Children of the Albatross (2 page)

The dreams which Djuna had started to weave in
the asylum as if they were the one net in which she could exist, leaping thus
always out of reach of unbearable happenings and creating her own events
parallel to the ones her feelings could not accept, the dreams which gave birth
to worlds within worlds, which, begun at night when she was asleep, continued
during the day as an accompaniment to acts which she now discovered were
rendered ineffectual by this defensive activity, with time became more and more
violent.

For at first the personages of the dream, the
cities which sprang up, were distinct and bore no resemblance to reality. They
were images which filled her head with the vapors of fever, a drug-like
panorama of incidents which rendered her insensible to cold, hunger and
fatigue.

The day her mother was taken to the hospital to
die, the day her brother was injured while playing in the street and developed
a gentle insanity, the day at the asylum when she fell under the tyranny of the
only man in the place, were days when she noted an intensification of her other
world.

She could still weep at these happenings, but
as people might lament just before they go under an anesthetic. “It still
hurts,” says the voice as the anesthetic begins to take effect and the pain
growing duller, thebody complaining more out of a mere remembrance of pain,
automatically, just before sinking into a void.

She even found a way to master her weeping.

No mirrors were allowed in the orphan asylum,
but girls had made one by placing black paper behind one of the small windows.
Once a week they set it up and took turns looking at their faces.

Djuna’s first glimpse of her adolescent face
was in this black mirror, where the clear coloring of her skin was as if
touched with mourning, as if reflected at the bottom of a well.

Even long afterwards it was difficult for her
to overcome this first impression of her face painted upon black still waters.

But she discovered that if she was weeping, and
she looked at the weeping in a mirror, the weeping stopped. It ceased to be her
own. It belonged to another.

Henceforth she possessed this power: whatever
emotion would ravish or torment her, she could bring it before a mirror, look
at it, and separate herself from it. And she thought she had found a way to
master sorrow.

There was a boy of her age who passed under her
window and who had the power to move her. He had a lean, eager face, eyes which
seemed liquid with tenderness, and his gestures were full of gentleness.

His passage had the power to make her happy or
unhappy, warm or cold, rich or poor. Whether he walked abstractedly on the
other side of the street or on her side, whether he looked up at her window or
forgot to look up, determined the mood of her day.

Because of his manner, she felt she trusted him
entirely, that if he should come to the door and ask her to follow him she
would do so without hesitation.

In her dreams at night she dissolved in his
presence, lost herself in him. Her feelings for him were the opposite of an
almost continuous and painful tension whose origin she did not know.

In contrast to this total submission to the
unknown boy’s gentleness, her first encounter with man was marked with
defiance, fear, hostility.

The man, called the Watchman by the girls, was
about forty years old when Djuna was sixteen. He was possessed of unlimited
power because he was the lover of the Directress. His main attribute was power.
He was the only man in the asylum, and he could deal privileges, gifts, and
give permissions to go out at night.

This unique role gave him a high prestige. He
was polite, carried himself with confidence, and was handsome in a neutral way
which adapted him easily to any kind of image the orphans wished to fashion of
him.

He could pass for the tall man, the
brown-haired man, the blond man; given a little leeway, he answered all the
descriptions of gypsy card readers.

An added piquancy was attained by the common
knowledge that he was the favorite of the Directress, who was verue role gah
hated. In winning his favor, one struck indirect blows at her authority, and
achieved a subtle revenge for her severity.

The girls thought of him as possessing an even
greater power than hers, for she who submitted to no one, had often been seen
bowing her head before his reproaches.

The one he chose felt endowed immediately with
greater beauty, greater charm and power than the other girls. He was appointed
the arbiter, the connoisseur, the bestower of decorations.

To be chosen by the Watchman was to enter the
realm of protection. No girl could resist this.

Djuna could distinguish his steps at a great distance.
It seemed to her that he walked more evenly than anyone she knew, evenly and
without stops or change of rhythm. He advanced through the hallways inexorably.
Other people could be stopped, or eluded. But his steps were those of absolute
authority.

He knew at what time Djuna would be passing
through this particular hallway alone. He always came up to her, not a yard
away, but exactly beside her.

His glance was always leveled at her breasts,
and two things would happen simultaneously: he would offer her a present
without looking at her face, as if he were offering it to her breasts, and then
he would whisper: “Tonight I will let you out if you are good to me.”

And Djuna would think of the boy who passed by
under her window, and feel a wild beating of her heart at the possibility of
meeting him outside, of talking to him, and her longing for the boy, for the
warm liquid tenderness of his eyes was so violent that no sacrifice seemed too
great—her longing and her feeling that if he knew of this scene, he would
rescue her, but that there was no other way to reach him, no other way to
defeat authority to reach him than by this concession to authority.

In this barter there was no question of
rebellion. The way the Watchman stood, demanded, gestured, was all part of a
will she did not even question, a continuation of the will of the father. There
was the man who demanded, and outside was the gentle boy who demanded nothing,
and to whom she wanted to give everything, whose silence even, she trusted,
whose way of walking she trusted with her entire heart, while this man she did
not trust.

It was the
droit du seigneur.

She slipped the Watchman’s bracelet around the
lusterless cotton of her dress, while he said: “The poorer the dress the more
wonderful your skin looks, Djuna.”

