Ladders to Fire (14 page)

Again Sabina turned her face away.

“I know you’re not a
femme
fatale
,Sabina
.
But didn’t you want him to think you were?”

With this peculiar flair she had for listening
to the buried child in human beings, Lillian could hear the child within Sabina
whining, tired of its inventions grown too cumbersome, weary of its adornments,
of its disguises. Too many costumes, valances, gold, brocade, veils, to cover
Sabina’s direct thrusts towards what she wanted, and meanwhile it was this
audacity, this directness, this unfaltering knowledge of her wants which
Lillian loved in her, wanted to learn from her.

But a smile of immeasurable distress appeared
in Sabina, and then was instantly effaced by another smile: the smile of
seduction. When Lillian was about to seize upon the distress, to enter the
tender, vulnerable regions of her being, then Sabina concealed herself again
behind the smile of a woman of seduction.

Pity, protection, solace, they all fell away
from Lillian like gifts of trivial import, because with the smile of seduction
Sabina assumed simultaneously the smile of an all-powerful enchantress.

Lillian forgot the face of the child in
distress, hungrily demanding a truthful love, and yet, in terror that this very
truth might destroy the love. The child face faded before this potent smile to
which Lillian succumbed.

She no longer sought the meaning of Sabina’s
words. She looked at Sabina’s blonde hair tumbling down, at her eyebrows peaked
upward, at her smile slanting perfidiously, a gem-like smile which made a
whirlpool of her feelings.

A man passed by and laughed at their absorption.

“Don’t mind, don’t mind,” said Sabina, as if
she were familiar with this situation. “I won’t do you any harm.”

“You can’t do me any harm.”

Sabina smiled. “I destroy people without
meaning to. Everywhere I go things become confused and terrifying. For you I
would like to begin all over again, to go to New York and become a great
actress, to become beautiful again. I won’t appear any more with clothes that
are held together with safety pins! I’ve been living stupidly, blindly, doing
nothing but drinking, smoking, talking. I’m afraid of disillusioning you,
Lillian.”

They walked down the streets aimlessly,
unconscious of their surroundings, arm in arm with a joy that was rising every
moment, and with every word they uttered. A swelling joy that mounted with each
step they took together and with the occasional brushing of their hips as they
walked.

The traffic eddied around them but everything
else, houses and trees were lost in a fog. Only their voices distinct, carrying
such phrases as they could utter out of their female labyrinth of oblique
perceptions.

Sabina said: “I wanted to telephone you last
night. I wanted to tell you how sorry I was to have talked so much. I knew all
the time I couldn’t say what I wanted to say.”

“You too have fears, although you seem so
strong,” said Lillian.

“I do everything wrong. It’s good that you
don’t ever ask questions about facts. Facts don’t matter. It’s the essence that
matters. You never ask the kind of question I hate: what city? what man? what
year? what time? Facts. I despise them.”

Bodies close, arm in arm, hands locked together
over her breast. She had taken Lillian’s hand and held it over her breast as if
to warm it.

The city had fallen away. They were walking
into a world of their own for which neither could find a name.

They entered a softly lighted place, mauve and
diffuse, which enveloped them in velvet closeness.

Sabina took off her silver bracelet and put it
around Lillian’s wrist.

“It’s like having your warm hand around my
wrist. It’s still warm, like your own hand. I’m your prisoner, Sabina.”

Lillian looked at Sabina’s face, the fevered
profile taut, so taut that she shivered a little, knowing that when Sabina’s
face turned towards her she could no longer see the details of it for its
blazing quality. Sabina’s mouth always a little open, pouring forth that
eddying voice which gave one vertigo.

Lillian caught an expression on her face of
such knowingness that she was startled. Sabina’s whole body seemed suddenly
charged with experience, as if discolored from it, filled with violet shadows,
bowed down by weary eyelids. In one instant she looked marked by long fevers,
by an unconquerable fatigue. Lillian could see all the charred traces of the
fires she had traversed. She expected her eyes and hair to turn ashen.

But the next moment her eyes and hair gleamed
more brilliantly than ever, her face became uncannily clear, completely
innocent, an innocence which radiated like a gem. She could shed her whole life
in one moment of forgetfulness, stand absolutely washed of it, as if she were
standing at the very beginning of it.

So many questions rushed to Lillian’s mind, but
now she knew Sabina hated questions. Sabina’s essence slipped out between the
facts. So Lillian smiled and was silent, listening merely to Sabina’s voice,
the way its hoarseness changed from rustiness to a whisper, a faint gasp, so
that the hotness of her breath touched her face.

She watched her smoke hungrily, as if smoking,
talking and moving were all desperately necessary to her, like breathing, and
she did them all with such reckless
intensuth
afont
>

When Lillian and Sabina met one night under the
red light of the cafe they recognized in each other similar moods: they would
laugh at him, the man.

“He’s working so hard, so hard he’s in a daze,”
said Lillian.

“He talks about nothing but painting.”

She was lonely, deep down, to think that Jay
had been at his work for two weeks without noticing either of them. And her
loneliness drew her close to Sabina.

“He was glad we were going out together, he
said it would give him a chance to work. He hasn’t any idea of time—he doesn’t
even know what day of the week it is. He doesn’t give a damn about anybody or
anything.”

A feeling of immense loneliness invaded them
both.

They walked as if they wanted to walk away from
their mood, as if they wanted to walk into another world. They walked up the
hill of Montmartre with little houses lying on the hillside like heather. They
heard music, music so off tune that they did not recognize it as music they
heard every day. They slid into a shaft of light from where this music
came—into a room which seemed built of
granified
smoke and crystallized human breath. A room with a painted star on the ceiling,
and a wooden, pock-marked Christ nailed to the wall. Gusts of weary, petrified
songs, so dusty with use. Faces like empty glasses. The musicians made of
rubber like the elastic rubber-soled night.

