Ladders to Fire (13 page)

The artist
is
there to keep accounts.

From his explorations of the Dome, the Select,
the
Rotonde
, Jay once brought back Sabina, though
with these two people It would be difficult to say which one guided the other
home or along the street, since both of them had this aspect of overflowing
rivers rushing headlong to cover the city, making houses, cafes, streets and
people seem small and fragile, easily swept along. The uprooting power of Jay’s
impulses added to Sabina’s mobility reversed the whole order of the city.

Sabinan
peot
in her wake the sound and imagery of fire engines as
they tore through the streets of New York alarming the heart with the violent
gong of catastrophe.

All dressed in red and silver, the tearing red
and silver siren cutting a pathway through the flesh. The first time one looked
at Sabina one felt: everything will burn!

Out of the red and silver and the long cry of
alarm, to the poet who survives in a human being as the child survives in him,
to this poet Sabina threw an unexpected ladder in the middle of the city and
ordained: climb!

As she appeared, the orderly alignment of the
city gave way before this ladder one was invited to climb, standing straight in
space like the ladder of Baron
Munchhausen
which led
to the sky.

Only Sabina’s ladder led to fire.

As she walked heavily towards Lillian from the
darkness of the hallway into the light of the door Lillian saw for the first
time the woman she had always wanted to know. She saw Sabina’s eyes burning,
heard her voice so rusty and immediately felt drowned in her beauty. She wanted
to say: I recognize you. I have often imagined a woman like you.

Sabina could not sit still. She talked
profusely and continuously with feverish breathlessness, like one in fear of
silence. She sat as if she could not bear to sit for long, and when she walked
she was eager to sit down again. Impatient, alert, watchful, as if in dread of
being attacked; restless and keen, making jerking gestures with her hands,
drinking hurriedly, speaking rapidly, smiling swiftly and listening to only
half of what was said to her.

Exactly as in a fever dream, there was in her
no premeditation, no continuity, no connection. It was all chaos—her erratic
gestures, her unfinished sentences, her sulky silences, her sudden walks
through the room, her apologizing for futile reasons (I’m sorry, I lost my
gloves), her apparent desire to be elsewhere.

She carried herself like one totally unfettered
who was rushing and plunging on some fiery course. She could not stop to
reflect.

She unrolled the film of her life stories
swiftly, like the accelerated scenes of a broken machine, her adventures, her
escapes from drug addicts, her encounters with the police, parties at which
indistinct incidents took place, hazy scenes of flagellations in which no one
could tell whether she had been the flagellator or the victim, or whether or
not it had happened it all.

A broken dream, with spaces, reversals,
contradictions, galloping fantasies and sudden retractions. She would say: “he
lifted my skirt,” or “we had to take care of the wounds” or “the policeman was
waiting for me and I had to swallow the drug to save my friends,” and then as
if she had written this on a blackboard she took a huge sponge and effaced it
all by a phrase which was meant to convey that perhaps this story had happened
to someone else, or she may have read it, or heard it at a bar, and as soon as
this was erased she began another story of a beautiful girl who was employed in
a night club and whom Sabina had insulted, but if Jay asked why she shifted the
scene, she at once effaced it, cancelled it, to tell about something else she had
heard and
een
at the night club at which she worked.

The faces and the figures of her personages
appeared only half drawn, and when one just began to perceive them another face
and figure were interposed, as in a dream, and when one thought one was looking
at a woman it was a man, an old man, and when one approached the old man who
used to take care of her, it turned out to be the girl she lived with who
looked like a younger man she had first loved and this one was metamorphosed
into a whole group of people who had cruelly humiliated her one evening.
Somewhere in the middle of the scene Sabina appeared as the woman with gold
hair, and then later as a woman with black hair, and it was equally impossible
to keep a consistent image of whom she had loved, betrayed, escaped from, lived
with, married, lied to, forgotten, deserted.

She was impelled by a great confessional fever
which forced her to lift a corner of the veil, but became frightened if anyone
listened or peered at the exposed scene, and then she took a giant sponge and
rubbed it all out, to begin somewhere else, thinking that in confusion there
was protection. So Sabina beckoned and lured one into her world, and then
blurred the passageways, confused the images and ran away in fear of detection.

From the very first Jay hated her, hated her as
Don Juan hates Dona Juana, as the free man hates the free woman, as man hates
in woman this freedom in passion which he grants solely to himself. Hated her
because he knew instinctively that she regarded him as he regarded woman: as a
possible or impossible lover.

He was not for her a man endowed with
particular gifts, standing apart from other men, irreplaceable as Lillian saw
him, unique as his friends saw him. Sabina’s glance measured him as he measured
women: endowed or not endowed as lovers.

She knew as he did, that none of the
decorations or dignities conferred upon a man or woman could alter the basic
talent or lack of talent as a lover. No title of architect emeritus will confer
upon them the magic knowledge of the body’s structure. No prestidigitation with
words will replace the knowledge of the secret places of responsiveness. No
medals for courage will confer the graceful audacities, the conquering
abductions, the exact knowledge of the battle of love, when the moment for
seduction, when for consolidation, when for capitulation.

The trade, art and craft that cannot be
learned, which requires a divination of the fingertips, the accurate reading of
signals from the fluttering of an eyelid, an eye like a microscope to catch the
approval of an eyelash, a seismograph to catch the vibrations of the little
blue nerves under the skin, the capacity to prognosticate from the direction of
the down as from the inclination of the leaves some can predict rain, tell where
storms are brooding, where floods are threatening, tell which regions to leave
alone, which to invade, which to lull and which to take by force.

