Winter of artifice; three novelettes (14 page)

A bower of light. Proximity to faith. At this height she finds something to lean 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 she is breathing music, in which all anger dissolves. It is not the swift changes of floor which made 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 sensuality traversing walls and reaching ecstasy. The orchestra is made with fullness, and only fullness rises to God. The soloist talks only to his own soul. Only fullness rises.

Like the fullness of the hotel. No matter what happened in each room, what diversions, distortions, hungers, incom-

pletions, when Djuna reaches the highest floor, the alchemy

is complete.

• * • «

The telephone rang and there was someone downstairs waiting to see the Voice. It was urgent. This someone came up, 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 two words there was a hesitancy. In each 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 that 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 traveled on lakes of gentle sensation that they had penetrated the dark, 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 am a pervert, I've had a lot of affairs 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 daikness of her acts. The atmosphere continued delicate like her hands and feet. No

matter what she was saying about her last love affairs, it was all permeated with innocence. She spoke breathlessly, with little repetitions and light gasps of awe and surprise at herself. "I loved Hazel so, I was swallowed up by her, just as before that I loved Georgia, and she could do anything with me. I would even help her to see her lovers, I would do anything she asked me. She got tired of me, and I went off alone to Holland, and I could not play the violin any more, I wanted to die. I made love to other women, but it was not the same. What terrible things I have done in my life, you can't imagine. I don't know what you will think. I can't see your face and that bothers me. I can't tell you because maybe you won't want to see me any more. Georgia told me one lies down and talks; it is like talking to oneself except that this Voice comes and explains everything and it stops hurting. I feel fine here lying down, but I am ashamed of so many things and I think they are very bad things I did, this sleeping with women, and other things. I killed a woman who got married. It was in my birthplace, in the South. She got married and then died the night of the wedding, and / did it. I thought all the time before the wedding that she ought not to love a man, there is no tenderness in men, and then I thought of the blood, and I prayed she should die rather than be married, and so I wished it, and she died. And I am sure it was my fault. But there is something much worse than this. It happened in Paris. I was working at the violin, I remember. My room was on the level with the street and the windows were open; I was playing away, and suddenly, I don't know why, I looked at the bow and looked at it for a long while and I was taken with a violent desire to pass it between my legs, as if I were the violin, and I don't know why I did it, and suddenly I saw people laughing outside. ... I nearly died of shame. You

will never tell this to anyone? I can't tell what you are thinking about me. When I don't know what people think I always imagine they are laughing at me, criticising me. I don't feel that you condemn me, I feel good here, lying down. I feel that at last I am getting some terrible things out, getting rid of them maybe, maybe I will be able to forget them, like the time I gave a little boy an enema with a straw, and I thought I had injured him for life, and a few years after that he got sick and died, and I didn't dare walk through the town because I was sure it was the enema that did it. Don't you think it was? I don't know why I did that. I wish I could see your face. I want revenge above all, because I was operated on, and I was not told why; I was told it was for appendicitis, and when I got well I found out I had no more woman's parts, and I feel that men will never want me because I can't have a child. But that is good because I don't like men, they have no tenderness. Not being able to have a child—that means I am a cripple; men won't love me. But I'm sure I wouldn't like it with a man—I tried how it felt once with a toothbrush, and I didn't like it. I had the funniest dream just before coming to you; I had opened my veins and I was introducing mercury into them, into each vein at the finger tip. Why can I never be happy? I am always thinking when I'm in love that it will come to an end, just like now I think if I don't find more things to tell you, I won't be able to come again, and I am afraid of this coming to an end, afraid you will not think

me sick enough."

• • • •

A week later, ten days later, she is lying down and talking to the Voice:

"Last night I was able to play. I felt you standing over me like an enormous shadow, and I could see your large signet

ring flashing, and what was stranger than all this, I smelled the odor of your cigar suddenly in the middle of the street. How can you explain this, walking casually through a street, I smelled your cigar and that made me breathe deeply; I always walk with my shoulders hunched up, you've noticed it; I walk hke a man; I am sure I am a man after all, because when I was a child I played like a boy; I hated to dress up in pretty things and I hated perfume. I don't understand why the smell of your cigar, which reminds me of my talks with you, made me want to breathe deeply. It's very funny. I haven't thought about Hazel for the last few days; maybe I don't love her any more; I only feel I love her when we are separating, when I see her going off on a train; then I feci terrible, terrible. Otherwise I am not very sure that I love her, really. I feel nothing when she is there, we quarrel a lot, that is all. With Georgia it was different, she made me feel she was there: Lillian, do this for me; Lillian, do that for me; Lillian, telephone for me; Lillian, carry my music. She was always deathly ill; I had to run around for her all the time; she was always dying, but always well enough to receive lovers. Always clinging to me, talking to me about her great loneliness, her love affairs. This talking to you is the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. How strange it is to talk absolutely sincerely as it comes, to say everything in one's head. I am getting well, but I don't want you to send me away. When I was a child I always wanted to go to Africa. I had a scrapbook all about Africa, with maps, timetables, boat sailings, information, pictures of airplanes and of the boats that could take me there. My school was very far away, I had to walk for two hours, and I called it Africa. I would set out for it all prepared for a trip. I liked going to school because it was Africa, and I thought about it at night.

