Ladders to Fire (2 page)

Weary of fighting the false pretexts she turned
upon herself, and her own weakness, her self-doubts, suddenly betrayed her.
Gerard had awakened the dormant demon doubt. To defend his weakness he had
unknowingly struck at her. So Lillian began to think: “I did not arouse his
love. I was not beautiful enough.” And she began to make a long list of
self-accusations. Then the harm was done. She had been the aggressor so she was
the more seriously wounded. Self-doubt asserted itself. The seed of doubt was
implanted in Lillian to work its havoc with time. The real Gerard receded,
faded, vanished, and was reinstated as a dream image. Other
Gerards
will appear, until…

After the disappearance of Gerard, Lillian
resumed her defensive attitude towards man, and became again the warrior. It
became absolutely essential to her to triumph in the smallest issue of an
argument. Because she felt so insecure about her own value it became of vital
importance to convince and win over everyone to her assertions. So she could
not bear to yield, to be convinced, defeated, persuaded, swerved in the little
things.

She was now afraid to yield to passion, and
because she could not yield to the larger impulses it became essential also to
not yield to the small ones, even if her adversary were in the right. She was
living on a plane of war. The bigger resistance to the flow of life became one
with the smaller resistance to the will of others, and the smallest issue
became equal to the ultimate one. The pleasure of yielding on a level of
passion being unknown to her, the pleasure of yielding on other levels became
equally impossible. She denied herself all the sources of feminine pleasure: of
being invaded, of being conquered. In war, conquest was imperative. No approach
from the enemy could be interpreted as anything but a threat. She could not see
that the real issue of the war was a defense of her being against the invasion
of passion. Her enemy was the lover who might possess her. All her intensity
was poured into the small battles; to win in the choice of a restaurant, of a movie,
of visitors, in opinions, in analysis of people, to win in all the small
rivalries through an evening.

At the same time as this urge to triumph
continuously, she felt no appeasement or pleasure from her victories. What she
won was not what she really wanted. Deep down, what her nature wanted was to be
made to yield.

The more she won (and she won often for no man
withstood this guerrilla warfare with any honors—he could not see the great
importance that a picture hung to the left rather than to the right might have)
the more unhappy and empty she felt.

No great catastrophe threatened her. She was
not tragically struck down as others were by the death of a loved one at war.
There was no visible enemy, no real tragedy, no hospital, no cemetery, no mortuary,
no morgue, no criminal court, no crime, no horror. There was nothing.

She was traversing a street. The automobile did
not strike her down. It was not she who was inside of the ambulance being
delivered to St. Vincent’s Hospital. It was not she whose mother died. It was
not she whose brother was killed in the war.

In all the registers of catastrophe her name
did not appear. She was not attacked, raped, or mutilated. She was not
kidnapped for white slavery.

But as she crossed the street and the wind lifted
the dust, just before it touched her face, she felt as if all these horrors had
happened to her, she felt the nameless anguish, the shrinking of the heart, the
asphyxiation of pain, the horror of torture whose cries no one hears.

Every other sorrow, illness, or pain is
understood, pitied, shared with all human beings. Not this one which was
mysterious and solitary.

It was ineffectual, inarticulate, unmoving to
others as the attempted crying out of the mute.

Everybody understands hunger, illness, poverty,
slavery and torture. No one understood that at this moment at which she crossed
the street with every privilege granted her, of not being hungry, of not being
imprisoned or tortured, all these privileges were a subtler form of torture.
They were given to her, the house, the complete family, the food, the loves,
like a mirage. Given and denied. They were present to the eyes of others who
said: “You are fortunate,” and invisible to her. Because the anguish, the
mysterious poison, corroded all of them, distorted the relationships, blighted
the food, haunted the house, installed war where there was no apparent war,
torture where there was no sign of instruments, and enemies where there were no
enemies to capture and defeat.

Anguish was a voiceless woman screaming in a
nightmare.

