Could anyone help her to forget Hans for an hour? Could Edgar help her, Edgar with his astonished eyes saying to her: “I cannot tell what you will be to-morrow, that is why I love you. You feed on miracles and transformations. You may have been afraid but you never died.” The whiteness of his room like the whiteness of the streets. The world excluded from his room. They met in quietness and elation. Elation in royal blue and whiteness.
Out in the snow again she does not feel her body. She is afraid of becoming a saint. Edgar might save her, Edgar waiting for her every day carrying flowers in silver paper. Flowers in silver paper! With this bouquet in his hand the world loses all its insensate rotation and askewness.
She has a fear of becoming a saint. She feels her body slipping away from her.
She is dancing with Edgar in the luminous turning disk in a shower of changing lights, but when her dress opens a little at the top she can smell the mixed odor of herself and Hans. She still feels Hans’ moisture between her legs. But she is still afraid of being lured back into the whitest corners of the dream, afraid of the nun’s wings like small ship sails. She likes to feel other desires around her. She would like many men to come and take hold of her, so her body would cease slipping from her. She finds herself so far from her desires, so far from her own flesh, this flesh, these feet walking over wet snow in sandals because she has so strong a sense of wonder she cannot believe her feet will get wet, her throat ache. Her love for Hans spilling over in multiple desires to be made woman many times over again, to remain woman at his side, to stay in his world because it is his world and he is in it. She sees the dirty snow, like the soiled bandages of a crippled city. She loves the world too much, it is implanted in her like man himself; no hatred pours from her, yet she is grateful to Edgar because his desire, his hand on her, the flowers in silver paper, everything that is simple, life-like. Ordinary, like his words ‘I love your gaiety, you’re a thoroughbred,’ because the place the dog tied at the entrance with the coats and hats, the waiter’s smile, the snow brought from the street marking the dance floor with stains, all this can arrest this ascension in her, this vast rotation in space, this proximity to all forms of departure. He said she was a thoroughbred, and not a saint. She had been made woman by Hans. Hans alone held in his hand all the roots of her being, and when he pulled them, in his own motion outward, he inflicted a torture which destroyed all the roots at once and sent her into space. Edgar wanted to come close to her, and she would let him, while imagining Hans’ pain. She would be Hans observing her own severance from him. A meeting of eyes, a silence, a blind meeting with Edgar, covered with flowers in silver paper, in a world that stood still. Below the level of feeling where Hans could watch the scene and be in turn transfixed to the pain of stillness while the nightmare enveloped and pierced him: and so Hans saw the clothes falling, heard the music, witnessed the scene of a Djuna lying down and saying: Why do you leave me so alone, through what fissure between us does this stranger penetrate and approach me? I am quiet and yielding like a plant. Unafraid and full of joy at feeling your pain, Hans. You are the man of the crowd and of the street. Here I lie with a stranger covered with ordinary flowers in silver paper. I am punishing you for being different, I am removing myself to permit you to breathe. What makes me lonely, Hans, are the cheap and gaudy people you go with. I lie here untouched by this stranger, who is only caressing you inside of me. He is complaining like a woman: you are not filled with me. This was a meeting like a curse in a dark, chaotic world to learn to put space between you and me.
It is as if she were in an eleva shooting up and down. Hundreds of floors of sensations varying faster than temperature. Up into the sun garden, no floors above. Deliverance. A bower of light. Proximity to the stars. Faith. At this height she finds something to lie on. Faith. But the red lights are calling: Down. The elevator coming down so swiftly brings her body to the concert floor. But her breath is caught midway, left in midheaven. Now it is music she is breathing, in which all anger dissolves. It is not the swift changes of floor which make her dizzy, but that parts of her body, of her life are passing into every floor, into the lives of others. All that passes into the room of the Voice he pours back now into her, to deliver himself of the weight. She follows the confessions, each anguish is repeated in her. The resonance is so immense, resonance to wind, to lament, to pain, to desires, to every nuance of sensibility, so enormous the resonance, beyond the entire hotel, the high vault of sky and the black bowl of hysteria, that she cannot hear the music. She cannot listen to the music. Her being is brimming, spilling over, cannot contain its own knowledge. The music spills out overflows, meets with the overfullness, and she cannot receive it. She is saturated. For in her it never dies. No days without music. She is like an instrument so tuned up, so exacerbated, that without hands, without players, without leadership, it responds, it breathes, it emits the continuous melody of sensibility. Never knew silence. Even in the darkest grottoes of sleep. So the concerts of the Hotel Chaotica Djuna cannot hear without exploding. She feels her body like an instrument which gives its strongest music when it is used as a body. Ecstasy reached only in the orchestra, music and sensualitly traversing all walls and reaching ecstasy. The orchestra is made with fullness, and only fullness rises to God. The soloist talks only to his own soul. All fullness rises.
Like the fullness of the Hotel. No matter what happened in each room, what contortions, distortions, growls, devourings, murders, when Djuna reaches the highest floor, the alchemy is complete. Music rises. Ecstasy rises. Like the fullness in herself. No cord untouched, no cells closed, no nerves silent: at the tips of her nerves a million eyes, and her moisture dripping in snow white drops everywhere.
The telephone rang and announced some one waiting downstairs to see the Voice. It was urgent. And this some one came, shaking an umbrella dripping with melted snow. She entered his room walking sideways like a crab, and bundled in her coat as if she were a package, not a body. Between each word there was a light gasp of hesitancy. Ineach gesture a swing intended to be masculine, but as soon as she sat on the couch, looking up at the Voice, flushed with timidity, saying shall I take off my shoes and lie down? he knew already she was not masculine. She was deluding herself and others about it. He was even more certain while watching her take off her shoes and uncover her very small and delicate feet. Not that the feet were an indication, but that he felt the woman in her through her feet, through her hands. They transmitted a woman current. The simple act of taking off her shoes betrayed that her caresses were those of a girl, girls in school arousing but the surface of each other’s feminine senses and believing when they had travelled on lakes of gentle sensation that they had penetrated the dark and violent center of woman’s response. All this he knew, and he was not surprised when she opened with “I find it hard to confess to you, I’m a pervert. I’ve had a lot of aff with women.” He wanted to smile. He could have smiled, she could not see him, but he could see her passing her delicate girl hand through the strands of her heavy hair with gestures meant to be heavy with disaster and dark implications. She could not, with any of her words, charge the atmosphere of the room as she meant to, with the darkness of her acts. The atmosphere continued delicate like her hands and feet. No matter what she was saying about her last love affairs, about her spread the smell of herbs. She spoke breathlessly, with little repetitions and light gasps of awe and surprise at herself: