Ladders to Fire (16 page)

The buses came upon them out of the dark,
violently with a deafening clatter, and they had to leap out of their way, only
to continue stumbling through dark streets, crossing bridges, passing under
heavy arcades, their feet unsteady on the uneven cobblestones as if they had
both lost their sense of gravity.

Lillian’s voice was plaintive and monotonous,
like a lamentation. Her blue eyes wavered but always fixed on the ground as if
the whole structure of her life lay there and she were watching its
consummation.

Djuna
was looking
straight before her through and beyond the dark, the lights, the traffic,
beyond all the buildings. Eyes fixed, immobile like glass eyes, as if the
curtain of tears had opened a new realm.

Lillian’s phrases surged and heaved like a
turgid sea. Unformed, unfinished, dense, heavy with repetitions, with
recapitulations, with a baffled, confused bitterness and anger.

Djuna
found nothing
to answer, because Lillian was talking about God, the God she had sought in
Jay.

“Because he had the genius,” she said, “I
wanted to serve him, I wanted to make him great. But he is treacherous,
Djuna
. I am more confused and lost now than before I knew
him. It isn’t only his betrayals with women,
Djuna
,
it’s that he sees no one as they are. He only adds to everyone’s confusions. I
put myself wholly in his hands. I wanted to serve someone who would create
something wonderful, and I also thought he would help me to create myself. But
he is destructive, and he is destroying me.”

This seeking of man the guide in a dark city,
this aimless wandering through the streets touching men and seeking the
guide—this was a fear all women had known…seeking the guide in men, not in the
past, or in mythology, but a guide with a living breath who might create one,
help one to be born as a woman, a guide they wished to possess for themselves
alone, in their own isolated woman’s soul. The guide for woman was still
inextricably woven with man and with man’s creation.

Lillian had thought that Jay would create her
because he was the artist, that he would be able to see her as clearly as she
had seen in him the great painter, but Jay’s inconsistencies bewildered her.
She had placed her own image in his hands for him to fashion: make of me a big
woman, someone of value.

His own chaos had made this impossible.

“Lillian, no one should be entrusted with one’s
image to fashion, with one’s self-creation. Women are moving from one circle to
another, rising towards independence and self-creation. What you’re really
suffering from is from the pain of parting with your faith, with your old love
when you wish to renew this faith and preserve the passion. You’re being thrust
out of one circle into another and it is this which causes you so much fear.
You know you cannot lean on Jay, but you don’t know what awaits you, and you
don’t trust your own awareness.”

Lillian thought that she was weeping because
Jay had said: Leave me alone, or let me work, or let me sleep.

“Oh, Lillian, it’s such a struggle to emerge
from the past clean of regrets and memories and of the desire to regress. No
one can accept failure.”

She wanted to take Lillian’s hand and make her
raise her head and lead her into a new circle, raise her above the pain and
confusion, above the darkness of the present.

These sudden shafts of light upon them could
not illumine where the circle of pain closed and ended and woman was raised
into another circle. She could not help Lillian emerge out of the immediacy of
her pain, leap beyond the stranglehold of the present.

And so they continued to walk unsteadily over
what Lillian saw merely as the dead leaves of his indifference.

Jay and Lillian lived in the top floor studio
of a house on the Rue
Montsouris
, on the edge of
Montparnasse—a small street without issue lined with white cubistic villas.

When they gave a party the entire house opened
its doors from the ground floor to the roof, since all the artists knew each
other. The party would branch off into all the little street with its quiet
gardens watched by flowered balconies.

The guests could also walk down the street to
the Park
Montsouris
lake, climb on a boat and fancy
themselves attending a Venetian feast.

First came the Chess Player, as lean, brown,
polished, and wooden in his gestures as a chess piece; his features sharply
carved and his mind set upon a perpetual game.

For him the floors of the rooms were large
squares in which the problem was to move the people about by the right word. To
control the temptation to point such a person to another he kept his hands in
his pockets and used merely his eyes. If he were talking to someone his eyes
would design a path in the air which his listener could not help but follow.
His glance having caught the person he had selected made the invisible alliance
in space and soon the three would find themselves on the one square until he
chose to move away and leave them together.

What his game was no one knew, for he was
content with the displacements and did not share in the developments. He would
then stand in the corner of the room again and survey the movements with a
semitone smile.

No one ever thought of displacing him, of
introducing him to
strangersight
w

But he thought it imperative to bring about an
encounter between the bearded Irish architect and
Djuna
,
because he had conceived a house for many moods, a house whose sliding panels
made it one day very large for grandiose states of being, one day very small
for intimate relationships. He had topped it with a removable ceiling which
allowed the sky to play roof, and designed both a small spiral staircase for
secret escapades and a vast one for exhibitionism. Besides, it turned on a
pivot to follow the changing whims of the sun, and who but
Djuna
should know this house which corresponded to her many moods, to her smiling
masks and refusal to show her night face, her shadows and her darkness, she who
turned on artificial pivots always towards the light, who was adept at sliding
panels to make womb enclosures suitable to intimate confessions, and equally capable
ofopening
them all at once to admit the entire world.

Djuna
smiled at the
Chess Player’s accuracy, and he left them standing on the square while the
Irish architect began with silken mouthfuls of words to design this house
around
Djuna
as if he were spewing a cocoon and she
would leave the party like a snail with a house built around her to the image
ofher
needs. On her black dress he was drawing a blue
print.

On this square something was being constructed
and so the Chess Player moved on, his eyes made of the glass one could look
through without being seen and now he seized upon
Faustin
,
the Zombie, the one who had died under the first blow struck at him
byexperience
. Most
ofthose
who
die like this in the middle of their life await a resuscitation, but
Faustin
awaited nothing: every line of his body sagged with
acceptance, the growing weight of his flesh cushioned inertia, submission. The
blood no longer circulated and one could see the crystal formations of fear and
stagnation as in those species of fish living in the deepest waters without
eyes, ears, fins, motion, shaped like loaves of bread, nourishing themselves
through static cells of the skin. His one obsession was not to free himself of
his death but to stand like a black sentinel at the gate and prevent others
escaping from their traps. He lived among the artists, the rebels, never
acquiescing in their rebellions, but waiting for the moment of Jay’s fullest
sunburst of enthusiasm to puncture it with irony, waiting for Lillian’s wildest
explosions to shame her as an exhibitionist, watching for
Djuna’s
blurred absences from reality to point out her delinquencies from the present.
His very expression set the stage for the murder; he had a way of bearing
himself which was like the summation of all the prohibitions: do not trespass,
do not smoke, do not spit, do not lean out of the window, no thoroughfare, do
not speed.

With his black eyes and pale face set for
homicide he waited in a corner. Wherever he was, a black moth would enter the
room and begin its flights of mourning, black-gloved, black-creped,
black-soled, inseminating the white walls with future
sadnesses
.
The silence which followed his words clearly marked the withering effect of
them and the time it took for the soil to bloom again. Always at midnight he
left, following a rigid compulsion, and the Chess Player knew he must act
hastily if he were going to exploit the Zombie’s death rays and test their
effect upon the living.

He walked the Zombie towards the fullest bloom
of all, towards the camellia face of Sabina which opened at a party like the
crowned prize-winner of the flower shows and gave every man the sensation he
held the tip of a breast in his teeth. Would Sabina’s face close when the
shadow of
Faustin
fell across it, when the black moth
words and the monotonous voice fell upon her ears curtained intricately by her
anarchic hair?

She merely turned her face away: she was too
richly nourished with pollen, seeds and sap to wither before any man, even a
dead one. Too much love and desire had flown through the curves of her body,
too many sighs, whispers, lay folded in the cells of her skin. Through the many
rivers of her veins too much pleasure had coursed; she was immune.

Faustin
the Zombie
felt bitterly defeated, for he loved to walk in the traces of Jay’s large
patterns and collect his discarded mistresses. He loved to live Jay’s discarded
lives, like a man accepting a second-hand coat. There was always a little
warmth left in them.

From the moment of his defeat, he ceased to attend
the Party, even in his role of zombie, and the Chess Player whose role it was
to see that the Party was attended at all cost, even at the cost of pretending,
was disturbed to see this shadowy figure walking now always between the
squares, carefully setting his foot on that rim of Saturn, the rim of nowhere
which surrounds all definite places. One fallen piece.

The Chess Player’s eyes fell on
Djuna
but she had escaped all seizure by dissolving into
the music. This was a game he could not play: giving yourself.
Djuna
gave herself in the most unexpected ways. She lived
in the cities of the interior, she had no permanent abode. She was always
arriving and leaving undetected, as through a series of trap doors. The life
she led there no one knew anything about. It never reached the ears of
reporters. The statisticians of facts could never interview her. Then
unexpectedly, in a public place, in a concert hall, a dance hall, at a lecture,
at a party, she gave the immodest spectacle of her abandon to Stravinsky, her
body’s tense identification with the dancer, or revealed a passionate interest
in the study of
phosphenes
.

And now she sat very neatly shaped in the very
outline of the guitar played by
Rango
, her body tuned
by the keys of her fingers as if
Rango
were playing
on the strands of her hair, of her nerves, and the black notes were issuing
from the black pupils of her eyes.

At least she could be considered as attending
the party: her eyes were not closed, as they had been a half hour earlier when
she was telling the Chess Player about
phosphenes
:
phosphenes
are the luminous impressions and circles seen
with the eyelids closed, after the sudden compression of the eyeball. “Try it!”

The guitar distilled its music.
Rango
played it with the warm sienna color of his skin,
with the charcoal pupil of his eyes, with the underbrush thickness of his black
eyebrows, pouring into the honey-colored box the flavors of the open road on
which he lived his gypsy life: thyme, rosemary, oregano, marjoram and sage.
Pouring into the resonant sound-box the sensual swing of his hammock hung
across the gypsy-cart and the dreams born on his mattress of black horsehair.

Idol of the night clubs, where men and women
barred the doors and windows, lit candles, drank alcohol, and drank from his
voice and his guitar the potions and herbs of the open
road,charivaris
of freedom, the drugs of leisure and laziness, the maypole dance of the
fireflies, the horse’s neighing fanfaronade, the fandangos and
ridottos
of sudden lusts.

Shrunken breasts, vacillating eyes, hibernating
virilities, all drank out of
Rango’s
guitar and
sienna voice. At dawn, not content with the life transfusion through cat guts,
filled with the sap of his voice which had passed into their veins, at dawn the
women laid hands upon his body like a tree. But at dawn
Rango
swung his guitar over his shoulder and walked away.

Will you be here tomorrow,
Rango
?

Tomorrow he might be playing and singing to his
black horse’s philosophically swaying tail on the road to the south of France.

Now arrived a very drunken Jay with his shoal
of friends: five pairs of eyes wide open and vacant, five men wagging their
heads with felicity because they are five. One a Chinese poet, tributary of Lao
Tze
; one Viennese poet, echo of Rilke; Hans the
painter derived from Paul Klee; an Irish writer feebly stemming from Joyce.
What they will become in the future does not concern them: at the present
moment they are five praising each other and they feel strong and they are
tottering with felicity.