Winter of artifice; three novelettes (13 page)

"Now say I am superficial."

"At this moment you are. I wanted you to face me and be truthful."

He paced up and down, pale with anger.

It seemed to her that her father was not quarreling with her but with his own past, that what was coming to light now was his underlying feeling of guilt towards her mother. If he saw in her now an avenger it was only because of his fear that his daughter might accuse him too. Against her judgment he had erected a huge defense: the approbation of the rest of the world. But in himself he had never quite resolved the right and the wrong. He, too, was driven now by a compulsion to say things he never intended to say, to make her the symbol of the one who had come to punish, to expose his deceptions, to prove his worthlessness.

And this was not the meaning of her struggle with him. She had not come to judge him but to dissolve the falsities. He feared so much that she had come to say: "the four persons you abandoned in order to Hve your own life, to save yourself, were crippled," that he did not hear her real words. The scene was taking place between two ghosts.

Her father's ghost was saying: "I cannot bear the slightest criticism. Immediately I feel judged, condemned."

Her own ghost was saying: "I cannot bear lies and deceptions. I need truth and sincerity."

They could not understand each other. They were gesticulating in space. Gestures of despair and anger. Her father pacing up and down, angry because of her doubts of him, forgetting that these doubts were well founded, forgetting

to ask himself if she was right or not. And she in despair because her father would not understand, because the fragile little Japanese bridge between the two portions of his soul would not hold her even for a moment, she walking with such light feet, trying to bring messages from one side to another, trying to make connections between the real and the unreal.

She could not see her father clearly any more. She could see only the hard profile cutting the air like a swift stone ship, a stone ship moving in a sea unknown to human beings, into regions made of granite rock. No more water, or warmth, or flow between them. All communication paralyzed by the falsity. Lost in the fog. Lost in a cold, white fog of falsity. Images distorted as if they were looking through a glass bowl. His mouth long and mocking, his eyes enormous but empty in their transparency. Not human. All human contours lost. _

And she thinking:\I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern. When I saw him I thought I would be happy and exalted. I pretended. I worked myself up into ecstasies. When one is pretending the entire body revolts^ There come great eruptions and revolts, great dark ravages, and above all, a joylessness. A great, bleak joylessness. Everything that is natural brings joy. He was pretending too—he had to win me as a trophy, as a victory. He had to win me away from my mother, had to win my approbation. Had to win me because he feared me. He feared the judgment of his children. And when he could not win me he suffered in his vanity. He fought in me his own faults, just as I hated in him my own faults.

Certain gestures made in childhood seem to have eternal repercussions. Such was the gesture she had made to keep 117

her father from leaving, grasping his coat and holding on to it so fiercely that she had to be torn away. This gesture of despair seemed to prolong itself all through her hfe. She repeated it blindly, fearing always that everything she loved would be lost.

It was so hard for her to believe that this father she was still trying to hold on to was no longer real or important, that the coat she was touching was not warm, that the body of him was not human, that her breathless, tragic desire had come to an end, and that her love had died.

Great forces had impelled her towards symmetry and balance, had impelled her to desert her father in order to close the fatal circle of desertion. She had forced the hourglass of pain to turn. They had pursued each other. They had tried to possess each other. They had been slaves of a pattern, and not of love. Their love had long ago been replaced by the other loves which gave them life. All those parts of the self which had been tied up in a tangle of misery and frustration had been loosened imperceptibly by life, by creation. But the feehngs they had begun with twenty years back, he of guilt and she of love, had been like railroad tracks on which they had been launched at full speed by their obsessions.

Today she held the coat of a dead love.

This had been the nightmare—to pursue this search and poison all joys with the necessity of its fulfillment. To discover that such fulfillment was not necessary to life, but to the myth. It was the myth which had forbidden them to deny their first ideal love or to recognize its illusory substance. What they called their destiny—the railroad track of their obsessions.

At last she was entering the Chinese theater of her drama

and could see the trappings of the play as well as the play itself, see that the settings were made of the cardboard of illusion. She was passing behind the stage and could stop weeping. The suffering was no longer real. She could see the strings which ruled the scenes, the false storms and the false lightning.

She was coming out of the ether of the past.

The world was a cripple. Her father was a cripple. In striking out for his own liberty, to save his life, he had struck at her, but he had poisoned himself with remorse.

No need to hate. No need to punish.

The last time she had come out of the ether it was to look at her dead child, a little girl with long eyelashes and slender hands. She was dead.

The little girl in her was dead too. The woman was saved. And with the little girl died the need of a father.

The Voice

DjTJNA is lying down in a cell-shaped room of the tallest hotel in the City, in a building shooting upward like a railroad track set for the moon. A million rooms like cells, all exactly alike, and reaching in swift confused layers towards the moon. The rapid birds of elevators traverse the layers with lightning flashes of their red and white eyes signaling UP or DOWN, to the sun terraces, the observation towers, the solarium, or the storage rooms in the underground. All the voices of the world captured by the radio wires in this Babel tower, and even when the little buttons are marked off this music of all the languages continues to seep through the walls. The people riding up and down the elevators are never permitted to crash through the last ceiling into pure space and never allowed to pierce through the ground floor to enter the demonic regions below the crust of the earth. When they reach the highest tip they swoop down again back to the heavy repose in darkness. For Djuna the elevator does not stop at the sun terraces. She is certain it will pass beyond and through the ceiling, as she does with her feelings, explode in a fuse of ascension. When it stops dead on the ground floor she feels a moment of anguish; it will not stop here but bury itself below, where there is hysteria and darkness, wells, prisons, tombs.