She stood waiting for Lillian at the door. And
what struck Lillian instantly was the aliveness of
Djuna
:
if only Gerard had been like her! Their meeting was like a joyous encounter of
equal forces.

Djuna
responded
instantly to the quick rhythm, to the intensity. It was a meeting of equal
speed, equal fervor, equal strength. It was as if they had been two champion
skiers making simultaneous jumps and landing together at the same spot. It was
like a meeting of two chemicals exactly balanced, fusing and foaming with the
pleasure of achieved proportions.

Lillian knew that
Djuna
would not sit peacefully or passively in her room awaiting the knock on her
door, perhaps not hearing it the first time, or hearing it and walking casually
towards it. She knew
Djuna
would have her door open
and would be there when the elevator deposited hr. And
Djuna
knew by the swift approach of Lillian that Lillian would have the answer to her
alert curiosity, to her impatience; that she would hasten the elevator trip,
quicken the journey, slide over the heavy carpet in time to meet this wave of
impatience and enthusiasm.

Just as there are elements which are sensitive
to change and climate and rise fast to higher temperatures, there were in
Lillian and
Djuna
rhythms which left them both
suspended in utter solitude. It was not in body alone that they arrived on time
for their meetings, but they arrived primed for high living, primed for flight,
for explosion, for ecstasy, for feeling, for all experience. The slowness of
others in starting, their slowness in answering, caused them often to soar
alone.

To
Djuna
Lillian
answered almost before she spoke, answered with her bristling hair and
fluttering hands, and the tinkle of her jewelry.

“Gerard lost everything when he lost you,” said
Djuna
before Lillian had taken off her coat. “He lost
life.”

Lillian was trying to recapture an impression
she had before seeing
Djuna
. “Why,
Djuna
, when I heard your voice over the telephone I thought
you were delicate and fragile. And you look fragile but somehow not weak. I
came to…well, to protect you. I don’t know what from.”

Djuna
laughed. She
had enormous fairy tale eyes, like two aquamarine lights illumining darkness,
eyes of such depth that lit first one felt one might fall into them as into a
sea, a sea of feeling. And then they ceased to be the pulling, drawing,
absorbing sea and they became beacons, with extraordinary intensity of vision,
of awareness, of perception. Then one felt one’s chaos illumined, transfigured.
Where the blue, liquid balls alighted every object acquired significance.

At the same time their vulnerability and
sentience made them tremble like delicate candlelight or like the eye of the
finest camera lens which at too intense daylight will suddenly shut black. One
caught the inner chamber like the photographer’s dark room, in which
sensitivity to daylight, to crudity and grossness would cause instantaneous
annihilation of the image.

They gave the impression of a larger vision of
the world. If sensitivity made them retract, contract swiftly, it was not in
any self-protective blindness but to turn again to that inner chamber where the
metamorphosis took place and in which the pain became not personal, but the
pain of the whole world, in which ugliness became not a personal experience of
ugliness but the world’s experience with all ugliness. By enlarging and
situating it in the totality of the dream, the unbearable event became a large,
airy understanding of life which gave to her eyes
an
ultimately triumphant power which people mistook for strength, but which was in
reality courage. For the eyes, wounded on the exterior, turned inward, but did
not stay there, and returned with the renewed vision. After each encounter with
naked unbearable truths, naked unbearable pain, the eyes returned to the
mirrors in the inner chambers, to the transformation by understanding and
reflection, so that they could emerge and face the naked truth again.

