Children of the Albatross (13 page)

They persisted in living on familiar terms only
with the surface of their personalities, and what she reached lay deeper where
they could not see it. They feltat ease among their falsities, and the
nakedness of her insight seemed like forcing open underworlds whose entrance
was tacitly barred in everyday intercourse.

They would accuse her of living in a world of
illusion while they lived in reality.

Their falsities had such an air of solidity,
entirely supported by the palpable.

But she felt that on the contrary, she had
contact with their secret desires, secret fears, secret intents. And she had
faith in what she saw.

She attributed all her difficulties merely to
the over quickness of her rhythm. Proofs would always follow later, too late to
be of value to her human life, but not too late to be added to this city of the
interior she was constructing, to which none had access.

Yet she was never surprised when people
betrayed the self she saw, which was the maximum rendition of themselves. This
maximum she knew to be a torment, this knowledge of all one might achieve,
become, was a threat to human joy and life. She felt in sympathy with those who
turned their back on it. Yet she also knew that if they did, another torment
awaited them: that of having fallen short of their own dream.

She would have liked to escape from her own
demands upon herself.

But even if at times she was taken with a
desire to become blind, to drift, to abandon her dreams, to slip into negation,
destruction, she carried in herself something which altered the atmosphere she
sought and which proved stronger than the place or people she had permitted to
infect her with their disintegration, their betrayal of their original dream of
themselves.

Even when she let herself be poisoned with all
that was human, defeat, jealousy, sickness, surrender, blindness, she carried
an essence which was like a counter-poison and which reversed despair into
hope, bitterness into faith, abortions into births, weight into lightness.

Everything in her hands changed substance,
quality, form, intent.

Djuna could see it happen against her will, and
did not know why it happened.

Was it because she began every day anew as
children do, without memory of defeat, rancor, without memory of disaster? No
matter what happened the day before, she always awakened with an expectation of
a miracle. Her hands always appeared first from out of the sheets, hands
without memories, wounds, weights, and these hands danced.

That was her awakening. A new day was a new
life. Every morning was a beginning.

No sediments of pain, sadness yes, but no
stagnating pools of accumulated bitterness.

Djuna believed one could begin anew as often as
one dared.

The only acid she contained was one which
dissolved the calluses formed by life around the sensibilities.

Every day she looked at people with the eyes of
faith. Placing an unlimited supply of faith at their disposal. Since she did
not accept the actual self as final, seeing only the possibilities of
expansion, she established a climate of infinite possibilities.

She did not mind that by this expectation of a
miracle, she exposed herself to immense disappointments. What she suffered as a
human being when others betrayed themselves and her she counted as nothing—like
the pains of childbirth.

She believed that the dream which human beings
carry in themselves was man’s greatest hunger. If statistics were taken there
would be found more deaths by aborted dreams than from physical calamities,
more deaths by dream abortions than child abortions, more deaths by infection
from despair than from physical illness.

Carrying this ultimate knowledge she was often
the victim of strange revenges: people’s revenge against the image of their
unfulfilled dream. If they could annihilate her they might annihilate this
haunting image of their completed selves and be done with it!

She only knew one person who might rescue her
from this world, from this city of the interior lying below the level of
identity.

She might learn from Jay to walk into a
well-peopled world and abandon the intense selectivity of the dream (
this
personage
fits into my dream and this one does not).

The dreamer rejects the ordinary.

Jay invited the ordinary. He was content with
unformed fragments of people, incomplete ones: a minor doctor, a feeble
painter, a h unfoocre writer, an average of any kind.

For Djuna it must always be: an extraordinary
doctor, a unique writer, a summation of some kind, which could become a symbol
by its completeness, by its greatness in its own realm.

Jay was the living proof that it was in this
acceptance of the ordinary that pleasure lay. She would learn from him. She
would learn to like daily bread. He gave her everything in its untransformed
state: food, houses, streets, cafes, people. A way back to the simplicities.

Somewhere, in the labyrinth of her life, bread
had been transformed on her tongue into a wafer, with the imponderability of
symbols. Communion had been the actual way she experienced life—as communion,
not as bread and wine. In place of bread, the wafer, in place of blood, the
wine.

Jay would give her back a crowded world
untransmuted. He had mocked her once saying he had found her portrait in one
page of the dictionary under
Trans
:transmutations, transformation,
transmitting, etc.

In the world of the dreamer there was solitude:
all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They
took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of
insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness,
discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in
the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again.

What was she seeking to salvage from the daily
current of living, what sudden revulsions drove her back into the solitary cell
of the dream?

Let Jay lead her out of the cities of the
interior.

She would work as usual, hours of dancing, then
she would take her shoes to be repaired, then she would go to the cafe.

The shoemaker was working with his window open
on the street. As often as Djuna passed there he would be sitting in his low
chair, his head bowed over his work, a nail between his lips, a hammer in his
hand.

She took all her shoes to him for repairing,
because he had as great a love of unique shoes as she did. She brought him
slippers from Montenegro whose tips were raised like the prows of galleys,
slippers from Morocco embroidered in gold thread, sandals from Tibet.

