Johanna wept, laughed, and threw the towels at my face. I wiped the floor.
Johanna raved:
“I love you, you are cruel and clever. You have been cruel and clever, Djuna, that’s why I got drunk. You’re cruel, terribly cruel.”
But when Johanna said I love you, it had the emptiness of a gasp. She had exhausted the meaning and potency of these words with her comedies. It was an automatic gasp. The impetus was feeble, deflated. Automatically she might repeat for ever “I love you,” but the actress in her had exhausted the potency of the words.
She was like a foaming sea, Johanna, a sea churning up wreckage, skeletons of ships which I had glimpsed in full sailing. The debris of her doubts and fears: “Hans, Djuna, you’re both too cruel and clever. I’m afraid of you both.”
At this moment I remembered the face of Johanna, the child staring through the dimmed taxi window, but before this caricature of Johanna’s distress, the pity I had felt then was gone.
Pity, illusion, the dream, all had been spilled in vomit, wiped up, washed down the sewer and lost.
Johanna slid off the bed and had to be hoisted back again. Hans was laughing softly, drunkenly, as he wiped the floor.
But I was unable to laugh. I was enslaved by my own inexorable seriousness. It seemed to have devolved on me, the weary task of representing tragedy, the necessity of bearing up my seriousness in spite of all ridicule. The discarded seriousness of others had fallen on my shoulders because I had known always that those who discard tragedy like an old glove or a frayed collar are throwing away something the preciousness of which was always clear to me. Exactly as if I had become a kind of rag-picker for the fragments of tragedy.
Driven again by this ridiculous seriousness, I stood there in the middle of the room, unable to laugh with Hans. I was caressing Johanna and putting cold rags on her forehead. I was vomiting with Johanna all the illusions, fantasies, grandiose gestures, colorful extravagances, vertigoes so seriously and noiselessly. In keeping with her destiny Johanna was continuing to add to the chain of her external movements, expressions and gestures.
I lay all dressed at Johanna’s side. My first night with Johanna. No more Johanna. The stench of vomit. A body. Earth. A body. Heavy earth. Inert earth. Johanna!
I craved at this moment the supreme drunkenness of creation. I was hungry again for my own ecstasies, my solitude, my lightness, my joys. My ecstasies without vomit: not those which filled the being with poisons which must afterwards be ejected as the whore that men empty themselves into is ejected at dawn.
Then came the moment when a curtain seemed to fall over my life. As this curtain fell, I strove wistfully to gather up the last movements. Johanna and I had been walking together in sandalled feet. I had seen the sandalled feet treading the asphalt. I had looked down at them and said thoughtfully: “I like to see ourselves walking.”
Because I was already no longer walking, neither walking, nor eating, nor sleeping. I was already writing—writing even as the curtain descended. I had yielded my maximum of human feelings. I had ceased to exist. I had lost my humanness. And before Johanna had become aware of this transformation, I had run away. The human being in me was dead.
Johanna had given me violets. I vomited them up too. Violets. More things. Another abortion. Trying to efface the failure of one gesture with another. Objects. The world of things, which in the end turns the stomach. These violets had been extremely touching. Johanna, still heavy-headed, after having torn down her pyramid of illusions, had rushed to buy me violets, to atone. Very sublime, these violets which I had thrown away. But I would not let myself be bribed. The violets were crushed between the tin-voiced typewriter keys. And with violet ink I recorded the night.
The following night I returned to Johanna.
We were alone.
We were alone without daylight, without past, without any thought of the resemblance between our togetherness and the union of other women. The whole world was being pushed to one side by our faith in our own uniqueness. All comparison was proudly discarded. Johanna and I alone, naked of knowledge and naked of other experiences. We remembered nothing before this hour; we were innocent of associations. We forgot what we had read in books, what we had seen in cafés, the laughter of men, and the mocking participation of other women. Our individuality washed down and effaced the universe. We stood at the beginning of everything. We were naked and innocent of the past.
We stood before the night which belonged to us as two women emerging out of sleep. We stood on the first step of our timidity, of our faith, before the long night which belonged to us. Blameless of original sin, of literary sins, of the sin of calculation, of premeditation, or of experience.
Two women. Strangeness. All the webs of ideas blown away. New bodies, new souls, new minds, new words. We would create it all out of ourselves, fashion our own reality. Innocence. No roots dangling into other days, other nights, or other people. The potency of a new stare into the face of our desire and our fears. Johanna’s timidity and mine. Johanna’s awkwardness and mine. Our fears. A great terror slashing through the room, cutting icily through us, like a fallen sword. A new voice. Johanna’s voice hoarse, breathless, and mine like an exhalation of hers, a breath, almost a voicelessness, because we were so frightened.
Johanna sat so heavily on the edge of the bed, her earthy weight like roots sinking into the earth. Under the weight of her jungle stare I trembled.
Our bracelets tinkled.
The bracelets had given the signal. A signal like the first tinkle of beads on a savage neck. I took my bracelet off. We put them on the table, side by side.
The light. Why was the light so still, like the suspense of our blood? Still with fear. Like our eyes. Shadeless eyes that could not melt.
The dresses. My dress rolled around me like a long seaweed. I wanted to turn and drop it on the floor, but my hands lifted it like a Bayadere lifting her skirt to dance, and it rose like an umbrella slip and then fell, fell, like a leaf under a rain-shower.
Johanna’s eyes were like the forest. The darkness of the forest, the watchfulness behind an ambush. Fear. I journeyed into the darkness of it. I walked from the place where my dress had fallen, carrying my breasts like gifts in my half-opened hands; I carried them to her as if expecting to be thrust by her mortally.
Johanna loosened her hair and said: “You are so extraordinarily white.” With a strange weight, like a sadness, she spoke. It was not the white substance of me, but my significance, the whiteness of my newness to life, which Johanna seemed to sigh for. “You are so white, so white and smooth.” And there were deep shadows in her eyes, shadows of one old with life; shadows in her neck, in her arms, and on her knees, violet shadows.
I wanted to reach out for her. I saw that Johanna wanted as much to become I as I wanted to become Johanna. I saw how we both wanted to exchange bodies, exchange faces. I saw in both of us the dark strain of wanting to be the other, to deny one’s self, one’s form, one’s reality. Johanna and I both struggling to deny our lives and our bodies: Johanna thinking she desired my newness, and I desiring Johanna’s deeply marked body.
I drank the violet shadows, drank the imprint of others, the accumulation of other hours, other rooms, other odors, other caresses. How all the others clung to Johanna’s body, made her heavy, heavy with the loss of herself, lost in the maze of her gifts! How the lies and the loves, and the dreams, and the obscenities and the fevers weighed down her body, and how I wanted to become leadened with her, poisoned with her!