In the inner chambers there was a treasure
room. In it dwelt her racial wealth of Byzantine imagery, a treasure room of
hierarchic figures, religious symbols. Old men of religion, who had
assid
at her birth and blessed her with their wisdom. They
appeared in the colors of death, because they had at first endangered her
advance into life. Their robes, their caps, were made of the heavily
embroidered materials of rituals illumined with the light of eternity. They had
willed her their wisdom of life and death, of past and future, and therefore
excluded the present. Wisdom was a swifter way of reaching death. Death was
postponed by living, by suffering, by risking, by losing, by error. These men
of religion had at first endangered her life, for their wisdom had incited her
in the past to forego the human test of experience, to forego the error and the
confusion which was living. By knowing she would reach all, not by touching,
not by way of the body. There had lurked in these secret chambers of her
ancestry a subtle threat such as lurked in all the temples, synagogues,
churches—the incense of denial, the perfume of the body burnt to sacrificial
ashes by religious alchemy, transmuted into guilt and atonement.

In the inner chamber there were also other
figures. The mother
madonna
holding the child and
nourishing it. The haunting mother image forever holding a small child.

Then there was the child itself, the child
inhabiting a world of peaceful, laughing animals, rich trees, in valleys of
festive color. The child in her eyes appeared with its eyes closed. It was
dreaming the fertile valleys, the small warm house, the Byzantine flowers, the
tender animals and the abundance. It was dreaming and afraid to awaken. It was
dreaming the lightness of the sky, the warmth of the earth, the fecundity of
the colors.

It was afraid to awaken.

Lillian’s vivid presence filled the hotel room.
She was so entirely palpable, visible, present. She was not parceled into a
woman who was partly in the past and partly in the future, or one whose spirit
was partly at home with her children, and partly elsewhere. She was here, all
of her, eyes and ears, and hands and warmth and interest and alertness, with a
sympathy which surrounded
Djuna
—questioned,
investigated, absorbed, saw, heard…

“You give me something wonderful, Lillian. A
feeling that I have a friend. Let’s have dinner here. Let’s celebrate.”

Voices charged with emotion. Fullness. To be
able to talk as one feels. To be able to say all.

“I lost Gerard because I leaped. I expressed my
feelings. He was afraid. Why do I love men who are afraid? He was afraid and I
had to court him.
Djuna
, did you ever think how men
who court a woman and do not win her are not hurt? And woman gets hurt. If
woman plays the Don Juan and does the courting and the man retreats she is
mutilated in some way.”

“Yes, I have noticed that. I suppose it’s a
kind of guilt. For a man it is natural to be the aggressor and he takes defeat
well. For woman it is a transgression, and she assumes the defeat is caused by
the aggression. How long will woman be ashamed of her strength?”

“
Djuna
, take this.”

She handed her a silver medallion she was
wearing. “Well, you didn’t win Gerard but you shook him out of
hpartly
eleath
.”

“Why,” said Lillian, “aren’t men as you are?”

“I was thinking the same thing,” said
Djuna
.

“Perhaps when they are we don’t like them or
fear them. Perhaps we like the ones who are not strong…”

Lillian found this relation to
Djuna
palpable and joyous. There was in them a way of
asserting its reality, by constant signs, gifts, expressiveness, words,
letters, telephones, an exchange of visible affection, palpable responses. They
exchanged jewels, clothes, books, they protected each other, they expressed
concern, jealousy, possessiveness. They talked. The relationship was the
central, essential personage of this dream without pain. This relationship had
the aspect of a primitive figure to which both enjoyed presenting proofs of
worship and devotion. It was an active, continuous ceremony in which there
entered no moments of indifference, fatigue, or misunderstandings or separations,
no eclipses, no doubts.

“I wish you were a man,” Lillian often said. “I
wish you were.”

Outwardly it was Lillian who seemed more
capable of this metamorphosis. She had the physical strength, the physical
dynamism, the physical appearance of strength. She carried tailored clothes
well; her gestures were direct and violent. Masculinity seemed more possible to
her, outwardly. Yet inwardly she was in a state of chaos and confusion.
Inwardly she was like nature, chaotic and irrational. She had no vision into
this chaos: it ruled her and swamped her. It sucked her into miasmas, into
hurricanes, into caverns of blind suffering.