No decorations, no diplomas for the lover, no
school and no traveler’s experience will help a man who does not hear the beat,
tempo and rhythms of the body, catch the ballet leaps of desire at their
highest peak, perform the acrobatics of tenderness and lust, and know all the
endless virtuosities of silence.

Sabina was studying his potentialities with
such insolence, weighing the accuracy of his glance. For there is a black
lover’s glance well known to women versed in this lore, which can strike at the
very center of woman’s body, which plants its claim as in a perfect target.

Jay saw in her immediately the woman without
fidelity, capable of all desecrations. That a woman should do this, wear no
wedding ring, love according to her caprice and not be in bondage to the one.
(A week before he was angry with Lillian for considering him as the unique and
irreplaceable one, because it conferred on him a responsibility he did not wish
to assume, and he was wishing she might consider an understudy who would
occasionally relieve him of his duties!)

For one sparkling moment Jay and Sabina faced
each other in the center of the studio, noting each other’s defiance, absorbing
this great mistrustfulness which instantly assails the man and women who
recognize in each other the law-breaking lovers; erecting on this basic mutual
mistrust the future violent attempts to establish certitude.

Sabina’s dress at first like fire now appeared,
in the more tangible light of Lillian’s presence, as made of black satin, the
texture most similar to skin. Then Lillian noticed a hole in Sabina’s sleeve,
and suddenly she felt ashamed not to have a hole in her sleeve too, for
somehow, Sabina’s poverty, Sabina’s worn sandals, seemed like the most
courageous defiance of all, the choice of a being who had no need of flawless
sleeves or new sandals to feel complete.

Lillian’s glance which usually remained fixed
upon Jay, grazing lightly over others, for the first time absorbed another
human being as intently.

Jay looked uneasily at them. This fixed
attention of Lillian revolving around him had demanded of him, the mutable one,
something he could not return, thus making him feel like a man accumulating a
vast debt in terms he could never meet.

In Sabina’s fluctuating fervors he met a
challenge: she gave him a feeling of equality. She was well able to take care
of herself and to answer treachery with treachery.

Lillian waited at the corner of the Rue Auber.
She would see Sabina in full daylight advancing out of a crowd. She would make
certain that such an image could materialize, that Sabina was not a mirage
which would melt in the daylight.

She was secretly afraid that she might stand
there at the corner of the Rue Auber exactly as she had stood in other places
watching the crowd, knowing no figure would come out of it which would resemble
the figures in her dreams. Waiting for Sabina she experienced the most painful
expectancy: she could not believe Sabina would arrive by these streets, cross
such a boulevard, emerge from a mass of faceless people. What a profound joy to
see her striding forward, wearing her shabby sandals and her shabby black dress
with royal indifference.

“I hate daylight,” said Sabina, and her eyes
darkened with anger. The dark blue rings under her eyes were so deep they
marked her flesh. It was as if the flesh around her eyes had been burned away
by the white heat and fever of her glance.

They found the place she wanted, a place below
the level of the street.

Her talk like a turbulent river, like a broken
necklace spilled around Lillian.

“It’s a good thing I’m going away. You would
soon unmask me.”

At this Lillian looked at Sabina and her eyes
said so clearly: “I want to become blind with you,” that Sabina was moved and
turned her face away, ashamed of her doubts.

“There are so many things I would love to do
with you, Lillian. With you I would take drugs. I would not be afraid.”

“You afraid?” said Lillian, incredulously. But
one word rose persistently to the surface of her being, one word which was like
a rhythm more than a word, which beat its tempo as soon as Sabina appeared.
Each step she took with Sabina was marked as by a drum beat with the word:
danger
danger
danger
danger
.

“I have a feeling that I want to be you,
Sabina. I never wanted to be anyone but myself before.”

“How can you live with Jay, Lillian? I hate
Jay. I feel he is like a spy. He enters your life only to turn around
afterwards and caricature. He exposes only the ugly.”

“Only when something hurts him. It’s when he
gets hurt that he destroys. Has he caricatured you?”

“He painted me as a whore. And you know that
isn’t me. He has such an interest in evil that I told him stories… I hate him.”

“I thought you loved him,” said Lillian simply.

All Sabina’s being sought to escape Lillian’s
directness in a panic. Behind the mask a thousand smiles appeared, behind the
eyelids ageless deceptions.

This was the moment. If only Sabina could bring
herself to say what she felt: Lillian, do not trust me. I want Jay. Do not love
me, Lillian, for I am like him. I take what I want no matter who is hurt.

“You want to unmask me, Lillian.”

“If I were to unmask you, Sabina, I would only
be revealing myself: you act as I would act if I had the courage. I see you
exactly as you are, and I love you. You should not fear exposure, not from me.”

This was the moment to turn away from Jay who
was bringing her not love, but another false role of play, to turn towards
Lillian with the truth, that a real love might take place.

Sabina’s face appeared to Lillian as that of a
child drowning behind a window. She saw Sabina as a child struggling with her
terror of the truth, considering before answering what might come closest to
the best image of herself she might give Lillian. Sabina would not say the
truth but whatever conformed to what she imagined Lillian expected of her,
which was in reality not at all what Lillian wanted of her, but what she,
Sabina, thought necessary to her idealized image of herself. What Sabina was
feverishly creating always was the reverse of what she acted out: a woman of
loyalty and faithfulness. To maintain this image at all costs she ceased
responding to Lillian’s soft appeal to the child in need of a rest from
pretenses.

“I don’t deny Jay is a caricaturist, but only
out of revengefulness. What have you done to deserve his revenge?”