Years later when Djuna thought the figure of
the Watchman was long since lost she would hear echoes of his heavy step and
she would find herself in the same mood she had experienced so many times in
his presence.

No longer a child, and yet many times she still
had the feeling that she might be overpowered by a will stronger than her own,
might be trapped, might be somehow unable to free herself, unable to escape the
demands of man upon her.

Her first defet at the hands of man the father
had caused her such a conviction of helplessness before tyranny that although
she realized that she was now in reality no longer helpless, the echo of this
helplessness was so strong that she still dreaded the possessiveness and
willfulness of older men. They benefited from this regression into her past,
and could override her strength merely because of this conviction of unequal
power.

It was as if maturity did not develop
altogether and completely, but by little compartments like the airtight
sections of a ship. A part of her being would mature, such as her insight, or
interpretative faculties, but another could retain a childhood conviction that
events, man and authority together were stronger than one’s capacity for
mastering them, and that one was doomed to become a victim of one’s pattern.

It was only much later that Djuna discovered
that this belief in the great power of others became the fate itself and caused
the defeats.

But for years, she felt harmed and defeated at
the hands of men of power, and she expected the boy, the gentle one, the
trusted one, to come and deliver her from tyranny.

Ever since the day of Lillian’s concert when
she had seen the garden out of the window, Djuna had wanted a garden like it.

And now she possessed a garden and a very old
house on the very edge of Paris, between the city and the Park.

But it was not enough to possess it, to walk
through it, sit in it. One still had to be able to live in it.

And she found she could not live in it.

The inner fever, the restlessness within her
corroded her life in the garden.

When she was sitting in a long easy chair she
was not at ease.

The grass seemed too much like a rug awaiting
footsteps, to be trampled with hasty incidents. The rhythm of growth too slow,
the falling of the leaves too tranquil.

Happiness was an absence of fever. The garden
was feverless and without tension to match her tensions. She could not unite or
commune with the plants, the languor, the peace. It was all contrary to her
inward pulse. Not one pulsation of the garden corresponded to her inner
pulsation which was more like a drum beating feverish time.

Within her the leaves did not wait for autumn,
but were torn off prematurely by unexpected sorrows. Within her, leaves did not
wait for spring to sprout but bloomed in sudden hothouse exaggerations. Within
her there were storms contrary to the lazy moods of the garden, devastations
for which nature had no equivalent.

Peace, said the garden, peace.

The day began always with the sound of gravel
crushed by automobiles.

The shutters werepushed open by the French
servant, and the day admitted.

With the first crushing of the gravel under
wheels came the barking of the police dog and the carillon of the church bells.

Cars entered through an enormous green iron
gate, which had to be opened ceremoniously by the servant.

Everyone else walked through the small green
gate that seemed like the child of the other, half covered with ivy. The ivy
did not climb over the father gate.

When Djuna looked at the large gate through her
window it took on the air of a prison gate. An unjust feeling, since she knew
she could leave the place whenever she wanted, and since she knew morethan
anyone that human beings placed upon an object, or a person this responsibility
of being the obstacle, when the obstacle lay within one’s self.

In spite of this knowledge, she would often
stand at the window staring at the large closed iron gate as if hoping to
obtain from this contemplation a reflection of herinner obstacles to a full
open life.

She mocked its importance; the big gate had a
presumptuous creak! Its rusty voice was full of dissonant affectations. No
amount of oil could subdue its rheumatism, forit took a historical pride in its
own rust: it was a hundred years old.

But the little gate, with its overhanging ivy
like disordered hair over a running child’s forehead, had a sleepy and sly air,
an air of always being half open, never entirely locked.

Djuna had chosen the house for many reasons,
because it seemed to have sprouted out of the earth like a tree, so deeply
grooved it was within the old garden. It had no cellar and the rooms rested
right on the ground. Below the rugs, she felt, was the earth. One could take
root here, feel as one with the house and garden, take nourishment from them
like the plants.

She had chosen it too because its symmetrical
facade covered by a trellis overrun by ivy showed twelve window faces. But one
shutter was closed and corresponded to no room. During some transformation of
the house it had been walled up.

Djuna had taken the house because of this
window which led to no room, because of this impenetrable room, thinking that
someday she would discover an entrance to it.

In front of the house there was a basin which
had been filled, and a well which had been sealed up. Djuna set about restoring
the basin, excavated an old fountain and unsealed the well.

Then it seemed to her that the house came
alive, the flow was re-established.

The fountain was gay and sprightly, the well
deep.

The front half of the garden was trim and
stylized like most French gardens, but the back of it some past owner had
allowed to grow wild and become a miniature jungle. The stream was almost
hidden by overgrown plants, and the small bridge seemed like a Japanese brige in
a glass-bowl garden.

There was a huge tree of which she did not know
the name, but which she named the Ink Tree for its black and poisonous berries.

One summer night she stood in the courtyard.
All the windows of the house were lighted.

Then the image of the house with all its
windows lighted—all but one—she saw as the image of the self, of the being
divided into many cells. Action taking place in one room, now in another, was
the replica of experience taking place in one part of the being, now in another.

The room of the heart in Chinese lacquer red,
the room of the mind in pale green or the brown of philosophy, the room of the
body in shell rose, the attic of memory with closets full of the musk of the
past.