Ladders to Fire (10 page)

The salon was gilded, the people were costumed
for false roles, the lights and the faces were attenuated, the gestures were
starched—all but Lillian whose nature had not been stylized, compressed or
gilded, and whose nature was warring with a piano.

Music did not open doors.

Nature flowered, caressed, spilled, relaxed,
slept.

In the gilded frames, the ancestors were
mummified forever, and descendants took the same poses. The women were candied
in perfume, conserved in cosmetics, the men preserved in their elegance. All
the violence of naked truths had evaporated, volatilized within gold frames.

And then, as
Djuna’s
eyes followed the path carpeted with detached leaves, her eyes encountered for
the first time three full-length mirrors placed among the bushes and flowers as
casually as in a boudoir. Three mirrors.

The eyes of the people inside could not bear
the nudity of the garden, its exposure. The eyes of the people had needed the
mirrors, delighted in the fragility of reflections. All the truth of the
garden, the moisture, and the worms, the insects and the roots, the running sap
and the rotting bark, had all to be reflected in the mirrors.

Lillian was playing among vast
mirrrs
. Lillian’s violence was attenuated by her reflection
in the mirrors.

The garden in the mirror was polished with the
mist of perfection. Art and artifice had breathed upon the garden and the
garden had breathed upon the mirror, and all the danger of truth and revelation
had been exorcised.

Under the house and under the garden there were
subterranean passages and if no one heard the premonitory rumblings before the
explosion, it would all erupt in the form of war and revolution.

The humiliated, the defeated, the oppressed,
the enslaved. Woman’s misused and twisted strength…

BREAD AND THE WAFER

WHEN JAY WAS NOT TALKING or painting he sang.
He sang under his breath or loudly according to his occupation. He dressed and
ate to a rhythm, as if he were executing a primitive ritual with his big body
that had not been quite chiseled off with the finish of a classical sculptor
but whose outline had remained rugged as if it were not yet entirely separated
from the wood or stone out of which it had been carved. One expected to feel
the roughness of it as when one touched a clay figure before it had been thrust
into the potter’s oven.

He had retained so much of the animal, a
graceful awkwardness in his walk, strong rhythmic gestures in full accord with
the pull of the muscles, an animal love of stretching, yawning, relaxing, of
sleeping anywhere, of obeying every impulse of his body. A body without nerves
or tensions.

When he stood upon his well-planted,
well-separated feet it was as if like a tree he would immediately take root
there. As he had taken roots lustily in Paris now, in the cafe, in his studio,
in his life with Lillian.

Wherever he found himself he was well, as if
the living roots of his body could sprout in any ground, at any time, under any
sky. His preference went, however, to artificial lights, crowds, and he grew,
talked, and laughed best in the center of a stream of people.

If he were waiting he would fill the waiting
with explosions of song, or fall into enthusiastic observations. The spectacle
of the street was enough for him; whatever was there was enough for him, for
his boundless satisfaction.

Placed before a simple meal he would begin his
prestidigitations: this steak is wonderful…how
good
it is. How awfully
good! And the onions… He made sounds of delight. He poured his enthusiasm over
the meal like a new condiment. The steak began to glow, to expand, to multiply
under the warmth of his fervor. Every dish was wrapped in amorous appreciation,
as if it had been brought to the table with a fire burning under it and was
flaming in rum like a Christmas pudding.

“Good, good, good,” said his palate, said his
roseate cheeks, said his bowed assenting head, said his voice, all expanding in
prodigious additions, as if he were pushing multiple buttons of delight, and
colors burst from the vegetables, meat, salad, cheese and wine. Even the
parsley assumed a festive air like a birthday candle on a cake. “Ah, ah, ah,
the salad!” he said, pouring over it a voice like an unguent along with the
olive oil.

His pleasure donned the white cap of the proud
chef playing gay scales of flavors, festooning the bread and wine with the high
taste of banquets.

The talk, too, burst its boundaries. He started
a discussion, let it take fire and spread, but the moment it took too rigid a
form he began to laugh, spraying it, liquefying it in a current of gaiety.

To laugh. To laugh. “I’m not laughing at you.
I’m not laughing at anyone, at anybody. I just can’t help myself. I don’t care
a bit, not a bit, who’s right.”

“But you must care,” said
Faustin
,
speaking through a rigid mask of sadness which made his face completely static,
and one was surprised that the words could come through the closed mouth. “You
must care, you must hold on to something.”

“I never hold on,” said Jay. “Why hold on?
Whatever you hold on to dies. There comes Colette. Sit here, Colette. How was
the trade today? Colette, these people are talking about holding on. You must
hold on, you must care, they say. Do you hold on, Colette? They pass like a
stream, don’t they, and you’d be surprised if the same ones bobbed up
continuously, surprised and maybe bored. It’s a good stream, isn’t it, just a
stream that does not nestle into you to become an ulcer, a good washing stream
that cleanses as it flows, and flows clean through.”

With this he drank fully from his
Pernod
, drank indeed as if the stream of absinthe, of
ideas, feelings, talk, should pass and change every day guided only by thirst.

“
You’redrunk
,” said
Colette. “You don’t make sense.”

“Only the drunks and the insane make sense,
Colette, that’s where you’re wrong. Only the drunks and the insane have
discarded the unessential for chaos, and only in chaos there is richness.”

“If you go on this way,” said
Faustin
, his finger pointing upward like a teacher of
Sanskrit, “someone will have to take care of you while you spill in all
directions recklessly. You’ll need taking care of, for yours is no real freedom
but an illusion of freedom, or perhaps just rebellion. Chaos always turns out
to be the greatest trap of all in which you’ll find yourself more securely
imprisoned than anyone.”