Passing through the carpeted hallways, she can hear the singing, the weeping, the quarrels and confessions seeping 120

out. Her footsteps are not heard in this convent of adulteries. The chambermaid is passing, carrying old newspapers, magazines, cigarette butts, breakfast left-overs. The boy is running with telegrams, special deliveries and telephone messages. He passes and with him a knife thrust of icy wind angrily banging the doors opened on intimate lives. Trays of food for the lovers and for the unloved. The house detective.

Merely passing down the halls noiselessly over the carpeted floor Djuna is aware of confessions seeping out. The elevators disgorge people feverishly eager to confess. They ask for the room of the modern priest, where a man in an armchair is listening to the unfaithful lying on the divan, looking down at them, with his own face against the light. Looking down at them to keep fresh in him the wound of compassion. When the glance rests on human beings from this position, where he can see the frailty of the hair, how it parts, falls, where it thins, where he can see the brow like a sharp landslide, discover the delicacy of the skin as it alone reveals itself when watched obliquely, all men seem in need of protection. From where he looks all noses slant without audacity, point without impertinence, merely a tender root to the mouth. The eyes are covered by weary eyelids, their motion slower when watched from above, a curtain of hyper-sensitive skin lowered with the gravity of sleep or death. Without the thrusting light-duel of the eyes, without the glaze and fervor of expression, courage, cruelty, humor, all men look crucified, passive, covering painful secrets. The mouth without its sensual openness, its breath, appears like a target mark, a vulnerable opening, a wound in the human being through which all his sorrows run hysterically.

The man listening to confessions is confined to his armchair and he sees them all struggling, defeated, wounded,

crippled. They are laying themselves open before him, demanding to be condoned, absolved, forgiven, justified. They want this Voice coming from a dark armchair, a substitute for God, for the confessor of old.

Djuna, lying down, remembers all this that she has lived, and that so many others are living after her. This talk in the dark with one who becomes part of herself, who answers all the doubts in her. This man without identity, the Voice of all she did not know but which was in her to bring to light. The Voice of the man who was helping her to be born again.

He was taking her slowly back to the beginning, and this talking to a man she could not see was like a dialogue with a Djuna much greater than the everyday Djuna, a Djuna she felt at times as clearly as one feels the pushing of the wind on street corners. The larger Djuna pushing the smaller one to act and speak greatness, not smallness or doubt or fear. The Voice had unearthed this larger Djuna, had confronted her with her desires, permitted them to fuse. Before this they lay separate with an abyss of yearning and hunger between them, one the smaller Djuna in a world she feared as tragic, the other the larger Djuna in a world she no longer feared. The Voice had spoken to dispel the turmoU in her, the dissonances, and the divisions: "I want to reconcile you to yourself." As if she had grown into two irreconcilable branches and so lost her strength.

"There is something wrong with me. I want to live only with the intimate self of the other. I only care about the intimate self. I hate to see people in the world, their masks, their falsities, their surrender to the world, their resemblance to others, their promiscuity. I only care about the secret self. I only want the dream and the isolation. I have the fear that 122

everyone is leaving, moving away, that love dies in an instant. I look at the people walking in the street, just walking, and I feel this: they are walking, but they are also being carried aivay. They are part of a current. Each moment that is passing takes them somewhere else. I confuse the moods which change and pass with the people themselves. I see them carried into eddies, always moving out of some state they will never return to, I see them lost. They do not walk in circles, back to where they started, but they walk out and beyond in some irretrievable way—too fast—towards the end. And I feel myself standing there; I cannot move with them. I seem to be standing and watching this current passing and I am left behind. Why have I the feeling thev all pass like the day, the leaves, the moods of climate, into death?"

"Because you are standing still and measuring time by your immobility, the others seem to run too fast towards an end. If you were living and running with them, you would cease to be aware of this death that is actually in you because you are watching."

"I stand for hours watching the river downtown. What obsesses me is the debris. I look at the dead flowers floating, petals completely opened, the life sucked out of them, flowers without pistils. Punctured rubber dolls bobbing up and down like foetuses. Boxes full of wilted vegetables, bottles with broken tops. Dead cats. Corks. Bread that looks like entrails. These things haunt me. The debris. When I watch people it is as if at the same time I saw the discarded parts of themselves. And so I can't see their motions except as acts which lead them faster and faster to the waste, the end, to the river where it will be thrown out. The faster they walk the streets, the faster they move towards this maos of debris. That is how I see them, caught by a current that carries them off." 123

"Only because you are standing still. If you were in the current, in love, in ecstasy, the motion would not show just its death aspect. You see what life throws out because you stand outside, shut out from the ferment itself. What is burned, used, is not regretted by anyone who is the fire consuming all this. If you were on fire you would enjoy throwing out what was dead. You would fight for the lightness of your movements. It is not living too fast and abandoning oneself that carries one towards death, but not moving. Then everything deteriorates. When parts of yourself die they are only like leaves. What refuses to live in you will become like cells through which the blood does not pass. The blood must pass. There must be change. When you are living you seek the change; it is only when you stop that you become aware of death."

Djuna walked out into the street, blind with the rush of memories. She stood in the center of the street eddies, and suddenly she knew the whole extent of her fear of flowing, of yielding, of depending on another. Suddenly she began walking faster than whoever was walking beside her, to feel the exultation of passing them. The one who does not move feels abandoned, and the one who loves and weeps and yields feels he is living so fast the debris cannot catch up with him. She was moving faster than the slowly flowing rivers carrying detritus. Moving, moving. Flowing, flowing, flowing. When she was watching, everything that moved seemed to be moving away, but when moving, this was only a tide, and the self turning, rotating, was feeding the rotation of desire. • * * *

It is as if she were in an elevator, shooting up and down. Hundreds of floors of sensations varying faster than temperature. Up into the sun garden, no floors above. Deliverance.