Ladders to Fire (17 page)

They had had dinner at the Chinese restaurant,
a rice without salt and meat with tough veins, but because of the shoal
beatitude Jay proclaimed he had never eaten such rice, and five minutes later
forgetting himself he said: “Rice is for the dogs!” The Chinese poet was hurt,
his eyelids dropped humbly.

Now as they walked up the stairs he explained
in neat phrases the faithfulness of the Chinese wife and Jay foamed with
amazement: oh, such beautiful faithfulness!—he would marry a Chinese woman.
Then the Chinese poet added: In China all tables are square. Jay almost wept
with delight at this, it was the sign of a great civilization. He leaned over
perilously and said with intimate secretiveness: In New Jersey when I was a boy
tables were always round; I always hated round tables.

Their feet were not constructed for ascensions
at the present moment; they might as well remain midway and call at Soutine’s
studio.

On the round stairway they collided with Stella
susurrating in a taffeta skirt and eating fried potatoes out of a paper bag.
Her long hair swayed as if she sat on a child’s swing.

Her engaging gestures had lassoed an artist
known for his compulsion to exhibit himself unreservedly, but he was not yet
drunk enough and was for the moment content with strumming on his belt. Stella,
not knowing what spectacle was reserved for her in his imagination, took the
offering pose of women in Florentine paintings, extending the right hip like a
holy water stand, both hands open as if inviting pigeons to eat from her palms,
stylized, liturgical, arousing in Manuel the same impulse which had once made
him set fire to a ballet skirt with a cigarette.

But Manuel was displaced by a figure who moved
with stately politeness, his long hair
patined
with
brilliantine, his face set in large and noble features by the men who carved
the marble faces in the hall of fame.

He bowed
ciously
over
women’s hands with the ritualistic deliberateness of a Pope. His decrees,
issued with
handkissing
, with soothing opening and
closing of doors, extending of chairs, were nevertheless fatal: he held full
power of decision over the delicate verdict: is it tomorrow’s art?

No one could advance without his visa. He gave
the passports to the future. Advance…or else: My dear man, you are a mere echo
of the past.

Stella felt his
handkissing
charged with irony, felt herself installed in a museum
not
of modem
art—blushed. To look at her in this ironic manner while scrupulously adhering
to medieval salutations this man must know that she was one to keep faded
flowers.

For he passed on with royal detachment and
gazed seriously for relief at the steel and wood mobiles turning gently in the
breeze of the future, like small structures of nerves vibrating in the air
without their covering of flesh, the new cages of our future sorrows, so
abstract they could not even contain a sob.

Jay was swimming against the compact stream of
visitors looking for re-enforcement to pull out the Chinese poet who had
stumbled into a very large garbage can in the front yard, and who was neatly
folded in two, severely injured in his dignity. But he was arrested on his
errand by the sight of Sabina and he thought why are there women in whom the
sediment of experience settles and creates such a high flavor that when he had
taken her he had also possessed all the unexplored regions of the world he had
wanted to know, the men and women he would never have dared to encounter. Women
whose bodies were a labyrinth so that when he was lying beside her he had felt
he was taking a journey through the ancient gorge where Paracelsus dipped his
sick people in fishing nets into lukewarm water, like a journey back into the
womb, and he had seen several hundred feet above his head the little opening in
the cathedral archway of the rocks through which the sun gleamed like a knife
of gold.

But too late now to dwell on the panoramic,
great voyage flavors of Sabina’s body: the Chinese poet must be saved.

At this moment Sabina intercepted a look of
tenderness between Jay and Lillian, a tenderness he had never shown her. The
glance with which Lillian answered him was thrown around him very much like a
safety net for a
trapezist
, and Sabina saw how Jay,
in his wildest leaps, never leaped out of range of the net of protectiveness
extended by Lillian.

The Chess Player noted with a frown that Sabina
picked up her cape and made her way to the imitation Italian balcony. She was
making a gradual escape; from the balcony to balcony, she would break the
friendly efforts made to detain her, and reach the exit. He could not allow
this to go on, at a Party everyone should pursue nothing but his individual
drama. Because Lillian and Jay had stood for a moment on the same square and
Sabina had caught Jay leaping spuriously into the safety net of Lillian’s
protectiveness, now Sabina acted like one pierced by a knife and left the game
for a balcony.

Where she stood now the noises of the Party
could not reach her. She heard the wind and rain rushing through the trees like
the lamentation of reeds in shallow tropical waters.

Sabina was lost.

The broken compass which inhabited her and
whose wild fluctuations she had always obeyed, making for tumult and motion in
place of direction, was suddenly fractured so that she no longer knew the
relief of tides, ebbs and flows and dispersions.

She felt lost.

The dispersion had become too vast, too
extended. For the first time a shaft of pain appeared cutting through the
nebulous pattern. Pain lies only in reflection, in awareness. Sabina had moved
so fast that all pain had passed swiftly as through a sieve, leaving a sorrow
like children’s sorrows, soon forgotten, soon replaced by a new interest. She
had never known a pause.

And suddenly in this balcony, she felt alone.

Her cape, which was more than a cape, which was
a sail, which was the feelings she threw to the four winds to be swelled and
swept by the wind in motion, lay becalmed.

Her dress was becalmed.

It was as if now she wore nothing that the wind
could catch, swell and propel.

For Sabina, to be becalmed meant to die.

Jealousy had entered her body and refused to
run through it like sand through an hourglass. The silvery holes of her sieve
against sorrow granted her at birth through which everything passed through and
out painlessly, had clogged. Now the pain had lodged itself inside of her.