At the words “taking care” Jay had turned
automatically towards Lillian and read in her eyes that fixed, immutable love
which was his compass.

When
Faustin
was
there at the cafe conversation would always start at the top of a pyramid
without any gradual ascension. It would start with the problems of form, being
and becoming,
physiognomics
, destiny versus incident,
the coming of the fungoid era, the middle brain and the tertiary moon!

Faustin
talked to
build. He insisted that each talk should be a complete brick to add to a
careful construction. He always started to draw on the marble-top table or
othe
tablecloth: this is our first premise, this is our
second premise, and now we will reach the third. No sooner had he made on the
table the semblance of a construction than there would come into Jay’s eyes an
absinthe glint which was not really the drink but some layer of his being which
the drink had peeled away, which was hard, cruel, mischievous. His phrases
would begin to break and scatter, to run wild like a machine without springs,
gushing forth from the contradictory core of him which refused all
crystallizations.

It happened every time the talk approached a
definite conclusion, every time some meaning was about to be extracted from
confusion. It was as if he felt that any attempt at understanding were a threat
to the flow of life, to his enjoyment. As if understanding would threaten the
tumultuous current or arrest it.

They were eating in a small cafe opposite the
Gare
St.
Lazare
, a restaurant
wide open on the street. They were eating on the street and it was as if the
street were full of people who were eating and drinking with them.

With each mouthful Lillian swallowed, she
devoured the noises of the street, the voices and the echoes they dropped, the
swift glances which fell on her like pieces of lighted wick from guttering
candles. She was only the finger of a whole bigger body, a body hungry,
thirsty, avid.

The wine running down her throat was passing
through the throat of the world. The warmth of the day was like a man’s hand on
her breast, the smell of the street like a man’s breath on her neck. Wide open
to the street like a field washed by a river.

Shouts and laughter exploded near them from the
art students on their way to the
Quatz
‘
ArtsBall
. Egyptians and Africans in feather and jewelry,
with the sweat shining on their brown painted bodies. They ran to catch the bus
and it was like a heaving sea of glistening flesh shining between colored
feathers and barbaric jewelry, with the muscles swelling when they laughed.

A few of them entered the restaurant, shouting
and laughing. They circled around their table, like savages dancing around a
stake.

The street organ was unwinding
Carmen
from
its roll of tinfoil voices.

The same restaurant, another summer evening;
but
Jayis
not there. The wine has ceased passing down
Lillian’s throat. It has no taste. The food does not seem rich. The street is
separated from the restaurant by little green bushes she had not noticed
before; the noises seem far from her, and the faces remote. Everything now
happens outside, and not within her own body. Everything is distant and
separated. It does not flow inside of her and carry her away.

Because Jay is not there? Does it mean it was
not she who had drunk the wine, eaten the food, but that she had eaten and
drunk through the pores of his pleasure and his appetite? Did she receive her
pleasure, her appetite, through his gusto, his lust, his throat?

That night she had a dream:
Jay
nt
>had
become her iron lung. She was lying inside of him and breathing through him.
She felt a great anxiety, and thought: if he leaves me then I will die. When
Jay laughed she laughed; when he enjoyed she enjoyed. But all the time there
was this fear that if he left her she would no longer eat, laugh or breathe.

When he welcomed friends, was at ease in
groups, accepted and included all of life, she experienced this openness, this
total absence of retraction through him. When alone, she still carried some
constriction which interfered with deep intakes of life and people. She had
thought that by yielding to him, they would be removed.

She felt at times that she had fallen in love
with Jay’s freedom, that she had dreamed he would set her free, but that
somehow or other he had been unable to accomplish this.

At night she had the feeling that she was being
possessed by a cannibal.

His appetite. The gifts she made him of her
feelings. How he devoured the response of her flesh, her thoughts about him,
her awareness of him. As he devoured new places, new people, new impressions.
His gigantic devouring spirit in quest of substance.

Her fullness constantly absorbed by him, all
the changes in her, her dissolutions and rebirths, all this could be thrown
into the current of his life, his work, and be absorbed like twigs by a river.

He had the appetite of the age of giants.

He could read the fattest books, tackle the
most immense paintings, cover the vastest territories in his wanderings, attack
the most solemn system of ideas, produce the greatest quantity of work. He
excluded nothing: everything was food. He could eat the trivial and the
puerile, the ephemeral and the gross, the
scratchings
on a wall, the phrase of a passerby, the defect on a face, the pale sonata
streaming from a window, the snoring of a beggar on a bench, flowers on the
wallpaper of a hotel room, the odor of cabbage on a stairway, the haunches of a
bareback rider in the circus. His eyes devoured details, his hands leaped to
grasp.

His whole body was like a sensitive sponge,
drinking, eating, absorbing with a million cells of curiosity.

She felt caught in the immense jaws of his
desire, felt herself dissolving, ripping open to his descent. She felt herself
yielding up to his dark hunger, her feelings smoldering, rising from her like
smoke from a black mass.

Take me, take me, take my gifts and my moods
and my body and my cries and my joys and my submissions and my yielding and my
terror and my abandon, take all you want
.

He ate her as if she were something he wanted
to possess inside of his body like a fuel. He ate her as if she were a food he
needed for daily sustenance.

She threw everything into the jaws of his
desire and hunger. Threw all she had known, experienced and given before. She
gathered all to feed his ravenousness; she went into the past and brought back
her past selves, she took the present self and the future self and threw them
into the is curiosity, flung them before the greed of his questions.