is a hundred times more acute, more overwhelming… Take drugs with me, Djuna. I want to do it with you. It’s with you I want to do it.”
I yielded, and consented with my head and my eyes. Then I saw that Johanna was looking at the Arab rug merchant who stood by the door, with his red hat, his kimono, and his slippers, his arms loaded with Arabian rugs and pearl necklaces. Under the rug I saw he had a wooden leg with which he was beating time to the jazz.
Johanna laughed hysterically, shaking her whole body with drunken laughter.
“You don’t know, Djuna… this man… with his wooden leg… you never can tell… he may have some. There was a man once, with a wooden leg like that. He was arrested and they found his wooden leg just packed with ‘snow’. Maybe I’ll go and ask him.”
And she got up with her heavy, animal walk, and talked to the rug merchant, looking up at him alluringly, begging, smiling up at him in that secret way she had of smiling at me. A burning pain invaded me to see Johanna begging. But the merchant shook his head, and smiled innocently, shook his head firmly and smiled, and offered her his rugs and the necklaces.
When I saw Johanna returning empty-handed I drank again, and it was like drinking fog, long draughts of fog.
We danced together, the floor turning under us like a phonograph record. Johanna dark and potent under the brim of her mannish hat.
A gust of jeers seemed to blow through the place. A gust of jeers. But we danced, cheeks touching, our cheeks chalice white. We danced, and the jeers cut into the haze and splendor of our dizziness like a whip. The eyes of the men were insulting us. The eyes of the men called us by the name the world had for us. Eyes. Green, jealous, crucified, tortured eyes. Eyes of the world. Eyes sick with hatred and contempt. Caressing eyes. Eyes ransacking our conscience. Stricken yellow eyes caught in the flare of a match. Heavy torpid eyes without courage, without dreams. Mockery. Frozen mockery.
Johanna and I wanted to strike those eyes, break them, break the bars of green wounded eyes condemning us. We wanted to break the walls confining us, suffocating us. We wanted to break out from the prison of our own fears, break every obstacle. But all we found to break were glasses. We took our glasses and we broke them over our shoulders and we made no wish, but we looked at the fragments of the glasses on the floor wonderingly, as if our mood might be lying there also, in broken pieces.
We danced mockingly, as if we were sliding beyond the reach of the men’s hands, running like sand between their insults. We scoffed at these eyes which brimmed with knowledge, for we knew the ecstasy of mystery, and of fog, and the words they uttered fell like heavy stones through the fog of our ecstasy. The eyes and the words of men fell through like stones, while we danced mockingly away and down the rolling hills of fog, fire and orange fumes of a world we had seen through a slit in the dream. Spinning and reeling and falling, spinning and turning and rolling down the brume and smoke of a world seen through a slit in the dream.
The waiter put his ham-colored hand on Johanna’s arm:
“You’ve got to get out of here, you two!”
I arrived with a bottle of vodka under my arm. I was already drunk—on the idea of the vodka. A high drunkenness, like an Arabian magic carpet.
I found Johanna in a sullen mood, sullen as a gypsy, a rampant dark sullenness, earth-colored, snake- tongued.
Hans came out of the kitchen looking pale, abstracted. He came out with a dazed expression, as if he had left his body on the table with the thick manuscript he had been slaving over.
“Look at him,” said Johanna, “that’s the ghost I have to live with.”
The bottle of vodka stood on the kitchen table. Hans put his hands around it lovingly, absentmindedly.
The three of us were now sitting around the stained kitchen table, looking mutely at the bottle of vodka. Suddenly Johanna pounced on it, uncorked it swiftly, and spilled out three brimming glasses of it.
“Sometimes,” said Johanna, “when I read what you’ve had to say about me, I don’t know whether I’m a goddess, a whore, or a criminal.”
“You flatter yourself,” said Hans, and I saw that his eyes were cruel and angry, his face flushed, and that he was looking at me too with a secret, vengeful anger which the drink had brought to the surface.
“To-day I was looking at a necklace in the Trocadero,” he continued. “A necklace which would have suited either of you. It was a big, clumsy necklace of bones which the men of Africa used to put around the necks of the women who lied. It would have suited you swell, the two of you!”
And he drank some more.
I felt a deep disquietude. I felt this anger, this hatred flaring up between us like a strong, brutal wind; I felt caught up by it, and at the same time, in some strange, inexplicable way, I felt unwilling to defend myself. It was like the taste of something acrid and new, like a poison, like a simoun storm in the desert, which made one nervous and yet heavy with fever. I picked up my vodka and drank with them—as if to signify my deep desire to sink with them into that dark, fiery realm of war and hate.
And then I noticed that Johanna’s body had begun to loosen visibly, that it had become like lead. I saw her mouth widening, saw her eyes growing bleary, her legs outstretched, heavy, inert, wooden. Johanna had suddenly lost her luminosity. Johanna suddenly looked to me exactly like a common, ordinary whore.
As the fiery vodka dulled me, I felt immensely weary of my constant ascensions. I wanted to be lost with Hans and Johanna, to yield, to forget my name and identity, and all that was expected of me, my promises and my pursuit of perfection. I wanted to follow Hans and Johanna into disorder, and indifference, and carelessness, and unscrupulousness, to borrow and take and beg and live only in the moment…
I laughed and said: “This vodka is like the sun, it burns all caring away, it burns consciousness away, it burns everything away…”
But when I saw the looseness of Johanna’s mouth and the abandon of her body on the chair, I said in a heavy voice:
“I don’t like you when you’re drunk, Johanna.”
Hans toppled over and fell asleep against the table, hiding his flushed red face in his arms, and laughing softly now and then.
Johanna’s Viking body was crumbling. I tried to drag her to bed, but she was too heavy for me. Like David I could fling stones at Goliath, but a drunken Goliath I could not carry to bed.
Hans awakened and helped me, tottering as he did so under the burden.
Johanna laughed, wept, vomited… In keeping with her role Johanna was going through the gestures which I had imagined myself to be making when I had seen Johanna drunk. It was Johanna who vomited for me all the lives and adventures I had embellished by the alchemy of illusion. I vomited with Johann the reality of adventure, my desire for drunkenness, for high color, for excess. Absolute drunkenness cancels the joys of drunkenness, intense living destroys intensity, reality destroys the dream. Everything beautiful has to remain suspended and unfinished.