She had lost herself somewhere along the
frontier between her inventions, her stories, her fantasies, and her true self.
The boundaries had become effaced, the tracks lost, she had walked into pure
chaos, and not a chaos which carried her like the wild
gallopings
of romantic riders in operas and legends, but a cavalcade which suddenly
revealed the stage prop: a papier-mache horse.

She had lost her boat, her sails, her cape, her
horse, her seven-league boots, and all of them at once, leaving her stranded on
a balcony, among dwarfed trees, diminished clouds, a miserly rainfall.

In the semi-darkness of that winter evening,
her eyes were blurred. And then as if all the energy and warmth had been drawn
inward for the first time, killing the senses, the ears, the touch, the palate,
all movements of the body, all its external ways of communicating with the
exterior, she suddenly felt a little deaf, a little blind, a little paralyzed;
as if life, in coiling upon itself into a smaller, slower inward rhythm, were
thinning her blood.

She shivered, with the same tremor as the
leaves, feeling for the first time some small withered leaves of her being
detaching themselves.

The Chess Player placed two people on a square.

As they danced a magnet pulled her hair and his
together, and when they pulled their heads away, the magnet pulled their mouths
together and when they separated the mouths, the magnet clasped their hands
together and when they unclasped the
hnds
their hips
were soldered. There was no escape. When they stood completely apart then her
voice spiraled around his, and his eyes were caught in the net grillage which
barred her breasts.

They danced off the square and walked into a
balcony. Mouth meeting mouth, and pleasure striking like a gong, once, twice,
thrice, like the beating wings of large birds. The bodies traversed by a
rainbow of pleasure.

By the mouth they flowed into each other, and
the little grey street ceased to be an impasse in Montparnasse. The balcony was
now suspended over the Mediterranean, the Aegean Sea, the Italian lakes, and
through the mouth they flowed and coursed through the world.

While on the wall of the studio there continued
to hang a large painting of a desert in smoke colors, a desert which parched
the throat. Imbedded in the sand many little bleached bones of
lovelessness
.

“The encounter of two is pure, in two there is
some hope of truth,” said the Chess Player catching the long floating hair of
Stella as she passed and confronting her with a potential lover.

Behind Stella hangs a painting of a woman with
a white halo around her head. Anxiety had carved diamond holes through her body
and her airiness came from this punctured faith through which serenity had
flown out.

What Stella gave now was only little pieces of
herself, pieces carefully painted in the form of black circles of wit, squares
of yellow politeness, triangles of blue friendliness, or the mock orange of
love: desire. Only little pieces from her external armor. What she gave now was
a self which a man could only carry across the threshold of an abstract house
with only one window on the street and this street a desert with little white
bones bleaching in the sun.

Deserts of mistrust.

The houses are no longer hearths; they hang
like mobiles turning to the changing breeze while they love each other like ice
skaters on the top layers of their invented selves, blinded with the dust of
attic memories, within the windowless houses of their fears.

The guests hang their coats upon a fragile
structure like the bar upon which ballet dancers test their limb’s wit.

The Party spreads like an uneasy octopus that
can no longer draw in his tentacles to seize and strangle the core of its
destructiveness.

In each studio there is a human being dressed
in the full regalia of his myth fearing to expose a vulnerable opening,
spreading not his charms but his defenses, plotting to disrobe, somewhere along
the night—his body without the aperture of the heart or his heart with a door
closed to his body. Thus keeping one compartment for refuge, one
uninvaded
cell.

And if you feel a little compressed, a little
cramped in your daily world, you can take a walk through a Chirico painting.
The houses have only facades, so escape is assured; the colonnades, the
volutes, valances extend into the future and you can walk into space.

The
painterspeopled
the world with a new variety of fruit and tree to surprise you with the
bitterness of what was known for its sweetness and the sweetness of what was
known for its bitterness, for they all deny the world as it is and take you
back to the settings and scenes of your dreams. You slip out of a Party into
the past or the future.

This meandering led the Chess Player to stray
from his geometrical duties, and he was not able to prevent a suicide. It was
Lillian who stood alone on a square; Lillian who had begun the evening like an
African dancer donning not only all of her Mexican silver jewelry but a dress
of emerald green of a starched material which had a bristling quality like her
mood.

She had moved from one to another with gestures
of her hands inciting others to foam, to dance. She teased them out of their
nonchalance or detachment. People would awaken from their lethargies as in a
thunderstorm; stand, move, ignite, catching her motions, her hands beating a
meringue of voices, a souffle of excitement. When they were ready to follow her
into some kind of tribal dance, she left them, to fall again into limpness or
to walk behind her enslaved, seeking another electrical charge.

She could not even wait for the end of the
Party to commit her daily act of destruction. So she stood alone in her square
defended by her own bristles and began: “No one is paying any attention to me.
I should not have worn this green dress: it’s too loud. I’ve just said the
wrong thing to Brancusi. All these people have accomplished something and I
have not. They put me in a panic. They are all so strong and so sure of
themselves. I feel exactly as I did in my dream last night: I had been asked to
play at a concert. There were so many people. When I went to play, the piano
had no notes, it was a lake, and I tried to play on the water and no sound
came. I felt defeated and humiliated. I hate the way my hair gets wild. Look at
Stella’s hair so smooth and clinging to her face. Why did I tease her? She
looked so tremulous, so frightened, as if pleading not to be hurt. Why do I
rush and speak before thinking? My dress is too short.”

In this invisible hara-kiri she tore off her
dress, her jewels, tore off every word she had uttered, every smile, every act
of the evening. She was ashamed of her talk, of her silences, of what she had
given, and of what she had not given, to have confided and not to have
confided.