“A mystical illusion,” repeated Djuna. “A mirage. If you know what happens to woman when she pursues a mirage, when she has a love affair with a mirage?”
“What can happen to her? It’s poetry.”
“It may be poetry, Lilith, but her nature revolts against it. At some moment or other your body will revolt, because it’s not real.”
“But it is only in his presence I feel true, natural.”
“But don’t get closer to him. If you come closer you will defeat your own salvation. But then… you are too lovely, he won’t let you pass without making an effort to retain you. That is what happened to me. I lost the father in him—perhaps I wanted to. I tempted him as a man, and then he became a man and desired me, then I was angry at him, as if it had been only a test, a test of the saviour in him. And he’s noe’s noee’s trying to save himself too.”
“You bitch, you bitch,” laughed Lilith.
“I liked upsetting him. Then, when he became a man and ran after me I was very angry—it seemed to prove that he was only human.”
“The world is very small, Djuna. If what you say is true it is very small. I’m going to choke in it. He can’t be merely human. He must be something else, something more. He has a magic power.”
Lilith enveloped Djuna in great softness. They lay talking in the dark. Only the softness, the glistening touch of legs mixed together, only to feel the softness and warmth of woman, the weight of her arm, the curve of her neck. Only to hear her breathing and talking and laughing in the dark. To lie there, wishing perhaps to be a man for a moment, but as a woman knowing there is no way of possessing a woman but as a man.
“Try and close your eyes, you’ll find another world that is immense, at night, Lilith.”
“I never remember the night. Why don’t I find a man who makes me feel what I feel with you? You are so warm, you are so quick. You are always where I am. Our impulses towards each other happen at the same moment. You are never late or slow or indifferent, and you have the gift of gesture. When I feel anguished, lost, alone, you always have the gift for saying what I need to hear, as if you knew when I am wandering alone, when I need to be called. After we are together you write me letters, and I need so much to feel again what we said, to be able to touch the words, to feel palpably that what happened to us is real. It’s the only thing I believe in, Djuna, everything else is ghostly. You say everything with your body, like a dancer. All your body talks, your hands, your walk. I believe you.”
“But none of this is love, Lilith. We are the same woman. Every woman in this hotel is the same woman. There is always a moment when all the outlines, the differences between women disappear, and we enter a world where all feelings, yours and mine, seem to issue from the same source. We lose our separate identities. What happens to you is the same as what happens to me. Once a month, you and I are exactly alike; and you know it. Listening to you is no longer watching a world different than my own, it’s a kind of communion.”
“And meanwhile everybody laughs, jeers and calls us all kinds of names.”
What softness. To lie on a wave. The marvellous silence—two women, one woman becoming plants. To turn over and watch the rivulets of shadows between the breasts, to lie on the down of the bed sleeping over one’s own body, like sleeping in the forest at night. The marvellous silence of woman’s thoughts, the secret and the mystery of night and woman become air, sun, water, plant. Feel the roots resting in the soil, the feet well planted in the coolness, in the brown pressure, firm against this creamy wall of earth. When you press against the body of the other you feel this joy of the roots compressed, sustained, enwrapped in its brownness, with only the seeds of joyousness stirring. A pleasure ebbing back and forth. Sun pressed luxuriantly against the body. Mystery and coolness of darkness between the four walls of another’s flesh. The back of Lilith, this soft, musical wall of fleh, the being floating in the utter waves of silence, enclosed by the presence of what can be touched. No more falling into space. No more quest, anxiety, seeking, yearning, turning, within this compact wall of tender flesh. Touch the delicate tendrils of hair, you touch moss and an end to hunger. This hand holds a strand of hair, the world complete, reduced, in the palm of the hand. You have entered from the dissonances of the street, from the separate, hard fragments walking without legs or head or arms, always mutilated, into the immense vault of an organ chant. Djuna lay at the centre of a wheel. Lilith warm and near. Or Hans talking rumblingly into her ear. The earth turns with a chant of roundness, fullness. It turns into a smooth, full round of plenitude. The spokes pass fast and are not seen at this moment. Only the drunkenness of rotation. Other days the wheel slows down and one gets caught in the spokes. One falls between them, they cut and mangle one. You are caught. The rhythm broken, you dangle, you are dragged, you are mutilated.
The steps of Georgia at the door. A voice with a mustache, the heavy pounding of her enormous feet. Her hands about to strike. Her breath like a beaver, her feet like giant ducks’ feet, her hands slapping the air. When she entered the room of the Voice it was like an attack. Thrusting herself into it as if her shoulders would hatchet down the obstacles.
She made the room seem small. She was not talking to the Voice, but smelling him, breathing over him, with her tongue flicking constantly over the wet lips, as if she had just finished eating him and were seeking the flavor again with her saliva.
Her lips were wet with appetite. She breathed, she snorted, warm and musky. She sat down as a gorilla sits on a branch with her arms ready to climb. When she said: I love, it was incongruous. She ought to have said: I am hungry. I am thirsty.
She had hair on her upper lip, hair in her nose, and hair like seaweeds on her head. The Voice was haunted by the vision of this hair, imagined that she might have hair inside her too, that her sex must be lined like the backs of sea-urchins.
She was very angry because the Voice had not answered her telephone call during the night. She had needed him desperately.
“I never answer the telephone at night,” said the Voice.
“And why not?”
“Because everyone would telephone at night. That is the moment when everyone feels the solidtude. Didn’t you ever sit by a telephone at night when in anguish and feel like calling some one, just to hear a voice? At night people don’t resist their impulses, their obsessions. One feels like addressing another human being just to make sure one is still among them.”
“That’s true. But I called for a more important reason. I have to conduct my orchestra to-morrow, and I have a new obsession. If you don’t help me somehow I’ll never be able to conduct. There was a story about my father which I didn’t tell you yesterday. I remembered it as son as I left you. When I was a girl I knew about his affairs with women. He confided in me. I knew exactly how he behaved, and the most cynical details. There are times even now, when I am making love, I suddenly become aware that I am acting like my father, I feel like him at the moment. One of his favorite amusements was to come to my door in the morning to wake me up, because I was lazy and found it hard to get up. He would knock very hard with his stick, then say: ‘Guess what I’m knocking with, guess!’ At first I didn’t. I laughed without knowing. Then one day I understood his laughter. For years this caused me a great shock. I used to hear this knocking of my father in my dreams. Then I forgot about it. I became an orchestra leader. One day, wanting to amuse a woman I loved, I knocked at her door with my orchestra baton: guess what I am knocking with? That night while conducting, while I was waving my stick, the whole scene came back to me. Do you think that’s why all women are so fascinated by me? I think about it day and night. The stick burns my fingers; I will never be able to conduct again.”