A Spy in the House of Love (15 page)

Sabina’s head had fallen on her chest in a pose
of contrition. “You don’t believe that this man is here to arrest me?”

“No, Sabina, that is what you imagine. It is
your own guilt which you have endowed this man with. You probably see this
guilt mirrored in every policeman, every judge, every parent, every personage
with authority. You see it with others’ eyes. It’s a reflection of what you
feel. It’s your interpretation: the eyes of the world on your acts.”

Sabina raised her head. Such a flood of
memories submerged her and hurt her so deeply she was left without breath. She
felt such pain. It was like the pain of the “bends” felt by deep sea divers
when they come to the surface too quickly.

“In your fabricated world, Sabina, men were
either crusaders who would fight your battles for you, or judges continuing
your parents’ duties, or princes who had not yet come of age, and therefore
could not be husbands.”

“Free me,” said Sabina to the lie detector.
“Set me free. I’ve said that to so many men: ‘Are you going to set me free?’”
She laughed. “I was all ready to say it to you.”

“You have to set yourself free. That will come
with love…” said the lie detector.

“Oh, I’ve loved enough, if that could save one.
I’ve loved plenty. Look at your notebook. I’m sure it is full of addresses.”

“You haven’t loved yet,” he said. “You’ve only
been trying to love; beginning to love. Trust alone is not love, desire alone
is not love, illusion is not love, dreaming is not love. All these were paths
leading you out of yourself, it is true, and so you thought they led to
another, but you never reached the other. You were only on the way. Could you
go out now and find the other faces of Alan, which you never struggled to see,
or accept? Would you find the other face of Mambo which he so delicately hid
from you? Would you struggle to find the other face of Philip?”

“Is it my fault if they only turned
one
of
their faces towards me?”

“You’re a danger to other human beings. First
of all you dress them in the costume of the myth: poor Philip, he is Siegfried,
he must always sing in tune, and be everlastingly handsome. Do you know where
he is now? In a hospital with a broken ankle. Due to immobility he has gained a
great deal of weight. You turn your face away, Sabina? That was not the myth
you made love to, is it? If Mambo stopped drumming to go home and nurse his
sick mother, would you go with him and boil injection needles? Would you, if
another woman loved Alan, would you relinquish your child’s claims upon his
protectiveness? Will you go and make of yourself a competent actress and not
continue to play Cinderella for amateur theatres only, keeping the artificial
snow drop which fell on your nose during the snow storm long after the play is
over as if to say: ‘For me there is no difference at all between stage snow and
the one falling now over Fifth Avenue’? Oh Sabina, how you juggled the facts in
your games of desire, so that you might always win. The one intent on winning
has not loved yet!”

To the lie detector Sabina said: “And if I did
all you ask of me, will you stop haunting my steps, will you stop writing in
your notebook?”

“Yes, Sabina. I promise you,” he said.

“But, how could you know so much about my
life…”

“You forget that you invited me yourself to
shadow you. You endowed me with the power to judge your acts. You have endowed
so many people with this power: priests, policemen, doctors. Shadowed by your
conscience, interchangeable, you felt safer. You felt you could keep your
sanity. Half of you wanted to atone, to be freed of the torments of guilt, but
the other half wanted to be free. Only half of you surrendered, calling out to
strangers: ‘Catch me!’ while the other half sought industriously to escape
final capture. It was just another one of your flirtations, a flirtation with
justice. And now you are in flight, from the guilt of love divided, and from
the guilt of not loving. Poor Sabina, there was not enough to go around. You
sought your wholeness in music… Yours is a story of non-love… And do you know
Sabina, if you had been caught and tried, you would have been meted out a less
severe punishment than you mete out to yourself. We are much more severe judges
of our own acts. We judge our thoughts, our secret intents, our dreams even… You
never considered the mitigating circumstances. Some shock shattered you and
made you distrustful of a single love: You divided them as a measure of safety.
So many trap doors opened between the night club world of Mambo, to the
Vienna-before-the-war of Philip, to the studious world of Alan, or the
adolescent evanescent world of Donald. Mobility in love became a condition for
your existence. There is nothing shameful in seeking safety measures. Your fear
was very great.”

“My trap doors failed me.”

“Come with me, Sabina.”

Sabina and Djuna went up to her studio, where
they could still hear the drumming.

As if to silence it, Djuna placed a record in
her phonograph.

“Sabina…” But no words came as one of
Beethoven’s Quartets began to tell Sabina, as Djuna could not, of what they
both knew for absolute certainty: the continuity of existence and of the chain
of summits, of elevations by which such continuity is reached. By elevation the
consciousness reached a perpetual movement, transcending death, and in the same
manner attained the continuity of love by seizing upon its impersonal essence,
which was a summation of all the alchemies producing life and birth, a child, a
work of art, a work of science, a heroic act, an act of love. The identity or
the human couple was not eternal but interchangeable, to protect this exchange
of spirits, transmissions of character, all the fecundations of new selves
being born, and faithfulness only to the continuity, the extensions and
expansions of love achieving their crystallizations into high moments and
summits equal to the high moments and summits of art or religion.

Sabina slid to the floor and sat there with her
head against the phonograph, with her wide skirt floating for one instant like
an expiring parachute; and then deflating completely and dying in the dust.

The tears on Sabina’s face were not round and
separate like ordinary tears, but seemed to have fallen like a water veil, as
if she had sunk to the bottom of the sea by the weight and dissolutions of the
music. There was a complete dissolution of the eyes, features, as if she were
losing her essence.

The lie detector held out his hands as if to
rescue her, in a light gesture, as if this were a graceful dance of sorrow
rather than the sorrow itself, and said: “In homeopathy there is a remedy
called pulsatile for those who weep at music.”