We hate Jay tonight. We hate man.

The craving for caresses. Wanting and fighting
the want. Both frightened by the vagueness of their desire, the indefiniteness
of their craving.

A rosary of question marks in their eyes.

Sabina whispered: “Let’s take drugs tonight.”

She pressed her strong knee against Lillian,
she inundated her with the brilliance of her eyes, the paleness of her face.

Lillian shook her head, but she drank, she
drank. No drink equal to the state of war and hatred. No drink like bitterness.

Lillian looked at Sabina’s fortune teller’s
eyes, and at the taut profile.

“It takes all the pain away; it wipes out
reality.”

She leaned over the table until their breaths
mingled.

“You don’t know what a relief it is. The smoke
of opium like fog. It brings marvelous dreams and gaiety. Such gaiety, Lillian.
And you feel so powerful, so powerful and content. You don’t feel any more
frustration, you feel that you are lording it over the whole world with
marvelous strength. No one can hurt you then, humiliate you, confuse you. You
feel you’re soaring over the world. Everything becomes soft, large, easy. Such
joys, Lillian, as you have never
agined
. The touch of
a hand is enough…the touch of a hand is like going the whole way… And time…how
time flies. The days pass like an hour. No more straining, just dreaming and
floating. Take drugs with me, Lillian.”

Lillian consented with her eyes. Then she saw
that Sabina was looking at the Arab merchant who stood by the door with his red
Fez, his kimono, his slippers, his arms loaded with Arabian rugs and pearl
necklaces. Under the rugs protruded a wooden leg with which he was beating time
to the jazz.

Sabina laughed, shaking her whole body with
drunken laughter. “You don’t know, Lillian… this man… with his wooden leg… you
never can tell… he may have some. There was a man once, with a wooden leg like
that. He was arrested and they found that his wooden leg was packed with snow.
I’ll go and ask him.”

And she got up with her heavy, animal walk, and
talked to the rug merchant, looking up at him alluringly, begging, smiling up
at him in the same secret way she had of smiling at Lillian. A burning pain
invaded Lillian to see Sabina begging. But the merchant shook his head, smiled
innocently, shook his head firmly, smiled again, offered his rugs and the
necklaces.

When she saw Sabina returning empty handed,
Lillian drank again, and it was like drinking fog, long draughts of fog.

They danced together, the floor turning under
them like a phonograph record. Sabina dark and potent, leading Lillian.

A gust of jeers seemed to blow through the
place. A gust of jeers. But they danced, cheeks touching, their cheeks chalice
white. They danced and the jeers cut into the haze of their dizziness like a
whip. The eyes of the men were insulting them. The eyes of men called them by
the name the world had for them. Eyes. Green, jealous. Eyes of the world. Eyes
sick with hatred and contempt. Caressing eyes, participating. Eyes ransacking
their conscience. Stricken yellow eyes of envy caught in the flare of a match.
Heavy torpid eyes without courage, without dreams. Mockery, frozen mockery from
the frozen glass eyes of the loveless.

Lillian and Sabina wanted to strike those eyes,
break them, break the bars of green wounded eyes, condemning them. They wanted
to break the walls confining them, suffocating them. They wanted to break out
from the prison of their own fears, break every obstacle. But all they found to
break were glasses. They took their glasses and broke them over their shoulders
and made no wish, but looked at the fragments of the glasses on the floor
wonderingly as if their mood of rebellion might be lying there also, in broken
pieces.

Now they danced mockingly, defiantly, as if
they were sliding beyond the reach of man’s hands, running like sand between
their insults. They scoffed at those eyes which brimmed with knowledge for they
knew the ecstasy of mystery and fog, fire and orange fumes of a world they had
seen through a slit in the dream. Spinning and reeling and falling, spinning
and turning and rolling down the brume and smoke of a world seen through a slit
in the dream.

The waiter put his ham-colored hand on Sabina’s
bare arm: “You’ve got to get out of here, you two!”

They were alone.

They were alone without daylight, without past,
without any thought of the resemblance between their togetherness and the union
of other women. The whole world was being pushed to one side by their faith in
their own uniqueness. All comparisons proudly discarded.

Sabina and Lillian alone, innocent of
knowledge, and innocent of other experiences. They remembered nothing before
this hour: they were innocent of associations. They forgot what they had read
in books, what they had seen in cafes, the laughter of men and the mocking
participation of other women. Their individuality washed down and effaced the
world: they stood at the beginning of everything, naked and innocent of the
past.

They stood before the night which belonged to
them as two women emerging out of sleep. They stood on the first steps of their
timidity, of their faith, before the long night which belonged to them.
Blameless of original sin, of literary sins, of the sin of premeditation.

Two women. Strangeness. All the webs of ideas
blown away. New bodies, new souls, new minds, new words. They would create it
all out of themselves, fashion their own reality. Innocence. No roots dangling
into other days, other nights, other men or women. The potency of a new stare
into the face of their desire and their fears.

Sabina’s sudden timidity and Lillian’s sudden
awkwardness. Their fears. A great terror slashing through the room, cutting
icily through them like a fallen sword. A new voice. Sabina’s breathless and
seeking to be lighter so as to touch the lightness of Lillian’s voice like a
breath now, an exhalation, almost a
voicelessness
because they were so frightened.

Sabina sat heavily on the edge of the bed, her
earthly weight like roots sinking into the earth. Under the weight of her stare
Lillian trembled.

Their bracelets tinkled.

The bracelets had given the signal. A signal
like the first tinkle of beads on a savage neck when they enter a dance. They
took their bracelets off and put them on the table, side by side.