His eyes traveled up from his work towards the
package she carried as if she were bringing him a gift.

He took the fur boots from Lapland he had not
seen before, and was moved by the simplicity of their sewing, the reindeer guts
sewn by hand. He asked for their history.

Djuna did not have to explain to him that as
she could not travel enough to satisfy the restlessness of her feet, she could
at least wear shoes which came from the place she might never visit. She did
not have to explain to him that when she looked at her feet in Lapland boots
she felt herself walking through deserts of snow.

The shoes carried her everywhere, tireless
shoes walking forever all over the world.

This shoemaker repaired them with all the
curiosity of a great traveler. He respected the signs of wear and tear as if
she were returning from all the voyages she had wanted to make. It was not
alone the dust or mud of Paris he brushed off but of Egypt, Greece, India.
Every shoe she brought him was his voyage too. He respected wear as a sign of
distance, broken straps as an indication of discoveries, torn heels as an
accident happening only to explorers.

He was always sitting down. From his cellar
room he looked up at the window where he could see only the feet of the
passers-by.

“I love a foot that has elegance,” he said.
“Sometimes for days I see only ugly feet. And then perhaps one pair of
beautiful feet. And that makes me happy.”

As Djuna was leaving, for the first time he
left his low working chair and moved forward to open the door for her, limping.

He had a club foot.

Once she had been found in the corner of a room
by her very angry parents, all covered by a shawl. Their anxiety in not finding
her for a long time turned to great anger.

“What are you doing there hiding, covered by a
shawl?”

She answered: “Traveling. I am traveling.”

The Rue de la Sante, the Rue Dolent, the Rue
des Saint Peres became Bombay, Ladoma, Budapest, Lavinia.

The cities of the interior were like the city
of Fez, intricate, endless, secret and unchartable.

Then she saw Jay sitting at the cafe table with
Lillian, Donald, Michael, Sabina and Rango, and she joined them.

Faustin the Zombie, as everyone called him,
awakened in a room he thought he had selected blindly but which gave the
outward image of his inner self as accurately as if he had turned every element
of himself into a carpet or a piece of furniture.

First of all it was not accessible to the door
when it opened, but had to be reached by a dark and twisted corridor. Then he
had contrived to cover the windows in such a manner with a glazed material that
the objects, books and furniture appeared to be conserved in a storage room, to
be at once dormant and veiled. The odor they emitted was the odor of
hibernation.

One expected vast hoods to fall over the chairs
and couch. Certain chairs were dismally isolated and had to be forcibly dragged
to enter into relation with other chairs. There was an inertia in the pillows,
an indifference in the wilted texture of the couch cover. The table in the
center of the room blocked all passageways, the lamp shed a tired light. The
walls absorbed the light without throwing it back.

His detachment affected the whole room. Objects
need human warmth like human beings to bloom. A lamp sheds a meager or a
prodigal light according to one’s interior lighting. Even specks of dust are
inhabited by the spirit of the master. There are rooms in which the dust is
brilliant. There are rooms in which even carelessness is alive, as the disorder
of someone rushing to more important matters. But here in Faustin’s room there
was not even the disorder caused by emotional draughts!

The walls of the rooming house were very thin,
and he could hear all that took place in the other rooms.

This morning he awakened to a clear duet
between a man and a woman.

Man:
It’s unbelievable, we’ve been
together six years now, and I still have an illusion about you! I’ve never had
this as long with any woman.

Woman:
Six years!

Man:
I’d like to know how often you have
been unfaithful.

Woman:
Well, I don’t want to know how
many times you were.

Man:
Oh, me, only a few times. Whenever
you went away and I’d get lonely and angry that you had left me. One summer at
the beach…do you remember the model Colette?

Woman:
I didn’t ask you. I don’t want to
know.

Man:
But I do. I know you went off with
that singer. Why did you? A singer. I couldn’t make love to a singer!

Woman:
But you made love to a model.

Man:
That’s different. You know it’s not
important. You know you’re the only one.

Woman:
You’d think it was important if I
had.

Man:
It’s different for a woman. Why?
Why did you, what made you go with that singer, why, when I love you so much
and desire you so often?

Silence.

Woman:
I don’t believe we should talk
about this. I don’t want to know about you. (Crying.) I never wanted to think
about it and now you made me.

Man:
You’re crying! But it’s nothing. I
forgot it immediately. And in six years only a few times. Whereas you, I’m sure
it was many times.

Woman:
(still crying) I didn’t ask you.
Why did you have to tell me?

Man:
I’m just mo sincere than you are.

Woman:
It isn’t sincerity, it’s revenge.
You told me just to hurt me.

Man:
I told you because I thought it
would drive you into being honest with me.

Silence.

Man:
How obstinate you are. Why are you
crying?

Woman:
Not over your unfaithfulness!

Man:
Over your own then?

Woman:
I’m crying over unfaithfulness in
general—how people hurt each other.

Man:
Unfaithfulness in general! What a
fine way to evade the particular.

Silence.

Man:
I’d like to know how you learned
all you know about love-making. Who did you learn from? You know what very few
women do.