And then they built a new school right next to my home, five minutes away, and I never went to school again. I was expelled; my father never forgave me; he was so mad he threw a knife out of the window and it hit our mare in the leg and that made a terrible impression on me; it was my fault too. Yesterday when I left you I was thinking about God, and what do you think happened to me? Walking out of the hotel I stumbled on the steps and I found myself kneeling on the sidewalk, and I did not mind it at all; it was wonderful, so many times I have wanted to kneel on the sidewalk, and I had never dared, and now thinking about you and what I could say to you the next time so you won't think I'm cured yet and send me away I felt that I have something now which you can't take from me, ever since I came here I have a feeling so warm and sweet and life-giving which belongs to me, I know you gave it to me, but it is inside of me now, and you can't take it away."

* * » »

Mischa came to the Voice limping, but he only talked about his hand. He could no longer play the cello. His hand was stiff. He was mute about his leg.

His mother had been a Cossack woman who rode horseback. His father had been obsessed with hunting. Mischa himself had never wanted women except when they wore red dresses, and then he felt like biting them. Women seemed to him something soft and blind, something to hide into. When he saw a woman he wanted to become small and hide in her. He used to call his mother in Russian, his Holy Secret.

His hand had been twisted, cramped for many years. He

held it out to show the Voice. He talked constantly about

his hand, how it felt, if it was stiffer today than yesterday.

He had played the cello when he was very young. He had

been a child prodigy. He remembered early concerts and his mother afterwards taking him between her large, strong horsewoman's knees and caressing him with pleasure because he had played well. His mother had been Uke no woman he had ever seen. She had very long black hair which she liked to wear down when she was at home, a sort of forest of black hair in which he would hide his face. His good-night kiss had never been anywhere but inside this black hair. Absolute blackness then, the hair tickling his eyelashes and getting inside his mouth. Hair so violent and strong, with a smell that made him di/.zy, hair that entwined itself around him. His mother had looked like a Medusa. Her hair must have been made of snakes, her face somehow fixed into one expression. It seemed to him that her eyes had never blinked. And the voice of a man and a bass laughter. A laughter that had lasted longer than any he had ever heard. He could hear it from his bed at night. He had dreamed of climbing with the help of his mother's long, heavy hair to a place where his father could not reach him. His father, all in leather, armed with guns, carrying wounded animals, dripping with blood, surrounded by dogs. It seemed to Alischa that he had found his mother's voice in the cello.

For days after this Mischa did not talk. He could not play the cello, he could not move his hand freely, and there were things he didn't want the Voice to know. But he felt that the Voice was watching him, feeling his way deftly into his secrets. He felt that the Voice was not convinced at all that it was the hand which caused Mischa's suffering. He felt slowly surrounded by intricate questions, pressed closer by unexpected associations. He felt like a criminal, but he could not remember the crime. The Voice enveloped him in questions. Mischa felt a great anguish, as if he had committed a 131

crime and were now concealing it. And he could not remember what it was. He felt the place where it was buried. What was buried? There, under the flesh, at the very bottom of a murky well of clay, there was something buried. Something which the Voice pushed him towards. An image. What? An image of his magnificient Medusa mother standing in her room. He was a little boy of eight. He had not been able to sleep. He had limped quietly to her room and knocked faintly at her door. She had not heard his knock. He had opened the door very slowly. He knew his father was not there, that he was out hunting. His mother was standing before him, very tall, wearing a long white nightgown. And on this white robe there was a blood stain. He had seen the stain. He had smelled the blood on her. He had cried out hysterically. He ran out of her room to look for the father. He picked up a riding whip. His father was returning from the hunt. He was standing at the door, taking off his leather coat, laying down his gun. There was a bloodstain on his sleeve. The animals he had killed were lying in the hall. The dogs were still barking, outside. Mischa went up to his father and struck him, struck at the man who had stained his mother's white robe with blood, who had hunted her as he hunted the animals.

As he told this he held up before him the stiffened hand. He thought the Voice would speak about the hand, but the Voice asked him: "And the lameness?"

Mischa winced and turned his face away. Behind what he had told lay his secret. Behind the facade of the image, the scene which he saw so clearly, lay a terrain of broken, cutting fragments, and on this a dead leg, like some discarded object, but not buried. It had always lain there, unburied. Dead. He was more aware of it than anything about his life. The dead leg rested right across the whole body, wooden. He had nailed